2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
spiritualism in Europe) in which participants linked hands round a table in the
expectation that combined nervous energy would make the table turn and the
‘electric baton’ of Hector Berlioz, in which the maestro created a telegraphic
network linked to metronomes which, in turn, were attached to human ‘sou chefs’,
to allow the varying beat of his baton to be communicated through simultaneously
human and electric channels to a vast orchestra. In each of these varying scenarios,
the living animal or human being is not only linked to a mechanical device but
incorporated within it and the phenomena that link the animate to the inanimate
parts of the experiment are thought to involve a simple reflex or the flow of nervous
influence between the two entities. In this paper I will explore why these various
enterprises developed as they did, and at the time that they did. I will use them to
address the nature of experiment, its relation to human action and inter-relations,
as the disciplines of modern experimental science came into being.
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Audra␣ J. Wolfe University of Pennsylvania
Protecting Turfs (Literally):
Negotiating the Meanings of Exobiology at the Dawn of the Space Age
The launch of Sputnik sparked the formation of numerous American scientific
advisory boards on the topic of space science. While some of these dealt with
technical questions on rocketry, scientists at the National Academy of Sciences,
NASA, the President’s Scientific Advisory Council, and the military threw
themselves into a topic generally known as “life science in space.” For the
public this usually meant one of two things: man-in-space research (bioastronautics)
or the search for extra-terrestrial life (exobiology). The Armed
Forces/National Research Council on Bioastronautics and early NASA
programs focused nearly exclusively on man-in-space, but Joshua Lederberg
and an eager collection of West Coast geneticists, bacteriologists, biochemists,
and chemists regarded interplanetary surface and atmospheric contamination
as the most critical problem posed by the space program. This was the origin
of the science of exobiology, loosely defined as the study of life outside of
earth. My paper focuses on the rhetorical framework of exobiology established
in these early discussions. Molecular knowledge legitimated exobiology as a
“basic” science in opposition to the “applications” of the man-in-space research;
simultaneously, containment and the concept of the alien ensured popular and
political support for their Space Age science. Other elite biologists—especially
those from naturalist evolutionary traditions—challenged the rhetorical devices
and narrative strategies used by the exobiologists. Questioning exobiology’s
legitimacy was a way to restate in Cold War terms the postwar debate on the
character of biology as a holistic or reductionistic science. Exobiology could
be regarded as either a step towards or a diversion from a positive experimental
biology program in space. A careful examination of language used to discuss
exobiology’s role in the space program will inform our understanding of the
relationship between American scientists and the state in the Cold War era.