2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Mark Cortiula University of New South Wales
The Science of Separation:
America’s Contribution to Australia’s Post-War Blood Fractionation
Program
One of the most important advances in laboratory medicine during the Second
World War was the development of blood plasma fractions as therapeutic
agents. Wartime research in both Britain and the United States led to the
development and adoption of two distinctive techniques for the separation
and concentration of blood components (a process known as fractionation) by
major pharmaceutical companies. At Harvard Edwin J. Cohn’s group perfected
a fractionation method based on ethanol extraction, while in England R. A.
Kecwick and M. E. Mackay developed an alternative approach using ether.
Although both techniques were considered for adoption in postwar Australia,
this paper argues that Australia, like many other countries, primarily chose to
adopt the American fractionation method because Cohn proved exceptionally
willing to share scientific knowledge and technical advice with antipodean
colleagues.
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T.␣ Hugh Crawford Georgia Institute of Technology
Filming the Event: Technology, Temporality, and the Object of Science
When teaching in science studies programs, one regularly engages, in one
form or another, the rather vexed relationship between the scientific fact or
object and the temporal frame from which it emerges. Students are quick to
see the social, cultural, and historical context that in some way surrounds such
facts, but, at the same time, are quick to place those same newly minted fact in
the rarefied realm of atemporal universality. One way of engaging this problem
is through detailed analysis of film popularizations of scientists and their
discoveries. This paper examines two mid-century film biographies, William
Dieterle’s Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame
Curie (1944 ) and attempts to show how those films’ narratives and the
technology of the cinema confound the spatialized, atemporal moment of
discovery with the temporal duration of laboratory protocols and film editing
techniques. A careful look at these films reveals how seemingly singular events
(the isolation of the TB bacillus, the moment of diagnosis, the discovery of
radium in a glowing dish) are actually Events-a term developed by Gilles
Deleuze in his somewhat idiosyncratic reading of Alfred North Whitehead
(The Fold). Through this notion of the Event (and, in A Thousand Plateaus,
his concept of the “virtual” ), Deleuze expands and explicates Whitehead’s
notion of how “actual entities” are a “concrescence of prehensions which have
originated in the process of becoming” (Process and Reality). What makes