2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
l’histoire naturelle des animaux (with text by Claude Perrault and engravings
by Sebastien Le Clerc). This paper follows the archival traces of the
production of this book, from the menagerie to the library. Just as the
menagerie itself was a product of the network of collecting agents bringing
the animals to Versailles, the book and its images were the outcome of the
interaction of several scenes of activity between the court and the printshop.
Le Clerc’s illustrations, for example, reveal the tension between ideals of
observational accuracy and the generic conventions set by other royal
publications. The problem of how these images could be made to travel can
then be explored through the English translation of the book made by
members of the Royal Society. By following such processes in the making
of the Histoire naturelle des animaux, we can uncover the diverse strategies
of display and inscription available to early modern natural historians.
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Michael Dietrich Dartmouth College
Johannes Holtfreter and the Politics of Gastrulation
As a graduate student with Hans Spemann and later as a young research
biologist in the 1920s and 1930s, Johannes Holtfreter contributed to the
extremely influential German research tradition concerned with the problem
of embryonic induction. Although his relationship with Spemann had never
been particularly good, the rise of National Socialism fueled Holtfreter’s
criticism of Spemann, his work, and his approach. Beginning in the early 1930s,
Holtfreter understood Spemann’s position on induction, on the organizer, and
on gastrulation to be expressions of nationalism and authoritarianism.
Holtfreter’s voluntary departure from Nazi Germany in 1939 and his subsequent
experiences as a refugee scholar solidified his convictions and led him to argue
against Spemann’s “organismic” approach to experimental embryology. In its
place, Holtfreter offered a mechanistic understanding of fundamental
embryonic processes such as gastrulation. In Holtfreter’s case, the politics of
gastrulation motivated his turn to more reductionistic and mechanistic
explanations of embryological phenomena.
Matthias Doerries Max Planck Institute for the History of Science /
Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg
Self-Effacement and Objective Knowledge: Henri-Victor Regnault
For the mid-nineteenth-century French physicist Henri-Victor Regnault,
nature—not the experimenter—was the ultimate judge in experimental matters.
The experimenter’s task was to conceive experimental conditions that would
allow nature to reveal its laws directly to the scientist, excluding any analysis
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