Abstracts Archive

When stationed in Manila, the Jesuit pharmacist and missionary Georg Joseph Kamel (1661-1706) produced extensive accounts about Philippine flora, which were later printed in Europe. Drawing on the example of the St Ignatius bean, a medicinal plant native to the Philippines monopolised by the Jesuit ...

In Republican China, controversies over antiquities and fossils management during Western expeditions in China prompted new laws and policy regulating foreign biological expeditions in China’s interiors. Luo Guihuan has examined the restrictions introduced by Academia Sinica to limit Wes...

Telling scientific stories is a multispecies affair. Non-human animals have been instrumental to studies of the world’s natural order, as model organisms for the human body, as experimental objects, as livestock to be cared for, and as theoretical proxies for human social organizations. Furthermor...

As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, n...

“Owning the Evidence: The Lasting Controversies of Early Primatology Filmmaking” traces the unusual history of intellectual ownership over a groundbreaking collection of early comparative psychology films. From 1913-1917, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler shot 6 reels of film depicting his exper...

The only publication Joseph Banks (1743–1820) is remembered for is the Florilegium, a series of illustrations that represent the plants he and Daniel Solander (1733–1782) collected during the Endeavour voyage to the Pacific between 1768 and 1771, which remained unpublished until the 1980s. Howev...

In 1906, English neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington published 'The Integrative Action of the Nervous System' describing how animal movement was built up from the interaction of reflex arcs, which were unit mechanisms of the nervous system. This is widely regarded as a seminal work heralding m...

Charles Darwin famously puzzled over how to explain altruistic behaviors in animals and humans: Entire castes of social insects dedicate themselves to the good of the colony but are themselves sterile, while humans who save the lives of others might not live to pass on to their children such noble i...

The first two decades of the twentieth century were not a golden age for the reception of Darwinism. Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) and Peter Bowler (1944-) developed the descriptor, “the eclipse of Darwinism,” to explain the state of affairs prior to the “modern evolutionary synthesis” of ge...

This paper considers how the current system of animal research regulation in Australia emerged within the cultural and political climate over the last four decades. This inquiry uses the development of the Australian code of practice for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes (the Code)...

Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of life has been loosened from its moorings to nature. Launched in 1958, the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided the institutional and political context to stage the ‘liveliness’ of mac...

Astrobiology, the scientific field investigating potential extraterrestrial life, is often understood as a post-Sputnik development initiated by academic molecular biologists anxious to distance themselves from NASA’s quasi-military human spaceflight program. This paper complicates this origin sto...

In vitro systems are commonly used within the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry. However, despite the prevalent use of these systems, discussions regarding the nature of in vitro modeling have thus far been limited, and do not capture the diversity of in vitro modeling techniques employed...

As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, n...

The study of plant phenomics in the field involves complex efforts of data collection and analysis. There are countless parameters of potential relevance ranging from the information about the soil, relevant microbiomes, plants at different stages of development, changing climatic conditions and so ...

Traditionally, barley was the second most important crop in the Korean Peninsula. When Japanese colonial authority in the early 20th century transplanted Japanese agricultural science and related discourses to Korea, it became the main agenda to increase production and consumption of barley, to spre...

In investigating how particular organisms became standard objects of scientific study, historians have tended to focus on the role of particular research communities (Kohler 1994) or institutions (Rader 2004) in these processes. More difficult to conceptualize are the forces shaping scientific organ...

During the Japanese colonial era (1910-45), biology was the scientific field in which the largest number of Korean researchers was active. Korean biologists trod diverse paths of academic growth, encompassing both those who had majored in the discipline at universities and those who had developed as...

This paper examines the controversy between two early American geneticists, William E. Castle (1867-1962) and Raymond Pearl (1879-1940). Scientific controversies among US geneticists have attracted relatively little attention because historians have mainly seen early American genetics as dominated b...

Allostery describes the process whereby ligand binding at one site on a protein transmits an effect to another distal site. Ever since its discovery in 1961, allostery has remained an important topic within structural biology because of its role in cell regulation. However, the concept has chan...

When France opened the world’s first veterinary schools in the 1760s the Crown changed its relationship to non-human animals and reconfigured a new set of social and scientific categories for livestock. The principle innovation of veterinary medicine was not the act of healing animals – a projec...

With the commercial and colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the early modern world, European missionaries played an important role in the interactions with indigenous peoples around the globe. In the course of the interactions, European missionaries intentionally (and uninten...

According to Physicist Leon Lederman, scientific myth-histories are not intended to be historically accurate. Instead, they serve as pedagogical devices that filter out unwanted historical details and noise. By filtering out this noise, myth-historians hope to perpetuate an essentialist idealization...

This talk focuses on the emergence of the term microbiome in the early 21st century, a rhetorical phenomenon that helped to legitimize the nascent field of human-microbial genomics as scientists advocated for the development of the multi-year, multi-site, $115 million Human Microbiome Project. The t...

In the nineteenth century, the British government supported the creation of botanic gardens throughout the empire, with over one hundred in existence by the century’s end. Colonial garden superintendents were expected to identify and cultivate economically and medicinally valuable plants and take ...

Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937), India’s first plant physiologist, deviated boldly from mainstream botany by claiming that plants possess “nerves” and “pulsating cells” that function much like the nerve and heart cells of animals. In support of these ideas he recorded “plant autographs,...

This paper focuses on the construction of a transnational community of scientific critics of biological weapons research in the late 1950s and 1960s. First initiated in 1957, the Pugwash Conferences were a transnational venue for scientists to discuss and criticize the Cold War arms race, which emer...

This paper centres on the oeuvre of Marcus Élieser Bloch (1723–1799), a Jewish physician living in Berlin. Bloch authored the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, a natural historical series on fishes consisting of twelve volumes published between 1782 and 1794. These books are lavishly illustr...

In colonial Spanish America, missionaries served as important collectors and mediators of indigenous knowledge of the natural world. Missionaries, especially Jesuit missionaries, provided some of the earliest accounts of American nature. Much of this knowledge came from their contacts in indigenous ...

Motoo Kimura began the neutralist-selectionist divide when, in 1969, he hypothesized that most substitutions of amino acids in proteins are selectively neutral and developed the neutral theory of molecular evolution. While neutralism began as an empirical claim, it transformed into a methodology inv...