Abstracts Archive

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...

As a self-described magus, Giovanni Battista della Porta (1535 – 1615) was convinced of his power to manipulate nature. Given proper conditions, the Neapolitan scholar believed that dogs could be made to degenerate from four-footed creatures to two-footed ones. Porta wrote that by amputating dogs ...

Be-hi ka-li (Umbellularia californica) is a hardwood tree native to California and southwestern Oregon with the potential to be a more widely valued source of a chocolate-like superfood in the future. Its nut is a nutrient-dense food and the leaves have many medicinal properties. Known by numerous d...

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...

The paper will revisit the history of conceptual change regarding the role of genes in development, by exploring the methodology of analyzing narrative practices in research publications. Historians of biology have analyzed the role of metaphors: “field”, “information”, “program” and oth...

With the advent of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), many Chinese academic, industrial, and government scientists felt compelled to use their expertise to respond to national need and to contribute their talents to the national military and economic development efforts that were taking place in pre...

The ideal strategy to secure the foundations of an empirically successful theory is to provide physical postulates on which it can then be unambiguously reconstructed. Identifying such postulates, especially when one wants them to be indisputable, may however prove difficult. Such is notoriously the...

The fourteenth century constituted a significant moment in the history of Asia. The Mongol empire, which had earlier brought large parts of Asia under one roof and facilitated cross-regional movements of texts and artifacts, degenerated. In an attempt to re-unite China under uniform rule and re-esta...

In recent years, computer simulations have become ubiquitous in science. They work with huge sets of data, are technologies to study processes, events or behaviour and introduce ways of doing science other than through observation, experiment or theory.  In my paper, I will study the use of comput...

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 start of the Cárdenas administration in 1934 is often seen as the moment when the promises of the Revolution were finally made real for the wide array of Mexicans who had fought in the decade-long conflict of the 1910s.  Mexican citizens were able to farm land communally, had access to sta...

The theories of light that were in circulation in the European universities of the thirteenth century are currently not well understood, partly because of the tremendous diversity among these theories and the wide range of sources that were drawn upon (for instance, Albert the Great, writing in 1242...

This paper investigates the training and work of Regino García y Basa, a Filipino painter and botanist who shaped the science and visuality of Philippine flora in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Most well known as the lead illustrator of Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas (1877�...

This paper focuses on “hermaphrodites” -- that is, individuals who were considered neither simply male nor female -- and the emerging profession of surgery in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. This era constituted a critical period for the profession of surgery and, as I argue, for long...

From 1949 to 1958, Chinese scientific associations, including the All-China Federation of Natural Science Societies and the All-China Association for Science Popularization, acted as one of diplomatic canal to unite potential partners and fight opponents among the isolation around the world. There w...

How does scientific knowledge gain authority in relationship to other ways of knowing? Standard narratives of modernity assume that science expands through secularization; as scientific facts and theories emerge to explain natural and social phenomena, these are thought to replace explanations offer...

By 1900, a wide range of schemes for mapping climate had emerged in Europe. What most of them had in common was the absence of weather. They represented climate as a static variable, a long-term average, in which phenomena on the time scale of weather—clouds, storms, and gales—were invisible. Ho...

In the aftermath of the New Culture Movement (1915–1919), Western-trained biologists in China helped establish a popular understanding of sex dimorphism that construed bodily morphology and function of the two sexes as opposite, complementary, and fundamentally different. Starting in the mid-1920s...

Economists developed the concept of ‘marginal utility’ in the late-nineteenth century within several different ‘schools’ of economics.  Their ideas have been seen as sufficiently similar that historians of economics have sometimes taken this to be a case of simultaneous discovery - by f...

After the “rediscovery” of the Roman catacombs in 1578, the Catholic Church began exporting the relics of early Christian martyrs across Europe and beyond.  Between 1578 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria received almost 400 of these “catacomb saints,” whose sparkling bodies still rest on altar...

In the heyday of the British Welfare State, in the decades immediately following World War II, people's worth was assigned and quantified along heteronormative, gendered lines. Electronic computers implemented the policies that created the Welfare State, leading to some of the first examples of algo...

In May 1993, a group of scientific experts and public officials from circumpolar nations gathered in Anchorage to assess the human and environmental legacies of the Cold War in the Far North. Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) opened the meeting by calling for action on the part of the participants ...

In the 1970s, governments worldwide vastly expanded their pre-market review of chemical data, and with it the need for toxicological testing. Previously, such review was only required for products intended to have biological effects, such as drugs and pesticides. Legislators and regulators weighed c...

Economics and the life sciences have long shared an interest in population, but in the early 1970s the status of that object changed. Whereas Malthus and his followers treated population growth as an exogenous, iron force pressing in on economics, and whereas neoclassical economists simply bracketed...

Feminist and decolonial historians of science have learned to ask “who gets to be a reliable knower of technical knowledge?” In this paper, I ask who gets to be a reliable knower and practitioner of science studies. I focus on the fiction of Michael Crichton who came of age as undergraduate and ...

The knowledge of why people should eat fruit and how fruit should be grown and utilized has historically varied. Focusing on such questions, this paper examines the history of the “hometown of Chinese honey nectar peach,” Longquanyi district of the city of Chengdu. In the Republican era, new var...

In his pathbreaking 1996 article, Michael Bravo called for greater attention to non-Western knowledge systems and how Western actors have tried to render these systems commensurate with Western science. This paper heeds Bravo’s call by examining this process of creating commensurability in the car...

  Naomi Mitchison co-authored her first, and only, scientific paper in 1915 with her brother JBS Haldane. In her memoirs, Mitchison describes feeling pushed out of science because she was more interested in the behavior and personality of her subjects than their genes. She went on to pursue a l...

In 1584, a short and remarkable book appeared in print: Letters on Natural Philosophy, written by a Paduan apothecary named Camilla Erculiani. Recently-rediscovered after centuries of obscurity, this book is the only work of natural philosophy published by a woman in sixteenth- century Italy that we...

In this paper, I discuss the case study of the concept ‘synapse’, focusing on a debate that took place during the mid- to late- 20th century. The ‘war of the soups and sparks’, in which scientists attempted to determine whether synaptic transmission is electrical or chemical, had just ended....