Following British officials’ recommendation to stop prescribing oral contraceptives linked to blood clots, US Senator Gaylord Nelson began collecting testimony from experts in 1970. He asked: Is the pill safe? Do women have enough information to make informed decisions? Histories of the pill and the women’s health movement remember these hearings as initiating the “pill scares” and resulting in the first insert for patients.
Most memorable, however, are the allegations of sexist underrepresentation of women among the experts. Feminists from D.C. Women’s Liberation protested the hearings because no women testified in the first round. The senators dismissed these “disturbances” and suggested feminists were prejudicing their own case. By the end, only 4 women (of 36 experts) had appeared, none of whom were regular users. Historians have agreed that Nelson refused women patients’ the platform to speak, and some have further charged that that those women who did testify were uncritically “pro-pill.”
While there is truth to these claims, they overshadow how gender norms about expertise shaped the testimony of the women who did testify. In this flashtalk, I will argue for the unique contributions of women as experts, such as providing gender-blind expertise, gender-based testimony as an expert-user, and gender-based criticism. Furthermore, I will explore how these gender norms excluded certain testimony, such as non-expert users, “emotive” appeals, and those “aggressive” disturbances. Primary sources include women’s testimony from the Nelson hearings and articles from the feminist publication off our backs.

Logic became a mathematical science in the decades around 1900; that same period saw a wild proliferation of systems for representing the newly mathematical logic on paper. The fertile period for notational invention that began with English mathematician George Boole’s algebraic methods in the mid nineteenth century reached a kind of apogee in interwar Poland, where logicians of the Lwów–Warsaw School effectively dissolved the line between notation and its object. Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956), one of the school’s leading figures, introduced a system of notation without punctuation or spacing. Every logical statement was represented by a single uninterrupted string of capital and lowercase Latin and Greek letters. Shorn of parentheses and other such outward flourishes, a statement’s length became a visually prominent and conceptually interesting attribute. Soon Łukasiewicz and his colleagues began working to build logical systems in as few letters as possible, seeing notational economy not merely as a stylistic virtue but as an object of scientific inquiry in itself. Their pursuit of brevity illustrates how a form of writing can shape and even reciprocally constitute the research programme that spawned it.

 
On 20 January 2018 RocketLab, a space-tech start-up, launched the Humanity Star, a metre tall ‘disco ball’ intended to “blink brightly across the night sky to create a shared experience for everyone on the planet”.[1] The launch provoked a range of responses from the scientific community, with some calling it “graffiti”, and astronomer Caleb Scharf going so far as to say “It’s hogging some of that precious resource, the dark night sky, polluting part of the last great wilderness.”[2]
In this paper I argue that Space has been re-cast by interested Actors from being a wilderness to be conquered, to a wilderness to be cherished and protected from private-sector and ‘non-scientific’ threats. In this paper I build on the previous work of Launius, Siddiqi and others in establishing a global history of spaceflight by contextualising the most recent era of ‘open’ Space in the history of other areas of international governance. In doing this I engage with the nexus between technology and international law by challenging the conception that space is still a ‘remote commons’ which is exploited for financial, technological or military gain. Rather, I argue that Space should better be understood as an open projection space upon which interested individuals or groups position symbols in order to form checkpoints through which to filter access to Space. 

[1] Unknown (2018). "A Star For Humanity." Retrieved 27/3/18, from https://www.thehumanitystar.com/.
 
[2] Scharf, C. A. (2018). "Twinkle, Twinkle, Satellite Vermin." Life, Unbounded. Retrieved 30/3/18, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/twinkle-twinkle-satellite-vermin/.
 
 

C​reationism goes global. Alt​hough there is no influential creationism in Mexico,​ like the one existing ​in the United States and other countries​, scientific creationism has been promoted in churches, schools and bible workshops in the last three decades. In this flash talk, I will make a quick reference to the legal and political context that has allowed this change of affairs that challenges the strong secular tradition in public education, and call attention to two influential representatives of this movement: Mexican creationist Ruben Berra, and John Morris Pendleton, an American scientific creationist who is looking for dinosaurs in the state of Zacatecas, in order to show the world is 6,000 years old. 

In response to the events in Chicago in 1968, several professional societies moved their annual meetings from Chicago to other cities, but the Association of Computing Machinery chose not to. In response, a group of computer scientists attempted to organize “The Counter-Conference,” a conference that would be held concurrently with the ACM’s 1971 meeting but would not be held in the Chicago area. The organizers’ choice to characterize the location of the ACM’s conference as a matter of professionalism in computer science reveals a vision for a socially-responsible computer science, while the failure of this conference to garner significant interest within the community of computer scientists reveals how computer scientists, like many academics in other disciplines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, rejected political engagement as an important aspect of academic professionalism.

The contemporary concept of “transgender” is based on the nuanced theoretical differences between biological sex and socialized performative gender roles; attempting to apply this contemporary distinction to historical actors has the potential to limit the depth and breadth of source material. A historical analysis of 20th century trans medicine must begin with an exploration of medical literature from the period to better understand how gender nonconformity was described, explained and approached as a medical condition. Unpacking the language systems surrounding the phenomenon of trans identity, particularly the language systems in medical literature, will demonstrate the way physicians and, thus, larger social communities understood those whose gender identity did not align with their anatomical sex.

In this talk, I will discuss the research that I've conducted as a 2018 NASA/HSS History Fellow on postwar visions of spaceflight on television. My study considers ways to rethink science fictional series (like NBC's Star Trek) as serious science educational ventures. Understanding the partnerships that brought Star Trek to air, I argue, helps us think through current science communication partnerships.

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 by biochemists. The nature of modeling in molecular biology and biochemistry is more diverse than it initially appears, and much of the modeling done within these fields remains unexplored by philosophers.
In my talk, I will briefly introduce one means by which biochemists have used in vitro studies to generate knowledge about molecular activity, citing studies from 2012 used to characterize the mechanisms behind the CRISPR-Cas9 system. Furthermore, I will gesture to where the philosophy of chemistry and the philosophy of biology might be brought together to better address questions about modeling in biochemistry.

Throughout history, there have been strong connections between science and education, with the history of science very often being a history of students, teachers, instructional sites, and educational activities. Education - both formal and informal - plays an important role in the formation of scientists' foundational knowledge and community practices, as well as serving as an important context for many scientists' careers. Contemporary educational research demonstrates that educational practices can have substantial and long-lasting impacts on students' understanding of science. Despite such significance, education's diversity in forms and impacts can be difficult to fully recognize and incorporate into our histories of science. In this flashtalk, I will introduce the multi-dimensional approach to thinking about education's role in science, and critically analyzing its impact, that I have developed and used in my dissertation work on 19th-century American science education.

21st-century wildlife films promote authenticity through the extensive use of making-of-documentaries (MODs), showcasing filmmaker trustworthiness and innovations in filmmaking practices and equipment. MODs have a long and understudied history, evolving in parallel with feature films. Enjoying recent prominence as promotional trailers, bonus features on DVD releases and websites, and televised segments within wildlife broadcasts, MODs work to make public the practical and technical conditions of wildlife film production to an unprecedented degree. This talk explores MODs’ contribution to a transformed public representation of natural history, and how the digital media landscape affords filmmakers new modes of performed transparency which contrast with previous MODs' stance of "claimed artificiality" as described by Gouyon (2016).

Popular Science was a pictorial published in Shanghai from 1933, which drew readers in with colorful covers and abundant use of images. Many of its images came from foreign popular scientific publications, alongside locally-made photos and illustrations. Why were certain images changed and adapted, while others were not? This flashtalk will present key examples of images from Popular Science magazine, and ask how did the “translation” of these image shape the meaning of popular science in Republican-era, urban China?

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 genetics and the theory of natural selection. The reception of Darwinism, during this period in China, has not been well explored by academic scholars. The “eclipse,” if it did happen, never stopped or delayed the pace of the development of biology in China. In this paper, I will investigate the development of science, particularly biology, by describing the establishment of the Science Society of China in June 1914, and its official publication, Kexue (lit. Science), which remained the major, if not the only, intellectual site for Chinese biologists to debate Darwinism. I will illuminate the dissemination of evolutionary ideas through the creative discussions in Kexue, in the 1910s, to test the hypothesis of an “eclipse” in a Chinese context and seek a possible answer to the question of why Chinese biologists had little interest in the translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the 1910s.

This talkextends historical investigations in the field of the history and philosophy of science and religion it into the under-studied world of Islam and science in Colonial India. I will examine why it may be important to have a more global and comparative approach in the field.

My work encompasses various digital humanities projects on the representation of urban space in early Boston. I will discuss the tools I used for this project, and the promising applications of digital humanities tools to better understant environmental history and the history of science as a whole.