Abstracts Archive

Darwin's theory of Coral Reefs, developed between 1835 and 1842, is commonly interpreted as subservient to his geology—constructed in order to provide evidence of subsidence contrary to the elevation he witnessed in South America. Recent work has broadened Darwin's motivations to the day-to-day af...

Papers in this roundtable explore the nature of “Early Science” as a term and a discipline that is ultimately defined and limited by its chronological boundaries, while at the same time wide-ranging in its scope. What exactly do we mean by Early Science? How early – and conversely how late –...

In the early 1940s, the British colony of Mauritius found itself in a precarious position. The 1942 Japanese occupation of Burma and a powerful cyclone in Bengal the same year shattered the rice economy of the Indian Ocean. Not three years later, three cyclones in 1945 pushed the Mauritian sugar eco...

At the turn of the twentieth-century, South African fauna was under significant threat. Devastating zoonotic diseases, plagues of birds, locusts, and carnivora had convinced veterinarians and farmers that wildlife and ‘civilisation’ could not coexist. Corn, citrus, and cattle had evicted bushvel...

Inspired by the ability of hormones to regulate metabolism, some medical researchers tried to realize the dream of human “rejuvenation” in the early 20th century. In 1920, Eugen Steinach (1861–1944) claimed to have found a scientific way to rejuvenate human bodies in a procedure he dubbed “t...

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...

Theater and science have been, and continue to be, entangled. It is telling, for example, that the most produced playwright in the USA during the 2017-2018 season was Lauren Gunderson, who specializes in plays based on narratives from the history of science. We, as historians, also engage with ...

The Logic Theory Machine (LT) has been described as “The First Artificial Intelligence Program” (Crevier, 1993). LT was a proto-computer-program developed at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California in 1955-56. It was designed by Herbert Simon, Allan Newell, and J. Clifford Shaw (hereaft...

The feminization of nature is a familiar story to historians of science. In The Death of Nature, for instance, Carolyn Merchant famously argued that nature’s presumed femininity acted first to restrain then to justify exploitative practices like mining in early modern Europe. Less well known...

In 1861 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker published a devastating review of an expedition undertaken by his German rivals, the Brothers Schlagintweit, to India and Central Asia. “There is ... a suspicion abroad,” Dalton informed readers of the Athenaeum, “that the brothers’ appointment was o...

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...

I discuss the emergence and early history of the concept ‘fact’ in German learned culture around 1800, particularly in physics and historiography. I argue that the fact-oriented methods of German physicists and historians were of common historical origin, by showing that the concept ‘fact’ w...

Albert the Great’s De vegetabilibus represents the first complete treatise on the vegetal world in the medieval Latin West. Albert focuses on plant physiology, especially dealing with digestion, as he adapts the doctrine of human digestion to plants by describing every activity in them as due to a...

At the turn of the twentieth-century, South African fauna was under significant threat. Devastating zoonotic diseases, plagues of birds, locusts, and carnivora had convinced veterinarians and farmers that wildlife and ‘civilisation’ could not coexist. Corn, citrus, and cattle had evicted bushvel...

It is rare to find scholarly classics whose authors were not eager to be acknowledged, but such is the case of Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens (1777), a founding treatise of Indology and a classic of early anthropology whose real author remained obscured for two centuries. That the mystery endured so...

The difficulty of integrating the history of chemistry into general narratives in the history of science recalls a historical (and historiographical) problem of how to deal with “Germany” within the general arc of European history. At most points of European history, defining where precisely “...

When medieval and early modern England was threatened by currency crisis, the possibility of transmutation became a matter of state. From the fourteenth century, English monarchs and their ministers cracked down on counterfeiting while simultaneously turning to alchemists to help resolve bullion sho...

On Tuesday, November 27, 1945, Mrs. Constance Rhodes received a personal letter from Dr. Arthur Whitney, superintendent of the Elwyn Training School for Mental Defectives in Media, Pennsylvania, letting her know that her seven-year-old son, Roger, “can not be granted admission to Elwyn because we ...

Astronomers like to present their discipline as the oldest science as well as the most international one. Who cares about earthly borders when contemplating the great beyond? Astronomers have claimed that their science has never been affected by worldly politics, even while recognizing the enormous ...

Using data from the General Embryological Information Service, we describe and analyze global trends in organism use during the 1950s and 1960s, visualized with topographic landscape diagrams. While the overall trend for developmental biology has been toward greater use of mammalian and avian system...

This paper examines the international and political background of the creation of Chinese Association of Scientific Workers, expounded its active role in the establishment and early activities of WFSW based on archives. As a new kind of scientific group, the AScW involved political affairs with prof...

2018 marks the 400th anniversary of the controversy over the comets between Orazio Grassi and Galileo Galilei. The appearance of three comets in 1618 initiated a scientific and polemical exchange between the two. A central issue of the debate was the location of the comets, either above or below the...

The discovery of RNA splicing in 1977 is widely considered to be a turning point in molecular biology, often viewed as the starting point of the RNA revolution. By showing that many eukaryotic messenger-RNAs are not co-linear with DNA but rather are the products of multiple splicings of non-contiguo...

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 ...

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)...

The Second International Congress of the History of Science, held in London in 1931, is chiefly remembered for the surprise appearance of the Soviet delegation and the lasting imprint that Boris Hessen’s Marxist reading of Newton’s Principia has left on the history of social constructivist thoug...

General linguistics is notoriously difficult to position in either the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences departments. This is mirrored in historical debates, which were especially prominent between 1880 and 1930, when linguists were discussing methodological issues in order to define ...

During the later half of the first millennium BCE, Babylonian astrologers utilized two separate micro-zodiac schemes that partitioned a single zodiacal sign in different ways. On the one hand, the ‘micro-zodiac of 13’ synchronized the movements of sun and moon, by linking changes in the sun’s...

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...

Periodization in the history of science is governed by the appearance of certain texts: Newton (1687), Lavoisier (1789), Lyell (1833), Darwin (1859), Einstein (1905), Watson and Crick (1953). Knowing the names and dates, we can call off the titles of these works, all seen to initiate a new phase in ...