Abstracts Archive

When collagen, abundantly available in all the connective tissues of animals, humans included, emerged as an important research problem right after the discovery of the double helix, G.N Ramchandran (GNR), a young Indian scientist at the University of  Madras, took up this topic as his main r...

Non-Western Science
Individual Paper

English mathematician George Boole (1815–1864) is considered a principal inventor of mathematical logic and a major predecessor of computer science. Historians typically emphasize his recasting Aristotelian logic in algebraic notation and applying the computational techniques of mathematical...

Mathematics
Individual Paper

When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time? ...

Historiography
Organized Session

Over the past decades, our comprehension of the structures of 18th-and 19th-century natural history has exponentially grown. Several seminal studies have been published on the quantitative practices initiated in these centuries, thus completely redrawing our image of natural history as a descriptive...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

In 1700 Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748) brought barometric light under control with his 'new phosphor'. It initiated a wave of inquiries that resulted, among other things, in the development of the first electrical engines. Bernoulli's apparatus was just one instance of phosphor at that time. Light-bea...

Natural Philosophy
Individual Paper

  Heart-lung machines are key components of cardiac surgery. Their main purpose is to replace cardiopulmonary functions during surgical interventions in the open heart. While today’s heart-lung machines are robust and reliable devices, their early versions were highly precarious assemblages. ...

Technology
Individual Paper

 In place-based science, location is key to scientific inquiry.  Thus, place-based science expands the focus from the rituals of laboratory practices within a laboratory to the actual placement of research in a landscape, on parcels of land often controlled by governmental or corporate entities. ...

Environmental Sciences
Organized Session

Historical memory has served as an important analytical category in social and political history. In contests over the meaning and memorialization of war, genocide, revolution, and national identity, rival groups have often constructed versions of history to advance competing agendas. Collective sto...

Historiography
Organized Session

My talk will explore the interdependence of exactitude in scholarly as well as scientific contexts in nineteenth-century Prussia. Focusing on the influential historiographic work of August Boeckh (1785-1867) on ancient metrology I will sound out the different notions of accuracy, exactitude and prec...

Practical Knowledge
Part of Organized Session

Every member of the species Cyprinodon diabolis, the Devils Hole pupfish, lives and reproduces in a desert pool ten-feet across by sixty-feet long. In recent years, managers from Death Valley National Park have observed as few as thirty-five individual fish in this habitat. The whole species could...

Life Sciences
Individual Paper

Hardly anything seems more ordinary than the extended, concrete bodies populating the world of experience.  Yet in explaining their manifest properties, physicists must appeal to entities radically unlike the bodies of our experience.  Medieval Aristotelians too struggled to resolve tensio...

Historiography
Organized Session

This roundtable explores several key issues relating to communicating the history of science beyond the community of historians. Historians of science typically report on scientific research, largely for an audience of other historians. Some have reached larger audiences, of course, but those w...

Historiography
Roundtable

There is a "folk history" of quantum physics within the community of physicists, one that bears little resemblance to the history of the field. According to this folk history, there is a single orthodox "Copenhagen interpretation" which solves or dissolves all of the questions at the foundations of ...

Physical Sciences
Part of Organized Session

European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with either the traditional genre of pharmacopeias or with the emergence of early modern botany.  This paper reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections of books, and argues that the design...

Natural Philosophy
Part of Organized Session

Death Valley is the hottest, driest, lowest, place in North America.  It is also home to thousands of desert-dwelling plants, animals, and paleontological artifacts.  After the National Park Service took over management of the valley in 1933, park rangers struggled to develop a coh...

Technology
Individual Paper

   Many traditional societies, often referred to as indigenous or tribal people, have accumulated a whole lot of empirical knowledge on the basis of their experience while dealing with Nature and natural resources. This traditional wisdom is based on the intrinsic realization that man and ...

Environmental Sciences
Individual Paper

For some years, the field of STS has focused on the need to write transnational connected narratives, based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts that describe the dynamics of scientific practices to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of scientif...

Historiography
Individual Paper

In 1972, Claude Teague, the Director of Corporate Research at R.J. Reynolds, argued that the tobacco industry should think of itself as being "a specialized, highly ritualized segment of the pharmaceutical industry." Reynolds, he claimed, was ultimately in the business of selling a drug: nicotine. W...

Medicine and Health
Individual Paper

Before sexologists taxonomized human sexual differences, studies of non-human animals served as an important site for explorations of the meaning and manifestation of sex. But if scientists looked to the animal world for evidence that a clear distinction between male and female was the norm, they di...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

 Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is required reading in high school and college classes, and those who read past the first chapter know that the book is based in part on his sociological research in Georgia and elsewhere. Moreover, it has recently been demonstrated by Earl Wright II and ...

Human and Social Sciences
Individual Paper

Diagrams are ubiquitous today, and we learn already at school how to read and make them. Their epistemic status is, however, curiously ill-defined. This was already the case when the term was first introduced from ancient Greek into Renaissance Latin and into the vernacular languages. In the period ...

Historiography
Individual Paper

All historians of science engage in storytelling. But what about when the science we investigate is itself a science of stories? Examples of narrative abound in natural history, geology, psychology, and in knowledge practices common to many sciences, such as modelling or diagrams. Examining the terr...

Historiography
Roundtable

This paper will provide a short overview of the emergence of history of science courses in Japanese colleges after World War II. The postwar reform of the Japanese education system was performed under the control of the occupying General Headquarters of the Allied Forces (GHQ). The Civil Information...

Non-Western Science
Individual Paper

In the late 1940s and 1950s the emerging field of cybernetics raised the possibility that machines might match humans in their cognitive abilities. Especially in Britain, where cybernetics enjoyed a close institutional relationship with neurology, figures like William Grey Walter constructed machine...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

Physicists often praise quantum electrodynamics (QED) as “the most precise scientific theory ever constructed”. Its calculations depend on a technique called renormalization, which was developed circa 1947 by Hans Bethe, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman. That technique m...

Physical Sciences
Part of Organized Session

In 1714, the Irish physician and respected member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, Thomas Molyneux published an intriguing account of fossil teeth found in Ireland in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It argued that these specimens were the remains of prehistoric elephants and...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

In a 1922 discussion of appropriate femininity, the author noted that “perspiration... steals away that natural freshness and fragrance” and “robs a young woman or girl of charm and daintiness.” Women navigated a complex system of etiquette in the early twentieth century in order to not only...

Technology
Part of Organized Session

My paper will focus on the career of the Hindi Scientific Glossary (1906), an artefact of nationalist knowledge making and the global circulation of western science from early-twentieth century South Asia. A bilingual lexicon containing Hindi equivalents for English scientific terms, the Glossary wa...

Human and Social Sciences
Part of Organized Session

Ethnoscientists play an invaluable role as exponents of biological and cultural diversity. This role has frequently been compromised, however, by the discipline’s close association with powerful imperial and colonial interests. This paper examines this tension in twentieth-century Philippines, wit...

Non-Western Science
Part of Organized Session

The premature death of James Prinsep (1799-1840) was a massive loss to the British Orientalist community. In his twenty years in India his work was united by a common theme: coins. His role as Assay Master saw him perfect ways of measuring both high temperatures and precise weights, and his Indologi...

Human and Social Sciences
Part of Organized Session

In 1871, an unmarried twenty-five year old woman in Mexico City reportedly "fell prisoner to an emotional suffering that drowned her in a state of indescribable distress." According to the obstetricians of Mexico City's National Medical School, the señorita had become hysterical after having been i...

Medicine and Health
Part of Organized Session

This paper argues that the out of Africa hypothesis is an expression of Euro-American cultural beliefs that are, paradoxically, anti-social. These commitments can be traced back to the influence of Christian scholasticism on early modern naturalist thinking, where reverence for order and God's imper...

Historiography
Part of Organized Session

The common names of insects in use in Europe from the late Middle Ages through the middle of the eighteenth century did a poor job of capturing their immense diversity. While folk names for culturally relevant plants and vertebrates generally name a Linnaean genus, many insect folk names designate a...

Life Sciences
Part of Organized Session

On the night of June 16, 1933, Dr. Haim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency was shot while strolling along a Tel Aviv beach with his wife. Speculation was rife concerning the identity of the murderers: was this a sexual assault or robbery attempt or was this a political...

Human and Social Sciences
Part of Organized Session

The Science Service, a news agency for the popularization of science, was established in 1921 by newspaper magnate, E.W. Scripps and scientist William E. Ritter. In 1929 the Service hired a young female writer, Marjorie Van de Water, to cover social science for its Science News-Letter and ...

Human and Social Sciences
Individual Paper