Episode 6: Uncommon Sense

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This episode explores two cases when we have realized that what we thought was common sense – well – wasn’t.

Guest essay – Scott Lough, “The Weirdness of Time” (part 1)

• for further reading:
  • Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks, and Cultures (UP of Colorado, 2002).
• Scott Lough is a husband, father, Montessori teacher trainer, educational consultant, science writer, lay preacher and resident of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, in Canada.

Host essay – “Quantity vs. Quality”

• for further reading:
  • Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell UP, 1992).
  • Marcia Ascher, Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas across Cultures (Princeton UP, 2002).
  • Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness: A Novel (Picador, 2003).
  • Marguerite Poland, David Hammond-Tooke, and Leigh Voigt, The Abundant Herds: A Celebration of the Cattle of the Zulu People (Fernwood Press, 2003).
  • Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (Oxford UP, 1983).

On the Shelf:

• Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).

Audio credits:

All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network, except where noted.

• Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
• Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)
• Ichiro Nakagawa, Slightly Different Flow of Time (during first segment)
• nurse, Daylight Savings Time Again (following first segment)
• Daniel Berkman, Heartstrings 2004 (during second segment; courtesy of Magnatune)
• Thee Phantom 5ive, Cattle Swagger (following second segment)
• Sound effects courtesy of the FreeSound Project:
  • Tibetan bell
  • Turkish market in Kreuzberg section of Berlin
  • Xhosa boys milking cows in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
  • Book pages turning

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Episode 5: Strength in Numbers

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When did the sciences become so technical that the general public saw them as beyond its grasp? What impact does that have on the scientists’ moral obligations?

This episode transports us to two conferences that can help us answer these questions. First, you will tag along with me to the History of Science Society (HSS) annual meeting that took place recently in Washington, DC. I’ll share with you some excerpts from Ted Porter’s fascinating lecture on “How Science Became Technical.”

Then, we’ll travel back a half-century to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, a remarkable event at which 21 eminent scientists – including Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, and Herman Muller – met to discuss the threat posed to world peace by thermonuclear weapons.

Segment 1 – “How the Sciences Became Technical” at the History of Science Society meeting in Washington

• for further reading:
  • Porter, Theodore M, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005).
  • Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996).
  • Porter, Theodore M., The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988).

Segment 2 – Pugwash: Cold War Scientists and Nuclear Disarmament

• for further reading:
  • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, including two articles on Pugwash’s history:
    • Mike Moore, “Forty Years of Pugwash,” (Nov/Dec 1997): 40-45.
    • Metta Spencer, ” ‘Political’ Scientists,” (Jul/Aug 1995): 62-68.
  • Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
  • Student Pugwash USA
  • Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1995).
  • Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
  • Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash: A History of the Conferences on Science and World Affairs (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1967). No longer in print, but worth reading as a first-hand account by a key player.

On the shelf:

Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology (Harvard UP, 2007).

Audio credits:

All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network, except where noted.

• Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
• Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)
• Science Groove, “Oxidative Phosphorylation” (following first segment)
• Leon McCawley, “Papillones Op. 2″ (during second segment; courtesy of Magnatune)
• Mister Vague, “Miss Atom Bomb 1951″ (following second segment)

Other links:

• History of Science Society
• British Society for the History of Science
• Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science
• International Union of History and Philosophy of Science

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Episode 4: Constant Companions

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This episode considers some of the animals – big and small, welcome and unwelcome – that have accompanied us humans on our journeys through the history of scientific and medical discovery. Of course animals have been the subject of scientific study for centuries, but what we often forget is that they aren’t simply passive subjects. Animals have their own agenda, which sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t harmonize with the agendas of the people they live with.

(You also get to hear what the host sounds like when microbes’ agendas get the better of her immune system.)

Host essay: “The Dog Who Would Be Naturalist”

• for further reading:
  • Burchell, William John, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822-24; reprint, Cape Town: C. Struik, 1967).
  • Gallant, Johan, The Story of the African Dog (University of Natal Press, 2003).
  • Ritvo, Harriet, Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989).
  • Van Sittert, Lance, and Sandra Swart, eds., Canis Africanis: A Dog History of Southern Africa (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007).

Host essay: “No Flies on Me”

• for further reading:
  • Cirillo, Vincent J., “‘Winged Sponges’: Houseflies as Carriers of Typhoid Fever in 19th- and Early 20th-Century Military Camps,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49 (2006): 52-63.
  • Kohler, Robert E., Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
  • Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2007).
  • Leavitt, Judith Walzer, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
    
  • Morgan, Nigel, “Infant Mortality, Flies and Horses in Later Nineteenth-Century Towns: A Case Study of Preston,” Continuity and Change 17 (2002): 97-132.

Audio credits:

All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network except where noted.

• Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
• Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)
• Dejunair, Walkin the Dogg; Freddie Wong, Dog Day Afternoon; Pops Mohammed, Ambient Africa (during first essay)
• Debbie Cassell, The Boatman’s White Dog (following first essay)
• dt king, Ladybug Labs (during second essay)
• Scarlatti Tilt, The Insects Party (following second essay)
• Sound effects courtesy of the FreeSound Project:
  • scream

Other links:

• Open Culture blog

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Episode 3: On Location in Berlin

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On today’s show, we embark on the first of what I hope will be many virtual excursions together. This time we visit Berlin, Germany. This beautiful city is famous for its political and cultural past, but also has a fascinating history in science and medicine.

There is so much to examine, but this episode will focus on Charité — an institution founded as a plague hospital that ended up treating soldiers, training medical students, hosting the founding work of modern pathology, and most recently housing a history of medicine museum — and the Berlin Phonogram Archive, a founding institution for ethnomusicology and a key voice in early twentieth century evolutionary arguments about race.

Host essays: “I Feel Your Pain” and “Evolution in Four-Part Harmony”

• for further reading/viewing/listening:
  • Eric Ames, “The Sound of Evolution,” Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003): 297-325.
  • Lazare Benaroyo, “Rudolf Virchow and the Scientific Approach to Medicine,” Endeavour 22, no. 3 (1998): 114-116.
  • Der Himmel über Berlin, aka Wings of Desire, dir. Wim Wenders (1987)
  • Arthur E. Imhof, “The Hospital in the 18th Century: For Whom?” Journal of Social History 10 (1977): 448-470.
  • Music! The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, 1900-2000 (Wergo, 2000).
  • Konrad Obermann, “Materialised Medical History,” The Lancet 359 (2002): 361-362.
  • Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998).
  • Londa Schiebinger, “Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science,” Isis 78 (1987): 174-200.

Audio credits:

All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network except where noted.

• Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
• Telemann Trio Berlin, Concerto in D-Dur – Allegro (Vivaldi), Triosonate in D-Dur – Largo (Bach) (courtesy of Magnatune; during historical intro and first essay)
• Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)
• RZ-1, Cuckoo-Berliner Remix (courtesy of CC Mixter; following first essay)
• Music! The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, 1900-2000 (Wergo, 2000; during second essay)
  • “Kham hom,” performed by a theater ensemble from Bangkok in Berlin, 1900
  • Eagle song of the Hopi Indians of Arizona, performed in Berlin, 1906
  • Xylophone piece of the Bondei, played on the “vilangwi” xylophone, Tanga, Tanganyika, 1903
  • Sorbian spinning room song, sung by Christine Marrak, Burg, Germany, 1907
  • “Tangiboa,” a death lament sung by Dawidi Anam, German New Guinea, 1928
• Electrix, Berlin am Meer (following second essay)
• Sound effects courtesy of the FreeSound Project:
  • Berlin Markt
  • Door opening and closing
  • Deep breath
  • Staedel Museum

Other links:

• Berliner Medizinhistoriches Museum (Berlin Medical History Museum)
• Mütter Museum, Philadelphia (pathology collection in the U.S.)
  
• Bill Squires’ Biology 131 course web site at Texas Lutheran, which includes video projects by his students with their views on the colonization of Mars.

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Episode 2: Opposites Attract

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On today’s show, we look at the seemingly obvious idea that women and men are opposites. So many cultures historically have assumed this to be so, and so many of these cultures have argued that differences between men and women had a natural basis. We will see how difficult that argument has been to maintain as science has probed deeper into the human body.

Guest essay: Amber Hoerauf, “The Hormone Revolution”

• for further reading:
  • Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20-25; and “The Five Sexes Revisited,” The Sciences (July/August 2000): 18-23.
  • Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
  • Eva Moore, Amy Wisniewski, and Adrian Dobs, “Endocrine Treatment of Transsexual People: A Review of Treatment Regimens, Outcomes, and Adverse Effects,” Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 88 (2003): 3467-3473.
  • Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
• Amber Hoerauf will graduate in December from Southwestern University with a degree in biochemistry. Katy Nichols, a fellow student at Southwestern, narrated the essay.

Host essay: “Yin to His Yang”

• for further reading:
  • Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960-1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
  • Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 9, no. 2 (1988): 1-31.
  • Emma Donoghue, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories (New York: Harvest Books, 2003).
  • Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
  • Will Roscoe, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

Audio credits:

All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network except where noted.

• Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
• Music in guest essay:
  • Glenn Miller, Moonlight Serenade (1939 recording)
  • Maestross, Orchestral
  • Brunswick Duo, Carmen Fantasie 1 by Borne
  • Francisco Drum, Coffeesong
  • Derek K. Miller, Cold Cloth and an Ice Pack
  • Alan Renkl, Lemonade
• Music in host essay
  • Guardian Mind Mix, Worldly Composer
  • Tilopa, Chinese Princess (courtesy of Magnatune)
• Edie Carey, Chemistry (following guest essay)
• Lil Ed and the Blues Imperials, Natural Man (following host essay)
• Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)
• Sound effects courtesy of the FreeSound Project
  • Medieval fanfare
  • Applause

Contest: Leave a substantive comment here on the website or on iTunes by September 25, and your name will entered into a drawing to win two books on the history of science fiction. Be sure to leave your e-mail address so that I know how to contact you.

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Episode 1: Stranger than Fiction

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Today’s show considers some of the ways that science fiction has drawn inspiration from planetary science.

Host essay: “Dying Planet”

• for further reading:
  • Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
  • Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900: The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
  • Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Guest essay:
Megan Healy, “Attack of the Lady Scientists!”

• films referenced in this essay:
  • Tarantula (1955)
  • Rocket Ship X-M (1950)
• for further reading:
  • Bonnie Noonan, Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005).
  • Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham, Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1998).
  • Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
• Megan Healy graduated in May from Southwestern University, where she concentrated on theater, French, and feminist studies. She begins law school at Tulane next month.

Audio credits:

• All music on this program courtesy of the Podsafe Music Network:
  • Sunburn in Cyprus, History (intro & outro)
  • 3vr3n, Spaces (in background during host essay)
  • 3rd Man, Entropology (in interludes during host essay)
  • The WindowPanes, Mars Needs Beef (following host essay)
  • Jimmy Golding, Supernatural Girl (following guest essay)
  • Happy Gemini 3, Pondering the 10^th Planet (transitions)

Guest voices:
Jack Green Musselman

Win fabulous prizes:
Leave a substantive comment here on the website by August 25, and your name will entered into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Powell’s Books.

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