November 30, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
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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.
Other links:
Posted in podcasts | Tagged atomic bomb, bertrand russell, cold war, conferences, einstein, history of science society, hss, nuclear weapons, peace, pugwash, soviet union | 2 Comments »
October 31, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
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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.
Other links:
Posted in podcasts | Tagged Burchell, Cape Colony, disease, dogs, empire, epidemic, flies, genetics, history of medicine, history of science, houseflies, imperialism, natural history, race, scientific expeditions, South Africa, war | 1 Comment »
September 28, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
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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 10th 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:
Other links:
Posted in podcasts | Tagged berlin, berlin phonogram archive, berlin phonogramm archiv, charite, ethnomusicology, evolution, german, germany, history of medicine, history of science, medizinhistoriches museum, on location, pathology, virchow | 5 Comments »
August 31, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
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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.
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.
Posted in podcasts | Tagged berdache, biology, China, gender, genetics, history of medicine, history of science, hormones, intersexuality, sex, transsexuality | 4 Comments »
August 6, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
In the essay “Dying Planet,” I said that nineteenth-century astronomers came to see Mars as the planet that most closely resembled Earth in size. I misspoke. Of the planets in our solar system, Venus is closest in size to Earth, and nineteenth-century astronomers knew that. I should have said that nineteenth-century astronomers saw Mars as the planet that was easiest to study for analogies to what would happen to Earth.
Posted in errata | Leave a Comment »
July 31, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
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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:
- for further reading:
- 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:
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.
Posted in podcasts | Tagged 1950s, America, astronomy, gender, history of science, Mars, sci fi, science fiction, space, War of the Worlds, Wells, women | 1 Comment »
March 22, 2007 by Elizabeth GM
The first episode of The Missing Link will go online this summer. More details coming soon.
In the meantime, I’m soliciting ideas for a regular segment that will be featured on the show. The segment will feature brief reviews and excerpts of books (or other media) on the history of science that are accessible to a broad audience. If you have a book to recommend, please leave a comment here.
Posted in announcements | Leave a Comment »
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