Perspectives on Science: Recent Episodes
Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
A new public events series from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine brings historical perspective to contemporary issues and concerns.
In the public forums, historians and other specialists speak about culturally relevant topics in front of a live audience at Consortium member institutions. Forum subjects range from medical consumerism to public trust in science and technology. Videos of these events are also available at chstm.org.
In podcast episodes, authors of new books in the history of science, technology, and medicine respond to questions from readers with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. These conversations illuminate the utility and relevance of the past in light of current events.
In Do Less Harm, editors Courtney E. Thompson and Kylie M. Smith bring together a group of leading historians and scholars to confront one of the most pressing questions in health history: How can we ethically approach stories of medicine and health without perpetuating harm? This thought-provoking collection invites readers into a crucial conversation about the responsibilities of historians when documenting the past.Through carefully curated essays, the contributors explore the ethical dilemmas that arise in researching, teaching, and writing about the history of health care. From patient privacy to the politics of archives, the essays cover how health histories have often overlooked, misunderstood, or misrepresented the people and communities most affected by medical practices. The contributors challenge the assumptions of the field, offering a more thoughtful approach to historical research—one that emphasizes empathy, accountability, and inclusivity.The book raises provocative questions and proposes practical strategies for historians and scholars to do less harm in their work and is organized around key themes such as research, teaching, writing, and public engagement, making it an indispensable resource for anyone working in the history of health care, ethics, or the health humanities. With its engaging style and accessible insights, Do Less Harm offers a fresh and timely perspective for academics, students, and readers interested in the ethical challenges of representing the past.FeaturingCourtney E. Thompson, Mississippi State UniversityKylie M. Smith, Emory UniversityRecorded on February 3, 2026For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/perspectives/do-less-harm-ethical-questions-health-historians#80906
Gender Studies, Yale University Rovel Sequeira, Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and English, University of MichiganRecorded on October 9, 2025For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/perspectives/2025-history-medicine-week#79804
MJoel Daniel Olea-Calixto, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California, DavisAndre Rosario, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Nursing, Rutgers UniversityRecorded on October 9, 2025For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/perspectives/2025-history-medicine-week#79798
Federal regulations are typically borne out of crisis. This conversation will examine how policy is set, starting in the Progressive Era and moving into the present day.
Topics: Think big questions and frame them well; crafting your grant; personal experience.Speakers: Gerardo Ienna is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Verona, Italy, and a Marie Curie global fellow (Grant Number 101026146). Simone Turchetti is Professor in history of science and technology at the Manchester University, UK, and PI of the ERC research project “Neworldata”.Recorded on May 29, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/79597
Topics: Should I turn my dissertation into a book?; How to find the right press; how to approach editors; how to outline a book proposal; collective authorship and editing; why book series.Speaker: W. Patrick McCray is Professor at the History Department at the University of California Santa Barbara, USA, and a series editor for Johns Hopkins University Press.Recorded on May 15, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/79600
Topics: Best practice in communication in teams; different ways of collaboration; are virtual tools a game changer; national styles; are we moving towards “big history”?Discussants: Olival Freire Jr. is Professor in history of science at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, and Director of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. Roberto Lalli is Assistant Professor in history of science and technology at the Polytechnico di Turino, Italy, and PI of the research project “FusEUrope”. Jinyan Liu is Professor at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, and vice-chair of the department of History of International Science and Technology.Recorded on April 24, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/79326
Topics: Academic vs non-academic jobs; Work-life balance; gender; transition out of academia.Speaker: Arwen Mohun is Professor in history at the University of Delaware, United States. Mohun has coordinated a working group on career diversity at the Consortium for History of Science Technology and Medicine.Recorded on April 10, 2025For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/79325
Topics include: The nuts and bolts; communication with editors; deadlines; the balance of criticism; how to connect the book-under-review to previous work; why are novel disciplinary perspectives relevant?Speaker: Gleb Albert is Assistant Professor in General and Eastern European History at the University of Luzerne, Switzerland, and experienced book review editor of H-SOZ-KULT.Recorded on February 27, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/78647
Christa Kuljian discusses her book, Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science. Focusing on a network of female scientists who began to examine women in science, gender and science, and sexism and racism in the institutions of science, Kuljian helps to uncover the early days of feminist science studies.Speaker:Christa Kuljian was a Research Fellow at the Consortium in 2019-2020. She is a free-lance writer based in Johannesburg, where she writes and teaches narrative non-fiction and focuses on writing about social justice. Christa is currently a Research Associate at WiSER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is also the author of two previous books, Sanctuary (Jacana Media 2013) and Darwin’s Hunch (Jacana Media 2016).For more resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/perspectives/christa-kuljian-our-science-ourselves.
Topics include: How to find suitable journals; how to respond to reviews; the role of journals in acdemic discourse; the policies and politics of journals.Discussants: Silvia Figueirôa is Professor at the University of Campinas, Brazil, and has edited several collective volumes. Joseph D. Martin is Associate Professor at Durham University, UK, chair of the editorial board of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, editor-in-chief of Physics in Perspective, and book reviews editor for the British Journal for the History of Science. Doubravka Olšáková is Senior Researcher in History at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and deputy editor of Centaurus. Tiago Saraiva is Full Professor of History at the Drexel University, USA, co-editor of History and Technology and a member of the Cambridge History of Technology editorial team.Recorded on March 27, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/78650
Topics include: What is oral history; limits and (dis-)advantages; biases; lessons from the practice; what to consider when producing and analyzing interviews; good technologies.Speakers: David Zierler is the Ronald and Maxine Linde Director of the Caltech Heritage Project, USA. Previously, David directed the Oral History Program at the American Institute of Physics. Sara Baum is an oral history transcription specialist and project manager, specializing in the history of science.Recorded on March 6, 2025.For more information visit: https://www.chstm.org/node/78648
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Benjamin Breen and Jonathan Moreno on the history of psychedelic drugs in America.There is a resurgence of interest in psychedelics in the medical world as possible treatments for conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This resurgence comes after a period during which psychedelic drugs were thought to be dangerous and have no medical value. An earlier perception was more optimistic. Figures such as Margaret Meade and Timothy Leary looked to drugs like peyote and LSD to allay fears, provide insights, broaden cultural perspectives and lead to chemical enlightenment.As mainstream institutions take yet another look, join us to examine the changing legal, medical and cultural perspectives on psychedelic drugs.Benjamin Breen is Associate Professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His second book is Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Meade, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. In addition to his academic publications, his writing has appeared in the The Washington Post, Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Slate, Aeon, The Pacific Standard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Public Domain Review, Nautilus, and Lapham’s Quarterly.Jonathan Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor Emeritus at University of Pennsylvania, where he works on bioethics, health policy, and the history and sociology of biology and medicine. He is the author of six books and numerous academic papers, and his work as also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Science, Nature, Slate, Politico, The Hill and Foreign Affairs.For more information on this and other topics, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/77474Recorded on December 10, 2024.
Join us for a discussion of the history of psychedelic drugs in America. There is a resurgence of interest in psychedelics in the medical world as possible treatments for conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This resurgence comes after a period during which psychedelic drugs were thought to be dangerous and have no medical value. An earlier perception was more optimistic. Figures such as Margaret Meade and Timothy Leary looked to drugs like peyote and LSD to allay fears, provide insights, broaden cultural perspectives and lead to chemical enlightenment. As mainstream institutions take yet another look, join us to examine the changing legal, medical and cultural perspectives on psychedelic drugs.Speakers:Benjamin BreenAssociate ProfessorUniversity of California, Santa CruzJonathan MorenoDavid and Lyn Silfen University Professor EmeritusUniversity of Pennsylvania
Historians of medicine often express the desire for their work to reach broader audiences; however, popular platforms—be they television, radio, podcasts, corporate or social media—can reach many but touch few. History of Medicine Week is dedicated to exploring the risks, benefits, experiences, and best practices for historians of medicine to make meaningful connections beyond familiar scholarly communities.This episode:Elena ConisUniversity of California, BerkeleyFor more information on this and other topics, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/200
In October 2022, the University of Pennsylvania HSS Department commemorated it's 50th anniversary, delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days, alumni, faculty, and current students gathered to discuss the department's history, its contributions to the field and new directions scholarship might take.For other sessions and more information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/153
In October 2022, the University of Pennsylvania HSS Department commemorated it's 50th anniversary, delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days, alumni, faculty, and current students gathered to discuss the department's history, its contributions to the field and new directions scholarship might take.For other sessions and more information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/153
In October 2022, the University of Pennsylvania HSS Department commemorated it's 50th anniversary, delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days, alumni, faculty, and current students gathered to discuss the department's history, its contributions to the field and new directions scholarship might take.For other sessions and more information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/153
In October 2022, the University of Pennsylvania HSS Department commemorated it's 50th anniversary, delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days, alumni, faculty, and current students gathered to discuss the department's history, its contributions to the field and new directions scholarship might take.For other sessions and more information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/153
In October 2022, the University of Pennsylvania HSS Department commemorated it's 50th anniversary, delayed two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over two days, alumni, faculty, and current students gathered to discuss the department's history, its contributions to the field and new directions scholarship might take.For other sessions and more information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/153
Join us for a discussion on the history of mining and the intersections of history of science with several other fields. How are mines sites of knowing the world, and how is that knowledge contested? How has our understanding of what a mine is changed over time, and what does that mean for how mines are studied? What can the methods and sources used in studying mines teach us about trends in the history of science and science studies? Discussants are:Allison Margaret BigelowUniversity of VirginiaVictor SeowHarvard UniversityJessica SmithColorado School of MinesRecorded on April 1, 2024For more information on this and other topics, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/157
Tune in one last time to a bonus episode of The DNA Papers with the authors of "the most beautiful experiment in biology" as they reminisce about "the best years of their lives" and field questions from the commentators of episode 14. Series moderator Neeraja Sankaran was joined by historian of science Kersten Hall to co-host this special treat. Matthew MeselsonHarvard University Franklin StahlUniversity of Oregon Kersten HallUniversity of Leeds Neeraja SankaranNational Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bangalore, IndiaRecorded on June 4, 2024.Please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144 for more information and related episodes.
Four historians share their interests in music, and their perspectives in using songs as source material for better understanding the history of science.Antony Adler, Carleton CollegeAndrew Fiss, Michigan Technological UniversityAsif Siddiqi, Fordham UniversityBetty Smocovitis, University of FloridaSong Notes:(https://soundcloud.com/antony-adler/the-dredging-song-by-edward-forbes) Edward Forbes "Song of the Dredge" Performed by Michael Schrimpf and Antony - Timestamp 34:06(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpxwJNNufko) Bio-Rad PCR Song - Timestamp 38:00(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IwmGomRRZ4&list=PLSO9Kihiwr3Mgze10g_zfxDxtNaXhCUz2) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - Bernard Hermann - Timestamp 40:40(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJgRoMzMxg) Cosmogony by Björk - Timestamp 44:50(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM) Songs of the Humpback Whale - Dr. Roger Payne - Timestamp 47:00(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGoXR5W88c) Farewell to Tarwathie by Judy Collins - Timestamp 47:30Recorded December 11, 2023For more resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/157
Episode three of the podcast companion to the Isis CB special issue on pandemics, focuses on the very substance of pandemics, namely the diseases themselves. Join Mark Honigsbaum, Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, and Michael Bresalier in a conversation about the impact of disease on history and on the condition of our planet vis-a-vis current diseases and those that may emerge, as well as the role and responsibility of the historian in dealing with pandemic incidents. Mark Honigsbaum, City University London Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, University of St. Andrews Michael Bresalier, Swansea UniversityFor more information and additional resources, go to https://www.chstm.org/video/149Recorded March 13, 2024.
The penultimate episode of the DNA Papers podcast series revisits a paper that demonstrated the semiconservative mode of DNA replication, which had been predicted by complementary base-paired double helix model of the molecule discussed in episode 13 of this series:Meselson, Matthew, and Franklin W. Stahl. “The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 44, no. 7 (July 15, 1958): 671–82. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.44.7.671The papers offers the details an experiment designed and performed by a pair of young molecular biologists, Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl at Caltech. They deployed the newly developed technique of density gradient centrifugation in combination with the use of heavy isotopes of nitrogen to show that during the replication of a DNA molecule, each progeny helix contained one strand that was conserved, or passed down directly from the parent and one new strand synthesized from the conserved template. Listen to our expert guests from different disciplines as they share their insights into what has been described as “the most beautiful experiment in biology”:Allan FranklinUniversity of Colorado BoulderMichel MorangeIHPST, Université Paris IWilliam C. SummersYale UniversityJanina WellmannMax Planck Institute for the History of ScienceRecorded on March 27, 2024For additional resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144
Rounding out the story begun in the previous installment, episode 13 of the DNA Papers centers on the publications in which the double helical structure for DNA was proposed, detailed, and its various implications speculated upon. It features four papers, all by Watson and Crick from Cambridge,. Together these papers not only proposed that DNA’s three dimensional structure was a double-stranded helix, but also described the antiparallel and complementary nature of its two component strands and the specific pairing of the component nucleotide bases, namely, the purines, A and G, with the pyrimidines T and C respectively. The papers also discussed the implications of these features for the fundamental functions of DNA.For more resources on this topic, see https://www.chstm.org/video/144.Recorded on Dec. 11, 2023.
Don's book project, "Daughters of Ceres: The Scientific Advancement of Women in Horticulture, 1870–1920" examines the confluence of two 19th century movements—one dedicated to the promotion of scientific agriculture, another to the advancement of women's education in science. These movements fueled international efforts to elevate women's position in the fields of horticulture and "the lighter branches" of agriculture. This new international movement organized to create new educational, employment, and civic opportunities for women in fields traditionally constructed as male bastions. "Daughters of Ceres" will sketch out more fully the professional and civic-oriented sides to the advancement of women's education in horticulrure, accounting for the role of commercial industries, industrial associations, professional societies, garden clubs, philanthropic foundations, and educational and scientific institutions that, collectively, participated in an extensive network that undergirded this movement. The book will offer a new perspective on "women in science" with a repositioning of horticulture in the overall landscape of scientific disciplines.Recorded on December 19, 2023.For more resources on this topic, see https://www.chstm.org/video/180
In this episode, we speak with Rena Selya, the archivist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and author of Salvador Luria: An Immigrant Biologist in Cold War America.Blacklisted from federal funding review panels but awarded a Nobel Prize for his research on bacteriophage, biologist Salvador Luria (1912–1991) was as much an activist as a scientist. In this first full-length biography of Luria, Rena Selya draws on extensive archival research; interviews with Luria's family, colleagues, and students; and FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to create a compelling portrait of a man committed to both science and society.In addition to his work with viruses and bacteria in the 1940s, Luria broke new ground in molecular biology and cancer research from the 1950s to the 1980s and was a leader in calling for scientists to accept an educational and advisory responsibility to the public. In return, he believed, the public should rely on science to strengthen social and political institutions.Luria was born in Italy, where the Fascists came to power when he was ten. He left Italy for France due to the antisemetic Race Laws of 1938, and then fled as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, making his way to the United States. Once an American citizen, Luria became a grassroots activist on behalf of civil rights, labor representation, nuclear disarmament, and American military disengagement from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Luria joined the MIT faculty in 1960 and was the founding director of the Center for Cancer Research. Throughout his life he remained as passionate about his engagement with political issues as about his science, and continued to fight for peace and freedom until his death.Recorded on November 22, 2023.For more resources about this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/178.
Episode 12 of the DNA Papers, is the first of a two-parter, which centers on papers published about the now iconic double helix structure of the DNA molecule. This episode features three publications, all published in the journal Nature, which represent the work of scientists working at King’s College London, whose X-ray crystallographic work provided some of the crucial data that supported the new double helix model. Wilkins, Maurice Hugh Frederick, Alec R. Stokes, and Herbert R. Wilson. “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids.” Nature 171, no. 4356 (1953): 738–40.Franklin, Rosalind E., and Raymond G. Gosling. “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate.” Nature 171, no. 4356 (1953): 740–41.Franklin, Rosalind E., and Raymond G. Gosling. “Evidence for 2-Chain Helix in Crystalline Structure of Sodium Deoxyribonucleate.” Nature 172 (1953): 156–57. Tune in to listen to our panel of experts in a lively and informative conversation about the place of these papers in the history of our understanding of DNA: Soraya de Chadarevian, University of California, Los AngelesElspeth Garman, Oxford UniversityKersten Hall, University of LeedsJan Witkowski, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory See also a collection of Resources at https://www.chstm.org/video/144Closed captioning available on YouTube.Recorded on Nov. 6, 2023.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Daniel Vandersommers, author of Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive. In this book, Vandersommers shows how zoo animals always ran away from the zoo. This is meant literally—animals escaped frequently—but even more so, figuratively. Living, breathing, historical zoo animals ran away from their cultural constructions, and these constructions ran away from the living bodies they were made to represent. Vandersommers shows that the resulting gaps produced by runaway animals contain concealed, distorted, and erased histories worthy of uncovering.Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo also demonstrates how the popular zoology fostered by the National Zoo shaped every aspect of American science, culture, and conservation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Between the 1880s and World War I, as intellectuals debated Darwinism and scientists institutionalized the laboratory, zoological parks suddenly appeared at the heart of nearly every major American city, captivating tens of millions of visitors. Vandersommers follows stories previously hidden within the National Zoo in order to help us reconsider the place of zoos and their inhabitants in the twenty-first century.For more resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/176.Recorded on October 31, 2023.
In this episode of Perspectives we speak with Christopher Willoughby, author of Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools. Masters of Health examines how the founders of U.S. medical schools promoted an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people's corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.For more resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/173Recorded on October 30, 2023.
In episode 11 of The DNA Papers we revisit a paper describing a famous experiment performed by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase which combined the atomic-age tools of radioisotopes with an ordinary kitchen blender to show that DNA alone, and not protein, was the carrier of hereditary information: Hershey, Alfred D., and Martha Chase. “Independent Functions of Viral Protein and Nucleic Acid in Growth of Bacteriophage.” The Journal of General Physiology 36, no. 1 (1952): 39–56. By using radioisotopes to separately label the DNA and protein components of a bacterial virus and demonstrating DNA’s central role in the earliest stages of viral replication inside a bacterial cell, Hershey and Chase’s 1952 paper provided powerful evidence about the chemical nature of the gene, and gained a well-deserved place among the classics in the history of DNA science. Here to share their ideas and opinions about the history and significance of this paper are: Angela Creager, Princeton UniversityGeoffrey Montgomery, Independent Science WriterWilliam Summers, Yale University See also a collection of resources on this topic at https://www.chstm.org/video/144. Recorded on Oct 24, 2023.
Following in the wake of the Isis CB special issue on pandemics, this episode of the companion podcast takes a deeper look at the social and political contexts of pandemics, and also considers the impact of doing such a history during times of disease crises. Contributors Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Keith Wailoo and Emily Hamilton share their insights and and experiences of taking stock of literature and also of the impact that COVID-19 had on their own scholarship and teaching.For more information and additional resources, go to https://www.chstm.org/video/149Recorded October 19, 2023.
The tenth episode of the DNA papers podcast brings to light some of the lesser discussed papers in the history of DNA that were instrumental in confirming its role in effecting genetic transformation. Both papers discussed in this episode were first presented at the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology; the first by a geneticist, and the second by a chemist, who were responsible for maintaining the continuity of work on bacterial transformation in Avery’s laboratory. These two papers provided important corroboration for the 1946 implication that the nucleic acid—DNA—of pneumococcus might be able to transform a variety of other bacterial traits besides their capsules and virulence.Ephrussi-Taylor, Harriett. “Genetic Aspects of Transformations of Pneumococci.” In Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 16:445–56. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1951.Hotchkiss, Rollin D. “Transfer of Penicillin Resistance in Pneumococci by the Desoxyribonucleate Derived from Resistant Cultures.” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 16 (January 1, 1951): 457–61. https://doi.org/10.1101/SQB.1951.016.01.032.Here to share their insights on these papers are:Eleonora Cresto, National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, Buenos AiresGeoffrey Montgomery, Independent Science WriterMichel Morange, IHPST, Université Paris I,Jan Witkowski, Cold Spring Harbor LaboratoryRecorded on Sept 19, 2023.See also a collection of resources on this topic at https://www.chstm.org/video/144.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Christopher Heaney, author of Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology. Bringing together the history of science, race, and museums' possession of Indigenous remains, from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, Empires of the Dead illuminates how South American ancestors became coveted mummies, skulls, and specimens of knowledge and nationhood. In doing so it reveals how Peruvian and Andean peoples have learned from their dead, seeking the recovery of looted heritage in the centuries before North American museums began their own work of decolonization.Recorded on October 13, 2023. For more resources on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/171
DNA Papers #2: Albrecht Kossel by Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Laura Stark is a historical sociologist and Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University. Her second book project, The Normals: A People’s History, explores how a global market for healthy civilian “human subjects” emerged in law, science, and everyday imagination over the past century. The Normals shows how logics of racialized citizenship were built into American clinical science in the post-World War II period—and how scientists and their human subjects worked for change. The George Sarton Memorial Lecture in the History and Philosophy of Science, named after a founding member of the History of Science Society (HSS), was first awarded in 1960. The lecture is given annually at the AAAS Annual Meeting by a distinguished practitioner in the history of science.Recorded March 4, 2023 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.For more information on this topic, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/170
The current and incoming editors of the journal Isis reflect on their expectations, experiences, and hopes for the journal and for the field of the history of science.Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massachusetts, AmherstElise Burton, University TorontoProjit Mukharji, Ashoka UniversityMatt Lavine, Mississippi State University Alexandra Hui, Mississippi State UniversityRecorded July 31, 2023For more episodes in this series, other podcasts, and additional resources, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/157
Episode 9 of the DNA Papers discusses a set of papers by the first scientist who made a sustained effort into uncovering the secret behind specificity of nucleic acids. The principle author, Erwin Chargaff, a European-American biochemist from Columbia University in New York, determined that the relative rations of the four nucleotide bases—A, T, G and C—were not present in all DNA in equal amounts as widely assumed, but rather, that they varied in proportion from one to another, with the amount of the A and G bases being equal to the T and C bases respectively. Furthermore, he also demonstrated that the ratio of these amounts was specific and consistent for a given species. He first laid out his vision for determining the role of nucleic acids in 1947, and over the next decade or so, proceeded to probe the finer details of DNA chemistry with the then state-of-the art innovations in techniques such as chromatography and UV spectroscopy.Papers discussed include: Chargaff, Erwin. “On the Nucleoproteins and Nucleic Acids of Microorganisms.” Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 12 (January 1, 1947): 28–34. https://doi.org/10.1101/SQB.1947.012.01.006. Vischer, Ernst, and Erwin Chargaff. “The Separation and Quantitative Estimation of Purines and Pyrimidines in Minute Amounts.” Journal of Biological Chemistry 176 (1948): 703–14. Chargaff, Erwin. “Chemical Specificity of Nucleic Acids and Mechanism of Their Enzymatic Degradation.” Experientia 6, no. 6 (June 15, 1950): 201–9.Joining us to illuminate the role of Chargaff and his experiments in the history of DNA are:Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis UniversityKersten Hall, University of LeedsHans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceView more at https://www.chstm.org/video/144Recorded August 9, 2023.
Join us for a discussion of history of science from the perspectives of Latin American, African, and Ottoman history — and global history more broadly. How have these perspectives been represented in the past? What has changed more recently? What are the pressing questions and challenges for the future of the field from a global perspective? Sharing their experiences and points of view on these issues:Harun Küçük, University of PennsylvaniaGabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard UniversityHelen Tilley, Northwestern UniversityRecorded on June 5, 2023.For information, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/157.
Maclyn McCarty, Oswald Avery and the enzymatic evidence for DNA as the transforming substance by Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine
Moviegoers who might never pick up a book on the history of science may nonetheless find themselves confronted with the stories, themes, and questions to which historians of science devote their careers when they go to the movies.
Films and other forms of popular culture both reflect and shape public discourse about the significance of scientific discoveries and the legacies of technological achievements.
For this episode, we’ve convened a film forum. HSS Secretary Matt Shindell hosts a discussion of four recent movies with fellow historians Yangyang Cheng, David Hecht, and Amit Prasad. Each of the films take on history of science subject matter in different ways; they include Christopher Nolan’s newly released biopic, Oppenheimer, Sudhir Mishra and Sachin Krishn’s satire, Serious Men, Ryan White’s documentary, Good Night Oppy, and Jianya Zhang’s heroic depiction of Qian Xuesen.
Recorded on July 27, 2023.
For information this topic, and other HSS@100 episodes, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/157.
The seventh episode of the DNA Papers is the central one in this podcast series, not only because it marks the halfway point of the podcast, but also, more so, because the paper discussed is at the center of the history of all twentieth century biology. Written by a trio of microbiologists at the Rockefeller University in New York City, this paper without saying so in actual words, represents the first publication to offer evidence that DNA (though not yet known by that name) is the stuff that makes up genes:
Avery, Oswald T., Colin M. MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty. “Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types: Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III.” The Journal of Experimental Medicine 79, no. 2 (1944): 137–58.
Joining the discussion of this historic paper are the following expert commentators:
Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester Ute Deichmann, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Geoff Montgomery, Independent Science Writer, New York City
Please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144 for additional resources on this topic.
Recorded on April 28, 2023.
The discovery of a never-released report from 1973 on women in the History of Science Society provides an opportunity to reflect on how much things have changed, what has not changed, and challenges that remain for improving inclusion in the Society. Discussants in this episode are:
Tara Nummedal, Brown University Samantha Muka, Stevens Institute of Technology Margaret Rossiter, Cornell University Matthew Lavine, Mississippi State University
For more information and more podcasts go to, https://www.chstm.org/video/157
Recorded on June 5, 2023.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Adam Johnson, Consortium NEH Fellow. Adam introduces us to his book project, which examines the shifting relationships between white ethnographic fieldworkers and Pueblo and Navajo communities in the American Southwest around the documentation of sensitive information. By contrasting Anglo universalist conceptions of knowledge with Pueblo and Navajo epistemic systems, which both have restrictions on the free flow of information (though in quite different ways), he shows that Indigenous practices of information control constrained ethnographic fieldwork methods. In response, Southwesternists regularly dropped the emerging gold-standard of participant observation to pursue Indigenous knowledge that was purposefully withheld from them, adopting tactics that isolated and coerced individual informants. The consequences of ethnographic extraction were complicated: for many communities, not only was sacred knowledge profaned when outsiders learned of it, but the publication of such information risked that even unsanctioned members of their own communities might learn things about which they were supposed to be ignorant.
For more resources and more episodes, visit https://www.chstm.org/video/161
The sixth installment of this podcast series introduces a brand new player into the story of DNA: a technique from physics called X-ray crystallography. This technique would eventually play a key role in unlocking the secrets of DNA structure, but this 1938 paper by Leeds-based scientists William Astbury and Florence Bell marks the first instance of anyone attempting to use X-rays for the visualization of the nucleic acids. It is also the first paper in this series where the main contributor to the work was a woman.
Sharing their insights about the significance of the “X-Ray Study of Thymonucleic Acid” which was published in the prestigious journal Nature (v. 141: 747-748), are:
Manju Bansal, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore Kersten Hall, University of Leeds Matthew Meselson, Harvard University Jan Witkowski, Cold Spring Laboratory
More resources and podcasts available at https://www.chstm.org/video/144
Recorded on April 4, 2023.
As the History of Science Society approaches its centennial celebration in 2024, its members reflect on the past 100 years of the profession, its fascinations and preoccupations, and its possible future in an increasingly globalized world. HSS@100 is produced in partnership with the History of Science Society.
Where has the Society been and where will it go next? Our first episode, hosted by HSS President Fa-ti Fan, kicks the series off with a discussion between HSS Presidents past, present, and future. Fan is joined by past Presidents Bernard Lightman and Jan Golinski, and current Vice President, Evelynn Hammonds. The group discusses what the history of science has meant to them, the value of history of science scholarship, and how the Society and its diverse members can expand understanding of the scientific enterprise and the contexts in which science is practiced.
Episode 5 of the DNA papers examines the contributions of the organic chemist Phoebus Levene, who published a corpus of some 200 papers on the subject over a period of four decades, during which he made discoveries about the constituents of, and developed his ideas about the structure of, DNA. Among other things, he was the first person to correctly identify the sugar components of the nucleic acids: d-ribose in RNA and d-2-deoxyribose in DNA. But these contributions have often been overlooked, and Levene is unfortunately more likely to be remembered in a negative light for something called the tetranucleotide hypothesis, which many believe hampered the progress of understanding the role of DNA.Here to talk about Levene’s contributions to nucleic acid chemistry, and offer some perspective about the tetranucleotide hypothesis are:Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis UniversityPedro Bernal, Rollins CollegeMark Lorch, University of Hull
Lukas Engelmann, Jacob Steere-Williams and Dora Vargha discuss how historians can move away from a model of biogrophy of disease and towards a better understanding of the co-occurrence of disease epidemic with epidemics of social phenomena.For more information and additional resources, go to https://www.chstm.org/video/149Recorded April 24, 2023.
An Albert M. Greenfield Forum in the History of ScienceIn 2014, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Daniel J. Kevles and Peter Westwick were invited to write the 150th anniversary history of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and were given unprecedented access to its extensive archival collection, much of which had never attracted scholarly attention. Their manuscript, tentatively titled The National Academy of Sciences in the American Democracy: A History is now very close to completion. The book is a contextual as well as an institutional history. It situates the Academy in both American and global history, covering the history of the natural and social sciences as well as engineering and medicine. It aims to weave the internal evolution of the Academy together with its impact on American government and society--and vice versa.For more resources on this topic, see https://www.chstm.org/video/154Recorded March 2, 2023.
Episode 4 of the DNA Papers features another chapter in the deep history of DNA in which the molecule itself doesn’t come up. As in the previous episode, the paper makes no explicit reference to either the molecule or its function. But the paper occupies an indisputable role in the history of DNA, because the discovery it reports opened the door to discovery of the function of DNA as the carrier of hereditary information. Joining the discussion on “The significance of pneumococcal types” by the British microbiologist and epidemiologist Fred Griffith (The Journal of Hygiene 27 (02): 113–59; 1928) are:Lloyd Ackert, Drexel UniversityMatthew Cobb, University of Manchester (guest moderator) Michel Morange, École Normale SupérieureFor additional resources on this topic, see https://www.chstm.org/video/144.
The papers discussed in episode 3 of the DNA Papers do not mention DNA in any way at all! And yet they are vitally important in any history of DNA because they provided the first step in bringing together a visible cellular component—the chromosome—both with ideas about heredity and about the chemical workings of living cells (DNA). The two papers, “On the Morphology of the Chromosome Group in Brachystola Magna,” and “The chromosomes in heredity,” were published in 1902 and 1903 in the journal The Biological Bulletin, by Walter Sutton.Here to share their insights about the bearings of Sutton and his discoveries and thoughts on the hereditary functions of the chromosomes are:Matthew Cobb, University of ManchesterDurgadas Kasbekar, The Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and DiagnosticsVassiliki Betty Smocovitis, University of FloridaSee also a collection of Resources at https://www.chstm.org/video/144.Recorded on on Aug 25, 2022
In episode 2 of the DNA Papers we discuss a cluster of papers from the late nineteenth century by the German physiological chemist Albrecht Kossel, who studied the chemical make-up of nuclein, and found and named its nitrogen-containing building blocks, probably best recognized today by their labels A, T, G, and C. Although work was deemed sufficiently important by his contemporaries to garner him the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1910, Kossel remains a lesser known figure in the history of DNA, especially among non-German speakers. The papers featured in this Kossel, Albrecht. 1879. “Ueber Das Nucleïn Der Hefe.” [On the nuclein of yeast] Zeitschrift Für Physiologische Chemie 3: 284–91. Kossel, Albrecht. 1882. “Zur Chemie Des Zellkerns.” [On the chemistry of the nuclei of cells] Zeitschrift Für Physiologische Chemie 7: 7–22. Kossel, Albrecht. 1886. “Weitere Beiträge Zur Chemie Des Zellkerns.” [Further contributions on the chemistry of the nuclei of cells] Zeitschrift Für Physiologische Chemie 10: 248–64.Sharing their perspectives on the Kossel’s contributions and their importance are:Pnina Abir-Am, Brandeis UniversityMark Lorch, University of HullHans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceFor more information and resources on this topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144
This series offers discussions with the editors and authors of a special issue of the Isis Current Bibliography. It provides perspectives into the state of current scholarhip on the history of pandemics, and where the field might be heading in the future.Neeraja Sankaran and Stephen P. Weldon introduce the series.Get an inside view of the editorial decisions and motivations behind a special issue of the Isis Current Bibliography, which focuses on scholarship in the history of pandemics. The editors discuss several important topics, including their approach to making the special issue both open access and open peer review; their efforts to make their special issue global in scope; and their editorial management of scholarly collaboration.Neeraja Sankaran is a historian of science and medicine at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bangalore, India. Her work focuses on the recent and near-contemporary history of biomedical sciences. An independent scholar since 2015, she has held both research and teaching positions at universities in different parts of the world, including the United States, Egypt, South Korea, India, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.Stephen P. Weldon is a historian of science at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism (Johns Hopkins Press, 2020) and is editor of the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, the definitive bibliographical resource for the discipline, which goes back to 1913. In 2015, he established an online open access service called IsisCB Explore that allows anyone to search this database.For more resources on this topic, see https://www.chstm.org/video/149Recorded August 29, 2022.
Judith Kaplan is a historian of the human sciences focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistics. She holds degrees in disability studies and the history of science, and is a National Science Foundation Research Scholar at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Dr. Kaplan's is working on a comprehensive history of modern linguistics while simultaneously exploring the ways in which scientific disciplines are shaped and negotiated over time. In this podcast, she describes her background and research in Consortium collections.For more information and resources about his topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.orgTo cite this podcast, please use footnote:Judith Kaplan interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 29, 2022, https://www.chstm.org/video/137
This podcast series illuminates the history of seminal discoveries and research through which we learned about the molecule that has been dubbed as the “secret of life” itself: DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid.Neeraja Sankaran introduces the series. She is a historian of science and medicine at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR, Bangalore, India. Her work focuses on the recent and near-contemporary history of biomedical sciences. An independent scholar since 2015, she has held both research and teaching positions at universities in different parts of the world, including the United States, Egypt, South Korea, India, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.For more information and resources on this topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144
The first episode of the DNA papers goes back to the nineteenth century when a young Swiss doctoral student, searching for the secrets of life by delving into the chemistry of cells, stumbled on to a hitherto unknown new chemical substance localized in the nucleus of pus cells. He named the substance nuclein; we now recognize it by the commonly used acronym for its chemical name: DNA. Friedrich Miescher reported his discovery in “Ueber Die Chemische Zusammensetzung Der Eiterzellen.” [On the chemical composition of pus cells] Medizinisch-Chemische Untersuchungen 4 (1871): 441–60.Joining us to discuss the significance of Miescher and his discovery are:Ralf Dahm, Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) gGmbH / Excellence Center for Life Sciences, Mainz, GermanyKersten Hall, University of LeedsWilliam C. Summers, Yale UniversitySophie Veigl, University of ViennaFor more information and resources on this topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/144
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Joseph Malherek, author of Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968. What is the surprising connection between socialism and the corporate focus group? How did socialists come to develop, of all things, the suburban American shopping mall? Listen in as Joseph Malherek explains the socialist roots of U.S. social research. He charts the lives and careers of Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen—an architect and urban planner—to tell the story of an intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States. These figures sought answers to the question: why do people do the things they do and make the economic decisions they make? Malherek demonstrates how U.S. businesses channeled socialist thought for creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior.
For more information and resources on this topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.org/video/143.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Susan Brandt, author of Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia.
Drawing on extensive archival research in Consortium collections, Susan Brandt demonstrates that women of various classes and ethnicities in early Philadelphia found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.
For additional resources on this topic and others, please see https://www.chstm.org .
Rana Hogarth is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois and an NEH Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Her research focuses on the medical and scientific constructions of race during the era of slavery and beyond. Professor Hogarth's first book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, examined how white physicians "medicalized" blackness—a term she uses to describe the process by which white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. Her work can be found in numerous scholarly journals including the American Journal of Public Health, American Quarterly, and African and Black Diaspora. In this podcast, she describes her background and her research in Consortium collections.
For more information and resources about his topic, and others, please see https://www.chstm.org
To cite this podcast, please use footnote: Rana Hogarth, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 23, 2022, https://www.chstm.org/video/141
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Ofer Gal, author of The Origins of Modern Science: From Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution.
What is the role of history in telling stories about science? How and why do we know about how the planets orbit? Why are there cathedrals in South America, and what does that have to do with science?
Listen in as Professor of History and Philosophy of Science Ofer Gal offers a peek into his exploration of science as a global cultural phenomenon. Gal’s synthetic approach to writing history of science begins with Plato and the Ancient Greeks and ends with Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. In between these great men of science, Gal analyzes a wide range of knowledge producers (including magicians), and draws connections between the role of political power, institutions such as learned academies and universities, and the production of knowledge about the natural world. Gal’s metaphor of the cathedral, the architectural form that signifies the power of a particular religion and a particular deity, prompts readers and listeners to situate scientific knowledge within the conditions of its production. The episode ends with an important reminder to consider the questions one asks, not just the answer one receives.
Closed-captioning available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/PxKucDmj4VY.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote: Ofer Gal, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, July 4, 2022, https://www.chstm.org/video/138
In this episode, we speak with Eugenia Lean, author of, Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940.
Did the process of industrialization occur in the same manner around the world? How did a Chinese romance novelist create a cosmetics empire that outperformed Japanese and European brands? Listen in as professor of Chinese History Eugenia Lean tells us how Chen Diexian (1879–1940), a man of letters, transformed Chinese industry in the early 20th century. Funding his business ventures with the profits from his romance novels, Chen tinkered, experimented, translated, copied and marketed his cosmetic and home pharmaceutical products to become a titan of industry. By analyzing how Chen created his Butterfly Toothpowder, patented fire extinguisher foam, and built local supply chains for his powder-based cosmetics, Lean shares a history of modern industry that tells a different story from the factory-based production in the US and Europe. Moreover, Lean explains how knowledge production and technological innovation can work together with poetry, “how-to column” journalism, and cultural translation and how innovation is not necessarily mutually exclusive from imitation.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Eugenia Lean, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, June 15, 2022, https://www.chstm.org/video/137.
Join us as we revisit our interview from April 2021 with Abraham Gibson, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio and author of Feral Animals in the American South: An Evolutionary History.
In his book, Abe Gibson tells the broader social and environmental history of the Southern United States by focusing on the domestication and subsequent ferality of dogs, horses, and pigs over the past three hundred years. Gibson discusses the co-evolution of humans and domesticated animals both in ancient history and the more recent history of the United States, and highlights how and why the open range in the U.S. South lasted longer than in other parts of the United States. Dr. Gibson uses the differential experiences of feral horses, dogs, and pigs to explore broader themes of commerce, sport, environment, and politics in Southern history from the colonial to the modern era.
This podcast features a number of questions for Prof. Gibson from Simon Joseph, a former staff member of the Consortium who currently works in the offices of the American Philosophical Society.
Abraham Gibson was a 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Abraham Gibson is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches courses on the history of science, technology, engineering, medicine, and the environment, and his research examines topics such as the domestication of animals, the evolution of cooperation, and the relationship between technology and society.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Abraham Gibson, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, April 30, 2021, www.chstm.org/video/119.
Join us as we revisit our spotlight on Aristotle's Masterpiece with Professor Mary Fissell, from October 2020. To see the visuals that Dr. Fissell references in the podcast, go to: www.chstm.org/video/83
Follow along with Professor Fissell as she discusses her research on this late 17th century sex, midwifery, and childbirth manual popular in England and America from its publication until well into the 20th century. Dr. Fissell explores the ways in which readers used their copies of the book to record births and vows of love and companionship, performing a similar function to the Bible. Dig into the similarities and differences between copies of the Masterpiece held at Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
To explore more resources related to this presentation, please visit: www.chstm.org/video/83
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Adam R. Shapiro, author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools.
In his book, Adam R. Shapiro details the ways that the business practices of the science textbook industry of the early twentieth century, combined with a new push toward teaching a unified subject called "biology" in American high schools, led to the showdown known as the Scopes Trial. However, as Shapiro notes, this seemingly paradigmatic clash of supposed opposites—science and religion—was really anything but: evolution and evolutionary thinking had been in the cultural zeitgeist for a half-century before the Scopes Trial, and antievolution religious sentiment had existed all throughout that time as well. Instead, he argues that we need to look at the shifting social, political, and economic situation in America, at a time when secondary education was becoming compulsory nationwide, and a small cadre of powerful textbook manufacturers were competing with each other for market share in proliferating science classrooms. Alongside an increasingly contentious battle between rural and urban visions of America, these developments—and not any insurmountable chasm between science and religion—set the stage for the Scopes Trial as well as for more recent conflicts about what should be taught in the nation's schools.
Adam R. Shapiro received his Ph.D. in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science from the University of Chicago. He was NSF Fellow-in-Residence at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology & Medicine in 2016-2017. His most recent book (with Thomas Dixon) is Science and Religion, A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Adam R. Shapiro, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, March 3, 2022, https://www.chstm.org/video/136.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Stephen Weldon, author of The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism.
In his book, Stephen Weldon uncovers how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, liberal ministers and rabbis created the humanist movement to accommodate religion to an increasingly scientific world and worldview. Joined by academic philosophers and prominent scientists in the years that followed, the movement engaged in battles not only with religious fundamentalists, but also with itself, as democratic humanists influenced by pragmatism fought with those influenced by the arch-rationalist philosophy of logical positivism. Professor Weldon places humanists and their "scientific spirit" at the vanguard of an increasingly secular and non-theistic America in the twentieth century. However, he also shows how humanism evolved over time, becoming more defensive in its response to the upswell of born-again Christian religiosity of the 1970s and 1980s.
Stephen Weldon is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Oklahoma and is the editor of the Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science. Dr. Weldon received his Ph.D. in History and History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/135
In light of the COVID-19 epidemic and the sometimes fierce opposition to vaccination, join us as we re-examine our presentation from January 2019 on contemporary vaccine skepticism in America and its historical roots.
What does the data show about present-day attitudes towards vaccination? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, political, and economic conditions? How are these issues mediated by the relationship between doctor and patient? Three experts—Jeffrey Baker, Elena Conis, and Erica Kimmerling—lead our discussion and share how their research tries to answer these complex questions.
"Trust in Science: Vaccines" is the first event in a series inspired by Perceptions of Science in America, a report from the Public Face of Science Initiative at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This series is presented by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
To view more resources and participate in the discussion, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/vaccines
What would it take to "render justice" in science? In this roundtable discussion, our panelists discuss two episodes that demonstrate how scientific credit and recognition reflect the social and political order of the times. Ruth Lewin Sime and Robert Marc Friedman discuss the "Meitner Scandal," in which the world-renowned physicist Lise Meitner was denied a Nobel Prize for her work, despite being nominated over 50 times and having been considered by many—both in her time and now—as an exemplary candidate. Michael Chwe and Peter Sachs Collopy discuss the recent reckoning with the racist and pro-eugenic beliefs of Robert A. Millikan, the former faculty member at Caltech and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics. They discuss activism in having Millikan's name taken off of buildings at Caltech, as well as current attempts to make Caltech more inclusive and diverse.
Our moderator for this panel is Susan Lindee, Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and our commentator is Sue V. Rosser, Provost Emerita and Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University.
Please watch a number of our panelists live on Sunday, February 20, 2022 at 12:00pm and on-demand as they discuss these issues at the 2022 AAAS Annual Meeting. The link to the AAAS Program can be found at: https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Session/28502
For more information on this forum and related resources, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/134
Richard Wetzell analyzes the history of "racial science" in Germany during the early years of the Nazi regime, demonstrating how medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and human geneticists wielded competing theories of race in order to influence public policy and maintain their professional status.
Richard Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, D.C. and editor of the GHI's Bulletin. Dr. Wetzell is a historian of modern Germany, with particular interests in the history of criminology and penal reform, and the history of the human and biological sciences.
To listen to other installments in the Consortium's series on "Race Science" and Scientific Racism, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/101
How did scientists, policymakers, and government officials think about concepts such as "scientific freedom" and "Western science" during the Cold War? Join us in revisiting our interview with Audra Wolfe, author of Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science.
In Freedom's Laboratory, Dr. Wolfe examines the relationship between science, politics, and governance in the United States during the Cold War. Wolfe examines the role of scientists in American cultural diplomacy after World War II, at a time when United States propaganda promoted a vision of science as empirical, objective, and international. This view of science was often contrasted with a representation of Soviet science as politically motivated and nationalistic.
Audra Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian. She is the author of two books on science and the Cold War, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America and Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can follow her on Twitter as @ColdWarScience and subscribe to her newsletter at Never Just Science dot substack dot com.
For more resources on this topic, please visit: www.chstm.org/video/112
How do we reconcile the positives and negatives of scientific and technological development? Join us in revisiting our interview with Susan Lindee, author of Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War.
In Rational Fog, Susan Lindee explores the way that science, technology and medicine were transformed by the military establishment and defense funding. She discusses how thousands of scientists, engineers, and physicians justified creating technologies of war, or instead rebelled against the use of science for such pursuits. As Dr. Lindee reminds us, scores of scientific societies have defended science as a uniquely positive endeavor dedicated to the "welfare of mankind," all while their members have pursuit chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons research for the purposes of human injury and death.
M. Susan Lindee is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Andy Evans discusses the history of "race science" in Germany before the Nazi takeover in 1933. Evans describes how Germany's nineteenth-century liberal anthropological tradition transmogrified into a hierarchical and racist "science" in the early part of the twentieth century.
Andy Evans is Associate Professor of History at SUNY New Paltz, and is the author of, among other works, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.
Find this podcast and others in the Consortium's series on race science and scientific racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Emily Merchant, author of Building the Population Bomb.
In her book, Dr. Merchant explores the history of population growth modeling and the intellectual and ideological battles over the concept of overpopulation. The author describes the battle between the so-called mercantilist position—held by a number of statisticians, among others—which held that population growth was the driver of national economic development and geopolitical strength, and the Malthusian position (named after noted economist Thomas Robert Malthus)—held by quite a few biologists and natural scientists—that saw rapid population growth as a harbinger of poverty, famine, and ecological collapse. The publication of the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich made overpopulation a cause célèbre in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, as Dr. Merchant makes clear, those fears did not come to fruition, and many of the problems that were blamed on overpopulation would more accurately have been ascribed to colonial and postcolonial economic relationships, and the maldistribution of global resources.
Emily Merchant is a historian of science and technology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Merchant was a 2012-2013 Dissertation Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology & Medicine.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Emily Merchant, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, November 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/130.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Douglas O'Reagan, author of Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War.
In his book, Douglas O'Reagan discusses the Allied effort to appropriate German science, technology, and industrial capability during and after World War II. As O'Reagan explains, Germany's longstanding reputation for scientific and technological excellence, beginning in the nineteenth century, was bolstered by the waves of German-Jewish émigré scientists fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, the Allies were fearful of the potential technological capabilities of the Nazis and were determined to learn from and exploit that knowledge as much as possible during and after the war.
However, the United States and the United Kingdom came to realize that, despite collecting copious and detailed notes on German science, technology, and industry and writing highly detailed reports on their findings, they were often missing the "know-how" that came with actual on-the-job or in-the-lab training. The French, seemingly more aware of the importance of tacit knowledge and the context in which work gets done (and also interested in surveilling the Germans lest they try to rebuild their military apparatus after the war) embedded students in laboratories and factories in order to learn from German experts in real world conditions. The French efforts to learn from German science and technology proved fruitful, whereas the Americans and British found their own reports relatively ineffective.
O'Reagan's book, detailing the largest-scale effort at technology transfer in world history, is a subtle and elegant story about the importance of tacit knowledge and situational context for knowledge creation, told from the perspectives of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union in their attempts to take Nazi technology and science.
Douglas O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security, and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a 2012 to 2013 Dissertation Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Douglas O'Reagan, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, November 8, 2021, www.chstm.org/video/129.
With the virtual joint meeting of the History of Science Society and Society for the History of Technology coming up next month, join us as we revisit our September 2020 discussion with Jan Golinski, Tom Misa, and AAHM President Keith Wailoo as they talk about the challenges of the present moment and what the future holds for their organizations.
They address the organizations' new initiatives, the roles of young scholars in the Societies, the limits and opportunities of virtual meetings, inclusion and diversity in the profession, and the current jobs crisis.
To find helpful resources related to this presentation, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/104
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Eric Hintz, author of American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D.
In his book, Eric Hintz describes how American independent inventors continued to innovate after the so-called "Golden Era of Invention" of the mid-to-late 19th century. Hintz argues that, while the first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of corporate R&D that internalized invention within large firms, independent inventors such as Chester Carlson, Samuel Ruben, and others continued to develop important technologies outside of the corporate structure. However, large firms did not always compete or try to do away with independent inventors; indeed, they often collaborated with independent inventors when they could not produce useful or profitable technologies in-house. Hintz discusses the importance of the American patent system for the viability of invention, and notes the ways in which women and African-American inventors were able to use the patent system to not only profit from their creations, but also bolster their arguments for equal rights. Dr. Hintz ends by noting that the independent inventor is still alive and well in American society in the 21st century, especially in the areas of computing and biotechnology.
Eric Hintz is a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
For more information on our ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, please visit: www.chstm.org/perspectives
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Eric Hintz, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/128.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Lucas Richert, author of Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture.
In his book, Lucas Richert discusses the impact of the countercultural movement on the theory and practice of psychiatry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Richert argues that broader societal developments—e.g., the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the Vietnam War—pushed a large number of psychiatrists and mental health workers to radically reform the discipline. Psychiatrists and psychologists such as R.D. Laing, Claude Steiner, Phyllis Chesler, and Mike Michaelson all labored to improve mental health by identifying and critiquing the power dynamics involved in both the practice of therapy and society at-large. Richert ends with a fascinating and timely discussion on the use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s, and the ways in which mind-altering pharmaceuticals are making their way back into the heart of the field in the 21st century after decades of prohibition.
Lucas Richert is Associate Professor and George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Lucas Richert, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/127.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Teasel Muir-Harmony, author of Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo.
In her book, Teasel Muir-Harmony discusses Project Apollo and the successful mission of landing humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. Dr. Muir-Harmony discusses the ways in which fears about Sputnik and the Soviet space program were either downplayed or amplified by politicians such as Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson in order to advance their political aims. She recounts how the goal of sending humans to the Moon was a foreign relations response to the loss of American prestige following Yuri Gagarin's historic spaceflight and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Muir-Harmony demonstrates that Project Apollo was primarily an international diplomacy endeavor to try to bring newly-independent and developing nations into America's "orbit" that had secondary effects of advancing technological development and inspiring millions to dream of going to space.
Teasel Muir-Harmony is a historian of science and technology and curator of the Apollo Spacecraft Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Teasel Muir-Harmony, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 3, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/126.
Join Dr. Rachel Walker as she recounts how reading a curious passage in the Anglo-African Magazine, which she found in the archives of the Library Company of Philadelphia, led to her research on race and science in early America, and more specifically, the nineteenth-century sciences of phrenology and physiognomy.
Professor Walker uses images from the archives of member institutions such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library to illustrate how phrenology and physiognomy were used by both scientists and laypeople in the nineteenth century. Although we often rightly associate these techniques with pseudo-scientific ways of supporting racist and sexist social hierarchies, Dr. Walker shows us how Black scientists and laypeople also used these sciences to forward their own assertions of Black excellence and genius.
Dr. Walker shows us how scientists and the many Americans who read and talked about phrenology and physiognomy used facial angles, head shapes, and other measurements of the face and skull to make judgments and predictions about friends, family members, strangers, business partners, and ultimately, entire groups of people. She emphasizes the need to understand these practices—even though we now reject them as pseudo-sciences—because they tell us a lot about how nineteenth-century individuals understood their social world and the people with whom they interacted on a daily basis.
Rachel Walker specializes in the history of gender, race, and popular science in early America. She is currently working on her first book project, which uncovers the history of physiognomy: a once-popular but now-discredited science, rooted in the idea that people's facial beauty reveals their moral and mental character. In 2018, Dr. Walker received her PhD from the University of Maryland in College Park.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Neeraja Sankaran, author of A Tale of Two Viruses: Parallels in the Research Trajectories of Tumor and Bacterial Viruses.
In her book, Neeraja Sankaran compares the research trajectories of two groups of viruses: cancer-causing viruses and bacteriophages, which infect and live at the expense of bacteria. She discusses how their respective discoveries—in 1911 by Peyton Rous and 1916 by Felix d'Herelle—changed our understanding of what viruses are, how they operate, and what they are capable of doing in animal and human bodies. Dr. Sankaran discusses the ways in which the phenomenal development of biomedical imaging and identification technologies in the middle decades of the 20th century allowed for our current understanding of what viruses are and how they are able to infect host cells. She ends her discussion with a poignant and timely call to recognize that stigmas of all kinds—whether against certain groups of people, or against viruses themselves as potential agents of disease—have often hindered the development of science and medicine, and that the worst effects of global epidemics (e.g., the AIDS epidemic, as well as COVID-19) may have been mitigated had the stigma surrounding those infected, and the viruses themselves, not existed.
Neeraja Sankaran is Senior Research Scholar at the Descartes Centre of Utrecht University. She is a historian of science and medicine interested in the recent and near-contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, and has worked on the history of virus research, molecular biology, immunology, and origins of life research.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Neeraja Sankaran, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, August 30, 2021, www.chstm.org/video/122.
What's that smell? Join us as we revisit our interview with Melanie Kiechle on the history of cities, senses and public health.
This episode of our podcast series features Melanie Kiechle's book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. The book illuminates the lives of 19th-century Americans—including medical experts and ordinary city-dwellers—who used their noses to detect and address sanitation challenges associated with foul odors in the midst of rapid urban and industrial growth.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: www.chstm.org/video/62
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Alberto Martínez, author of Burned Alive: Giordano Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition.
In his book, Alberto Martínez reevaluates the life, career, and death of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and cosmologist burned alive by the Catholic Inquisition in Rome in 1600. Martínez demonstrates that it was not his heterodox religious beliefs that led to his condemnation, but instead his visionary scientific beliefs—that the Earth moves, and that there are many worlds other than our own—that led to his demise. Dr. Martínez discusses the contrasting ways in which Bruno and Galileo were dealt with by the Inquisition, and shows how they drew upon the insights of prior thinkers to inform their own views about the heavens and the earth. He ends by discussing the immense power the Catholic Church has had over the construction of knowledge, and how it influences our collective memory of people like Giordano Bruno.
Alberto Martínez is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
This podcast features a number of questions for Dr. Martínez from Lisa Nocks, a historian at the IEEE History Center, and from Vivion Vinson, a retired nurse.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Alberto Martínez, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, July 27, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/123.
If you've watch television or listened to the radio lately, you've probably been bombarded with direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Join us as we revisit our forum from October 2018 on the interplay between medicine and advertising, capitalism and consumerism.
Why do we refer to patients as "consumers" in the United States? Is today's opioid crisis the result of medical consumerism run amok--of pills hawked like soap to gullible shoppers? Is picking a doctor really like choosing a new car?
In this talk, historians Nancy Tomes and David Herzberg discuss when and why patients started to be called "consumers," and examine the positive and negative aspects of twentieth-century medical "consumerism." We explore a century of efforts to deliver pharmaceutical relief through properly calibrated markets, and evaluate the risks (and often-misunderstood benefits) of governing addictive drugs as consumer goods.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: www.chstm.org/video/57
Direct-to-consumer genetic testing has been in the news this week with the recent IPO of 23andMe. Thus, we are revisiting our forum from September 2017 on biobanking, genetics, and the competing interests of individuals, businesses, and society in the collection and use of genetic samples.
Are we now approaching a time when we could all live, at least in freezers, forever? Modern collection and storage of biological samples make possible a kind of "immortality" for anyone who has ever had a saliva sample frozen for genealogical testing or a blood sample stored in medical collections. New technologies, like CRISPR for gene editing, expand possible future uses of biological materials stored around the world. The story of Henrietta Lacks, popularized in a book by Rebecca Skloot and an HBO special starring Oprah Winfrey, illustrates the ways that a single person's cells and tissues can take on lives of their own as research material. In 1953, just before her death, Lacks's cancer cells yielded the oldest and most common human cell line still used in research.
There has been significant public interest in her remarkable story, but the "immortality" of people like Henrietta Lacks raises pressing questions for all of us. Who owns and controls bodily materials extracted from research subjects and patients? Who can profit from the cells and genes that make us who we are? How do we weigh the value of personal privacy and an individual’s sense of self against the potential for medical progress? How do imbalances of wealth and power influence questions of consent, exploitation, and identity for people who provide biological materials? These questions framed a public forum organized by the Consortium and hosted by the American Philosophical Society on September 28, 2017.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: www.chstm.org/video/51
Held in partnership with the American Philosophical Society, this discussion brings together historians Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi to discuss the fascinating world of the mind sciences in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time period, the human mind captured the imagination of the American public. Efforts to reveal the subconscious and to understand mental physiology inspired the creation of new technologies, modes of experimentation, and collaborations that aspired to make visible the inner workings of the brain. These developments had a profound impact on the production of scientific and medical expertise that continues to influence conceptions of race, gender, and mental illness in the present.
Dr. Thompson focuses on the history of phrenology, exploring its connection to popular and elite theories of criminality. As she explains both in her presentation and in her book An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America, phrenology constructed scientific ways of identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions - ways which often recruited and justified folk notions and stereotypes of what criminals looked like and how they acted.
Dr. Puglionesi recounts how and why psychologists and others interested in the mind investigated seances, clairvoyance, and telepathy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some researchers were interested in debunking frauds and con artists, most were interested in reconciling the mind sciences with the supernormal. Dr. Puglionesi's book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, tells this history and highlights the ways in which psychical research troubled the boundaries of science and its relationship to democracy and popular ways of experiencing the world.
To cite this content, please use footnote:
"Sciences of the Mind," Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, accessed Month Day, Year, https://www.chstm.org/video/121.
In light of the current global vaccination campaign against COVID-19 and the struggles to increase vaccine acceptance and ensure vaccine compliance, we revisit our Trust in Science: Vaccines forum from January 2019.
What are the historical roots of resistance to vaccination? What is the data about contemporary attitudes? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, economic and political contexts? How do these issues play out in the relationship between a doctor and a patient? Listen to experts share their research and experience on these questions, and lead our discussion.
"Trust in Science: Vaccines" is the first event in a series inspired by Perceptions of Science in America, a report from the Public Face of Science Initiative at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know is available now on Netflix, or go to https://www.blackholefilm.com and click on the Watch button at the top for more options.
What can black holes teach us about the boundaries of knowledge? These holes in spacetime are the darkest objects and the brightest—the simplest and the most complex. With unprecedented access, Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know follows two powerhouse collaborations. Stephen Hawking anchors one, striving to show that black holes do not annihilate the past. Another group, working in the world’s highest altitude observatories, creates an earth-sized telescope to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. Interwoven with other dimensions of exploring black holes, these stories bring us to the pinnacle of humanity’s quest to understand the universe.
In the video above, historians of science Lorraine Daston and Simon Schaffer join Peter Galison for a roundtable discussion about the film, its scientific, philosophical and artistic content, and the choices Peter made as director. Afterwards, Peter answers questions about the film from friends of the Consortium.
To cite this content, please use footnote:
"Behind the Scenes: Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know," Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, accessed Month Day, Year, https://www.chstm.org/video/120.
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Abraham Gibson, author of Feral Animals in the American South: An Evolutionary History.
In his book, Abe Gibson tells the broader social and environmental history of the Southern United States by focusing on the domestication and subsequent ferality of dogs, horses, and pigs over the past three hundred years. Gibson discusses the co-evolution of humans and domesticated animals both in ancient history and the more recent history of the United States, and highlights how and why the open range in the U.S. South lasted longer than in other parts of the United States. Dr. Gibson uses the differential experiences of feral horses, dogs, and pigs to explore broader themes of commerce, sport, environment, and politics in Southern history from the colonial to the modern era.
This podcast features a number of questions for Dr. Gibson from Simon Joseph, a former staff member of the Consortium who currently works in the offices of the American Philosophical Society.
Abraham Gibson was a 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Abraham Gibson is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches courses on the history of science, technology, engineering, medicine, and the environment, and his research examines topics such as the domestication of animals, the evolution of cooperation, and the relationship between technology and society.
To cite this podcast, please use footnote:
Abraham Gibson, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, April 30, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/119.
In light of India's ongoing struggle with COVID-19 and its devastating impacts, we revisit our conversation with Kavita Sivaramakrishnan from June 30, 2020. Dr. Sivaramakrishnan discusses public engagement and political history in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in India.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: www.chstm.org/video/74
To view Professor Hansen's images and for more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/118.
Join Professor Bert Hansen as he discusses a number of popular images of American medicine from the late nineteenth century that he has donated to Yale's Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. In this presentation, Professor Hansen shows us what medicine looked like and how it was experienced by the public at that time.
Professor Hansen's images use medicine to satirize the politics of the day, often showing politicians, political parties or mascots as sickly and in need of care. These illustrations depict the changing character of medicine and how it was interpreted by journalists, cartoonists, and the reading public in the late nineteenth century.
Dr. Hansen's presentation, using images he has collected over decades and which are now part of The Bert Hansen Collection at Yale's Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, reveals the transformation of medicine and its evolving public reception through lively and fascinating mass media cartoons and illustrations.
Bert Hansen has been teaching the history of science and medicine, after earning his PhD from Princeton University in 1974, at Binghamton University, the University of Toronto, New York University, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has published two books and numerous articles about medical and scientific developments from the 14th century through the 20th and about the imagery and popular attitudes that surround them. He has also written about gay history. His most recent scholarship examines the significance of Louis Pasteur's engagement with the fine arts. For more, see https://berthansen.com.
Stephen Kenny scrutinizes the career of surgeon Rudolph Matas, the so-called "father of vascular surgery." Kenny demonstrates how his life and work must be understood in the context of segregation in the U.S. South and the racialized medicine that was practiced there in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also highlights the ways in which Matas used medical photography to legitimate an ideologically driven racialized research agenda.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on "Race Science" and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Wendy Gonaver, author of The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880.
Wendy Gonaver reveals the history of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia and its superintendent, John M. Galt. Gonaver explains the Asylum's exceptional status as the only psychiatric facility to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants. Although Eastern Lunatic Asylum instituted a progressive form of "moral therapy" that reflected Enlightenment values (including doing away with mechanical restraints and corporal punishment), it nevertheless reflected and upheld the institution of slavery and, later, the racially discriminatory society of the antebellum South.
Gonaver describes how superintendent John M. Galt believed that "religious fanaticism," as manifested in the abolitionist movement, was more harmful to a person's mental health than any sort of intemperance or "insanity." Despite this fact, Galt was the only psychiatric superintendent in the South to advocate for integrated wards and both black and white attendants. Careful not to romanticize Galt or his work, Gonaver explains how his advocacy of integrated institutions led to him becoming a pioneer in the development of outpatient psychiatric care. However, after Galt's death in 1862, Eastern Lunatic Asylum became segregated like all of the other psychiatric facilities in the South. As a result, psychiatric facilities for black patients in the antebellum South came to mimic the slave plantations that had existed beforehand, leading to abuse and involuntary imprisonment, without even the pretense of adequate or humane care.
Wendy Gonaver is the author of The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the College of William and Mary. She taught as an adjunct at several universities, and currently works at the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives at Chapman University.
For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/116.
In this recording, historian Warwick Anderson discusses his investigations into the development of "race science" in the Global South and the fabrication of whiteness as a "strategy of authority."
Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. As an historian of science, medicine and public health, Dr. Anderson's work has focused on ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
In this episode of our podcast series on race and science, Anderson discusses the differences between how "race science" was practiced in the Global South and how it was practiced in North America and Europe. He notes that theories about race—and thus the practices of "race science"—were often more malleable and flexible in the Southern Hemisphere, as opposed to the more rigid racial typologies and hardline eugenics that characterized the United States and Western Europe. In addition, following the work of James Baldwin and Homi Bhabha, Anderson notes how whiteness has been used as a "strategy of authority" for colonial settlers rather than as a robust identity, a fact he illustrates through his research on race in Australia and the Philippines.
To listen to other installments in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/101
In this recording and in her book Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race, and the Search for Human Origins, Christa Kuljian examines the history of paleoanthropology in South Africa, interrogating the ways in which ideas about racial hierarchies influenced the founding and development of the field. Her research demonstrates how the social and political context in which paleoanthropology has been practiced in South Africa and elsewhere influenced the development of the science, and how present-day scientists are pushing back against their field's troubling legacy.
Christa Kuljian is a writer, author, and Research Associate at WiSER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
In this episode of Perspectives, we sit down with Audra Wolfe to discuss her book, Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. In Freedom's Laboratory, Dr. Wolfe examines the relationship between science, politics, and governance in the United States during the Cold War, highlighting the ways in which scientists, policymakers, and administrators defined and thought about concepts such as "scientific freedom" and "Western science." She examines the role of scientists in American cultural diplomacy after World War II, at a time when United States propaganda promoted a vision of science as empirical, objective, and international. This view of science was often contrasted with a representation of Soviet science as politically motivated and nationalistic.
Dr. Wolfe adds to our knowledge of how science and propaganda, psychology and diplomacy, interacted with one another and were deployed on both sides during the Cold War. Weaving diplomatic history with the history of science, Wolfe's book demonstrates the powerful and controversial uses and abuses of science during the Cold War.
Audra Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian. She is the author of two books on science and the Cold War, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America and Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can follow her on Twitter as @ColdWarScience and subscribe to her newsletter at Never Just Science dot substack dot com.
For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/112
In this episode of Perspectives, we talk with M. Susan Lindee, author of Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War.
In Rational Fog, Susan Lindee explores the way that science, technology and medicine were transformed by the military establishment and defense funding. She discusses the ways in which thousands of scientists, engineers, and physicians justified or made peace with creating technologies of war, or instead rebelled against the use of science for such pursuits. Indeed, as Lindee reminds us, scores of scientific societies have defended science as a uniquely positive endeavor dedicated to the "welfare of mankind," all while many of their members have pursuit chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons research for the purpose of human injury and death.
M. Susan Lindee is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Elise Burton discusses the development of genetics, "race science," and race concepts in the Middle East. Dr. Burton sketches the connections between European, North American, and Middle Eastern scientists, and elaborates upon how contemporary issues (such as COVID-19) are influenced by ideas of genetic nationalism.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
This seminar in the Economization of Global Health series focuses on the origins, production and reception of one of the major moments in the economization of global health: the World Bank's World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (WDR93). Our speakers, both internationally recognized economists, played key roles in this venture: Dean Jamison was the lead author of the report, while Abdo Yazbeck was responsible for much of the technical work. In this seminar, the two discuss their work on the report and reflect on its origins and impact.
Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines how scientific articulations of human diversity have been used to both legitimize and confront notions of race and racism in the modern world.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
Sadiah Qureshi recounts the history of the exhibition of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain, and how these shows contributed to the formation of anthropology.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
In this podcast episode, we talk with Jonson Miller, author of Engineering Manhood: Race and the Antebellum Virginia Military Institute.
In Engineering Manhood, Jonson Miller explores the development of the Virginia Military Institute and the engineering profession in the Antebellum United States. Miller delves into the ways in which VMI was a node in the struggle for political representation among lower and middle-class white men, while explicitly excluding women and black men from its egalitarian mission.
Jonson Miller was a 2014 to 2015 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/108
John Jackson discusses the legacy of nineteenth-century "race science" on twentieth-century scientific investigation, the challenge to "race science" made by population genetics and anthropology, and the ways in which the pseudoscience of race continues to inform twenty-first century debates.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
Rana Hogarth talks about how white physicians "medicalized" blackness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how African-Americans pushed back against this endeavor.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101
This event looks at the profound health inequities around giving birth, further laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussions with experts include how slavery and the history of reproductive medicine intersect, the impact that medical racism has on Black birthing people from slavery to freedom, engagement in the national reproductive justice movement, and recent efforts to address racial inequities in maternal mortality and morbidity in NYC. This event is part of the Race & Health series at The New York Academy of Medicine.
For more resources related to this presentation, please visit: www.chstm.org/video/102
Follow along with Professor Mary Fissell as she discusses her research on Aristotle's Masterpiece, a late 17th century sex, midwifery, and childbirth manual popular in England and America from its publication until well into the 20th century. Dr. Fissell explores the ways in which readers used their copies of the book to record births and vows of love and companionship, performing a similar function to the Bible. Dig into the similarities and differences between copies of the Masterpiece held at Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
To explore more resources related to this presentation, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/83
Join Fellows of the Consortium and Jan Golinski, Thomas Misa, and Keith Wailoo, the respective presidents of the History of Science Society, Society for the History of Technology, and the American Association for the History of Medicine, as they discuss the challenges of the present moment and what the future holds for their organizations. They discuss the organizations' new initiatives, the roles of young scholars in the Societies, the limits and opportunities of virtual meetings, inclusion and diversity in the profession, and the current jobs crisis.
To find helpful resources related to this presentation, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/104
What is the relationship between technological change and economic development? Do the roots of the 'knowledge economy' lie in sixteenth century Europe? Explore these issues and more beginning with an in-depth look at Johannes Stradanus's Nova Reperta [ca. 1590], an engraved series of prints depicting inventions such as the printing press, gunpowder, and guaiacum, a plant used to treat syphilis. Join our speakers as they go on to discuss the relationship between local and global knowledge, the role of collaboration for invention, and the positive and negative impacts of new technology over the past six centuries.
To find more resources related to this presentation, please visit: www.chstm.org/video/104
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan reflects on public engagement, political history, and the COVID-19 crisis in India.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Mary Augusta Brazelton talks about the COVID-19 crisis along with the history of public health and modernization in China.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Marcos Cueto discusses the COVID-19 crisis in Brazil.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Amir Afkhami discusses the history of epidemic disease in Iran, including the current crisis.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Cindy Connolly, Patricia D'Antonio, and Julie Fairman discuss the role of nurses and the nursing profession in the history of pandemics.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Catherine Burns explores the COVID-19 crisis in South Africa in the context of the history of HIV/AIDS.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. Fifty years later, five nations have sent spacecraft to the Moon and private enterprises are increasingly engaging with its exploration. The advancement of space science, the allure of profiting on lunar resources, and ideas for a permanent human presence on the Moon are raising attention. They also generate controversy and pose challenging questions. Why go to the Moon? Should we go back? Who benefits and who pays for going to the Moon? Join us for a conversation with space historian Roger Launius and historian of colonialism Margaret Huettl and share your questions and thoughts as to the past and future of lunar exploration.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/66
Elena Conis examines how we use history, especially of the polio epidemics, when we discuss the COVID-19 pandemic.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Nancy Tomes reflects on the experience of being a historian of medicine during the COVID-19 epidemic, and interdisciplinary efforts to respond to the outbreak.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Dora Vargha talks about the role of international institutions during a pandemic.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis provides us with an introduction to the history and evolution of infectious disease.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
In this podcast, we discuss the history of vaccines and public health with Dora Vargha, author of Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic.
Dora Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War.
Dora Vargha was a 2010 to 2011 Dissertation Research Fellow and 2015 to 2016 Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/72
In this podcast episode, we talk with James Poskett, author of Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920.
Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world—and how the world changed phrenology.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/71
Kathryn Olivarius recounts how epidemics have exacerbated social and economical inequalities.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
In this episode, we talk with Joseph Martin, author of Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter.
Joseph Martin tells the story of how solid state physics challenged and redefined some of the core ideals of American physics, and in the process played an essential role in sustaining the prestige physics enjoyed in Cold War American society.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/88
In this episode, we talk with Cameron Strang, author of Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands: 1500-1850.
Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/87
Natalia Molina discusses the intersection of race and public health during the covid-19 and other pandemics.
Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at: https://www.chstm.org/video/74
In this podcast episode, we discuss the history of how biblical notions of race influenced European understandings of Africa with Michael Robinson, author of The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/70
Is the story of American girls’ and women’s access to science and math education a direct path from exclusion to inclusion? What does equity for girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) look like, and how do we get there? Pairing a historian and educational researcher, this event takes a journey from the 1800s through the present, including surprising histories, continuing challenges, and current strategies.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/63
Why do we refer to patients as "consumers" in the United States? Is today's opioid crisis the result of medical consumerism run amok--of pills hawked like soap to gullible shoppers? Is picking a doctor really like choosing a new car?
Join us as historians Nancy Tomes and David Herzberg discuss when and why patients started to be called "consumers," and examine the positive and negative aspects of twentieth-century medical "consumerism." We explore a century of efforts to deliver pharmaceutical relief through properly calibrated markets, and evaluate the risks (and often-misunderstood benefits) of governing addictive drugs as consumer goods.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/57
Join us to examine vaccine skepticism, in contemporary America, historically, and in the clinic. What are the historical roots of resistance to vaccination? What is the data about contemporary attitudes? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, economic and political contexts? How do these issues play out in the relationship between a doctor and a patient? Three experts share their research and experience on these questions, and lead our discussion.
"Trust in Science: Vaccines" is the first event in a series inspired by Perceptions of Science in America, a report from the Public Face of Science Initiative at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Two more events will cover trust in science through evolution and climate change.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/61
In this episode, we discuss race, anthropology, and the collection and display of human remains with Samuel Redman. Sam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/65
Many social, economic, and political factors affect urban health on local, regional and global scales. Examples from near and far, past and present, abound. In the 18th century, yellow fever coursed from city to city across the world as merchant shipping helped spread the disease. As cities incubated the disease, social relations among urban communities were reconfigured. In modern times, increasing urbanism—the unintended effect of agricultural policies compounded by political instability and social prejudice—led to outbreaks of disease. The entrenchment of Chagas disease—a debilitating and sometime fatal infection—made the city of Arequipa, Peru, a microcosm for the way cities shape disease, and a model for the recent bedbug outbreak in New York City.
Join American historian Billy Smith, and epidemiologist Michael Levy, for a conversation that uses both science and history to understand the intersection of urban development and the spread of contagions.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/56
Are we now approaching a time when we could all live, at least in freezers, forever? Modern collection and storage of biological samples make possible a kind of "immortality" for anyone who has ever had a saliva sample frozen for genealogical testing or a blood sample stored in medical collections. New technologies, like CRISPR for gene editing, expand possible future uses of biological materials stored around the world. The story of Henrietta Lacks, popularized in a book by Rebecca Skloot and an HBO special starring Oprah Winfrey, illustrates the ways that a single person's cells and tissues can take on lives of their own as research material. In 1953, just before her death, Lacks's cancer cells yielded the oldest and most common human cell line still used in research.
There has been significant public interest in her remarkable story, but the "immortality" of people like Henrietta Lacks raises pressing questions for all of us. Who owns and controls bodily materials extracted from research subjects and patients? Who can profit from the cells and genes that make us who we are? How do we weigh the value of personal privacy and an individual’s sense of self against the potential for medical progress? How do imbalances of wealth and power influence questions of consent, exploitation, and identity for people who provide biological materials? These questions framed a public forum organized by the Consortium and hosted by the American Philosophical Society on September 28, 2017.
Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/51
In this episode, we will discuss energy, environment, and the origins of the American fossil fuel paradigm with Christopher Jones. Christopher is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University, and the author of Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America.
Routes of Power traces the pathways by which the American energy industry grew into a vast network of canals, pipelines, and wires crisscrossing the nation. This network fueled an explosion of urban and industrial growth and accelerating the speed at which goods and power moved from sites of extraction and production to sites of consumption. While cities on the Eastern seaboard benefited from cheap and abundant energy, rural regions of the mid-Atlantic suffered from the environmental costs of creating and maintaining the power infrastructure.
Christopher Jones was a 2008 to 2009 Dissertation Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/64
What's that smell? Join us as we discuss the history of cities, senses and public health.
The first episode of our new podcast series features Melanie Kiechle's book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. This book illuminates the lives of 19th-century Americans—including medical experts and ordinary city-dwellers—who used their noses to detect and address sanitation challenges associated with foul odors in the midst of rapid urban and industrial growth.
Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at: https://www.chstm.org/video/62