Biological Sciences (inactive)

Maile Arvin (University of Utah) will join us to discuss the introduction to Part I of her book, "The Polynesian Problem: Scientific Production of the 'Almost White' Polynesian Race" and Chapter Two "Conditionally Caucasian: Polynesian Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century Eugenics and Physical Anthropology" of her recently published book Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Eben Kirksey (Institute for Advanced Study, Deakin University) will join us to discuss a chapter of his forthcoming book, The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans.

We will discuss Christine Keiner's paper, "A Two-Ocean Bouillabaisse: Science, Politics, and the Central American Sea-Level Canal Controversy" Journal of the History of Biology 50, no. 4 (2017):835–887. This paper won the 2019 Everret Mendelsohn Award from the JHB. 

Edna Suárez Díaz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, will join us to discuss her recent paper: “The Molecular Basis of Evolution and Disease: A Cold War Alliance.” Journal of the History of Biology 52, no. 2 (June 1, 2019): 325–46. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-017-9476-9.
 

Sara Ray, PhD student, University of Pennsylvania
The Monsters of Peter and Wolff: Monstrous Births and Anatomical Collecting in the Formation of Developmental Embryology, 1697-1782
Description from Sara:
"In the basement of the Russian Academy of Sciences there was--according to the eighteenth century embryologist Caspar Wolff--a "storehouse of monsters." Wolff was describing the hundreds of abnormal human fetuses which had been collected and preserved by Tsar Peter the Great half a century earlier--a collection which Peter had established in order to inquire into the causes of monstrosity and processes of generation. This paper treats the history of Peter's curious collection (and Wolff's use of it as research material in his theory of epigenesis) as a unique vantage point from which to revisit the eighteenth-century shift toward developmental embryology."  

Please join us to meet with Gina Surita, Princeton University PhD student.  Her paper "The Power of Phosphate: Making and Breaking Bonds in Wartime" is now posted.

Geoff Bil, "System and Sensibility: Indigenous Plant Names Between Nature and Artifice"

Joanna Radin, Department of History, Yale University, "Rescaling Colonial Life From the Indigenous to the Alien: The Late 20th Century Search for Human Biological Futures"

Paul Wolff Mitchell, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania will present "The fault in his seeds: Lost notes to the case of bias in Samuel George Morton's cranial race science" from PloS Biol 16(10), and a work in progress, "'Bodily and Spiritually Lowered and Degraded' Tiedemann, Morton, and Enslaved Africans in the Formation of 19th Century Racial Craniology".