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".

Jay Aronson, "Humanitarian DNA Identification in Post-Apartheid South Africa." An additional article, "The Strengths and Limitations of South Africa’s Search for Apartheid-Era Missing Persons," is included as optional reading.

Note Special Date
Rosanna Dent, "Exemplary Indigenous Masculinity in Cold War Genetics"

Note Special Day CH 6: "Improving Breed II: Science" from Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton, The Invention of the Modern Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (JHU Press, 2018). The book's conclusion is included in the file as optional additional reading.

The working group will be reading Rachel Dentinger’s recent article titled “From ‘actual forces’ to ‘token stimuli’: Gottfried S. Fraenkel, and the evolutionary ‘raison d’être’ of plant molecules, 1930-1960s,” HSNS (2017): 47, 127-163.

Tina Gianquitto will discuss her interdisciplinary work in history of biology and literary studies and her new project on plants. We'll read two articles: “Criminal Botany: Progress, Degeneration, and Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants” in American’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2014) and “Botanical Smuts and Hermaphrodites: Lydia Becker, Darwin’s Botany, and Education Reform” Isis, 104:2 (2013): 250-277

The group will read "Circulating Biomedical Images: Bodies and Chromosomes in the Post-Eugenic Era," by Maria Jesus Santesmases. It appeared in History of Science, volume 55, 2017, pp. 395-430. We will be joined by Maria Jesus Santesmases who will discuss this paper with us and Susan Lindee from the University of Pennsylvania who will serve as commentator.
 

The working group read "A Feeling for the Algorithm: Working Knowledge and Big Data Biology," by Hallam Stevens. Osiris 2017: 32:151-174. Hallam Stevens joined the meeting discuss this paper with us.

Excerpts from (with a focus on chapter 5): John Jackson Jr .and David J. Depew, Darwinism, Democracy and Race: Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2017)

Selections from David P. Munns, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

Chapters 13, 14 and 15 of Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms and Molecules (University of Chicago Press, 2016). We focused on the "molecules" part of this ambitious and long book, and especially the work done by people like Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Mark Feldman at Stanford University on human population genetics, genomics and the "genographic project."