Luis Campos, University of New Mexico
New York City History of Science Society Consortium
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Faculty House, Columbia University, 64 Morningside Drive
(An interactive map of Columbia’s campus can be found here:http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/)
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the evening primrose played a central role in emerging understandings of heredity and evolution. As the central model organism for botanist Hugo de Vries' immensely influential "mutation theory" (this theory is the root of our modern concept of mutation), the primrose was thought to have entered into a "mutating period" and to be producing new species in every generation. Or was it producing new sexes? In this talk I explore the "degenerate" sexuality of the evening primrose and find some queer interconnections between plants and people, chromosomes and conditions, and heredity and society, as investigators alternately relied on assumptions about human sexuality to make sense of the plant, and on assumptions about the plant's heredity to make political claims for "mutant" people.
Luis Campos is Associate Professor of History of Science and Senior Fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico. His scholarship integrates archival discoveries with contemporary fieldwork at the intersection of genetics and society. His book on the prehistory of radiation genetics, entitled Radium and the Secret of Life, will be published in spring 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. He is currently at work on his next book on the history of synthetic biology.
--> To RSVP for dinner with the speaker following the lecture, please contact Sean O'Neil at sto2109@columbia.edu.
Sponsoring Organizations::
Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society
New York University
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Columbia University
University Seminar in History and Philosophy of Science
City University of New York
Ph.D. Program in History, History of Science Lecture Series
New York Academy of Sciences
Section for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology