Perspectives on Science

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 racial 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 racial science 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.