History and Philosophy of Science

Our Fountains of Youth: An excerpt from The Longevity Seekers

April 25, 2013
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Our Fountains of Youth: An excerpt from The Longevity Seekers

The Longevity Seekers: Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth by Ted Anton

The tale of the fountain of youth is a mythic encounter that dates back to Herodotus, which has enraptured would-be seekers for two-thousand-years and counting. In The Longevity Seekers, science writer Ted Anton updates the search and takes readers inside a story of contemporary bioscience that began with worms and branched out to snare innovative minds from California to Crete, investments from big biotech, and endorsements from TV personalities like Oprah and Dr. Oz. Below follows an excerpt from the book’s preface, which invites its reader to “explore the relation of a unique science of its time and, in so doing, the relation of any science to any time.”

***

The Laboratory of Molecular Biology sat at the end of Hills Road on the southern edge of Cambridge, England. In 1983 the weather had been so miserable that twenty-nine-year-old Cynthia Kenyon taped a yellow sun on her single window overlooking distant hedgerows and a lone traffic light. She was checking her experiments in her tiny three feet of bench space in a room in one of . . .

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2012 PROSE Awards

February 11, 2013
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2012 PROSE Awards

The 2012 PROSE Awards, announced February 7, 2013, “annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories.” Since 1976, the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) have bestowed the awards on deserving recipients—and among them, we’re delighted to see several University of Chicago Press books acknowledged. Congrats to all the winners and honorable mentions!

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The awards for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology featured a clean sweep by Chicago, led by Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment, which traces both the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire.

An Honorable Mention was awarded to Sachiko Kusukawa’s Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany, a consideration of the works three early modern learned authors who dealt with botany and anatomy—Leonhart Fuchs, Conrad Gessner, and Andreas Vesalius—and how their illustrations were integral to producing a . . .

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2012: A Year in Books

December 21, 2012
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2012: A Year in Books

In wrapping of the year’s best-of-2012 lists, we couldn’t help but single out the University of Chicago Press titles that made the cut as reads worth remembering. With that in mind, here’s a list of our books that earned praise as cream of the crop here and abroad, from scholarly journals, literary blogs, metropolitan newspapers, and the like. If you’re looking, might we (and others) recommend—

        

A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

made the Philadelphia City Paper’s Best of the Year list named one of the best books of the year by the Houston Chronicle included in Bookriot’s list of the five most overlooked books of 2012 picked as the book of the year by a bookseller at the Oxford Blackwell’s: “ feel so evangelical about I want to run around screaming ‘YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK OR YOUR LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE,’ in Billy Graham style.” named one of the ten best fiction books of 2012 by the Wall Street Journal named by Wall Street Journal fiction editor Sam Sacks as one of his own favorite fiction books of 2012 named by Sasha Frere-Jones of the New Yorker as . . .

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Frank Oppenheimer: Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

September 27, 2012
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Frank Oppenheimer: Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

From Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium

by K. C. Cole

CODA: LIVING A FRUITFUL LIFE

Speech to the 1960 graduating class of Pagosa Springs High School

by Frank Oppenheimer

I am grateful for the life I have lived. It has certainly not been as full as the lives of some people, and yet it has probably been richer in experience and in a sense of accomplishment than the lives of many.

I think that part of the sense of having lived a full and a rich life comes from an inability to continually take things seriously—but not too personally. Of a willingness, even a determination, to become deeply involved in what you are doing, but not obsessed by it.

What have you taken seriously? What has involved a lot of your attention, your time and worry: I can mention a tremendous variety of things: your school work, ball games, county fairs, science fairs, plays, concerts, talent shows, to name some of the obvious ones. But also some . . .

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K U H N F E S T

September 26, 2012
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K U H N F E S T

“One is not one’s own historian, let alone one’s own psychoanalyst.”—Thomas Kuhn, via a 1991 profile in Scientific American 

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, making good on an earlier monograph that ran in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. 50 years later, “paradigm shift” is a ubiquitous reference for pomo and post-structuralist thinkers tinkering at the edges of science and culture, and we get our staid facts straight in deciphering one “Bad Newton” from another. For Kuhn, the drama of the paradigm shift really begins to unfold in times of crisis, when revolutionary science unveils challenging alternatives to then-dominant models, introducing a period of uncertain allegiances until the new paradigm is able to assert itself.

The initial publication climate for Kuhn’s signature work was tenuous—the nation was soon-to-be knee-deep in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and had already weathered Federal Marshalls escorting James Meredith to classes at the University of Mississippi. Other soon-to-be cultural memes blotted the radar:

the debut of The Incredible Hulk #1 Students for a Democratic Society’s draft of the “Port Huron Statement” John Lennon’s under-the-radar marriage to Cynthia Powell Johnny Carson’s semi-permanent takeover . . .

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An excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle’s never-before-published Arctic diary (A Week in the Life)

September 25, 2012
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An excerpt from Arthur Conan Doyle’s never-before-published Arctic diary (A Week in the Life)

From Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, copublished by the British Library and the University of Chicago Press, which makes public for the first time Arthur Conan Doyle’s notebook and sketches from his time as a twenty-one-year-old ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler

NB: Seals are clubbed.

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Thursday April 15th

Beautifully fine day but we did a poor day’s work, about 46 I sink. Assisted in shooting 2 bladders. They took five balls each. A pretty little bird with a red tuft on its head, rather larger than a sparrow came and fluttered about the boats. No one had ever seen on e like it before. Rather a long beak, feet not webbed, white underneath, with a “pea-wheet—pea-wheet.” A sort of Snowflake. Georgey Grant got his trousers torn by a young Sea Elephant in the evening.

Friday April 16th

Steamed hard to the North West all day to see if we could see anything of the seals. Failed in seeing many, and only picked up half a dozen. Jack Buchan shot a hawk in the evening which the Captain with his eagle eye discerned . . .

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Adrian Johns, derived from the Latin pirata

April 20, 2012
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Adrian Johns, derived from the Latin pirata

Adrian Johns is having a pretty good series of weeks. Earlier this month, the intellectual property specialist was named a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow. The chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the Allan Grant Maclear Professor in History at the University of Chicago, Johns plans to use his Guggenheim funding to study the intellectual property defense industry.

Johns is no stranger to prizes. His earlier work The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, his most recent volume, won the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Book of the Year Award and was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Just yesterday, Johns was feted in a ceremony bestowing yet another honor on his work with Piracy, the Gordon J. Laing Prize for best faculty author, editor or translator of a book published in . . .

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Announcing the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows

April 13, 2012
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Announcing the 2012 Guggenheim Fellows

 

The 2012 class of Guggenheim Fellows was announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inciting some exuberant responses on the part of several winners (check out Terry Teachout’s Twitter feed). The Guggenheim has long been hailed as the “mid-career award,” honoring scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, who have likely published a book or three, professed a fair amount of research, and are actively engaged in projects of significant scope. The fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic).

Among this year’s crop (we dare say more forward-leaning than previous years?) is a roster of standout “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” affiliated with the University of Chicago Press:

Creative Arts

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of three poetry collections, coeditor of . . .

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Robert J. Richards, Sarton Medalist

November 9, 2011
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Robert J. Richards, Sarton Medalist

Kudos to Robert J. Richards, the Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago, for a recent accolade: the Sarton Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the History of Science Society (HSS).

Named after George Sarton, a founder of the HSS, the Sarton Medal is “the highest honor conferred by the History of Science Society, in recognition of a lifetime of exceptional scholarly achievement by a distinguished scholar, selected from the international community.”

Richards’s credentials? Besides authoring Laing Prize-winners The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (2008) and The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (2002), Richards has also penned The Meaning of Evolution (1992) and Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (1987, and winner of the Pfizer Prize from the HSS for the best book in the history of science). In addition, he’s coedited two collections: Darwinian Heretics (with Abigail Lustig and Michael Ruse) and the Cambridge Companion to Darwin’s Origin of Species (also with Michael Ruse).

From the Sarton Medal release:

Professor Richards holds an MA in biological psychology (University of . . .

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TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Penny Chisholm

May 27, 2011
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TRAFFIC: Carl Zimmer and Penny Chisholm

Welcome back to TRAFFIC, a Chicago Blog series featuring leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We’ll be ending a month of Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer, with one final conversation about ocean-borne viruses with Penny Chisholm.

Sallie W. “Penny” Chisholm is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and professor of biology at MIT. Her research lab seeks to advance our understanding of the ecology and evolution of microbes in the oceans, and how they influence global biochemical cycles. In January 2010, she was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal, for “pioneering studies of the dominant photosynthetic organisms in the sea and for integrating her results into a new understanding of the global ocean.”

A Billion Viruses in the Sea

Dear Carl,

Thank you for giving viruses the recognition they deserve. As you point out, the discovery of viruses in the oceans is relatively recent. It seems that about once every decade there are similar major discoveries in oceanography that change the way we think about ocean ecosystems. One of these—a discovery by the late John Martin—was that iron . . .

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