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Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences is a fascinating study of the work of some of the most influential expositors of scientific doctrine during the 19th century—though they are rarely credited as such. The names of the popular science writers of the Victorian era are often overshadowed by those of the scientists they wrote about, but as Jon Turney notes in a recent review for the Times Higher Education, in his new book Lightman skillfully illuminates their cultural and historical importance. Turney writes:

The Victorian explosion of print embraced a diversity of treatments of science and its significance that exhibits many of the tensions that still mark science in public. Who has the right to speak for science, to interpret nature or to have the final word on humans' place in a universe in which God's hand in creation is in question?

As he catalogues the many contributors to the new popular scientific literature, and their works, Lightman illuminates how the different answers to these questions played their part in battles over science's authority and cultural prestige.…

Throughout, Lightman pays detailed attention to publishers and print runs, as well as to the authors' lives and works. The book is a substantial work of scholarship rather than a casual read, and it offers much for historians of science as well as students of popular writing.

Read the rest of the review on the THE website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Reviews
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Podularity.com, a literary blog based in the UK, is running an interesting podcast of an interview with author Martin Kemp on the topic of his recent book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. Interviewer George Miller engages Kemp in a discussion of the links between humans and animals embedded in Western culture to explore the question; where is the line between animal and human? And, does the line even exist at all? Navigate to Podularity.com to listen.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
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An interview with Jan Golinsky author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment was posted yesterday to Benjamin Cohen and David Ng's science blog, the World's Fair. The interview begins with an interesting synopsis of the book and its unique contribution to both cultural history and the history of science. From the World's Fair:

WORLD'S FAIR: What do we have here? When you sent in the prospectus to Chicago, what did you tell them this would be about?

JAN GOLINSKI: The book explores beliefs about weather and climate in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies. I argue that these beliefs reflect some of the important social and cultural changes of the period. People began to study the weather in a way that we recognize as more "scientific," but traditional attitudes also survived, even what we might call "superstitions." The tensions between scientific and traditional approaches seemed to me symptomatic of the age, and to some extent of modern attitudes to the natural environment in general.

WF: You're a premier historian of science, respected, influential, articulate, good-humored, don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this…namely, what does a book about the weather contribute to our understanding of the history of science?

JG: I think of it as a combination of history of science with cultural history. I didn't set out to trace the origins and growth of a science of weather, but to place scientific practices like record-keeping and the use of instruments in their cultural context. So, I suppose it contributes to the way we can understand science as a set of practices and beliefs that has developed in specific historical settings.

Read the rest of the interview on the World's Fair blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | History and Philosophy of Science
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Writing for the February 28 New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Chris Feudtner reviews our new edition of Michael Bliss's The Discovery of Insulin, a fascinating account of the struggle of four Canadian scientists—Frederick Banting, J.J.R. Macleod, Charles Best, and J.B. Collip—to make one of the most important medical discoveries of the modern age. Feudtner writes:

During the past century, medical science has produced numerous remarkable therapeutic achievements, but few accomplishments can rival—in terms of importance or drama—the development of insulin in 1921 and 1922.…

Twenty-five years ago, the historian Michael Bliss composed his remarkably illuminating recounting of this saga. It has proved to be the definitive account. Bliss, now a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, has also written highly regarded biographies of the inimitable physician Sir William Osler, the polymath surgeon Harvey Cushing, and the fascinating, albeit mercurial, Banting. But as Bliss confides, "The Discovery of Insulin is my favourite," and the book has now been released in a 25th anniversary edition, with a new preface and an updated concluding chapter.

You can find the full text of the review on the New England Journal of Medicine website, or find out more about the book here.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism has already generated much interest in the U. S. where the effect of the marketplace on academic science has been news for quite some time. But last Friday London's Physics Today ran a positive review of Greenberg's insightful analysis of campus capitalism as well, noting the book's applicability to science policy in the UK. Greg Parker writes for Physics Today:

When I joined the University of Southampton's microelectronics group in 1987 after spending 10 years in industry, I shared some of my commercial ideas for advancing the group into the 21st century with my academic colleagues. To say that my personal vision of paradise was close to their vision of hell is probably a pretty accurate observation. Two decades on, I now understand why they felt that way. Science for Sale contains a lot of information that explains this vast difference in perception, and the book also does a good job of highlighting how academia and industry differ on practical and ethical levels.

Parker continues:

My first worry on picking up the book was that it would be almost totally inapplicable to the current situation in the UK. Daniel Greenberg is a US journalist who usually writes about American science policy and practice, so I was expecting to find very little overlap with the reality of academic and business life in the UK. Much to my surprise, however, the overlap was almost 100%…

[T]his book does an excellent job of listing in detail the problems and the successes of trying to link the industrial world with academia.…

Archived in Biology | Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Now Available in Paperback

Peter Dear's intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that scientific ambition is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science, he reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.

“The portraits of individual scientists, from Newton, Boyle, and Faraday to Einstein and Bohr, are vivid and pithy; [Dear] has a good ear for the apt quote that lets us hear their voices.”—Eric Ormsby, New York Sun

“[Dear] shows how mechanistic explanations in physics and chemistry became ever more frequent after the industrial revolution, only to be supplanted by the nihilism of quantum theory in the social turmoil that followed the first world war. It is full of insights into how society, culture and people’s perception interweave across biology, chemistry and physics.”—Adrian Barnett, New Scientist

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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This month's issue of the journal Nature is running a nice review of Richard Owen's nineteenth century treatise on biological forms On the Nature of Limbs—one of the foundational works contributing to the development of modern evolutionary theory—newly reprinted in a facsimile edition edited by Ronald Amundson. Michael Coates writes for Nature:

A decade before Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Owen very nearly sketched a theory of evolutionary transformation, fragments of which appear here. However, as Padian describes, such were the sociopolitical and philosophical strains on Owen's position that he stalled at the final intellectual leap. Owen's patrons were of the Oxbridge-educated establishment—adherents to the natural theology of the 'argument from design' (for the existence of God) as advocated most influentially by William Paley (now sadly repackaged with a molecular gloss by the proponents of 'intelligent design').… But it remains an excellent source for those interested in how we identify and interpret pattern in nature. A dissertation on similarity, conservation and variability in form, it addresses issues of enduring interest to systematic biologists as well as to the revitalized field of evolutionary developmental biology.…

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr.'s Maps: Finding Our Place in the World has been given quite a positive review in this month's issue of the British science and technology magazine, BBC Focus. Praising the book for its thoughtful exploration of maps and the many divergent purposes they have served throughout human history, reviewer Nick Smith writes:

If you though maps were merely aerial drawings of places that help us get from point A to B, you will be astonished by the depth and breadth of this book.

The editors have cleverly set out the book's structure in terms of what function maps perform, instead of ranging from continent to continent as with traditional atlases. There is macro-mapping throughout the ages and maps portraying land use, as well as those concerned with commerce, art, advertising, entertainment and national identity. There is plant distribution, cartographic analysis of the geology of the US and even the "distribution of the slave population of the Southern States.…" Fascinating stuff.

See a collection of unusual maps from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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In the January 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement reviewer Richard A. Fortey takes note of Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time for its fascinating tale of the scientific quest to discover the age of the earth. Fortey writes:

Pascal Richet is a geophysicist, and well able to explain the complexities of the discoveries that led from Crooke's tube through to those of Pierre and Marie Curie, and on to the discovery of isotopes of lead and uranium. Richet never short-changes the reader on the science, and his grasp of more than a thousand years of speculation about our origins is unfailingly impressive.…

My own pleasure, and this may be perverse, was in discovering some of the forgotten figures, like M Le Bon and his black light, or Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who thought that "there was nothing strange in assuming that rocks had semen." In a curious way, the doomed aberrations of science mark out the changes in zeitgeist more effectively than the triumphs of the famous names. Newton's obsession with chronology is as informative of the times in which he lived as his triumphs in mathematical physics.…

I cannot imagine a better attempt at such a broad sweep through science and history.

Read the rest of the review on the TLS website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Nature magazine is currently running a review of two recent historical accounts of popular science in the Victorian period, Bernard Lightman's Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences and Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856. Writing for Nature, historian Frank A. L. James notes how both books make important contributions to our understanding of how science has influenced the western public and perhaps some insights into current debates about public education and engagement with the sciences. James writes:

The popularization of science has become a growth area for historical study. It is a natural continuation of the historian's quest to understand the social and cultural context and impact of science, and a consequence of scientists' admonitions over the past 20 years that the public should be better informed.

Implied is that the efforts of earlier generations of scientists fell short of making their work accessible to the public. But Lightman's and O'Connor's books paint a very different picture, at least with respect to the nineteenth century.

Lightman maps the careers of some 30 popularizers, many sparsely covered before, who derived their income from writing science books.… O'Connor shows that promoting knowledge about geology was then similar to the marketing of other types of literature and art—science was an integral part of culture.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…

He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Jessica Riskin's Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life was recently given a great review by science fiction writer Greg Bear in Nature. Riskin's book collects seventeen essays from a conference of distinguished scholars in several fields who bring a historical perspective to this most contemporary of scientific topics. And as Bear notes in his review, the result is a particularly comprehensive treatment of the history of artificial life. Bear writes:

The strength of Genesis Redux lies in its scholarship and range of topics. Clockworks, mechanical toys and their influence on biological concepts are presented in fascinating detail. Joan Landes introduces us to the Hoffmanesque works of Jacques de Vaucanson's feminine flautist and (excreting) duck, and to the flayed, preserved and posed cadavers, the écorchés, of Jean-Honoré Fragonard: there is a dancing fetus and a very naked man staring in horror, jawbone in hand. Landes delivers a lively analysis of our reactions to the abject and uncanny, the frisson so beloved by fans of Dr Frankenstein.

The review continues:

Genesis Redux takes the time to shed light on areas I would not naturally consider, and thus enlightens and expands the topic. Its cautious perspective—the enthusiasms of the past considered in the sober light of history—provides a useful counterpoint to [other books on the subject].

See the rest of the article on the Nature website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Reviews
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The perceived conflicts between science and religion have dominated the media lately with controversies surrounding everything from intelligent design to stem cell research making headlines almost daily. But nowhere was this apparent contradiction more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882—1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Matthew Stanley's new book Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington provides an in-depth study of how Eddington successfully incorporated both religious and scientific values into his life and work. In a recent edition of Nature magazine reviewer Owen Gingrich explains:

To analyse the relationship between science and society (including religion), Stanley examines the bridging function of what he calls "valence values". Like the bonding ring of electrons, these values facilitate the interaction between science and culture. Through the lens of these values, Stanley uses Eddington as a test case for exploring the interaction of science and religion in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike the natural theologians of the previous century, Eddington did not seek a harmonization between science and religion. He saw both as processes of seeking. As he reminded his audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, "A knowledge of nature is the great end of our work; but, if we cannot attain that, there is at least the struggle after knowledge, which is perhaps no less a thing." Eddington could have said the same of his religion.

Presenting a fascinating picture of Eddington's refreshingly liberal views on the intersection of religion and science Practical Mystic is a timely study of Eddington's brilliant life and work.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion | Reviews
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Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism received a positive review in this month's BBC Focus magazine. Greenberg's book is a detailed study of the relationship between academia and the commercial sector—a relationship which some critics argue has corrupted the quality of academic inquiry, especially in the sciences. But as reviewer Steve Fuller notes, Greenberg's penetrating new book reveals that campus capitalism might, in fact, not be as nearly as bad as commonly thought. Fuller writes:

Greenberg's story is framed by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act by the US Congress in 1980, which allowed universities and other non-profit institutions to seek intellectual property rights without seeking prior government approval.… The nation as a whole would presumably benefit from the commercial availability of such privately protected science.

However this 'neo-liberal' turn in US science policy has led to a host of allegations. These range from big business trying to buy large biomedical science departments to a breakdown in the peer review process through undetected cases of research fraud. Greenberg's verdict is that while such cases do exist, their rarity is even more striking.

Greenberg provocatively argues that overblown claims about the capitalist corruption of academia may turn out to be self-defeating. Universities already provide an array of free or low-cost service for business, from training potential employees to researching potentially lucrative fields. Moreover such activities are bound to increase in the coming years. In that case, it might be in academia's own interest to cultivate more explicit ties with the commercial sector, if only to ensure that business pays its own way.

Archived in Biology | Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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Martin Kemp's new book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science was given an interesting advance review in the September 6 edition of Nature. Reviewer Alison Abbot begins her piece:

On waking, Henry Jekyll stared with horror at the metamorphosis of his hand, normally "professional in shape and size… large, firm, white and comely." Jekyll's experiment to separate the human and animal sides of himself had been all too successful. He noted further: "The hand which I now saw … lying half shut on the bedclothes was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a smart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde."

Thus Martin Kemp ends his treatise The Human Animal in Western Art and Science with this apposite quote from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel. It epitomizes the dilemma that has fascinated us for millennia. How much of the animal is there within us? Conversely, how much is human in animals?

Kemp answers these questions. Science, from Darwin to the latest neuroscience and genomics, has shown that there is no sharp animal-human divide, only a sliding scale. And in guiding us to this conclusion, Kemp's six chapters deviate through an amusing and erudite visual history, drawing from art, philosophy, literature, film and other cultural media.

Continue reading the review on the Nature website.

Kemp's book is currently scheduled for release in early October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The New York Times reported today about the controversy surrounding the work of Barnard professor of anthropology Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose 2001 Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society has sparked disputes in and out of academe since its publication.

El-Haj's work is an analysis of archaeological practice in Israel, attempting to explain the complicated interplay of politics and science in the Middle East and the ongoing role that archeology plays in defining the past, present, and future of Palestine and Israel.

El-Haj is currently up for tenure at Barnard, but due to the controversial nature of her work, she has some powerful opponents who claim that her own findings have been influenced by political interests. From the New York Times:

It is Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, that has made her a lightning rod, setting off warring petitions opposing and supporting her candidacy, and producing charges of shoddy scholarship and countercharges of an ideological witch hunt.…

The Middle East Studies Association, an organization of scholars who focus on the region, chose her book in 2002 as one of the year's two best books in English about the Middle East. The other was Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, by Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, published by Cambridge University Press.

Jere L. Bacharach, a historian at the University of Washington who presented the awards, said at the time that both books were "nuanced, nonpolemic works on subjects that too often lend themselves to political tirades and polemics."

Critics of Dr. Abu El-Haj's book, however, said her aim was to undermine Israel's right to exist, and challenged her methodology and findings.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Times website. Also read an excerpt from Facts on the Ground previously posted to this blog.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion
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Martin Kemp's soon-to-be-published The Human Animal in Western Art and Science was given a noteworthy review in today's New York Sun. Praising the book for its exploration of the many fascinating intersections between man and beast in western culture, reviewer Eric Ormsby writes for the Sun:

[The Human Animal in Western Art and Science] is based on the Louise Smith Bross Lectures that Mr. Kemp gave at the Art Institute of Chicago in April 2000 and that he has revised and expanded, supplementing his witty and erudite text with some 185 marvelous illustrations. His theme is "humanized animals and animalized humans" and he ranges widely to explore it. Beginning with a lucid (and rather gruesomely illustrated) discussion of the four humours, which humans and animals were thought to share, Mr. Kemp moves through the centuries. Dürer, Cranach, Da Vinci, and Rembrandt may occupy pride of place, and rightly so, but many fascinating, lesser known figures appear as well. These include the brilliant Charles Le Brun in 17th-century France, whose drawings of human facial expressions from despair to astonishment are one of the marvels of the volume, as well as the half-mad Viennese sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, whose contorted portraits of "manic grins" and the grimaces of "beak-like mouths" fairly leap from the page. In such depictions, humans are animalized and animals humanized, so disturbingly that all our artificial boundaries begin to dissolve.

Read the rest of the review online at the New York Sun website.

The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is currently set to be released this October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Last Sunday the Los Angeles Times ran an interesting review of Pascal Richet's new book, A Natural History of Time. Applauding some of the many rich details included in this fascinating story of mankind's endeavors to construct a chronology, Times review editor Sara Lippincott writes:

[Richet] begins with early myths, stories humans told themselves to make sense of their world. These myths were "outside of time," he writes, "because nature, above all, is governed by cycles" and "neither beginning nor end can be discerned." The Egyptians, for example, counted years in cycles, starting with each new reign. Speaking of the Egyptians, one of the entrancing nuggets in this nugget-studded book is the information that their hours "varied in duration according to the length of the day." We owe the stable, 60-minute hour to the Greeks, via "the sexagesimal notation of the Mesopotamians."

From the ancient Egyptian calendar to modern radiometric dating, Richet's book delivers an eye-opening exploration of the history of man's quest for time, giving us a chance to truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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As creatures of finite lifespan, capable of both learning about the past and imagining the future, humans are naturally fascinated with the concept of time. Questions of the origins of the earth, the universe, and humanity have been perpetual preoccupations, eliciting some of humanity's most trenchant thought—and most heated debates. With A Natural History of Time, Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of attempts over centuries to determine the age of the earth. Featuring such luminaries as Hesiod, Leonardo, Descartes, and Newton, A Natural History of Time marries the pleasures of history to the drama of scientific discovery, giving readers a chance to marvel at just how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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Critic Edward Rothstein begins his "Connections" column in today's New York Times by mentioning Robert Wilson's recent staging of Fables de La Fontaine at the Lincoln Center Festival. Featuring a cast of masked half-human, half-animal characters, Rothstein describes the stage adaptation of La Fontaine's work as an unusual reversal of Aesop's fables: "Aesop's animals are nearly human," writes Rothstein, "La Fontaine's humans are nearly animals."

But though they might contrast in this respect, both Aesop and Fontaine's fables seem to agree on the undeniable similarities between human and animal. And in his forthcoming book The Human Animal in Western Art and Science Martin Kemp demonstrates how this blending of the animal with the human is, and has been, a recurring theme throughout western culture. Citing Kemp's book, Rothstein's article goes on highlight just how pervasive such depictions of the human-animal really are:

We name sports teams after rams or bulls and automobiles after cougars or jaguars. Our language speaks of crocodile tears and fish eyes.…Babies' rooms, filled with stuffed bears, lions and lambs, are like plush pastoral Edens before the Fall… For adults fables bring the animals and the humans even closer together, with discomforting or startling results, ranging from the grimness of Art Spiegelman's comic-book Maus to the romance of the film March of the Penguins.

But what is the point of these preoccupations? In a book to be published in September by the University of Chicago Press, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science, Martin Kemp, who teaches art history at Oxford University, shows just how powerful the theme is, and how essential it is to Western traditions of art and science.The animal is used to reveal the human, the human to reveal the animal.

The animal world, he points out, may have provided the first model for understanding the complexities of the human one.

Read Rothstein's article on the Times website or find out more about Kemp's fascinating new book set to for release this October.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
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