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 Nebraska), a PhD in philosophy (St. Louis University) and a PhD in the history of science (University of Chicago). He has served as the director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science at the University of Chicago since 1992 and was appointed the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science in 2004. He holds appointments in the Department of History, in the Department of Philosophy, in the Department of Psychology, and in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Professor Richards received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and was made a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2010. The University of Chicago has bestowed on Professor Richards numerous awards for teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level. The University appointed him Distinguished Service Professor in 2011, and Ryerson Memorial Lecturer in 2005.

From Goethe and Humboldt to Haeckel and Herbert Spencer —Richards reminds us of the importance of the history of ideas as they relate to mind and behavior. And for that, it seems that this hearty congrats might be long overdue.

Archived in Awards | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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."

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 availability limits the growth of phytoplankton (your 'geoengineers') over large regions of the oceans. This changed the major 'drivers' of carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans, and climate models had to be changed accordingly.

Evidence that iron—carried from land to ocean via atmospheric dust—limits the ocean's capacity to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere has fueled the idea that large scale ocean iron fertilization could be used for engineering Earth's climate. What does this have to do with viruses (you are wondering)? Well, it turns out that iron has been used to flocculate viruses for wastewater treatment, and to concentrate them from ocean water for scientific study. What if iron dust deposition does the same in the oceans? What if it not only stimulates phytoplankton growth, but also reduces phytoplankton death rates by 'precipitating viruses' and settling them out of the system? Might this phenomenon help explain the observed relationships between iron dust deposition and atmospheric carbon dioxide in ice cores? This has been proposed by MIT's Hyman Hartman, who has also suggested that we might enhance phytoplankton's capacity to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by (somehow) killing off viruses in the oceans. I doubt he is truly serious. But I also doubted the seriousness, twenty years ago, of people proposing ocean iron fertilization (OIF) as a means of carbon sequestration. Today, research on OIF for geoengineering is endorsed by leading scientists.

Whether or not one takes seriously the idea of global geoengineering with anti-virals, a thought experiment along these lines quickly exposes the complexity of marine microbial systems (give it a try!). In fact, recent field experiments have revealed one of the many possible unexpected consequences; it turns out that when you reduce all the viruses in a sample of seawater you actually decrease the carbon fixation of cyanobacteria, because reduced lysis of heteotrophic bacteria deprives cyanobacteria of essential nutrients they need to grow optimally. In a nutshell, even these simple microbial systems are so complex that it is impossible to predict the consequences of removal of one component.

Just some food for thought.

Penny

Dear Penny:

It is funny how what at first seems absurd when it comes to virus can eventually become conventional wisdom. The very idea that the ocean harbored many viruses was absurd as late as the 1980s. Seawater just seemed like a terrible place for viruses to survive. But when scientists began to give a close look at the ocean, they discovered otherwise. A single spoonful of seawater might harbor a billion viruses. Most of those viruses proved to be bacteriophages—in other words, they infect bacteria. That's not surprising, because the most abundant hosts in the oceans are microbes. But what is surprising is the effect that those marine phages have on life in the sea. Viruses kill half of all the bacteria in the oceans every day. As you note, the rupturing of all those cells (known as lysis) dumps vast supplies of nutrients into the ocean, possibly fertilizing other microbes to grow faster. Since the microbes of the ocean pull down huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (and also return a lot of it back there), the overall effect that viruses have on the climate could potentially be huge. I can't help but find the idea of viruses influencing the climate a bit absurd—but the more I learn about viruses in the ocean, the more accustomed I get to it.

Your speculations about viral geoengineering bring a fitting close to the discussions we've been having on this blog over the past month. Once scientists discovered viruses, they began to acquire the power to control them. They were able to develop vaccines and public health measures that could sometimes slow their spread. In many cases, we've only had moderate success in controlling viruses, but in a few case—such as those of smallpox and rinderpest—we are now at the point where we could soon eradicate entire species of virus from the face of the Earth.

But the discovery of viruses has also revealed to us that they are not merely things that make us sick and must be eradicated. Phages can kill life-threatening bacteria, for example. For now, however, phage therapy is not standard medical procedure, in part because governments are a bit queasy about approving viruses as living drugs. As your MIT colleague Tim Lu explained last week, he's taking his research in a different direction, using phages to destroy the biofilms that grow in heating and cooling systems in buildings. In effect, he's trying to heal architecture.

It's a natural progression from bodies to buildings to the entire planet. At least it's natural to speculate about using anti-virals to change the global climate. Still, I can't help but think—what kind of drug store could fill that prescription?

Carl

For more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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're delighted to continue this month's Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes MIT scientist Timothy Lu to talk about the quest to use viruses to cure infectious diseases.

Timothy Lu is assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT, where he heads the Synthetic Biology Group. Carl wrote a profile of Lu last year in Technology Review.

Dear Carl:

Bacteriophages are the most abundant biological particles on earth, but due to their size, and perhaps ubiquity, most of us don't think of them very often. Phages are essentially just bacterial viruses. When it comes to viruses, the popular notion is that they are bad entities that are responsible for disease and suffering. The truth is, however, that phages are very different from human viruses. Phages do not infect human cells and are not responsible for the viral diseases that plague mankind, such as AIDS, herpes, cervical cancer, and the common cold. Furthermore, phages have had a tremendous impact on modern biology and biotechnology.

Much of our early scientific efforts to understand genetic regulation were carried out in the humble phage. Phage proteins called recombinases are an integral component for the construction of "knockout animals," which cannot express particular genes—an indispensable tool in modern biological research. Phage display, a technique for sticking a library of peptides on phage surfaces and panning for targets to which these peptides will bind, has been used to make nanowires for batteries, identify new antibodies to treat human diseases, and understand the basic science which underlie protein-protein interactions.

Despite their importance as major research tools in the biomedical community, however, research into the use of phages as human therapeutics has garnered a mixed reputation in the Western world. Soon after their discovery in the early twentieth century, phages were tried as novel antimicrobial agents. Indeed, one can imagine the excitement that the early phage researchers must have experienced when observing the lysis—or clearing of bacterial cultures—by the addition of a newly discovered biological agent!

However, early reports claiming impressive successes at treating bacterial infections with phages were later tempered by failures in other settings and repeated trials.

Looking back, it is likely that a lack of detailed understanding of phage biology was responsible for much of these failures. Unlike antibiotics, which act like broad-spectrum bombs that blast all bacteria, good or bad, in their paths, phages are targeted warriors, the biological equivalent of a sniper or laser-guided missile. This targeted behavior is beneficial because it avoids killing bacteria which are good for us, as opposed to antibiotics which cause collateral damage. However, this targeted behavior also has its flaws because to effectively treat a specific bacterial contamination with phages, one must understand the bacterial compositions in detail and know what mixture of phages to use against them. Such capabilities were not available or known during the early days of phage therapy.

Thus, the subsequent discovery of antibiotics, along with their simplicity and miracle successes, largely displaced phages from antimicrobial research in Western medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result, the notion of phage therapy often elicits justifiable skepticism when discussed as an alternative to antibiotics today, even though the antibiotics pipeline has dried up and we are in desperate need of new strategies to combat the rising tide of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Fortunately, in the past few decades, there has been a renaissance brewing in the phage world. Commercial, government, and academic labs have begun to tackle the fundamental issues that have held back phage therapy using rigorous molecular tools. To use phages to effectively treat bacterial contaminations, these labs have been developing technologies for classifying bacterial populations, identifying the right combination of phages to use, and optimizing phage properties using evolutionary or engineering approaches.

Instead of tackling the high hurdles that need to be crossed for direct human use, many labs and companies have chosen to apply phages to other applications in industrial, environmental, and diagnostic settings. For example, Intralytix makes phages to treat listeria contaminations of food, Omnilytix makes phages that control bacterial infections on tomatoes and peppers, and Microphage makes phages that can detect and report on the presence of harmful antibiotic-resistant superbugs, such as MRSA. A company called Novophage is advancing the use of phages for industrial applications, where they have the potential to enhance energy inefficiency and decrease biofouling (for full disclosure, I am a founder of this startup). Major advantages of phages compared with chemical biocides and pesticides include greater biocompatibility and decreased environmental toxicity. Using natural biological particles to combat biological problems is consistent with our society's continuous drive to reduce the use of harmful chemicals and is, I believe, a great application for phages in the modern era of biotechnology.

The hurdle that has yet to be overcome is the use of phages for human therapeutics, the original application area for phage therapy. Nonetheless, given the great need for new antimicrobial therapies and the inroads that these laboratories have been making into optimizing phages for practical applications, the prospect of effective phage therapy being applied to human infectious diseases in Western medicine seems to be growing!

Tim

Dear Tim:

In all my work as a science writer, I can't think of a story as strange as the history of phage therapy. It's been nearly a century since the Canadian physician Felix d'Herelle discovered viruses that infect bacteria. And yet, despite great promise, phage therapy has yet to become a mainstay of medicine.

What makes the story even stranger is that Herelle could see the promise of phage therapy as soon as he discovered the viruses. He was soon using them to treat dysentery and cholera. When four passengers on a French ship in the Suez Canal came down with bubonic plague, Herelle gave them phages. All four victims recovered. He went on to conduct large-scale public health campaigns for the British government in colonial India. Phage therapy became so well-known that Herelle inspired the central character in Sinclair Lewis's 1925 best-selling novel Arrowsmith. Phage therapy became big business: Herelle developed commercial drugs that were sold by the company that's now known as L'Oreal, which were used to treat skin wounds and to cure intestinal infections.

But by the time he died in 1949, Herelle had sunk into obscurity. Doctors had abandoned phage therapy for antibiotics. His dream did not vanish entirely, however. On his travels, Herelle met Soviet scientists who wanted to set up an entire institute for research on phage therapy. In 1923 Herelle helped establish the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology in Tbilisi, which is now the capital of the Republic of Georgia. At its peak, the institute employed 1200 people to produce tons of phages. In World War II, the Soviet Union shipped phage powders and pills to the front lines, where they were dispensed to infected soldiers.

Soviet scientists continued to investigate phage therapy after World War II. They conducted the best trial of the viruses in 1963. They enrolled 30,769 children in Tbilisi. Once a week, about half the children swallowed a pill that contained phages against dysentery. The other half of the children got a pill made of sugar. To minimize the influence of the environment as much as possible, the Eliava scientists gave the phage pill only to children who lived on one side of each street, and the sugar pill to the children who lived on the other side. The Eliava scientists followed the children for 109 days. Among the children who took the sugar pill, 6.7 out of every 1,000 got dysentery. Among the children who took the phage pill, that figure dropped to 1.8 per 1,000. In other words, taking phages caused a 3.8-fold decrease in a child's chance of getting dysentery.

Phage therapy only began to attract interest in the West after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Soviet scientists could communicate more freely with the rest of the world. And yet, as you point out, the U.S. government has been leery of approving viruses for medical treatments. Gone are the days when a physician like Herelle could pretty much do as he pleased. As a result, many companies and investors are reluctant to embrace his phages.

If phage therapy can leap over these hurdles, I think that there are a vast number of potential applications. Treating a skin infection is just the start. Phages, after all, are part and parcel of every person's inner ecology. Our bodies are home to 100 trillion bacteria and other microbes. Recent surveys estimate that these microbes play host to about four trillion phages, which come in about 1,500 different species. In some cases, our phages kill their hosts, and thus maintain an ecological balance in our mouths, noses, guts, and other nooks and crannies. In other cases, phages insert genes into their microbial hosts, giving them new powers.

The human microbiome is not merely an infestation we tolerate. It plays many different roles in our bodies. Microbes synthesize vitamins for us, regulate how much energy we get from our food, fight off invading pathogens, nurture our immune system, and potentially even influence our behavior. It may be possible to manipulate the microbiome through the phages that have coevolved with it for millions of years.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Sallie Chisholm on the nature of ocean viruses. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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're delighted to continue this month's Friday TRAFFIC features, led by popular science writer Carl Zimmer. This week Zimmer welcomes Richard Preston, New Yorker contributor and bestselling author, for a conversation on smallpox and the possible eradication of other viruses.

Richard Preston is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and his awards include the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. Preston also the only person who isn't a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award for public health.

Dear Carl:

There's a debate in the scientific community about what to do with the remaining stocks of smallpox virus on the planet. Should the virus be preserved so that it can be studied? Or should the virus be destroyed, so that—in theory at least—it would become extinct and would not threaten the human species again?

Smallpox virus, or Variola major, is the cause of probably the worst infectious disease in human history. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, experts believe that smallpox killed half a billion people, accounting for far more deaths than all the wars of the time. Smallpox is a grisly and supremely painful disease. The disease has around a 33 percent case-fatality rate in unvaccinated patients. That is, a third of the disease's victims who haven't been vaccinated die. The victims suffer from an incredibly painful rash—blisters known as pustules stud the body. The survivors are typically left with scars for life. About ten percent of fatal smallpox cases consist of hemorrhagic smallpox, a manifestation of the disease in which the victim dies with hemorrhagic symptoms, including bleeding from the orifices. Smallpox virus spreads in the air from person to person, traveling in tiny droplets spewed when an infected person speaks or coughs. The vast majority of the world's population today has little or no immunity to smallpox, because vaccination ceased during the 1970s.

Smallpox was declared eradicated globally in 1980 by the World Health Organization (WHO), after a remarkable and heroic WHO-led effort to eradicate the virus worldwide. Today, the only remaining samples of live smallpox virus are stored in just two locations: a high-security lab at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and in the Vector State Research Center in Siberia, Russia. For a number of years, now, various member nations of the WHO have been pressing the WHO to order those stocks destroyed.

The smallpox virus stock at the CDC occupies a volume about the size of a basketball; the virus samples are frozen in small plastic tubes the size of pencil stubs. The Russian stock is probably similar. It would be very easy to destroy the virus: just heat it up.

But should it be destroyed? A series of defectors from the old Soviet Union have revealed that the Soviet Union weaponized smallpox; that the virus was a mainstay of the clandestine Soviet biowarfare program. Illicit stocks of smallpox may have been taken out of Russia; nobody knows where the virus might exist on earth today in the form of undisclosed, secret stocks of the virus.

Researchers using live smallpox virus at the CDC have been studying the virus in an effort to develop antiviral drugs that would be effective against a smallpox infection. The drugs might also be effective against genetically engineered smallpox.

The genome sequence of smallpox virus is publicly available and can be downloaded from the Internet. Some day it will probably be technically feasible to recreate live smallpox from its genome sequence. Even if all the living smallpox were destroyed, it might be brought back to life in a lab somewhere, some day.

D. A. Henderson, who led the WHO eradication of smallpox, argues that the virus should be destroyed, regardless of whether it can be recreated. He argues that if the WHO makes smallpox extinct, then anyone who later had the live virus would be committing a crime against humanity and could be prosecuted in international courts.

On the other hand, researchers who are developing defenses against smallpox argue that the disease is simply too dangerous to destroy; they argue that we must continue to study it under the principle of Sun Tzu, "Know thy enemy."

What do you think?

Richard

Dear Richard:

Your question is a timely one. On May 16, the World Health Organization will be having their annual meeting, and one of the items on their agenda is a global consensus about what to do with the world's remaining smallpox stocks.

If WHO does decide on eradication, it will be an historical moment. We humans have only eliminated two viruses from the wild. Smallpox was the first. The second, as of last October, is rinderpest, a devastating scourge of cattle. For now, both smallpox and rinderpest remain in laboratory stocks. But if WHO decides to get rid of the smallpox lab stocks, too, the virus may be eliminated from the planet.

The prospect of such a milestone raises the question of why we haven't been able to wipe out any of the other viruses that plague us. In some cases, it's because viruses have escape routes. In 2004, for example, SARS burst on the scene, killing 774 people in total before quarantines and other public health measures beat it back. There have been no reported cases of SARS since then in humans, but SARS is probably thriving. It spread from animal hosts—bats and civets—to humans, and it doubtless retreated back to them.

Some viruses are hard to eradicate because they're lurkers. HIV takes years to produce symptoms, making it hard to recognize and treat infected people. By the time it makes itself known, people may have spread it to many other victims. And doctors still lack vaccines for HIV and many other viruses.

In all these respects, smallpox is a peculiar virus. Unlike SARS, smallpox only infects humans. Unlike HIV, smallpox makes itself known in a matter of days. It's also unusual in that there's a cheap, effective smallpox vaccine. Combined, these three factors made it possible to effectively break the transmission cycle of smallpox and thereby drive it towards extinction.

Whenever a species goes extinct, we lose the opportunity to get to know it better. I'm sure no one would shed a tear at the extinction of smallpox, but, as you note, there's a lot we still don't understand about the virus. I don't think getting the opportunity to try people for crimes against humanity is worth giving up the chance to learn more about smallpox.

Even if smallpox never rears its ugly head again, that knowledge could still be valuable. Studies on smallpox DNA suggest that it evolved just a few thousand years ago from a pox that infected African rodents. Many closely related pox strains infect animals today, and they have plenty of chances to evolve into a new human pox. In 2003, for example, people in the Midwest came down with monkeypox, an African virus that is closely related to smallpox. It was baffling at first that an African pox could infect American victims. Eventually public health workers determined that the victims got the virus from prairie dogs they all bought at the same Missouri pet store.

If smallpox can help us prepare for the next pox, we should resist the urge to annihilate it.

Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring a conversation between Zimmer and Timothy Lu on phage therapy. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267. Additional materials, including those directed at a K-12 audience, can be found on the World of Viruses website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Welcome to TRAFFIC, a series exclusive to the Chicago Blog presenting an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities and sciences, whose prescient views on current events help us to interpret contemporary culture. We're delighted to begin a month's worth of Friday TRAFFIC posts helmed by popular science writer Carl Zimmer in collaboration with some of our most acclaimed virologists, immunologists, and scientifically minded journalists.

Please join us for the next four weeks in welcoming discussions on virology and immunology with W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity; small pox with Richard Preston, New Yorker writer and bestselling author; phage therapy with Timothy Lu, inventor and Novophage founder; and ocean viruses with Sallie Chisholm, biological oceanographer and marine science expert.

With that in mind, join us for our first TRAFFIC exchange with Zimmer and Lipkin below:

The New York Times calls Carl Zimmer “as fine a science essayist as we have.” In his widely admired books, essays, and blogs, Zimmer charts the frontiers of biology. Booklist acclaimed his most recent title A Planet of Viruses as “absolutely top-drawer popular science writing.” Zimmer is a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. W. Ian Lipkin, MD, is the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology, and professor of neurology and pathology in the Mailman School of Public Health and the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. His specialty is detecting new viruses and testing links between viruses and diseases. In A Planet of Viruses, Zimmer describes Lipkin's discovery of West Nile Virus in the United States, as well as his work uncovering hidden strains of the common cold. Zimmer also profiled Lipkin in November 2010 for the New York Times.

Dear Carl,

I just finished A Planet of Viruses. It's a compelling read that explores new frontiers in microbe hunting and the complex path from disease association to disease causation, a path we have not fully traveled. As with any book there are holes to be filled; nonetheless, this is an excellent roadmap!

We typically think of viruses as pathogens, but there is abundant and increasing evidence that they had an important and positive role in our evolution as mammals and the planet we live in. Retroviruses, a special kind of RNA virus of which HIV is the most famous, intercalate their genetic code into their host's. When host cells replicate their DNA, the virus replicates with it. If the virus makes its way to a sperm or egg cell, the virus wins the (rare) opportunity to get passed on from parent to child, over and over again. These genetic infiltrators, known as endogenous retroviruses, have integrated themselves into mammalian genomes over millions of years. They activate genes during pregnancy to produce proteins that prevent rejection of a fetus as a foreign body, likely facilitating the evolution of the placenta and live birth. Marine viruses, known as bacteriophages, which are the most abundant viruses on earth, shape our ecosystem by infecting and lysing bacteria in deep-sea sediment, thus affecting how nutrients are recycled.

Initiatives like the Human Microbiome Project, which surveys the human body's resident microorganisms and how they interact with our genes to influence health and disease, have mostly focused on bacteria. However, scientists cannot continue to ignore viruses, fungi, and other bugs! Traditionally, we have focused on bacteria because they are easy to clone, allowing us to replicate parts of their genome that may shed light on our own evolution. With the advent of newer and “sexier” technologies like virus detection microchips and high throughput sequencing, we can turn our attention to studying our interactions with viruses in more detail. As we learn more about the viruses in our gastrointestinal and respiratory tracts, I will be very much surprised if there are no helpful inhabitants among them.

Stay tuned!

Carl, you also discuss zoonotic diseases like AIDS, influenza, SARS, and Ebola, but let's not forget that how investigators decide where and when to sample for potential pathogens is also important. Hotspot modeling allows us to target surveillance efforts to ‘hot spots’ for human disease—the areas where human pathogens are most likely to emerge. The EcoHealth Alliance is a pioneer in this field and an advocate for the idea of One Health, which promotes collaboration among environmental scientists, vets, and clinicians.

And what about those curious about how microbe hunters do what we do? What are the platforms we use to find known and novel agents? How do we prove relationship to disease (or equally important, disprove a causative relationship)? Carl, let's give them directions! The work we do the Center for Infection and Immunity helps to answer some of those queries. We provide links to papers and interviews that address these challenges as well as video demonstrations of some relevant technologies

Last (but not least), as this is not a peer reviewed publication, and I have been encouraged to let my imagination run free, I wonder whether you might consider a chapter in a potential sequel focused on how microbes may alter host behavior to enhance their growth and dissemination. For example, rabies is associated with the inability to swallow, leading to the accumulation of saliva that contains rabies virus, and with aggressive (rabid) behavior that facilitates its spread. It is possible, though I have no experimental proof, that when herpes simplex virus infects the sacral ganglia, it may (in)advertently stimulate nerve endings in the pelvic area , promoting sexual activity and increasing the likelihood it will move into another host.

Carl, thanks again for sending me a preview copy of your book. I look forward to many spirited discussions!

Best,

W. Ian Lipkin

Dear Ian:

Thanks for your reflections. There's a lot to ponder in them, but I'm most intrigued by your most speculative ideas—namely, whether viruses manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. As we discover more and more viruses, I suspect that scientists will indeed find good evidence that at least some viruses act like puppet masters.

I first became familiar with this sort of strategy while writing my previous book, Parasite Rex. Some of the most spectacular examples of parasite manipulation come from animal parasites. The lancet fluke—a parasitic flatworm—has a life cycle that takes it from snails to ants to grazing mammals like cows or sheep. Getting from one species to another is no simple feat. The lancet fluke has ways of manipulating one host after another to make its way through life. Mammals release the fluke eggs in their droppings, which are then eaten by snails. The snails defend themselves by coating the eggs in slime and then “coughing” them up. Ants passing by find the slime delicious, and devour it, along with the eggs inside.

Once inside the ant, the fluke eggs hatch, and the parasites develop. When they're ready for their next host, they begin to alter the ant's behavior. At twilight, the ant crawls up a blade of grass and clamps onto the tip. That's when grazing mammals are likely to pass by and devour the grass, and the ant, and the parasites inside. If the ant does not get eaten by dawn, the parasite causes it to release its grip and crawl down to the ground, where it can enjoy the shade until the end of the next day—when it feels the urge to climb again.

There are many such examples, and for some reason most of them come from parasitic animals—tapeworms, parasitoid wasps, thorny-headed worms, and the like. I don't think that this bias reflects the superior sophistication of parasitic animals over non-animal parasites like viruses. I think it's just another case of the drunk looking for his keys under a lamp post—not because the keys are there, but because that's where it's easier to look.

Consider, for example, the fungus Cordyceps. This little mushroom has no animal nervous system. It's just a mass of fungal cells. Yet Cordyceps manages to manipulate ants as well as lancet flukes. Ants pick up its spores on the ground, whereupon the fungus penetrates its host exoskeleton and starts to grow inside. It doesn't kill its host, however. Instead, it feeds on the ant's internal fluids until it's ready for its next stage of life. The ant then starts to climb—not to the tip of a blade of grass, but to the underside of a leaf a few feet off the ground. The ant clamps onto a vein in the leaf, whereupon the fungus sprouts a flower-like stalk out of its head, which showers spores on the ants below.

While Cordyceps may not have the complexity of the animal nervous system, however, it's not simple. Fungi have big genomes. Yeast, for example, has about 6,500 genes. There's a lot of storage capacity in such a genome to encode lots of sophisticated strategies. A parasitic fungus might be able to use some of its many genes to make proteins that interacted with its host's nervous system to direct it to just the right spot on a leaf. Viruses, on the other hand, typically only have a handful of genes.

Are ten genes enough for a virus to manipulate a host? I suspect they may well be. After all, scientists have already shown how viruses can manipulate us in other ways, such as the way that human papillomaviruses can speed up the growth and division of their host cells. There's nothing particularly special about behavior that would make it beyond the reach of viruses. They'd just need to make proteins that could shut down certain genes in neurons or switch other ones on to produce big changes. And as I mention in A Planet of Viruses, scientists are now finding giant viruses that contain over a thousand genes. Perhaps they have unappreciated powers of manipulation, too.

Parasitologists have one big piece of advice for anyone who wants to investigate whether viruses manipulate their hosts: don't be fooled by mirages. It is very tempting to see any change in a host as the product of a fine-tuned adaptation in its parasite. But it's also possible that a strange host behavior is merely a byproduct of being infected. It's not easy to distinguish between these alternatives. One way is to measure just how big of a difference these “manipulations” make to parasites. Robert Poulin of the University of Otago has studied a parasitic fluke that infects cockles on the beaches of New Zealand. It then needs to get into the shore birds that eat the cockles to move to the next stage of its life cycle. And it just so happens that the infected cockles lose the ability to burrow. So if you walk around on the beach in New Zealand, a lot of the cockles you see may be infected and unable to dig back down into the sand.

Seems like a great way for the parasite to boost its odds of getting into a bird, right? Well, Poulin worked through a detailed model of the parasite life cycle and discovered that it actually makes little difference. For one thing, the cockles also get eaten by other predators in which the parasite can't survive. So Poulin concludes that this case of “manipulation” could not have evolved because it benefited the parasites. Instead, it's just a side-effect. If someone wants to see if the aggression caused by rabies is a manipulation, they could try to carry out a similar test. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be interesting.

Still, it would be a mistake to look only for the most fine-tuned adaptations in viruses. Just consider a single-celled protozoan called Toxoplasma, which normally has a life cycle that takes it from cats to rats and other mammal prey and back to cats again. Toxoplasma does not make rats sick. Instead, it forms harmless cysts in rat brains. And there it seems to manipulate rats in a very precise way: it causes them to lose their fear of cat odor. This change may make them easier prey for cats, boosting the reproductive success of the parasite.

Toxoplasma is a serious health problem for humans. Pregnant women need to avoid contact with cat litter or garden soil, because they may pick up the parasite and accidentally ingest it. While healthy adults can keep Toxoplasma in check, fetuses with immature immune systems cannot. Toxoplasmosis can thus cause serious brain damage, as the parasite grows unchecked. Toxoplasmosis is also a serious concern for adults with compromised immune systems—due to AIDS or immune-suppressing drugs taken after organ transplants.

In human adults, the parasite may be benign, but it does appear to cause some shifts in personality. Some studies suggest that people with Toxoplasma are more likely to get into car accidents, for example. It would be a mistake to see these personality shifts as the parasite's strategy for getting us eaten by cats. For one thing, Toxoplasma was probably not a common disease in humans until the domestication of house cats—when we came into close contact with their parasite-laden droppings. For another, I doubt my pet cats would ever consider me a potential breakfast.

Still, the fact that these personality shifts are not fine-tuned adaptations does not make them unimportant. Could some psychological disorders, like depression, be the result of viruses that alter the behavior of their regular animal hosts? And as virologists like you discover new viruses moving into our species from other animal hosts, I wonder if they'll bring their puppetmaster tricks with them.

Best,
Carl

Stay tuned for next Friday's installment of TRAFFIC, featuring Zimmer in conversation with Richard Preston. And for more info on A Planet of Viruses, please visit the book's UCP page here.

This blog and the book A Planet of Viruses are part of the World of Viruses project, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health through the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA), Grant No. R25 RR024267.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
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’Tis the season for award announcements and prize citations, and we're delighted to announced several recent winners and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin with an award close to home: the Gordon J. Laing Prize, which is awarded annually by the University of Chicago Press (since 1963) to the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction. This year, we honor Robert J. Richards for The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Continue reading "Awards, fellowships, and recent accolades" »

Archived in Art and Architecture | Awards | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Our oceans are home to an astounding array of creatures, some of whom engage in peculiar underwater activities that help them stay alive, fight predators, reproduce, and eat. While this might sound simple, the actual patterns and behaviors that determine the rhythms of biodiversity are much more complicated—and witnessed by a very select few of us who dwell above ground. We asked marine scientist Ellen Prager, author of Chasing Science at Sea: Racing Hurricanes, Stalking Sharks, and Living Undersea with Ocean Experts and Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter, on how scientists might engage the public in highly topical matters—like the complications of marine life—that often require them to translate their expertise and specialized knowledge into relevant, accurate, and accessible writing.

The elegant beauty of a pacific sea nettle. Photo copyright David Wrobel / SeaPics.com.

Continue reading "Ellen Prager on Sex, Drugs, Sea Slime, and writing science" »

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
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Welcome to TRAFFIC, an exchange of thoughts between leading figures from across the humanities, social science, and natural sciences, whose prescient views on current events help to shape the way we interpret the world around us.

Join us for the two-day exchange TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril on the future of that nation and the larger global consequences, in light of the recent tsunami and earthquake that devastated the Tōhoku region on the Pacific coast, leaving left thousands dead, tens of thousands more imperiled, and a series of nuclear reactors on the brink of partial meltdown. Today, we asked sociologist Lee Clarke, a specialist in technological and organizational failures, with expertise in community response to disaster, and Ronald T. Merrill, a geophysicist and paleomagnetic pioneer, to share their thoughts with us on how they see Japan's future unfolding:

From Ronald T. Merrill, author of Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism:

My wife and I lived in Japan most of 1965 while I was studying geophysics. During that time we made many friends, which have subsequently increased in number. We wish them all the best during this tragic time.

Although somewhat painful, earth scientists can use this tragedy as an opportunity to educate others on earthquakes and tsunamis. Unfortunately, there likely could be more bad news to come. My 'rule of thumb' is to expect that another earthquake, about a magnitude smaller than the main shock, could be among the many aftershocks to follow in the coming year or so. Although such an aftershock (around magnitude 8) would have about 30 times less energy than the 9.0 earthquake that struck on March 11 (not the ten times less energy often erroneously given in the popular media), it would still release hundreds of times more energy than did the Hiroshima atomic bomb dropped near the end of World War II. It could also trigger another devastating tsunami.

Although we all hope that this possibility is not realized, we can reflect on what we would do in a similar situation, particularly in Washington State where I live. About 13 subduction earthquakes with magnitude near 9 are estimated to have occurred off our coast during the past 7500 years. The last one occurred in 1700 and was large enough to produce a tsunami that struck Japan with waves several feet tall. Such an earthquake is almost inevitable in our State's future, even though seismologists do not have the capability of predicting just when this will occur.

In the meantime, everyone living where earthquakes occur should consider how prepared they are: Do you know what to do in the event of an earthquake? Have your bookcases been secured to a wall? Where do you plan to obtain drinking water when your taps fail and none is available to purchase? These questions and others are well worth considering now.

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From Lee Clarke, author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Modern Imagination:

Some working hypotheses

The horrors in Japan reveal the folly of concentration. In Worst Cases, I flagged population concentration as one of the social conditions that gives rise to "globally relevant disasters." People concentrate themselves in dangerous places and this makes them a target that's easier to strike when hazards come along. Japan is in the Ring of Fire. So is Indonesia, where 250,000 died in the 2004 tsunami. So are two nuclear plants in California, Diablo Canyon and San Onofre (2 live reactors, 1 dead one, also "spent" nuclear fuel).

Thinking in terms of worst cases isn't always a bad idea. I've taken a little heat, so to speak, over the past five years for advocating "possibilistic thinking." This heat is mainly from people who didn't read the book. But if there'd been more of it in Japan maybe they wouldn't have put the backup generators in the basement. Maybe someone would have said "Well, it's unlikely but if a tsunami rolls in we want to have the cooling system well above sea level; the consequences could be really bad."

We flaunt our vulnerabilities to powerful forces like the atom, the sea, tectonic plates, and organizational failures, to great peril. Hubris is at the root of many of our vulnerabilities. As I wrote in Worst Cases, "Hubris enables people to push the envelope, to build things never before built, and to think of things never before thought." Hubris can help the audacious imagination. But it can just as easily hurt the impudent one. Here are some examples: thinking the Mississippi River can be controlled indefinitely, presuming New York City is safe from hurricanes, and neglecting the New Madrid fault.

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Join us tomorrow for Part II of TRAFFIC: Japan in Peril, with additional commentary from an ageism expert and Japanese historian on what happens next—and how we might prepare for this future.

For additional information on Lee Clarke's Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination, and Ronald T. Merrill's Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism, please visit the University of Chicago Press's website here.

TRAFFIC is taken from the Arabic taraffaqa, "to walk along slowly together."

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Archived in Books for the News | Cartography and Geography | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
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John Martin (1789-1854), English Romantic painter, was born the same week that the Bastille was stormed—an event whose sturm und drang might be said to eerily echo the grandiose theatrical visions of Martin's work in oils. Martin's large-scale paintings bore the influence of contemporary diorama culture—indeed, Martin even claimed that D. W. Griffith was aware of his work and many see his panoramic, imaginative works as precursors to epic cinema. During the last four years of his life, in particular, Martin furthered his scenes of apocalyptic destruction and disaster by engaging with a triptych of biblical subjects: The Great Day of His Wrath, The Last Judgment, and The Plains of Heaven.

This week, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle opened a major new exhibition of Martin's work, which will run through the end of April before traveling to the Tate Museum later this year. This is the largest public exhibition of Martin's work since his death and the first exhibition devoted to the painter in more than thirty years, and it will include both previously unseen and newly restored paintings. Paying particular attention to how Martin's populism fits within the larger narrative of British art, the exhibition also connects to larger questions of showmanship, science, epic morality, and today's charged social and political culture.

In The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856, Ralph O'Connor demonstrates how Martin's art helped to give birth to the modern geological imagination. The story of the nineteenth-century geological writers—James Parkinson, John Playfair, William Buckland, James Rennie, and others—is a saga on par with the theatricality of Martin's paintings. Backed by other men of science, clergymen, and hacks who borrowed freely from the Bible, poetry, and the panorama industry, these pioneering scientists piqued the public imagination by recasting the story of creation with uncouth mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and serpentine sea dragons in lieu of Adam and Eve. Just as Martin's paintings circulated through a public sphere half charged by fear of a coming moral apocalypse and half enthralled by new theatrical opportunities, so too did Victorian geological writing enter into the discourse of the wider Bible-reading public.

The Earth on Show garnered several prizes, including the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the Best Book Award from the British Society for Literature and Science—with Martin's retrospective as impetus, it's as good a time as any to revisit its enthusiasm for the days when paleontological wonders first went public.

The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53), John Martin. Courtesy of the Tate, London, 2010.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
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Occasionally we find ourself a humanist on the moon here at the Chicago Blog, though not without sensitivity towards our more rarefied friends who yield to Aristotle and the laws of nature. Scientists: those chroniclers of phenomena and behavior with interesting Kepler tattoos and jokes about Karl Popper and inductivism. We kid? But we do wish to point out the interesting—and complicated—space that emerges when works in the history and philosophy of science meet the much-charted forms of the contemporary book review and author interview. Perhaps exemplified no better than in the call-in public radio talk-show (cited below!), this realm of scientia curiosa abets a natural TOP FIVE OR TEN list of highlights and lowlights in reviews and 'views, recently registered. Onward!

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"It sounded a bit like Maria was on the line from Mars."

From a live, call-in interview on Newstalk Ireland with Maria D. Lane, author of Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet (full podcast available here)

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"Are you of the opinion that one of earth's magnetic poles might have been tidally locked to THE MOON many, many years ago?"

From Ronald T. Merrill's recent appearance on Science Friday's (with Ira Flatow!) "The Poles, They Are A Changin'" discussing Our Magnetic Earth: The Science of Geomagnetism

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"One of the defining books (though this is the revised edition to the first version) in the history and sociology of science. Probably can read this in relation to some follow-up articles in 'Essential Tension.'"

From the blog Unquiet Mind of an Academic Libertine, in which a PhD student preps (annotations!) for her field list in science studies with Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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"Such provocative findings, and Winsberg's exceptionally readable account of the reasoning that led him to them, will interest many general readers as well as scientists and philosophers of science."

From Richard C. J. Somerville's Science review of Eric B. Winsberg's Science in the Age of Computer Simulation (a great von Neumann microhistory, to boot!)

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"Readers of this pluralistic narrative are left with a revitalized appreciation for scientific virtues: why they mattered in late modern technoscience and why they continue to matter in the world to come."

From a review of Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation on the aptly named blog The Bubble Chamber ("Where history and philosophy of science meet society and public policy")

Additional interviews with Shapin about the book are available here and here

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And one more, perhaps unrelatedly? A grain of salt (unscientifically) tossed over the shoulder:

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."—Bertrand Russell

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by KAM at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 1883, an interdisciplinary advocacy group promoting the study of literature and modern languages was founded at Johns Hopkins University. In its one-hundred and twenty-seven year run, the Modern Language Association has grown to include more than 30,000 members in over 100 countries, fostered several major publications and a serialized radio show, and survived the changing mores and face of the academy ("Watch for our posters and leaflets!"—from a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books in 1968 from Noam Chomsky, Frederick Crews, Florence Howe, and others, as to how the '68 MLA meeting in NYC might work to make the organization more responsive to society—part of a fascinating exchange available here).

One-hundred and twenty-seven years, though, is nothing to laugh at—and neither is the high regard with which the organization's annual awards for book-length scholarship are held. Notices went out via the interweb yesterday and we couldn't be more thrilled for several of our authors, who'll be further commended at the 2011 annual meeting this January in Los Angeles.

Laura Dassow Walls, author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, garnered the forty-first annual James Russell Lowell Prize for "an outstanding literary or linguistic study by a member of the academy." Walls traces von Humboldt's ideas for Cosmos, the book that crowned his career, to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where von Humboldt first envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link discourses and nations in a global web of community. Check out the excerpt available at the book's UCP page here and have a look at what Science called "a heartfelt plea for environmental holism."

Jane Tylus will share the twenty-first annual Howard R. Marraro Prize for "outstanding book in the field of Italian Literature" for Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others, which Choice earlier proclaimed an "essential" volume.

Andrew Piper, whose Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination we just blogged about yesterday afternoon, received the seventeenth annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book for this work on the book's changing identity at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as acclaim from the New Republic for one of the Best Art Books of 2009.

And finally: Eric Slauter, author of The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution—in which he uncovers the hidden cultural histories upon which the document rests, in light of the artifice of the developing state—received Honorable Mention for the First Book award. Read an excerpt from the first chapter of The State as a Work of Art at the BookDaily site here.

Hearty congrats and warm weekend wishes to all of the winners!

Archived in Awards | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
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Isaac Newton's influence on modern science is immeasurable. But Newton was also profoundly invested in the study of alchemy, a notorious pseudoscience that has been often dismissed as either a delusion or a scam. However, this view of alchemy has been under revision in recent years, a process driven by the work of scholar William R. Newman, who has led the investigation into the links between alchemy and the scientific revolution.

In a New York Times article exploring Isaac Newton's interest in and experiences with alchemy, Natalie Angier draws heavily on Newman's insights into the history of what should be more properly understood as a kind of protochemistry. While the famous quest to turn lead into gold didn't pan out, Angier notes that the alchemists' "work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. 'Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,' said Dr. Newman, 'and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.'"

Far from the puzzling pursuit of an otherwise brilliant scientist, alchemy proves to have played an important part in Newton's legacy as a physicist:

Dr. Newman argues that Sir Isaac's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays, and that a sunbeam prismatically fractured into the familiar rainbow suite called Roy G. Biv can with a lens be resolved to tidy white sunbeam once again. "I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton's breakthroughs in optics," said Dr. Newman. "He's not just passing light through a prism—he's resynthesizing it." Consider this a case of "technology transfer," said Dr. Newman, "from chemistry to physics."

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science
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Philosophy of science has lost one of its brightest minds: David L. Hull died this week at the age of 75. In an obituary in yesterday's Sun-Times, Michael Ruse, who considered Professor Hull "a mentor and 'big brother'" said of his late colleague, "David was not just interested in the philosophy side but in the whole history and development of science." And Robert J. Richards remembered him by saying, "There are many whose careers owe something to David."

Indeed, many of Hull's students and admirers have found a home at the University of Chicago Press (both Ruse and Richards have published books with us), and his Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, which, as the Sun-Times describes, "applied the rules of evolution in nature to evolution in science, proposing that the forces responsible for changes in species also act on scientific ideas," has become in the 22 years since its publication an essential text in the philosophy of science.

We at the Press are saddened to learn of Hull's passing, but we're honored to keep his legacy alive with our strong lists in the history and philosophy of science.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On this day in 1921, researchers at the University of Toronto announced the discovery of the hormone insulin. In the nearly nine decades since, insulin has transformed diabetes from a death sentence to a manageable condition.

But the discovery of this miracle drug was hardly free from controversy. With various researchers staking claims for recognition and prize money, the bizarre clash of scientific personalities threatened to overshadow one of the most significant and contentious medical events of modern times. In the brilliant, definitive book The Discovery of Insulin, award-winning historian Michael Bliss sets the record straight.

When F. G. Banting and J. J. R. Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering and isolating insulin, Banting immediately announced that he was dividing his share of the prize with his young associate, C. H. Best. Macleod divided his share with a fourth member of the team, J. B. Collip. For the next sixty years medical opinion was intensely divided over the allotment of credit for the discovery of insulin. In resolving this controversy, Bliss also offers a wealth of new detail on such subjects as the treatment of diabetes before insulin and the life-and-death struggle to manufacture insulin. This now-classic study unearths a wealth of material, ranging from scientists' unpublished memoirs to the confidential appraisals of insulin by members of the Nobel Committee.

Check the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book the New Republic praised as an "excellent account of the insulin story [and] a rare dissection of the anatomy of scientific discovery [that] serves as a model of how rigorous historical method can correct the myths and legends sometimes perpetrated in the scientific literature." And next Spring, Bliss will return to our list with The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease, a compact and compelling history that renders medical history as a fascinating story of dedication and discovery.

Archived in Books for the News | History | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge aired a program last week on the theme of monsters, inviting several authors on the show whose books explore the important role they play in the Western imagination. Among them was Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

While Buhs doesn't believe in Bigfoot, as his book demonstrates, there's no denying Bigfoot mania. Tracing the wild and wooly story of America's favorite homegrown monster from the early nineteenth-century to the present, Buh's book offers more than a few interesting insights on what our fascination with this monster says about modern American culture.

You can catch the To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast on the WPR website or archived at this third party site. Also, find out more about Buhs' book on our website with this excerpt, and an interview with the author. Or stay right right here at the UCP blog to read our previous post featuring Buhs in dialogue with fellow UCP author Sigrid Schmalzer on Bigfoot and its Chinese analog, the yeren.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
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Eighty-five years ago today, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined $100 for violating the Butler Act, which made it illegal for school teachers to question or teach against the biblical explanation of the origin of life. Though much has changed in the last nearly nine decades, evolution is still put on trial and Charles Darwin's theories often subjected to intense scrutiny and debate.

But how many people—especially those who disagree with him—have ever taken the time to read Darwin's work? In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the seminal On the Origin of Species (which was commemorated in 2009), the New York Times launched an innovative interactive feature, which allows users to read samples from the classic text as well as annotations from prominent scientists. Several of our authors are represented. John Thompson, author of The Coevolutionary Process and The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution and editor of our Interspecific Interactions series, contributed his thoughts about Darwin's description of the natural selection process. William B. Provine, author of The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics and Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology, talked about his marked-up copy of On the Origin of Species and how difficult it is to select just one favorite passage from a book he's been teaching from for forty years. And Robert J. Richards, author of numerous books, including, most recently, Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, reflected on two of his favorite passages.

Today marks an important moment in the ongoing fight to teach science in public schools. And after you spend some time with Darwin, be sure to browse all of our books on evolutionary science, as well as those that consider the reverberations of the Scopes trial from an legal, educational, and scientific perspective.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's in your garage? A car? Some bikes and boxes and bins? Boring. We know a guy that's turning lead into gold in his. Or at least recreating Isaac Newton's experiments. Meet the proud owner of the world's only (that we know of) suburban alchemical garage, William R. Newman, professor of the history of science at Indiana University and author of, most recently, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution.

Discover magazine recently visited Bloomington, Indiana, to see Professor Newman's unusual lab firsthand and noted: "[Newman] has recreated 17th Century laboratory conditions and experiments, including a homemade replica of Isaac Newton's laboratory furnace in his backyard. Newman's research shows that alchemists were not just tinkering blindly—they produced 'A solid body of repeated and repeatable observations of laboratory results.'"

Intrigued yet? (Boing Boing was. They linked to the story yesterday afternoon.) Want to learn more? Check out all of Professor Newman's books on the history of alchemy, as well as George Starkey's Alchemical Laboratory Notebooks and Correspondence, which Newman edited along with Lawrence M. Principe (who teamed up with Newman once before, to produce the award-winning Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry).

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Massimo Pigliucci, author of Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk was recently invited to write for the Washington Post's Political Bookworm blog. The blog's regular author Steven Livingston introduces Pigliucci's article:

[In Nonsense on Stilts Pigliucci] analyzes how the belief in bunk science occurs, looking into how scientists work and spread their knowledge and how the culture absorbs it. Here, Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, turns his sights on a related issue: the way ideology worms its way into public education and elbows aside serious scholarship. His case in point: Texas.

Continue reading online at the Washington Post's Political Bookworm blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science
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Last week, Andrew Wakefield, the doctor whose research suggested a link between the childhood MMR vaccine and autism, was banned from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. The New York Times reports: "The disciplinary tribunal's action came after more than a decade of controversy over the links Dr. Wakefield and associates in Britain, as well as supporters among parents of some autistic children in Britain and the United States, have made between autism and a commonly used vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. The suggestion of a link caused use of the vaccine in Britain and elsewhere in the world to plummet, a development that critics of Dr. Wakefield said contributed to a sharp rise in measles cases in countries where the vaccine was in use. Most scientific papers have failed to find any links between vaccines and autism."

Though the move was hailed by many as a victory of science over pseudoscience, some wonder if it is too little too late. Opines the Boston Globe: "But sadder still is the possibility that, in the minds of thousands of parents desperately clinging to hopes of finding a cure for autism, Wakefield's legend might survive untarnished, possibly even exalted."

Why, even after Wakefield has been disbarred and his work discounted, do some people still believe him? And more generally, why do people hold tight to their fringe beliefs?

These are the questions that Massimo Pigliucci sets out to answer in his new book Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics—from AIDS denialism to vaccines to creationism to global warming—Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a "taxonomy of bunk" that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.

Pigliucci and his book have been everywhere lately. Recently, New Scientist praised Pigliucci's work as a "brilliant book, which ought to be required reading for, well, everyone." Pigliucci was a guest this morning on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (listen to the audio recording here) and was interviewed on KERA's program Think this afternoon (audio will be posted here). He's also been making rounds of the podcasts, appearing recent on Skeptically Speaking and The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. And, if you still can't get enough, you can always check out his own blog, Rationally Speaking.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Environmental conservation and sustainable development are hallmarks of the modern green movement. But few people realize these concepts have been around for centuries. In fact, according to historian Harriet Ritvo, the environmental movement as we know it can be traced back to an unlikely place at an unlikely time: a bucolic reservoir in Victorian Britian.

This week's Science magazine reviews The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism, which "chronicles water-starved, late-19th-century Manchester's determination to convert tiny Thirlmere … into the world's largest reservoir." Ritvo's history brings to vivid life the colorful and strong-minded characters who populated both sides of the debate, revisiting notions of the natural promulgated by Romantic poets, recreationists, resource managers, and industrial developers to establish Thirlmere as the template for subsequent—and continuing—environmental struggles.

Deemed "a penetrating microstudy that mixes environmental, scientific, urban, and political history" by Science, The Dawn of Green investigates Victorian ideas about industry, development, and technology to shows how the lessons learned in the Lake District can inform and guide modern environmental and conservation campaigns.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Climate change—and the debate about its causes or validity—is a subject of perpetual interest. Recently, we told you about the chasm between meteorologists—who predict short-term weather patterns and remain skeptical about long-term change—and climatologists—who, as the New York Times reported, "almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change." (Stephen Colbert also recently covered in conflict with an amusing "Science Catfight" between Joe Bastardi, a weather forcaster, and Brenda Ekwurzel, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.)

Now the UK's Independent has offered an overview of books that "separate global warming fact from fiction." And Massimo Pigliucci's Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk get singled out as "entertaining and valuable guide to sorting the scientific grain from the chaff of pseudoscience."

He makes a distinction that clarifies some of our current problems. There are two kinds of bone fide science: one is law-based and experimental, cut-and-dried as a crystal chalice or a perfect intertwined double helix of DNA. Then there are historical sciences such as evolution or climate research that employ "the methods of a crime detective." .… As Pigliucci points out, what happened happened, and can be deduced by the trail it left; what might happen in the future involves contingency, freak occurrences that can tip the path of events onto a different course—"for want of a nail…". We can reconstruct the meteorite event of 65 million years ago but cannot predict the next such strike. We are left with a range of probabilities.

In the new book, Pigliucci explores the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. Although the Independent praised Pigliucci, not every one agrees. In The Chronicle Review, Carlin Romano offers a different—and less admirative—perspective on the book. But, given the contentious nature of the book, we expect a robust debate.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy
Posted by at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Humboldt who? That's usually the reaction from modern readers when introduced to the father of geography, Alexander von Humboldt. He was admired by Darwin and Jefferson, yet Humboldt is less well-known than the men he inspired. So why is it important to keep his legacy alive? And what does this nineteenth-century German-born naturalist have to offer science and the humanities in the twenty-first century anyway? A lot. At least that's what the University of Chicago Press thinks, and we've begun publishing books that translate his writing and contextualize his explorations.

Last year, the Press published The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, Laura Dassow Walls's reintroduction of this seminal thinker to new audiences. Her book traces Humboldt's ideas for Cosmos —the book that crowned his career—to his 1799 journey to the Americas, where he first experienced the diversity of nature and of the world's peoples—and envisioned a new cosmopolitanism that would link ideas, disciplines, and nations into a global web of knowledge and cultures. Walls recently spoke about Humboldt and her book at the Virginia Festival of the Book, and Book TV was there to film the presentation. After you watch her speech here, be sure to check out an excerpt from the book here.

Also this Spring, the Press is publishing the long-awaited translation of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland's Essay on the Geography of Plants. Among the most cited writings in natural history, after the works of Darwin and Wallace, this work appears here for the first time in a complete English-language translation. Covering far more than its title implies, it represents the first articulation of an integrative "science of the earth," encompassing most of today's environmental sciences. The edition also includes a stunning poster-sized color reproduction of the Mt. Chimborazo tableau, an icon in the history of science and scientific graphics.

The Press has also commissioned a new series called Humboldt in English, which will feature volumes of new, unabridged, and annotated translations of the most significant parts of Alexander von Humboldt's monumental study of transatlantic and global modernities. The first volume, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, will be released this fall. For more on the series, go here.

Archived in Author Events | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Smithsonian Institution has more than thirteen million images in some seven hundred collections throughout its network of museums, research centers, and the National Zoo. The Bigger Picture is a blog that takes a closer look at the Smithsonian's holdings and invites readers to consider the impact of photography on our perception of history.

In a recent post, Press author Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette considered images from the Smithosian's Flickr commons of female physicists, including Marie Sklodowska Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie, Lise Meitner, and Herta R. Leng. The fascinating discussion, which looks at the intersection of publicity and politics in the world of physics, can be found here.

Around here, LaFollete is known for her analysis of science in different media: her 2008 book Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television transports readers to the early days of radio, when the new medium allowed innovative and optimistic scientists the opportunity to broadcast serious and dignified presentations over the airwaves. Lafollette chronicles the efforts of science popularizers, from 1923 until the mid-1950s, as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science's idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.

After you are done flipping through the Smithsonian's Flickr collection, have a look at this excerpt from Lafollette's book.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
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Here's a link to one of the more interesting blogs we've stumbled across lately. Rationally Speaking, a blog managed by Massimo Pigliucci, CUNY philosopher and author of Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology, as well as the forthcoming Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, is a spin off Pigliucci's work on the philosophy of science with a focus on debunking virtually everything from Google, to the idea of American democracy itself. Recently, they've started up a new podcast, with the inaugural episode titled "Can history be a science?" and a special Valentines' day episode on the science and philosophy of love right around the corner. Listen and read at http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to Wikipedia, recorded discoveries of bog bodies—human bodies which have been found remarkably preserved by the unique conditions of the sphagnum bogs in which they are found—go back as far as the 18th century. The mystery surrounding the significance of these bodies and the nature of their demise has for centuries provoked a macabre fascination in the public mind, but until the mid-twentieth century, no one even knew how long the bodies had lain in their muddy graves. As Philip Hoare notes in a recent book review in the Telegraph, it was not until Danish archaeologist PV Glob's 1969 book The Bog People, that many of these bodies were revealed to be human sacrifices dating back to the early iron age. As Hoare writes "sentenced to death for worldly crimes but slain to propitiate the terrible deities, they were strangled with leather nooses or were pinned face down with wooden struts to drown in the mud."

Hoare continues:

As a young girl in Copenhagen, Karin Sanders, [author of the new book on the subject Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination], was also a fan of Glob's book. But hers is a decidedly post-modern account, one which seeks to show how the bog bodies took their place in our culture, out of theirs, 'estranged from us even as they mirror us'. She deftly teases out the paradoxes: born of neither land nor water but something in between, the bodies are an uncanny link between the pagan beliefs that prompted their deaths and our own supposedly rational world.

Demonstrating the profound impact these discoveries have made on modern western society, Sanders shows how these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past.

To find out more read the complete review in the Telegraph.

Archived in Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Arizona in conjunction with PBS has posted an interesting video featuring Fulvio Melia on the topic of his new book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics. Check it out below. More info on the book follows.

For decades after its initial publication Einstein's theory of general relativity, which used six interlocking equations to describe the effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time, remained largely a curiosity for scientists. Further research into Einstein's work was hindered by its extreme complexity and lack of empirical verifiability. That is, until a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate solved its great riddle in 1963. Roy Kerr's solution emerged coincidentally with the discovery of black holes that same year and provided fertile testing ground—at long last—for general relativity. Today, scientists routinely cite the Kerr solution, but even among specialists, few know the story of how Kerr cracked Einstein's code.

In Cracking the Einstein Code Fulvio Melia offers an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Kerr's great discovery. Melia vividly describes how luminaries such as Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Emmy Noether set the stage for the Kerr solution; how Kerr came to make his breakthrough; and how scientists such as Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking used the accomplishment to refine and expand modern astronomy and physics. Today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While we might take for granted the notion that animal species can become extinct—and that, occasionally, humans are the direct cause—among the early pioneers of natural science, the idea that any link in the great chain of being could be broken took a while to sink in. As the Washington Times' Claire Hopley notes in a recent review of Mark V. Barrow Jr.'s Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction From the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology:

18th- and early-19th-century scientists and thinkers believed that the world was created with a complete inventory of humans, animals, birds and vegetation, forming a chain of being.

The idea that a link in this chain could disappear undermined this fundamental concept. As Jefferson wrote, "Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." He put the mammoth first in his list of American mammals because he expected that a living example would be discovered as explorers moved westward and encountered wildlife unknown in the east.

The existence of uncharted territories, not only in America but also in Africa and the South Pacific, fostered resistance to the idea of extinction. But as distant countries were explored it became clear that species were being wiped out.…

But as Barrow's new book demonstrates, as the idea of extinction gained credence so too did the idea of conservation, at first, among natural scientists who wished to preserve specimens for study, and later, among members of the public interested in preserving the beauty of the North American wildlife.

Delivering a sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative of these efforts to preserve the natural world, Barrow's Nature's Ghosts takes readers on a journey from the early scientific discoveries that revealed the threat of extinction, to the pioneering conservation efforts of early naturalists like John James Audubon and John Muir.

With Nature's Ghosts Barrow offers an unprecedented view of what we've lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Discoveries in astronomy challenge our fundamental ideas about the universe. Where the astronomers of antiquity once spoke of fixed stars, we now speak of whirling galaxies and giant supernovae. Where we once thought Earth was the center of the universe, we now see it as a small planet among millions of others, any number of which could also hold life. These dramatic shifts in our perspective hinge on thousands of individual discoveries: moments when it became clear to someone that some part of the universe—whether a planet or a supermassive black hole—was not as it once seemed.

Secrets of the Universe invites us to participate in these moments of revelation and wonder as scientists first experienced them. A renowned astronomer himself, Paul Murdin here revisits the most important astronomical discoveries ever made and introduces the scientists who made them in seventy short chapters which can be read consecutively as one narrative or dipped into and savored individually. The book makes even the most complex astronomical phenomena—from supermassive black holes to interstellar nebulae—wholly accessible to newcomers and general readers. It also features 400 full-color images, many of which would fit comfortably in the pages of Sky & Telescope or National Geographic.

The first section of Secrets explores discoveries made before the advent of the telescope, from stars and constellations to the position of our own sun. The second considers discoveries made within our own solar system, from the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter to the comets and asteroids at its distant frontier. The next section delves into discoveries of the dynamic universe, like gravitation, relativity, pulsars, and black holes. A fourth examines discoveries made within our own galaxy, from interstellar nebulae and supernovae to Cepheid variable stars and extrasolar planets. Next Murdin turns to discoveries made within the deepest recesses of the universe, like quasars, supermassive black holes, and gamma ray bursters. In the end, Murdin unveils where astronomy still teeters on the edge of discovery, considering dark matter and alien life alike. Really no topic in the history of astronomy evades Murdin’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive book on the subject for years to come.

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Black holes are undoubtedly one of the all-time coolest phenomena in astrophysics. With his theory of relativity, Einstein initially predicted their existence as the inevitable result of gravitation on some of the more massive objects in the universe. But according to Fulvio Melia's new book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics, for more than four decades after the publication of Einstein's ideas, this phenomenon, along with the rest of Einstein's theory, remained a curious abstraction for most scientists who lacked the final set of equations that would allow them to empirically verify its principles.

Then came Roy Kerr, the twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate who solved the great riddle in 1963, transforming Einstein's theory into an applicable description of how real objects in the universe actually behave—including black holes. As a recent review in the New Scientist notes:

The most intriguing application of Kerr's solution is in describing objects that are so massive and so dense that their gravitational field prevents even light from escaping. Einstein himself was skeptical that such "black holes" could exist in nature. Just as Kerr was developing his solution, however, the first compelling evidence for black holes was found. Today, black holes are thought to be commonplace, including the "supermassive" variety that lurk at the centre of most galaxies, and Kerr's solution has become a vital tool in astrophysics and cosmology.

Indeed, today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Offering a detailed account of Kerr's great discovery Fulvio Melia's Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics showcases of some of the most important science of the twentieth century.

For more check out the review in the New Scientist or read this excerpt from the book.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the wake of the American revolution, world-renowned French naturalist Count Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle opined that the flora and fauna of the New World (humans included) were inferior to European specimens. Buffon's theory of American "degeneracy" began a French and American culture war, as prominent Americans, among them Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, fought to refute the European claims.

As a recent review in Natural History magazine notes, Lee Allen Dugatkin's Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, vividly recreates these debates, including the amazing story—referenced in the book's title—of Jefferson's shipment of a full-grown moose carcass to Buffon, in the hopes of definitively proving that North American fauna were every bit the equal of Europe's. Laurence A. Marschall writes for Natural History:

He succeeded, with the help of correspondents in New England, who arranged to kill a moose in Vermont, cart it to the coast, and ship its skeleton and skin to Paris, where it arrived around October 1, 1787. Unfortunately, Buffon died within little more than a year of the moose, writing nothing more on the subject, so we will never know if he was convinced of the error of his ways.

Still, though the giant moose may not have made much of an impact on Buffon's Histoire, thanks to Dugatkin's fascinating, not to mention entertaining, chronicle of these debates, we can rest assured that it has found its rightful place in ours.

For more, read Marschall's review in the current issue of Natural History magazine.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because Albert Einstein’s equations so accurately describe the world around us, they seem timeless. But in truth, we have only understood how to apply his theory of general relativity for less than fifty years. When Einstein published his description of the effect of gravitation on the shape of space and the flow of time in 1916, few scientists knew what to do with it. Enter Roy Kerr, a twenty-nine-year-old Cambridge graduate who solved the great riddle in 1963. The solution he proposed emerged coincidentally with the discovery of black holes that same year and provided fertile testing ground—at long last—for general relativity. Today scientists routinely cite the Kerr solution, but even among specialists few know the story of how Kerr cracked Einstein’s code.

Part biography, part chronicle of scientific discovery, Cracking the Einstein Code unmasks the history behind the search for a real-world solution to Einstein’s field equations. Offering an eyewitness account of the events leading up to Kerr’s great discovery, Fulvio Melia vividly describes how luminaries such as Karl Schwarzschild, David Hilbert, and Emmy Noether set the stage for the Kerr solution; how Kerr came to make his breakthrough; and how scientists such as Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking used the accomplishment to refine and expand modern astronomy and physics. Today more than 300 million supermassive black holes are suspected of anchoring their host galaxies across the cosmos, and the Kerr solution is what astronomers and astrophysicists use to describe much of their behavior.

Sometimes dramatic, often exhilarating, but always attuned to the human element, Cracking the Einstein Code is ultimately a showcase of how important science gets done.

Read the press release. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you saw just one episode of the PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea, or if you saw them all, you saw certain images repeatedly: brown bears catching salmon at Brooks Falls, a wolf loping across a meadow in Denali, bison lumbering through the snow of Hayden Valley, and Mt. McKinley rising to improbable heights above a cloud bank. These signature images are like a visual glue that Ken Burns used to hold together the multitude of places and people covered in the National Parks series.

These indelible character of these signature images, and all the magnificent images in the series, attest to the remarkable power that photographic images of natural scenery have to create a compelling story and and establish cognitive and emotional connections with the parks as well as with the people who have preserved them. The National Parks series becomes the latest in a long chain of photographic imagery, including the work of Ansel Adams and New Deal filmmakers, to picture nature as a place of grace for the individual and the nation.

This is the subject of a book we published a few years ago, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform by Finis Dunaway. He tells the story of how visual imagery shaped modern perceptions of the natural world. By examining the relationship between the camera and environmental politics through detailed studies of key artists and activists, Dunaway captures the emotional and spiritual meaning that became associated with the American landscape.

We have an excerpt from the book which discusses the role of coffee-table picture books, especially those published by the Sierra Club under the leadership of David Brower, in creating an environmental consciousness that protected natural areas across the country. One book, This is Dinosaur, played a significant role in the battle over damming the Green River in the area known as Echo Park, in Dinosaur National Monument—a story told in Episode Six of the series. This is Dinosaur, edited by Wallace Stegner, who first called the national parks "the best idea we ever had," was part of the successful campaign to galvanize public and Congressional opinion and defeat the Green River dam project.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by DB at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's "Google Doodle" acknowledges the 400th anniversary of the public debut of Galileo Galilei's telescope, commemorating one of the most important technical innovations in the history of science. As the Guardian's Peter Walker writes, it was "exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, [that] the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope."

Though a rather crude instrument by today's standards, Galileo's scope allowed him to demonstrate some of the most solid empirical evidence in support of Copernicanism the world had ever seen, producing a revolution, not only in astronomy and cosmology, but in the social fabric of renaissance Italy (and the rest of the western world). With the publication of his observations in Sidereus Nuncius the preeminent scientist immediately found himself at odds with the Vatican and the Medici court, resulting in one of the most famous instances of the intellectual as martyr since Socrates. His struggles to reconcile the troubled relationship between Copernicanism and Scripture, along with his treatment at the hands of the Vatican (put under house arrest for the remainder of his life after being put to trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633), have sparked perennial interest by the writers of the history of science, including Mario Biagioli, professor of history of science at Harvard University, and the author of two books on the subject: Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism and more recently, Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy.

In Galileo, Courtier Biagioli shows how Galileo attempted to gain acceptance of his scientific ideas by fashioning both his career and his science to the demands of Medici court patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige; demonstrating how Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions. And in Galileo's Instruments of Credit Biagioli expands on his previous work to focus on the aspects of Galileo's scientific life that extend beyond the framework of court culture, offering a revisionist account of the different systems of exchanges, communication, and credibility at work in various phases of Galileo's career.

Examining the nexus of science, politics, and power and its inevitable influence on scientific practice, Biagioli's books offer readers a fascinating and insightful look at Galileo and the lasting impact of his discoveries on the occasion of his invention of one of the most important scientific instruments the world has ever known.

For more read two articles on the topic at the Guardian.co.uk or see this excerpt from Galileo's Instruments of Credit.

Archived in Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For some time now the movement to preserve natural habitats has gained in popularity as we begin to understand our species' limited capacity to thrive in isolation from the untold number of other organisms that make up the ecosystems in which we live. And with the clear and present danger posed by mass-extinctions, climate change, and the rapid depletion of natural resources, many long for a return to the abundance that the wilds of North America once offered. But while it is impossible to turn back the hands of time, with Steve Nicholls' recent book, Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery we can at least gain a clearer picture of what it was like, and perhaps the inspiration to repair the damage. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers writes a recent review of the book for the Washington Times:

Paradise Found is one of the best books I have read in years. The book guides us easily through the North Atlantic, the East Coast, subtropical Caribbean, the West Coast, Baja California and the Great Plains, seamlessly blending firsthand accounts from historical journals, personal anecdotes and the latest scientific inquiry. Wildlife filmmaker and entomologist Steve Nicholls paints a picture of 500 years of people and nature, giving us a time machine tour of our continent's abundant past.

And what an abundance there was! Meadows full of ducks, forests filled with all kinds of berries and nuts—oaks, pecans and most plentiful of all, the American chestnut. Those forests were not the same as we know today. These were natural cathedrals, with green roofs arching 50 feet above one's head; giant trunks measured more than 20 feet in circumference. So many strawberries littered the ground that one naturalist noted his horse's hooves were being stained red with their juice. At the mouth of a river was an island filled with so many egrets that it looked as if it were blanketed with snow.…

Digging into the journals and diaries of explorers and settlers, [Nicholls] became convinced if more people knew the true vitality of nature, they would not only be awed, but be reminded of the sheer scale of our impact on the planet—and be spurred to repair the damage. Environmental awareness is not new, but as Mr. Nicholls states, "our mentality has been to preserve and isolate sections of nature, in national parks or wilderness areas, separate from the human world."

We city folk have grown so apart from nature that I wonder how many comprehend how much has been lost from our own backyards. Here in Georgetown, the cocoon where I live, neighbors shop at eco-friendly Whole Foods, yet, in apparent disconnect, chop down century-old trees and spray pesticides on their properties, replacing soil with cement and trees with clumps of liriope. Is it any wonder that the amount and variety of songbirds have steadily diminished, while the pesky mosquito remains?

This detached attitude is, in no small way, responsible for the scale of effects Mr. Nicholls outlines in his book. "The bottom line is that we are just one part of nature," he writes, and the sooner we become enlightened with that humbling realization, the sooner we can bring about a balance to our immediate environment and beyond.

Read the rest of the review on the Washington Times website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Biology | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Of the stories making today's headlines, the continued technical glitches in the Large Hadron Collider should particularly resonate with some Chicagoans—especially those with PhD's in particle physics. Until the construction of the LHC, the Batavia based Fermilab was home to the world's most powerful supercollider, the Tevatron, so named because of its ability to accelerate particles at energy states of up to one terravolt, (TeV). But since an international consortium of scientists powered up the LHC, which boasts a target operating energy seven times that of the Tevatron, the lab has been preparing to fade into the background as the new collider takes over its position conducting experiments at the cutting edge of particle physics.

But since 2007 several malfunctions have delayed CERN's first sub-atomic smash-ups, and now, as has been widely reported this morning, another malfunction may set those experiments back even further.

As the New York Times notes, this is obviously bad news for researchers and engineers eager to demonstrate the scientific payoff promised by the 15 year, $9 billion dollar project, but for the folks back at Fermilab, it may mean that the Tevatron gets to stay online for a little while longer as scientists whose work doesn't require the full capacity of the LHC return to Batavia during the interim for some good old 1 TeV particle-smashing.

And what better to enhance the experience of Fermilab's return to center-stage, than Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall's fascinating historical account of the labs in Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience. Recalling a time when thick glasses and pocket protectors were all the rage and names like Robert R. Wilson and Leon M. Lederman rang throughout the accelerator tunnels, Fermilab takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of the labs, with a special focus on its early role in the rise of "megascience,"—the collaborative struggle to conduct large-scale international experiments—in the context of the Cold War. Delivering a detailed account of the growth of the modern research laboratory and capturing the drama of human exploration at the cutting edge of science, Fermilab takes an illuminating look at science's past, and perhaps its future as well as scientists return to the labs, granting the accelerator another chance at isolating a Higgs boson, or perhaps shedding some light on the nature of dark matter before the LHC takes over the spotlight—eventually.

For more info see this special website for the book.

Also, for a fascinating look at the life and career of the lab's namesake, who's work also helped set the stage for the research performed there, see this excerpt from Fermi Remembered, edited by James W. Cronin.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics
Posted by TXM at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As was widely reported today, the so-called "missing link"—the piece in the evolutionary puzzle that definitively ties humans to apes—was identified in Germany. And her name is "Ida." Reports the New York Times:

Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.

Described as the “most complete fossil primate ever discovered,” the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey.

But just as soon as the discovery was announced, accusations of showmanship and exaggeration were lobbied at the scientific team behind the findings. (It's hard not to wonder whether Google, long famous for its sparse homepage, changed its logo to celebrate the discovery or as part of a larger publicity campaign.) In unpacking the implications of scientific discovery in an age of social media and orchestrated press events, the Christian Science Monitor wrote:

But almost as dazzling as the find itself was the way in which it was unveiled. The announcement was made with great fanfare at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and coincided with a peer-reviewed article about the discovery. And like any good reality television star, [Jorn] Hurum was thinking “cross-platform”: his team has a sleek website, an exclusive interview arrangement with ABC News, a book aimed at mainstream audiences, a deal with the History Channel, and a full-length movie about little “Ida.”

This troubling commingling of science and media has worried some observers. But far from being a modern phenomenon, earth scientists have long had a reputation for creating hype. Ralph O'Connor's 2008 book The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 reveals how shrewd science-writers marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. Although "Ida" passed through a peer-review process, unlike the specimens proffered by hypemen of the Victorian era, the over-the-top nature of her unveiling certainly resembles the tactics of the discredited showmen of O'Connor's book.

Whether you want to learn more about fantastic monsters of deep time or the men behind the discovery of geohistory, Chicago's books on paleontology and earth science are the missing link in your personal collection. Check out all of our books in these related fields and decide for yourself if Ida answers more questions than she raises.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Sir Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of an ancient Cretan civilization in the early twentieth century he claimed to have discovered a culture that was pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—so very unlike his native England. Freud, Joyce, Picasso, and many others embraced this vision of a lost paradise.

Reviews have begun to arrive for Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism in which Cathy Gere explores how disillusioned modernists sought—and created—an ancient culture that offered an alternative to the one they inhabited. A review in Harper's notes that Gere uncovers a century of "bizarre misreadings of the nearly unknown ancient culture of Crete, and in so doing has produced that rarest of literary surprises: a genuinely hilarious work of Minoan historiography." The review continues:

[Gere traces] the unexpected genealogy of the ancient Cretans in the modern imagination, from the time they were first unearthed beneath a modest hillock at the end of the nineteenth century to their emergence as peaceful pastoralists who worshiped a goddess, pirouetted over bulls, and displayed suspicious tendency to reflect in great detail the moral, political, and even sexual preoccupations of Sir Arthur Evans, the English millionaire who led the excavation for almost half a century.

Gere locates the original impulse for "Minoan modernism" in Nietzsche's theories of the birth of tragedyand in the "excavations" the charlatan Heinrich Schliemann carried out at Mycenae and Troy. Schliemann breathed into the nascent discipline of archaeology a fairy-tale atmosphere of childhood longing and quasi-supernatural wish-fulfillment… that runs through Gere's series of portraits of those writers and artists "who would make the ancient world urgently relevant to literary and artistic modernism…"

The book has also just been reviewed in the Economist, which begins by drily noting that "archaeology is an inexact science." Find out more about Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism on our website.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So if the Gold Leaf Lady can prove to be a fruitful subject for academic inquiry, why not Bigfoot as well?

As a recent article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, Joshua Blu Buhs, author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, doesn't make any arguments about the existence of the legendary Sasquatch, but as a cultural phenomenon, Bigfoot, the author shows, proves a substantial subject. Summarizing Buh's fascinating account "of how the trope of the wild man has figured culturally since ancient times," Nina C. Ayoub writes for the Chronicle:

[Buhs'] travels deep into the Himalayas where Bigfoot's Asian cousin, the Yeti, has been pursued. He describes how even seasoned mountaineers could be taken in by high-altitude conditions of sun and "sublimated" snow that can turn a fox print into a sprawling hominid-like track and explores the creature's appeal to the nonindigenous. "The Yeti was untouched by the materialism of modern life," he writes. Years after conquering Everest, Edmund Hillary led an expedition with a side goal of investigating the Yeti. He concluded that the beast was a myth. "Snowman melted," said The New York Times in 1961.

Yet even as Yeti stock went down, Bigfoot currency rose, and the focus turned to the Pacific Northwest. New reports of footprints in Bluff Creek, Calif., in 1958 sparked a furor that brought in such outsiders as Ivan Sanderson, a Scottish naturalist and Fortean, one of a group that investigated bizarre phenomena — "damned things," as the anomaly specialist Charles Fort (1874-1932) called them.

Throughout Bigfoot, Buhs emphasizes the fascination with the creature among midcentury white working-class men. "To proclaim Bigfoot's existence," he argues, "was to insist upon one's dignity against a world that either denied it, or, worse, went on spinning about its axis as though dignity did not even matter." Buhs shows how Bigfoot's hunters and believers figured in the culture of men's adventure magazines. "Readers didn't mind that their True (or Real) was full of lies," he says. "Truth in these magazines was not about facts or correspondence with reality but resisting changing values and valorizing an older tradition."

Thus, using Bigfoot to comment on our modern relationships to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs new book offers readers the definitive take on this elusive beast.

Continue reading the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Do a quick Google search for "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" and near the top of the results you'll find more than a few links to websites like this one, dedicated to the "scientific" exploration of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery, offering everything from geographical data and personal accounts of the latest sightings, to some of the coolest t-shirts money can buy—evidence that Bigfoot mania still grips some not insignificant segment of the American population. But while other folks might consider serious inquiry into the existence of the Sasquatch to be an exercise in futility, as Sumit Paul-Choudhury notes in a recent review for the New Scientist Joshua Blu Buhs' new book investigating the social significance of the myth itself proves quite worthwhile. Paul-Choudhury writes:

That belief in mythical animals is a product of social change is central to [Joshua Blu Buh's] Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs's book starts out… suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became "folklore for an industrial age" because it meshed well with Britain's post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places.…

Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters' desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change skeptics.

Thus drawing fascinating connections between the myth of Bigfoot and modern Americans' relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media, Buhs new book offers the definitive take on this elusive beast.

Find out more about the book on our website or read Sumit Paul-Choudhury's full review in the New Scientist.

Archived in History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The alchemist's quest to transform base metals into gold lasted over 2500 years beginning with the ancient Egyptians and culminating with eighteenth century European and American alchemists like George Starkey and his apprentice Robert Boyle. As Stephen Heuser writes in a recent article for The Boston Globe: "Centuries of work and scholarship had been plowed into alchemical pursuits, and for what? Countless ruined cauldrons, a long trail of empty mystical symbols, and precisely zero ounces of transmuted gold. As a legacy, alchemy ranks above even fantasy baseball as a great human icon of misspent mental energy." But, Heuser asks, "was it really such a waste?"

In his article Heuser cites the rising number of scholars who would answer that question in the negative—including Press authors Bernard Lightman, Tara Nummedal, William R. Newman, and Lawrence M. Principe—all of whom have joined the ranks of historians, humanists, and philosophers of science that cite alchemy's profound influence on the beginnings of modern chemistry in calling for a reappraisal of its historical significance. Heuser's article continues:

Alchemists, they are finding, can take credit for a long roster of genuine chemical achievements, as well as the techniques that would prove essential to the birth of modern lab science[Robert Boyle is also today widely regarded as one of the founders of modern chemistry]. In alchemists' intricate notes and diagrams, they see the early attempt to codify and hand down experimental knowledge. In the practices of alchemical workshops, they find a masterly refinement of distillation, sublimation, and other techniques still important in modern laboratories.…

Bringing alchemy under the tent of science does more than illuminate a turning point in a distant history, however: It suggests a different way to think about science in our own time. Science might be the most productive tool ever invented for understanding the world, but despite its claims on truth, it is still just that: a tool, and a man-made one. Alchemy is an important reminder that modern science [also] has a context…

Isaac Newton, the first great physicist, reached for alchemy when he tried to formulate a theory of the universe that could account for everything from plant life to gravity. Albert Einstein tried, and failed, to cap his career by formulating a single theory that explained all the universe's forces. And at the cutting edge of modern physics, string theory purports to offer a complete but possibly unprovable explanation of the universe based on 11 dimensions and imperceptibly tiny strings.

Alchemists wouldn't recognize the mathematics behind the theory. But in its grandeur, in its claim to total authority, in its unprovability, they would surely recognize its spirit.

Read the rest of Heuser's article on the Boston Chronicle's website Boston.com. Or click on our author's names above to find our more about their books and the revival of alchemy studies.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events
Posted by TXM at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today marks the 186th anniversary of the birth of British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Best known for independently proposing the theory of evolution by natural selection, Wallace today remains less well-known than his more celebrated counterpart, Charles Darwin. Nevertheless, Wallace's contributions continue to loom large over modern natural science, and his legacy is celebrated in many books published by the University of Chicago Press. For a reader looking to celebrate Wallace's birthday by learning more about this unjustly over-shadowed scientist, the best place to start would be our own An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace by Martin Fichman.

The first comprehensive analytical study of Wallace's life and controversial intellectual career, An Elusive Victorian examines not only his scientific work as an evolutionary theorist and field naturalist but also his philosophical concerns, his involvement with theism, and his commitment to land nationalization and other sociopolitical reforms such as women's rights. As Fichman shows, Wallace worked throughout his life to integrate these humanistic and scientific interests. His goal: the development of an evolutionary cosmology, a unified vision of humanity's place in nature and society that he hoped would ensure the dignity of all individuals.

To reveal the many aspects of this compelling figure, Fichman not only reexamines Wallace's published works, but also probes the contents of his lesser known writings, unpublished correspondence, and copious annotations in books from his personal library. Rather than consider Wallace's science as distinct from his sociopolitical commitments, An Elusive Victorian assumes a mutually beneficial relationship between the two, one which shaped Wallace into one of the most memorable characters of his time.

Happy reading, and happy birthday ARW!

Archived in Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On this date in 1610, Galileo Galilei first observed the four moons of Jupiter, which are now known as the Galilean moons. To kick off the International Year of Astronomy—a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo—we highlight two titles on Galileo by Mario Biagioli, notable for their depiction of the great scientist as much more than a man focused on the stars.

A fascinating cultural and social history of science highlighting the workings of power, patronage, and credibility in the development of science, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism argues that Galileo's courtly role was integral to his science—the questions he chose to examine, his methods, even his conclusions. In the court of the Medicis and the Vatican, Galileo fashioned both his career and his science to the demands of patronage and its complex systems of wealth, power, and prestige. As Steven Shapin noted in the American Historical Review, "One achievement of this important book is that historians will no longer be able to sustain the traditional view of 'science speaking truth to power.'"

Focusing on the aspects of Galileo's scientific life that extend beyond the framework of court culture and patronage, Biagioli offers in Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy a revisionist account of the different systems of exchanges, communication, and credibility at work in various phases of Galileo's career. In six short years, Galileo Galilei went from being a somewhat obscure mathematics professor running a student boarding house in Padua to a star in the court of Florence to the recipient of dangerous attention from the Inquisition for his support of Copernicanism. Galileo's tactics during this time shifted as rapidly as his circumstances, argues Biagioli, and the pace of these changes forced him to respond swiftly to the opportunities and risks posed by unforeseen inventions, further discoveries, and the interventions of his opponents. (Read an excerpt.)

And if you want to read more from the man himself, check out Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger, the first scientific treatise based on observations made through a telescope (including those moons he spotted 399 years ago!).

Happy International Year of Astronomy!

Archived in Commentary | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bible famously states that Christians cannot serve both God and mammon, and that it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a pin than for a rich man to enter heaven. But clearly, believers, as well as non-believers, benefited from the economic boom years just as surely as they’ve felt the pinch since the collapse. But how can Christian thought help us better understand the recession? To answer this question, we turned to religion and economic scholar Stewart Davenport, whose recent book, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon: Northern Christians and Market Capitalism, 1815–1860 examines how antebellum Protestants reconciled their faith with the developing American economy.

The Economic Crisis: What Would Jesus Do?

To begin, I’d like to point out the folly of asking this question in the first place. “What would Jesus do?”—although a catchy slogan—is obviously not a substantive ethical question. “WWJD?” makes for good bracelets to sell to teenagers, in other words, but is thoroughly inadequate for the serious reflection of complex ethical dilemmas. I only wanted to include it in the title here so I could have the opportunity to distance myself from it. In what follows I will briefly explain why, and then move on to what I hope are the real options for understanding our current economic climate from the perspective of Christian faith.

Continue reading "Where Would Jesus Invest?" »

Archived in Economics | History and Philosophy of Science | Religion
Posted by at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The mapping of the human genome at the turn of the twenty-first century by the Human Genome Project was a scientific sensation. The media abounded with stories about our new knowledge of the building blocks of human life and the tremendous medical breakthroughs that were sure to follow—while other accounts put a darker spin on the achievement, warning of consequences from genetic discrimination to designer germs.

For the layman, the claims and counterclaims can be dizzying; it's hard to know just what the genomics revolution is likely to mean in our everyday lives. With Genomes and What to Make of Them, Barry Barnes and John Dupré cut through the confusion and offer a smart and straightforward account of what we know, what we can hope for, and what, if anything, we should fear. Opening with a brief history of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick to Craig Venter, Genomes and What to Make of Them explains what genomics tells us about our evolutionary history and what it can reveal on the individual level, such as our risk of disease. Meanwhile, the authors argue, the dangers of genetic research—from biological warfare to a revived eugenics—are very real, and only a proactive government and a vigilant citizenry can ensure the full life-enhancing potential of this exciting new science. Engagingly written and up-to-date, Genomes and What to Make of Them is both a primer on current knowledge and a road map to an exciting future.

Read the press release. Also, listen to an interview with the author.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cultural critic Julia Keller has written an interesting article about Lennard J. Davis's new book Obsession: A History for the lifestyle section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune. In her article, Keller notes how "obsessive" behavior has come to define our culture, though in a very polarized way. We admire those whose drive leads them to professional or athletic success. But we also might recommend someone who can't stop washing their hands every five minutes, or spends hours straightening the picture frames in their living room, to go find a good psychologist to help them with their OCD. In her article Keller quotes Davis:

"To be obsessive is to be American, to be modern."

Yet the term has never been a stable category. When does an eccentricity become an obsession? When does a quirk become a pathology? You can't understand obsession, the professor believes, without considering "the social, cultural, historical, anthropological and political" swirl in which it lives.

And in Obsession Davis does just that, tracing the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive sex and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis's graceful cultural analysis.

To find out more read Keller's article on the Tribune's website. Also read an interview with Davis or listen to his appearance on the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History and Philosophy of Science | Psychology | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Listen in as Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation joins host Chris Gondek on the Chicago Audio Works podcast to discuss the cultural evolution of the scientific vocation from the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present. How has this shift affected public perceptions of science? And what demands does this make on the individual character of scientists? Shapin addresses these questions and more in episode three of the Chicago Audio Works podcast.

Chicago Audio Works is produced by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane and the Invisible Hand. This and previous episodes of Chicago Audio Works are also available from iTunes and other digital media aggregators.

See all audio and video available from the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science
Posted by TXM at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Join expeditions on the frontiers of research! Listen as eminent men of science tell of their achievements! Just as Watson Davis beckoned listeners to gather around their radios for his broadcast of Adventures in Science, so too does Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette invite readers to travel back in time to the heyday of science programming in Science on the Air.

Before the dawn of television, programs like Our Friend the Atom, The World Is Yours, and Cavalcade of America flourished. But with broadcasting success came the directive to entertain, not just educate. Science on the Air chronicles the efforts of science popularizers as they negotiated topic, content, and tone in order to gain precious time on the air. Offering a new perspective on the collision between science’s idealistic and elitist view of public communication and the unbending economics of broadcasting, LaFollette rewrites the history of the public reception of science in the twentieth century and the role that scientists and their institutions have played in both encouraging and inhibiting popularization. By looking at the broadcasting of the past, Science on the Air raises issues of concern to all those who seek to cultivate a scientifically literate society today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The current issue of Science magazine contains a glowing review of Martin J. S. Rudwick's latest book, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Reviewer Ralph J. O'Conner notes that Worlds Before Adam follows up on Rudwick's previous book, Bursting the Limits of Time, to cover the second phase (1820-1845) of a revolutionary period in the history of science in which scientists began to make important discoveries that transformed their conception of geological history and redefined human understanding of our place in the natural world. Praising both books for their clarity and insight O'Connor writes:

Like [Bursting the Limits of Time], Worlds Before Adam is the product of painstaking research. It appears dauntingly long but is a delight to read. Rudwick's style is lucid and engaging throughout, and he is unfailingly courteous to his nonspecialist readers, ensuring that all terms and concepts are fully explained and avoiding unnecessary jargon. The book's strictly chronological arrangement gives it a strong narrative thrust, and its many beautifully printed illustrations and generous quotations from original sources enhance the sense of primary contact with the evidence.…

In these two graceful and judicious volumes, Rudwick has restored geology to its rightful historical place at the heart of modern scientific culture. More than this, he enables readers to experience geology as a new science. By immersing us in the investigations, reflections, and debates of the time, he lifts us out of our present-day perspective so that we see the objects of geology afresh, through the astonished eyes of those who created it.

Navigate to the Science website to read the review.

Also see all our titles by Martin J. S. Rudwick.

Archived in Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The August 16 edition of the Guardian published a short but positive review of John D. North's Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology. The review praises the book for its comprehensive exploration of these two sciences, and their integral role in helping mankind to define his place within the universe. From the Guardian:

At nearly 900 pages, this is a suitably monumental book about the biggest subject of all: the cosmos.… From Stonehenge and ancient China, where sunspots were first recorded in 28BC (European astronomers didn't spot them until the 17th century), to today's search for dark matter, Machos and Wimps, this remarkable work brings together the global history, theories, people and technologies of astronomy to tell a story that "has very few intellectual parallels in the whole of human history."

See the review on the Guardian website.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Mathematics and Physics | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael F. Robinson, author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture has written an interesting piece for the Space Review that draws on his cultural analysis of polar exploration in the nineteenth century to comment on NASA's recent space exploration initiatives. In the article, Robinson notes that sensationalism was often used to justify early polar expeditions rather than their scientific value, and argues that NASA's recent plans to send astronauts to Mars might be an analogous situation. Robinson writes:

A manned mission to Mars, if it happens, will be a dazzling event guaranteed to keep us glued to our televisions. But symbolism alone cannot carry the US space program forward. One hundred years ago, Americans faced the same dilemma on the Arctic frontier. In their relentless pursuit of the North Pole, explorers had abandoned science. After Robert Peary claimed the discovery of the North Pole in 1909, American scientists breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, scientific exploration of the Arctic could begin in earnest. Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, expressed the mood of scientists then, but he could have been expressing the opinion of many scientists now. "We must not forget that the explorer is not expected merely to travel from one point to another, but that we must expect him also to see and to observe things worth seeing."

Read the article on the Space Review website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History and Philosophy of Science | Politics and Current Events | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…

[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today about the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria discussing, among other topics, a fascinating talk given by Professor Alan Liu—one of the leading theorists focusing on the intersection between digital technology and the humanities, and the author of several books on the subject including, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and the forthcoming Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database. Writing for the Chronicle William Pannapacker takes note of Liu's talk for its examination of the increasing use of digital information resources like Wikipedia by students, and the problem of its limitations in terms of scholarly authority. Pannapacker writes:

Since it's clear enough that Wikipedia—and other sites based on reader-generated content—are too large and accessible to police themselves effectively, Liu argues that the responsibility for that policing should be adopted by the already existing structures of authority, including academe in particular.

I have to agree: We can't get our students into the libraries; we hardly go there ourselves anymore, as much as we might love them. The time has just about arrived when information that is not online does not exist for most people.…

Of course, Liu's presentation raises more questions than it answers: There are, after all, so many complications about the means by which credibility can be rated. We all know the peer-review system is not perfect.

But Liu's vision of a more public, collaborative, and service-oriented role for professors has considerable appeal to me, and it charts some of the steps that must now be taken into this new world of online knowledge production.

Read the full article online at the Chronicle website, then navigate to the website for the University of Victoria's Digital Humanities Institute to view the archived podcast of Liu's talk.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Film and Media | History and Philosophy of Science | Literature
Posted by TXM at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Cosmos, John North offers a sweeping overview of the two sciences that define our place in the universe: astronomy and cosmology. Cosmos moves from astronomy's prehistoric beginnings to its use by the great ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, the Americas, and Rome. The innovations of master astronomers is described in detail, along with modern-day developments such as the advent of radio astronomy, the brilliant innovations of Einstein, and the many recent discoveries made with the help of the Hubble telescope. This new edition brings North's seminal book right up to the present day, as North takes a closer look at last year's reclassification of Pluto as a "dwarf" planet and gives a thorough overview of current research.

Read the press release.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing for the May 15th edition of Nature, reviewer Deborah Jean Warner gives a nice summary of Mark Monmonier's new book, Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change:

Mark Monmonier, professor of geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York, seeks to inform the public about how cartography and society intersect. He wishes us to look closely at maps, to recognize which features are shown or missing, and understand why. In Coast Lines, he offers an assortment of eclectic and fascinating information about how coastlines have been defined, determined and depicted, focusing on the United States in the twentieth century.

Different maps and charts of the same coastal area show different cartographic coastlines. Monmonier calls our attention to four types, explaining that each is a human construct designed to serve a specific purpose, and the result of many observations and assumptions (the latter sometimes gaining the upper hand). One cartographic coastline is the high-water line visible from offshore. Another, introduced in the nineteenth century to aid safe navigation, is the low-water line. Two are more recent: storm surge lines are designed mainly for evacuation planning and flood insurance, and inundation lines describe the plausible effects of changing geological and meteorological conditions.

Read the rest of the review on the Nature website.

Archived in Cartography and Geography | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 07:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
Posted by TXM at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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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Dr. Golem explores some of the mysteries and complexities of medicine while untangling the inherent conundrums of scientific research and highlighting its vagaries. Driven by the question of what to do in the face of the fallibility of medicine, Dr. Golem encourages a more inquisitive attitude toward the explanations and accounts offered by medical science.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The latest issue of the London Review of Books features a nice review of Martin J. S. Rudwick's Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Here is an excerpt from the review, written by Richard Fortey: "To describe Rudwick as scholarly is rather like describing Mozart as musically talented. He is omniscient, and it's greatly to be wished that this book becomes known beyond the ranks of historians of the recondite. His story stops just as Charles Lyell appears, to become one of the major players in geology, and he promises us a subsequent volume on the development of the ideas of this pivotal figure. In Lyell, we have a British scientist who genuinely earned his place in the pantheon."

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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Catharsis is an elegant and moving book that reminds us of the humanity and gentle dignity of being a doctor. Written by Andrzej Szczeklik, a world renowned cardiologist who counts among his patients the poets Wislawa Szymborska and the late Czeslaw Milosz, this life-affirming work gives spiritual resonance to mundane medical moments and disenchanted science by embedding them in a rich blend of myth and art. Deftly weaving the history of medicine, classical literature, and anecdotes from his own clinical experiences, Szczeklik draws deeply on our humanistic heritage to describe the art of medicine.... Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in History and Philosophy of Science | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)