48th Annual Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, Massachusetts April 26 - 27, 2013

Session 1

Redi, Malpighi, and Vallisnieri on the Origin of Insects and the Generative Powers of the Environment Richard Gawne (Duke University) [email protected]

Popular texts often emphasize Louis Pasteur’s role in the demise of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, but the modern debates over the validity of this theory began in earnest several centuries earlier with the work of practitioners such as Francesco Redi, Marcello Malpighi, and Antonio Vallisnieri. These individuals were especially interested in the question of whether insects could be generated from various amalgams of non-living matter, and together, their overtly empiricist contributions effectively refuted the idea that the environment has the capacity to give rise to such animals. Controversies over the origin of microscopic entities would rage well into the nineteenth century, but following the efforts of these practitioners, it was generally believed that visible organisms could only be produced by others of their kind. In my essay, the representative works of Redi, Malpighi, and Vallisnieri are examined in detail. Special attention is paid to the methods employed by each individual in an effort to show how their writings complemented one another, and jointly contributed to the ascendency of the experimentalist methodology, and a new worldview which stressed that even the humblest organisms visible to the naked eye have a biogenetic origin. I conclude by detailing the lessons that contemporary scientists can learn from this historical episode, arguing, among other things, that it highlights the fact that naturalistic observations often provide crucial insights that cannot be obtained from the lab bench.

Art or Science? Leopold Blaschka's Marine Aquaria Florian Huber (University of Vienna) fl[email protected]

The presentation focuses on the early glass models of marine invertebrates by the Bohemian glass artist Leopold Blaschka (1822–1895). Between around 1860 to 1936 Leopold and his son Rudolph created thousands of lifelike models of marine invertebrates and flowers as decorative items and teaching resources for universities and scientific collections in Europe and the U.S. Their lifelike appearance, delicate details and the fact that they are completely made of glass still exerts fascination today. Their display of organicist aesthetics, clearly visible for example in the jellyfish’s relations of symmetry, places the glass models in the context of art nouveau. But they are also embodiments of a scientific worldview. In the beginning of his career, Leopold Blaschka created “marine aquaria”, i. e. dry fish tanks filled with artificial sea creatures, to promote and present his glass objects to the public. This

Page 1 of 5 concept was clearly inspired by the work of the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888). By describing the influence of Gosse’s work, the talk will show how Leopold Blaschka’s early models are situated between science and art.

Session 2

The Role of Place in Scientific Theory: Alfred Russel Wallace and The Scientific Fertility of the Australasian Archipelago Emily Matykiewicz (Florida State University) [email protected]

The geographic area that encompasses modern day Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and New Guinea is a hotspot for theoretical biology- it has provided the raw evidence for a significant number of ground-breaking scientific theories. Notably, both the theory of evolution by natural selection and the equilibrium theory of island biogeography, two paradigmatic theories in biological science, were achieved in part as a result of contact with the geographic area of the Australasian Archipelago. However, the significance to modern science would not be as great if it were not for one man, the Englishman Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace’s eight years in the region yielded depth and breadth of knowledge and theory that acts as a catalyst for sustained scientific advancement stemming from this singular region. Wallace’s enthusiasm for natural science and cheerful fearlessness made him well suited to exploring the equatorial archipelago. His field notes and collections alone added monumental data to the understanding of our natural world and his published ideas inspired a still flourishing field of work amongst biologists and geographers. In this process of catalysis, he even launched a new field of inquiry- biogeography. In addition to exploring how Wallace influenced ongoing scientific inquiry and progress, this paper explores how his findings resonate with our current understanding of biodiversity and environmental science. The Australasian archipelago played a major role in Wallace’s prominence, and his writings on it were integral to sparking its continued study. The Australasian archipelago’s unique and volatile geography provides an excellent vantage point from which to assess the intellectual history of evolutionary and biogeographical science.

Progress as Adaptation: Spencer, Lamarck, and Evolution Federico Morganti (Dipartimento di Filosofia, “Sapienza” Università di Roma) [email protected]

The paper aims to elucidate Herbert Spencer’s attitude towards the evolutionary thought of Jean- Baptiste Lamarck. According to a common misunderstanding, Spencer’s view of evolution, in its endorsement of the inheritance of acquired characters, was nothing but a different form of Lamarckism. Such a description, while stressing a relevant feature of Spencer’s perspective, still impoverishes his view by forcing it into an inadequate interpretative framework: the clash between Darwinians and Lamarckians. The quarrel between these two schools of evolutionists, not only was subsequent to the development of Spencer’s thought, but was also confined to a limited number of biological concerns which by no means exhaust the extent of Spencer’s philosophical evolutionism, whose aspiration was to explain not merely organic evolution but the whole cosmic development. Moreover, even considering solely the biological side of the matter, there are two

Page 2 of 5 aspects of Spencer’s perspective which render it quite irreducible to Lamarck’s. Firstly, while Lamarck had founded his own account of evolution on the particular features of living beings, Spencer referred evolutionary change to the fundamental transformations of force, matter and motion, thus explaining evolution in physical terms. Secondly, while Lamarck had seen in life an inherent tendency to advance towards more complicated forms, Spencer explicitly rejected such hypothesis reducing all evolutionary progress to a form of adaptation. Nonetheless, in order to avoid a seemingly theologically-oriented conception of evolution, he embraced the equally slippery view based on the idea of a growing ‘harmony’ between organisms and environments. The paper will focus on the explanation of these two main points.

Session 3

The Overfishing Problem Gregory Furguson-Cradler (Princeton University) [email protected]

In the early decades of the twentieth century no problem was more pressing and vexing to fisheries scientists and fishermen than that of overfishing. Faced with declining overall yields and ever smaller average fish sizes, scientists in Europe and North America wrestled with the concept. How should overfishing be defined? How could it be recognized? Most importantly, how could it be avoided? In this paper, I focus on debates and discussions particularly under the auspices of the inter-governmental International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) but also in individual European and North American national contexts about overfishing and how it could be expressed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Borrowing concepts and, increasingly, mathematical models from disciplines as diverse as actuarial science, economics, and thermodynamics, the discussion led to a number of definitions of overfishing and models for calculating rational fisheries yields. I will show how closely connected were science, industry and the market for fish products. Methods of collecting data, theorizing overfishing and modeling fisheries were assemblages of practice communicated across social, professional and epistemic boundaries. By the 1920s, scientists from across Europe in both capitalist and socialist economies increasingly attempted to crack the overfishing nut in terms of profit-maximizing rationality. Rational fishing as utility maximization would guide research until after WWII when it was replaced gradually and unevenly by a new concept and virtue: sustainability.

Fetal Risk, Federal Response: Alcohol Warning Labels and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Erica O'Neil (Arizona State University) [email protected]

In the late 1960s and early 70s, physicians in the United States and France published the first medical observations linking alcohol consumption during pregnancy with adverse birth outcomes. Coined Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) in 1973, the syndrome's etiology was difficult to arrive at due to complications presented by dosage, exposure, timing during pregnancy, and a host of maternal factors. Despite the ambiguities surrounding FAS, within three years US government agencies were discussing the idea of requiring warning labels to alert the public to the risk of FAS. However, the first legislative subcommittee hearing devoted to FAS occurred in 1978, and it was a

Page 3 of 5 full fifteen years after FAS’s initial definition that Congress passed the Alcohol Beverage Labeling Act mandating warning labels. This paper examines the medical emergence of FAS and early legislative discussions of the risk of alcohol consumption during pregnancy. I will introduce two preceding historical case studies of substances that impacted fetal development, thalidomide and cigarettes, and examine the federal regulatory response to the risks posed by each. By discussing comparative antecedents, my goal is to situate FAS within the historical legislative framework for how emergent fetal risks were interpreted as public health concerns. I will then outline the substantial differences surrounding the public health response to FAS, differences that have much to do with the politicized history of alcohol in the US. Further, as FAS occurs disproportionately in marginalized socioeconomic groups, dimensions of social justice at the science-policy interface are also critical to this public health history.

Session 4

Migrating Birds: Biological Sentinels for Human Disease Barbara Canavan (Oregon State University) [email protected]

There is no historical analog to the rapid increase of environmental change and its impact on the microbial world. This presentation is a landscape scale analysis that focuses on a remote region of the Tibetan Plateau and its role as a hotspot for the global spread of influenza along the migratory routes of wild birds. Although remote in location, the power of this remote place includes interconnections of history, biology, environment, health, and geopolitics. The presentation will include concise arguments about the ecological, biological, and geopolitical aspects of the emergence of avian influenza and its spread along the path of migratory birds. Climate change and the mixing of wild and domestic birds are important factors in events that led to the spread of avian influenza to many new countries on three continents by 2006. For over fifty years, scientists have considered evidence that aquatic birds are a significant reservoir of human influenza. Scientists dismissed this evidence for decades as irrelevant in the human disease process. Today, this topic remains the subject of energetic scientific debates. Surveillance over vast spatial and temporal scales calls for international collaboration among researchers in biology, wildlife science, public health, ecology, virology, genetics, and climate. While still in a nascent phase, this interdisciplinary approach has led to new knowledge of the biology of the human-animal interface. This case study argues that wild aquatic birds can serve as biological sentinels and provide early warning of human disease. As part of my doctoral dissertation on the history of virology as a discipline separate from microbiology, the Tibet case casts light on fundamental questions about the relationship between microbes, humans, and other species. This is the first conference presentation and first for a JAS-Bio meeting for this dissertation case study.

Page 4 of 5 The Zinder Report and Molecular Biology’s Politics of Memory Robin Wolfe Scheffler (Yale University) robin.scheffl[email protected]

Molecular biologists have been active participants in creating documenting the successes of their field. As scholars such as Pnina Abir-Am or Sorya de Chadarevian have argued, these acts of memory-making have played an important role in establishing the disciplinary authority of molecular biology and in defining its research agenda. However, memories of failure have been important as well. In this paper, I explore the history and reception of the 1974 “Zinder Report,” a critical evaluation of the National Cancer Institute’s NASA-style Virus Cancer Program (VCP). In the recollection of an influential circle of molecular biologists, the Report marked a triumph of scientific prudence over the misplaced public expectation that a “moonshot” program could produce a human cancer vaccine. However, the VCP persisted, indeed expanded, for many years after the Report! Using new archival sources, I place the Report and its reception within the anxiety of the emerging molecular biology community regarding its intellectual fecundity and federal patronage—both of which were profoundly in doubt during the early 1970s. Tellingly, the Report focused less on the wisdom of seeking a human cancer virus than on the role of scientists in the management of the VCP. However, the quasi-occult status of the Report after its publication (it was never formally issued) allowed a few vocal molecular biologists to frame the Report’s critique as a key factor in the VCP’s “failure” as part of a broader campaign to divert funds from cancer vaccine research to the support of laboratory research into oncogenesis. My aim is neither to condemn these molecular biologists or redeem the VCP, but rather to show how these memories of “failure” played a role in defining the “correct” relationship between molecular biologists and the federal government in conceiving more recent efforts such as the Human Genome Project.

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