Paper and Poster Abstracts for History of Science Society Meeting – 2014 Abstracts are sorted by the last name of the primary author. Author: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson Title: Coal Futures 1789-1884 Abstract: Long before William Stanley Jevons’ The Coal Question (1865), mining engineers and natural historians sought to calculate the extent of the British coal reserves. Centennial and millennial time scales entered Victorian politics in the 1830s through debates on coal exhaustion. Coal husbandry was theorized by geologists and political economists as a problem of intergenerational equity and became the subject of policy in the case of coal tariffs. After 1870, John Ruskin developed a vision of adverse anthropogenic climate change, linked to deforestation, agriculture, glacial contraction, and coal use. In short, politicians, intellectuals, and scientists increasingly began to see industrial Britain as a carbon society, subject to unprecedented environmental pressures. Author: Janet Abbate Title: From Handmaiden to “Proper Intellectual Discipline”: Computer Science, the NSF, and the Status of Applied Science in 1960s America Abstract: From the mid-1950s to 1970, relations between academic computer scientists and the National Science Foundation underwent a significant shift. Initially regarded by NSF as merely a tool to support the more established sciences, computer science rapidly became institutionalized in university departments and degree programs in the early 1960s, and NSF responded by creating an Office of Computing Activities in 1967 to fund research and education as well as facilities. Since funding is essential to the practice of science as well as a signifier of disciplinary power and status, acquiring a dedicated government funding stream was a remarkable coup for such a young field. Yet both the notion of CS as “science” and the appropriateness of NSF supporting “applied science” were highly contested in contemporary reports, editorials, and congressional testimony, revealing fundamental disagreements over the nature and purpose of science. Within the CS community, the professional society ACM (which attempted to represent the field as a whole) struggled to defuse tensions between academic and industry members with competing visions of their discipline. Within NSF, the question of how to fund CS intersected with debates over the intellectual status of “applied science” and external pressures to make science serve social needs. Through a variety of rhetorical and political strategies, CS advocates were able to claim epistemological respectability for computer science and shape its trajectory for years to come, while leaving underlying tensions unresolved. Author: Pnina Abir-Am Title: The ‘Theoretical Biology Club’ in London, the ‘Delbrück Seminar’ in Berlin, and the ‘Club de Physiologie Cellulaire’ in Paris: Social Origins of Collective Creativity in Early Molecular Biology Abstract: The prevalence of “clubs” in the early days of molecular biology (1930s-1940s) raises the question of the role of such or informal social formations in fostering the collective creativity that later became a hallmark of molecular biology. In this field, many discoveries (as well as less well known work) reflected and depended upon collaborative opportunities that were greatly strengthened by means of science policy in the aftermath of WW2. (e.g. DNA structure in 1953, semiconservative replication of DNA in 1958; messenger-RNA in 1961, the operon in 1961, allostery in 1965) This talk compares three such early clubs in terms of their theoretical interests, social composition, political ideology, and collaborative legacies. The three clubs to be compared are: the “Theoretical Biology Club” in Greater London during 1932- 1938, which pioneered the discourse on protein structure as the “first” secret of life, a topic which became the key part of early molecular biology; the “Delbrück Biophysics Seminar” in Berlin which pioneered new physical approaches to genetic mutation; and the “Club de Physiologie Cellulaire” in Paris, which pioneered new biochemical approaches to protein synthesis, yet another key topic in molecular biology. Such a transnational approach is necessary if we are to avoid the pitfall of singular “origins” for a field which produced different research schools in different countries. HSS Paper Abstracts 2014 Author: Rodolfo Alaniz Title: The Biotic Debate and the Disruption of Transatlantic Marine Naturalist Networks Abstract: In 1853, American naval naturalists developed a way to collect sediment samples from the deep sea, an almost unexplored geography for zoologists and geologists. These samples challenged dominant beliefs about the existence of life in deep marine environments. The availability of these rare samples determined who could participate in the resulting scientific controversy, known as the biotic debate by American contemporaries. Those sediment samples traveled along nineteenth- century transatlantic scientific networks for almost a decade. An international community of scholars emerged based on the circulation of those samples. However, the outbreak of the US Civil War interrupted the production of the samples. This presentation explores the effect of the US Civil War on the biotic debate, including the dissemination of valuable samples along prewar networks, the scattering of American naturalists across the Atlantic during the war, and the ways that international collaborators adapted to the spread of new marine science practices. A focus on the disruption of transatlantic networks highlights new figures, such as Louis François de Pourtalès, a member of the US Coast Survey and protégé of Louis Agassiz, and their roles in nineteenth-century geology, zoology, and marine science via the biotic debate. Author: Amir Alexander Title: Geometries of Power Abstract: Euclidean geometry served as the embodiment of timeless, universal Truth in early modern Europe. Based on simple self-evident assumptions, and proceeding step by logical step to absolutely certain condition, it was viewed as a model of unchallengeable stability and order in a strife-ridden world. This gave geometry enormous political cachet, as rulers, administrators, and reformers all claimed geometrical authority for their designs. This was most explicitly the case for absolutist rulers such as Louis XIV, who made the geometricism of Versailles a pillar of his rule. But it is also true of social reformers who insisted that the commerce-friendly and egalitarian geometrical grid was the natural city plan for the burgeoning American republic. Author: Hanne Andersen, Anne Markovich, and Terry Shinn Title: Disciplinarity Studies and the ‘New Disciplinarity’ in Nanoscale Scientific Research Abstract: First, this talk will provide a brief overview of studies of disciplines and interdiscipinarity within HPSS. In the early phase, HPSS studies of disciplines and their development revealed that the structure of science and its development displayed a complexity that did not easily lend itself to simple, generalized accounts. Later, interest in HPSS turned away from generalized accounts of structure and development and turned instead towards micro-studies of the particular, including scientists’ local collaboration across disciplinary boundaries that was analyzed through notions such as boundary objects or interactional expertise that tend to emphasize fluidity and blurred boundaries. Next, the talk will provide a new framework for the analysis of 20th century disciplines exemplified by nanoscale research. We analyse the cognitive processes and work structure and dynamics of research exhibiting a particular form that has gone unnoticed in explorations revolving around the opposed paradigms of traditional disciplinarity versus today’s interdisciplinarity. This recent form of discipline, we term the ‘new disciplinarity’. Our examination of disciplines through the study of the nanosciences focuses on processes of cognition. Our survey in nanoscale research laboratories has brought to light five key features of the new disciplinarity - “disciplinary referent”, « borderland », “project”, “displacement”, and “temporality”. These components contrast with traditional disciplinary inward-looking statics, and with interdisciplinary unbounded dedifferentiation and fluidity. We suggest that the emergence of the new disciplinarity is linked to the extension and impacts of intellectual, instrument and materials genericity in contemporary science. Author: Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray Title: The Beginning of an ‘Exceptional Era’ in Australia?: Early Genetic Modification Research Regulation and its Implications for Public Understanding of Science Abstract: By 1974, concerned scientists called for a voluntary research moratorium on deliberate molecular recombination of DNA and convened the international 1975 Asilomar conference, claimed 20 years later by two of its key participants to have marked the beginning of an ‘exceptional era’ not only for science but public discussion of science policy (Berg & Singer PNAS 1995). The impacts of this historic event on science and policymaking beyond the U.S. have not been well- documented: this paper seeks to remedy this lacuna in the case of Australia, often lauded as a model for scientific governance HSS Paper Abstracts 2014 of genetic modification (GM) technologies. Within months after Asilomar, one of the first GM regulatory bodies in the world was established in Australia, composed primarily of scientists doing recombinant DNA