Artifice and the science of sweet

Thesis (S.M. in Science Writing)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Humanities, Graduate Program in Science Writing, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-40).Aspartame has become an extremely popular artificial sweetener since its entry into the American market in 1981. Humans have an evolutionary preference for sweet tastes, and artificial sweeteners became a mainstream alternative to cane sugar in the 2 0 th century for people looking to cut calories. Saccharin and cyclamates, both discovered accidentally in early chemistry labs, set the scientific precedent for low-calorie sweeteners and also built the consumer base that would lead to aspartame's rise after its own accidental discovery in 1965. This thesis takes a journalistic look at how artifice came to satisfy the human sweet tooth. Drawing on expert interviews, scientific papers, historical accounts and congressional records, it also examines some of the health complaints like headaches and seizures that have been attributed to aspartame's breakdown products, such as phenylalanine. Even after extensive FDA testing has found little scientific proof for many of these claims, controversy and uncertainty about aspartame persist. There are also new challenges: researchers are now investigating the idea that consuming diet drinks may actually contribute to weight gain. At the same time, as obesity rates climb and schools and cities look to ban calorie-dense sodas, many public health experts welcome aspartame because it poses a less clear-cut risk than sugar.by Allison MacLachlan.S.M.in Science Writin

Restoring, Rewriting, Reimagining: Asian American Science Fiction Writers and the Time Travel Narrative

Asian American literature has continued to evolve since the emergence of first generation Asian American writers in 1975. Authors have continued to interact not only with Asian American content, but also with different forms to express that content – one of these forms is genre writing. Genre writing allows Asian American writers to interact with genre conventions, using them to inform Asian American tropes and vice versa. This thesis focuses on the genre of science fiction, specifically in the subgenre of time travel. Using three literary case studies – Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History,” Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” – this thesis seeks to explore the ways in which different Asian American writers have interacted with the genre, using it to retell Asian American narratives in new ways. “The Man Who Ended History” explores the use of time travel in restoring lost or silenced historical narratives, and the implications of that usage; How to Live Safely is a clever rewriting of the immigrant narrative, which embeds the story within the conventions of a science fictional universe; “Story of Your Life” presents a reimagining of alterity, and investigates how we might interact with the alien in a globalized world. Ultimately, all three stories, though quite different, express Asian American concerns in new and interesting ways; they may point to ways that Asian American writers can continue to write and rewrite Asian American narratives, branching out into new genres and affecting those genres in turn

Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern origins in the United States, 1893–1939

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent. Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists

Shaping science with the past : textbooks, history, and the disciplining of genetics

Science is generally not thought of as being deeply historiographical. Although it is clear that scientists frequently write about history in their work — that, for example, they identify the significance of an advance by situating it historically, or refer to a historic source of authority in order to add legitimacy to a position — it is often supposed that the historical claims of scientists are incidental to the scientific. This thesis contests basic assumptions of this view. In a study of the textbooks of twentieth century Anglo-American genetics — of a place where the canon of a science is consolidated, as the heterogeneous approaches and controversies of its practice are rendered unified for its reproduction — I develop a novel taxonomy of the forms in which history can be written, and of the scientific functions that they can serve. Progressing from an analysis of narrative historical accounts, to latent and embedded formulations of the past, I demonstrate the ways in which geneticists used history-writing in the disciplining of the foundations, future practitioners, conceptual order, and boundaries of their science. After an introductory chapter identifying some of the ways in which the textbooks and historical accounts of a science may be contributory, rather than intellectually external and temporally subsequent, to its formation and development, I advance the central argument of this thesis in four chapters. Each examines a different form of historywriting. In the first, I explore the disciplining of the foundations of genetics, with a study of the explicit, narrative histories of hereditary science that were written in three important first-generation genetics textbooks. Identifying radical differences in their accounts of the same nineteenth-century figures, experiments and theories, I argue that these different ways of consolidating history were connected to fundamentally different ideas of the conceptual foundations of the science, and that they were used to advance divergent visions of the science’s future. I then look at the historical case-based and problem-solving method of teaching that was developed in the 1920s-1940s to convey the science of genetics. I argue that this method created 'virtual historical environments' that allowed students to learn and practice not only the principles that were studied by geneticists and were explicitly taught as rules in the text, but also the tacit skills needed to follow, find, and understand these rules. Here, history was used in the disciplining of the mind of the student. In the third chapter, I look at the 'standard historical approach' to teaching in the 1930s-1950s, exploring the establishment of this approach, the functions and consequences of literary devices on which it relied, and the ways in which the meaning of facts and theories were shaped within it. My central contention is that a notion of history was constitutive of the organizational logic, narrative structure, and inner rationality of textbook genetics, thereby performing a powerful function in the disciplining of the conceptual order of the science. The fourth chapter explores the sense of history embodied in the use of the concept of 'classical genetics' in textbooks of the 1960s-1970s. Tracing the semantic development of 'classical' from its first uses in the 1920s, I argue that this term was a politically powerful concept in the language of geneticists: at first used to define and establish sources of scientific authority, it was subsequently developed in arguments about the philosophical and ideological character of genetics, and eventually served to establish the disciplinary identity and boundaries of the science. By differentiating these various uses of 'classical', I show that the disciplinary power of this term — which is derived from the authority of history — relied on the effacement of its historicity and the situations in which it was created and deployed. With this thesis, I push the boundaries on common conceptions of what is involved in, and what should be counted as, the 'history' and 'writing' of history-writing. Advancing a novel taxonomy of the forms in which the historical can appear, I provide a starting point for further historiographical research on the subtle yet powerful ways in which the historicity of our past can make claims upon us

“The Pondering Repose of If”: Herman Melville’s Literary Exegesis

This study examines how Herman Melville’s oeuvre interacts with Old Testament (OT) wisdom literature (the Books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes). Using recent historical findings on the rise of religious skepticism and the erosion of Biblical authority in both Europe and the United States, I read Melville as an author steeped in the theological controversies of the eighteenth-century. Specifically, I am interested in teasing out the surprising disavowals of overt religious skepticism in Melville’s writing. By tracing the so-called Solomonic wisdom tradition throughout Melville’s oeuvre, I argue that Melville had developed an epistemology of contemplation towards that body of Biblical texts. Scholarship has traditionally painted Melville as a subversive if not downright skeptical religious thinker. Most studies have produced authorial readings, using texts as forensic evidence to make assertions about the author’s psychology. Incidentally, such assessments have confirmed the narrative of Herman Melville as a grand failed author of the nineteenth century, while ignoring the ambivalent attitudes toward Biblical authority, textual history, and skepticism that emerge in Melville’s writing. The present study intervenes by re-addressing several procedural questions about Melville’s literary dealings with the Bible: How does Melville deal with the distinct topics of religion, theology, religious skepticism, and doubt? How does he think through the relationship between science and religion as well as that of personal religion and theology? I claim that Melville’s work can be read as a continuous contemplation of Biblical wisdom. His writing, I argue, deals productively rather than a destructive with the Bible, its textual history, and authority. Melville’s thinking on theological and religious subjects was not merely subversive but constructive. In mounting this argument, I contradict current scholarship that reads Melville as trying to invent a new American Bible. In contrast, I show how Melville’s philosophical forays, even when critical, are dependent on the ethics, language, and thinking of the OT

Race in Feminism: Critiques of Bodily Self-Determination in Ida B. Wells and Anna Julia Cooper

If, as Angela Davis has argued, the last decade of the nineteenth century was a critical moment in the development of modern racism, the same can be said of the development of modern feminism. Late nineteenth-century feminism, like institutional racism, saw major institutional supports and ideological justifications take shape across this period. Organizations of American women, both black and white, were shaping political arguments and crafting activist agendas in a post-Reconstruction America increasingly enamored of hereditary science, prone to lynching, and possessed of a virulent nationalism. This essay takes a historical view of womanhood, bodily self-determination and well-being, concepts now at the heart of feminist thinking by women of color and white women. It explores the racist tenor of the 1890s and its impact on the concept of female sovereignty as it emerged in the speech and writing of four black and white intellectuals at the turn of the century. Reading work of Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells in the context of Frances Willard and Victoria Woodhull, I explore the emergence of sovereignty or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the base of feminist work

Experimentalism by contact

This essay considers literary "experimentalism" as a constructed category animated by epistemic virtues, using the case study of "contact" as both anthropological and literary values in the 1920s. Examines Language writing, the work of William Carlos Williams, and the Writing Culture group in anthropology

The Failure or Future of American Archival History: A Somewhat Unorthodox View

The quality of research on American archival history has been uneven and the quantity not very impressive. This essay reviews some of the highlights of American archival history research, especially the growing interest in cultural and public history that has produced some studies of interest to scholars curious about the history of archives. The essay also focuses more on why such research still seems so far removed from the interests of most archivists. The essay will consider some hopeful signs, such as the re-emergence of records and record-keeping systems as a core area for study, for a renewed emphasis on American archival history. While much needs to be done, I am optimistic that the golden age of historical research on American archives lies ahead

Some Linear Thoughts on a Cyclical Vision

I am honored to have been included in this Symposium on Jack Balkin’s new book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time. Professor Balkin is a giant in the legal academy and a public intellectual of the first rank. Here, as elsewhere, he has written a book that combines careful study of American history and constitutionalism with lucid, propulsive prose. The other contributors to this Symposium are themselves a Who’s Who in constitutional law, history, and political science. I am not sure I quite belong in this exalted company. Even though I have written about some specialized – if sometimes topical – corners of the American Constitution, I am not a constitutional theorist in the large sense. I am also not a trained historian. Such historical writing as I have done is mostly small-bore inquiries into things like the import of homicide prosecutions in Boone County, Missouri, in the Civil War era, or might be disparaged by real certificated historians as what Alfred Kelly labeled “law office history.” Nor am I a political scientist, despite having the bachelor’s degree in that topic that so often presages a descent into law school. I am just an old criminal lawyer who now teaches and writes about whatever interests him. Hence, I am not really qualified to critique constitutional theory of the sweep presented in Professor Balkin’s book. Nonetheless, reading it has not only informed me, but stimulated a few questions, which I explore in this Article