The American Career of Jane Marcet\u27s \u3cem\u3eConversations on Chemistry\u3c/em\u3e, 1806-1853

Jane Haldimand Marcet\u27s Conversations on Chemistry has traditionally claimed historical attention for its effects on the young bookbinder Michael Faraday, who was converted to a life of science while binding and reading it. Marcet inspired Faraday with a love of science and blazed for him that road in chemical and physical experimentation which led to such marvelous results, in H.J. Mozans\u27s romantic account. Or, as Eva Armstrong put it, Marcet led Faraday to dedicate himself to a science in which his name became immortal.

Review of Lisa Yoneyama, \u3cem\u3eHiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory\u3c/em\u3e

This is a sensitive study of the ways that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has been remembered, by survivors, urban leaders, ethnic Koreans, women\u27s groups, and others. It is a compelling resource for the growing number of historians of science interested in politics of commemoration. It is also relevant to historians of technology or science who recognize that consumers of end users of technology are part of the history of any machine. For many military technologies, of course, the ultimate consumers are those who experience the bodily injury or physical disruption that the machine is intended to produce

Provenance and the Pedigree: Victor McKusick\u27s Fieldwork with the Old Order Amish

Provenance is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the record of the ultimate derivation and passage of an item through its various owners. The term is most commonly used to describe the history or pedigree of a painting—who has owned it, its value at various stages—but it also has a meaning in silviculture, in which it refers explicitly to genetic stock. Provenance, for forestry professionals, is the record of where a seed was taken and of a character of the mother trees. In this essay I explore provenance in both sense, as a textual record of the origins of a given object (in this case a blood or tissue sample) and as a record of genetic stock. I focus on fieldwork, which creates a record of origins that can certify the authenticity and reliability of a particular pedigree, which then can acquire status as a form of scientific evidence

Review of Evelyn Fox Keller, \u3cem\u3eRefiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology\u3c/em\u3e

Moleuclar biology has attracted historical attention in recent years, prompted perhaps by the Human Genome Project, the rise of the biotechnology industry, or the exuberant participant-histories of the 1970s and 1980s. A satisfactory explanation of this scientific field and its cultural and political moorings has yet to appear but much new work is on the way

Voices of the Dead: James Neel\u27s Amerindian Studies

During his 1967 fieldwork, James V. Neel, professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan, spent a good deal of time collecting chicken dung. He scraped up dirt and chicken waste from the ground around the Yanomamö villages. He sought out dirt from the floors of the Yanomamö houses, where parrots were kept as free-roaming pets. He crawled under chicken coops, filling seventy-five labeled plastic bags with samples, using a fresh plastic spoon for each sample, and he worried about getting this soil and bird waste safely back to Atlanta, Georgia, for testing at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Scientific Outsiders and the Human Genome Project. Review of Timothy F. Murphy and Marc A. Lappé, \u3cem\u3eJustice and the Human Genome Project\u3c/em\u3e; Robert F. Weir, Susan S. Lawrence, and Evan Fales, \u3cem\u3eGenes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics\u3c/em\u3e; Tom Wilkie, \u3cem\u3ePerilous Knowledge: The Human Genome Project and Its Implications\u3c/em\u3e

The Human Genome Project, the international effort to map and sequence the genetic material of Homo sapiens, has by now generated a mass of information about DNA sequences. It has also generated an independent, but related, mass of texts exploring the philosophical, historical, sociological, and legal implications for medical care, human identity, law, politics, and reproduction that the project raises. Indeed, the Human Genome Project is perhaps most noteworthy for its status as the first and only scientific project to fund independent studies of its own social implications. The genome project budget in the United States, which is divided among several federal agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, includes a generous amount set aside for bioethicists, policy planners, historians, philosophers, and other scholars. Of the three books reviewed here, only one (Justice and the Human Genome Project) has any connection to this funding mechanism. But all reflect the popular and political interest that the genome project has provoked. Few of those commenting on the genome project in these studies are laboratory molecular biologists familiar with polymerase chain reaction, in situ hybridization, or any of the other technologies for manipulating DNA that have been so important to the project. They are, instead, scientific outsiders who are expected to shed light on the long-term social implications of the access to hereditary information that the genome project promises to make possible

Review of Patrick Tierney, \u3cem\u3eDarkness in El Dorado\u3c/em\u3e

More than once as the controversy over this book unfolded reporters and others told me the number of footnotes in Tierney\u27s chapter on the measles outbreak: 147. I have now tallied the total number of footnores in the entire book including the appendix (1,599). Such numbers seem to interst people. It is considerable more difficult to quantify the evidentiary force and legitimacy of these footnores. My own assessment is perhaps suggested by the fact that I have rewritten this review several times in an effort to make it difficult for anyone to extract a decontextualized endorsement on some future web page or book jacket. This accounts for the somewhat stilted style, for which I apologize

A Defense of Gay Science. Review of Timothy F. Murphy, \u3cem\u3eGay Science: The Ethics of Sexual Orientation Research\u3c/em\u3e

It is a measure of the strength, clarity, and coherence of this outstanding book that the reader will sometimes be uncomfortable with its precise logic. Timothy Murphy, a professor of medical humanities at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, builds a strong argument in support of sexual orientation research despite the fact that a scientific marker for sexual behavior would make possible a host of draconian bodily controls. These could include drug therapies and the selective abortion of fetuses marked by undesired sexuality. The possible reduction in the number of gay individuals that such science could conceivably produce is not a sufficient reason, in Murphy\u27s interpretation, to constrain the choices of adults either to refuse to parent a gay child or to seek medical therapy themselves for their own unwanted desires

The ELSI Hypothesis. Review of George Annas and Sherman Elias, \u3cem\u3eGene Mapping: Using Law and Ethics as Guides\u3c/em\u3e; Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood, \u3cem\u3eThe Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project\u3c/em\u3e; Marcel Melancon and Raymond Lambert, \u3cem\u3ele genome humain: Une responsabilite scientifique et sociale\u3c/em\u3e; Michael Yesley, \u3cem\u3eBibliography: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project\u3c/em\u3e

For the historian of science the current international program aimed at mapping and sequencing the entire human genome can be a bit of a headache. The literature on the Human Genome Project (HGP) is vast and inadequate; the endeavor itself is complicated, involving many institutions and funding sources and demanding at least some technical knowledge of molecular genetics, computational biology, informatics, and medical genetics, not to mention science policy and corporate biotechnology. The project is indecently contemporary, at best eight years old. Meanwhile, genome project promoters (genomics scientists, biologists turned journalists, and actual journalists) have been producing instant histories of the HGP, complete with founding parents and eureka experiences. In these accounts, the anticipated complete map of the human genome, expected by around 2000, commonly appears as a critical medical resource that will make it possible for geneticists to understand and cure genetic disease and, indeed, almost all disease. Such bewitching promises are of course part of an established genre of political narrative that is presumably not taken too seriously, least of all by those making the claims. But they have added poignancy to the public debate, as those afflicted with genetic disease or those who fear their children will be so afflicted long for the DNA translation that will, they hope, end their cross-generational suffering