Colloquia 2004-2005 Michael Gordin, Princeton University "The Weekday Chemist: The Training of Aleksandr Borodin" Abstract: Aleksandr P. Borodin (1833-1887) is most widely known as one of the leading figures of nineteenth-century Russian musical composition, particularly as composer of the unfinished opera Prince Igor, and as an active member of the so-called Mighty Five. Less widely recognized outside of a small group of aficionados, is that Borodin was trained as a medical physician and organic chemist, and that he served until his death as professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. Over the years since his death, numerous studies have attempted to reconcile C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" in this one individual, either arguing for synergy of the music and chemistry, or for the competing demands both placed on his time -- as demonstrated in his meager productivity in both realms. Instead of taking this confrontational approach, this talk presents Borodin's career(s) as pedagogical journeys, expanding on the process by which he was "trained" as both a chemist and a composer. Viewing his biography through the lens of training removes the illusion of a conflicted soul and highlights the centrality of pedagogy in his own views about the relations between art, science, and his other principal interest: women's education. 4:15pm, Thursday, October 14, 2004 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University H. Darrel Rutkin, visiting scholar "Galileo, Astrology and the Scientific Revolution: Another Look" In this talk I wish to make two main points: (1) that Galileo was a practicing astrologer during most if not all of his career, and (2), its corollary, that practicing astrology was still a normal activity for a mathematician, a mathematicus, in the early 17th century. This talk will provide a survey of most of the extensive evidence for reconstructing Galileo's astrological practice, most of which has long been published; at the same time I will emphasize how certain themes which run throughout Galileo's career may be used to coordinate his multifaceted practice. It will emerge that Galileo's profession as a mathematicus, as learned, practiced and taught within a social context deeply conditioned by patronage dynamics, can provide such themes; in particular, awareness of the premodern disciplinary configuration of mathematics and astronomy - and their relationship with astrology - may serve to integrate our understanding of Galileo's studies and teaching at Pisa, his teaching and extracurricular activities at Padua, and further aspects of his career at Florence and Rome. This research on Galileo is part of a larger project - including my dissertation - which attempts to sharpen and revise our understanding of astrology's central place in premodern science, and the precise contours of its removal during the scientific revolution. 4:15pm, Thursday, November 4, 2004 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Mark Harrison, Director, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine; Reader, History of Medicine, and Fellow, Green College, Oxford University. "Science and the British Empire" 4:15pm, Friday, January 14, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Associate Professor, Department of History, SUNY-Buffalo, University Faculty Harrington Fellow, University of Texas at Austin (2004-2005). "Seventeenth-Century Colonialism and Demonology: New-World Nature and Landscapes" 4:15pm, Friday, January 28, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Itamar Pitowsky, Eleanor Roosevelt Professor of the Philosophy of Science in the Program for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Logic and Probability in Modern Physics The case of quantum mechanics" 4:00pm, Tuesday, January 25, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University and 4:00pm, Tuesday, February 1, 2005 and 4:00pm, Tuesday, February 8, 2005 These talks are sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology Sachiko Kusukawa, Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science Trinity College, Cambridge "Picturing Objects of Knowledge in the Sixteenth Century: The Cases of Fuchs, Vesalius and Gessner" 4:15pm, Thursday, February 3, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Michael Osborne, Associate Professor, Department of History and Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara. "Commerce, Science, and Colonialism: The Colonial Institutes of France" 4:15pm, Friday, February 11, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Lorraine J. Daston, February 28 - March 3rd, 2005 Raymond F. West Memorial Lecturer Lecture Monday Feb 28th at 7pm Discussion Tuesday March 1st, 4pm Lecture Wednesday march 2nd, 5pm Discussion Thursday March 3rd, 4pm All events will be at the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Ave. See SHC.stanford.edu Trevor Burnard, University of Sussex, UK "Gender in the Anglo-Jamaican World of the Eighteenth Century" 4:15pm, Friday, March 4, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Minisymposium on Tobacco Litigation Allan Brandt Harvard University Louis Kyriakoudes, University of Southern Mississippi Robert Proctor, Stanford University 4:00pm - 7pm, Thursday, March 10, 2005 Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford University Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University "The medical ASSAYER of Marcello Malpighi" Abstract: Between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century several Italian physicians, notably Gerolamo Sbaraglia, Marcello Malpighi, and Giovanni Battista Morgagni, engaged in a dispute about the the role and significance of recent anatomical findings to therapeutics. My talk focuses on the early part of the dispute and Malpighi's reply to Sbaraglia, which provides a remarkable account, organ by organ, of how the new mechanistic microscopic anatomy affected medical practice. But the dispute had a philosophical and theological significance as well. Embedded in the literary format of Malpighi's work is a coded message that has not yet been deciphered. That message presents Malpighi - then archiater to the Pope - as the Galileo of medicine. At a time when in Rome atomism and the opinions of Galileo, Descartes, and Gassendi were under attack, Malpighi's text provided a powerful defense of atomism and the neoterics. 4:00pm, Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Angela Creager, Princeton University "Nuclear Energy in the Service of Biomedicine: The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Radioisotope Program, 1946-1955" Abstract: The widespread adoption of radioisotopes as tools in biomedical research was one of the major consequences of the "physicists' war" for postwar life science. The development of a formal infrastructure equipping scientists with radioisotopic tracers was intimately related to the atomic bomb and its political ramifications: In 1946, the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began producing and distributing radioisotopes as a means of promoting the peaceful benefits of the atom. My paper will provide a brief political history of the establishment of the AEC's isotope distribution program and the debates it sparked (including whether non-American researchers should be eligible to receive the isotopes). Large-scale radioisotope production for the bomb project took place in east Tennessee at Plant X-10; this site was rechristened Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1948, the center for the AEC's radioisotope distribution program. From 1946 to 1955, the AEC sent out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to research laboratories, companies, and clinics. The rapid growth in biomedical utilization of radioisotopes stimulated new areas of experimentation in existing fields, such as physiology and biochemistry, as well as in emerging fields such as molecular biology. Radioisotopes were also employed by field scientists (most prominently ecologists) during the same years they became routine elements of laboratory research. The consumption of radioisotopes by scientists and physicians was strongly promoted by the AEC, but not without regulation; access remained entangled with questions of national security, especially for researchers outside the U.S. 4:15pm, Thursday, April 7, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, University of Paris, France "Which roles for the public in science?" 4:15pm, Thursday, April 14, 2005 Room 307, Lane History Building, Stanford University Serafina Cuomo, Imperial College, London, UK "Death and the Craftsman: Images of Ancient Technicians" 4:15pm, Tuesday April 19th, 2005 Classics, Room 21C, Stanford University Abstract: most of what has been written about ancient technical knowledge relies on written sources, which reflect the views of only a small portion of the repositories of the technical knowledge in question, i.e. the 'top' level of well-educated, relatively wealthy technicians. But what about 'invisible' technicians? This paper is an attempt to retrieve information about them by looking at funerary evidence. I will focus on tombs from the first to second century AD that bear the image of the carpenter's square, and explore what they can tell us about how the technicians viewed themselves and their activities. Co-sponsored with the Department of Classics Maurice Finocchiaro, University of Nevada, Las Vegas "Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992" 4:15pm, Thursday May 5, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University In the four centuries since Galileo's condemnation in 1633, the controversy about its facts, causes, issues, and implications has become a cause célèbre whose importance and fascination rival those of the original episode. Yet until recently that subsequent controversy had not been systematically studied. This talk will report on a recently completed book that surveys the sources, facts, and issues of that subsequent controversy. It will also discuss some broader and deeper interpretive and critical issues involving comparison and contrast of the original affair and the subsequent cause célèbre, the relationship between science and religion, and the tension between cultural myths and documented facts. And the talk will preview a new project for a synthetic account that would provide both an interpretive understanding and a critical assessment of both Galileo's original trial (1613-1633) and the subsequent Galileo affair (1633-1992). Antonella Romano, Centre Koyre, France "Science within the Missionary Enterprise in New Spain: Mobility of Men, Mobility of Knowledge?" 4:15pm, Thursday, May 19, 2005 Lane History Building Room 307, Stanford University Focusing on the diffusion of the Jesuits in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico, my paper analyzes their unique role as specific international and intercontinental circulators of science and knowledge. I am especially interested in the "missionnaires savants," professors or specialists of science that the Society of Jesus sent from locations such as Alcalá, Messina and the German cities to the Spanish province of New Spain. My goal is to understand how they shaped the circulation of science and knowledge. What aspects of European culture did they mobilize? What were their specific intellectual goals in relationship to the global missionary project? How did the means by which their ideas circulate affect the nature of their knowledge? The scale of this study, which focuses on the trajectories of individual missionary-scientists, needs to be located within the more general problematic of the "politics of religious mobility". How did the Society of Jesus think about and structure that circulation? What were the goals and meaning of that mobility? How did the politics of science correspondence with political agendas within the Jesuit order as well as in early modern European society? The more general aim of this talk is to provide a series of reflections about local knowledge and the production of early modern European science, defined as a process of reordering the natural world within a universal framework. Previous Year's HPST Colloquia HPST Home Page Top of Page