British Journal for the History of Science最新文献

In 1934 C.V. Raman, Nobel Prize laureate in physics, founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in an attempt to create a single unified national scientific society for India. Instead, due to actions of Raman, the Royal Society and other British and Indian scientists, three distinct Indian science academies emerged and have persisted to the present day. Taking place against a background of British imperialism, Indian nationalism and scientific internationalism, Raman's actions provide a fascinating case study of scientific production and the shaping of scientific networks in (British) India. This paper scrutinizes this hitherto unexplored late imperial stage of the Indian scientific landscape and highlights the versatile role of British imperialism in influencing the founding and functioning of the Indian Academy of Sciences under Raman. The latter's national and international career and leadership testify to a complex relationship where the personal and the political became intertwined with science in (British) India.

Prognosis is an important aspect of any scientific culture. Speculation and imagination about future knowledge, social organization and technology pervade the practice of science and lend it aim and direction (or at least the appearance of direction). This article is about the development of prognosis in the fiction and popular-scientific writing of Jane Webb Loudon (1800-58), a writer familiar within the history of science for her publications in botany and gardening, if not for her romantic novel The Mummy!, one of the earliest examples of the genre later known as science fiction. I argue that Webb Loudon viewed scientific activity as declining and flourishing throughout human history, and that she anticipated the science of her time would 'resuscitate' knowledge and even political structures of past eras (like ancient Egypt). Following the work of Jim Endersby and other historians of science who have worked to reintegrate the role of fiction in our understanding of science culture, I argue that Webb Loudon's efforts to promote and diffuse her understanding of science and its relation to the future (and past) ought be viewed as informing the cultural meaning of science in the nineteenth century.

During the forty-thousand-mile voyage of HMS Beagle (1831-6) Charles Darwin compiled an extensive corpus of manuscript materials, containing a highly specialized chromatic vocabulary. Darwin's dedicated use of binomial colour terms, such as 'aurora red', 'orpiment orange' and 'gamboge yellow', was the result of his regular consultation of a work popular among British naturalists: Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. A copy of this compact colour manual was among Darwin's 'most useful' possessions on the Beagle. Now held in Cambridge University Library (DAR LIB T.620), Darwin's copy of Syme's book evidences both the difficulties of capturing accurate colour in exploratory natural history and the mechanisms by which this was attempted. Mining the Beagle archive for representations of coloured phenomena, this article reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin's reliance on Werner's Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive, subjective and shifting nature of natural hues.

This paper explores the potential offered by a cinematographic approach to the study of museums, particularly science centres. By setting up an intermedial lens that maps between the museum medium and film - particularly the visitor experiences in museums onto a specific genre of museum film - correspondences between these media and their respective 'grammars' are analysed. After a brief overview of the relationship between museums and film in the twentieth century, a language of documentary film suitable for museum film is introduced based on the film theory of Jon Boorstin, who also directed a film on the Exploratorium in San Fancisco, which adapted post-war insights in communication design as developed by the Eames Office. Reviewing five documentaries about the Exploratorium shows that only Boorstin's museum film could adequately convey the museum experience to others, thus going beyond intermediality to enable a transmedial transfer. How this film emerged through the cooperation of the Exploratorium with the Eames Office and national funding agencies is presented in some detail in order to show that the intermedial lens can work both ways, allowing for the transmedial application of film analysis to the museums themselves.

This paper explores the complex role penicillin played in the relations between Britain, the USA and the USSR between the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War through the lens of science diplomacy and the category of negotiation. In the post-war years the Soviets tried to acquire know-how on large-scale penicillin production from Britain and the USA. While the USA refused to collaborate, the British strategy was more complex. The British government allowed the Oxford team, which had discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin, to disclose all the technology and know-how concerning large-scale penicillin production of which they were aware to the Soviets, while simultaneously trying to slow down penicillin research and production in the Soviet Union by controlling the export of certain industrial machinery, Podbielniak extractors, to Eastern Europe. By contrast, the USA put a stop to scientific and technological collaboration with the Soviets, but were less strict about the export of industrial machinery. The different strategies generated tensions between Britain and the USA, and ultimately mirrored both the British fear of an American disengagement from Europe and the American will to protect the interests of their national industry.

The paper examines BBC television programmes that feature museum spaces of science and technology, contextualizing the development of this programme type in the 1950s and 1960s with science (and history-of-science) broadcasting. In 1971, the BBC televised a ten-part series devoted to UK science and technology museums. Within These Four Walls, the central case study, featured episodes filmed at the Natural History Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Institution and the Science Museum, among others; its televisual tour guides included prominent science broadcasters - Patrick Moore, George Porter and Eric Laithwaite - as well as curators and scholars of the history of science, such as Joseph Needham. The paper explores, using intermediality as an analytical category, how the museological conventions of curated gallery displays and tours have been adapted and transposed to television. In doing so, it reflects on the historiographies that emerge from this intermedial product (a series of televised museum tours), arguing that they should be interpreted in the cultural context of the early 1970s. It concludes that the presentation of historical authenticity through intermedial constructions of place, objects and performances conferred what Thomas Gieryn has dubbed 'truth spots' on history-of-science narratives for audiences.

This article traces the visual culture of human genetic engineering over the past decade, focusing on the CRISPR genome editing technology. We argue that the representations surrounding CRISPR exemplify, and to an extent define, this visual culture. We examine the history of CRISPR, particularly its human applications from 2012 to 2022, through a periodization that includes the CRISPR craze, gene therapy initiatives, the He Jiankui controversy and clinical trials. Employing an expanded interpretation of intermediality within science communication, this work addresses the role of figuration across the relationships between specialist science reporting and the mainstream press and between traditional and social media. Using a mixed-methods approach combining visual and social-media analysis, the article presents an empirical analysis of three key figures - the double helix, the scientist and the human subject - and their roles across the discussed phases. The study concludes by articulating the stabilizing, amplifying and affective functions of intermedial figuration within science communication.

Audiences for science in the media live and operate, as agents who endow science with social and cultural meanings, in an intermedial world. Following cultural tracers through time and across media, and attending to a key actors' category, intermediality, historians of the public culture of science can access the social dimension of the mediation of science. Adopting an intermedial approach allows us to attune the historiography of the public culture of science to the evolution of science communication scholarship over the past three decades, and understand the role of audiences in the production of cultural meanings about science.