Journal of the History of Biology最新文献

This article employs space and place as analytic categories in the history of life sciences and public health research in rural Argentina. The historical-ecological panorama of South America's "Gran Chaco" region served as the backdrop to key life sciences research agendas and public health initiatives of the twentieth century. Through an examination of the cross-disciplinary works of Argentine zoologist, schoolteacher, and fiction writer Jorge Washington Ábalos (1915-1979), this investigation reveals how his social and professional identities, together with multiscalar mobilities and networks of knowledge production, came to bear on the ways in which he conducted research, engaged with collaborators during his field practice, and produced knowledge over the course of his career. More broadly, this study posits the sociospatial and cultural specificities of place (in this case the Gran Chaco) as key forces that shape ideas and practices relevant to the history of biology. The study draws from a diverse bibliography of publications from Ábalos' multifaceted career. His works include scientific reports on the venomous fauna of the Gran Chaco (animal behavior, morphology, and taxonomy), and epidemiological studies of what the global health community today terms "Neglected Tropical Diseases." These are accompanied by a collection of novels, short stories and autobiographically-inspired accounts of his time spent living in rural landscapes and social contexts.

Julian Huxley is remembered as the author of his landmark 1942 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. Nowadays, however, he is criticized for having reduced biology to the selection of genes. Some have nevertheless suggested that Huxley's biological views were more expansive-including rather than excluding issues regarding development or environment. In this paper, using hitherto unexamined sources, I show that Huxley's developmental understanding of animal characters was rooted in his education at Oxford in the early 20th century. From embryologically and physiologically trained Oxford teachers, he learned to see characters as things that could not be predicted from the cell's physico-chemical properties. Characters arose anew through dynamic interactions between parts. Huxley and his teachers labeled these as "epigenetic" processes that integrated multiple cross-pollinating causes such as heredity and development. After briefly exploring Huxley's understanding of character development, I show how we can get to grips with Huxley's biological views by exploring the context of his education at Oxford from 1906 to 1909. I then show how Huxley received and used these ideas, before I illustrate how they played an important role in his academic and socio-political work.

The Embryo Project (EP) recently turned twenty years old. In honor of that milestone, this essay seeks to assess the project-where it started and where we are now, where it has had the greatest impacts, and where we might go from here. I write on behalf of the current Embryo Project editorial team. Briefly stated, we believe that EP's main contributions are (1) providing valuable information for users of many age groups and educational stages through a peer-reviewed, online, trusted information source; (2) educating both undergraduate and graduate students in the process of researching and writing historically grounded articles about science; and (3) providing a model for educators who are interested in developing similar projects.

This article is the second part of an elucidation of the complex relationship between Lamarckism (broadly speaking) and the rise of the French school of molecular biology at the Pasteur Institute. In the first part, Jean Gayon, Richard Burian and this author (2017) showed how the characterization of the bacteriophage's development cycle was first theorized on the basis of several Lamarckian conceptions of the inheritance of acquired characters, before it came to be understood in strictly molecular and genetic terms by André Lwoff and then François Jacob after the Second World War. This article focuses on the second line of research that led to the lactose operon model, that of enzymatic adaptation. This history does not show the exact same pattern: this time, the issue of Lamarckian heredity played a less important (yet still significant) role. To a greater extent, the question of finality and finalism was the main concern of the work of Jacques Monod, Melvin Cohn and their collaborators. This article examines how Monod took up the challenge of a Lamarckian finalism that was typical of French interwar biology and how, at the end of the 1950s, he had to radically rethink the place of finality in the characterization of molecular structures. This article also reconstructs the theoretical and experimental context in which the concept of "cellular memory" originated, a concept that could easily have fit with Lamarckian interpretations. Thus, in the field of enzymatic adaptation too, certain aspects of Lamarckism played a key role as a challenge for the nascent molecular biology.

Since its founding in January 1920, the National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) has played a fundamental role supporting microbiological research in Britain and globally. NCTC is an international repository for authenticated bacterial strains of medical and veterinary significance, making many available to researchers. Among the oldest collections of its kind still operating today, it presently holds almost 6,000 historically and microbiologically significant strains. Drawing on records of the Medical Research Council, which sponsored the NCTC, and uncataloged, previously unstudied archival holdings at the UK Health Security Agency, this article lays out and for the first time critically examines details of the establishment of the NCTC, and explores its far-reaching impacts on microbiology in the 20th century, and particularly on microbial taxonomy and classification.

This paper focuses on the career of Janice Carson Beatley (1918-1987), a botanist and plant ecologist, who moved into the male-dominated field of nuclear studies to investigate the flora, vegetation and ecology of the Nevada Test Site between 1959 and 1973. It examines her background, training, her employment history, and her relationship with plant ecologist John "Jack" Wolfe, who himself had accepted a position in the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1958. It explores her scientific work, which included creating an inventory of the flora and vegetation of the region, but also assessing the damage from radioactive fallout, and inferring basic ecosystem processes in this desert region, which covered parts of the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts. She made major contributions to understanding these ecosystems, especially the precise role of precipitation as an environmental trigger for the development of the vegetation. By the end, she had established some sixty-eight permanent plots and developed a herbarium of approximately 13,500 mounted specimens, many of which were deposited at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Toward the end of her work with the AEC, she became embittered by a sense of having been marginalized and not accorded proper appreciation for her scientific contributions. Her career illustrates difficulties that confronted women scientists as they attempted to establish themselves in fields dominated by men, such as nuclear energy.