Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

This essay reviews the discipline-connecting potential of experimentation. Two examples are used to illustrate how researchers in the first half of the twentieth century profitably combined resources from different disciplines in their experiments. These experiments were designed to test mechanism models describing chemical processes underlying the behavior of biological systems. The researchers had clear expectations about how certain interventions should affect the behavior of the organisms studied, if that behavior was indeed based on the presumed chemical processes. They manipulated the organisms in the relevant ways and determined how the behavior of the organisms changed as a result.

Employing and extending Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's analytical concept of epistemic things, this essay proposes one reason why squid giant axons, unusually large invertebrate nerve fibers, had such great impacts on twentieth-century neurobiology. The 1930s characterizations of these axons by John Zachary Young reshaped prevailing assumptions about nerve cells as epistemic things, I argue. Specifically, Young's preparations of these axons, which consisted of fibers attached to laboratory technologies, highlighted similarities between giant axons and more familiar ones via lines of comparative study common to aquatic biology. Young's work convinced other biologists that the squid giant fibers were, in fact, axons, despite their unusual fused (syncytial) structures, thereby promoting further studies, such as intracellular measurements, made possible by the fiber's size. Tracing direct relations between preparations of squid axons and broader interpretations of neurons as epistemic things, this paper renders an actors’ category, “preparations,” into an analytical one. In turn, it offers glimpses into how aquatic organisms shaped twentieth-century neurobiology and how local experiments can drive broader, disciplinary changes.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the safety of drinking carbohydrate-containing fluids two hours prior to surgery in older adults using ultrasonography.

Methods: We conducted a nonrandomized and noninferiority comparative study in 60 patients aged over 65 yr who were scheduled for total knee arthroplasty. Patients who were fasted from midnight (fasting group) or who drank 400 mL of a carbohydrate-containing fluid (carbohydrate ingestion group) two hours prior to surgery were matched for age, sex, and body mass index. We measured the cross-sectional area (CSA) of gastric antrum using ultrasound and estimated the gastric fluid volume as the study's primary outcome measure. The noninferiority margin (δ) for the mean difference was predefined as 50 mL. The secondary outcome measures included CSA of the antrum and qualitative gastric volume.

Results: The mean (standard deviation) gastric volume was not significantly different between the fasting group and the carbohydrate ingestion group (30.2 [25.4] mL vs 28.4 [35.8] mL; each group, n = 30; P = 0.81). The mean difference in gastric volume was -1.9 mL (95% confidence interval [CI], -17.9 to 14.2), and the upper limit of the 95% CI was lower than the prespecified noninferiority limit (δ = 50 mL). Secondary outcomes were not significantly different between the two groups.

Conclusion: Drinking of carbohydrate-containing fluid two hours prior to surgery was noninferior to overnight fasting with respect to residual gastric volume at induction of anesthesia in healthy older adults who undergoing total knee arthroplasty.

Study registration: ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04514380); registered 14 August 2020.

The Farm Hall Transcripts appeared to offer a unique opportunity for a study in the history and sociology of science. My request for access to the transcripts was initially denied, but later was allowed thanks to the intervention of British intellectuals. The recorded opinions of the interned German scientists indicate that initially they had attempted to produce a nuclear weapon, but later abandoned it. The record also traces their development of a view of history, by which the relative morality of the German scientists’ work could be judged, versus that of the Allies.

This welcome set of original and instructive papers illuminates and enriches the history of twentieth-century ethology in multiple ways. It adds a wealth of actors, animals, methods, and places to those featured in previous treatments of ethology's development. Some of the papers extend the chronology beyond the heyday of ethology's disciplinary construction to consider exciting developments in the 1970s and beyond. Others consider animal behavior research programs pursued contemporaneously with but independently of mainline ethology's development from the 1930s through the 1960s. Another paper takes us inside an ethologist's archive of visual images to examine the importance of such images (and such a setting) for ethological practice. Collectively, the papers provide new opportunities to contemplate how research programs and disciplines evolve; the relations between concepts, practices, and places; ethology and politics, and much more. At the same time, the individuality of the papers is conspicuous. They have not been constructed on the same model. The authors have followed their own approaches, corresponding to their own, respective interests. A short commentary is not sufficient to do justice to each of them. Rather than attempt to review them one by one, I will consider a pair of themes that may help relate the papers to each other and to the history of ethology: (1) the ongoing challenge of defining ethology and identifying who the ethologists were (or are); (2) the practices and places of animal behavior study.

When the American Physical Society (APS) awarded me the 2020 Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, I was asked to submit a topic for my laureate lecture. After some thoughts I proposed that the APS's Forum for History and Philosophy of Physics should deviate from tradition and have not only the laureate, but also other colleagues speak in a themed session at the 2020 APS Spring Meeting. My proposal was accepted along with my proposed theme, “Farm Hall.”

The internment of ten German atomic physicists at the English manor estate Farm Hall near Cambridge during the second half of 1945 and the transcripts of some of their conversations, which were secretly recorded and selectively transcribed by the British secret service, represent a unique and fascinating source in the history of modern physics. During the past three decades, these transcripts have repeatedly—and almost cyclically—become the focus of intense discussions. It was therefore only natural to use the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the internment for a corresponding session, especially since Farm Hall is also of outstanding importance for my own work in the history of physics.

I was one of the first researchers—perhaps the first German historian (of science)—to examine the transcripts and related documents stored at the US National Archives after their release in spring 1992. This was entirely not so much a merit as sheer researcher's luck, because that spring I happened to make my first ever visit to what for me (as an East German) was literally the “New World.” As a fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, I was a guest of Gerald Holton at Harvard. My journey also took me to Washington, D.C., and, not entirely coincidentally, to the National Archives. After my return to Berlin, and not least through the encouragement of my friend and colleague Mark Walker, the idea of a German edition of the Farm Hall transcripts arose. It was by no means an easy task to find a German publisher, but eventually the German edition was published practically simultaneously with the English edition in the summer of 1993.¹

For the APS session, American scholars were invited who are not only experts on the subject of Farm Hall, but who also belong to my closer American circle of colleagues and to whom I owe many a helpful suggestion and reference on the subject. Unfortunately, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic prevented the scheduled session from taking place as planned at the 2020 APS Spring Meeting; it was instead held as an online event on 15 March 2021.

What follows are revised versions of the papers given by Ryan Dahn (American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD) and Mark Walker (Union College, Schenectady, NY) as well as essays by David Cassidy (Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY) and Gerald Holton (Harvard University Cambridge, MA). A newcomer to the “club of veteran Farm Hall historians,” Dahn takes a fresh look at the transcripts and discusses why th

In this paper, the author, a historian, describes the challenges he encountered as he sought to turn the Farm Hall event and its surviving transcripts into a theatrical play. The play, Farm Hall, was produced in New York in 2014 and published in Cassidy 2017. This paper further discusses what the author learned about the nature and elements of a play, how he applied those lessons to his play, and the advantages and disadvantages of this genre for bringing historical events to the general public.