As someone more drawn to writing and literature during my college years, I was fascinated to discover that science has a history. I had once thought of science as objective—distinct from liberal arts and social science disciplines in that it consisted of facts that could be proved. I came to understand that it’s just another field of human endeavor filled with flaws like any other. Sometimes, scientists cheat, lie, favor certain facts over others, or knowingly publish false results. It can become a cultural and political battleground—and to refer to something as “pseudoscience” is like calling a work of art you don’t like “pseudo-art” or a piece of music you don’t enjoy “pseudo-music.”
I wrote
The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair
Haldane was not only one of the three founders of the field of biostatistics but was notorious for his support of Lysenko as well. In fact, the story of Haldane’s supposed advocacy of Lysenkoism is much richer and more complicated than it would seem—in the end, it was more a feature of his instinct for contrarianism, inclination to doubt what others assumed to be common sense, and faith that “the universe is not only queererer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.”
Haldane is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of science, and his role in the Lysenko controversy is just one of the many interesting stories the author describes in seamlessly poetic prose.
J. B. S. Haldane's life was rich and strange, never short on genius or drama-from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method; to his time in the trenches during the First World War, where he wrote his first scientific paper; to his numerous experiments on himself, including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid; to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War. He is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of evolution, but his peers hailed him as…
The phrase “politics of science” has rarely been so well-described and analyzed than in the history Wolfe recounts. Her narrative of how the belief in “scientific freedom” was utilized as a weapon of ideology in the fight against communism shows how entangled the careers of politicians and scientists became during a period of intense struggle between two competing civilizations—the USA and the USSR—during the Cold War.
The Cold War ended long ago, but the language of science and freedom continues to shape public debates over the relationship between science and politics in the United States.
Scientists like to proclaim that science knows no borders. Scientific researchers follow the evidence where it leads, their conclusions free of prejudice or ideology. But is that really the case? In Freedom's Laboratory, Audra J. Wolfe shows how these ideas were tested to their limits in the high-stakes propaganda battles of the Cold War.
Wolfe examines the role that scientists, in concert with administrators and policymakers, played in American cultural diplomacy…
Less than a decade after Lysenko’s downfall, Zhores Medvedev published The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, one of the first and most fascinating accounts of the controversy published during the Cold War.
For this and other acts of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, Medvedev was declared insane and forced into a mental hospital where the challenge of keeping one’s sanity around people telling you you are crazy became his daily existence. Chilling.
Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet biochemist and outspoken critic of the Soviet bureaucracy, who was railroaded into a mental hospital, and his brother, historian Roy Medvedev, who rallied the Soviet scientific and intellectual community in protest, together tell the story of "repression by psychiatry" in Russia today.
Well before Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fleck coined the term “thought collective” to explain how conformity and “group think” produce “truth” in a given social and political milieu.
In Fleck's account, what Kuhn would later term “paradigm shifts” were the result of the gradual change in agreement on what scientists consider to be true rather than some eureka moment where fact is suddenly revealed.
Originally published in German in 1935, this monograph anticipated solutions to problems of scientific progress, the truth of scientific fact and the role of error in science now associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn and others. Arguing that every scientific concept and theory-including his own-is culturally conditioned, Fleck was appreciably ahead of his time. And as Kuhn observes in his foreword, "Though much has occurred since its publication, it remains a brilliant and largely unexploited resource."
"To many scientists just as to many historians and philosophers of science facts are things that simply are the case: they are discovered…
A poetic account of fruit fly genetics and how it revolutionized the study of evolution and heredity. Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “fly room” at Columbia University was where it all happened in the first decades of the 20th century as he and his students turned Drosophila melanogaster into what has become the model organism of genetic research.
After reading this book, you’ll never swat another fruity fly again.
The story of Nobel Prize–winning discoveries regarding the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm.
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer's Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his asssociates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer's studies are changing our world view--and even our lives.
Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of…
Trofim D. Lysenko was an agronomist who rose to power and prominence in the Soviet Union right after the Bolshevik Revolution. He modeled his theories of evolution and heredity upon Marxist doctrine—arguing, for example, that trees should be planted in clusters rather than in rows so that they could cooperate, rather than compete, for light and nourishment.
He claimed that any species could eventually evolve to adapt to any environment and promised to transform the environment of the USSR so that bananas could be grown in Moscow and melons in Siberia. In 1948, as the Cold War was just underway, he received the support of Joseph Stalin to ban genetics in the Soviet Union, a decree which soon spread to other Communist Bloc countries as well.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
