Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science最新文献

{"title":"2022 Wilkins–Bernal–Medawar Lecture Remaking Ourselves: Technologies of Flesh and the Futures of Selfhood","authors":"Philip Ball","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2023.0061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0061","url":null,"abstract":"Our biotechnologies have entered uncharted territory. The facility for precision editing of the human genome raises the prospect of systematic, ‘post-Darwinian’ control of inheritance. Stem cells can be used to make embryo-like structures that were never fertilized eggs and which might or might not recapitulate normal embryonic development. Neural ‘organoids’ grown in a dish force us to ask what are the minimal substrates of consciousness. It is easy to spin dystopian tales out of such developments, but those offer little guidance for the more urgent issue of how to regulate these technologies or how to discuss their ethical and societal implications. Here I argue for the importance, in those debates, of keeping historical and cultural perspectives visible and explicit: on the one hand to recognize the deep roots of the more lurid fantasies that these developments evoke, and on the other hand to consider how the latest advances challenge the narratives that scientists themselves have employed to frame their research. We should be prepared to be unsettled by what in 1890 zoologist Jacques Loeb called ‘a technology of living substance’—but perhaps not necessarily in ways we can anticipate.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135536621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Harvesting Underground: (re)generative theories and vegetal analogies in the early modern debate on mineral ores (I)","authors":"Francesco Luzzini","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2023.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0032","url":null,"abstract":"The early modern use of vegetal terms to explain the origin and growth of ores was widespread in mining industry, alchemy, and natural philosophy. In the writings of authors from many different backgrounds, mineral veins were often described as ‘trees’ which moved upwards, bore fruits, and underwent a life cycle. Accordingly, the existence in ores of ‘seeds’ (and, therefore, of a (re)generative power) was frequently invoked to explain the apparent similarities between minerals and plants. This method of describing mineral processes—called here the botanical model —also had a lasting terminological influence, as is attested by various expressions that are still common among miners and scientists. The notions underlying these terms are part of a larger body of ‘organic interpretations’ of mineral resources that endured into the eighteenth century and contributed to the development of the Earth sciences, mining industry, and the human–environment relationship. In focusing mainly on the rise of the botanical model in Renaissance Europe, this essay is the first part of a more extensive study (to be completed in a forthcoming paper) on the evolution of this important concept and its interaction with the new science throughout the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134991030","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Large as life: Francis Bacon on the animate matter of plants","authors":"Guido Giglioni","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2023.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2023.0029","url":null,"abstract":"As paradigmatic instantiations of animate matter, plants are natural specimens of both large and long life in Francis Bacon's philosophy. More than animals do, they display the power of physical growth and temporal continuity. More than the minerals do, they boost connectivity and fluidity. As a direct expression of animate matter, the life of plants is bountiful, real and supple. The way they grow redefines the very norms of measure and form in nature. Here the adjective ‘large’, when used to qualify the life of plants, indicates that such variables as size, proportion and hierarchy may vary dramatically when matter takes on the state of vegetal animation. Bacon is certainly aware of the threatening impact that this view may have on the way in which we understand and handle reality: nature, which does not listen to human reason, has within itself the potential to grow out of proportion, ignoring the laws of form, order and measure. In this respect, plants set a bad example as they display remarkable powers of plasticity and metamorphosis in matter. Bacon, however, is more interested in the observable and experimental reality of plants, for this aspect of the investigation could have decisive implications within the greater scheme of the Great Instauration.","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49006897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Publish and flourish, or the collective wisdom of peer review.","authors":"Anna Marie Roos","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9364700/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40715510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Localizing Western expertise: İhsan Doğramaci, Ş. Raşit Hatipoğlu, and the quest for scientific development in modern Turkey","authors":"Ali Erken","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article discusses the dynamics between Western experts and local technocrats in Turkey in their quest for scientific development in the first decades of modern Turkey. Based on primary archival sources, it examines the work of İhsan Doğramacı (d. 2010) and Ş. Raşit Hatipoğlu (d. 1973), who led various projects in the fields of medical and agricultural development. İhsan Doğramacı, a prominent scholar in the medical sciences, established a close partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s and led the establishment of Hacettepe University in the 1960s. S. Raşit Hatipoğlu was an agricultural expert who worked closely with German scientists, was involved in developing the Higher Institute of Agriculture in Ankara in the 1930s and then served as minister of agriculture in the 1940s. The article notes that the transfer of Western science and institution-building required the appropriation of local knowledge, political and intellectual networks and a negotiation process that included global and national challenges.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138505874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fresh Fish: Observation up Close in Late Seventeenth-Century England.","authors":"Didi van Trijp","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2019.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0051","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The traditional view of London's Royal Society as a closed circle has been subject to revision in the past decades. Historians have shown the considerable extent to which the Fellows of the Society drew on a broad range of men of practice for their respective skill sets. This article offers an in-depth analysis of the contributions of fishermen and fishmongers to the creation of natural knowledge. It centres on the <i>Historia piscium</i> (Oxford, 1686), written by Francis Willughby and John Ray, and its surrounding sources. This natural history of fishes aspired to give a concise and precise overview of species, and to uncover the divine order in which they were created. While men of practice contributed to this project in multiple ways, their first-hand observations carried particular weight. Through their cumulative experience of working with fish they saw a great number of living species, rather than the dried exemplars that naturalists would usually consult in cabinets of curiosities, or the indirect evidence that images might present. This article examines what kind of exchanges took place between fishermen and fishmongers on the one hand and Fellows on the other, and where, how and why these were incorporated into the fish book. In so doing, it also aims to qualify the value attached to direct (natural historical) observation in the socio-cultural context of late seventeenth-century England.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39301890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The limits of Chemistry: how William Gregory contested the boundaries of 'established science', 1820-1850.","authors":"Ellen Packham","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2019.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, I examine the controversial career of William Gregory (1803-1858). As a chemistry professor and chemical author, Gregory made many attempts to redefine the bounds of chemical science to incorporate mesmerism, phrenology and animal magnetism. I use a series of letters between Gregory and the prominent phrenologist George Combe to highlight the fact that the definition of 'established science' and its disciplinary boundaries were matters that occupied the thoughts and affected the careers of both men. Gregory maintained his reputation as a chemist while simultaneously being ridiculed for his public promotion of phrenology, mesmerism and animal magnetism. Where previous scholarship has tended to separate Gregory's chemical work from his support for disputed phenomena, this paper aims to prove that, for Gregory and his contemporaries, work on mesmerism, animal magnetism and phrenology was methodologically inseparable from chemical work. Gregory argued that all facts and theories should be judged and debated using the same criteria for credibility, accuracy, scepticism and rigour. He and others pushed to include contested phenomena within the boundaries of science to ensure that the facts, controversies and theories relating to them could be subjected to the same rigorous investigation and legitimate debates as were expected of chemical facts and theories.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0025","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25389005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"'We must send you a sample'-a Persian-European dialogue: insights into late nineteenth-century ceramic technology based on chemical analysis of tiles from the Ettehadieh house complex, Tehran, Iran.","authors":"Moujan Matin,&nbsp;Mohammad Gholamnejad,&nbsp;Ali Nemati Abkenar","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2020.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper focuses on the production technology of late nineteenth-century tiles from the Ettehadieh House Complex in Tehran, Iran. It makes use of the opportunity to provide for the first time the results of chemical and microstructural analyses of late nineteenth-century tiles selected directly from context and with known provenance. The paper integrates the results of chemical study of the Ettehadieh tiles with other available technological information on nineteenth-century Persian tiles, including chemical analyses of signed tiles and samples of pigments, as well as the study of the treatise of a certain Persian potter, 'Ali Mohammad Isfahani, to suggest processes of materials procurement and manufacture. These processes are used as evidence to discuss trade and technological interactions between Iran and Europe in the nineteenth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25389004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad.","authors":"Rijul Kochhar","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The confluence (<i>sangam</i>) of India's two major rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, is located in the city of Allahabad. Ritualistic dips in these river waters are revered for their believed curative power against infections, and salvation from the karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the rivers have mythic valences in Hinduism and other religious traditions. Yet the connection of these river waters with curativeness also has a base in historical microbiology: near here, the British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, in 1896, first described the 'bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganges rivers on Cholera microbes', predating the discovery of bacterial viruses (now known as bacteriophages) by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters in sacred writings and folklore, and later elaboration in the work of Hankin, this paper traces an epistemology of time that connects the mythic to the post-Hankin modern scientific, asking how imaginations of the waters' antibacterial properties are articulated through idioms of faith, filth and the phage. The paper explores how the bacteriophage virus comes to be spoken about within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, among contemporary historians, biologists and doctors, and in the city's museums. At the same time, it traces the phage in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature, to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as a potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Allahabad presents a 'cosmotechnics' where faith, filth and phage are inextricably intertwined, generating complex triangulations between natural ecologies, cultural practices and scientific imaginations. Cosmotechnics therefore opens up novel avenues to reimagine the phage as a protean object, one that occupies partial and multiple spaces in the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad today.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38597184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vladimir Sertić: forgotten pioneer of virology and bacteriophage therapy.","authors":"Zdravko Lacković,&nbsp;Karlo Toljan","doi":"10.1098/rsnr.2019.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Vladimir Sertić was a pioneer of bacteriophage research in the period between the two world wars. He was born and educated in Croatia, where he made his initial discoveries, and joined Félix d'Herelle's Laboratoire du Bactériophage in Paris in 1928. Original documents and a box with hundreds of sealed bacteriophages samples were kept in Sertić's Zagreb home for decades. Following Vladimir's death, his sister passed this archival material to Professor Zdravko Lacković in 1989. Some years later, these artefacts were opened and studied. Additionally, we conducted a literature search using the term 'Vladimir Sertić' in the databases PubMed and Google Scholar. After a detailed examination of these data, we established a chronology of his work and compiled a list of his scientific publications. A complete bibliography, with the exception of those publications already cited here, is provided as an appendix. Sertić's key contributions included the exploration of the properties of phage lysins, the devising of a uniform bacteriophage classification system and, in collaboration with his protégé, Nikolai Boulgakov, the isolation of numerous bacteriophage strains, including the famous φX174. Finally it was Sertić's pioneering work in Zagreb that offered confirmation that phages are live agents.</p>","PeriodicalId":49744,"journal":{"name":"Notes and Records-The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1098/rsnr.2019.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38592811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}