The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine

Writing Recent Science

Ronald E. Doel, Thomas Söderqvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134482962
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

As historians of science increasingly turn to work on recent (post 1945) science, the historiographical and methodological problems associated with the history of contemporary science are debated with growing frequency and urgency.

Bringing together authorities on the history, historiography and methodology of recent and contemporary science, this book reviews the problems facing historians of technology, contemporary science and medicine, and explores new ways forward.

With contributions from key researchers in the field, the text covers topics that will be of ever increasing interest to historians of post-war science, including the difficulties of accessing and using secret archival material, the interactions between archivists, historians and scientists, and the politics of evidence and historical accounts.

1 Introduction
What we know, what we do not—and why it matters

Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist

Every generation thinks it discovered sex, according to an old witticism. Likewise, a historically minded reader of today’s news media might conclude that every generation thinks it invented scientific scandals, biomedical hucksterism, and scientific-technological disasters. Postmodern “pop” culture, in particular, seems oblivious to historical context. Perhaps this is because the postmoderns are too dazzled by the glittery spectacles of the present and the promissory notes of the future to heed the lessons of the past. Consider the almost total lack of historical references in most recent media reports on the Korean biotech scandal of 2006; on the utopian-worlds-to-be advertised by stem-cell and nanotech researchers; and on the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 and the levee failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.¹

With few exceptions (especially in the United States, where history is one of the least popular subjects among high school students and the label “outdated” is culturally akin to a death sentence), media commentary treated these developments as if they had fallen from the sky, as if they had no past or prehistory to better illuminate their meanings. One need not invoke Santayana’s by-now clichéd dictum about those who forget the past fail to recognize the dangers that await civilizations, which voyage at light speed into the cosmos with no memory of where they’ve been—and, thus, of who they are and of what they value.

At the very least, awareness of the history of recent science, technology, and medicine can benefit the wise cynic or jaded undergraduate, who greet news developments like these with a shrug and a smirk: “What did you expect? So what else is new?” Better, an awareness of the history of science can enlighten both taxpayers and policymakers, who, in pondering (and perhaps bankrolling) the sales pitches of today’s scientists, must ask themselves the same question that so many Americans asked themselves during the “Moon race” of the 1960s: “Is this trip necessary?” Better still: we need history to decide the fortunes of scientific research and biomedical pursuits—to help present and future generations to understand the larger temporal and social contexts of these contemporary transformations.

Moreover, historians of recent science, technology, and medicine now need to tell new stories, and face new challenges in doing so. The Cold War ended almost two decades ago. Even before the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, physics had ceased to be the queen of the natural sciences in most scientifically advanced nations. In 1993, the US Congress had voted against continued funding of the Superconducting Super Collider, the largest particle accelerator then in planning, while backing the Human Genome project.² Already by then the biosciences had become the new favorites not only of governments and industrial interests but also of universities, overturning dominant patterns in place for nearly a century.³ In 1996 the life sciences (biology, medicine, and agriculture) dominated university research and development in the United States, with 55% of $21 billion spent.⁴ This trend intensified after the September 11th attack. After anthrax-filled letters contaminated offices of the US Congress, biological warfare research joined stem cell research and human-induced global warming as key issues in international science policy.⁵

This volume is about what we know—and don’t yet know—about science, technology, and medicine in the recent past. This volume also addresses new methods that historians can use to explore these developments. It is the second volume in this series to address these critical themes.⁶

What questions should we ask? Certainly many challenges that historians of science, technology, and medicine face in studying this period are reassuringly familiar. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 (involving seismologists) was preceded by the international Migratory Bird Treaty of 1919, where biologists helped guide negotiations.⁷ Big science undertakings at CERN and the US national laboratories had antecedents in the major “factory observatories” in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century, whose hard-driving directors and highly specialized staffs recalled their industrial counterparts.⁸ Technology transfer was already a concern for Britain and the United States soon after the American Revolution, even if US officials now are more concerned about advanced technology flowing to less developed nations than with circumventing British restrictions on exporting powerloom technologies.⁹ Certain methodological issues are familiar as well: the same social history approaches that have broadened our understanding of the roles of women, minorities, skilled artisans and technicians in recent history of medicine and science also have challenged traditional accounts of the Scientific Revolution.¹⁰

Yet other themes and circumstances have a new feel to them, and occupy unfamiliar ground. They require historians of recent science, technology, and medicine to journey beyond familiar conceptual coastlines into largely uncharted historiographic waters. Physics no longer stands as the exemplar for all fields of recent science. Moreover, because science, technology, and medicine increasingly operate on global scales, comprehensive accounts of these activities now need to cover a much larger-than-traditional geographic canvas, including the People’s Republic of China, India, South America, and South-East Asia.¹¹ Relationships between the largely industrialized northern hemisphere nations and less-developed southern hemisphere nations ought be as carefully examined as the better-studied tensions and exchanges between the East Bloc and West Bloc scientific communities.¹² Scientific intelligence-gathering became a high-priority concern for Washington, Moscow, and Beijing after the Second World War, another novel departure.¹³ When in the early 1960s a conservative American diplomat sniffed that the US embassy in Brazil needed a science attaché “like a cigar store Indian needs a brassiere,” he called attention to another fundamental shift: the growth of science, technology, and medicine as aspects of diplomacy and foreign policy.¹⁴ Historical judgments on many major issues remain elusive: did the Cold War hinder international scientific interactions, or did increased avenues of communication “denationalize science,” as Elisabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin have argued?¹⁵

Even apparently familiar landscapes in the history of recent science, technology, and medicine now require perceptive re-examination. If at the start of the twenty-first century biological warfare has largely replaced thermonuclear war as a dominant Western anxiety, so have the security restrictions and intimate ties to the state once characteristic of nuclear physics come to characterize several domains of modern biology. In the US, restrictions on access to academic biological laboratories—already restricted by controversial privacy agreements with pharmaceutical firms and other major donors—have grown tighter since the anthrax attacks in October 2001.¹⁶ Federal contracts with universities increasingly require pre-publication reviews of scientific papers. Expanded restrictions on sharing data (including a new “Sensitive but Unclassified Information” clause) have limited the numbers of participants in research.¹⁷ How these issues will shape biological research remains unclear. A senior official for research and development in the newly formed US Office of Homeland Security lamented in 2002 that “We’ve never owned the biology community in the way we own the physicists.”¹⁸ It is too early to know if growing state interest in biology in the early twenty-first century will come to be seen as a historical milestone on a par with the influence of the Second World War and the Cold War. But it does suggest large new questions that historians need to consider.¹⁹

Historians are also increasingly concerned with the ethics and morality of science. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many individuals around the world finally felt free to address issues of moral conduct during the four decades of the Cold War. Popular interest in ethical transgressions by the state soared. This interest meshed with the Vergangenheitspolitik movement that sought to explore silences in historical accounts throughout the twentieth century, resulting from the state’s heightened power to shape historical narratives and to repress memory (from South African apartheid to the appalling Tuskegee syphilis experiments involving black Americans).²⁰ The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, established by US Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary in 1994, sought to discover the extent to which American citizens had been subject to covert efforts by the US government to assess individual responses to radiation as the Cold War intensified.²¹

This pioneering undertaking was not the first to probe morals in scientific research. Historian Jan Sapp’s 1990 analysis of research ethics (centered on the mid-twentieth century biologist Franz Moewus) helped to pave the way for Daniel J. Kevles’s study of David Baltimore, the Nobel Laureate and immunology researcher accused of fabricating data in a published paper who became the poster-boy of academic fraud within the US Congress in the mid-1990s.²² Baltimore was later exonerated. But a darker judgment has fallen on the Stanford physicist Victor Ninov, whose boastful 1998 claim that he had discovered two new trans-uranium elements now seems “a result of fabricated research data and scientific misconduct.”²³ Contemporary fascination with morality in science runs deeper still. Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen (about the conflict between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his former student Werner Heisenberg, leader of the German atomic bomb project, during their fall 1941 meeting in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen) played to sold-out audiences in London, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, New York and elsewhere— including Copenhagen.²⁴ When in 2002 Bohr’s previously unknown letters to Heisenberg surfaced (denouncing Heisenberg’s subsequent benign recollections about his famous 1941 visit, asserting instead that Heisenberg was then looking forward to a German-dominated Western Europe), the story made the front page of the New York Times.²⁵

These are only some of the issues historians have recently addressed. Consider the problem of sources. The once-stable world of typewritten and handwritten letters preserved in university archives, together with bound periodicals lining library shelves, is yielding to the realm of email, e-journals, weblogs, and other web-based reports. How stable are these new sources of historical information? Studies in 2003 found that up to half of web-based citations (URLs, or uniform resource locators) became inaccessible within four years.²⁶ Archivists and historians worry about the long-term implications of these trends. They are also concerned about the fate of classified documents—an issue that extends beyond the formal end of the Cold War—since entire archives of classified documents, many stored without traditional archival safeguards, have gone missing in the United States and several Western European nations. This complicates the task of writing traditional historical accounts.²⁷

A further challenge in writing this history is that scientists increasingly work in large multi-disciplinary teams. Experimental papers in biomedical journals like Cell frequently involve ten or more authors with different disciplinary backgrounds, each contributing a particular methodological skill to the common outcome. The epochal papers in Nature on February 16, 2001 that reported on the draft human genome sequence were crafted by more than 2500 authors from 20 laboratories around the world (the Craig Venter et al. paper in Science the day before “only” had about 250 authors). If the relevant archives for writing the history of recent science, technology, and medicine are no longer the papers of individual scientists but of collaborative groups, how confident can we be that the records of these collaborations will survive?²⁸ Since contemporary scientists have deployed new writing and authorship strategies, do historians of recent science, technology, and medicine need to adopt new methodologies as well? One approach—extending the collaborative, multidisciplinary, social history-oriented research projects favored by the Annales School— involves employing teams of historians to explore the largest undertakings of modern science, each researcher tackling a manageable part: Big History for Big Science. Several notable historical accounts, including those of nuclear physics laboratories, have utilized this approach.²⁹ In the late 1980s and 1990s, the Sloan Foundation pursued pioneering efforts to develop historical information on significant yet largely unexplored fields of recent science. They did so by inviting grassroots participation, allowing scientist-participants in activities such as GATE (the Atlantic Tropical Experiment of the larger Global Atmospheric Research Program, or GARP, conducted during the summer of 1976) to write online narratives about their experiences. But these projects foundered. Collaborations of more than two hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: What We Know, What We Do Not—And Why It Matters
• Part I: Where Are We Now? The Challenges of Writing Recent Science
• Part II: Whose History? Ethics, Lawsuits, National Security, and the Writing of Contemporary History
• Part III: Witness to History: Issues In Biography and Ethics
• Part IV: Secrecy, Politics, and Science: Probing the Meaning of the Cold War
• Part V: History Detectives: New Ways of Approaching Modern Science, Technology, and Medicine
• Part VI: New Voices: Neglected and Novel Perspectives