History Of Science Societies Sprout Up Nationwide, With More

Foundation, the History of Science Society has seen the development of a number of specialized historical interest groups under its umbrella. In fact, the society has endeavored to remain a unifying instrument for the new groups, rather than see the field become fragmented, says society executive secretary Keith R. Benson. Benson is also a professor of medical history and ethics at the University of Washington, Seattle, and archivist for the history and philosophy of biology division of the American Society of Zoologists. Among the first of these new, virtual subsocieties to form, Benson says, were the Committee on Women and the Forum for the History of Science in America, both in the early 1980s. But in just the past few years, since 1989, he's seen a sharp rise in the number of forums, including new groups on the histories of astronomy, chemistry, and early modern science. One reason suggested for the increasing specialization in the history of science is the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex topography of scientific endeavor today. "History of science used to be a relatively intimate activity," says Ronald L. Numbers, editor of Isis, the History of Science Society's journal and the oldest publication in the field. Numbers is also a professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "The annual meetings were fairly small." Now, he says, the meetings have gotten quite large--there are nearly 4,000 individual members. "You might go to one of these [main] meetings and not see your colleagues working in your area as you bounce around from one session to another," Numbers says. "And I think these interest groups reflect a desire to have a little more intimacy." Lewenstein sees similar factors feeding the diversification of the history of science. "Once any society gets to be large enough that not everybody in it is talking about the same thing," Lewenstein says, "then the problem becomes, what do you do? Do you create new journals? Do you create new societies or new sections within societies?" Benson notes that the last decade or so also has seen increasing links between the historians of science and other humanities scholars of science, stimulating further specialization and growth. Some of the societies now sharing members and ideas with the History of Science Society are the Philosophy of Science Association, founded in 1933; the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), founded in 1958; and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), founded in 1975. Other important related groups are the American Association for the History of Medicine, founded in 1925, and the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, the United States branch of which was established in the 1960s, as well as several professional historian groups. A clearer sense of the past can help scientific disciplines see further into the future, too, Thackray says. "It becomes possible to look in two directions, instead of simply having a unifocus," says Thackray, "so that you can see tomorrow in the framework of yesterday. If your vision extends a little farther back, you may have a better sense of what to expect looking farther forward." from the interplay of these forces is Peter Taylor's ISHPSSB. According to Taylor, the fledgling society is trying hard not to become just "another professional society," whose meeting attendees spend most of their time jockeying for professional notice and career advancement. Taylor explains: "We want to make sure that the focus continues to be on having very rich sessions, sessions that are exploratory, where people don't have to feel, `I haven't finished thinking about this, so I dare not present it in public.' [We want] exactly the opposite--`I haven't finished thinking about this, so this is an ideal chance to air in public.' " As a result, Taylor says, the society has been very successful in stimulating discussion and development in the field. "This society has had some part in the process of the last decade of history of science becoming less history of ideas and more social history," Taylor says. "Some of the interesting, very contextualized history has begun to happen at this meeting." Organizations devoted to science history are not always focused on centuries past. The historical perspective can also contribute to thinking about subjects with relatively short histories in the usual sense. Victoria A. Harden is cochairwoman, for example, of the AIDS History Group of the American Association for the History of Medicine, which held its first conference in 1989. She is also director of the National Institutes of Health Historical Office, primarily devoted to documenting 20th century biomedical research. The AIDS group is, perhaps because of the currency of its focus, more eclectic than many other history of science organizations, Har- den says. "We have journalists, physicians, archivists, museum people, sociologists, and private collectors of AIDS posters," she says. "It has turned out to be a combination of historians, providing historical perspective, and players--policy and scientific--stating their own remembrances." Among the speakers at the group's late-October meeting in Bethesda, Md., were C. Everett Koop, former surgeon general, and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH Office of AIDS Research and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Harden also heads the DeWitt Stetten Jr. Museum of Medical Research at NIH, named after the physician-scientist- administrator who died in 1990. "People came to Stetten with a lot of instruments that they couldn't keep in their labs because they'd become obsolete," Harden says. "But they'd say, `This is such a classic instrument and so much work has been done on it, somebody ought to save this.' And that was the beginning of our collection." Harden adds: "If you accept the proposition that biomedical research has changed the way we live in the 20th century, then these kinds of things are certainly worth saving." notion that an understanding of science history pertains directly to the daily activities of working scientists. Indeed, some go so far as to say that scientists are perhaps better off ignoring certain lessons of the past. "The sort of history of science that appears in textbooks is very edifying," says Ronald Numbers. "It's a very progressive story of one scientist's work leading to the work of another--standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak. Historians get in there and show that it's not quite as neat and nice as that." Some of the great scientists of the past, despite their accomplishments, also suffered serious ethical and methodological lapses at times, he says. And the prevailing values and views of the day have sometimes powerfully influenced the direction of past science. "I suspect that 99 percent of scientists are untouched by any sensitivity towards historical, philo- sophical, or sociological concerns," Numbers says. "Most of them are still out there discovering `truth.' And that's probably important. If they got too relativistic, they probably wouldn't have the motivation to continue to do science the way they do it." An area in which historians of science do feel that their efforts are having an impact is in the way science is taught in the universities today. "Those scientists who are interested in historical issues and the provisional nature of scientific theory are going to be interested in those issues, anyway," says Karen Johnson, an associate professor of physics at St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y. "So, I don't expect to change the way anybody does science. "But there is a trend now to use history of science more in teaching science," Johnson says. "Instead of teaching science as given fact and formulas that just fall out of the sky, you teach students where it came from and why we believe this, the provisional nature of scientific theory, the historical background, and the philosophical implications." Historians of science also say their work has helped shape some science policy decisions. For example, in the debate in Congress this year that led to the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider (SSC), the history of science informed some of the arguments, they say. "People started complaining about the effect of political institutions on science when the SSC was canceled," says Bruce Lewenstein. "But to a historian, this is simply old news." Harvard's Holton notes that some scientists made the point, based on historical examples, that once the SSC was canceled, it would not be an easy matter to reinvigorate the high-energy physics field. "You can't, five years later, turn on the spigot and hope something comes out," he says. "The professions will have disbanded there." One particularly active--and more directly influential-- history of science interest area centers on studies of women in science. Historians have found the feminist perspective particularly useful in exploring the workings of science and women scientists receptive to their work. "History of science in [the United States] has had difficulties connecting to scientists, partly because science has been thought to be value-free or untouched by social influences, so it seemed irrelevant," says Londa Schiebinger, a professor of history and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. "But women in science understand the relevance of the history and of the social influences on their positions," says Shiebinger, who is also cochairwoman of the History of Science Society's Committee on Women. Schiebinger says that, as more and more women make careers in scientific fields, changes in the content of science may result from such gender studies. She is the author of two recent books, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989) and Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, Beacon Press, 1993). As an example of the influence of gender in sci- ence, Schiebinger cites the taxonomic work of Linnaeus. "Why are mammals called mammals?" she asks rhetorically. "Linnaeus had a million choices--mammary glands are not the only unique characteristic of mammals. I'm interested in how human knowledge is only partial knowledge because of gender. "Nature is extremely rich," Schiebinger adds. "We run in one direction, so we know a lot about a few things. But we don't even walk in other directions."

History Of Science Societies Sprout Up Nationwide, With More

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Franklin Hoke

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November 1993

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