Representing scale: What should be special about the heritage of mass science?

This symposium marks the achievement of a transformation in the history of science. Whereas in the 1960s, the study of modern developments was marginal to the field, it has now become a key part of the discipline's central concerns. The contrast between this conference and a 1960 symposium is illuminating. The paper reflects on the tensions over the future direction of the discipline expressed at the 1974 semi-centenary conference of the History of Science Society. Today, genomics with its vast demand for resources and its challenges to traditional boundaries is not untypical of a wide range of scientific activities. Its study can serve as a pioneering case study interesting for itself and important for a wider understanding of science. Papers at this meeting show the implications for the understanding of methods, appropriate targets of study, the interpretation of images and the preservation of archives.

History Teaches Us That Confronting Antibiotic Resistance Requires Stronger Global Collective Action.

Antibiotic development and usage, and antibiotic resistance in particular, are today considered global concerns, simultaneously mandating local and global perspectives and actions. Yet such global considerations have not always been part of antibiotic policy formation, and those who attempt to formulate a globally coordinated response to antibiotic resistance will need to confront a history of heterogeneous, often uncoordinated, and at times conflicting reform efforts, whose legacies remain apparent today. Historical analysis permits us to highlight such entrenched trends and processes, helping to frame contemporary efforts to improve access, conservation and innovation.

Biological warfare warriors, secrecy and pure science in the Cold War: how to understand dialogue and the classifications of science.

This paper uses a case study from the Cold War to reflect on the meaning at the time of the term 'Pure Science'. In 1961, four senior scientists from Britain's biological warfare centre at Porton Down visited Moscow both attending an International Congress and visiting Russian microbiological and biochemical laboratories. The reports of the British scientists in talking about a limited range of topics encountered in the Soviet Union expressed qualities of openness, sociologists of the time associated with pure science. The paper reflects on the discourses of "Pure Science", secrecy and security in the Cold War. Using Bakhtin's approach, I suggest the cordial communication between scientists from opposing sides can be seen in terms of the performance, or speaking, of one language among several at their disposal. Pure science was the language they were allowed to share outside their institutions, and indeed political blocs.

Applied science. Introduction.

Such categories as applied science and pure science can be thought of as "ideological." They have been contested in the public sphere, exposing long-term intellectual commitments, assumptions, balances of power, and material interests. This group of essays explores the contest over applied science in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century. The essays look at the concept in the context of a variety of neighbors, including pure science, technology, and art. They are closely related and connected to contemporary historiographic debate. Jennifer Alexander links the issues raised to a recent paper by Paul Forman. Paul Lucier and Graeme Gooday deal with the debates in the last quarter of the century in the United States and Britain, respectively. Robert Bud deals with the earlier part of the nineteenth century, with an eye specifically on the variety of concepts hybridized under the heading of "applied science." Eric Schatzberg looks at the erosion of the earlier concept of art. As a whole, the essays illuminate both long-term changes and nuanced debate and are themselves intended to provoke further reflection on science in the public sphere.

"Applied science": a phrase in search of a meaning.

The term "applied science," as it came to be popularly used in the 1870s, was a hybrid of three earlier concepts. The phrase "applied science" itself had been coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, translating the German Kantian term "angewandte Wissenschaft." It was popularized through the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, which was structured on principles inherited from Coleridge and edited by men with sympathetic views. Their concept of empirical as opposed to a priori science was hybridized with an earlier English concept of "practical science" and with "science applied to the arts," adopted from the French. Charles Dupin had favored the latter concept and promoted it in the reconstruction of the Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Métiers. The process of hybridization took place from the 1850s, in the wake of the Great Exhibition, as a new technocratic government favored scientific education. "Applied science" subsequently was used as the epistemic basis for technical education and the formation of new colleges in the 1870s.

Innovators, deep fermentation and antibiotics: promoting applied science before and after the Second World War.

The historiography of penicillin has tended to overlook the importance of developing and disseminating know-how in fermentation technology. A focus on this directs attention to work before the war of a network in the US and Europe concerned with the production of organic acids, particularly gluconic and citric acids. At the heart of this network was the German-Czech Konrad Bernhauer. Other members of the network were a group of chemists at the US Department of Agriculture who first recognized the production possibilities of penicillin. The Pfizer Corporation, which had recruited a leading Department of Agriculture scientist at the end of the First World War, was also an important centre of development as well as of production. However, in wartime Bernhauer was an active member of the SS and his work was not commemorated after his death in 1975. After the war new processes of fermentation were disseminated by penicillin pioneers such as Jackson Foster and Ernst Chain. Because of its commercial context his work was not well known. The conclusion of this paper is that the commercial context, on the one hand, and the Nazi associations of Bernhauer, on the other, have submerged the significance of know-how development in the history of penicillin.

From applied microbiology to biotechnology: science, medicine and industrial renewal.

In the late 1970s politicians and civil servants were acutely aware of the chronic decline of the manufacturing sector as a source of employment in Britain. At a time of fear of mass unemployment, sources of new work were urgently sought. Biotechnology had been promoted by visionaries since the early twentieth century. With oil prices soaring, its potential to produce substitutes for petroleum derivatives seemed newly attractive. At the beginning of 1976, John Bu'Lock at Manchester brought the attention of the new President of the Royal Society, Lord Todd, to the developments in enzyme and fermentation technologies. Both the Society and government began to take biotechnology seriously. In 1979 the Society organized a groundbreaking meeting, 'New horizons in industrial microbiology'. In parallel, John Ashworth, the chief scientist of the government think-tank the Central Policy Review Staff, prompted by American developments in genetic engineering, its commercial exploitation and regional development, led thinking among government officials. The Spinks enquiry into biotechnology was consequently formed in 1979 as a collaborative enterprise of the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils and the Royal Society. The recommendations for far-reaching collaboration between research councils, government and industry were not fully implemented. However, even the limited implementation led to new models of science that would be significant in the emergence of a reconstruction of science.

The revolutionary implications of the word biotechnology.

Despite the success of the chemical industry, since the early 20th century biotechnology has been framed as a natural and revolutionary alternative. The idea has involved the interweaving of the concepts of engineering new products using living processes, and of engineering new living beings themselves. The potential of these twin themes as alternatives to chemical technologies has been debated since the revolutionary era at the end of World War I. Highpoints included the 1930s and the 1960s. The emergence of genetic engineering techniques in the 1970s enabled the realisation of long-existing aspirations. Ever since then there have been marked changes as the emphasis of biotechnology has shifted from the engineering of micro-organisms to produce proteins to the engineering of animals and even man. The sense of millenial change expressed when the human genome was first drafted is therefore both genuine and old-established.