The Politics of Sources Meets the Practices of the Librarian: An Interview with Esther Chen.

[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the 'politics of sources'. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively early phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio-politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes.

History as a biomedical matter: recent reassessments of the first cases of Alzheimer's disease.

This paper examines medical scientists' accounts of their rediscoveries and reassessments of old materials. It looks at how historical patient files and brain samples of the first cases of Alzheimer's disease became reused as scientific objects of inquiry in the 1990s, when a genetic neuropathologist from Munich and a psychiatrist from Frankfurt lead searches for left-overs of Alzheimer's 'founder cases' from the 1900s. How and why did these researchers use historical methods, materials and narratives, and why did the biomedical community cherish their findings as valuable scientific facts about Alzheimer's disease? The paper approaches these questions by analysing how researchers conceptualised 'history' while backtracking and reassessing clinical and histological materials from the past. It elucidates six ways of conceptualising history as a biomedical matter: (1) scientific assessments of the past, i.e. natural scientific understandings of 'historical facts'; (2) history in biomedicine, e.g. uses of old histological collections in present day brain banks; (3) provenance research, e.g. applying historical methods to ensure the authenticity of brain samples; (4) technical biomedical history, e.g. reproducing original staining techniques to identify how old histological slides were made; (5) founding traditions, i.e. references to historical objects and persons within founding stories of scientific communities; and (6) priority debates, e.g. evaluating the role particular persons played in the discovery of a disease such as Alzheimer's. Against this background, the paper concludes with how the various ways of using and understanding 'history' were put forward to re-present historic cases as 'proto-types' for studying Alzheimer's disease in the present.

Slicing the cortex to study mental illness: Alois Alzheimer's pictures of equivalence.

Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a German physician who specialized in psychiatry, and who is today known for the first description of a-in his own words-peculiar ailment (eigenartige Erkrankung), which was named after him. In his time, however, he was foremost recognized for his work in refining histopathological techniques and thereby contributing to the methodological arsenal for differential diagnosis in clinical psychiatry. In his laboratory that was based at the renowned Munich Psychiatric University Clinic led by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), Alzheimer, his assistants, and students conserved, prepared, and studied slices of deceased patients' brains under the microscope. How could histological postmortem research better clinical diagnoses? Against what norm should the pathologies be compared? What was the normal brain in a context of highly invasive preparation techniques and the artifacts that they produced? In an unpublished lecture series, Alzheimer explicitly addressed these questions and framed them in terms of practical problems and possible solutions: where to get normal brains from; how animal studies could help to enlighten the normal brain and infectious mental disorders; how the study of hereditary idiocy might yield knowledge about normal brain development and general brain pathology. This chapter offers a close reading of parts of Alzheimer's lectures, his habilitation thesis, and his programmatic opening paper of a journal that he cofounded. These sources provide us with an introduction into the making of the normal and the pathological brain in histopathology that focuses more on problems and controversies than providing an undisputable, easy-to-use framework. I examine the premises of Alzheimer's conceptualization of "pictures of equivalence" (Aequivalentbilder) to elucidate how the epistemological gap between postmortem research and clinical psychiatry was managed in this particular context. The excavation of this historical epistemology not only fills a gap in the rich history of brain research that has mostly focused on brain localization theory, of which Alzheimer and Kraepelin were skeptical. It also provides a case study for how "the normal" and "the pathological" were put to work, and were, literally, pictured. In conjunction with the other chapters of this volume, this contribution thereby raises the historiographical and philosophical question of what to include into an assessment of the making and use of models of the brain.

Conference report "Stoffwechsel. Histories of metabolism", workshop organized by Mathias Grote at Technische Universität Berlin, November 28-29th, 2014.

Historical analyses of what metabolism has been conceived of, how concepts of metabolism were related to disciplines such as nineteenth-century nutritional physiology or twentieth-century biochemistry, and how their genealogies relate to the current developments may be helpful to understand the various, at times polemic, ways in which the boundaries between metabolism and heredity have been re-drawn. Against this background, a small number of scholars gathered in Berlin for a workshop that equally aimed at bringing new stories to the fore, and at considering seemingly known ones in a new light. Some aspects of the discussions are summarized in this paper.

Mutant mice: experimental organisms as materialised models in biomedicine.

Animal models have received particular attention as key examples of material models. In this paper, we argue that the specificities of establishing animal models-acknowledging their status as living beings and as epistemological tools-necessitate a more complex account of animal models as materialised models. This becomes particularly evident in animal-based models of diseases that only occur in humans: in these cases, the representational relation between animal model and human patient needs to be generated and validated. The first part of this paper presents an account of how disease-specific animal models are established by drawing on the example of transgenic mice models for Alzheimer's disease. We will introduce an account of validation that involves a three-fold process including (1) from human being to experimental organism; (2) from experimental organism to animal model; and (3) from animal model to human patient. This process draws upon clinical relevance as much as scientific practices and results in disease-specific, yet incomplete, animal models. The second part of this paper argues that the incompleteness of models can be described in terms of multi-level abstractions. We qualify this notion by pointing to different experimental techniques and targets of modelling, which give rise to a plurality of models for a specific disease.