Beginning this October 8th, the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology will convene virtually for the first time. This annual meeting, appropriately enough, focuses on science within the context of history and society. In a similar spirit, we at Harvard University Press are highlighting five recent and forthcoming books that offer a valuable perspective on the history of science, but also the current moment. We are offering a discount on these and other books related to the conference.
History will remember 2020 as a year of war. A technoscientific battle against a previously unknown threat. A year when an invisible virus challenged the world. And despite the uniqueness of the current battlefield, it presents familiar uncertainties, rationalities, and emotions, inescapably similar to what Carl von Clausewitz termed the ‘fog of war.’ As M. Susan Lindee writes in Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War, Clausewitz viewed wartime actions as both measurable and shadowy, cost-benefit calculations made during a twilight haze. Choices are often made with gaps in information, with the hope that the unknown consequences will skew favorably toward survival. The similarities to our struggle against COVID-19 are painfully clear. Lindee continues, “scientific ideas and technological innovations can help us understand cultures and systems of power.” Awareness of how science and technology has been applied to past military struggles provides invaluable insight into how it can, and should, be applied to our current fight. The choices leaders make on what to do with the power of human innovation and industry can lead to a future of lifesaving vaccinations just as easily as it has to historical violence.
The current pandemic highlights how arguments over science underlie most of our divisive and consequential policy debates, such as genetic modification, climate change, and immigration. Andrew Jewett’s Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America recounts a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. He traces the history of the widespread indictment that science has been too often compromised by political ideology, with dire consequences for the country. By piecing together its development, varied expressions, and ultimate consequences, Jewett reveals how suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture.
But, as we know, tension between politics and science is not unique to 20th-century America. As Henry Cowles states, “science as a way of thinking had a politics of its own.” The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey explores the intertwined politics and histories of evolution and experiment in an unexpected history of how modern science took shape. Evolution, once viewed as a natural adaptation, itself evolved into the scientific method and soon became a controversial symbol of science’s power over nature. Instead of being a kind of knowledge deduced from observations and principles, “the method” became a way of thinking.
The 19th century soon saw the rise of yet another kind of thinking: visual problem solving. The forthcoming (Spring 2021) A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication by Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer tells the story of the 400-year evolution of an intellectual framework that has become essential to both science and society at large. From its origins in statistical data during the 17th century to the 19th century “golden age” of data display, visual and graphic communication was used for everything from tracking disease outbreaks to understanding social phenomena. Across countless disciplines, people realized that information could be more effectively conveyed through visual display than solely through use of words or tables. This trend continues to accelerate into the 21st century and has become integral to how we understand, retain, and use information.
The increase in utilization of graphics and illustration have also contributed to the evolution of scientific research. In The Black Box of Biology: A History of the Molecular Revolution, Michel Morange writes, “Open a book on molecular biology or glance at an online article, and you will be struck by the quantity and quality of the graphical representations…the pages will teem with illustrations of macromolecules, intracellular pathways, and networks.” Morange further maintains that few areas of science that have seen such an incredible transformation in such a short span of time as molecular biology. From new advancements like CRISPR and genetic engineering to the development of new scientific programs such as synthetic biology and systems biology, the past few decades of biological progress can only be understood within the context of the larger molecular paradigm. As this paradigm fosters new disciplines, the fundamental importance of molecular biology only becomes more pronounced.
