Peter Lutz, PhD, brilliantly traverses the major milestones along the evolutionary path of biomedicine from earliest recorded times to the dawn of the 20th century. With an engaging narrative that will have you turning "just one more page" well into the night, this book revealingly demonstrates just how the modern scientific method has been shaped by the past. Along the way the reader is treated to some delightfully obscure anecdotes and a treasure trove of rich illustrations that chronicle the tortuous history of biomedical developments, ranging from the bizarre and amusing to the downright macabre. The reader will also be introduced to the major ideas shaping contemporary physiology and the social context of its development, and also gain an understanding of how advances in biological science have occasionally been improperly used to satisfy momentary social or political needs.

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives. Information of all sorts is being collected on a massive scale, from Google to Facebook and well beyond. But as the amount of information in databases explodes, we are forced to reassess our ideas about what knowledge is, how it is produced, to whom it belongs, and who can be credited for producing it. Every scientist working today draws on databases to produce scientific knowledge. Databases have become more common than microscopes, voltmeters, and test tubes, and the increasing amount of data has led to major changes in research practices and profound reflections on the proper professional roles of data producers, collectors, curators, and analysts. Collecting Experiments traces the development and use of data collections, especially in the experimental life sciences, from the early twentieth century to the present. It shows that the current revolution is best understood as the coming together of two older ways of knowing—collecting and experimenting, the museum and the laboratory. Ultimately, Bruno J. Strasser argues that by serving as knowledge repositories, as well as indispensable tools for producing new knowledge, these databases function as digital museums for the twenty-first century.

First published in 1966 as a 60th birthday tribute to Max Delbrck, this influential work is republished as "The Centennial Edition." The book was hailed as "[introducing] into the literature of science, for the first time, a self-conscious historical element in which the participants in scientific discovery engage in writing their own chronicle ("Journal of History of Biology").

What is it like to do field biology in a world that exalts experiments and laboratories? How have field biologists assimilated laboratory values and practices, and crafted an exact, quantitative science without losing their naturalist souls? In Landscapes and Labscapes, Robert E. Kohler explores the people, places, and practices of field biology in the United States from the 1890s to the 1950s. He takes readers into the fields and forests where field biologists learned to count and measure nature and to read the imperfect records of "nature's experiments." He shows how field researchers use nature's particularities to develop "practices of place" that achieve in nature what laboratory researchers can only do with simplified experiments. Using historical frontiers as models, Kohler shows how biologists created vigorous new border sciences of ecology and evolutionary biology.

In the final years of the twentieth century, emigres from mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science resolved that if the aim of biology was to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Sophia Roosth, a cultural anthropologist, takes us into the world of these self-named synthetic biologists who, she shows, advocate not experiment but manufacture, not reduction but construction, not analysis but synthesis. Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. What we see through her careful questioning is that the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon are determined circularly by their own experimental tactics. This is a story of broad interest, because the active, interested making of the synthetic biologists is endemic to the sciences of our time."

How and why do complex scientific disciplines such as physics change emphasis from one sub-discipline to another? Do such transitions stem entirely from developments within the discipline itself or also from external factors? This book addresses these questions by examining the transition from atomic to nuclear physics, theoretically and experimentally, at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen in the 1930s. On the basis of extensive archival research, Finn Aaserud shows that the “Copenhagen spirit,” the playful research atmosphere under Bohr’s fatherly guidance that permeated the Institute, thrived because of extra-scientific circumstances that Bohr exploited to the fullest, such as the need to help Jewish physicists out of Hitler’s Germany and the changing funding policies of private foundations, notably those of the Rockefeller Foundation which made it opportune to introduce research in experimental biology at the Institute. “A clear, carefully developed and substantially convincing argument... Aaserud gives a detailed and impressively documented account of the direction of Bohr’s scientific interests... Aaserud is... to be congratulated for his original, clear — indeed, didactic — work of scholarship and enlightenment.” — Paul Forman, Physics Today “A professional historian’s study of the happenings at the Niels Bohr Institute in the decisive years 1930 to 1940... In particular, the... support of the Institute by Danish and other foundations, mainly the Rockefeller Foundation, are treated in great detail, revealing many interesting aspects of these relationships... The detailed accounts... of Bohr’s negotiations are a testimony to Bohr’s uncanny ability to get what he wanted from the various foundations... Aaserud’s book is an invaluable source of information [showing] that Bohr was not only an inspiring physicist and philosopher but also a cunning negotiator who knew how to make use of his great reputation for the benefit of science.” — Victor F. Weisskopf, Science “Aaserud elucidates Bohr’s skills not only as mentor and guiding hand behind the ‘Copenhagen spirit,’ but also as financial negotiator.” — Neil Wasserman, Isis, A Journal of the History of Science Society “This book teaches us that running such [a truly elite] institution required entrepreneurial skills as well as scientific genius. Bohr had an abundance of both.” — Jeremy Bernstein, Nature “Redirecting Science is the history of Bohr’s institute during the 1930s when it experienced a drastic change in its research priorities, from a laissez-faire mode of work and lack of clearly defined research programme to a concerted research effort in nuclear physics and experimental biology... Aaserud gives a highly interesting account of the interaction between physics and biology... Aaserud’s carefully documented work is an excellent example of how institutional history may transcend social and institutional limitations and integrate also conceptual history of science.” — Helge Kragh, Centaurus “By showing that a new research programme at one of the most important scientific institutes in the world was triggered, and pushed forward, by social and financial considerations, this book delivers yet another blow to the tired old idea that scientific knowledge is driven by its own internal, inexorable logic. It also throws valuable light on Bohr’s activities and strategies as a fundraiser and institution builder.” — John Krige, The British Journal for the History of Science

A Companion to the History of American Science offers a collection of essays that give an authoritative overview of the most recent scholarship on the history of American science. Covers topics including astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, eugenics, Big Science, military technology, and more Features contributions by the most accomplished scholars in the field of science history Covers pivotal events in U.S. history that shaped the development of science and science policy such as WWII, the Cold War, and the Women’s Rights movement