# ABSTRACTS **The 56th Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology** **Jointly held by the Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology (MIT),and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS)and the Department of the History of Science (Harvard)** Abstracts Saturday 9 April 2022 **9:00-10:30am** **Session 1: Biology on the Inside** 1. **Anin Luo** "Animals between Universality and Locality: The Emergence of Experimental Biology in Republican China" Address**:** 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, New Jersey, USA 08544 **Abstract:** In 1926, Robert Kho-seng Lim founded the Chinese Physiological Society (CPS) in Beijing. Drawing on the resources of its leaders—most of whom were employed by foreign-backed, wealthy research institutes—the CPS trained biologists to experiment on live animals and distributed expensive laboratory equipment and materials to other establishments in China. It was the first Chinese society dedicated to experimental biology; at a time when “descriptive” taxonomy and morphology were dominant, it thus fostered not only experimental physiology, but also experimental biology more generally in China. This paper tells this history through the laboratory animals used in biology experiments and the buildings in which they were housed. It argues that the animals, bred from local species and standardized so to be able to participate in universal experimental science, signified the simultaneous locality and universality of experimental biology as it emerged in China in this period. Animal houses, where animals were made standard and kept separated from the local environment, were a critical part of the process of making science universal. By tracing how CPS scientists built animal houses to insulate the science conducted within from local residents’ knowledge—as well as residents’ responses, or lack thereof, to the animal experiments—the paper also provides a cultural history of experimental biology. More than simply a way of practicing science, experimental biology signified Chinese elites’ scientism: their imaginations for inclusion into international networks of universal science and hopes that science could help China progress along a path to modernity. Animals and animal houses, the paper shows, were the material foundations of such aspirations. **2. Gina Surita** "Cellular Power Plants: An Overview of Postwar Mitochondria Research" Address: 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 **Abstract:** This talk asks how the cellular organelles known as mitochondria became established as the “power plants” or “powerhouses” of the cell in post-World War II biological discourses. Researchers designated mitochondria as the cellular “power plants” based on the idea that they were the site for the generation of the cell’s main energy-carrying molecule, ATP. If ATP was indeed generated within mitochondria, then these organelles served a key energy-transforming function in the cell: they converted the energy derived from the oxidative breakdown of food into the phosphate bond energy of ATP. The energetic coupling of oxidative processes with phosphorylation was known as “oxidative phosphorylation,” and became quite a contentious area of research in the 1950s and 1960s. By examining the underlying similarities in mitochondria researchers’ descriptions of the organelle’s energetic functions, this talk seeks to add another dimension to previous scholarship on oxidative phosphorylation and mitochondria research, which has thus far emphasized tensions and controversy among approaches (e.g., biochemistry/enzymes vs. cell biology/membrane structure). Rather than offering another account focused on disagreements, this talk seeks to bring together the interpretations of various mitochondria researchers to understand how they collectively constructed the mitochondrion as the “power plant” or “powerhouse” of the cell. 3. **Libby O’Neil** “Dream Laboratories and Psychical Microscopes: On Psychoanalysis as an Experimental Science” Address: Yale University, Program in the History of Science and Medicine **Abstract:** In his foreword to the first edition of *The Interpretation of Dreams*, published in the final weeks of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud confidently told his readers that “in making this attempt at presenting an interpretation of dreams I do not think I have gone beyond the bounds of neuro-pathological interest.” Nevertheless, throughout the next century many pages were devoted to arguing over precisely this point. This paper circumvents a long and venerable tradition of arguing over the veracity of psychoanalytic claims, and looks instead for methodological similarities between Freudian psychoanalysis and contemporaneous forms of laboratory practice in fin de siècle Vienna. I argue that the procedures for dream analysis laid out in *The Interpretation of Dreams* suggest that Freud, rather than abandoning his scientific training, instead transposed the practices of fin de siècle Viennese medical science into the laboratory of dreams. That is, this paper argues that the dreaming mind itself functioned as a “laboratory” for practicing the techniques of psychoanalysis, in an experimental tradition borrowed from the morgues and dissection chambers of Vienna’s laboratories of experimental pathology. Further, I re-considering Freud’s model of the mind as a composite microscope in the final chapter of *The Interpretation of Dreams*, where he highlights the dreaming mind as an insulated space, reflecting back the images and urges of the unconscious mind. Freud transformed the microscope from an instrument for studying the brain into a model for theorizing the mind, using the methodological approaches of experimental pathology to attempt a science of the immaterial. By taking seriously the experimental roots of psychoanalysis, I hope to historicize the epistemic abysses that attend the science of the mind. **11:00-12:30pm** **Session 2: Evolution as explanation** **4. Anna Christensen** “In the End is the Beginning”: Speculating about Deep Evolutionary Pasts and Futures with Dougal Dixon" Address: Department of History of Science, Harvard University **Abstract:** In this paper I seek to connect Dougal Dixon’s late 20th century project of speculative evolution as represented by his After trilogy, to the early efforts of eighteenth and nineteenth century scientists to speculate about prehistoric evolutionary pasts. I argue that Dixon operates using many of the same scientific principles that guided these scientists and that both projects are fundamentally ones of using scientific principles coupled with incomplete information and imagination to visually represent alternative evolutionary forms. Dixon’s three books utilize differently formulated evolutionary ethics to shed light on how we think about evolution and planetary change in deep time. Fundamentally, for Dixon, under the dictates of evolution and geologic change, space and time are collapsed such that the deep past is little different from the deep future. **5. Sam Franz** "Adaptation as Learning: John Holland and Evolutionary Computing at the University of Michigan" Address, 303 Claudia Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 **Abstract:** During the 1960s, computer scientists, mathematicians, and logicians at the University of Michigan adapted evolutionary biology to explain computers, businesses, and other organizations. Their program grew out of the mid-1950s Logic of Computers Group at the same institution, where John Holland and his colleagues, working in the new discipline of “automata studies,” explored adaptive approaches to computing while borrowing the language of evolution from biologists like R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright. Collapsing the distinction between learning and adaptation, they argued that adaptation as an abstract concept could solve problems in several academic disciplines, including economics, game theory, and neurophysiology. Much of the interdisciplinary work associated with the “complexity sciences” has been identified with the Santa Fe Institute, a private institution formed in the 1980s that saw the general problems of complexity in the economy and culture. My work shows that early research on this kind of generalized adaptation began outside of any specific application and was influenced by a newly synthesized evolutionary biology, supported by the usual suspects of American Cold War science funding. I explore how these researchers made evolutionary biology into an intellectual toolkit for understanding adaptation as a *general feature of systems.* In contrast to some scholarship on the rise of the complexity sciences, I show how general theories of adaptive systems—in biology as well as economies and political order—originated in the first decades of the Cold War and took a partially different form because of the institutions that supported their work. Recent historical scholarship has identified the complexity sciences and the Santa Fe Institute as characteristic of late twentieth century science in the US. This paper shows that many of these features were already present in the 1960s and interrogates their origins and their logic. **6. Nayanika Ghosh** "Sociobiology as Cold War Propaganda: What Can the History of Nuclear Science Offer the History of Organismic Biology" Address: Department of History of Science, Harvard University **Abstract:** 20. key frameworks have been used to theorize postwar American science. A Cold War framework has loomed large in the histories of physics, geology, radiobiology, and genetics. Within historiographies of organismic biology, however, it is a politics of science-backed UNESCO internationalism that has been used to frame the entry of postwar biological approaches such as sociobiology. I contend that theorizing the entry of sociobiological theories of human behavior in the 1970s within a context of internationalism alone inadvertently enables an infamous “irony.” That sociobiologists–whose progressive commitment to this internationalism was manifest in their theories of *universal* human behavior–were ultimately accused of conservatism. I propose that an approach that integrates UNESCO internationalism with a theoretical framing of the Cold War borrowed from historiographies of nuclear science complicates this “irony.” Sociobiology has already been implicated as a “natural” justification of capitalism. Explicitly theorizing it as anticommunist Cold War propaganda however permits a deeper analysis of why its claim to political neutrality, despite upholding obvious pre-war conservative doctrines that postwar biology sought to distance from, was treated as credible. I ultimately argue that it is this framing that allows us to see how biological determinism–advanced by scientists committed to global internationalism–served local Cold War ideology in the United States. **1:30-3:00pm** **Session 3: The Body Politic** **7. Jessica Hester** “‘We the people’ would soon decide for them”: Resurrection, Dissection, Democracy, and Race in 19th-Century Philadelphia" Address: Institute of the History of Medicine, **Abstract**: Historians of medicine like Michael Sappol have studied the trade in human cadavers, and Daina Ramey Berry and others have tracked the ways that the bodies of Black Americans were disproportionately exploited after death. This paper builds on that work in analyzing an 1882 grave-robbing in Philadelphia, in which so-called “resurrectionists” roused six bodies from rest in Lebanon Cemetery, a burial ground for Black Philadelphians. By comparing coverage of the incident, aftermath, and ensuing trial in Philadelphia’s white city papers and Black press (focusing on the *Christian Recorder*, the Philadelphia-based mouthpiece of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), I argue that some Black writers leveraged the language of racial uplift to configure some instances of postmortem dissection as a patriotic project and way to participate more fully in democratic life. **8. Margo Williams** "Biopolitics and the Bacillus: Sinophobia in an Epidemic of Bubonic Plague in Sydney, 1900-10" Address: 1664 Columbia Rd NW, Washington, DC 20009 **Abstract:** In 1900, the city of Sydney, Australia was struck by an epidemic of bubonic plague. The epidemic was contemporaneous with significant advances in bacteriological methods and understandings of disease transmission which led the city’s health officials to culture and study the bacillus, quarantine vessels from international ports, and stockpile doses of the 1894 Haffkine plague vaccine. However, theories and intervention strategies surrounding plague’s etiology and transmission remained murky, with much dissent within the global scientific community concerning human-human transmission. As well, as this paper explores, Sydney’s public health response to the 1900 plague epidemic was informed by, and informed, racialized conceptions of disease which implicated Chinese people and spaces as pathogenic catalysts for the spread of plague. This essay explores the ways Chinese bodies featured as the primary targets of public health interventions in Sydney but, conversely, were deemed irrelevant to epidemiological analyses compiled in the report by the city’s chief medical officer, John Ashburton Thompson. Thanks to Thompson’s report, Sydney’s 1900 epidemic became an internationally cited case study supporting the zoonotic transmission of plague from fleas to rats and humans. However, analyses of local news coverage and photographic records of sanitation efforts responding to the epidemic reveal the ways culpability, in both public and scientific discourse, was also assigned with race, class, and national identity in mind. Bringing together discussions of nascent biomedical technologies and methods in epidemiology with discourse surrounding national identity at the turn of the 20th century, this work aims to highlight the dangerous ramifications of the ways the politics of race are configured in the politics of disease. **9. Katherine McLeod** "The Call of the Hoatzin: Ecology, Evolution, and Eugenics at the Bronx Zoo" Address: 412 Bainbridge St. Unit E, Philadelphia, PA **Abstract**: From 1908 to 1922, the Curator of Birds at the New York Zoological Park, William Beebe, repeatedly tried—and failed—to bring a bird called the hoatzin from its watery habitat in British Guiana (now Guyana) to the zoo in the Bronx run by the New York Zoological Society. Beebe was convinced that hoatzin, if properly cared for and displayed, would reveal scientific truths to him and the zoo-going public about the evolutionary origins of birds and winged flight. While contemporary scholarship about zoo science in the United States has focused on how animal husbandry and environmental conservation shaped the scientific practices of zoos at the turn to the twentieth century, Beebe’s scientific goals with hoatzin show that evolutionary theory and ecology were central issues at the Bronx Zoo. Further, the reaction of the Bronx Zoo’s administration, led by Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, to Beebe’s ecologically oriented project reveals that there were two camps competing to determine what the science of the Bronx Zoo would be, both of which hinged on how to engage evolutionary theory, but to very different ends. Beebe wanted to use zoo displays to conduct research into evolutionary ethology and ecology. Grant and Osborn were less interested in experimentation, and instead invested in using the Bronx Zoo as a place to educate the public about rigid taxonomic categories and species hierarchies in ways that supported their political goals outside the zoo—namely restrictive immigration reform, eugenics, and the preservation of nature in the United States. Whereas Beebe saw his scientific practice as dependent on messy multi-species connections, Grant and Osborn stressed a narrative of purity and separation (of species and race) that ultimately determined the scientific functionality of the Bronx Zoo. **3:15-4:15pm** **Session 4: Microbes, Megafauna, and Gender** **10. Meg Perret** "Why Do Pandas Have So Little Sex?”: Scientific Representations of Giant Panda Reproduction in Zoo Captive Breeding Programs, 1985-2020" Address: History of Science & Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Harvard University **Abstract**: Giant pandas are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity. Captive breeding programs have sought to improve the reproductive success of captive giant pandas by using assisted reproductive technologies, administering Viagra to the pandas, showing the pandas pornography, and arranging panda “speed dating.” This talk analyzes the history of scientific research on captive panda reproduction in captive breeding programs between 1985 and 2020 conducted by conservation biologists in the U.S. and China. Between 1985 and 2015, scientists characterized male aggression towards females or low male libido as the primary causes of poor reproductive outcomes. Then, following a series of studies conducted by researchers at the San Diego Zoo, scientists instead emphasized the issue of mate compatibility in determining captive breeding outcomes between 2015 and 2020. Using methods from feminist theory, this talk examines the influence of cultural norms of gender and sexuality on the history of representations of captive panda reproduction. While previous scholars have analyzed panda exhibitions in zoos, this is the one of the first studies of representations of panda reproduction in scientific research, popular scientific magazines, and documentary film. This case study has implications for understanding how representations of endangered species are entangled with narratives about the future of human gender and sexuality. This talk contributes to debates in animal studies, zoo history, history of science, feminist theory, and extinction studies. **11. Caitlin Kossmann** “I have contributed to science because twice I have quit my job as a wife:” On the pedagogy and reluctant feminism of Lynn Margulis" Address: History of Science and Medicine, Yale University **Abstract:** In several interviews and presentations, controversial microbiologist and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis recounted having “twice quit her job as a wife”—although never as a mother—in favor of her scientific work. Firmly rejecting the idea that she was a role model for “having it all,” Margulis emphasized the impossibility of fulfilling the traditional woman’s role as keeper of children and household while simultaneously pursuing science. She argued for better child care and equal pay, and took care to mentor female students both personally and professionally. But this is not to say that Margulis identified as a feminist—quite, the opposite, in fact. Nor was her choice of science over husbands an indication that sexual and romantic relationships were unimportant to her. From the paradoxes of Lynn Margulis’s relationship to women’s rights and feminism, this paper illuminates the fundamental role of gender in Margulis’s scientific work and her conceptions of scientific community. While her work has been framed as both feminist[\[1\]](#_ftn1) and queer,[\[2\]](#_ftn2) Margulis’s thought and practice resist easy categorization under either term. Taking a wider view of her research alongside her personal relationships, personal writings, and pedagogical efforts, however, not only reveals what might be understood as queer or feminist principles in her science, but also how her lived experiences impacted her resistance to a gendered analysis of her work. This paper analyzes Margulis’s personal and professional letters, fiction, and poetry alongside the scientific papers and letters to the editor surrounding her work on microbial evolution and the Gaia hypothesis. In so doing, this paper provides new insights into the dynamics of biological professionalization and the politics of the international scientific community in the late twentieth century. Combining gender studies with the study of scientific norms and communities, this paper provides a model for updating theories of scientific communities and for bridging insights of history and philosophy of science with gender studies and (queer and feminist) science studies. **4:30-5:00pm** **Special Session on Museums** John Durant Address: MIT “Invisible Biology” **Abstract:** For museums, classical biology is displayed with relative ease: witness the fossils, bones, skins, whole organisms, and even entire habitats that populate natural history museums worldwide. But the 20th century transition to cells and molecules has rendered modern biology increasingly invisible in museums. Some possible responses to this challenge will be illustrated with examples drawn from the new MIT Museum, which is due to open to the public in October 2022. --- [\[1\]](/file:///C:/Users/guarente/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/CKF0TBPS/JASBio%20%20Abstracts.docx#_ftnref1) Evelyn Fox Keller, “From Individual to Community: The Scientific Journey of Lynn Margulis,” *New Scientist*, July 3, 1986, 46-50. [\[2\]](/file:///C:/Users/guarente/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/CKF0TBPS/JASBio%20%20Abstracts.docx#_ftnref2) Donna Haraway, *Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene*, Duke University Press, 2016.