Accounts of twentieth-century agricultural industrialization in the United States and beyond often center the production and distribution of commercial F1 hybrid seed as a pivotal development. The commercialization of hybrid corn seed in the 1930s was initially heralded as a science-driven advance in agricultural productivity. However, since the 1970s "hybrid seed" has been linked to many perceived perils attendant on industrialized agriculture, from the undermining of farmers' independence to the diminishment of crop genetic diversity to the consolidation of corporate control over the global food system. First grouped with the semidwarf varieties of the Green Revolution to emblematize capital- and chemical-intensive agriculture, hybrids are today often lumped together with genetically modified (GM) varieties for much the same reason. This essay revisits the scholarship that helped produce this understanding of hybrid seed. It explores how and why the singular history of hybrid corn inflected understandings of crop breeding and seed production in general, contributing to lasting confusion about the promises and pitfalls of distinct approaches to crop development and the nature of hybrid seed.

This essay tells the story of the "Danysz virus," a bacterial culture that was designed and deployed to cause epidemics among rodents and was sold globally by the Institut Pasteur from 1900. Jean Danysz (1860-1928) initially identified the culture during his studies of epidemics in population cycles of common voles. His experiments turned to the ambitious goal of increasing the bacteria's virulence by emulating the rodent's animal economy in the laboratory in order to mass-produce a culture. The bacterial culture was supposed to bring about a man-made epidemic for sale on the global pest- and plague-control market. The essay considers the Danysz virus as a "cognitive good" and analyzes the material as well as intellectual transfers that shaped its development, supported its international application, and prompted the experimental testing of its promises. While the culture largely failed to bring about the exponential growth of lethal infections in rat populations Danysz promised, the virus did succeed in distributing his theoretical revision of virulence. Through its commercial distribution, his product recast virulence as a function of the relation between bacteria and their milieu and offered a novel concept of mutual pathogenicity that far exceeded deterministic models of infection prevalent at the time.

The debate about the superiority of ancient versus modern culture, known as the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, also found expression in conflicting positions about the developing mathematical methods of natural philosophy. Isaac Newton explicitly referred to the authority of Euclidean geometry as a justification for the conservative form of the proofs in his Principia Mathematica, where he avoided the use of analytic geometry and infinitesimal calculus, the central innovations of seventeenth-century mathematics, as much as possible. Rather, he modeled his proofs, just like the overall structure of the treatise, as closely as possible on Euclid’s geometry. A century later, however, Joseph-Louis Lagrange announced in the introduction to his Mechanique Analytique that no geometrical diagrams would be found there and that Newtonian mechanics was presented exclusively in the form of analytic equations. This essay analyzes the relationship of this radical change in the theoretical methodology of mechanics to the actors’ ideas about ancient science and its authority. It also discusses the consequent development of a conception of ancient science as distinct from modern science and the relation of this conception to a history of science in our contemporary sense.

This essay investigates a hitherto-unexamined collaboration between two of the founders of modern history of science, Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, and two economists, Paul Samuelson and Rupert Maclaurin. The arena in which these two disciplines came together was the Bowman Committee, one of the committees that prepared material for Vannevar Bush’s Science—The Endless Frontier. The essay shows how their collaboration helped to shape the committee’s recommendations, in which different models of science confronted each other. It then shows how, despite this success, the basis for long-term collaboration of economists and historians of science disappeared, because the resulting linear model of science and technology separated the study of scientific and economic progress into noncommunicating boxes .

In the late nineteenth century, Argentine intellectual elites turned to world’s fairs as a place to contest myths of Latin American racial inferiority and produce counternarratives of Argentine whiteness and modernity. This essay examines Argentine anthropological displays at three expositions between 1878 and 1892 to elucidate the mechanisms and reception of these projects. Florentino Ameghino, Francisco Moreno, and others worked deliberately and in conjunction with political authorities to erase the indigenous tribes from the national identity, even while using their bodies and products to create prehistory and garner intellectual legitimacy. Comparison of the three fairs also demonstrates how the representation of Amer-Indians and their artifacts shifted in accordance with local political needs and evolving international theories of anthropogenesis. The resulting analysis argues for the importance of considering the former colonies of the Global South in understanding the development of pre-twentieth-century anthropology and world’s fairs, particularly when separating them from their imperial context.

The United States Patent Office of the 1850s offers a rare opportunity to analyze the early gendering of science. In its crowded rooms, would-be scientists shared a workplace with women earning equal pay for equal work. Scientific men worked as patent examiners, claiming this new occupation as scientific in opposition to those seeking to separate science and technology. At the same time, in an unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, female clerks were hired to work alongside male clerks. This article examines the controversies surrounding these workers through the lens of manners and deportment. In the unique context of a workplace combining scientific men and working ladies, office behavior revealed the deep assumption that the emerging American scientist was male and middle class.

“Practice” has become a ubiquitous term in the history of science, and yet historians have not always reflected on its philosophical import and in particular on its potential connections with ethics. This essay draws on the work of the virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre to develop a theory of “communal practices” and explore how such an approach can inform the history of science, including allegations about the corruption of science by wealth or power, consideration of scientific ethics or “moral economies,” the role of values in science, the ethical distinctiveness (or not) of scientific vocations, and the relationship between history of science and the practice of science itself.

This essay takes seventeenth-century Stockholm as its point of departure in discussing the many spaces to which early modern medicine belonged, in particular the court, the cityscape, the site of the pharmacy, and the city’s Collegium Medicum. It shows how scholarly medicine and pharmacy arose along with the city itself. They were a part of the city and of its many interlaced local, European, and global flows and relationships. Thus the essay offers new perspectives on medicine as part of, and a driving force behind, Stockholm’s transition from a medieval town to the capital of an early modern state, as well as the city’s integration into the early modern system of global trade. It also shows how a switch of perspective may relocate pharmacy to the center of the seventeenth-century medical world. By focusing on the city, rather than on specific professional groups, the essay seeks to problematize the alleged special importance of physicians for early modern medicine and the view that physicians held a superior status in relation to other medical practitioners, as well as to artisans/craftsmen.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, at its headquarters in the City of London, the Honourable East India Company established a new museum and library. By midcentury this museum would contain one of Europe’s most extensive collections of the natural history, arts, and sciences of Asia. This essay uses the early history of the company’s museum, focusing in particular on its natural history collections, to explore the material relationship between scientific practice and the imperial political economy. Much of the collections had been gathered in the wake of military campaigns, trade missions, or administrative surveys. Once specimens and reports arrived in Leadenhall Street and passed through the museum storage areas, this plunder would become the stuff of science, going on to feed the growth of disciplines, societies, and projects in Britain and beyond. In this way, the East India Company was integral to the information and communication infrastructures within which many sciences then operated. Collections-based disciplines and societies flourished in this period; their growth, it is argued, was coextensive with administrative and political economic change at institutions like the East India Company. The essay first explores the company’s practices and patterns of collecting and then considers the consequences of this accumulation for aspects of scientific practice—particularly the growth of scientific societies—in both London and Calcutta.

Thoroughly a product of imperial Russia’s aristocratic culture, the mineralogist and geochemist Aleksandr Fersman rose to the top of the country’s scientific establishment after the Bolsheviks took control. He then remained a staunch supporter of various industrial projects through much of the Stalinist period. This essay puts Fersman’s thinking about the natural world in conversation with a quite distinctive mode of intellectual inquiry that developed contemporaneously. Eurasianism was a philosophical doctrine of a group of Russian émigrés who emphasized Russia’s unique status straddling Europe and Asia. While Fersman did not belong to this group of thinkers, a number of his ideas drew on specific experiences in the environments of the Eurasian landmass. Indeed, the article argues that Fersman’s dualistic understanding of nature, his advocacy for the field of geochemistry, his definition of deserts, and a scheme he proposed for industrial operations owed much to the Eurasian settings of the science he practiced. Furthermore, this case of a Eurasian mineralogist illuminates novel aspects of the interplay between national and global sciences.

The history of Orthodoxy and science invites contrasts with other religious traditions. In contradistinction to the Latin West, for example, Eastern Orthodoxy throughout its history embraced the “pagan” scientific achievements of ancient Greece. Also unlike in the West, where ecclesiastical institutions often supported scientific activities, scholars in the East—in both the Byzantine and Ottoman periods— relied primarily on temporal sources to sustain their investigations of nature. Islam, with its strenuous resistance to any assimilation of the human to the divine, provides another contrasting example, as does the later Protestant justification for science grounded in the need to restore a fallen world through the application of experimental research. Not surprisingly, Eastern Orthodox believers seem to have paid little attention to non-Christian faiths, with the exception of Islam and Judaism, until well into the twentieth century.

This essay offers an overview of the history of the relations between science and Eastern Christianity based on Greek-language sources. The civilizations concerned are the Byzantine Empire, the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire, and modern Greece, as a case study of a national state. Beginning with the Greek Church Fathers, the essay investigates the ideas of theologians and scholars on nature. Neoplatonism, the theological debates of Iconoclasm and Hesychasm, the proposed union of the Eastern and Western Churches, and the complex relations with the Hellenic past all had notable impacts on the conception of science held by the Byzantine Orthodox. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the Christian Orthodox world did not actively participate in the making of the new science that was developing in modern Europe. It had to deal with the assimilation of scientific ideas produced by Western Christianity, and its main concern was the “legitimacy” of knowledge that did not originate directly from its own spiritual tradition. Finally, with regard to the Greek state, beyond the specific points of contact between the sciences and Orthodox Christianity—pertaining, for example, to materialism, evolution, and the calendar—the essay presents the constant background engagement with religion visible in most public pronouncements of scientists and intellectuals.

In Russia the theme of science and religion found its strongest resonance at the levels of humanistic scholarship and Christianity in general, where visions of harmony dominated and doctrinal and confessional particularity was largely absent. The fraught relations of both the Holy Synod and the Imperial Academy of Sciences with the Russian state since the early eighteenth century had the collateral consequence of minimal institutional contacts between theology and natural philosophy. Though “scientific apologetics” eventually found a place in the seminaries, scientists did not contribute to this scholarship in the nineteenth century. The rare prominent scientist who entertained religious beliefs posited either harmony or conflict in public writings even more rarely, and it is the varieties of religious indifference—not solely Soviet in origin—that invite historical inquiry.

“Science and Orthodox Christianity: An Overview” is an ambitious survey that reminds scholars of science in Islamic societies that the conversation between Islam and science is really a conversation between Islam and science in different contexts and that conversations between Islam and science can be found with less renowned scientific developments such as prophetic medicine. This response points out parallels in how Greek Orthodox and Ottoman Muslim scholars mediated new developments in Western European science and in how both Greek Orthodox and some Ottoman Muslim scholars propounded a mathematical humanism. Finally, it argues that the account of post-1453 scientific exchange is more complex than “Science and Orthodox Christianity” intimates. At the least, if there was no scholarly exchange between Greek Orthodox Christians, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Muslims and Jews—who, in turn, enjoyed scholarly exchange with the West well after 1453—there are clearly two different Easts.

This essay offers a comparative discussion of attitudes to science within Jewish and Christian Orthodoxies. When it touches on the contemporary period, it deals with different varieties of Jewish Orthodoxy rather than the more liberal Jewish denominations. Debates about science and religion, rarely involving active—let alone prominent—scientists, take place within both religious traditions. The issues can be roughly divided in two categories—cognitive and social—even though the two may occasionally intersect. The first category, apparently more important for the Greek Orthodox, addresses issues of the content of research and of its influence on ethics. Social issues constitute the other important aspect of the interaction between religion and modernity: Is it desirable to spend time on anything but religious studies and to engage in modern society at all, lest its more permissive norms and ideas corrupt proper behavior? This aspect seems to preoccupy Jewish Orthodoxy more than Greek Orthodoxy.

This essay considers some of the major theological differences between Eastern and Western traditions of Christianity and puts forward proposals about how these might be related to the divergent trajectories of the formal study of nature in these two cultural contexts. A key difference lies in the “other-worldly” orientation of Eastern Orthodoxy and its emphasis on deification, which contrast sharply with ideas of original sin and fall–redemption theology in the West. These latter ideas came to play a significant role in the rise of Western science, with the sciences being understood as part of a practical redemptive exercise that could help alleviate the material consequences of original sin.

Efthymios Nicolaidis et alii open their essay with what amounts to a paradox: they maintain that Orthodox Christianity “scarcely participated in the making of the new European science” but also quote John William Draper’s positive assessment of the openness of the Orthodox Church to the sciences. Whether they manage to resolve this paradox is unclear. This response to their overview suggests that they neglect two key elements: the categorical difference between medieval scientia and modern science; and the role of institutions such as universities and scientific societies. Furthermore, to gauge the relation of Orthodox Christianity to modern science, one would also have had to take the Russian Orthodox Church into account, as after the fall of Constantinople the Greek Orthodox Church was deprived of much of its political and institutional power.