In this episode of Perspectives, we sit down with Audra Wolfe to discuss her book, Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. In Freedom's Laboratory, Dr. Wolfe examines the relationship between science, politics, and governance in the United States during the Cold War, highlighting the ways in which scientists, policymakers, and administrators defined and thought about concepts such as "scientific freedom" and "Western science." She examines the role of scientists in American cultural diplomacy after World War II, at a time when United States propaganda promoted a vision of science as empirical, objective, and international. This view of science was often contrasted with a representation of Soviet science as politically motivated and nationalistic. 

Dr. Wolfe adds to our knowledge of how science and propaganda, psychology and diplomacy, interacted with one another and were deployed on both sides during the Cold War. Weaving diplomatic history with the history of science, Wolfe's book demonstrates the powerful and controversial uses and abuses of science during the Cold War.

Audra Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian. She is the author of two books on science and the Cold War, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America and Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can follow her on Twitter as @ColdWarScience and subscribe to her newsletter at Never Just Science dot substack dot com. 

For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/112

Audra Wolfe — Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science

In this recording, historian Warwick Anderson discusses his investigations into the development of "race science" in the Global South and the fabrication of whiteness as a "strategy of authority."

Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. As an historian of science, medicine and public health, Dr. Anderson's work has focused on ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the United States. 

In this episode of our podcast series on race and science, Anderson discusses the differences between how "race science" was practiced in the Global South and how it was practiced in North America and Europe. He notes that theories about race—and thus the practices of "race science"—were often more malleable and flexible in the Southern Hemisphere, as opposed to the more rigid racial typologies and hardline eugenics that characterized the United States and Western Europe. In addition, following the work of James Baldwin and Homi Bhabha, Anderson notes how whiteness has been used as a "strategy of authority" for colonial settlers rather than as a robust identity, a fact he illustrates through his research on race in Australia and the Philippines. 

To listen to other installments in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/101

Warwick Anderson on Race and Science

Stephen Kenny scrutinizes the career of surgeon Rudolph Matas, the so-called "father of vascular surgery." Kenny demonstrates how his life and work must be understood in the context of segregation in the U.S. South and the racialized medicine that was practiced there in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also highlights the ways in which Matas used medical photography to legitimate an ideologically driven racialized research agenda. 

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on "Race Science" and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101

Stephen Kenny on Race and Science

To view Professor Hansen's images and for more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/118.

Join Professor Bert Hansen as he discusses a number of popular images of American medicine from the late nineteenth century that he has donated to Yale's Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. In this presentation, Professor Hansen shows us what medicine looked like and how it was experienced by the public at that time. 

Professor Hansen's images use medicine to satirize the politics of the day, often showing politicians, political parties or mascots as sickly and in need of care. These illustrations depict the changing character of medicine and how it was interpreted by journalists, cartoonists, and the reading public in the late nineteenth century.

Dr. Hansen's presentation, using images he has collected over decades and which are now part of The Bert Hansen Collection at Yale's Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, reveals the transformation of medicine and its evolving public reception through lively and fascinating mass media cartoons and illustrations.

Bert Hansen has been teaching the history of science and medicine, after earning his PhD from Princeton University in 1974, at Binghamton University, the University of Toronto, New York University, and Baruch College of the City University of New York. He has published two books and numerous articles about medical and scientific developments from the 14th century through the 20th and about the imagery and popular attitudes that surround them. He has also written about gay history. His most recent scholarship examines the significance of Louis Pasteur's engagement with the fine arts. For more, see https://berthansen.com.

"Overlooked Images of Medicine" in America's New Mass Media of the Late 19th Century

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Abraham Gibson, author of Feral Animals in the American South: An Evolutionary History.

In his book, Abe Gibson tells the broader social and environmental history of the Southern United States by focusing on the domestication and subsequent ferality of dogs, horses, and pigs over the past three hundred years. Gibson discusses the co-evolution of humans and domesticated animals both in ancient history and the more recent history of the United States, and highlights how and why the open range in the U.S. South lasted longer than in other parts of the United States. Dr. Gibson uses the differential experiences of feral horses, dogs, and pigs to explore broader themes of commerce, sport, environment, and politics in Southern history from the colonial to the modern era. 

This podcast features a number of questions for Dr. Gibson from Simon Joseph, a former staff member of the Consortium who currently works in the offices of the American Philosophical Society.

Abraham Gibson was a 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Abraham Gibson is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He teaches courses on the history of science, technology, engineering, medicine, and the environment, and his research examines topics such as the domestication of animals, the evolution of cooperation, and the relationship between technology and society.

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Abraham Gibson, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, April 30, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/119.

Abe Gibson — Feral Animals in the American South

In light of India's ongoing struggle with COVID-19 and its devastating impacts, we revisit our conversation with Kavita Sivaramakrishnan from June 30, 2020. Dr. Sivaramakrishnan discusses public engagement and political history in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in India.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at:
www.chstm.org/video/74

From the Archives — Kavita Sivaramakrishnan on COVID-19

Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know is available now on Netflix, or go to https://www.blackholefilm.com and click on the Watch button at the top for more options. 

What can black holes teach us about the boundaries of knowledge? These holes in spacetime are the darkest objects and the brightest—the simplest and the most complex. With unprecedented access, Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know follows two powerhouse collaborations. Stephen Hawking anchors one, striving to show that black holes do not annihilate the past. Another group, working in the world’s highest altitude observatories, creates an earth-sized telescope to capture the first-ever image of a black hole. Interwoven with other dimensions of exploring black holes, these stories bring us to the pinnacle of humanity’s quest to understand the universe.

In the video above, historians of science Lorraine Daston and Simon Schaffer join Peter Galison for a roundtable discussion about the film, its scientific, philosophical and artistic content, and the choices Peter made as director. Afterwards, Peter answers questions about the film from friends of the Consortium. 

To cite this content, please use footnote:

"Behind the Scenes: Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know," Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, accessed Month Day, Year, https://www.chstm.org/video/120.

Behind the Scenes: Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know

In light of the current global vaccination campaign against COVID-19 and the struggles to increase vaccine acceptance and ensure vaccine compliance, we revisit our Trust in Science: Vaccines forum from January 2019.

What are the historical roots of resistance to vaccination? What is the data about contemporary attitudes? How do these attitudes relate to changing social, economic and political contexts? How do these issues play out in the relationship between a doctor and a patient? Listen to experts share their research and experience on these questions, and lead our discussion.

"Trust in Science: Vaccines" is the first event in a series inspired by Perceptions of Science in America, a report from the Public Face of Science Initiative at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

From the Archives — Trust in Science: Vaccines

Held in partnership with the American Philosophical Society, this discussion brings together historians Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi to discuss the fascinating world of the mind sciences in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time period, the human mind captured the imagination of the American public. Efforts to reveal the subconscious and to understand mental physiology inspired the creation of new technologies, modes of experimentation, and collaborations that aspired to make visible the inner workings of the brain. These developments had a profound impact on the production of scientific and medical expertise that continues to influence conceptions of race, gender, and mental illness in the present. 

Dr. Thompson focuses on the history of phrenology, exploring its connection to popular and elite theories of criminality. As she explains both in her presentation and in her book An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America, phrenology constructed scientific ways of identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions - ways which often recruited and justified folk notions and stereotypes of what criminals looked like and how they acted.

Dr. Puglionesi recounts how and why psychologists and others interested in the mind investigated seances, clairvoyance, and telepathy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some researchers were interested in debunking frauds and con artists, most were interested in reconciling the mind sciences with the supernormal. Dr. Puglionesi's book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, tells this history and highlights the ways in which psychical research troubled the boundaries of science and its relationship to democracy and popular ways of experiencing the world.

To cite this content, please use footnote:

"Sciences of the Mind," Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, accessed Month Day, Year, https://www.chstm.org/video/121.

Sciences Of The Mind with Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi

Direct-to-consumer genetic testing has been in the news this week with the recent IPO of 23andMe. Thus, we are revisiting our forum from September 2017 on biobanking, genetics, and the competing interests of individuals, businesses, and society in the collection and use of genetic samples. 
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Are we now approaching a time when we could all live, at least in freezers, forever? Modern collection and storage of biological samples make possible a kind of "immortality" for anyone who has ever had a saliva sample frozen for genealogical testing or a blood sample stored in medical collections. New technologies, like CRISPR for gene editing, expand possible future uses of biological materials stored around the world. The story of Henrietta Lacks, popularized in a book by Rebecca Skloot and an HBO special starring Oprah Winfrey, illustrates the ways that a single person's cells and tissues can take on lives of their own as research material. In 1953, just before her death, Lacks's cancer cells yielded the oldest and most common human cell line still used in research.

There has been significant public interest in her remarkable story, but the "immortality" of people like Henrietta Lacks raises pressing questions for all of us. Who owns and controls bodily materials extracted from research subjects and patients? Who can profit from the cells and genes that make us who we are? How do we weigh the value of personal privacy and an individual’s sense of self against the potential for medical progress? How do imbalances of wealth and power influence questions of consent, exploitation, and identity for people who provide biological materials? These questions framed a public forum organized by the Consortium and hosted by the American Philosophical Society on September 28, 2017.

Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at:
www.chstm.org/video/51

From the Archives — Immortal Life: The Promises and Perils of Biobanking and the Genetic Archive

If you've watch television or listened to the radio lately, you've probably been bombarded with direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Join us as we revisit our forum from October 2018 on the interplay between medicine and advertising, capitalism and consumerism.
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Why do we refer to patients as "consumers" in the United States? Is today's opioid crisis the result of medical consumerism run amok--of pills hawked like soap to gullible shoppers? Is picking a doctor really like choosing a new car?

In this talk, historians Nancy Tomes and David Herzberg discuss when and why patients started to be called "consumers," and examine the positive and negative aspects of twentieth-century medical "consumerism." We explore a century of efforts to deliver pharmaceutical relief through properly calibrated markets, and evaluate the risks (and often-misunderstood benefits) of governing addictive drugs as consumer goods.

Find this presentation and further resources on the Consortium's website at:
www.chstm.org/video/57

From the Archives — Shopping for Health: Medicine and Markets in America

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Alberto Martínez, author of Burned Alive: Giordano Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition.

In his book, Alberto Martínez reevaluates the life, career, and death of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and cosmologist burned alive by the Catholic Inquisition in Rome in 1600. Martínez demonstrates that it was not his heterodox religious beliefs that led to his condemnation, but instead his visionary scientific beliefs—that the Earth moves, and that there are many worlds other than our own—that led to his demise. Dr. Martínez discusses the contrasting ways in which Bruno and Galileo were dealt with by the Inquisition, and shows how they drew upon the insights of prior thinkers to inform their own views about the heavens and the earth. He ends by discussing the immense power the Catholic Church has had over the construction of knowledge, and how it influences our collective memory of people like Giordano Bruno. 

Alberto Martínez is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

This podcast features a number of questions for Dr. Martínez from Lisa Nocks, a historian at the IEEE History Center, and from Vivion Vinson, a retired nurse. 

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Alberto Martínez, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, July 27, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/123.

Alberto Martínez — Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo, and the Inquisition

Join Dr. Rachel Walker as she recounts how reading a curious passage in the Anglo-African Magazine, which she found in the archives of the Library Company of Philadelphia, led to her research on race and science in early America, and more specifically, the nineteenth-century sciences of phrenology and physiognomy. 

Professor Walker uses images from the archives of member institutions such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library to illustrate how phrenology and physiognomy were used by both scientists and laypeople in the nineteenth century. Although we often rightly associate these techniques with pseudo-scientific ways of supporting racist and sexist social hierarchies, Dr. Walker shows us how Black scientists and laypeople also used these sciences to forward their own assertions of Black excellence and genius. 

Dr. Walker shows us how scientists and the many Americans who read and talked about phrenology and physiognomy used facial angles, head shapes, and other measurements of the face and skull to make judgments and predictions about friends, family members, strangers, business partners, and ultimately, entire groups of people. She emphasizes the need to understand these practices—even though we now reject them as pseudo-sciences—because they tell us a lot about how nineteenth-century individuals understood their social world and the people with whom they interacted on a daily basis.

Rachel Walker specializes in the history of gender, race, and popular science in early America. She is currently working on her first book project, which uncovers the history of physiognomy: a once-popular but now-discredited science, rooted in the idea that people's facial beauty reveals their moral and mental character. In 2018, Dr. Walker received her PhD from the University of Maryland in College Park.

Race & Popular Science in Early America

What's that smell? Join us as we revisit our interview with Melanie Kiechle on the history of cities, senses and public health.

This episode of our podcast series features Melanie Kiechle's book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America. The book illuminates the lives of 19th-century Americans—including medical experts and ordinary city-dwellers—who used their noses to detect and address sanitation challenges associated with foul odors in the midst of rapid urban and industrial growth.

Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at:
www.chstm.org/video/62

Replay—Melanie Kiechle's Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Neeraja Sankaran, author of A Tale of Two Viruses: Parallels in the Research Trajectories of Tumor and Bacterial Viruses. 

In her book, Neeraja Sankaran compares the research trajectories of two groups of viruses: cancer-causing viruses and bacteriophages, which infect and live at the expense of bacteria. She discusses how their respective discoveries—in 1911 by Peyton Rous and 1916 by Felix d'Herelle—changed our understanding of what viruses are, how they operate, and what they are capable of doing in animal and human bodies. Dr. Sankaran discusses the ways in which the phenomenal development of biomedical imaging and identification technologies in the middle decades of the 20th century allowed for our current understanding of what viruses are and how they are able to infect host cells. She ends her discussion with a poignant and timely call to recognize that stigmas of all kinds—whether against certain groups of people, or against viruses themselves as potential agents of disease—have often hindered the development of science and medicine, and that the worst effects of global epidemics (e.g., the AIDS epidemic, as well as COVID-19) may have been mitigated had the stigma surrounding those infected, and the viruses themselves, not existed.

Neeraja Sankaran is Senior Research Scholar at the Descartes Centre of Utrecht University. She is a historian of science and medicine interested in the recent and near-contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, and has worked on the history of virus research, molecular biology, immunology, and origins of life research.

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Neeraja Sankaran, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, August 30, 2021, www.chstm.org/video/122.

Neeraja Sankaran — A Tale of Two Viruses

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Teasel Muir-Harmony, author of Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo.

In her book, Teasel Muir-Harmony discusses Project Apollo and the successful mission of landing humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. Dr. Muir-Harmony discusses the ways in which fears about Sputnik and the Soviet space program were either downplayed or amplified by politicians such as Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson in order to advance their political aims. She recounts how the goal of sending humans to the Moon was a foreign relations response to the loss of American prestige following Yuri Gagarin's historic spaceflight and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Muir-Harmony demonstrates that Project Apollo was primarily an international diplomacy endeavor to try to bring newly-independent and developing nations into America's "orbit" that had secondary effects of advancing technological development and inspiring millions to dream of going to space.

Teasel Muir-Harmony is a historian of science and technology and curator of the Apollo Spacecraft Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Teasel Muir-Harmony, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 3, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/126.

Teasel Muir-Harmony — Operation Moonglow

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Lucas Richert, author of Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture.

In his book, Lucas Richert discusses the impact of the countercultural movement on the theory and practice of psychiatry in the late 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Richert argues that broader societal developments—e.g., the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the Vietnam War—pushed a large number of psychiatrists and mental health workers to radically reform the discipline. Psychiatrists and psychologists such as R.D. Laing, Claude Steiner, Phyllis Chesler, and Mike Michaelson all labored to improve mental health by identifying and critiquing the power dynamics involved in both the practice of therapy and society at-large. Richert ends with a fascinating and timely discussion on the use of psychedelic drugs in psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s, and the ways in which mind-altering pharmaceuticals are making their way back into the heart of the field in the 21st century after decades of prohibition. 

Lucas Richert is Associate Professor and George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Lucas Richert, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/127.

Lucas Richert — Break On Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Eric Hintz, author of American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D.

In his book, Eric Hintz describes how American independent inventors continued to innovate after the so-called "Golden Era of Invention" of the mid-to-late 19th century. Hintz argues that, while the first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of corporate R&D that internalized invention within large firms, independent inventors such as Chester Carlson, Samuel Ruben, and others continued to develop important technologies outside of the corporate structure. However, large firms did not always compete or try to do away with independent inventors; indeed, they often collaborated with independent inventors when they could not produce useful or profitable technologies in-house. Hintz discusses the importance of the American patent system for the viability of invention, and notes the ways in which women and African-American inventors were able to use the patent system to not only profit from their creations, but also bolster their arguments for equal rights. Dr. Hintz ends by noting that the independent inventor is still alive and well in American society in the 21st century, especially in the areas of computing and biotechnology. 

Eric Hintz is a historian with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

For more information on our ever-growing library of podcasts, videos, and essays on the history of science, technology and medicine, please visit:
www.chstm.org/perspectives

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Eric Hintz, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, September 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/128.

Eric Hintz — American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D

With the virtual joint meeting of the History of Science Society and Society for the History of Technology coming up next month, join us as we revisit our September 2020 discussion with Jan Golinski, Tom Misa, and AAHM President Keith Wailoo as they talk about the challenges of the present moment and what the future holds for their organizations. 

They address the organizations' new initiatives, the roles of young scholars in the Societies, the limits and opportunities of virtual meetings, inclusion and diversity in the profession, and the current jobs crisis.

To find helpful resources related to this presentation, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/104

Replay—Presidents of HSS, SHOT, and AAHM (September 2020)

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Douglas O'Reagan, author of Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War.

In his book, Douglas O'Reagan discusses the Allied effort to appropriate German science, technology, and industrial capability during and after World War II. As O'Reagan explains, Germany's longstanding reputation for scientific and technological excellence, beginning in the nineteenth century, was bolstered by the waves of German-Jewish émigré scientists fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, the Allies were fearful of the potential technological capabilities of the Nazis and were determined to learn from and exploit that knowledge as much as possible during and after the war.

However, the United States and the United Kingdom came to realize that, despite collecting copious and detailed notes on German science, technology, and industry and writing highly detailed reports on their findings, they were often missing the "know-how" that came with actual on-the-job or in-the-lab training. The French, seemingly more aware of the importance of tacit knowledge and the context in which work gets done (and also interested in surveilling the Germans lest they try to rebuild their military apparatus after the war) embedded students in laboratories and factories in order to learn from German experts in real world conditions. The French efforts to learn from German science and technology proved fruitful, whereas the Americans and British found their own reports relatively ineffective. 

O'Reagan's book, detailing the largest-scale effort at technology transfer in world history, is a subtle and elegant story about the importance of tacit knowledge and situational context for knowledge creation, told from the perspectives of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union in their attempts to take Nazi technology and science.

Douglas O'Reagan is a historian of technology, industry, and national security, and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a 2012 to 2013 Dissertation Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Douglas O'Reagan, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, November 8, 2021, www.chstm.org/video/129.

Douglas O'Reagan — Taking Nazi Technology

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Emily Merchant, author of Building the Population Bomb. 

In her book, Dr. Merchant explores the history of population growth modeling and the intellectual and ideological battles over the concept of overpopulation. The author describes the battle between the so-called mercantilist position—held by a number of statisticians, among others—which held that population growth was the driver of national economic development and geopolitical strength, and the Malthusian position (named after noted economist Thomas Robert Malthus)—held by quite a few biologists and natural scientists—that saw rapid population growth as a harbinger of poverty, famine, and ecological collapse. The publication of the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich made overpopulation a cause célèbre in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, as Dr. Merchant makes clear, those fears did not come to fruition, and many of the problems that were blamed on overpopulation would more accurately have been ascribed to colonial and postcolonial economic relationships, and the maldistribution of global resources.

Emily Merchant is a historian of science and technology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Merchant was a 2012-2013 Dissertation Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology & Medicine. 

To cite this podcast, please use footnote:

Emily Merchant, interview, Perspectives, Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, November 9, 2021, https://www.chstm.org/video/130.

Emily Merchant — Building the Population Bomb

Andy Evans discusses the history of "race science" in Germany before the Nazi takeover in 1933. Evans describes how Germany's nineteenth-century liberal anthropological tradition transmogrified into a hierarchical and racist "science" in the early part of the twentieth century. 

Andy Evans is Associate Professor of History at SUNY New Paltz, and is the author of, among other works, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.

Find this podcast and others in the Consortium's series on race science and scientific racism at:
www.chstm.org/video/101

Andy Evans on Race and Science in Germany

How do we reconcile the positives and negatives of scientific and technological development? Join us in revisiting our interview with Susan Lindee, author of Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War.

In Rational Fog, Susan Lindee explores the way that science, technology and medicine were transformed by the military establishment and defense funding. She discusses how thousands of scientists, engineers, and physicians justified creating technologies of war, or instead rebelled against the use of science for such pursuits. As Dr. Lindee reminds us, scores of scientific societies have defended science as a uniquely positive endeavor dedicated to the "welfare of mankind," all while their members have pursuit chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons research for the purposes of human injury and death.

M. Susan Lindee is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Replay—Susan Lindee's Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War

Elena Conis examines how we use history, especially of the polio epidemics, when we discuss the COVID-19 pandemic.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at:
https://www.chstm.org/video/74

Elena Conis on COVID-19

Nancy Tomes reflects on the experience of being a historian of medicine during the COVID-19 epidemic, and interdisciplinary efforts to respond to the outbreak.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at:
https://www.chstm.org/video/74

Nancy Tomes on COVID-19

Kathryn Olivarius recounts how epidemics have exacerbated social and economical inequalities.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on COVID-19 at:
https://www.chstm.org/video/74

Kathryn Olivarius on COVID-19

In this episode, we talk with Joseph Martin, author of Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter. 

Joseph Martin tells the story of how solid state physics challenged and redefined some of the core ideals of American physics, and in the process played an essential role in sustaining the prestige physics enjoyed in Cold War American society.

Find this podcast and further resources on the Consortium's website at:
https://www.chstm.org/video/88

Joseph Martin — Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter

Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines how scientific articulations of human diversity have been used to both legitimize and confront notions of race and racism in the modern world. 

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101

Sebastian Gil-Riano on Race and Science

Rana Hogarth talks about how white physicians "medicalized" blackness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how African-Americans pushed back against this endeavor.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at: www.chstm.org/video/101

Rana Hogarth on Race and Science

Elise Burton discusses the development of genetics, "race science," and race concepts in the Middle East. Dr. Burton sketches the connections between European, North American, and Middle Eastern scientists, and elaborates upon how contemporary issues (such as COVID-19) are influenced by ideas of genetic nationalism.

Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on Race Science and Scientific Racism at:
www.chstm.org/video/101

Elise Burton on Race and Science

A new public events series from the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine brings historical perspective to contemporary issues and concerns.

In the public forums, historians and other specialists speak about culturally relevant topics in front of a live audience at Consortium member institutions. Forum subjects range from medical consumerism to public trust in science and technology. Videos of these events are also available at chstm.org.

In podcast episodes, authors of new books in the history of science, technology, and medicine respond to questions from readers with a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise. These conversations illuminate the utility and relevance of the past in light of current events.

Perspectives on Sci Tech Med

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