2009 History of Science Society Prize CitationsSource: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 610-614Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657173 .

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2009 HISTORY OF SCIENCE SOCIETY PRIZE CITATIONS

NATHAN REINGOLD PRIZE

The Nathan Reingold Prize, established to rec-ognize standout work by a graduate student, isawarded to Rachel N. Mason Dentinger for herarticle “Molecularizing Plant Compounds, Evo-lutionizing Insect–Plant Relationships: GottfriedS. Fraenkel and the Physiological Study of In-sect Feeding in the 1950s.” This is a fascinatingand remarkable paper that highlights how newperspectives on biological phenomena emergedin the twentieth century at the juncture betweenmolecular biology and evolutionary biology.The Prize Committee members considered it anintellectually rich paper, strongly archival andprimary source based, and written in a clear andengaging style.

The organizing principle of the paper is thatscientific interest in the chemical relations be-tween insects and plants was revived in themid-twentieth century as part of the new biolog-ical frameworks, methods, and goals arisingfrom both molecularization and the evolutionarysynthesis. The paper chronicles how the for-merly unremarkable chemicals of plants weretransformed through these new research pro-grams into, first, the specific molecular agents ofbiological activity and, second, the results of anevolutionary past.

One of the main characters of the story isGottfried Samuel Fraenkel (1901–1984), a Ger-man immigrant who initially worked in Jerusa-lem and London. In 1948 Fraenkel joined theDepartment of Entomology at the University ofIllinois, where he received support from theRockefeller Foundation. Fraenkel’s work on in-sect physiology, nutrition, and plant host selec-tion became increasingly “molecular” and cre-ated the basis for the emergence, in the 1960s, ofcoevolutionary studies of plants and insects. Thepaper also describes the role played in this pro-cess by other scientists, such as Vincent G. De-thier, a prominent American insect physiologist,and Reginald H. Painter, a professor of entomol-ogy at Kansas State University, illustrating howFraenkel was part of a broader scientific move-ment. Throughout the paper, extensive detailconcerning these entomologists’ work is consis-tently placed within the context of more generalarguments of broad interest to historians of sci-ence.

One of the most intriguing of these argumentsis that Fraenkel’s work calls into question theinterpretation of the “molecularization” of thelife sciences as a reductionist trend. The author

argues that Fraenkel’s work “illustrates how thenew molecular paradigm, considered by mosthistorians of biology to epitomize the powerof reductionism in twentieth-century biology,could be both fully embraced and also sub-verted: molecules became central to biology, butthey were also tools, used in service to the studyof the evolution of higher-level interactions be-tween distantly related species.” We found con-vincing the author’s claim that the paperprovides “not only a history of the early foun-dations of coevolutionary studies, but . . . also acase study of the dialectical interplay betweenanalysis and synthesis in the twentieth-centurylife sciences.”

The conclusion—with ambitious but compel-ling insight—links the findings and ideas of theauthor to old and new problems central to thehistory of science, including the relationship be-tween applied and basic science, the influence ofwartime objectives and humanitarian concernson scientific research, the importance of socialgoals in the development of experimentalism,the role of international meetings, and thesources of patronage for twentieth-century sci-ence. In sum, this paper suggests that our field iscapable of producing new approaches and ofcreating new avenues for research. Many histo-rians of the life sciences will find the claimsinteresting, promising, or debatable. But we be-lieve that in both drawing on and critiquingrecent interpretations of twentieth-century biol-ogy, the paper illustrates how the history ofscience is also subject to a constant interplaybetween analysis and synthesis—an interplaythat, in our field, can be highly productive.

MARCOS CUETO (Chair)DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI

KRISTIN JOHNSON

DEREK PRICE/ROD WEBSTER AWARD

The 2009 Price/Webster Prize Committee enthu-siastically and unanimously awards this year’sprize to Angela N. H. Creager and Gregory J.Morgan for their article “After the Double Helix:Rosalind Franklin’s Research on Tobacco mosaicvirus” (Isis, 2008, 99:239–272). Creager and Mor-gan’s article is exemplary in operating at multiplelevels. Most accessibly, they document RosalindFranklin’s speculative theorizing and collaborativescientific work, countering the image of the cau-tious and overly sensitive “Rosy” of JamesWatson’s memoir and fleshing out her character asa scientist. Their technical close study of the role

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of TMV in the development of knowledge aboutviruses and its intertwining with models of nu-cleic acids broadens and deepens our under-standing of the intellectual history of molecularbiology. Their attention to the personal, mate-rial, and institutional aspects of this work suc-ceeds in offering a compelling new interpreta-tion of scientific cooperation and competition inthe emerging international community of molec-ular biology.

SACHIKO KUSUKAWA (Chair)LYNN K. NYHART

BENJAMIN ELMAN

JOSEPH H. HAZEN PRIZE

The Joseph H. Hazen Prize Committee of the His-tory of Science Society is proud to award the 2009prize to Frederick Gregory, Professor of History ofScience at the University of Florida. ProfessorGregory’s distinguished accomplishments as aneducator in history of science range across a re-markably broad range of media, including not justconventional lectures, seminars, textbooks, andweb resources but also film, television, DVDs, andtheatrical role-play. Through these energetic activ-ities, his rich insights from history of science in allperiods have inspired many high school teachersand their students, as well as undergraduates, grad-uate students, scientists, and the general public. Itis difficult to think of any other educator in ourfield who has been able to cultivate such a highlevel of expertise in communicating history ofscience across such diverse audiences, and withsuch a consistently enthralling effect. For example,after his precollegiate lectures, Florida seventhgraders have surrounded Professor Gregory—ap-parently unwilling to let him leave the buildinguntil all their questions have been answered. Andas one of Professor Gregory’s graduate studentsrecalled, “I will always consider Dr. Gregory to benot only my intellectual mentor but one of mymost important role models for teaching.”

GRAEME GOODAY (Chair)MURIEL BLAISDELL

FRITZ DAVIS

MARGARET W. ROSSITER HISTORY

OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE PRIZE

Monica Green’s Making Women’s Medicine Mas-culine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)stands out among this year’s Rossiter Prize entriesfor the clarity, originality, and significance of hermain argument as well as the scope of her re-search. The book takes a threadbare romantic story

about the rise of modern medicine and replaces itwith a complex, carefully documented, and com-pelling historical study. Green is not denying the“masculinization” of women’s medicine but hasrewritten the “before” and “after” pictures, thechronology, and the factors at work. The emphasison literacy, rather than institutions such as theuniversity or licensing per se, made it possible todistinguish gender from other exclusionary princi-ples. We were impressed by the expertise, erudi-tion, and analytical power of the author. Accessi-bly written, the book is a major contribution to thehistorical study of gender and medical science andpractice.

IDA STAMHUIS (Chair)JOAN CADDEN

ZUOYUE WANG

WATSON DAVIS AND HELEN MILES

DAVIS PRIZE

Charles Seife’s fascinating, engagingly worded,and insightfully illustrated book, Sun in a Bot-tle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Sci-ence of Wishful Thinking (New York: Viking,2008), is the culmination of years of research,reporting, and interviewing scientists who wereengaged in the international quest after WorldWar II to produce energy from nuclear fusion incontrolled experiments. At every stage, new the-oretical analyses and new machines fueled thewishful thinking that success would be achievedperhaps a decade in the future, leading to acheckered history that included two irreproduc-ible claims that cold fusion could be produced intabletop experiments. Seife’s book opens newwindows for students and the general public intothe lives and work of scientists; it is a worthywinner of the 2009 Watson Davis and HelenMiles Davis Prize.

Charles Seife is Professor of Journalism atNew York University. He received an M.S. de-gree in mathematics from Yale University, wasformerly a journalist with Science magazine, haswritten for several other science magazines, andis the author of three earlier books for the gen-eral public.

ROGER H. STUEWER (Chair)EDWARD J. LARSON

KENNETH R. MANNING

PFIZER PRIZE

The Pfizer Prize was awarded to Harold J. Cookfor Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine,and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007).

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This magnificent book makes a powerful ar-gument for the interrelationships of commerceand science in the early modern period. Cookmaintains that the energetic exploration and me-ticulous description of natural objects were hall-marks of Dutch science in the late sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, reflecting a commercialculture that valued travel, curiosity, honesty,clarity of expression, and a detailed knowledgeof things. “When such values began to reorientnatural philosophy,” he proposes, “somethingrecognizably like modern science emerged.” Hispersuasive argument suggests that new ways ofknowing reflected a Dutch commercial societybased on long-distance sea-borne trade and thatan appreciation for material objects broughtwith it an interest in the meticulous observationand description of those objects—literally, anew “objectivity.”

In making a case for the role of commerce inthe coalescence of a new science, Cook revisitsand revivifies problems that have long been cen-tral to our field. His general argument for theimportance of commerce bears similarities tothose advanced many decades ago by Marxistssuch as Hessen and Bernal and by the sociolo-gists Merton and Zilsel, although Cook’s supplereasoning and exhaustive study of evidencehave no parallel in those earlier works. Whilereaffirming Merton’s association of science andthe commercial life of the seventeenth century,Cook challenges the other, more famous, themethat emerged from Merton’s work, the linkagebetween science and Puritanism. While con-scious of the classical and humanist influenceson early modern science, Cook plainly seesmore immediate and worldly concerns as givingthe enterprise momentum, a hands-on style,

standards of expression, and criteria for success.Cook’s extensive treatment of Descartes (1596–1650), who spent twenty years in the Nether-lands, emphasizes the philosopher’s later workon the passions and the close connections of thatwork to Dutch empirical and materialist tradi-tions.

Cook also rescues scores of second- andthird-tier naturalists from obscurity, giving themfaces and voices and thereby situating more fa-miliar figures, such as Descartes, Beeckman,and Boerhaave, in a much richer context. Likethe Dutch empire, Cook’s reach is global, and hedevelops a richly contextualized picture of ac-tivities involving medicine and natural history inthe Dutch East Indies and in other locations farfrom Amsterdam. He shows readers how theDutch inventoried the natural products of theirgrowing empire; how they interacted with Jap-anese, Chinese, and Malayan healers; and howthey developed collections, herbaria, and gar-dens to make the natural products of far-flungtrading posts accessible to scholars at home. Healso shows by a mass of empirical evidence thatthe fields of natural history were created bynumerous people in diverse places around theworld, rather than by a few elite Europeans.Cook’s book, in short, is exemplary both forchallenging us to think anew about early modernscience and for bringing readers a wealth ofempirical detail about one of its key centers. Heshows that the new science of natural historywas fundamentally global, a lesson with far-reaching consequences for our historical under-standing of science.

SUSAN LINDEE (Chair)JOHN SERVOS

PAMELA LONG

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SARTON MEDAL

As everyone in this room will know, the SartonMedal is the most prestigious award of the His-tory of Science Society, given annually since1955 to an outstanding historian of science se-lected from an international pool. The recipientof this year’s Sarton Medal is my friend, one-time colleague, and dissertation advisor JohnMurdoch, who is also Professor of the History ofScience at Harvard University.

John Murdoch entered the history of scienceprofession by a way that is now quite uncom-mon, at least in the United States. His Ph.D.,awarded in 1957, was in the field of philosophyrather than in history or in the history of science.The thesis was an edition of the fourteenth-century scholastic Thomas Bradwardine’s workon the continuum, with a philosophical intro-duction by John. This dissertation led to a three-year position in Harvard’s History of ScienceDepartment, followed by an equally abbreviatedstint at Princeton and then a return to Harvard

that has so far lasted for forty-seven years.John’s scholarship, produced in a steady streamover these years, has always been marked by itsclose attention to the written text—be it inLatin, Greek, or some other language, by itsuncommon focus on intellectual rigor, and by itsunwillingness to shy away from difficult pri-mary material. Although John’s way of doingthings is in some respects closer to the currentmodus operandi of classicists and historians ofphilosophy than to the methods of most histori-ans of science today, I would argue that there isno better way to get inside the heads of premod-ern scientific writers. Moreover, at a time whenhistory and philosophy of science is reassertingitself as an integrated field, John’s approach maypoint the way to a fruitful interaction betweenthose trained in history and those whose school-ing is in the field of philosophy.

A further consequence of John Murdoch’sphilosophical background appears in his favored

At the 2009 HSS meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, William Newman presents John Murdoch with acopy of Evidence and Interpretation in Studies on Early Science and Medicine: Essays in Honor ofJohn E. Murdoch, edited by Edith Sylla and William R. Newman. Photo courtesy of Sage Ross.

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form of publication—the learned essay. Johnhas published well over sixty essays on variousaspects of ancient and medieval science duringhis career, and they are required reading foranyone with an interest in premodern science. Iparticularly recommend the brilliant 1978 articlecowritten with Edith Sylla and called “The Sci-ence of Motion,” which serves as the single bestintroduction that I know of to medieval physicalscience. But this is not the only side of Murdoch’sscholarship. His Album of Science, published in1984, remains the most valuable collection oflearned medieval iconography available today.With images ranging from Guido of Arezzo’s fa-mous musical hand to schematic trees depictingthe divisions of licit and demonic magic, the Al-bum of Science provides a remarkable record ofancient and medieval culture across the board.

John’s seemingly universal command of me-dieval learning would almost make him qualifyfor the moniker “Renaissance Man,” if that didnot verge on being a term of abuse for a medi-evalist. However that may be, the very diversityof thesis topics among his former students tes-

tifies to the surprisingly broad range of John’sinterests—or at least to his tolerance. In a word,John has advised theses on subjects as diverse asJesuit science among the Chinese, the interac-tion of Roman Imperial science and religion,and, dare I say it, medieval alchemy. It wouldtake far too long for me to list all of John’sformer graduate students and those who oweother intellectual debts to him. A representa-tive—but by no means exhaustive—sampling ofthem may be found among the sixteen authorsappearing in the Festschrift published by Brillthis year to celebrate John’s eightieth birthday. Ihope it will not be presumptuous if I offer acollective “thanks” to John on behalf of all thoseformer students, colleagues, and beneficiaries ofhis exceptional scholarly gifts and of his per-sonal, as well as intellectual, generosity.

WILLLIAM NEWMAN

Department of History and Philosophy ofScience

Indiana UniversityBloomington, Indiana 47405

ErrataKristie Macrakis’s name was misspelled in her Notes on Contributors entryin the June 2010 issue of Isis. That entry should also have mentioned thatshe is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Isis apologizes forthese errors.

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