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Throughout the 16th century, cosmographers, government regulators, and the navigators' guild argued about how best to train the pilots responsible for guiding ships across the ocean, a task of crucial economic importance in early modern Spain. The various ideas proposed for training and licensing reveal huge disagreements about the nature of navigation and the role of science within it. The cosmographers thought of navigation as an application of astronomy and geography. They wanted to teach astronomy to the pilots, and were appalled at the number who could neither read nor perform the calculations necessary to determine latitude astronomically. They agreed that practical experience was necessary, but thought it useless without a theoretical underpinning to explain what the pilots were seeing. The pilots' guild, and individual pilots, emphasized the importance of detailed local knowledge. They wanted to ensure that all candidates were experienced sailors with first-hand experience of all the key ports, and denied that literacy was necessary or even especially desirable. Their suspicion of theoretical knowledge was such that the guild suggested that candidates be examined before attending the required cosmography classes, so that they would not appear to be more knowledgeable than they were. Government officials were gradually persuaded to support the cosmographers, instituting required lectures in cosmography, and eventually choosing a cosmographer over a representative of the pilots' guild to oversee the examinations. In this paper I use these debates, and the different ideas of navigation they indicate, to explain some of the reasons the pilots were so reluctant to change their practices, and the difficulties the cosmographers faced in trying to change navigation from a craft to an applied science.

Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, was the first woman to publish extensively on scientific subjects in English. Her poetry, discourses, and essays present a heterodox materialism more radical than anything espoused by Hobbes or the founders of the Royal Society. As a woman, Cavendish was denied entry to the developing community of natural philosophers in the later half of the seventeenth century. In order to circumvent the constraints on her identity as a serious contemplator of nature, Cavendish attempted to manipulate the rituals of patronage. Through gifts of her books, and the promise of her munificence, Cavendish sought recognition of her status as a natural philosopher from the universities of England, and many of the major thinkers of her time, including Joseph Glanvill, John Pell and Walter Charleton. Those who received her favor had to walk a narrow line between admitting her as a colleague and patron, while disparaging her gender and competency. Cavendish's experience demonstrates quite specifically the role of patronage in the emerging scientific community, and how social conditions limited the role of women in science.

Following in the footsteps of Tycho, Galileo, and Kepler among others, members of the Royal Society of London and of the Academie des Sciences in Paris encouraged significant changes in astronomical instrumentation and observation during the late seventeenth century. Despite such encouragement, however, members of the new societies often disagreed over the validity of knowledge produced with the new instrumentation and the nature of the observations they made possible. Nevertheless, new and improved instruments, techniques, observations, observatories, and the rise of a "community" of astronomical practitioners eventually coalesced to form a new type of disciplinary astronomy. This paper focuses on the role of scientific societies in legitimizing astronomical observation and how the new credibility and authority within the societies led to problems with the acceptance and/or rejection of astronomical instrumentation and observation. The networks of correspondents and the personal interactions of various astronomical practitioners in the late seventeenth century-persons such as Flamsteed, Hooke, Hevelius, Cassini, and Halley-created further problems due to personality conflicts and divergent opinions to the reliability of certain instruments. I show how these networks of correspondents and the personal interactions among these individuals illustrate sociological and epistemological issues that defined both the astronomer and the astronomy of the late seventeenth century.

This paper is concerned with microscopic research on the retina carried out in the second third of the nineteenth century. During this period, various researchers attempted to determine the microscopic structure of this organ. Contrary to what might be expected, these investigations did not lead to a stabilisation of the microscopic object but instead to its destabilisation. I will looks at G. R. Treviranus's (1776-1837) pioneering work on the nerve endings in the retina, and confront it with subsequent incompatible research done by G. G. Valentin (1810-1883), J. Henle (1809-1885) and E. Brucke (1819-1892). These later microscopists revealed the microscopic structure of the object in greater detail, thereby undermining Treviranus's results. They failed, however, to establish any stable account. Hence, I will focus on two questions. Why was the first model of the retina given up so quickly? and, Why was it so difficult to establish a new one? I argue that these difficulties are to be understood in the context of major programmatic disciplinary changes undergone by the life sciences in the 1840s and 1850s. These changes profoundly affected both the overall goals of microscopic anatomy and the way in which microscopic research was carried out.

The course for the glorious and glorified Göttingen development of quantum physics in the 1920s was set in the years before World War I when, after a prelude by Minkowsi, David Hilbert tried to translate a vision of mathematically enhanced natural science into research politics dealing with redirecting time, funds, and positions towards novel fields of quantum and atomic physics. While the Göttingen physics establishment embodied by Woldemar Voight, the Bach cantata directing precision physicist, ordered on thousands of pages crystal properties according to their tensorial character for all his life, Hilbert not only asked his physics assistants to play the latest popular music on his gramophone but was convinced that reduction to simple atomic properties would solve the questions of the structure of matter within a couple of years. A closer look will be taken on Hilbert's instrumental role in the hiring of Peter Debye, whom he called in 1915 the "Newton of chemistry" or rather "molecular physics" and whom he nominated for the Nobel prize for physics in the following two years.

Protozoa were important objects of biological research at the turn of the century. However, the psychological study of single-celled organisms was also an active domain of scientific investigation. The study of the "psychic life" of microorganisms, often referred to as "cellular psychology," was the stage upon which some of the most important issues in the life sciences were debated: vitalism versus mechanism, the evolution of consciousness, the objectification of psychological phenomena, and the disciplinary boundaries between biology and psychology. In this paper we examine the historical circumstances surrounding the appearance and eventual disappearance of microorganisms as valid objects of psychological study, and the impact of these studies upon subsequent developments in psychology. We do so by treating the career of the French psychologist Alfred Binet as indicative of these broader movements. Binet promoted the study of the psychic life of microorganisms as "individual psychology," before turning to his better-known studies of child development and mental testing. We trace the origins of these studies to another lesser-known tradition; proponents of "general physiology" attempted to shift physiological study away from its focus on humans and higher organisms, and to ground the science anew in the study of life's most basic units, cells, making it applicable to all of the living world. Under the influence of Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Preyer, and Max Verworn, general physiology also encompassed the psychological study of the most fundamental forms of life. During this period, researchers such as Karl Möebius, Jacques Loeb, Herbert Spencer Jennings, and Robert Yerkes investigated psychological phenomena in lower organisms. Notions of the uniqueness of the individual, which were established in these studies of microorganisms, were taken up later in developmental psychology and the psychology of personality.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when nuclear energy was seen as the most promising energy solution, twenty-four states challenged the nuclear power establishment by defending in court their right to impose more stringent radiation standards than those of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The operation of the Monticello nuclear power plant sparked a controversy that became a turning point in the civilian nuclear power debate. Concerns about the health effects of low-level radiation from the routine operation of nuclear power plants catapulted onto the national agenda. The Monticello controversy and its aftermath brought enormous pressure to bear on the nuclear power industry and had a deep and long lasting effect on an array of policy issues. Prominent nuclear scientists, John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, became deeply involved in the debate and provoked both the nuclear power establishment and the scientific community. Political pressure and scientific disagreement over the effects of low-level radiation combined to produce a watershed in health physics. The interplay of the Monticello radiation-standards debate and the specialty of health physics, I argue, offers a promising basis on which to elaborate the interaction between politics and science and the production of scientific knowledge.

Ewald Hering's color vision theory of the 1870s is often portrayed as an opponent theory. The assimilation and dissimilation processes Hering postulated as the mechanism of color vision are seen as opponent or mutually exclusive. These processes are taken to explain first and foremost the opponency of the basic color sensations red-green and blue-yellow. The idea is that a given light stimulus can only excite a given process type and its associated sensation but never its opponent process type and its associated sensation. I will demonstrate that Hering's mechanism is not opponent. My demonstration leaves us with a puzzle over the main problem of color vision Hering thought his theory solved and how it solved it. This puzzle is resolved by considering the context of the rivalry between Hering and Hermann von Helmholtz over the explanation of complementary colors. Helmholtz's trichromatic theory assumed white is a byproduct of hues and results from additive mixing in the visual system. Hering argued against this idea of "complementing" hue processes and hypothesized that the color vision mechanism cancels into white. Hering's assimilation and dissimilation processes should thus be seen as canceling color processes. I emphasize the importance of distinguishing canceling from opponent processing even in modern color vision theories such as Hurvich and Jameson's opponent process theory.

Ole Worm was an eager student of iatrochemistry in his youth and studied the subject with the Paracelsian Johan Hartmann as well as the more eclectic chemical physician Gregor Horst. During his student years he traveled a bit, and met in England the physicians Craig and Turquet Mayerne, among others. After returning to Copenhagen and taking a position at the university, Worm publicly attacked the Rosicrucians in an address to the graduating class, and his subsequent publications and private letters reveal a disillusionment with Paracelsian and Helmontian ideas. The secondary literature claims that he never did think much of alchemy, although he remained enthusiastic about chemical drugs. Worm is most widely known today as a collector of natural oddities and artifact s and an avid student of Scandinavia's runic inscriptions and monuments. His collection activity, and the publication that accompanied it, suggest that he favored an openness about nature's "secrets" rather than a more secretive attitude that has been fathered off on the Paracelsians by modern scholars. I propose to peruse Worm's correspondence and some of the primary and secondary sources with an eye toward determining his attitudes toward evidence and issues of privacy, secrecy, and publication associated with them. If time permits, I will attempt to place these in the intellectual and political contexts of Denmark during the first period of Lutheran Orthodoxy and also Worm's extensive communication with correspondents abroad.

In the eighteenth century, two parallel programs of mechanics were pursued in France. One stressed an applied and empirical notion of mechanics as the study of machines and was pursued by artisans, craftspeople, and technicians trained and supported by the French monarchy. The second stressed a more theoretical definition of mechanics as the science of motion in general and used the new science of the differential calculus to lay the foundation of modern physics. The primary practitioners of this more theoretical program were elites located in and around the Paris Academy of Sciences. The negotiation between these two programs that occurred in the first half of the Eighteenth Century reveals a great deal about the social, military, and commercial pressures shaping the development of the physical sciences in France at this time. The Paris Academy of Sciences sat at the institutional crossroads of these struggles, and as an absolutist institution charged with effecting the unity of science in the kingdom, these contests posed real challenges to the institution. In my paper, I want to explore these tensions by focusing on the development of mechanics within the academy of sciences in the early decades of the eighteenth century. What I will show is how the institutional dynamic launched in 1699 with the reform of the royal academy placed these two programs of mechanics in into competition with one another in a new way by placing the academy in a new relationship with both the state and the public at large. Furthermore, I will show how the engagement between the practitioners of these two approaches to mechanics within the crucible of this new institutional dynamic shaped the character of the science produced in France and the status of these two programs within this institutional setting. My paper will conclude by drawing some conclusions about this history in relation to the canonical histories of Newtonian mechanics and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France.

The paper presents an attempt at constructing a typology of multi-institutional collaborations in science, focusing on such arrangements in the physical sciences. It examines the sociological aspects of the emergence, development, and relative success of cooperative arrangements that involve three or more organizations. Data from a long-term study of multi-institutional collaborations are used to typologize inter-organization formations in high-energy physics, space science, geophysics, ground-based astronomy, and a variety of other research fields. Using cluster analysis and qualitative comparative analysis, collaborative projects are characterized along several dimensions: magnitude, composition, organization, centralization and power, participation, communication patterns, inter personal and professional relations, data acquisition, and archival practices.

The Atomic Energy Commission faced a daunting public safety and public relations challenge in 1950: the construction and operation of a nuclear weapons testing program in the continental United States that left surrounding populations both physically protected and psychologically reassured. Planners recognized that the ongoing viability of a continental testing program would require the support of the American people, support that would depend on safe operations as well as a strong public relations effort. Scientists and bureaucrats working for the AEC thus worked to develop a testing and public information program to achieve these goals. By 1954, the results were mixed. While the AEC considered the safety of its testing program to be exemplary, the agency was dissatisfied with the public reaction to radioactive fallout, a reaction that continued to intensify during the latter half of the decade. This paper evaluates the disparity between the operational and public relations elements of the AEC's testing program to illuminate radiation safety-related decision making and risk assessment practices during a critical period in the Cold War. This paper argues that, for radiation safety practices in the atmospheric testing program, public relations served as a salve for epistemological confusion, a plaster used to cover areas of inadequate expertise or inconsistencies in disciplinary interpretation. Public relations was thus held accountable for issues more appropriately related to science and engineering. Those involved with the testing program tended to blame inadequate public relations efforts instead of operational failures or an insufficient understanding of nuclear test- related phenomena at times of crisis or self-reflection. This pattern of blame illustrates the integrative function that public relations played in the testing program those who spoke to outsiders were ultimately responsible, albeit informally, for synthesizing and reconciling the significant differences of opinion that existed with in the expansive and fragmented AEC, and for bridging gaps in existing scientific, technical, and medical knowledge. Based on primary documents and contemporary newspaper accounts of the Nevada atmospheric testing program from the process of selecting a continental test site through the 1957 Plumbbob series, this paper examines the complex decision-making environment surrounding radiation safety during a critical period in the Cold War. The American atmospheric testing program both provoked and was shaped by contested and changing perceptions and reactions among government officials, scientific experts, residents of the American southwest, and national and worldwide public opinion. This process illustrates the difficulties involved in constructing and executing a coherent public safety or public information strategy regarding radiation safety in the 1950s.

In 1883, a new technique for the culture of brewers‰ yeast was introduced at the Carlsberg Brewery by Emil Christian Hansen, the director of the Physiological Department at the Carlsberg Laboratory. Hansen's technique of "pure yeast culture," which consisted of the microscopic isolation of a single yeast cell and its subsequent growth under sterile culture conditions, promised to solve the long-standing brewers‰ problem of diseased or spoiled beer that Hansen believed was caused by the presence of "wild" yeasts in the brewing vessels. While many brewers welcomed this new understanding of pure yeast in the brewing process and were quick to adopt Hansen's technique, others were highly critical. One of the most pointed critiques came from Max Delbrück, a brewing scientist at the Versuchs-und Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin. Delbrück did not dispute the value of pure yeast as a remedy for brewing diseases. What he did oppose the reliance of Hansen's solution on laboratory techniques rather than on traditional brewing skills. As an alternative, Delbrück proposed a "natural" method of pure yeast culture that was more firmly rooted in the brewer's knowledge and craft. The contrasts between Hansen's and Delbrück's methods of pure yeast culture highlight the complex interplay between traditional practices and laboratory-based techniques during a period of increasing industrialization of many artisanal trades.

Grace Pickford (1902-1986) was an important marine biologist and endocrinologist. She received her training in zoology at Cambridge University In 1926, she won a fellowship to South Africa where she did research in limnology and on earthworms. She received a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1931. She did research at Yale's Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory and taught at Yale and at Albertus Magnus College. She became a world expert on deep-sea cephalopods, and was one of the First women biologists to go to sea on a research vessel on a Danish expedition in 1951 women were not allowed on US levy vessels at that time. Pickford changed her research area to comparative endocrinology as a result of fish research she conducted during World War II. Her pioneer experimental research in fish endocrinology for and on the pituitary gland was internationally known. She was finally made a full professor at Yale in 1969. Pickford was also the first wife of G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the most important modern ecologist and limnologist of this century. They worked together on three continents they published their joint research in limnology from South Africa and the United States. Yet Hutchinson's autobiography covering this period of his life completely omits Grace Pickford. Archival material recently made public at Yale reveals Pickford's influence on Hutchinson's important limnological work on the Yale North India Expedition.

A practice of representing nature in a "realistic" or "naturalistic" manner gained momentum around 1400, especially among northern European sculptors and panel painters. This paper argues that this practice constitutes a claim on the part of artisans about their own social status and their mode of viewing nature. We can "read" in their paintings and sculptures a statement about the primacy of nature as well as a claim that the knowledge they gain from their active manipulation of nature is more certain than other types of knowledge. This "artisanal worldview" was then articulated (sometimes in the language of scholars) by individuals liminal between scholar-humanists and practitioners, and thus formed the basis for the central tenets of the new natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus I argue that artisans and practitioners can be regarded as an important source for the view that certainty is located in matter and nature and the knowledge can be gained by observing and experiencing the particularity of nature.

My own experience comes out of co-teaching a full-year course (with a philosopher) to sophomore level Honors students at Emerson College on the subjects of mathematics, the natural sciences, and ethics and values. At the same time, I have also been co-teaching another course (with an environmental scientist) on the subject of genetics and the social implications of science. Prior to this year, I taught one pertinent course at MIT (which Charles Weiner had developed) entitled "American Science: Ethical Conflicts and Political Choices." Unlike MIT, Emerson College has no science majors; so rather than teaching ethics and politics to future scientists and engineers, I am now teaching both ethics and science to pre-professional fine arts, journalism, and visual media majors.

Despite the political tension which accompanied the postwar division of Germany, both East and West Germany shared an interest in maintaining the world-renowned Deutsche Industrie-Normen (German Industrial Norms, or DIN), which led to consultation and co-operation in the German Norms Committee and joint representation at the International Standards Organisation (ISO). By August and September 1961, however, this changed as East Germany withdrew its co-operation and agitated for a separate seat at ISO. The attempt to construct a virtual wall in the area of standards and norms thus coincided precisely with the construction of the Berlin Wall, and had implications for the division of German technological culture, the "Sovietization" of East German science and technology, and the disastrous performance of the East German economy in the area of innovation.

John Lankford's American Astronomy provides a framework for understanding the development of the astronomical profession over an eighty-year period. My remarks will show the ways and extent to which this framework can be used to illustrate the career of Percival Lowell, the subject of my current research. More specifically, I will consider how Lankford's discussion of norms for education, rewards, career directions, etc. can help clarify distinctive and common elements in Lowell's career; problematic aspects of applying the framework as suggested in Lowell's case will also be considered.

University College London Medical School Professor Henry Charlton Bastian was the last well-known public advocate of the theory of spontaneous generation of microorganisms. As such he has been painted by most past historiography as an extraordinary anomaly on the British scientific scene by 1870. However, very little detailed treatment has been given to Bastian's early training and to how he could have arrived at his views on spontaneous generation in the context of Natural Theology-dominated mid-Victorian science. Furthermore, because his chief public opponents, eventually credited with vanquishing Bastian, were the prominent Darwinians T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall, it is widely assumed that Bastian must have had no stature among the "young guard" of evolutionary scientists. By reconstructing Bastian's training, his early research program, and his patrons during the first stage of his scientific career, this paper will show that Bastian was, in fact, one of the most promising young stars among the Darwinians during the 1860s. His interest in spontaneous generation was fully embedded in evolutionary thinking, and during the late 1860s he attracted and spoke for a significant faction among Darwinian sympathizers that thought it plausible that evolution and spontaneous generation were linked.

Through the 1940s and 50s the foremost Indian physicist Sir C. V. Raman was embroiled in a scientific controversy concerning lattice dynamics with Max Born, a leading physicist in Europe. The controversy, which spanned almost two decades, consumed Raman. All his research students were assigned to work on some aspect or the other of crystal spectroscopy and lattice dynamics. Raman dictated the experimental researches of his students who became mere technical conduits for his program rather than critically reflective participants. In this paper, in addition to addressing the cognitive and scientific considerations of the Raman-Born controversy, I discuss briefly, the role of aesthetic, philosophical and cultural constraints on Raman's theories, and the particular cultural and social imperatives that made possible the peculiarities of Raman's laboratory and his style of research.

This paper examines one of the least understood aspects of scientific contact between Japan and "the West" in the late Tokugawa period--the introduction of Western natural history museums into Japan. Due to internal and external pressures, the Tokugawa government pursued contact with Western countries. In 1860, a Japanese delegation was sent to the U. S. to exchange a treaty of amity. While in Washington, D. C., the delegates had a chance to visit the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution. It was officially the first time that Japanese had ever been to Western museums. Drawing upon official reports and personal correspondence, the paper will interpret the mission members' perceptions of Western natural history museums and explain how the experience and reports of the mission affected the establishment and organization of Japan's first natural history museums.

In this paper I analyze the financing of research on multiple sclerosis in the United States from 1919 to 1960. This is a useful case-study for understanding the consequences of the shift from a system of medical research funding dominated by private foundations before World War II to a regime of financing marked by the increased involvement of the federal government after 1945. The Commonwealth Fund (CF) financed research on multiple sclerosis at the New York Neurological institute from 1919 to 1945. Conflict arose between the neurologists and the CF because the neurologists used their grant money in ways not originally proposed. The CF chose researchers based on individual reputation and the judgment of the foundation officer rather than through a system of peer review and competition. This direct financing of individual projects based on what was basically a gentleman's agreement resulted in individual reputation and the judgment of the foundation officer rather than through a system of peer review and competition. This direct financing of individual projects based on what was basically a gentlemen's agreement resulted in individualized and decentralized research. Individual researchers retained the authority for making decisions about the direction research should go and how they should conduct their experiments. In 1946 multiple sclerosis patients formed the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS). They collectively organized and pressured medicine, the government, and society to fund research on their disease. They succeeded in raising large sums of money for research on multiple sclerosis and in persuading the federal government to establish the National Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness (NINDB) in 1950. Through a system of interlocking directorates neurologists as a structured specialty controlled the research dollars of the NMSS and the NINDB. An elite group of neurologists replaced the prewar foundation officer as the key decision makers about which projects would be funded and they replaced the individual researcher in deciding what was a legitimate direction of research. This had the effect of nationalizing the financing, planning, and control of multiple sclerosis research in the United States and also helped to solidify hierarchies in the specialty of neurology in America. This was not due simply to the increased role of the federal government because it was not clear what was public and what was private because of the de facto merging of the voluntary societies with the NINDB. What emerged in the 1950s was a national research conglomerate marked by virtually indistinguishable boundaries between the public and private spheres under the control of an elite group of neurologists.

In 1933, physical anthropologists at the Field Museum of Natural History opened the Races of Mankind, an exhibit devoted to the presentation of naturalized human racial categories, embodied in more than 100 life-size bronze figures, modeled from "life" by Malvina Hoffman. My paper explores how gender was mobilized in the creation of this exhibit, showing the tangled ways masculine and feminine existed in practice and theory for men and women, scientists and artists in this context. The threads of gender that wound throughout the Field Museum project formed contradictory and unexpected combinations. Hoffman, as a woman, encountered resistance, first to entering the highly masculine world of sculpture, and then as a female sculptor faced fears that she would be too temperamental to entrust with such a large project. Hoffman's strategies for negotiating masculinized professional fields varied with circumstances. Often she relied on masculine strategies, stressing her independence, knowledge of her craft, and her skills, but never acknowledged these in gendered terms. She built an extensive social network, including wealthy patrons, parlaying her personality and artistry into professional contacts. While anthropologists at the Field Museum privileged scientifically produced knowledge over other forms, they relied on the intuitive, emotive qualities of art to convey the racial forms and essences to a public untutored in the methods of physical anthropology. The sculptures mobilized a dual authority-the masculinized scientific logic of anthropology and the feminized intuition and artistry of sculpture. Knowledge claims embodied in the sculptures were based on three forms of evidence: the professionally legitimated authority of anthropologists at the Field Museum and around the world who defined racial categories and usually selected appropriate individuals for Hoffman to model, the artist's heightened sensibility through which Hoffman supposedly apprehended racial essences directly, and Hoffman's witnessi ng authentic racial types in situ through her travels. The authenticity of individuals as representative racial types rested in the masculinized authority of professional anthropologists, while the racial qualities of each man and woman were attested to by Hoffman's intuitive apprehension of them and her eyewitness account, embodied in each of her creations.

H. A. Lorentz was an extremely introverted man. Historiographically speaking, this has resulted in a bleak and timeless image of Lorentz as an intellectual. In this paper I aim to add some historical colour to his biography by discussing Lorentz' views on the nature and social meaning of science. Given the paucity of data, I shall do this by comparing Lorentz with some of his more outspoken contemporaries who held views that can be shown to have been similar or dissimilar to his own. I will show that this approach is helpful to obtain a better insight into Lorentz' physics. His views on the nature of science can help to explain his lifelong adherence to the ether concept and his never-ending doubts with regard to Einstein's special theory of relativity. Instrumental in this context is an unpublished letter from Lorentz which shows that he was strongly inclined to accept Fechner's theory of physical monism.

In this talk, I will describe and analyze the cultural, technical and scientific transformations of the meaning of "noise" in 20th-century America. Through out the 19th century, noise was typically defined in contradistinction to "musical" sounds, where "irregularity of vibration" (in contrast to the "regular" vibration of musical tones) was cited as a primary characteristic. In the 20th century, this definition lost its usefulness, as a wider range of sounds came to be defined as noise, and as the nature of musical sound also changed. In the modern city, "noise" became a public health problem, and for some its definition came to be rooted in ideas about the physiological and psychological damage that it was seen to incur. For others, the definition was rooted in the idea of noise as a social problem, and its "wantedness" or "unwantedness" was the primary characteristic. At the same time, in the fields of electrical engineering and communication, noise was defined as an electrical signal which interfered with another, information-carrying signal. Acoustical engineers developed new electro-acoustic tools for measuring sound, and a physical unit for measuring sound and noise-the decibel-was created. The convergence of all these new definitions of noise will be examined by considering the role of acoustical scientists and engineers in the Noise Abatement Campaign of New York City in 1930.

In June 1820, shortly after his father Gia Long's death, Emperor Minh Mang dispatched Jean Marie Despiau to Macau for smallpox vaccine. Although histories of the period imply that Despiau traveled alone, Despiau's own letters indicate that he led a team of 10 Vietnamese physicians to Macao to study vaccination techniques. Despiau was a French doctor who had been one of Gia Long's personal physicians for over twenty years. He was well known by the young Minh Mang and was one of the few Frenchmen at Court who had not opposed Minh Mang's succession to the throne. Minh Mang thus favored Despiau although other Frenchmen were dismissed from Court. Despiau himself was a member of the Nguyen Dynasty Palace Medical Service under Emperors Gia Long and Minh Mang from 1805 to 1824. This paper will examine Despiau's involvement with the Royal Medical Service, his relationship with members of the royal family and the details of the mission he led to Macao for smallpox vaccine.

The conceptual and rhetorical centerpiece of Ivan Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning Lectures on the Work of the Main Digestive Glands (1897) was a series of "characteristic secretory curves" that demonstrated the purposefulness, regularity, and precision of glandular responses to various foods. Presented as the simple empirical products of laboratory experiments, these curves actually represented the end-product of a complex production process involving the choice of a "template dog" for each gland, an assessment of "good" and "bad" experiments (based, in part, upon judgments regarding the animal's psychological constitution and mood), and a series of other interpretive decisions. In this paper I will first describe the different types of interpretive moments in Pavlov's "chronic experiments" and will then examine them in detail by exploring the construction and verification of two key "characteristic curves." I will conclude with some thoughts about the theory and practice of what Pavlov called "physiological thinking."

The Australian biochemist E. C. Slater greatly influenced biochemistry in the Netherlands. An interesting aspect of his work is his vision on the aims of biochemical research and the organization of a research institute. How did this vision develop during the early part of his career and what exactly influenced this vision? It is clear that his ideas changed radically after leaving the Australian Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, where he mostly did applied nutritional research, for the Molteno Institute in Cambridge. Under the guidance of David Keilin he was introduced to the fundamental line of biochemical research, concentrated on the metabolic aspects of cell respiration. He came to the conclusion that the so-called "heroic" phase of nutrition research was over and that further important advances could only be made by a line of fundamental research. Although he planned to return to Australia to run the Australian Institute of Anatomy, cultural opinions about applied and fundamental research in Australia, with which he could not agree, prevented him from doing so. In Amsterdam, however, he found a place for his own research school, where it eventually flourished and gained a formidable reputation in his particular line of research, bioenergetics.