Forum for the History of Science in America Prize
Year 2000 Book Prize Winner:
Nicolas Rasmussen's
Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation
of Biology in America, 1940-1960
On behalf of the
Forum for the History of Science in America, I am happy to announce that
the Forum's Book Prize for 2000 has been awarded to Nicolas Rasmussen
for his book, Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation
of Biology in America, 1940-1960, published by Stanford University
Press in 1997 in the series, Writing Science, edited by Timothy
Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
To quote from
the prize citation:
"At the end of
the twentieth century, it is fitting to award the Forum prize for a book
that portrays a discipline that in many ways epitomizes the issues of
twentieth-century American science.
Dr. Rasmussen's book--and his own interest in history and philosophy of
science--grew directly out of his own experience working in biology labs.
His longstanding curiosity about the ways "the practical rituals" of experimental
protocols and routines arose and were passed along found a focus when
he was trained as an electron microscopist. The early technology and use
of the electron microscope had, as a result of World War II, been concentrated
in just a few institutions in the United States and Canada; and it was
recent enough that many of its founding scientists were still alive and
eager to talk.
Picture Control
asks, "How [does] our knowledge depend on our technology?" To address
the question, Rasmussen weaves together a chronicle of the development
of a new scientific tool, a sociology of the individuals, institutions,
and communities that embraced it, a study of the new scientific information
it provided, and, above all, an analysis of the epistemological problems
of interpreting those new images and facts.
To mention just
one of many examples, Rasmussen describes and illustrates with micrographs
how Keith Porter, at the Rockefeller Institute in the late 1940s and early
1950s, persuaded himself and his colleagues that the endoplasm of cells--a
featureless "ground substance" under the light microscope--really did
have the complex structure that the electron microscope revealed. Though
much of the book necessarily deals with technical details, Rasmussen's
clear, often witty account makes it easy for even non-biologists to follow
the thread of the narrative and the argument.
Picture Control is a rich, ambitious work which both
illuminates a key innovation of twentieth-century biology and offers its
own methodological innovations for the study of technology, technique,
and scientific discovery."
In 2001, the prize will be awarded for an outstanding article;
in 2002, for a book.
For details about eligibility and nominations, please get
in touch with the 2001 committee chair, Dr. Clark A. Elliott, "Clark A.
Elliott" claelliott@earthlink.net.
Karen Reeds
Forum 2000 Prize committee chair
16 April 2001 | Contact
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