Holiday & Introductory Course August 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Adam Kuper, Amy Dahan, Andrew Warwick, Anthony Grafton, C. S. Lewis, Daniel Greenberg, Edward Appleton, Jack Morrell, James Secord, Jan Golinski, John Gascoigne, John Hedley Brooke, Martin Rudwick, Neil Morgan, Noel Coley, Peter Bowler, Peter Dear, Robert Olby
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I am going to be doing some traveling for the next couple of weeks, and so there are likely to be no new posts in that time. In other news, starting in October, I will be teaching a year-long introduction to the history of science course here at Imperial. I’ve included a tentative lecture schedule and reading list below the fold. This isn’t set in stone yet, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
Preliminary Survey: Literature on Agricultural Research to 1945 November 19, 2010
Posted by Will Thomas in Technocracy in the UK.Tags: Abigail Woods, Alfred Daniel Hall, Barbara Kimmelman, Bernd Gausemeier, Berris Charnley, Christophe Bonneuil, Colin J. Holmes, David F. Smith, Deborah Fitzgerald, Edith Rebecca Saunders, Edward John Russell, Gilles Denis, Gregor Mendel, Jean-Luc Mayaud, John Boyd Orr, John Winnifrith, Jonathan Harwood, Justus Liebig, Karin Matchett, Keith Vernon, Louis Pasteur, Margaret Rossiter, Marsha Richmond, Neil F. McCann, Paolo Palladino, Paul Brassley, R. A. Fisher, Robert Olby, Susanne Heim, Thomas Wieland, Tiago Saraiva, Timothy DeJager, William Bateson
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The importance of agricultural research in the intellectual history of science should be self-evident. Justus Liebig (1803-1873) was a key figure in both the development of laboratory methodology and agricultural science. Gregor Mendel’s (1822-1884) famous experiments were in plant breeding. Louis Pasteur’s (1822-1895) most celebrated work was on the cattle disease, anthrax. William Bateson (1861-1926), who coined the term genetics, was the first director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution in London, 1910-1926. Statistician, geneticist, and eugenics proponent R. A. Fisher (1890-1962) was employed by the Rothamsted Experimental Station, 1919 to 1933 (and temporarily relocated there from 1939 to 1943). Interwar and postwar virologists and molecular biologists did a great deal of work on the economically destructive tobacco mosaic virus.
In these examples, problems of agriculture form a motivating context for contributions to biology, statistics, and other fields. The history of agricultural research itself remains somewhat difficult to discern, even though it apparently constitutes a long, sizable tradition. We do have some enumeration of accomplishments in research and technique, written in retrospect by practitioners. For the case of the UK, the following resources are available:
Ether Wave Propaganda 