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  1. The organism strikes back: Chlorella algae and their impact on photosynthesis research, 1920s–1960s.Kärin Nickelsen - 2017 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39 (2).
    Historians and philosophers of twentieth-century life sciences have demonstrated that the choice of experimental organism can profoundly influence research fields, in ways that sometimes undermined the scientists’ original intentions. The present paper aims to enrich and broaden the scope of this literature by analysing the career of unicellular green algae of the genus Chlorella. They were introduced for the study of photosynthesis in 1919 by the German cell physiologist Otto H. Warburg, and they became the favourite research objects in this (...)
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  • “The awe in which biologists hold physicists”: Frits Went’s first phytotron at Caltech, and an experimental definition of the biological environment.David P. D. Munns - 2014 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (2):209-231.
    After Darwin, experimental biology sought to unravel organisms. By the early twentieth century, organisms were broadly conceived as the product of their heredity and their environment. Much historical work has explored the scientific attack on the genotype, particularly through the new science of genetics. This article explores the tandem efforts to assert experimental control over the environment in which plants grew and developed. The case described here concerns the creation of the first phytotron at Caltech by botanist and plant physiologist (...)
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  • The instability of field experiments: building an experimental research tradition on the rocky seashores.Jean-Baptiste Grodwohl, Franco Porto & Charbel N. El-Hani - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3):45.
    In many experimental sciences, like particle physics or molecular biology, the proper place for establishing facts is the laboratory. In the sciences of population biology, however, the laboratory is often seen as a poor approximation of what occurs in nature. Results obtained in the field are usually more convincing. This raises special problems: it is much more difficult to obtain stable, repeatable results in the field, where environmental conditions vary out of the experimenter’s control, than in the laboratory. We examine (...)
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  • Working across species down on the farm: Howard S. Liddell and the development of comparative psychopathology, c. 1923–1962.Robert G. W. Kirk & Edmund Ramsden - 2018 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (1):24.
    Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell “Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior (...)
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  • Demarcating Nature, Defining Ecology: Creating a Rationale for the Study of Nature’s “Primitive Conditions”.S. Andrew Inkpen - 2017 - Perspectives on Science 25 (3):355-392.
    The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue for (...)
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  • The resisted rise of randomisation in experimental design: British agricultural science, c.1910–1930.Dominic Berry - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (3):242-260.
    The most conspicuous form of agricultural experiment is the field trial, and within the history of such trials, the arrival of the randomised control trial is considered revolutionary. Originating with R.A. Fisher within British agricultural science in the 1920s and 30s, the RCT has since become one of the most prodigiously used experimental techniques throughout the natural and social sciences. Philosophers of science have already scrutinised the epistemological uniqueness of RCTs, undermining their status as the ‘gold standard’ in experimental design. (...)
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  • Labs in the Field? Rocky Mountain Biological Stations in the Early Twentieth Century.Jeremy Vetter - 2012 - Journal of the History of Biology 45 (4):587 - 611.
    Biological field stations proliferated in the Rocky Mountains region of the western United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay examines these Rocky Mountain field stations as hybrid lab-field sites from the perspective of the field side of the dichotomy: as field sites with raised walls rather than as laboratories whose walls with the natural world have been lowered. Not only were these field stations transformed to be more like laboratories, but they were also embedded within (...)
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  • The phytotronist and the phenotype: Plant physiology, Big Science, and a Cold War biology of the whole plant.David P. D. Munns - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 50:29-40.
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