Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People’s Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the (...) connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People’s Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the (...) connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Phenologists track the seasonal behavior of plants and animals in response to climatic change. During the second half of the twentieth century, phenologists developed a large-scale project to monitor the flowering time of the common lilac across the United States. By the 1960s, this approach offered a potential plant-based indicator of anthropogenic climate change, a biological signal amidst the emerging narrative of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As a tangible representation of changes in climate—warmer temperatures lead to earlier blooming—phenology (...) proved highly legible to scientists, politicians, and laypeople. Yet, as phenology gained broader repute in the 1960s, both in agricultural stations and as a component program of the International Biological Program, it struggled to align itself epistemically with the regnant disciplinary assumptions of mid-century ecology. Operating in the hinterlands between laboratory and field, biology and meteorology, ecological theory and agronomy practice, phenologists challenged prevailing notions of the model organism and what it meant to study biology in the field. Rebranding the discipline as a component of ecosystem modeling, scientists successfully brought phenology within the purview of mainstream ecology. In so doing, however, they obscured its climate-relevant meteorological character and stymied the development of a biological narrative of climate change. (shrink)