This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

The history of what we call molecular biology today is not just the story of DNA. Molecular biology emerged from and was supported by a multiplicity of widely scattered, differently embedded, and loosely, if at all connected experimental systems for characterizing living beings to the level of biologically relevant macromolecules. By implementing different modes of technical analysis, these systems created a new space of representation in which the central concepts of molecular biology gradually became articulated. The paper describes the establishment (...) of the rat liverin vitro protein synthesis system of Paul Zamecnik and his group a the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University between 1947 and 1952. Insofar as such systems orient the research activity, they may also prove helpful for the orientation of the historian. Experimental systems „have a life of their own. (shrink)