Summary Popular science journalism flourished in the 1860s in England, with many new journals being projected. The time was ripe, Victorian men of science believed, for an ?organ of science? to provide a means of communication between specialties, and between men of science and the public. New formats were tried as new purposes emerged. Popular science journalism became less recreational and educational. Editorial commentary and reviewing the progress of science became more important. The analysis here emphasizes those aspects of popular (...) science which have been identified by Frank Turner as ?public science? and by Thomas Gieryn as ?boundary-work?. The religious, intellectual, and utilitarian values claimed for science by editors and contributors in their tasks of persuading the public to support science and of distinguishing science from what they often called ?applied science? are discussed. These values are shown to vary among editors and, for the editors examined here, Shirley Hibberd, Henry Slack, James Samuelson, William Crookes, and Henry Lawson, to differ significantly from those of T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Norman Lockyer, on whom much study of the popularization of science in the 1860s has focused. (shrink)

This paper uses the friendship and collaboration of Edwin Ray Lankester , zoologist, and Herbert George Wells , novelist and journalist, to challenge the current interpretation of late Victorian concern over degeneration as essentially an intellectual movement with little influence in contemporary debates over social and political problems. Degeneration theory provided for Lankester and Wells the basis both for a personal bond and for an active programme of social and educational reform. I trace the construction of Lankester’s account of degeneration, (...) initially as empirical ‘fact’ and later as ideologically inflected theory, and the reciprocal relationship between this theory and his critique of the British university system. I use Wells’s Outline of history to illustrate the profound influence of Lankester’s degenerationist worldview on Wells’s scientific and socio-political thought. Lankester’s synthesis of his theory and his critique led the two men to reject eugenics as an unscientific and ideologically incompatible solution to the problem of national deterioration. Instead, they campaigned for the reform of scientific education as a means of keeping mankind from physical, intellectual and cultural degeneration. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changing social and cultural climates challenged the position of scientists in Western society. Ringer and Harwood have described how scientists reacted by adopting either pragmatist or ‘comprehensive’ styles of thought. In this article, I will show how a group of Dutch intellectuals, including many scientists, came up with an alternative approach to the dilemmas of modernity, and eventually became influential in shaping Dutch society. They combined elements of both styles into what I (...) call a ‘synthetic technocrat’ ideology, a reaction against intellectual and political fragmentation. These ideas were often combined with pleas for educational reform, culminating in a plea for gebildete Tatkraft. I will analyse the development of the synthetic technocrat movement from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s. During this period, the movement became increasingly political in nature, but in a radically different way to comparable movements in other countries, especially Germany. (shrink)

The origin, character, and reception of the Development Act of 1909 are described. Extant evaluations of its historical significance are presented and criticized. It is claimed that the significance of the Act for the promotion of scientific research in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry has been largely overlooked. The way in which the Commissioners of the Act interpreted their brief by establishing scholarships, new research institutes, and developing existing institutes is described.

That science is fundamentally universal has been proclaimed innumerable times. But the precise geographical meaning of this universality has changed historically. This article examines conceptions of scientific internationalism from the Enlightenment to the Cold War, and their varying relations to cosmopolitanism, nationalism, socialism, and ‘the West’. These views are confronted with recent tendencies to cast science as a uniquely European product.

Historians have given much attention to museums and exhibitions as sites for the production and communication of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But few studies have analysed how the activity and participation of visitors was designed and promoted at such locations. Using Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London 1884 as the empirical focal point, this paper explores a new mode of involving exhibition audiences in the late nineteenth century. Its particular form of (...) address is characterized by an ambition to transform the visitors' self-understanding by engaging them with various techniques of scientific observation and representation of social issues. By analysing the didactics of this particular project, I argue that the observational ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and associated modes of representation in this instance became an integrated part of a political vision of self-observation and self-reformation. Thus the exhibit and related projects by Galton not only underpinned a theoretical lesson, but also were part of an effort to extend a complex set of practices among the general public. (shrink)

The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (a scrutiny and information-gathering body) and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (a legislative science (...) and technology advice body). Drawing on official papers, Hansard records and unpublished archival material, this account complements existing studies of the relationships between government ministers and experts. It highlights how individual members of the all-party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee have influenced institutional change. In so doing it exposes some of the challenges confronting Parliament in the scrutiny of science policy from the mid-twentieth century to today. In particular, it reveals MPs’ concerns about their ability to scrutinize science policy in the absence of a select committee on science and technology in the Commons during the 1980s. This shows that parliamentary scrutiny of science was compromised during the very period when the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher set about making major changes to the organization and funding of government-sponsored research in the UK. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the 'transformation of biology' in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as 'equal though different'. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum-more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the 'naturalist' and the 'experimentalist' was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the ‘transformation of biology’ in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and (...) continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as ‘equal though different’. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum—more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘experimentalist’ was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

This paper traces the relationship between the food committees of the Royal Society and government during the First World War, concentrating on the period up to the resignation of Lord Devonport as first Food Controller. It argues that, in the context of a radical public science discourse emanating from some sections of the scientific community and greatly increased contacts between scientists and government, the food scientists of the committees were moved to press for a formalization of the committees' role in (...) food policy. The members constantly manoeuvred to achieve this aim, but also used a network of alternative channels into the heart of the policy process to get their findings translated into hard policy. In doing so, they explicitly rehearsed characteristic 'public science' arguments. In the institutional blur of wartime state-science relations, scientists often got close to the policy-making process. Post-War, the state swiftly moved to clarify the position: science was to be given more money, but was to be specifically blocked by new administrative arrangements embodied in the Haldane Report on the Machinery of Government from having any say in the core areas of general policy, the expert domain of the generalist policy-maker. (shrink)

The measurement of science and technology is now fifty years old. It owes a large part of its existence to the work of the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the centrality of S&T statistics in science studies, it is surprising that no history of the measurement exists in the literature. This article outlines such a history. The history is cast in the light of social statistics. Like social statistics, (...) S&T indicators are produced mainly by governments but differ in a number of aspects. First, they have not been developed to control individuals. Second, they have taken shape from the start at the international level. Third, they reflect a consensus among states and their organizations. This article shows that this specificity is due to the sociopolitics that drives S&T measurement. (shrink)

This article discusses popular and academic debates that turned on the merit of either science or the humanities. The author uses four cases to provide this history: the Huxley-Arnold debate of the 1880s, the science education reformation (and neglect-of-science) debates in Britain in the 1920s, the two-culture debate of the 1960s, and the science wars of recent years. Each of those debates (on one side, at least) sought to establish the supremacy of science for society’s welfare, and the first three (...) (on both sides) necessarily excised interdisciplinary approaches from their proposed solutions. More recently, the science wars have drawn comparison to the two-culture debate, even though this recent skirmish cannot be distinguished from a concern over the effects of interdisciplinary scholarship. The purpose of this article is to trace the relationship of the debates and comment on their role for the future of STS. (shrink)

That the export of Scottish engineers and engineering teachers to Japan in the 1870s aided that country's astonishingly rapid process of modernization from a feudal to a capitalist, industrialized society will not occasion surprise or dissent. As the Japan weekly mail editorialized in 1878: In no direction has Japan symbolised her advance towards assimilation of the civilisation of the Western world more emphatically than in that of applied science.