ABSTRACT The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted (...) numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans—experiments publicized by post–Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere. (shrink)

Bergmann’s rule and Allen’s rule played important roles in mid-twentieth century discussions of adaptation, variation, and geographical distribution. Although inherited from the nineteenth-century natural history tradition these rules gained significance during the consolidation of the modern synthesis as evolutionary theorists focused attention on populations as units of evolution. For systematists, the rules provided a compelling rationale for identifying geographical races or subspecies, a function that was also picked up by some physical anthropologists. More generally, the rules provided strong evidence for (...) adaptation by natural selection. Supporters of the rules tacitly, or often explicitly, assumed that the clines described by the rules reflected adaptations for thermoregulation. This assumption was challenged by the physiologists Laurence Irving and Per Scholander based on their arctic research conducted after World War II. Their critique spurred a controversy played out in a series of articles in Evolution, in Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, and in the writings of other prominent evolutionary biologists and physical anthropologists. Considering this episode highlights the complexity and ambiguity of important biological concepts such as adaptation, homeostasis, and self-regulation. It also demonstrates how different disciplinary orientations and styles of scientific research influenced evolutionary explanations, and the consequent difficulties of constructing a truly synthetic evolutionary biology in the decades immediately following World War II. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted (...) numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans—experiments publicized by post–Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere. (shrink)

From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers ...

Often the truth value of a scientific claim is dependent on our faith that laboratory experiments can model nature. When the nature that you are modelling is something as large as the tallest terrestrial mountain on earth, and as mysterious as the reaction of the human body to the highest point on the earth's surface, mapping between laboratory and ‘real world’ is a tricky process. The so-called ‘death zone’ of Mount Everest is a liminal space; a change in weather could (...) make the difference between a survivable mountaintop and a site where the human respiratory system cannot maintain basic biological functions. Predicting what would happen to the first human beings to climb that high was therefore literally a matter of life or death – here inaccurate models could kill. Consequently, high-altitude respiratory physiology has prioritized not the laboratory, but the field. A holistic, environmentally situated sort of science used a range of expertise to prove the laboratory wrong time after time. In so doing, Everest was constructed paradoxically both as a unique field site which needed to be studied in vivo, and as a ‘natural laboratory’ which could produce generalizable knowledge about the human body. (shrink)

On Wednesday 27 April 1898, Dr Luigi [Louis] Westenra Sambon addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London on a topic of much interest to the Victorian public. An Anglo-French medical graduate of the University of Naples, a Fellow of the London Zoological Society and a recent visitor to Central Africa, he was well equipped to tackle the subject of the ‘Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands’. The ‘problem of tropical colonization’, he began, ‘is one of the most important and pressing (...) with which European states have to deal. Civilization has favoured unlimited multiplication, and thereby intensified that struggle for existence the limitation of which seemed to be its very object…I know full well that the question of emigration is beset with a variety of moral, social, political, and economic difficulties; but it is the law of nature, and civilization has no better remedy for the evils caused by overcrowding.’Even from these introductory remarks, it is already plain that Sambon's project was a compound product of medical diagnosis, colonial imperative, Darwinian demography and moral evaluation. And it is the rhetorical zone roughly marked out by this quadrilateral of disease, empire, struggle and virtue that I want to explore here. First, however, it will be instructive to return to that afternoon a century ago and spend a little more time listening in on the deliberations. (shrink)