The Leipzig physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–88) is best known for his introduction of psychophysics, an exact, empirical science of the relations between mind and body and a crucial part of nineteenth-century sensory physiology and experimental psychology. Based on an extensive and close reading of Fechner’s diaries, this article considers psychophysics from the vantage of his everyday life, specifically the experience of taking a walk. This experience was not mere fodder for his scientific practice, as backdrop, object, or tool. Rather, on foot, Fechner pursued an investigation of the mind-body parallel to his natural-scientific one; in each domain, he strove to render the mind-body graspable, each in its own idiom, here everyday and there scientific. I give an account of Fechner’s walks as experiences that he both undertook and underwent, that shaped and were shaped by the surrounding everyday cacophony, and that carried a number of competing meanings for Fechner himself; the attendant analysis draws on his major scientific work, Elemente der Psychophysik (1860; Elements of Psychophysics ), as the thick context that renders the walks legible as an everyday investigation. What results are three modes of walking—physiopsychical, interpersonal, and universal—each engaging the mind-body at a different level, as also engaged separately in Elemente ’s three major sections, outer psychophysics, inner psychophysics, and general psychophysics beyond the human. This analysis ultimately leads to a new view of Fechner’s belief in a God who was “omnipresent and conscious in nature” and whom Fechner encountered daily on his walks in the budding of new blooms and rustling of the wind. More broadly, I aim to bring the analysis of everyday experiences as experiences into the historiography of science.

Popularization of science typically follows the lead of scientific research, conveying to lay audiences ideas and discoveries initially published in professional scientific literature and vetted by the expert community. The physicist George Gamow (1904–1968) did not respect this tradition, but promoted some of his most unorthodox scientific hypotheses as funny stories in his popular writings for non-specialists and teenagers, sometimes years before he dared to present them to the purview of academic peers in papers submitted to specialized research journals. Gamow’s proposal of the Big Bang cosmology—the theory that our universe started out in an explosive manner from a superhot and superdense state with thermonuclear reactions forming matter—was discussed by him initially in a series of non-serious articles and books, starting in 1938. Historians of cosmology recognize Gamow’s crucial contribution to the development of the Big Bang theory on the grounds of his subsequent professional publications but have not paid sufficient attention to his popular science writings and their role in changing our conception of the universe.

Despite the restrictions on knowledge and materials of the Anglo-American nuclear monopoly in the early Cold War, Norway and the Netherlands managed to build and operate a joint nuclear reactor by July 1951. They were the first countries to do so after the Great Powers. Their success was largely due to the combination of the strategic materials of heavy water (Norway) and uranium (the Netherlands). Nonetheless, they had to overcome significant political and technical obstacles. In that process a number of specific nuclear secrets played a central role. This case is used to study how and why knowledge circulation was impeded by secrecy. Specifically, I will explore four different secrets that illustrate how the Netherlands and Norway, being outside the British and American secrecy regimes, chafed against those regimes. Knowledge circulation was enabled through relations within networks that were at the same time scientific, diplomatic, and personal. I will identify three main factors that affected the mobility of information: the availability of strategic nuclear materials, the scientists’ individual interactions, and national interests.

The mid-twentieth century Australian fieldwork of Joseph B. Birdsell illustrates, perhaps uniquely, the transition from typological structuring in physical anthropology before World War II to human biology’s increasing interest in the geographical or clinal patterning of genes and commitment to notions of drift and selection. It also shows that some morphological inquiries lingered into the postwar period, as did an attachment to theories of racial migration and hybridization. Birdsell’s intensive and long-term fieldwork among Aboriginal Australians eventually led him to criticize the settler colonialism and white racism that had made possible his expeditions and data collection. Yet he continued to regard Aboriginal communities as “island laboratories” and to treat Aboriginal people as convenient research subjects, distancing himself from their life worlds and experiences of dispossession and exploitation. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

In 1952, a joint Indo-Australian team undertook one of the first genetic studies of the Chenchu people of southern India. Long thought of as one of the oldest populations on the subcontinent and a potential link between South Asian and Aboriginal Australian populations, the study hoped to illuminate the deeper demographic histories of both India and Australia. Coming as it did immediately on the heels of decolonization, it also signaled a new era of scientific collaborations after empire. But what exactly does “collaboration” entail? How far do agendas and imaginations actually cohere in such a “collaboration”? The various collaborating actors in the Chenchu project held very distinctive ideas and agendas. Keeping blood at the center, this article explores those distinctive “bloodworlds” that were mobilized in the course of the Chenchu study. The published text of the study was a potpourri of these different bloodworlds; equally important, however, was the bloodworld this potpourri could not accommodate: the bloodworlds of Chenchu wizards. Not a world engendered in some pure or isolated “tribal culture,” but a magical bloodworld created through historical interactions with Shaivism and Shi’ism. This was a bloodworld eminently recognizable by the Chenchu themselves, but incapable of accommodation in the published study on them. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

In this article, I explore the history of biological materials that scientists and physicians collected from those who survived the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Originally acquired beginning in 1946 to track the genetic effects of radiation in the offspring of atomic bomb survivors, these materials gradually became relevant to other kinds of biological and biomedical research. Many of the samples still held at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation are from individuals (approximately 65 percent) who are no longer alive. To scientists and others engaged with their management and use, these samples are uniquely valuable, timeless, a legacy for “all mankind.” Like materials taken from isolated populations around the world, the atomic bomb samples are both unique and universalized. They join other forms of Big Data in their seamless transition from dramatic specificity to general relevance. My paper explores what such legacies mean, and what they might teach us about the history of biology, the practices of biobanking, and the post-1945 Pacific world. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

This essay reflects on the tension between standardization and the search for variation in the human genome. The stabilization of the human chromosome count in the 1920s was based on the consensus that “Whites,” “Negroes,” and “Japanese,” as well as women and men, had the same number of chromosomes. Yet the idea that there might be chromosomal differences between various groups of people was never quite abandoned. When in the mid-1950s the human chromosome number was revised from 48 to 46, the new count was tested in populations around the world. The description of the “normal human karyotype” that was negotiated in the 1960s was driven by the search for a standard against which the genetic variation revealed by the flurry of testing could be measured. And although the human genome project in the 1990s promised to provide the genetic blueprint that all humans shared, it has in fact led to an increased focus on the genetic variation that distinguishes the history, identity, and health outcomes of various human populations. Following concrete examples, this essay investigates the historically contingent quests that have been driving the search for common standards and variation, and the role Pacific and Indigenous populations have played in these endeavors. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

This paper examines how populations in a multiethnic cohort project used to study environmental causes of cancer in Hawai‘i have been reorganized in ways that have contributed to the racialization of the human genome. We examine the development of two central genomic data infrastructures, the multiethnic cohort (MEC) and a collection of reference DNA called the HapMap. The MEC study populations were initially designed to examine differences in nutrition as risk factors for disease, and then were repurposed to search for potential genomic risk factors for disease. The biomaterials collected from these populations became institutionalized in a data repository that later became a major source of “diverse” DNA for other studies of genomic risk factors for disease. We examine what happened when the MEC biorepository and dataset, organized by ethnic labels, came to be used, in conjunction with the data from the HapMap reference populations, to construct human population genetic categories. Developing theory on genomic racialization, we examine (1) how and why Hawai‘i became sited as a “virtual natural laboratory” for collecting and examining biomaterials from different ethnic groups, and the consequences of the transformation of those local Hawaiian ethnic groups into five racial and ethnic OMB categories meant to represent global continental groups for genomic studies. We then discuss (2) how this transformation, via the geneticists’ effort to standardize the study of genomic risk for disease around the globe, led to the construction of humans as statistical genetic resources and entities for genomic biomedicine and the human population genetics discipline. Through this transformation of populations and biorepositories, we argue (3) that the twenty-first century has seen the intertwining of “race,” “population,” and “genome” via large-scale genomic association studies. We show how “race” has become imbricated in human population genetics and genomic biomedicine. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Pacific Biologies: How Humans Become Genetic , edited by Warwick Anderson and M. Susan Lindee.

In 1853, the director of the Belgium Royal Observatory, Adolphe Quetelet, welcomed delegates from several countries to two consecutive meetings that have acquired considerable reputation as the first international congresses of, respectively, meteorology and statistics. This paper examines the local context where several similar international congresses (on free trade, universal peace, prison reform, public hygiene, etc.) were organized in the same decade. It argues that the new Belgian state developed this new form of international conference in order to bolster its soft power in the Concert of Nations. It also discusses tensions between national interests and global beliefs in the efficiency of science, which arose from these congresses. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.