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.

Unlike what is often presumed, scientific internationalism persisted through the First World War and its aftermath. Although many scientists aligned themselves with their belligerent nations after 1914, and although Germany and Austria were excluded from international meetings after 1919, the rhetoric celebrating the universally fraternizing nature of science continued as if no such ruptures existed. In this article I argue that this persistence was rooted in the war itself, and particularly in the massive mobilization of academics in wartime propaganda and diplomacy. In these activities they used internationalist arguments and their own supranational status as scientists to defend their countries’ war causes and defame those of the enemy. I illustrate this by following the diplomatic work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. From the start of the war Bergson presented himself as a neutral scientific arbiter, developing a philosophy of the war (based on his work on life and evolution) as a battle of German barbarity versus universal (not just French) civilization. His government took note and sent Bergson on several diplomatic tasks, most notably a secret mission to the United States, early 1917, where he was to speak to President Wilson to persuade him to enter the war on the French side. Bergson’s universalism and his stature as a philosopher should appeal to Wilson’s dislike of partisanship and craving for the moral high ground. After the war, Bergson-style universalism continued and was institutionalized in the League of Nations and its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation—with Bergson as its president. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

This paper is a response to a 2018 call for greater understanding of how previous examples of marine science diplomacy could help shape present day efforts to draft a new law of the sea that protects marine biodiversity and conserves the marine environment. It tackles this through analysis of the various twists, turns, and challenges of early science diplomacy efforts in marine science during the early twentieth century. It looks in turn at questions of defining and agreeing on research objectives, how backchannel science diplomacy can become official government diplomacy, and finally, how careful science diplomacy brought Germany back to the international research arena so as to successfully put in place marine conservation measures during the 1920s. In doing this, it argues that the foundation of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas in 1902 represented a revolutionary moment where supra-national scientific research, coordination, and conservation politics for the ocean first emerged; with International Council for the Exploration of the Sea becoming a key model for all subsequent marine science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

This introduction examines the growing interest in science diplomacy and the parallel lack of in-depth historical studies on this new concept. In particular, we first show how the recent attention toward science diplomacy has led to a proliferation of hagiographic accounts reflecting the urgency to support its growth rather than truly investigate its ancestry. We then turn to consider how our historical understanding of science diplomacy could be improved, and how this knowledge could equally be of significance to science diplomacy practitioners today. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

The Spanish Doñana Biological Station, inaugurated in 1964, poses two historiographical puzzles. First, it was the first large project of the World Wildlife Fund, which is usually seen as a response to the very specific post-imperial challenges of African parks. Second, it was the first non-alpine park in Spain, and although it was designed and inaugurated in the midst of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, it was an explicitly transnational project. This paper approaches Doñana’s unique story through the concept of ecological diplomacy. It points to the diplomatic strategies mobilized by a small group of ecologists with managerial and financial skills. Promoting Doñana, British ornithologists presented it as an African wilderness, which created tensions with Spanish ecologists, themselves colonial scientists. Ecological diplomacy, moreover, refers to a characteristic period between conservation diplomacy and environmental diplomacy. In it, conservation was understood as the top-down management of foreign territories for research purposes. While this can be partly understood as the globalization of the Swiss model for conservation, it arrived in Spain through the mediation of the French Tour du Valat station and of English ecology. Finally, stressing the ecological dimension of this type of conservation diplomacy helps in studying the role of the science of ecology and its transformations. As Doñana became a national park, the WWF’s early emphasis on research was replaced by a new attention to recreation. Max Nicholson’s participation in the International Biology Program granted him an opportunity to favor this model when Doñana became a national park. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

The US monopoly of information regarding nuclear weapons was one of the distinctive features of the early Cold War. It encouraged US officials to bolster their country’s hegemonic role in post-war affairs, something that scholars have previously referred to in terms of “atomic diplomacy.” This paper shows that Cold War atomic diplomacy originated in an ancestral form of what we call today “science diplomacy,” distinctive of wartime allied relations during WW2. It first explores how science became a distinctive feature of wartime diplomacy by looking at agreements regarding exchanges of information and collaboration that shaped the relations between wartime allies (US, UK, and the Soviet Union). It then shows that their signing (and, at times, their rejection) eventually paved the way to conflicting views within allied administrations on what to share, making their officials less inclined to pool more knowledge toward the end of WW2. In conclusion, US monopolistic stances and atomic diplomacy originated in these disagreements, also marking the demise of wartime science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

In this article we discuss two phases in the evolution of global environmental programs, namely the Man and Biosphere Programme and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, with the aim of showing their hidden diplomatic ambitions from both US and Soviet perspectives. In the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet views on the biosphere prevailed thanks to the influence of Soviet scientists in the International Council of Scientific Unions and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In the 1980s, the domination of this field by US scientists ushered in the establishment of Earth system science as a new research trend based on Earth observation technologies. We argue that despite the influence of Soviet ecologists in directing international coordination of research on the biosphere, Earth system science did not set in a trajectory of environmental cooperation. This outcome can be explained if we take the environmental and ecological turn that arose during the Cold War as being intertwined with political concerns and national interests in both the US and the USSR. Security, scientific diplomacy, and geopolitical issues limited East-West collaboration on the interdisciplinary study of the earth, which instead turned into a sort of cooperative antagonism. The transition from biosphere studies to Earth system science reveals a changing strategy toward environmental problems, which in turn reflects changes in Cold War policy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy , edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

In 1894, Ohio mathematician Benjamin Franklin Finkel founded The American Mathematical Monthly to engage a broader audience of mathematicians than were involved with the newly formed American Mathematical Society. Along with mathematical puzzles, articles, and discussions, the first ten volumes of the Monthly included biographies of American mathematicians who worked as teachers, writers, and broadly skilled practitioners. Although the details about each mathematician were different, their biographies often followed a similar narrative template to contemporary depictions of the self-made man. This article argues that the story of the self-made mathematician, as presented in early issues of the Monthly , helped ground mathematics in day-to-day American life while asserting ties to different forms of masculinity. Such assertions were particularly significant in the late nineteenth century when a professional mathematics community was taking shape in the United States, and its leaders were becoming increasingly focused on “modern,” abstract forms of research. By marshalling a variety of cultural tropes tied to self-making, physical labor, rural identity, and manhood, biographies in the Monthly offered a particular image of American mathematics at a time when the boundaries of the category “mathematician” were shifting, and what it meant to be an American mathematician had yet to be defined.

This analysis of the scientific and academic career of the Russian-Italian physicist Gleb Wataghin, founder of the physics course at the University of São Paulo, in the richest state of Brazil, in 1934, brings to light elements present in the formation of a scientific identity , which we characterize here as transnational. The methodological recourse to transnationalism is a cornerstone of our analysis, insofar as it was itself an integral part of Wataghin’s career, considering that he made foreign travel a systematic part of his approach and placed it at the disposal of his Brazilian students. Thanks to his training as a physicist and his membership in the international scientific community in the 1920s and ’30s, Wataghin brought to Brazil not just the latest topics on the physics agenda in the Northern Hemisphere, but also contacts that later enabled his students to spend time at institutions and laboratories run by renowned physicists. The scientific values and practices Wataghin transported to Brazil are discussed, as is the way he combined them with the values held dear by the São Paulo elite, responsible for planning and funding the university, who saw modern science as a symbol of erudition and a means by which to win back their political influence in Brazil, which they had lost in 1930 with the rise to power of a centralizing federal government.

This study explores the full set of handwritten and printed materials associated with the 1869 publication of the first version of Dmitrii Mendeleev’s periodic system of elements: “An Attempt at a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Affinity.” Using innovative historical research methods, the author has been able to refute the publication date traditionally associated with the first version of the periodic table, as well as to establish an accurate chronology of its subsequent publications. This task was made possible through the discovery of previously unknown handwritten materials in Mendeleev’s personal archive and the Russian State Historical Archive. This typographical analysis of the first publication of Mendeleev’s periodic table represents a rare and unusual opportunity in the history of science: it gives us the chance to observe how, in the process of publishing the results of a scientific study, a researcher comes to realize that what he has discovered is, in fact, a major scientific breakthrough and begins to take the necessary steps toward establishing his scientific priority.