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Examining the issue of 'British decline' after the war, this fascinating text describes the evolution of cooperation in Britain and France, and argues that the relationship between these two countries helped to disseminate a culture of research, resulting in the transformation of the medical sciences and the pharmaceutical industry in both countries. Of interest to a wide range of academic disciplines, this highly relevant book discusses topics including penicillin, sulphamide drugs, and the effects of war in both countries.
Does science work best in a democracy? Were 'Soviet' or 'Nazi' science fundamentally different from science in the USA? These questions have been passionately debated in the recent past. Particular developments in science took place under particular political regimes, but they may or may not have been directly determined by them. Science and Ideology brings together a number of comparative case studies to examine the relationship between science and the dominant ideology of a state. Cybernetics in the USA is compared to France and the Soviet Union. Postwar Allied science policy in occupied Germany is juxtaposed to that in Japan. The essays are narrowly focussed, yet cover a wide range of countries and ideologies. The collection provides a unique comparative history of scientific policies and practices in the 20th century.
Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science provides detailed case studies – ranging from post-War nuclear science to contemporary climatology – of how sovereignty has been constructed, reaffirmed, and transformed in the twentieth century by the construction of scientific disciplines, knowledge practices, and research objects.
This book focuses on some of the major developments in the history of contemporary (19th and 20th century) mathematics as seen in the broader context of the development of science and culture. Avoiding technicalities, it displays the breadth of contrasting images of mathematics favoured by different countries, schools and historical movements, showing how the conception and practice of mathematics changed over time depending on the cultural and national context. Thus it provides an original perspective for embracing the richness and variety inherent in the development of mathematics. Attention is paid to the interaction of mathematics with themes whose proper treatment have been neglected by the traditional historiography of the discipline, such as the relationship between mathematics, statistics and medicine.
Bringing together authorities on the history, historiography and methodology of recent and contemporary science, this book reviews the problems facing historians of technology, contemporary science and medicine and explores new ways forward.
With the rise of genomics, the life sciences have entered a new era. This book provides a comprehensive history of molecular genetics and genomics.
A pioneering study of the relations between gender and technology.
A historical exploration of scientific disputes on the causation of so-called ‘prion diseases’, this fascinating book covers diseases including Scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). Firstly tracing the twentieth-century history of disease research and biomedicine, the text then focuses on the relations between scientific practice and wider social transformations, before finally building upon the sociologically informed methodological framework. Incisive and thought-provoking, The Social Construction of Disease provides a valuable contribution to that well-established tradition of social history of science, which refers primarily to the theoretical works of the sociology of scientific knowledge.
Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers introduces the visionary women who opened the door for today s female engineers. Pioneers such as Emily Roebling, Kate Gleason, Edith Clarke, and Katherine Stinson come to life in this anthology of essays, articles, lectures, and reports. In this book, the significant contributions women have made to engineering, in areas as diverse as construction management, environmental protection, and industrial efficiency, are finally placed in their proper historical context. Studies on women engineers in the 1920s and in the years following World War II, underscore how far women have progressed in engineering, and how far they have to go. With selection...
Elsie MacGill achieved many firsts in science and engineering at a time when women were considered to be inferior in the sciences. In 1923, at the age of nineteen, she became the first woman to attend engineering classes at the University of Toronto. She was the first woman in North America to hold a degree in aeronautical engineering and the first woman aircraft designer in the world. As chief engineer for the Canadian Car and Foundry Company she oversaw the production of the Hawker Hurricane, and designed a series of modifications to equip the plain for cold weather flying. Her Maple Leaf trainer may still be the only plane ever to be completely designed by a woman. And she did all this while suffering from polio. In this biography we learn that she supervised 4500 workers and produced about 1450 Hawker Hurricanes by the end of WWII. Elsie was a popular heroine of her time, inspiring the comic book "Queen of the Hurricanes" in the 1940s. In later life she became a powerful feminist activist, advocating for the rights of women and children.