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Wilhelm Reich, Biologist
Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution—all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science’s most controversial figures—perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of “pseudoscience” that have long dogged Reich’s research, James Strick argues that Reich’s lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy ...
Sparks of Life
How, asks James E. Strick, could spontaneous generation--the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving materials--come to take root for a time (even a brief one) in so thoroughly unsuitable a field as British natural theology? No less an authority than Aristotle claimed that cases of spontaneous generation were to be observed in nature, and the idea held sway for centuries. Beginning around the time of the Scientific Revolution, however, the doctrine was increasingly challenged; attempts to prove or disprove it led to important breakthroughs in experimental design and laboratory techniques, most notably sterilization methods, that became the cornerstones of modern microbiolog...
Where's the Truth?
Where's the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical writings, drawn from his diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientist's life—his joys and sorrows, his hopes and insecurities—and chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy." A student of Freud's and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism, and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Where's the Truth? begins in January 1948, shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Adm...
Evolution and the Spontaneous Generation Debate
'Carefully selected by James Strick, this comprehensive collection of primary source materials resurrects the forgotten man of evolutionary theory, Henry Charlton Bastian, and opens a new window on controversies which divided the ranks of evolutionary naturalists. The hostile reaction of Thomas Henry Huxley and his allies to Bastian's challenge - that they accept the theory of spontaneous generation and the materialism connected with it - shows just how far they were willing to go to sanitize evolutionary theory for public consumption while maintaining their own respectability. Strick's collection is a vivid reminder of the volatile politics of evolution and the importance of not losing sigh...
Beyond Mechanism
It has been said that new discoveries and developments in the human, social, and natural sciences hang “in the air” (Bowler, 1983; 2008) prior to their consummation. While neo-Darwinist biology has been powerfully served by its mechanistic metaphysic and a reductionist methodology in which living organisms are considered machines, many of the chapters in this volume place this paradigm into question. Pairing scientists and philosophers together, this volume explores what might be termed “the New Frontiers” of biology, namely contemporary areas of research that appear to call an updating, a supplementation, or a relaxation of some of the main tenets of the Modern Synthesis. Such areas...
The Living Universe
The Living Universe is a comprehensive, historically nuanced study of the formation of the new scientific discipline of exobiology and its transformation into astrobiology. Among many other themes, the authors analyze how research on the origin of life became wedded to the search for life on other planets and for extraterrestrial intelligence. Many scientific breakthroughs of the last forty years were either directly supported or indirectly spun off from NASA's exobiology program, including cell symbiosis, the discovery of the Archaea, and the theories of Nuclear Winter and the asteroid extinction of the dinosaurs. Exobiology and astrobiology have generated public fascination, enormous publi...
When Biospheres Collide: A History of NASA's Planetary Protection Programs
PRINT FORMAT ONLY NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRINT PRODUCT- OVERSTOCK SALE -- Significantly reduced list price This new book from the NASA History Series tackles an interesting duo of biological problems that will be familiar to anybody who has seen photos of Apollo astronauts quarantined after their return to Earth. Namely, how do we avoid contaminating celestial bodies with Earthly germs when we send spacecraft to study these bodies, and how do we avoid spreading foreign biological matter from space when our robotic and human spacefarers return to Earth? Biological matter from an external system could potentially cause an unchecked epidemic either on Earth or in space so strict pre...
Herrera's 'Plasmogenia' and Other Collected Works
This book collects three outstanding examples of the work of Mexican biologist Alfonso Luis Herrera (1868-1943), a pioneer in experimental origins of life research. Two of the collected works appear here in English for the first time. Herrera's works represent the attempt to deal experimentally with the issue of an autotrophic origin of life, a possibility that was widely accepted prior to Alexander I. Oparin's ideas regarding the possibility of organic synthesis and the origin of life in an early Earth environment. An active promoter of Darwinian ideas in Latin America, Herrera was also among the first 20th century researchers to attempt to “create life in a test tube.” This collection ...
