History of Science at Oregon State University

Welcome to Holland: the Changing Nature of Life

May 14th, 2012

Do you welcome change? Dr. Jane Barton began by querying the audience on their acceptance of the inevitable. We are all human and were born with a terminal illness: Life. So how does the average person see change and how does that affect the quality of their coping skills. As a hospice chaplain who began her journey in the oil fields of Texas, Dr. Barton is intimately familiar with loss and change although that familiarity began in her childhood. She posited that change within itself is not inherently positive or negative. To quote an old colloquialism, the only constant is change. Welcome to Holland. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Biology, Graduate Students, Health and Medicine, Hundere, Visitors | No Comments »

Biomedical ethics and the Self

May 10th, 2012

by Natalie Rich*

During my visit to the Western Michigan University Undergraduate Biomedical Ethics Symposium this last weekend, I had the chance to share an excerpt from my honors thesis with several other students interested in bioethics from across the country. The topics discussed involved relatively straightforward examples, such as case studies involving the end of life wishes of elderly cancer patients to abstract ties between Alzheimer’s disease and personal identity. Was the physician justified in resuscitating the eighty-year-old woman who asked not to be resuscitated? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Health and Medicine, Philosophy, Undergraduate Students | No Comments »

An American’s View of NPT, From Vienna

May 1st, 2012

Richards is currently in Vienna, the headquarters of the IAEA

by Linda M. Richards*

May 1 is a real Worker’s holiday all over Austria, so today the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) was closed and there were no official NPT Preparatory Committee meetings. The NPT is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Almost all the shops and businesses are closed, except for restaurants and–luckily–this internet cafe where I rented a computer for one Euro an hour to offer this humble blog piece.

This morning the members of the Japanese peace group Gensuikyo and Soku Gakkai International, both groups that supported Linus Pauling, invited the NGO NPT Prep Com participants to march with them in the massive worker’s rights parade with survivors of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Graduate Students, Nuclear, Peace and Security, Science and Politics | No Comments »

Radical Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Intellectual Historian’s Contribution

May 1st, 2012

by Mason Tattersall*

Dr. Jonathan Israel’s April 26 talk at Oregon State, “Radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution,” presented the key figures in the early (1789-93) stage of the Revolution as proponents of what Israel terms the Radical Enlightenment. Contrary to some accounts Israel characterizes the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror not as a radicalization of the Revolution and the Enlightenment project that underlay it, but as a counter-revolutionary populist reaction against the Radical Enlightenment ideas and policies of the early leaders of the revolution (orators, philosophers, newspaper editors). Israel’s talk centered around a banquet held by The British Club, a group of Anglo-American intellectuals in Paris, on the 17^th of November 1792. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Graduate Students, Philosophy | No Comments »

Colonial Science, Contagion and the Imaginarium of Marseille

April 14th, 2012

by Michael A. Osborne*

Marseille continually reinterprets its colonial heritage. The city constitutes an imaginarium of material and immaterial symbols revealing of its history. No French city has been more wedded to colonization than this cross roads of Mediterranean peoples. Historians signal frequently its lavish colonial expositions of 1906 and 1922, and a visitor to the one of 1922 found that the city itself was “a colonial city, … [like] a capital of the French colonial empire.” Aside from the 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris, the 1906 exposition was the largest French event of its genre. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Biology, Faculty, Health and Medicine | No Comments »

History of Science, Pacific Northwest Style

April 13th, 2012

by Miranda Paton*

It’s an exceptional history of science meeting indeed when discussion of a paper turns to the possibility of requesting someone’s FBI file. No more can be said without blowing a fellow researcher’s cover.

The occasion for this recommendation was the group discussion of a paper given at 30^th annual meeting of the Columbia History of Science Group that convened at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on March 9-11, 2012. Thirty or so historians, some with partners and children in tow, enjoyed a program of 12 papers, good eats and intense competitions for various prizes with strict—if sometimes obscure—criteria. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Graduate Students, Meetings | 1 Comment »

Reflection: Lisa Sanders and the Medical Mystery

March 20th, 2012

by Rachel St. Clair*

Looking out on a large crowd in La Selles Center, Lisa Sanders understood that she had an attentive audience. Sanders, who is known for her work on the television show “House” as both a producer and inspiration, came to Oregon State to discuss the theory of diagnosis. Her March 13 lecture, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” focused on the importance for patient narrations of symptoms in the doctors office. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Graduate Students, Health and Medicine | 1 Comment »

Women in Science: Who Inspires You?

March 12th, 2012

Lise Meitner in 1946

Take the poll! You can choose four! In honor of Women’s History Month, we are taking a moment to ask ourselves who inspires us most among notable women of science? There are lots of ways I could have asked this. I could have asked, “who were the most influential women in science?” Or “Whose ideas were the most important?” Or “Who did the most for women’s participation in the scientific enterprise?” All of these are important questions, but I left it vague. Please vote for up to four, and please take a moment to explain why in the comments. Also, contact me if you think I should add someone to the list. Obviously it is a very limited list, only twenty, taken from my own courses on the history of science. Although it starts here in March 2012, I’ll leave the poll up. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Women | 8 Comments »

Reflection: The Republic of Science and Popper’s Open Society

March 8th, 2012

by Mahdieh Tavakol*

An interesting aspect of Karl Popper’s thought was the interconnection between his political philosophy and his philosophy of science. This aspect was presented by Malachi H. Hacohen, an intellectual historian of Duke University, in his talk entitled “Karl Popper and the Liberal Imagination in Science and Politics”, part of this year’s series Horning Lecture series, An Adventure of the Mind. Although Hacohen’s talk was a broader intellectual biography of Popper, what intrigued me most was Popper’s move from scientific community to an ideal Open Society. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Graduate Students, Philosophy, Science and Politics | No Comments »

Reflection: And God said “No”

March 2nd, 2012

Detail of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel

by Tracy Jamison*

Mark Lynas is an optimist. On February 29^th, Mr. Lynas lectured here at OSU at LaSells Stewart Center on his book, The God Species. According to Mr. Lynas, humans are a God species and consequently we have to “run the planet as if we were gods”. Not the kind of Gods found in Greek mythology, when humans were still learning the nature of the world, but kind, benevolent gods who recognize that we have to be good stewards of our planet. Mr. Lynas related that the earth is estimated to be approximately 3.7 billion years old and Homo sapiens are estimated to have been on the earth 100,000 years. Mr. Lynas stated, “We, as humans, have gone from poking sticks in an anthill to creating global communication systems”. At the risk of sounding anthropocentric, we have come a long way. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Energy, Environment, Food and Diet, Graduate Students, Science and Politics, Science and Religion | 1 Comment »

History of Science at Oregon State University

Welcome to Holland: the Changing Nature of Life

Biomedical ethics and the Self

An American’s View of NPT, From Vienna

Radical Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Intellectual Historian’s Contribution

Colonial Science, Contagion and the Imaginarium of Marseille

History of Science, Pacific Northwest Style

Reflection: Lisa Sanders and the Medical Mystery

Women in Science: Who Inspires You?

Reflection: The Republic of Science and Popper’s Open Society

Reflection: And God said “No”

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