Pegasus Books, 2019. — 368 p. George Murray Levick was the physician on Robert Falcon Scott’s tragic Antarctic expedition of 1910. Marooned for an Antarctic winter, Levick passed the time by becoming the first man to study penguins up close. His findings were so shocking to Victorian morals that they were quickly suppressed and seemingly lost to history. A century later, Lloyd...
2nd ed. — Routledge, 2003. — 256 p. Considered a classic in the field, Troy Duster's Backdoor to Eugenics was a groundbreaking book that grappled with the social and political implications of the new genetic technologies. Completely updated and revised, this work will be welcomed back into print as we struggle to understand the pros and cons of prenatal detection of birth...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. — 320 p. This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally...
Springer, 2019. — 204 p. — (Springer Biographies) This book sheds light on a little-known aspect of the Imperial family of Japan: For three generations, members of the family have devoted themselves to biological research. Emperor Showa (Hirohito) was an expert on hydrozoans and slime molds. His son, Emperor Akihito, is an ichthyologist specializing in gobioid fishes, and his...
Oxford, UK: Society for Freedom in Science, 1949. — 14 p. — (Occasional Pamphlet No. 9) Resignation from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., by Henry H. Dale ‘What Sort of a Man is Lysenko? ’ by R. A. Fisher ‘ The Soviet Genetics Controversy by John R. Baker
Oxford, UK: Society for Freedom in Science, 1949. — 14 p. — (Occasional Pamphlet No. 9) Resignation from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., by Henry H. Dale ‘What Sort of a Man is Lysenko? ’ by R. A. Fisher ‘ The Soviet Genetics Controversy by John R. Baker
New York: Routlefge, 2019. — 233 p. During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the...
With a Foreword by Sir David Attenborough. — Brill, 2018. — 999 p. Interposed between the natural world in all its diversity and the edited form in which we encounter it in literature, imagery and the museum, lie the multiple practices of the naturalists in selecting, recording and preserving the specimens from which our world view is to be reconstituted. The factors that weigh...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. — 284 p. This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human...
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. — 359 p. This is the first history of phytotrons, huge climate-controlled laboratories that enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Made possible by computers and other modern technologies of the early Cold War, such as air conditioning and humidity...
Oxford University Press, 2003. — 385 p. Genesis: The Evolution of Biology presents a history of the past two centuries of biology, suitable for use in courses, but of interest more broadly to evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and biomedical scientists, as well as general readers interested in the history of science. The book covers the early evolutionary biologists-Lamarck,...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. — 368 p. Francis Willughby lived and thrived in the midst of the rapidly accelerating scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Traveling with his Cambridge tutor John Ray, they decided to overhaul the whole of natural history by imposing order on its messiness and complexity. It was exhilarating, exacting, and exhausting work. Yet before...
University of Chicago Press, 2018. — 523 p. The emergence of biology as a distinct science in the eighteenth century has long been a subject of scholarly controversy. Michel Foucault, on the one hand, argued that its appearance only after 1800 represented a fundamental rupture with the natural history that preceded it, marking the beginnings of modernity. Ernst Mayr, on the...
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003. — 653 p. Jean Fernel (1497-1558) was one of the foremost medical writers of his day, ranked by his contemporaries alongside Andreas Vesalius, reformer of anatomical studies, and Paracelsus, radical reformer of theories of disease and treatment. He is arguably the leading expositor of the Galenic system of medicine. He...
Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. — 328 p. — ISBN: 978-1-118-52431-2. Knowledge of human anatomy has not always been an essential component of medical education and practice. Most European medical schools did not emphasize anatomy in their curricula until the post-Renaissance era; current knowledge was largely produced between the 16th and 20th centuries. Although not all cultures...
New York: NHP, 1964. — 179 p. — ISBN: 978-0313225833. Most introductory biology books throw a large collection of facts in your face without really giving you any explanation of how they came to be. What makes this so hard is that the heart of biology is about details. One way of putting this is - nomenclature (taxonomies) is to biology, as mathematics is to physics....