Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley)
And the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)
Katherine Pandora
University of Oklahoma
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Portraying the "Intimate Scientist" in 20th Century America: The Pushback in Popular Culture against Scientific Arrogance
There is a historiographic familiarity to assertions that the rise of modern science is marked by claims of objectivity, produced by disembodied intellects who testify to facts of nature with detachment, either due to their ability to discipline their emotions or by insulating themselves from emotional engagement by producing knowledge through mechanical media or validating it in the cold, unforgiving light of impersonal statistical equations. What has been less well-studied by historians of science are claims on behalf of the intimate scientist, for whom the pursuit of scientific knowledge is embedded within conditions that demand personal engagement and an intimacy with the realities under study in order to secure truths about elusive facts of nature. In this presentation, I suggest that this vernacular image of the intimate scientist was initiated with widespread popularity through media tropes in the popular press about the horticulturist Luther Burbank at the start of the 20th century, and was carried forward, for example, in the work of such collaborators as novelist John Steinbeck and marine biologist Edward Doc Ricketts (co-authors of The Sea of Cortez, 1941) and in Rachel Carson’s mid-century nature writing, and then renewed for a cinematic age in Hollywood’s depiction of Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz) and in National Geographic’s television specials on primatologist Jane Goodall. I argue that the circulation of these images of the intimate scientist within the public arena is part of a larger debate over scientific arrogance, with ramifications for understanding what it means for moderns to live in a scientific culture that have yet to be appreciated by historians of science, sociologists of scientific knowledge, and those who are concerned with science in public life.
4:00PM
Monday, May 5, 2008
140 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: ohst@berkeley.edu
