History of genetics

Statistics derives its power from classifying data and comparing the resulting distributions. In this paper, I will use two historical examples to highlight the importance of such data practices for statistical reasoning. The two examples I will explore are Franz Boas’s anthropometric studies of native American populations in the early 1890s which laid the foundations for his later critique of the race concept; and Wilhelm Johannsen’s experiments in barley breeding, which he carried out for the Carlsberg Laboratory around the same time and which prepared the ground for his later distinction of genotype and phenotype. Both examples will show that the manipulation of data depended on complex classificatory practices: the distinction and articulation of “tribes,” “races” and “family lines” in the case of Boas, and the selection and construction of “populations” and “pure lines” in the case of Johannsen. They also reveal a fundamental difference between data practices in the human and the life sciences: Whereas the latter are relatively free to construct populations in the laboratory, the field, or on paper, the former have to rely on social categories shaped by historical accident and self-perception of the subjects under study.

A pioneering study in ‘human genetics’ and the evolutionary aspects present in his revival of epigenetic theory should rank the French philosopher Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) among the great forerunners of genetics and evolution.

he triumphs of recent biology - understanding hereditary disease, the modern theory of evolution - are all thanks to the fruit fly, the guinea pig, the zebra fish and a handful of other organisms, which have helped us unravel one of life's greatest mysteries - inheritance.

Jim Endersby traces his story from Darwin hand-pollinating passion flowers in his back garden in an effort to find out whether his decision to marry his cousin had harmed their children, to today's high-tech laboratories, full of shoals of shimmering zebra fish, whose bodies are transparent until they are mature, allowing scientists to watch every step as a single fertilised cell multiples to become millions of specialised cells that make up a new fish. Each story has - piece by piece - revealed how DNA determines the characteristics of the adult organism. Not every organism was as cooperative as the fruit fly or zebra fish, some provided scientists with misleading answers or encouraged them to ask the wrong questions.

This thesis focuses on the role and historical development of strategies of experimental domestication in scientific knowledge production, with a particular focus on the function of the laboratory strains known as 'wild types' in the model organism systems of classical genetics, where they play the role of standing in for the 'natural' instance of the species so that variation may be measured. As part of establishing how lab wild types came to assume this role, I have situated them within a much longer historical trajectory that tracks how changes in the manner that European intellectual traditions conceptualised the domestic-wild divide were linked to the development of new forms of scientific domestication and knowledge production. These new developments required that existing domesticating practices be intensified, expanded and analogised in order to better control, capture and comprehend 'wild' nature. My first two chapters introduce the domestic-wild div...

For most of human history, the notion that paternity was uncertain appeared to be an immutable law of nature. The unknown father provided entertaining plotlines from Shakespeare to the Victorian novelists and lay at the heart of inheritance and child support disputes. But in the 1920s new scientific advances promised to solve the mystery of paternity once and for all. The stakes were high: fatherhood has always been a public relationship as well as a private one. It confers not only patrimony and legitimacy but also a name, nationality, and identity.

The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to establish biological truth has not ended the quest for the father. Rather, scientific certainty has revealed the fundamentally social, cultural, and political nature of paternity. As Paternity shows, in the age of modern genetics the answer to the question “Who’s your father?” remains as complicated as ever.

For more information: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980686

Somatic hybridization is the particle collider of the biological world: where plant cells stripped of their cell wall are fused to create interspecific crosses containing a huge range of genetic information. This paper charts the origins of somatic hybridization and its rise and fall as a plant breeding technique. During the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of somatic hybrids through cell fusion promised a new era of crop improvement. Yet the promises of somatic hybridization were instead fulfilled by advances in recombinant DNA technology. Rather than cast somatic hybridization as a failed research program, this paper argues that a number of factors significantly slowed, but did not halt, developments in somatic hybridization research from the 1960s; the technique should therefore be considered a dormant biotechnology. Reconstructing the history of somatic hybridization reveals a new history of modern biotechnology beyond genetic modification, dominated by plant physiologists.

By the summer of 1948, socialist Yugoslavia seemed determined to follow in the footsteps of its closest ally, the Soviet Union, and strike a decisive blow to “reactionary genetics.” But barely a month before the infamous VASKhNIL session, the Soviet–Yugoslav split began to unravel, influencing the reception of Lysenko’s doctrine in Yugoslavia. Instead of simply dismissing it as yet another example of Stalinist deviationism, Yugoslav mičurinci carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfigurations in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. The essay examines the strategies employed by supporters and opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine, as well as those sympathetic to it but yet unconvinced of its scientific validity and political appropriateness. It emphasizes globally unique attempts to de-Stalinize Michurinist biology and use it in the political-ideological struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union, pointing to local agency and the bottom-up nature of attempts both in support of and against the doctrine.

Esta tese tem por tema a constituição da Eugenia e da Criminologia na Universidade do Paraná, entre 1945 e 1964. A proposta visa historicizar a trajetória de produção da ciência eugênica e da ciência criminológica, compreendendo como essas ciências foram interpretadas por agentes que ocupavam espaços de autoridade dos campos médico e jurídico paranaense, bem como de agentes que buscavam confirmar lutas por espaços de autoridade. Elegemos como objeto de análise teses e manuais escritos na Universidade, e incluem-se teses de doutorado, teses de cátedras, teses de docência livre, teses de conclusão de curso, assim como artigos científicos produzidos naquela espacialidade e temporalidade. A problemática é pensada em relação a como essas ciências foram relegitimadas no pós 1945, período em que passaram a ser estigmatizadas como pseudociência, mas foram socialmente interpretadas por agentes, que produziram e reproduziram ciência no espaço social da Universidade. Nossa hipótese remonta ao argumento de que essas interpretações sociais da ciência criminológica e eugênica foram rearranjadas com nova roupagem, mas que se mantiveram, em partes, biodeterminantes no pós 1945. Novos sentidos aos conceitos foram agregados e expostos à crítica. Assim, apresentamos quadros intelectuais da Universidade do Paraná, desvendando redes de sociabilidades intelectuais e científicas, conflitos e parcerias, projetos individuais e coletivos.

Inauguración de la exposición "Antonio de Zulueta (1885-1971). Primer genetista de España" en el Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Madrid, lunes 20 de diciembre, 2021 [hasta el 28 de agosto de 2022].

Opening of the exhibition "Antonio de Zulueta (1885-1971). Spain's first geneticist", at National Museo of Natural Sciences, Madrid, Monday, December 20, 2021.

The name of Dr. Mengele is notorious for the 20 months he spent as "camp doctor" in the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he collected twins, as well as whole families and and inmates with various bodily anomalies and conducted all sort of research, which, for a long time, appeared not only sadistic but scientifically absurd. Everybody thought Mengele was a crazy and lonely doctor with no connection to "serious science".  Unfortunately for "serious science", Mengele was not a lonely scientist but a young and ambitious scientist with strong ties to two major research institutes in Berlin, the KWI for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, lead by his doctorvater and medical geneticist Prof. O. von Verschuer, and the KWI for Biochemistry, directed by A. Butenandt, the Nobel Price Laureate for his work on sex hormones. In this paper, we study both the context of twin research in human genetics and the particular project on the structure and pigmentation of the human eye.

The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia—a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra—harbour tremendous diversity in their genes, cultures and languages. In this study, we report novel genome-wide data for 763 individuals from Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. We furthermore report additional damage-reduced genome-wide data of two previously published individuals from the Eneolithic Botai culture in Kazakhstan (~5,400 bp). We find that present-day inner Eurasian populations are structured into three distinct admixture clines stretching between various western and eastern Eurasian ancestries, mirroring geography. The Botai and more recent ancient genomes from Siberia show a decrease in contributions from so-called ‘ancient North Eurasian’ ancestry over time, which is detectable only in the northern-most ‘forest-tundra’ cline. The intermediate ‘steppe-forest’ cline descends from the Late Bronze Age steppe ancestries, while the ‘southern steppe’ cline further to the south shows a strong West/South Asian influence. Ancient genomes suggest a northward spread of the southern steppe cline in Central Asia during the first millennium bc. Finally, the genetic structure of Caucasus populations highlights a role of the Caucasus Mountains as a barrier to gene flow and suggests a post-Neolithic gene flow into North Caucasus populations from the steppe.

The indigenous populations of inner Eurasia, a huge geographic region covering the central Eurasian steppe and the northern Eurasian taiga and tundra, harbor tremendous diversity in their genes, cultures and languages. In this study, we report novel genome-wide data for 763 individuals from Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. We furthermore report genome-wide data of two Eneolithic individuals (~5,400 years before present) associated with the Botai culture in northern Kazakhstan. We find that inner Eurasian populations are structured into three distinct admixture clines stretching between various western and eastern Eurasian ancestries. This genetic separation is well mirrored by geography. The ancient Botai genomes suggest yet another layer of admixture in inner Eurasia that involves Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe, the Upper Paleolithic southern Siberians and East Asians. Admixture modeling of ancient and modern populations suggests an overwriting of this ancient structure in the Altai-Sayan region by migrations of western steppe herders, but partial retaining of this ancient North Eurasian-related cline further to the North. Finally, the genetic structure of Caucasus populations highlights a role of the Caucasus Mountains as a barrier to gene flow and suggests a post-Neolithic gene flow into North Caucasus populations from the steppe.

Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars , however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as "racial sciences"-physical anthropology, serological anthropology,

School science descriptions about Mendel and his story are problematic because several statements that are controversial among historians of science are repeated over and over again as if they were established facts. Another problem is the neglect of other scientists working on inheritance in the second half of the 19th century, including Darwin, Spencer, Galton, Nägeli, Brooks, Weismann and de Vries, who paved the way for the reinterpretation of Mendel’s work in 1900. These problems are often found in textbooks and are likely to be present in school science throughout the world. Here, we discuss the contributions that history of science and papers published in journals that target teachers may bring to improve how school science deals with Mendel and his contributions. Evidently the idea is not that school teachers could solve problems still under discussion in the historical literature. The point is, rather, that it is important to avoid treating Mendel’s contributions as uncontroversial, mentioning, for instance, that there are ongoing debates on whether he proposed the laws named after him, appealing to invisible factors underlying phenotypic traits that are seen as the heritable potentials for those traits, and would in due time be known as genes. History of science can contribute to put the mythic Mendel into question in the science classroom, bringing school science closer to the controversies around the interpretation of his work.

Barbara McClintock worked on genetics in corn (maize) plants and spent most of her life conducting research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, New York.
McClintock's research focused on reproduction and mutations in maize, and described the phenomenon of genetic crossover in chromosomes. Through her maize mutation experiments, McClintock observed transposons, or mobile elements of genes within the chromosome, which jump around the genome. McClintock received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her research on chromosome transposition. McClintock's work helped explain the behavior of chromosomes in organismal development and identified transposition as a cause of genetic variation.

O caso Lysenko foi emblemático na história da ciência e teve seu auge no cenário de profundas disputas políticas e ideológicas da Guerra Fria. O agrônomo Trofim D. Lysenko sustentou na URSS a teoria pró-lamarckista de Ivan V. Michurin, que contrariava algumas teses centrais da genética ocidental mendeliana.

A partir de 1948, sob a influência de Lysenko, o governo soviético liderado por Stálin censurou a pesquisa em genética clássica por dez anos e perseguiu diversos cientistas, como o geneticista Nikolai I. Vavilov, que morreu em um campo de concentração em 1943.

As teorias e políticas de Lysenko deram origem à corrente de pensamento denominada Lysenkoísmo, que impactou fortemente a comunidade científica das repúblicas soviéticas e de diversos países no mundo, como demonstraram numerosos trabalhos de história da ciência.

Poucos trabalhos na América Latina e – até onde sabemos – nenhum no Brasil se dedicaram a este tema relevante na história da biologia e da ciência em geral. O objetivo principal desta pesquisa é analisar as reações e repercussões do caso Lysenko no Brasil.

A pesquisa foi desenvolvida em três frentes de atuação integradas: i) análise da repercussão na mídia de massas, por meio da análise de matérias de jornais, revistas nacionais e algumas internacionais, ii) repercussão na comunidade científica local, por meio de entrevistas, documentos, publicações científicas etc. e iii) a influência nos meios políticos, particularmente na esquerda brasileira, examinando documentos, jornais, dentre outros.

Os resultados demonstraram a existência de um volume significativo de documentos que expressam distintas reações e repercussões ao Lysenkoísmo no Brasil, como a rejeição pelos cientistas brasileiros e a aceitação e difusão das ideias de Lysenko pelo Partido Comunista Brasileiro.

Sinteticamente, a década de 1930 marcou a chegada das técnicas desenvolvidas por Lysenko no Brasil, apresentadas como promissoras pelos por alguns cientistas brasileiros. Na década de 1940 de houve um processo de ideologização da controvérsia, com uma crescente polarização entre seus defensores e detratores. No contexto da Guerra Fria, especialmente após 1948, Lysenko começou a ser retratado pela mídia nacional e alguns cientistas como um pseudocientista obscurantista. Por outro lado, surgiram as primeiras publicações ligadas ao PCB apoiando e divulgando as teorias Lysenkoístas. O maior impacto do Lysenkoísmo ocorreu nos anos de 1950. A controvérsia ganhou uma roupagem explicitamente politizada e ideologizada. Houve um crescente movimento consciente de negação do Lysenkoísmo no Brasil por parte dos geneticistas. Nas décadas de 1960 e 1970 assistimos a uma redução dos impactos da controvérsia no país, a partir do declínio do Lysenkoísmo na URSS.

This article examines the interaction between human population genetics and the reconstruction of national identities and histories. Since the first use of mitochondrial DNA analysis of human origins in 1987, scientific research on population history using genetic technologies, or genetic history studies, has flourished, engaging with diverse politics of social identity and national belonging across the globe. Previous scholars have stated that a distinct feature of genetic history studies is the globalized research and commercial network enabled by technological innovations and social transformations during the 1990s. This paper contributes further to this literature by analyzing how local geneticists became part of the global research network and how globalization at large—e.g., economic liberalization and the rise of multiculturalism—functioned in the development of genetic history studies in South Korea. By focusing on a leading population geneticist, Kim Wook and his genetic origin research on Koreans, I will show the role that Korean geneticists had in reconfiguring Korean national identity—from an ethnically homogeneous group to an ethnically diverse one—while their research practices, questions, and methods were inspired and supported by domestic globalization policies and discourses and a transnational network of genetic history studies. I will also reveal the essential, albeit equivocal, part genetic knowledge played in the debate on national belonging in this county.

Le Lettres de M. de Maupertuis, qui riproposte nella loro traduzione settecentesca italiana (dal titolo originale: Lettere filosofiche del sig. di Maupertuis, Traduzione dal francese di Orazio Arrighi-Landini, Venezia 1760), furono pubblicate a Dresda nel 1752. L’opera consiste in una raccolta di brevi lettere scientifiche e filosofiche nelle quali l’autore, allora Presidente dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Berlino, presenta criticamente lo stato dell’arte delle scienze fisiche e naturali al volgere della prima metà del Settecento. Nell’ultima lettera, la celebre Lettre sur le progrès des sciences («uno dei testi più interessanti della metà del secolo»), Maupertuis propone innovative, e a volta fantasiose linee di ricerca che avrebbero richiesto l’intervento di finanziamenti governativi. Le Lettres suscitarono la miope ironia di Voltaire, forse geloso del successo di Maupertuis alla corte di Potsdam, e la conseguente rottura dei rapporti tra i due francesi. Particolarmente interessanti sono le Lettere di carattere medico-biologico, per la loro modernità e acutezza. Fra queste si trova la spesso citata Lettera sulla generazione degli animali, nella quale un Maupertuis ‘evoluzionista’ ante-litteram, attraverso un pionieristico studio ‘genetico’ condotto su una famiglia di Berlino, rilancerà la teoria epigenetica contro il preformismo allora imperante.

Two books recently published abroad by prominent historians of biology on Lysenkoism acknowledging the revival of interest in this phenomenon among the international scientific community are considered. The first book in two volumes, The Lysenko Controversy As a Global Phenomenon, edited by W. deJong-Lambert and N.L. Krementsov, combines modernized old and new approaches to the study and understanding of Lysenkoism. The author shows the merits of the two volumes, demonstrating the progress reached in recent years in works on this topic, and focuses on several drawbacks of the edition. The other book analyzed is L. Graham's, Lysenko's Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia. In this book T.D. Lysenko's activities and their consequences for scientific culture in general and for contemporary Russian science in particular as well as some problems of Lysenkoism in the country's current political context are considered. In the opinion of the reviewer, the polemical character of the book gives a serious reason for reflections on the fate of not only Rus-sian science but also of the country.

The article will focus on the mutagenesis programme in agriculture implemented by the Italian Atomic Energy Commission, starting from 1955, through the establishment of a specific technological and experimental system: the so-called “gamma field”, a piece of agricultural land with a radioisotope of Cobalt-60 at the center. The Cobalt-60 would emit constant radiation, which would bombard the specimens planted in concentric circles around the source, inducing genetic mutations. The Italian gamma field went into operation in January 1960 at the Casaccia Laboratory, about twenty miles north of Rome, with a radiation device made available by the US Government for the Atoms for Peace programme.
This article will analyse, first of all, how the American experimental model of mutation breeding was translated into the Italian context, becoming instrumental for the establishment of plant genetics within the local academic system; secondly, it will describe how the sociotechnical imaginary embodied by the gamma field was part and parcel of this process of discipline-building and scientific demarcation.

After World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl (1926-2015), inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism.

The publication includes Mark B. Adams’s letters to Theodosius Dobzhansky regarding the history of
Russian genetics and evolutionary biology. Mark B. Adams is a historian of biology, and Emeritus Associate
Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Th. Dobzhansky (January 25, 1900 — December
18, 1975) was a prominent Russian-American geneticist, evolutionary biologist, thinker, and evolutionary
humanist. He was one of the central figures in the field of evolutionary biology in the first half of the
XXth century, and played a key role in the “evolutionary synthesis” of the 1930s‑1940s and in shaping the “synthetic” or modern theory of evolution. Dobzhansky was born in a small town Nemirov in the
South-West of the Russian Empire, went to Thomas Hunt Morgans’s lab in the United States in December,
1927, and in 1931 he decided not to return to the USSR. The main theme of the letters written in
1970–1975 is Adams’s meetings with Th. Dobzhansky, including several recorded interviews. The key
goal of these interviews was to illuminate various aspects of the development of Russian genetics, mainly
during the 1920s, including contributions and personalities of the most important Russian biologists,
notably Yu.A. Filipchenko, N.K. Koltsov, S.S. Chetverikov, N.I. Vavilov and A.S. Serebrovsky, as well as
Dobzhansky’s library and his relations with Russian colleagues during the time of Dobzhansky’s life and
research in the Soviet Union. A letter, dated November 11, 1975, also includes Adams’s Research Proposal
“Studies in the History of Russian Biology 1870–1930”, Specific Research Information, Addendum, and
Curriculum Vitae for his application for an IREX grant.

This article explores a scientific technology—mitochondrial analysis—that underlies contemporary technoscientific phenomena such as genetic ancestry tests, ethnic diversity projects, and national genome projects. The article focuses on the figure of “Mitochondrial Eve,” the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of modern humans, who lived in Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. Introduced by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson in 1987, Mitochondrial Eve became the object of an intense scientific and cultural debate, appearing in numerous journal articles and on the cover of Newsweek magazine, as well as in media commentaries on gender roles and popular culture. Through a critical reading of the press coverage of the mitochondrial debate between 1987 and 2000, this article explores an evolving set of cultural emotions, including hope, celebration, suspicion, and anxiety that shaped the idea of human ancestry during the debate. The article argues that the introduction of “Y-chromosome Adam” in 1995 marked a key shift in these affective negotiations, as it engendered a strictly heteronormative and symbolically white dynamic that rendered safe the feminist and multicultural potential suggested in early commentaries. The article concludes by considering how the affective politics of the mitochondrial debate inform the affective politics of today’s biotechnologies.

Este libro recorre la trayectoria de formación histórica del concepto de herencia biológica desde la modernidad temprana hasta el siglo XX, y propone una manera de ver y entender ese proceso que ubica una serie de elementos claves para comprender la construcción y consolidación del mismo, así como su funcionamiento en las ciencias y la cultura modernas.

The article will focus on the mutagenesis programme in agriculture implemented by the Italian Atomic Energy Commission, starting from 1955, through the establishment of a specific technological and experimental system: the so-called "gamma field", a piece of agricultural land with a radioisotope of Cobalt-60 at the centre. The Cobalt-60 would emit constant radiation, which would bombard the specimens planted in concentric circles around the source, inducing genetic mutations. The Italian gamma field went into operation in January 1960 at the Casaccia Laboratory, about twenty miles north of Rome, with a radiation device made available by the US Government for the Atoms for Peace programme This article will analyse, first of all, how the American experimental model of mutation breeding was translated into the Italian context, becoming instrumental for the establishment of plant genetics within the local academic system; secondly, it will describe how the sociotechnical imaginary embodied by the gamma field was part and parcel of this process of discipline-building and scientific demarcation.

Since a working draft sequence mapping of the human genome was published in 2001, the variety of the national genome projects has been initiated in South Korea. One of the rationales for such projects is that "the Korean genome database" will be used for "the personalized medicine for Asians." By focusing on the development of human genomics in this country, this paper examines how the discourse has emerged as a strategy for commercializing the national genome. The paper argues that Korean genomicists developed this strategy under the influences of the global "genome sovereignty" policy and local "Asian regionalist" science policy. It will contribute to the literature of the "Asian" race and genomics by shedding new light on the historical formation of the Pan-Asian Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (PASNP) consortium beyond the Singaporean experience.

Metaphors are ambivalent and powerful tools of science and used and reflected as such since Baconian times. There is a consensus not only within this anthology but also espoused within philosophy, psychology, science and technology studies that, within the natural sciences, metaphors play very important educational roles (e.g. Maasen & Weingart 2000, Lakoff & Núñez 2000, Keller 1995, Hesse 1966, Gentner & Grudin 1985, Gentner & Jeziorski 1993, Cooke & Bartha 1992). Metaphors are often used in areas where meaning is otherwise hard to convey (Schmitt 2003). They frequently appear in communication between experts and laypeople and are thus a common ingredient in media publications about the natural sciences.
As metaphors are an essential tool in all complex communicative situations (Johnson 2010), they play a leading role within the public media and popular science. When topics of natural science and medicine are transmitted to the broader public, the communicative situation between speaker and audience is often understood as similar to that within schools or universities: for a long time at least it was assumed that ‘the public’ lacked sufficient knowledge about the natural sciences and technology, especially when taking a specific (and in particular a critical) position regarding the natural sciences (Marks 2009). It was assumed that the public simply required proper information in order to adopt a more positive stance.
When new technology needs to be explained to a lay audience by means of illustration and modeling, this often comes in combination with humor and mostly aims at convincing the audience of the benefits of this technology (Semino 2008, Herrmann 2013). We find such a situation whenever new technology is presented to the public with the aim of a discursive change in favor of these developments, as for instance the introduction of alternative energy, green revolution, education reform or space exploration. Expert discourse going public about contested technology shows a very specific use of metaphors, as this study reveals.

This paper aims to illustrate the influence of Franz Unger’s (1800-1870) and Carl Wilhelm Nägeli’s (1817-1891) anatomical and developmental works on Gregor Mendel’s (1822-1884) use of numerical ratios in biological inquiry. All hypotheses concerning Mendel’s sources of inspiration have hitherto overlooked the cytological teaching of Unger, his professor of botany. In the 1830s and 1840s, Unger was a pioneer of cell theory. His publications, including his university textbooks, are characterized by a particulate and quantifying approach towards vital phenomena. Special attention will be paid to Unger’s and Nägeli’s ‘law of plant growth’, which shows some striking basic correspondences with Mendel’s approach. This demonstrates, firstly, that mathematical thinking was not alien to mid-nineteenth century botany, and secondly, that Mendel’s conceptions were influenced by an even greater variety of ideas circulating around 1850.

I explore and offer critical reflections on the widespread practice of attributing negative value to “vital forces” in debates on health and disease, as the direct result of the extensive dissemination of genetics and its implications since the late 1960s. This historical reconstruction focuses on the most heated debates published in popular-science periodicals and editions, having the longest-lasting public “echo,” which has shaped intergenerational continuity in the reproduction of vitalist arguments in discursive practices regarding health, disease, and their genetic factors. Mapping attacks on vital forces as various forms of negation addresses three different debates in the historically interrelated repertoire of potentially rival approaches to health, disease, and their genetic factors: (1) the attribution of negative value to primatal instinct as an obstacle to the progress of human civilization; (2) the normative vitalism mainly associated with French philosophers George Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze; and (3) the movement for the deinstitutionalization of health care within the negative theology presented by Ivan Illich. The reproduction of vitalist arguments in the each of the three realms is seen as a historical continuity of the medical vitalism that appeared in the Enlightenment and produced a less monolithic and more conceptually coherent continuum of the positions regarding health, diseases, and their causes. In line with the Lakatosian division into internalist and externalist histories of science, I focus on the multiple functions of vitalist arguments: as a main force in the contest among rival theories regarding health and disease (as a part of the internalist narrative); as a signifier of boundary work delineating science and not-science, whether theology or “bad” science aimed at legitimizing science (as a part of externalist history); and an ideological platform for bridging science and its performance in reproduction policy.