Between 1930 and 1937, the Boston-based artist Katharine Lane Weems (1899–1989) designed and executed a complex architectural sculpture program for the façade of the Biological Laboratories building at Harvard University. Harvard biology faculty and administrators looked to the Biological Laboratories, funded in 1928 by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and constructed between 1930 and 1931, as an opportunity to unify the increasingly fragmented biological research and teaching affiliated with the university and to argue for the importance of modernized facilities as critical to the future of the experimental life sciences. During the design process, Weems collaborated with naturalists associated with Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Thomas Barbour and Harold J. Coolidge, who took control of the exterior sculpture program for the laboratory. Over a seven-year period, Weems drew on her expertise as an animal sculptor and her interest in modeling animals from life to design and execute an “educational exhibit” on the building façade. Her sculptures brought natural history display practices and traditions of animals on exhibition in zoological parks into conversations about the architecture of the university laboratory. Weems carved four animal group friezes and thirty-four individual animal portraits into brick; crafted three bronze door panels depicting organisms from the sea, land, and air; and created two, massive three-ton bronze Indian rhinos, Bessie and Victoria, to stand guard at the laboratory’s threshold. Weems’ animal sculpture program represents a tremendous artistic achievement for a woman artist. It also offers a novel lens with which to re-examine efforts to unify the biological sciences before the evolutionary synthesis and to re-consider the enduring impact of animals on display on public understandings of science.
This article reconstructs the political, institutional, and scientific processes that led to the founding of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, tracing the trajectory of the EMBO Laboratory project from its substantial redesign in 1967 through the intergovernmental negotiations that culminated in the EMBL treaty of 1974. Against existing historiography centered on the early 1960s, the article proposes a revised chronology: the EMBO Laboratory was not designed in 1963–64 but in 1967–71, and its history cannot be understood without foregrounding the role of the European Molecular Biology Conference (EMBC) as the institutional and diplomatic arena through which the project was debated, reshaped, and ultimately realized. The first two sections examine two successive proposals—the “Nice proposal” (1967–68) and the “Konstanz proposal” (1969–70)—showing how they articulated the tension between centralization and decentralization in the Europeanization of molecular biology, and how EMBO functioned as an epistemic community that negotiated disciplinary boundaries, coordinated national interests, and mobilized political support among European governments. The third section analyzes the siting process, demonstrating how the choice of Heidelberg emerged from a conflictual interplay of intergovernmental competition, national research agendas, and local conditions. More broadly, the article situates the origins of EMBL within the specific dynamics of European integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that the establishment of EMBC and EMBL was not only a product of this integration process but also an instrument of it.
This article examines how knowledge of blood types was localized in China between 1918 and 1948. I argue that blood-type knowledge was not passively transplanted from the West, but actively reconstructed in response to local medical needs, nationalist discourse, and existing cultural frameworks. The article develops this argument along three lines. First, although blood typing entered modern hospitals and proved useful for transfusion medicine, its wider implementation remained constrained by uneven institutional capacity and limited state reach. Second, Chinese researchers used blood-group distribution studies first to compare Chinese and Western populations and later to investigate regional and ethnic diversity within China, thereby helping to construct a biological narrative of the Chinese nation centered on historical mixture rather than racial purity. Third, blood-type temperament theory circulated as a form of popular science and resonated with vernacular practices such as physiognomy and fortune-telling. Taken together, these developments show how scientific modernity in Republican China was reshaped through negotiation with local institutions and cultural expectations.
This article traces the history of microbial culture collections to explore the evolution of microbial biodiversity conservation and biotechnological valorization between 1972 and 2022. It shows how a progressive assetization of microbial value led to an enclosure of the global microbial commons. Culture collections were enablers and victims of this change. Analyzing collections across Europe, the Americas, and Asia as well as the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC), the article reconstructs how culture collections functioned as a key infrastructure for the globalized take-off of the biotechnology industry. Biotechnological investment in microbial exploitation created important revenue streams amidst public funding cuts and collections' declining role as research hubs. However, pressure to control and generate income from microbial assets also shifted moral economies governing microbial exchange and led to commercial rivalry between collections. While biodiversity concerns prompted a reconceptualization of collections as microbial arks, the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity's recognition of national sovereignty over bioresources further complicated microbial conservation. Actors such as the WFCC and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tried to reconcile access and benefit sharing (ABS) obligations and intellectual property (IP) via guidelines, networking, and accreditation. However, entrenched asymmetries in the global distribution of ex situ conservation infrastructures and microbial value generation remained unaddressed despite passage of the 2010 Nagoya protocol on ABS. Meanwhile, advances in sequencing and synthetic biology not only highlighted biases in existing collections, but also pointed to an era in which in silico approaches to biodiversity might supersede existing in vitro museums.
The field of phylogenetic systematics, founded by the German entomologist and theorist Emil Hans Willi Hennig (1913-1976), became a central battleground in the so-called systematics wars, a period of intense conflict between competing schools of taxonomic thought. A critical turning point in this debate was Joseph Felsenstein’s articulation of “Hennig’s Dilemma,” a critique which asserted that Hennig relied on biologically unrealistic assumptions: that one must know with absolute certainty the ancestral state of every character, that evolutionary reversals to an ancestral state are impossible, and that homoplasy is prohibited. In this way, there would be no solution to resolving tree incompatibilities. This so-called dilemma and assumptions were highly effective; they successfully painted parsimony as a fatally flawed method, clearing the path for the dominance of maximum likelihood and other model-based approaches to systematic theory and practice. The consequences of this “victory” are still felt today, with morphological data and parsimony analysis largely marginalized. This paper aims to move away from this accepted view by examining original historical works, such as Hennig’s 1950 work. It argues that these so-called assumptions constitute a profound misrepresentation of Hennig’s actual writings and epistemic assumptions, and that “Hennig’s Dilemma” is more accurately understood as “Felsenstein’s Dilemma,” a persistent uncertainty over this historical misinterpretation of Hennig’s work. Hennig's so-called dilemma, I argue, functioned as a powerful rhetorical device that, while influential, does not hold up to scrutiny against Hennig’s original texts. The enduring nature of this conflict suggests that we have not, in fact, moved beyond the systematics wars.
This article explores the history and transformation of service culture collections—repositories designed to conserve, catalogue, and distribute microorganisms beyond specialized research. Between the 1920s and 1970s, efforts to standardize microbial collecting evolved amid complex geopolitical, institutional, and scientific power dynamics. The article examines how postwar collections were shaped by (post)colonial politics, scientific internationalism, and shifting notions of microbial value, especially in relation to tensions between centralized and decentralized models of conservation. Based on archival sources from several countries and organizations, the study traces the trajectories of key institutions such as the International Federation of Culture Collections (IFCC), the British Commonwealth Committee on Collections of Microorganisms (BCCC), and the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC). While early attempts at reorganizing microbial classification were led by the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1930s, a postwar centralizing initiative in Lausanne—backed by UNESCO and the IAMS—faced resistance from Commonwealth and US scientists, who promoted a decentralized framework. Japan soon joined this camp, reinforcing the alternative approach. These tensions culminated in the creation of the WFCC (1962–1970), which prioritized the exchange of microbial data over physical samples, marked a broader shift toward service-oriented viable collections, and published the first World Directory of Culture Collections in 1972. Ultimately, the rise of molecular taxonomy and patent regimes challenged traditional microbial archives and redefined their scientific and political significance, shifting away from the early ideal of universal “palace” of living microbes.
This paper explores the complexities of extrapolating insect data to understand nuclear exposure effects on humans. Within radiation research, animal studies are invaluable tools for understanding biological effects of radiation exposure. However, data are often employed selectively, exposing unsettled science in extrapolating animal data to human radiation effects. Here we focus on our understanding of the genetic effects of radiation exposure, and how the debates about the long-term effects on humans were molded by research carried out on the model organism known as Drosophila; disagreements among scientists occurred within the constraints of research on this model organism, creating what we see as a possible Drosophila bias. By tracing how Drosophila became the dominant model organism for radiation genetics, we show how this choice created an epistemic framework that often dismissed contradictory evidence from other organisms, including the more recent Lepidoptera data from Fukushima. Even when animal studies demonstrate harm, they are often dismissed due to the belief—and some of the science—of human exceptionalism: that humans are intrinsically more resilient than animals. In this work, we consider Michel Foucault’s ideas on epistemes as they apply to human exceptionalism in the context of radiation effects, mutation, and harm. By examining these two cases genealogically, we demonstrate how Drosophila’s dominance established frameworks of population resilience that persist to this day, leading to the dismissal of contradictory butterfly findings as inconsistent with “conventional understanding” rather than as challenges to what counts as legitimate evidence in radiation biology.
By the late 1850s, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had independently formulated similar theories of evolution by natural selection, yet they diverged notably in their treatment of artificial selection. This difference, evident in their 1858 joint presentation to the Linnean Society, has sparked scholarly debate over whether it reflects a deep, enduring divergence or a more superficial misunderstanding. I argue that this difference reflects substantial disagreement, but not for the reasons traditionally offered. I argue that while both Darwin and Wallace acknowledged that artificial selection could lead to (i) traits shaped by the aesthetic preferences, whims, or novelty-seeking tendencies of human breeders, and (ii) organisms highly dependent on the artificial environments in which they were cultivated, they disagreed about whether natural selection could produce comparable outcomes. Darwin thought natural selection could, under certain conditions, yield traits and dependencies analogous to those seen in domesticated varieties, whereas Wallace denied that such parallels could be drawn. This difference, I argue, makes sense in light of their wider respective projects and goals. Finally, turning to the vexed and related question of whether Wallace accepted Darwin’s argument by analogy, I agree with previous scholarship that Wallace could have accepted the cogency of Darwin’s analogy, both in 1858 and at the time he wrote Darwinism in 1889, since this was consistent with his other theoretical commitments. But he certainly questioned the desirability of drawing such an analogy.
Romantic notions of nature, formulated around the turn of the 18th century, have shaped much of Western environmental consciousness and are often linked to the emergence of holistic ecology in the 20th century. Due to its perceived proximity to Romanticism, holistic ecology has played a complex and influential role in both environmental discourse and practice. This paper examines the extent to which key strands of holistic ecology, particularly the organismic ecology of Frederic Clements and the systems ecology of Eugene and Howard T. Odum, as framed by John Law’s (2004) concept of “scientific romanticism,” can be considered genuinely Romantic. Drawing on the history of ecology and philosophy, it compares the holistic assumptions of these ecological fields with those of philosophical Romanticism. The analysis reveals that, while both traditions draw from an organicist reservoir and share a commitment to naturalism, they diverge in critical ways. Philosophical Romanticism revitalized nature as a self-generating, creative force (natura naturans), whereas holistic ecology, never embracing such spiritual or aesthetic dimensions, oriented toward a more mechanistic image of nature (natura naturata). It evolved from Clements’ Romantic motifs of unity and teleology to the Odums’ cybernetic systems framework, aligned with technocratic rationality and the Newtonian worldview.
