Departmental Papers (HSS)
Through a broad range of scholarly projects, HSS faculty research examines relations between the technical practice of scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and clinicians, and the material, social, political and cultural context in which those practices occur.
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Publication Voices of the Dead: James Neel's Amerindian Studies(2003-01-01) Lindee, Susan MDuring his 1967 fieldwork, James V. Neel, professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan, spent a good deal of time collecting chicken dung. He scraped up dirt and chicken waste from the ground around the Yanomamö villages. He sought out dirt from the floors of the Yanomamö houses, where parrots were kept as free-roaming pets. He crawled under chicken coops, filling seventy-five labeled plastic bags with samples, using a fresh plastic spoon for each sample, and he worried about getting this soil and bird waste safely back to Atlanta, Georgia, for testing at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).1Publication Technological World-Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms(2007-03-01) Tresch, JohnMartin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe.Publication Paparazzi in the Woods: Hidden Surveillance Cameras are Making the Wilderness Less Wild(2008-08-14) Benson, Etienne SNext time you go for a hike, keep an eye out for the hidden cameras. The first sign that you're under surveillance might be a plastic or metal case, about the size of a hefty hardcover book, strapped to a tree or the whirr of the film advancing.Publication Provenance and the Pedigree: Victor McKusick's Fieldwork with the Old Order Amish(2003-01-01) Lindee, Susan MProvenance is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the record of the "ultimate derivation and passage of an item through its various owners." The term is most commonly used to describe the history or pedigree of a painting—who has owned it, its value at various stages—but it also has a meaning in silviculture, in which it refers explicitly to genetic stock. Provenance, for forestry professionals, is the record of where a seed was taken and of a character of the "mother trees." In this essay I explore provenance in both sense, as a textual record of the origins of a given object (in this case a blood or tissue sample) and as a record of genetic stock. I focus on fieldwork, which creates a record of origins that can certify the authenticity and reliability of a particular pedigree, which then can acquire status as a form of scientific evidence.Publication Transubstantiation in Science. Review of Anglea Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise, Science Without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives; Jessica Riskin, Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life(2009-01-01) Lindee, Susan MThese two volumes made me think about transubstantiation, the process through which something retains its form, color, and shape, yet becomes, in reality, something else. The usual example is the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, in the Roman Catholic ritual of the Eucharist. Transubstantiation is a standardized miracle (the repetitive, guaranteed miracle of the Mass, offered four times a day). The miracle requires dense layers of social and rhetorical labor, and in this sense, it is not unlike the work of using models in Drosophila genetics, plate tectonics, or primatology. But I have something a bit grander in mind.Publication Review of Peter M. Hammond and Gradon B. Carter, From Biological Warfare to Healthcare: Porton Down, 1940-2000(2003-01-01) Lindee, Susan MThe British biological warfare laboratory established at Porton Down in 1940 occupies a special niche in the history of science and war. It has been a restricted and highly controlled space for the production of secret knowledge, and it has provoked sustained and enduring public controversy since as early as 1948. It has operated at the margin between the public and the secret, between offensive and defensive knowledge of pathogens, and between military research and health-care research. True and untrue rumors of novel diseases, infected research animals, accients, suspicious deaths, and long-term contamination have focused on the facility for decades. The laboratory's staff scientists have also published many hundreds of respectable papers in scientific and medical journals. Porton Down is a place where the contradictions of twentieth-century biomedical science are clear and compelling.Publication Review of Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado(2001-04-01) Lindee, Susan MMore than once as the controversy over this book unfolded reporters and others told me the number of footnotes in Tierney's chapter on the measles outbreak: 147. I have now tallied the total number of footnores in the entire book including the appendix (1,599). Such numbers seem to interst people. It is considerable more difficult to quantify the evidentiary force and legitimacy of these footnores. My own assessment is perhaps suggested by the fact that I have rewritten this review several times in an effort to make it difficult for anyone to extract a decontextualized endorsement on some future web page or book jacket. This accounts for the somewhat stilted style, for which I apologize.Publication Review of Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory(2000-06-01) Lindee, Susan MThis is a sensitive study of the ways that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has been remembered, by survivors, urban leaders, ethnic Koreans, women's groups, and others. It is a compelling resource for the growing number of historians of science interested in politics of commemoration. It is also relevant to historians of technology or science who recognize that consumers of "end users" of technology are part of the history of any machine. For many military technologies, of course, the ultimate consumers are those who experience the bodily injury or physical disruption that the machine is intended to produce.Publication Sputnik, Cold War Nostalgia, and 9/11: The Lessons of Sputnik post-9/11(2007-10-04) Lindee, Susan MIt is not an anniversary we usually celebrate and it was not any fun for the United States at the time. Fifty years ago today, on the night of October 4, 1957, a 22-inch aluminum ball, primitive by today's standards, sent the American public, and the policy and scientific elite, into high crisis.[1]Publication Cloning in the Popular Imagination(2001-01-01) Nelkin, Dorothy; Lindee, Susan MDolly is a cloned sheet born in July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh by Ian Wilmut, a British embryologist. She was produced, after 276 failed attempts, from the genetic material of a six-year-old sheep. But Dolly is also a Rorschach test. The public response to the production of a lamb from an adult cell mirrors the futuristic fantasies and Frankenstein fears that have more broadly surrounded research in genetics, and especially genetic engineering. Dolly stands in for other monstrosities—both actual and fictional—that human knowledge and technique have produced. She provokes fear not so much because she is novel, but because she is such a familiar entity: a biological product of human design who appears to be a human surrogate. Dolly as "virtual" person is terrifying and seductive—despite her placid temperament.