"To earn a degree, every doctoral candidate should go out to Harvard Square, find an audience, and explain his or her] dissertation." Everett Mendelsohn's worldly advice to successive generations of students, whether apocryphal or real, has for over forty years spoken both to the essence of his scholarship, and to the role of the scholar. Possibly no one has done more to establish the history of the life sciences as a recognized university discipline in the United States, and to inspire a critical concern for the ways in which science and technology operate as central features of Western society. This book is both an act of homage and of commemoration to Professor Mendelsohn on his 70th birthday. As befits its subject, the work it presents is original, comparative, wide-ranging, and new. Since 1960, Everett Mendelsohn has been identified with Harvard Univer sity, and with its Department of the History of Science. Those that know him as a teacher, will also know him as a scholar. In 1968, he began- and after 30 years, has just bequeathed to others - the editorship of the Journal of the History of Biology, among the earliest and one of the most important publications in its field. At the same time, he has been a pioneer in the social history and sociology of science. He has formed particularly close working relationships with colleagues in Sweden and Germany - as witnessed by his editorial presence in the Sociology of Science Yearbook."

Founded in 1914, the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has made an unparalleled contribution to the biological understanding of embryos and their development. Originally much of the research was carried out through experimental embryology, but by the second half of the twentieth century, tissue and cell cultures were providing histological information about development, and biochemistry and molecular genetics have taken center stage. This final volume in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provides a history of embryology and reproductive biology spanning a hundred years. It provides important insights into the evolution of both scientific ideas and the public perception of embryo research, concluding with a reflection on current debates.

This book complements fact-drive textbooks in introductory biology courses, or courses in biology and society, by focusing on several important points: (1) Biology as a process of doing science, emphasizing how we know what we know. (2) It stresses the role of science as a social as well as intellectual process, one that is always embedded in its time and place in history. In dealing with the issue of science as a process, the book introduces students to the elements of inductive and deductive logic, hypothesis formulation and testing, the design of experiments and the interpretation of data. An appendix presents the basics of statistical analysis for students with no background in statistical reasoning and manipulation. Reasoning processes are always illustrated with specific examples from both the past (eighteenth and nineteenth century) as well as the present. In dealing with science and social issues, this book introduces students to historical, sociological and philosophical issues such as Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigms and paradigm shifts, the social-constructions view of the history of science, as well as political and ethical issues such human experimentation, the eugenics movement and compulsory sterilization, and religious arguments against stem cell research and the teaching of evolution in schools. In addition to specific examples illustrating one point or another about the process of biology or social-political context, a number of in-depth case studies are used to show how scientific investigations are originated, designed, carried out in particular social/cultural contexts. Among those included are: Migration of monarch butterflies, John Snow's investigations on the cause of cholera, Louis Pasteur's controversy over spontaneous generation, the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

"To earn a degree, every doctoral candidate should go out to Harvard Square, find an audience, and explain his or her] dissertation." Everett Mendelsohn's worldly advice to successive generations of students, whether apocryphal or real, has for over forty years spoken both to the essence of his scholarship, and to the role of the scholar. Possibly no one has done more to establish the history of the life sciences as a recognized university discipline in the United States, and to inspire a critical concern for the ways in which science and technology operate as central features of Western society. This book is both an act of homage and of commemoration to Professor Mendelsohn on his 70th birthday. As befits its subject, the work it presents is original, comparative, wide-ranging, and new. Since 1960, Everett Mendelsohn has been identified with Harvard Univer sity, and with its Department of the History of Science. Those that know him as a teacher, will also know him as a scholar. In 1968, he began- and after 30 years, has just bequeathed to others - the editorship of the Journal of the History of Biology, among the earliest and one of the most important publications in its field. At the same time, he has been a pioneer in the social history and sociology of science. He has formed particularly close working relationships with colleagues in Sweden and Germany - as witnessed by his editorial presence in the Sociology of Science Yearbook."

Founded in 1914, the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington has made an unparalleled contribution to the biological understanding of embryos and their development. Originally much of the research was carried out through experimental embryology, but by the second half of the twentieth century, tissue and cell cultures were providing histological information about development, and biochemistry and molecular genetics have taken center stage. This final volume in a series of five histories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington provides a history of embryology and reproductive biology spanning a hundred years. It provides important insights into the evolution of both scientific ideas and the public perception of embryo research, concluding with a reflection on current debates.