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This article examines the introduction of the medical mask in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of surgery, bacteriology and infection control. During this important episode in the longer history of the medical mask, respiratory protection became a tool of targeted germ control. In 1897, the surgeon Johannes Mikulicz at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), drawing on the bacteriological experiments of his colleague Carl Flügge, used a piece of gauze in front of his nose and mouth as a barrier against microorganisms moving from him to his patients. This article explores the social, cultural and medical contexts of this particular use of the mask, in connection with germ theory and surgeons’ struggle with wound infection. It explores the alignment of the new aseptic surgery with the emerging field of bacteriology in a local milieu that favoured interdisciplinary cooperation. The account also follows the uptake of the mask outside of surgery for other anti-infectious purposes and shows how the new type of anti-infectious mask spread simultaneously in operating rooms as well as in hospitals and sanatoria, and eventually in epidemic contexts.

This article investigates how a discourse about the role and value of public participation in science, technology, and innovation emerged and evolved in the research policies of the European Commission. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two main discourses have been successively institutionalized: the first focused on participation in policy-making, while the second aimed at participation in the production of knowledge and innovation. This paper distinguishes three main institutional phases: (i) a phase dedicated to public participation in the governance of science and technology (2000–2010); (ii) a reframing period of science and technology policies by the Commission to integrate the growing emphasis on innovation (2010–2014); (iii) a period focusing on co-creation and citizen science as new ways to involve the public in science and technology (2014-today). Factors such as individual commitments of key policy actors, specific epistemic communities and institutional dynamics within the Commission played a crucial role in shaping the policies of participation. But broader factors are also essential to account for these changes. In this respect, the economic crisis of the late 2000s appears fundamental to understanding how the conception and promotion of public participation in the European science and technology policies have evolved over time. This paper thus offers new insights to the analysis of the political economy of public participation.

Over the past two decades, a number of digital platforms have been developed with the aim of engaging citizens in scientific research projects. The success of these platforms depends in no small part on their ability to attract and retain participants, turning diffuse crowds of users into active and productive communities. This article investigates how the collectives of online citizen science are formed and governed, and identifies two ideal-types of government, either based on self-interest or on universal norms of science. Based on an ethnography of three citizen science platforms and a series of interviews with their managers, we show how different technologies – rhetorical, of the self, social, and ontological – can be diversely combined to configure these collectives. We suggest that the shift from individual projects to platforms is a defining moment for online citizen science, during which the technologies that sustain the collectives are standardized and automatized in ways that make the crowd appear to be a natural community.

Rethinking histories of data requires not only better answers to existing questions, but also better questions. We suggest eight such questions here. What counts as data? How are objects related to data? What are digital data? What makes data measurable, and what does quantification do to data? What counts as an “information age” ? Why do we keep data, and how do we decide which data to lose or forget? Who owns data, and who uses them? Finally, how does “Big Data” transform the geography of science? Each question is a provocation to reconsider the meanings and uses of “data” not only in the past but in the present as well.

Advances in molecular genetics and genomics, and their applications in personalised medicine and other fields, are raising important socio-scientific issues. If the aim of science teaching is to educate scientifically literate citizens, the implications of current genetic and genomic technologies for our lives have to be addressed in science courses. Educational policies in all industrialized societies consider science literacy as a main goal of education. The science standards in several European Union member states (Eurydice Network 2011) and the United States (National Research Council 2012) have stated similar goals. Given the key role attributed to genes as determinants of human identity, health, and behavior, genetics is a scientific field about which science literacy is particularly important. With the wide media attention given to the identification of the genetic basis of human traits and the increasing availability of direct-to-consumer genetic tests it is important that non-experts understand what kinds of reliable genetic knowledge can be acquired and what their implications for society are. Thus, science educators and teachers need to be informed about the current status of genetics and genomics research, the technological state of the art, its biomedical applications, and the relevant ethical issues. The contribution of research scientists to the public understanding of science is important in this respect (Reydon et al. 2012).

The standard narrative in the history of the life sciences focuses on the rise of exper- imentalism since the late nineteenth century and the concomitant decline of natural history. Here, I propose to reexamine this story by concentrating on a specific set of material and cognitive practices centered on collections. I show that these have been central for the production of knowledge not only in natural history, from the Renais- sance to the present, but also in the experimental sciences. Reframing the history of the life sciences in this way makes historical continuities visible and raises new possibilities to contextualize recent developments in science, such as the prolifera- tion of databases and their growing use.

Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences relies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such as DNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creation and their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition. At the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical tradition, based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay focuses on the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank, the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental knowledge in the world. The debates leading to its creation—about the collection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit and authorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge—illuminate the different moral economies at work in the life sciences in the late twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent rise of public access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly, this essay challenges the big picture according to which the rise of experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentieth century. It argues that both traditions have been articulated into a new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice in science at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The rise of experimentation and the decline of natural history constitute the historiographic backbone to most narratives about the history of the life sciences in the twentieth century. As I argue here, however, natural history practices, such as the collection and comparison of data from numerous species, and experimental practices have actually converged throughout the century, giving rise to a new hybrid research culture which is essential to the contemporary life sciences. Looking at some examples of researchers who studied experimentally the relationships between organisms offers a unique window into how the norms, values, and practices of natural history entered the laboratory and, conversely, how the norms, values, and practices of experimentation transformed natural history. This paper concentrates on a largely overlooked episode in the history of the life sciences: the development of Alan A. Boyden's serological taxonomy. In the United States, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, he was the most prominent advocate of this experimental approach in natural history. His quest for an objective method to understand the relationships among species, his creation of a serological museum where he could apply his comparative perspective, and his continued negotiations between natural historical and experimental traditions, illustrate the rise of a new hybrid research culture in the twentieth century. It also helps us solve a historiographic puzzle, namely how biological diversity become so central in the experimental life sciences, i.e., in a tradition which we generally understand as having focused on a few model organisms, and which relegated the study of biodiversity to naturalists and their museums.

Collecting, comparing, and computing molecular sequences are among the most prevalent practices in contemporary biological research. They represent a specific way of producing knowledge. This paper explores the historical development of these practices, focusing on the work of Margaret O. Dayhoff, Richard V. Eck, and Robert S. Ledley, who produced the first computer-based collection of protein sequences, published in book format in 1965 as the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. While these practices are generally associated with the rise of molecular evolution in the 1960s, this paper shows that they grew out of research agendas from the previous decade, including the biochemical investigation of the relations between the structures and function of proteins and the theoretical attempt to decipher the genetic code. It also shows how computers became essential for the handling and analysis of sequence data. Finally, this paper reflects on the relationships between experimenting and collecting as two distinct ‘‘ways of knowing'' that were essential for the transformation of the life sciences in the twentieth century.

Neither science nor state has ever been transcendentally “neutral,” but they have sometimes been made neutral, together, as this paper shows in the context of cold war Europe. The paper explores how the Swiss government tried to “depoliticize” and “demilitarize” new international research institutions in the fields of high‐energy physics (CERN), space research (ESRO and ELDO), and molecular biology (EMBL) in order to make science neutral. Conversely, this paper investigates how participation in “neutralized” scientific institutions supported Switzerland’s neutrality policy and strengthened this essential element of its national identity. It thus addresses symmetrically the coproduction of neutral science and neutral state.

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will celebrate its 40th birthday next year. This seems like a good opportunity to take a closer look at how EMBO came into being in 1964, and at the driving forces that established this first European organization to represent molecular biology. Investigating the origins of EMBO also allows us to explore the history of molecular biology in Europe and how it changed from a marginal specialty into a well‐established practice in most fields of experimental biomedicine. > When EMBO was informally created in Ravello, it was just a ‘club’ of life scientists who wanted to promote molecular biology research in Europe Like many other institutions, EMBO has its official history, and the canonical version was laid down in a sample copy of The EMBO Journal by John Tooze, former Executive Director of EMBO: “In December 1962, immediately following the Nobel Prize Investiture ceremony, John C. Kendrew together with James D. Watson visited the Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) in Geneva on their way home from Stockholm. Leo Szilard, the nuclear physicist‐turned‐molecular biologist, was also in Geneva at the time. Having decided that the Cuban missile crisis [October 1962] might lead to war he had left New York and had taken refuge in Switzerland. During the course of a conversation the three visitors had with Victor Weisskopf (CERN Director General), Leo Szilard proposed that Europe's molecular biologists should attempt to emulate their colleagues in particle physics and try to persuade their governments to establish an international laboratory for molecular or fundamental biology patterned on the CERN model. […] The upshot was a meeting held at Ravello, Italy on 16–17 September 1963. [A group of molecular biologists] discussed the possibility of international cooperation in fundamental biology. The group decided that a European organization was a more …

In 1949, Linus Pauling and his collaborators published a study in the journal Science entitled ‘‘Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease.’’ In this now classic study, they showed that hemoglobin from patients suffering from sickle cell anemia has a different electrical charge than hemoglobin from healthy individuals. This result demonstrated for the first time that an abnormal protein could be causally linked to a disease, and that genes determined the structure of proteins. This report made headline news and had a powerful impact on both the biomedical community and the general public. Fifty years later, this study is discussed in almost every medical and biological textbook and has became a favorite example in editorials to illustrate the progress of biomedical research. This article explores the history of Pauling’s sickle cell anemia and its subsequent integration in different collective memories, up to the present day. It also discusses the function of the collective memories of Pauling’s discovery for contemporary biomedical research. 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Fifty years ago this month, Linus Pauling published his seminal Science paper describing the difference in electrophoretic mobilities between normal hemoglobin and that from patients with sickle cell anemia. In so doing he founded the field of molecular medicine, as Strasser explains in a lively Perspective that looks at the discovery and its aftermath.

Since its foundation, the nucleic acid sequence database GenBank has merged the values of natural history with those of the experimental sciences.

Since the late twentieth century, “citizen science” has become an increasingly fashionable label for a growing number of participatory research activities. This paper situates the origins and rise of the term “citizen science” and contextualises “citizen science” within the broader history of public participation in science. It analyses critically the current promises — democratisation, education, discoveries — emerging within the “citizen science” discourse and offers a new framework to better understand the diversity of epistemic practices involved in these participatory projects. Finally, it maps a number of historical, political, and social questions for future research in the critical studies of “citizen science”.