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The late blight disease of potatoes, which triggered the great Irish famine of 1845-1849, remains one of the most feared and intractable plant diseases today. Decades of dispute about the cause of the disease followed the outbreak of 1845, and the scientifi c controversy illustrates the uneasy historical relationship among farmers, scientifi c agronomists, and plant pathologists. Consensus fi nally emerged that the fungus Phytophthora infestans was the true cause of the disease, but that organism's full life cycle remained obscure. Its sexual oospores could not be readily obtained by mycologists, despite sporadic reports that had been observed. The 20th century opened with great optimism that resistant varieties could be developed using dominant R-genes obtainable from some wild species, and this optimism led to a proliferation of public breeding programs between 1925 and 1935. But these hopes had foundered by the early 1950s with the inexplicable appearance of new fungal races that could overwhelm the most blight-resistant germplasm. The Rockefeller Foundation's postwar agricultural initiative in Mexico led during the 1950s to dramatic and unexpected solutions to some of the late blight puzzles. But even then the fungus remained obscure, and effective, non-chemical control methods have never been forthcoming. This article examines the historical frustrations of late-blight science and advances that history as a case study illustrating the rise and fall of an “heroic age” of resistance breeding and plant pathology in the first half of the 20th century.

On 14 January 1999, the Health Protection Branch of Health Canada denied regulatory approval to the Monsanto Corporation's recombinant bovine growth hormone, Nutrilac. In doing so it rejected the first major product of genetic engineering proposed for regulatory approval in Canada that had been commercially targeted at the agriculture and food-production system. The decision ended a bitter and sometimes bizarre saga characterized by allegations of corporate bribery, whistle-blowing scientists and hostile parliamentary committee investigations. The rBST story is examined here as an example of contemporary technoscientific controversies, as a case study in the Canadian regulatory style and for its relevance to current debates over the reform of Canadian regulatory procedures. Le 14 janvier 1999, la Direction generale de la protection de la santa de Same Canada refusait d'accorder A la societe Monsanto l'approbation reglementaire concemant Nutrilac, son hormone de croissance bovine recombinee. Ce faisant, elle rejetait le premier produit d'importance issu du genie genetique et propose pour approbation reglementaire au Canada, produit qui ciblait, de facon commerciale, l'agriculture et le systeme de la production alimentaire. La decision mettait fin A une saga amere et parfois etrange, caracterisee par des allegations de corruption relatives aux entreprises, par la denonciation des scientifiques et par des enquetes hostiles de comites parlementaires. On examine ici I'histoire du rBST, un bon exemple de controverse technoscientifique contemporaine, en tant qu'etude de cas du style reglementaire canadien, ainsi que pour sa pertinence quant aux debats actuels sur la reforme du systeme reglementaire canadien. Public issues today focus increasingly upon technological innovations, the controversies to which they give rise and the regulatory decisions they necessitate. These controversies usually involve risk or the perception of risk, and they raise issues of social justice as to how risks and benefits are to be shared. They differ from other kinds of political and social disputes because they purport to turn on highly technical questions that require expert scientific assessment. Theorists like Dorothy Nelkin have noted that such controversies often see a "displacement of issues" from the political, economic and moral questions that motivate the controversy to a focus on narrowly technical or scientific issues that serve as surrogates. The science behind technoscientific controversies is typically disputed, uncertain and usually insufficient to resolve the dispute or to generate expert consensus. Much of it is what Canadian theorist Liora Salter has called "mandated science" - research done specifically to assist a regulatory decision or to satisfy regulatory requirements. If the research is mandated by government but performed by an initiating manufacturer, it is typically treated as proprietary, confidential and hence unavailable to public scrutiny - one of the several ways in which, according to Salter, mandated science differs in character from academic or research science. The uncertainty that besets much mandated science is inherently political. Uncertainty can justify calls for more research, regulatory delay and so defence of the status quo. Technoscientific controversies are typically dealt with in the science-based, regulatory agencies of government. There they disrupt the low-profile routine of these agencies, thrust them into the public and media spotlight and subject their proceedings to unfamiliar and unwelcome political criticism. They challenge the scientistic assumptions that often prevail in these agencies and so threaten their cognitive authority. No wonder, then, that with technoscientific controversies on the rise, the question of how different agencies within the same governmental structure and comparable regulatory agencies in different governments deal with science-based regulatory controversies has become an urgent question. …

The analysis of technoscientific regulatory controversies is now an established genre within science studies, with a small but important methodological and meta-literature. That literature has only rarely noted how published accounts of particular controversies inevitably employ narrational strategies, including decisions about emplotment, time-frames, character-motivation, and the use of tropes, to endow these stories with political and epistemological meaning. In an exercise designed to recover these narrational elements and promote narrative consciousness, this paper presents two separate accounts of a single important controversy: Canada's recent regulatory experience with the Monsanto Corporation's recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). The discussion points out the different narrational strategies employed in each account, and analyses how these strategies interact with explicit or theory-based interpretive approaches to determine how the accounts contribute to `public moral argument' about regulatory affairs. It concludes with broader speculations on the advantages that a greater reliance on narrative form has to offer the field of controversy-analysis and science studies in general.

Theodore Ziolkowski, Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004)Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006)In the same symbolic way that the modern political world can be traced to revolutionary Paris, and the modern economic world to industrial Manchester, so modern academia and modern scholarship trace their origins to Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. There and then the study of history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, and, somewhat later, the natural sciences was transformed in content and methodology onto the lines that would characterize them until deep into the twentieth century. Some argue that the period from 1770 to 1830 launched a still more fundamental transformation in the very structure of academic knowledge: the creation of modern “disciplines” as the new social and intellectual forms through which knowledge would be classified, produced, and communicated.

FORMERLY the history of education consisted largely ofthe Ideengeschichte of pedagogical theory and of narrow admini? strative and inst tutional studies of s hool and universities. More recently, what Konrad Jarausch called the "old 'new history of education'" has turned to different concerns.1 These include the quan? titative analysis of social and institutional structures: comparative studies of school types, student recruitment and mobility patterns, and the developing career structure ofthe teaching corps. The new history of education attempts to unravel the bureaucratic and political struc? tures and debates which accompanied educational reform and its im? plementation. Its theoretical discussions have focussed on middlelevel causation, mainly on attempts to correlate particular pedagogical agendas with specific social interests. Despite its very considerable achievements, the new history of edu? cation is open to criticism for its neglect of how educational reform is rooted in larger patterns of historical change. It has also been criticized

THE SOCIOLOGIST AVRAHAM ZLOCZOWER produced his remarkable master's thesis, "Career Opportunities and the Growth of Scientific Discovery in Nineteenth-Century Germany, with Special Reference to Physiology," in 1960. His basic argument became widely known during the next few years through journal articles written by Zloczower himself and by his thesis director, Joseph Ben-David, and in 1973 the thesis was published in German translation.' The Zloczower thesis represents the most ambitious and persuasive attempt yet made to demonstrate quantitatively that scientific creativity is governed by institutional factors and career motivations external to the cognitive features of the science. In this essay we point out that the original Zloczower argument implicitly contains a "weak" and a "strong" version of his central thesis, each appealing to somewhat different evidence, and we advance a tentative criticism of the strong version. Since most readers are unfamiliar with the detailed evidence on which Zloczower's thesis rests, we begin with a summary that stresses more clearly than did the original the quantitative relationships central to the argument. We acknowledge, however, that our summary hardly does justice to the richness of Zloczower's original, which draws on comparisons between German physiology and that of other nations, and which appeals extensively to historical testimony of the physiologists of the day. Zloczower begins his analysis by assembling a numerical index of scientific creativity or research achievement, specifically the number of "discoveries" or

The philosophical convictions of Hermann von Helmholtz and the empiricist psychology he developed have been extensively discussed in historical literature. This literature has not usually emphasized the tacit assumptions about human physiology that underlaid these convictions nor the way in which Helmholtz's epistemology served as a methodological directive in his research. Helmholtz assumed nerve transmission between sense organs and the mind to be a passive process. Distortion in stimulus patterns occurs physically in the sense organs, which can therefore be treated through mechanical analogies. Stimuli become converted to the perceptions of consciousness through mental processes that are essentially analogous to conscious, inductive inference and that are therefore susceptible, in principle, to introspective investigation. This view of mental function reflected Helmholtz's intellectual debt to German idealism, especially to the philosophical views of J. G. Fichte.

A massive bibliography of works on physiological optics allows an approximate reconstruction of literature production in this science between 1840 and 1894. It shows how relative levels of productivity varied in over seventy constituent problem areas and challenges us to explain the shifting foci of research activity in terms of what is known about the institutional and theoretical development of the field. This paper describes the growth of the science and offers such an interpretation, arguing that physiological optics passed from a `pre-paradigm' to a `paradigm' stage between 1850 and 1870. The elements of the paradigmatic formulation affected literature production in various problem areas differently, depending on the nature of the consensus they imposed, and the formulation did not prevent chronic disagreements on important theoretical questions from re-emerging.

The term ‘Ohm's law’ traditionally denotes the formula of Georg Simon Ohm relating voltage, current, and resistance in metallic conductors. But to students of sensory physiology and its history, ‘Ohm's law’ also denotes another relationship: the fundamental principle of auditory perception that Ohm announced in 1843. This aspect of Ohm's science has attracted very little attention, partly because his galvanic researches so thoroughly eclipsed it in success and importance, and partly because Ohm's work in physiological acoustics had so little immediate impact on the science of his time. On announcing his hypothesis in 1843, Ohm found himself drawn into a bitter dispute with the physicist August Seebeck, who successfully discredited the hypothesis and forced Ohm to withdraw from the field.