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The article focuses on a community of geologists studying glaciation in the Adelaide Geosyncline in South Australia, Australia including Walter Howchin (1845-1937), Tannatt William Edgeworth David (1858-1934), and Robert Lockhart Jack (1878-1964) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They defined the region as Lower Cambrian, but is now accepted as being Neoproterozoic. Other subjects include the opposing geological theories of a "fixist" earth versus continental drift; academic debates regarding the interpretation of geological findings; and the Glacial Research Committee of the Australasian Association for Advancement of Science.

Scientific and political developments of the early twentieth century led Michael Polanyi to study the role of the scientist in research and the interaction between the individual scholar and the surrounding conditions in community and society. In his concept of “personal knowledge” he gave the theory and history of science an anthropological turn. In many instances of the history of sciences, research is driven by a commitment to beliefs and values. Society plays the role of authority and communicative backdrop that presupposes individual liberty. As a system of beliefs science is rooted in community and also in history. However, as soon as fellow humans become the objects of research, their appeal transcends the researcher. Consequently, the history of human endeavor reveals a “firmament” of standards and obligations which represent an ontological reality, for which Polanyi invokes Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of noosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the physics community deal with the subsequent work of a scientist whose earlier work has been regarded as incorrect? An interesting case of this involves Joseph Weber whose claim to have observed gravitational waves was rejected by virtually all of the physics community, although Weber himself continued to defend his work until his death in 2000. In the course of this defense Weber made a startling suggestion regarding the scattering of neutrinos. I will summarize the history of gravity waves including the rejection of Weber's claim around 1975, his later work on gravity waves, and examine the reaction of the physics community to his neutrino hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early 1920s to the end of 1930s, US meteorologists implemented a program of weather observation flights by airplanes as a chief method of collecting data from the upper-air. The seemingly well-defined task of obtaining more weather data as quickly as possible posed serious technical and managerial challenges to the meteorologists, who struggled to fix both the transient air and the pilots' risky weather flights. The relationship between meteorologists and pilots mediated through the recording instrument - meteorograph - reveals that the practices of collecting and representing scientific data were intimately entangled with various questions of professional identity, control in scientific practice, and the contested meaning of the 'automatic.' Putting the instrument and the project in this context enables us to understand why the new instrument 'radiosonde' that finally replaced the airplane method was called the 'robot observer.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and its director Willem de Sitter during the interwar period in Holland. After De Sitter was appointed acting director in 1918, he contacted his mentor astronomer J. C. Kapteyn of Groningen University to consider how to reorganize the Observatory to turn it into a center of international astronomy. Other subjects considered include the Observatory's German-language publication "Annalen der Sternwarte in Leiden," the influence of British astronomer David Gill of the Royal Observatory in South Africa on De Sitter, and the hiring negotiations involved in the appointments of Ejnar Hertzsprung and Anton Pannekoek as vice-directors for the Observatory.

In 1947 the Medical Research Council of Britain established the Laboratory Animals Bureau in order to develop national standards of animal production that would enable commercial producers better to provide for the needs of laboratory animal users. Under the directorship of William Lane-Petter, the bureau expanded well beyond this remit, pioneering a new discipline of "laboratory animal science" and becoming internationally known as a producer of pathogenically and genetically standardized laboratory animals. The work of this organization, later renamed the Laboratory Animals Centre, and of Lane-Petter did much to systematize worldwide standards for laboratory animal production and provision--for example, by prompting the formation of the International Committee on Laboratory Animals. This essay reconstructs how the bureau became an internationally recognized center of expertise and argues that standardization discourses within science are inherently internationalizing. It traces the dynamic co-constitution of standard laboratory animals alongside that of the identities of the users, producers, and regulators of laboratory animals. This process is shown to have brought into being a transnational community with shared conceptual understandings and material practices grounded in the materiality of the laboratory animal, conceived as an instrumental technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the career history of the animal husbandry researcher Clive Maine McCay, the development of his research in longevity, aging, and nutrition during the mid 20th-century, and how his work blossomed into a mainstream multidisciplinary academic field. An overview is given of McCay's professional career, highlighting his work at Cornell University from the 1930s to the 1950s. Other subjects discussed include the emergence of gerontology as a discipline and McCay's contributions to the conceptual unification of the field despite its multiple cross-disciplinary aspects.

The phenomenon of self-stimulation of the brain was discovered in 1954. This was one of the more important discoveries in behavioral neuroscience and psychology. The present article examines the origins of the phenomenon, describing some of the distal origins briefly, since each has a long history of its own and concentrates on the more proximal origins, including experiments preceding and closely related to the phenomenon and includes an account of the relevant knowledge at that time. A brief description of the events leading to Olds' crucial, if serendipitous, experiment is retold, followed by descriptions of some early experiments that preceded the later voluminous body of work based on it. Finally, some views are expressed about the import of the finding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the history of scientific dying in the 19th and 20th century by focusing three main incisions: the experimentalization, the implementation, and the instrumentalization of human death in research contexts. With the anti-vitalistic turn in the 1840s the experimentalization of death, which was closely linked to the spectacular "physique amusante" of galvanizing and magnetizing human subjects, was suspended. Scientists were no longer interested in the physiological and spiritual processes of dying and experimental death became parenthetic. This implementation of death in the 19th century was removed by the instrumentalization of scientific dying in the Nazi Concentration Camps. From a sociological perspective, the experimental death in the 'Krankenrevier' was constitutive for the absolute power of the SS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper centers on the history of the development of science and scientific research in Spain in the mid-twentieth century, by reading Jose Maria Albareda's Considerations on Scientific Research. The book blends anecdotes about his personal life and personal references to scientists from abroad, with whom Albareda was associated, thoughts on the nature of science and the situation of research in Spain after the Civil War (1936 - 1939), and proposals about the relation between the State and the University. Albareda was a professor of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Universidad Central, and, from 1939, General Secretary of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (Higher Council for Scientific Research) and Director of the Institute of Edaphology. Reading Albareda's autobiography allows us to use biographical data from one of the protagonists of scientific policy in Spain in the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate a scientist's reflections on intellectual life and its relationship with existing institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection attends to Paul White's call in his introduction to this Focus section for a history of science that is informed by the history of emotions. It offers a succinct historical exemplification of the possibilities of studying the history of science in terms of the history of emotions. It draws on Raymond Williams's concept of "structure of feeling" in arguing for the emergence of an adrenaline structure of feeling during the early twentieth century. It provides a mosaic of different views of the immanence of the adrenaline structure of feeling in diverse scientific realms by broaching some of the major themes that appear in the individual essays in this Focus section. In connection with the [self-injection] of adrenalin, you can call the feeling anything you like, but it is really general, and a good deal like the feeling you have when you are waiting for an experiment to start. --Carney Landis, 1926 "Feeling" is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of "world view" or "ideology." It is not only that we must go beyond formally held and systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable. --Raymond Williams, 1977 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science of artificial intelligence (AI) is not as unemotional as it might first appear. Not only are researchers in the field now taking an interest in how to program affective capacities into artificial agents; there is also plenty of historical evidence that concerns about affect have been present in AI from the earliest years. Examination of archival materials from the 1940s and 1950s shows that affects (particularly as they circulate between men) have been a significant part of innovation in AI from the beginning. This essay looks at one fragment of that history: the currents of affective and sexual interests in and around Walter Pitts, one of the important, eccentric, and little-written-about founders of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Spanish utopian visions and dreams associated with the peaceful application of nuclear technologies in the 1960s in Spain, focusing particularly on the industrial and agricultural applications of isotope technologies. It considers how the Nuclear Energy Board of Spain (Junta de Energía Nuclear or JEN) met the economic development needs of Spain by finding practical applications for their isotope research. Other subjects include the science policy of Spain under General Francisco Franco, public attitudes towards atomic research and nuclear power, and restrictions on the exchange of scientific knowledge during the Cold War.

The article discusses the history of isotope research in France done by the French Atomic Energy Commission (the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique or CEA) during the period from 1946 to 1958. It focuses on the various scientific instruments used to bombard isotopes such as accelerators, cyclotrons, and reactors and considers how the instruments defined the research done in the radioisotope preparation laboratories at CEA. The authors consider British research during the same period and compare it to research conducted at CEA.

The article presents a comparative analysis of the history of isotope research programs designed for both biomedical and industrial applications in the United States, Great Britain, and France from 1945 to 1965. The author focuses particularly on the European isotope industry, especially the radioisotope distribution networks, the creation of training sites for research of radioisotopes, and scholarly publications which focused on isotope research or the use of isotopes as research tools. The author compares the success and productivity of the scientific research by considering evidence of material resources, workforce, and knowledge.

The article discusses Hungarian radiochemist George Hevesy and his research on radioactivity in Hungary during the 1910s. The author asserts that scientific methodology in the study of radioactivity during the period was based on the scientific legacies evolving from either natural history or experiment-based scientific research, sometimes called Baconian science. Other subjects considered are Hevesy's relationships with other scientists in Hungary, the development of the radioactive tracer method, the first applications of radioactive tracers and indicators, the isotope theory of matter, and radioactivity expert Béla Szilárd.

The article discusses British chemist and physicist Francis Aston, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of the isotopes of light elements in 1919 using his mass-spectrograph at Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. The author focuses on Aston's career at Cavendish Laboratory and his adaptive methods of handling laboratory equipment for physics and chemistry experimentation. Some other notable scientists considered include J. J. Thompson, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy.

The article discusses reports published within this special issue on the twentieth century history of the science of isotope research, including one by Jeff Hughes and Gabor Palló on the early isotope research by scientists including Frederick Soddy and Francis Aston, one by Soraya Boudia on the use of medical imaging in World War II, and one by Simone Turchetti on Cold War isotope research.

I propose we abandon the unit concept of “the evolutionary synthesis”. There was much more to evolutionary studies in the 1920s and 1930s than is suggested in our commonplace narratives of this object in history. Instead, four organising threads capture much of evolutionary studies at this time. First, the nature of species and the process of speciation were dominating, unifying subjects. Second, research into these subjects developed along four main lines, or problem complexes: variation, divergence, isolation, and selection. Some calls for ‹synthesis’ focused on these problem complexes (sometimes on one of these; other times, all). In these calls, comprehensive and pluralist compendia of plausibly relevant elements were preferred over reaching consensus about the value of particular formulae. Third, increasing confidence in the study of common problems coincided with methodological and epistemic changes associated with experimental taxonomy. Finally, the surge of interest in species problems and speciation in the 1930s is intimately tied to larger trends, especially a shifting balance in the life sciences towards process-based biologies and away from object-based naturalist disciplines. Advocates of synthesis in evolution supported, and were adapting to, these larger trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of communication research, focusing on conflict between empirical and critical schools of thought. Debates over epistemology are said to have significantly influenced the development of communication as a scholarly field. The involvement of researchers Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno with the Princeton Radio Research Project during the 20th century is cited as an example of this intellectual conflict. Lazarsfeld, who was heading the project, was committed to empirical research, while Adorno advocated a critical theoretic approach.

Since his death in 1882, if not before, Charles Darwin has been a key icon of the modern era. The bearded sage of Down House has been invoked in a wide range of contexts in the English-speaking world, from eugenics and social policy to debates about the implications of science for religious belief. The essays in this Focus section explore the Darwinian image in an unusual diversity of media, examining portrait photographs, portable sculptures, newspaper caricatures, cartoons, after-dinner drinking songs, and long-playing records. They suggest that Darwin's celebrity needs to be understood not as the outcome of the unique qualities of his life and work, but as an aspect of the emergence of the idea of the scientist, a process closely tied to the developing communication and entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paleontologist Robert Broom developed an image of himself as a scientific rebel, assailing the centers of expert authority from the margins as he pursued a career whose idiosyncratic path was dictated less by the promise of professional security or material reward than by the whims of his curiosity and the desire to be free of institutional constraint. In the 1930s Broom put forward an idiosyncratic evolutionary theory that rejected both Lamarckian and Darwinian mechanisms in favor of "spiritual agencies" responsible for the evolutionary process. He characterized his views as a dissent from the orthodox evolutionary thought of most scientific authorities, and he believed such acts of dissent to be integral to the virtuous conduct of science. Broom was drawing on a familiar trope in the history of the sciences--that of the scientist as a heroic rebel. However, the religious infection of Broom's theory, and his characterization of fellow scientists as purveyors of orthodoxy, reverses the more common form of the trope, which associates religion with orthodoxy and institutional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increased attention on the visual in the history of science, there is renewed interest in the role of portraiture and other forms of personal imagery in constructing scientific reputation and the circulation of scientific ideas. This essay indicates some directions in which researchers could push forward by studying the dissemination of pictures and portraits of Charles Darwin. Selected portraits are discussed, with particular attention paid to their circulation. The mode of production and original intent of these portraits is briefly addressed, but the thrust of the argument is to highlight subsequent shifts in usage. While self-fashioning is an important part of the story, it is useful also to dwell on the rise and diversification of printed media in conjunction with escalating interest in Darwin as a celebrity figure. Historicizing the variety of opportunities that people have had of "looking" at Darwin adds considerably to our understanding of scientific fame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the historical background and early formation of Wilhelm Johannsen’s distinction between genotype and phenotype. It is argued that contrary to a widely accepted interpretation (For instance, W. Provine, 1971. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Mayr, 1973; F. B. Churchill, 1974. Journal of the History of Biology 7: 5–30; E. Mayr, 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; J. Sapp, 2003. Genesis. The Evolution of Biology. New York: Oxford University Press) his concepts referred primarily to properties of individual organisms and not to statistical averages. Johannsen’s concept of genotype was derived from the idea of species in the tradition of biological systematics from Linnaeus to de Vries: An individual belonged to a group – species, subspecies, elementary species – by representing a certain underlying type (S. Müller-Wille and V. Orel, 2007. Annals of Science 64: 171–215). Johannsen sharpened this idea theoretically in the light of recent biological discoveries, not least those of cytology. He tested and confirmed it experimentally combining the methods of biometry, as developed by Francis Galton, with the individual selection method and pedigree analysis, as developed for instance by Louis Vilmorin. The term “genotype” was introduced in W. Johannsen’s 1909 ( Elemente der Exakten Erblichkeitslehre. Jena: Gustav Fischer) treatise, but the idea of a stable underlying biological “type” distinct from observable properties was the core idea of his classical bean selection experiment published 6 years earlier (W. Johannsen, 1903. Ueber Erblichkeit in Populationen und reinen Linien. Eine Beitrag zur Beleuchtung schwebender Selektionsfragen, Jena: Gustav Fischer, pp. 58–59). The individual ontological foundation of population analysis was a self-evident presupposition in Johannsen’s studies of heredity in populations from their start in the early 1890s till his death in 1927. The claim that there was a “substantial but cautious modification of Johannsen’s phenotype–genotype distinction” (Churchill, 1974, p. 24) from a statistical to an individual ontological perspective derives from a misreading of the 1903 and 1909 texts. The immediate purpose of this paper is to correct this reading of the 1903 monograph by showing how its problems and results grow out of Johannsen’s earlier work in heredity and plant breeding. Johannsen presented his famous selection experiment as the culmination of a line of criticism of orthodox Darwinism by William Bateson, Hugo de Vries, and others (Johannsen, 1903). They had argued that evolution is based on stepwise rather than continuous change in heredity. Johannsen’s paradigmatic experiment showed how stepwise variation in heredity could be operationally distinguished from the observable, continuous morphological variation. To test Galton’s law of partial regression, Johannsen deliberately chose pure lines of self-fertilizing plants, a pure line being the descendants in successive generations of one single individual. Such a population could be assumed to be highly homogeneous with respect to hereditary type, and Johannsen found that selection produced no change in this type. Galton, he explained, had experimented with populations composed of a number of stable hereditary types. The partial regression which Galton found was simply an effect of selection between types, increasing the proportion of some types at the expense of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preparative and analytical methods developed by separation scientists have played an important role in the history of molecular biology. One such early method is gel electrophoresis, a technique that uses various types of gel as its supporting medium to separate charged molecules based on size and other properties. Historians of science, however, have only recently begun to pay closer attention to this material epistemological dimension of biomolecular science. This paper substantiates the historiographical thread that explores the relationship between modern laboratory practice and the production of scientific knowledge. It traces the historical development of gel electrophoresis from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, with careful attention to the interplay between technical developments and disciplinary shifts, especially the rise of molecular biology in this time-frame. Claiming that the early 1950s marked a decisive shift in the evolution of electrophoretic methods from moving boundary to zone electrophoresis, I reconstruct various trajectories in which scientists such as Oliver Smithies sought out the most desirable solid supporting medium for electrophoretic instrumentation. Biomolecular knowledge, I argue, emerged in part from this process of seeking the most appropriate supporting medium that allowed for discrete molecular separation and visualization. The early 1950s, therefore, marked not only an important turning point in the history of separation science, but also a transformative moment in the history of the life sciences as the growth of molecular biology depended in part on the epistemological access to the molecular realm available through these evolving technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the International Congress of Zoology held in Washington D.C. in 1963 as a portrait of American zoologists’ search for effective and rewarding relationships with both each other and the public. Organizers of the congress envisioned the congress as a last ditch effort to unify the disparate subdisciplines of zoology, overcome the barriers of specialization, and ward off the heady claims of more reductionist biologists. The problems zoologists faced as they worked to fulfill these ambitious goals illuminate some of the challenges faced by members of the naturalist tradition as they worked to establish disciplinary unity while seeking public support in the competitive world of twentieth century science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the scientific debates and the reception of evolutionary theories throughout the 20th century in Spain. The author traces the introduction of Darwinian and alternative evolutionary theories in the early 20th century, discusses the controversies between Darwinian and anti-Darwinian perspectives before the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and considers the influence of the Spanish Civil War on the scientific and ideological debate concerning these theories. He also comments on the Spanish reception of the modern evolutionary synthesis developed by authors such as Julian Huxley, George Gaylord Simpson and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

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Not until the twentieth century did science come to be regarded as fundamentally technical in nature. A technical field, after all, meant not just a difficult one, but one relying on concepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists. The alternative, to identify science with an ideal of public reason, attained its peak of influence in the late nineteenth century. While the scale and applicability of science advanced enormously after 1900, scientists have more and more preferred the detached objectivity of service to bureaucratic experts over the cultivation of an engaged public. This reshaping of science, which has been both celebrated and condemned, provided a stimulus to the incipient field of history of science, and it remains a key historical problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of science and cosmology, especially in the 20th century, and the role of the American West as the site of much important research and observation, especially in astronomy. The cosmology and creation myths of Native Americans are discussed, as is the union of the fields of human and natural history in the early 20th century. Thinkers discussed include historian Frederick Jackson Turner, physicist Albert Einstein, astronomer Edwin Hubble, and others. Western astronomical observatories discussed include the Lick and the Mount Wilson observatories in California, among others. Also discussed are the John D. Hooker Telescope, and space telescopes such as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected--not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discipline of endocrinology emerged over roughly the same period in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, and its practitioners across the world shared research practices and agendas to a considerable degree. Yet the discipline's institutions, networks, and social practices were firmly embedded in the particular social fabric of concrete locales, and they were built on specific local traditions, resources, and patronage. Through analysis of the origins and early progress of Soviet endocrinology, this essay uncovers numerous factors and multiple actors involved with the institutional development of the discipline in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. As elsewhere in the world, the medicinal use of animal tissue extracts--organotherapy--paved the way for wide acceptance of the ideas of the nascent science of endocrinology by both the Soviet medical community and the general public. Organotherapy also supplied the new discipline with "seed" institutions, technologies, and personnel--the veterinarian Iakov Tobolkin and the therapist Vasilii Shervinskii. But the specific institutional, political, economic, and ideological landscape of Soviet Russia shaped the discipline in a particular way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a literary criticism of six books that focus on science in the Soviet Union during the rule of Josef Stalin. Some of these include "Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists," by Alexei B. Kojevnikov; "Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars," by Ethan Pollock; and "Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia Between the Wars," edited by Susan Gross Solomon.

The paper discusses how well Kuhn’s general theory of scientific revolutions fits the particular case of the chemical revolution. To do so, I first present condensed sketches of both Kuhn’s theory and the chemical revolution. I then discuss the beginning of the chemical revolution and compare it to Kuhn’s specific claims about the roles of anomalies, crisis and extraordinary science in scientific development. I proceed by comparing some features of the chemical revolution as a whole to Kuhn’s general account. The result will be that Kuhn’s general description of scientific revolutions fits the chemical revolution extraordinarily well. However, this result should not be taken as an empirical confirmation of Kuhn’s theory, but rather as an indication that the chemical revolution is a constitutive part of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several images and photographs related to topics presented in articles in the April 2014 issue of the periodical "Leonardo" are presented, including an image of the 1963 art exhibition "Live Stills: Apple Sees Red," by the artist Billy Apple, the diagram "The Stages of Development--Theoretical," by the mathematician Christine Ladd-Franklin, and a piece of Mayan pottery.

The article discusses visual history and material culture studies. The author also talks about a section of the journal called "Images, History, and Technology." The author explains that visual history is often used to describe a visual account such as a narrative that uses pictures to enliven a text. Authors will often build an argument around an image and consider what a representation reveals about a particular culture or period. How to interpret historical events and cultural moments through visual history is also discussed.

An editorial is presented which addresses the author's views about the treatment of leprosy (Hansen's disease) in relation to changes involving American medicine during the 20th century, and it mentions another article which appears in the same issue of the journal and deals with science, cultural attitudes, and the understanding of diseases. Treatments for cancer and heart disease are examined, along with medical cures and various forms of survivorship care.

The haphazard development of twentieth century biology is criticized from the standpoint of John Dewey who rejects the classical Greek philosophical approach. Neglect of history of science was pointed out by Sarton and Dingle, but they, and Dewey, could not convince scientists that their approach is planless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Paul Karl Moritz Knipping, a German scientist who has contributed to the completion of the experimentation of diffraction of X-rays by systematic crystals. Knipping has started his college studies in Heidelberg, Germany in 1904 and transferred to Munich in 1905 to continue and finish his thesis on the influence of the pretreatment on various properties of lead. After 1912, Knipping's work has focused on X-rays making him a prominent figure in the science history.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to articles regarding the role of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the 20th-century science by Freeman Dyson and Kamesh Wali in the December 2010 issue.