Table Of ContentGlobal
Transformations
in the
Life
Sciences,
1945–1980
Global
Transformations
in the
Life
Sciences,
1945–1980
Edited by
Patrick Manning
&
Mat Savelli
University of
Pittsburgh
Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4527-7
Jacket art: Ethiopian poster illustrating the activities of the Smallpox Eradication
Programme © World Health Organization/Ato Tesfaye, 1975
Jacket design by Alex Wolfe
CONTENTS
Foreword by Joanna Radin vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Life Sciences in the Era of Decolonization,
Social Welfare, and Cold War
Patrick Manning 1
Chapter 1. India Abroad: The Transnational Network of
Indian-Trained Physicians after Partition
David Wright, Sasha Mullally, and Renée Saucier 15
Chapter 2. The Postcolonial Context of Daniel Bovet’s
Research on Curare
Daniele Cozzoli 31
Chapter 3. The Disappointment of Smallpox Eradication
and Economic Development
Bob H. Reinhardt 47
Chapter 4. “Dermatoglyphics” and Race after the Second World War:
The View from East Asia
Daniel Asen 61
Chapter 5. Global Epidemiology, Local Message: Sino-American
Collaboration on Cancer Research, 1969–1990
Lijing Jiang 78
vi CONTENTS
Chapter 6. From Sovietization to Global Soviet Engagement?
Doubravka Olšáková 99
Chapter 7. Sexological Spring? The 1968 International Gathering
of Sexologists in Prague as a Turning Point
Kateřina Lišková 114
Chapter 8. The “Brain Gain Thesis” Revisited: German-Speaking
Émigré Neuroscientists and Psychiatrists in North America
Frank W. Stahnisch 128
Chapter 9. What’s in a Zone? Biological Order versus National Identity
in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study
Audra J. Wolfe 146
Chapter 10. For the Benefit of Humankind: Urgent Anthropology
at the Smithsonian Institution, 1965–1968
Adrianna Link 160
Chapter 11. What Counts as Threatened? Science and the
Sixth Extinction
Jon Agar 180
Notes 195
Bibliography 259
List of Contributors 303
Index 309
FOREWORD
Long before anyone was talking about “the Anthropocene,”
thoughtful observers of the post-1945 world saw the life sciences as central
to imagining the human future on a planet that they had already irrevoca-
bly transformed. René Dubos, for example, in his 1966 book, Man Adapt-
ing, remarked of the species, “The more human he is, the more intensely do
his anticipations of the future affect the character of his responses to the
forces of the present.”1 Though Dubos may not have been thinking of the
rise of feminism or even a broader upending of a gendered system of life,
he was keenly aware that any consideration of human survival, let alone
potential, was going to be intimately entangled with transformations in the
fields of biology and ecology.
Dubos was born in France but spent his career as a microbiologist,
environmentalist, and public intellectual in the United States, where he
popularized the maxim “Think globally, act locally.” The present volume
makes clear that an expansive history of life science and world history are,
together, uniquely suited to the task of interpreting how scientists deployed
their expertise in the service of geopolitics as well as interventions into the
lives of specific people. The contributors have taken a global approach that,
in each chapter, plunges into deeply rooted and local histories of life. Even
as it brings new attention to the role of humans and social welfare in the
vii
viii JOANNA RADIN
postwar life sciences, this volume interrogates the anthropocentric aims
promoted by Dubos in its consideration of new postwar agendas of conser-
vation and environmental stewardship.
Moreover, for these authors, life science includes but also goes far beyond
the important molecular and genetic work that has been the overwhelming
focus of scholarship on postwar history of biology. Today, many—from
heads of state to businesspeople to citizens—are still struggling to make
sense of the factors that Dubos’s generation faced. Think, for instance, of
the ways Silicon Valley entrepreneurs promote innovation without ques-
tioning whose lives are most likely to be transformed and at what costs.
Indeed, the rise of “global health” has been made possible in large part by
the philanthrocapitalism of America’s digital age. It has involved vaccines
and pharmaceuticals, international organizations that focus on both hu-
man health and environmental conservation, and the politics of decoloni-
zation, which has reproduced race-based forms of exclusion and violence.
What is global health, then, if not the effort to harness the promises of the
sciences of life—in particular biomedicine, anthropology, and ecology—in
the name of future social welfare, biosecurity, and diplomacy? The history
of global health is the history of life science since the Second World War.
The health of the globe and its inhabitants is on the minds of countless
who are experiencing the reemergence of old tensions once thought to be
history. While Cold War standoffs between the United States and the Sovi-
et Union have not played an outsize role in histories of postwar life science,
the advent of nuclear technologies, the rise of biomedicine, fossil fuel–
induced climate change, as well as neoimperialist projects of modernization
and economic development have deeply shaped the conditions of possibil-
ity for the present. The complex and detailed contributions to this volume
are an invaluable resource for understanding the past and reimagining it
in a way that creates futures in which science can be used to support the
flourishing of many kinds of life.
Joanna Radin
Section for the History of Medicine,
Yale University
PREFACE
This collective work expands into the late twentieth century an
inquiry into the global patterns and global implications of scientific inves-
tigation, pursuing history of science in the light of the expanding fields of
world and global history. The interest of world historians in history of sci-
ence can hardly be surprising. Especially in the past twenty years, the over-
lapping fields of world history and global history have developed rapidly,
addressing the whole of human history, but with particular focus on global
interconnections of the early modern and modern eras. Key contributions
in this era of expanding publication have focused on environmental and
migration history, supplementing earlier world historical concentration
on civilizational, imperial, and political history. Additional contributions
emerged in economic history at the turn of the twenty-first century, es-
pecially through comparison of European and Asian centers of economic
life. World historians showed interest in technological change though not
much in global scientific connections. Social, cultural, and intellectual
issues, while they advanced in many fields of historical study during the
late twentieth century, did not develop vigorously in the world historical
context. Thus, world historical thinking and research unfolded in uneven
fashion, especially because of the widely ranging topics of interest. Never-
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