Science diplomacy on display: mobile atomic exhibitions in the cold war: Introduction to Special Issue.

Despite the increasing interest in science exhibitions, there has been hardly any work on mobile science exhibitions and their role within science diplomacy - a gap this thematic issue is meant to fill. Atomic mobile exhibitions are seen here not only as cultural sites but as multifaceted strategic processes of transnational nuclear history. We move beyond the bipolar Cold War history that portrays propagandist science exhibitions as instances of a one-way communication employed to promote the virtues of the two major and conflicting political powers. Instead, Science Diplomacy on Display follows mobile atomic exhibitions as they move across national borders and around the world, functioning as spaces for diplomatic encounters. Exhibitions play a vital role not only in the production of knowledge and the formation of political worldviews but also as assets in diplomatic negotiations and as promoters of a new worldview in which nuclear stands at the centre. They are powerful iconic diplomatic devices, that is systems of representations that capture the diplomatic processes in action and make the nitty-gritty details of international relations visible. This issue seeks to trace the multiple and often contradictory meanings that mobile exhibitions took on for various actors.

The Global Experiment: How the International Atomic Energy Agency Proved Dosimetry to Be a Techno-Diplomatic Issue.

This paper draws attention to the role of the IAEA in shaping radiation dosimetry practices, instrumentation, and standards in the late 1950s and 1960s. It traces the beginnings of the IAEA's radiation dose intercomparison program which targeted all member states and involved the WHO so as to standardize dosimetry on a global level. To standardize dosimetric measurement methods, techniques, and instruments, however, one had to devise a method of comparing absorbed dose measurements in one laboratory with those performed in others with a high degree of accuracy. In 1964 the IAEA thus started to build up what I call the "global experiment," an intercomparison of radiation doses with participating laboratories from many of its member states. To carry out the process of worldwide standardization in radiation dosimetry, I argue, an organization with the diplomatic power and global reach of the IAEA was absolutely necessary. Thus, "global experiment" indicates a novel understanding of the experimental process. What counts as an experiment became governed by a process that was designed and strictly regulated by an international organization; it took place simultaneously in several laboratories across the globe, while experimental data became centrally owned and alienated from those that produced it.

With strings attached: Gift-giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US foreign policy.

In 1958 the United States of America offered two mobile radioisotope laboratories to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as gifts. For the USA, supplying the IAEA with gifts was not only the cost of "doing business" in the new nuclear international setting of the Cold War, but also indispensable in maintaining authority and keeping the upper hand within the IAEA and in the international regulation of nuclear energy. The transformation of a technoscientific artefact into a diplomatic gift with political strings attached for both giver and receiver, positions the lab qua gift as a critical key that simultaneously unlocks the overlapping histories of international affairs, Cold War diplomacy, and postwar nuclear science. Embracing political epistemology as my primary methodological framework and introducing the gift as a major analytic category, I emphasize the role of material objects in modeling scientific research and training in a way that is dictated by diplomatic negotiations, state power, and international legal arrangements.

Determining Nuclear Fingerprints: Glove Boxes, Radiation Protection, and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In a nuclear laboratory, a glove box is a windowed, sealed container equipped with two flexible gloves that allow the user to manipulate nuclear materials from the outside in an ostensibly safe environment. As a routine laboratory device, it invites neglect from historians and storytellers of science. Yet, since especially the Gulf War, glove boxes have put the interdependence of science, diplomacy, and politics into clear relief. Standing at the intersection of history of science and international history, technological materials and devices such as the glove box can provide penetrating insight into the role of international diplomatic organizations to the global circulation and control of scientific knowledge. The focus here is on the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Packaging radium, selling science: boxes, bottles and other mundane things in the world of science.

This article discusses the intersection of science and culture in the marketplace and explores the ways in which radium quack and medicinal products were packaged and labelled in the early twentieth century US. Although there is an interesting growing body of literature by art historians on package design, historians of science and medicine have paid little to no attention to the ways scientific and medical objects that were turned into commodities were packaged and commercialized. Thinking about packages not as mere containers but as multifunctional tools adds to historical accounts of science as a sociocultural enterprise and reminds us that science has always been part of consumer culture. This paper suggests that far from being receptacles that preserve their content and facilitate their transportation, bottles and boxes that contained radium products functioned as commercial and epistemic devices. It was the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act that enforced such functions. Packages worked as commercial devices in the sense that they were used to boost sales. In addition, 'epistemic' points to the fact that the package is an artefact that ascribes meaning to and shapes its content while at the same time working as a device for distinguishing between patent and orthodox medicines.

The women radium dial painters as experimental subjects (1920-1990) or what counts as human experimentation.

The case of women radium dial painters - women who tipped their brushes while painting the dials of watches and instruments with radioactive paint - has been extensively discussed in the medical and historical literature. Their painful and abhorrent deaths have occupied the interest of physicians, lawyers, politicians, military agencies, and the public. Hardly any discussion has concerned, however, the use of those women as experimental subjects in a number of epidemiological studies that took place from 1920 to 1990. This article addresses the neglected issue of human experimentation in relation to the radium dial painters. Although women's medical examinations have been classified as simple, routine measurements of radiation burden on the body and presented as a great offer to humanity, for more than fifty years those women had been repeatedly used as experimental subjects without proper consent. I argue that through this case it becomes obvious that the issue of defining what counts as human experimentation shifts from an epistemological to a serious ethical and political question, concerning the making of scientific knowledge while issues of gender related to this process are also discussed.

The city as a context for scientific activity: creating the Mediziner-Viertel in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

At the turn of the 19th century, a surprisingly dense network of academic institutes and medical facilities developed on the margins of Ringstrasse, the impressive boulevard that surrounded the old city of Vienna. Enmeshed, socially and culturally in the life of the city, that area known as the Mediziner-Viertel grew out of the needs of natural scientists and physicians as much as it was shaped by the liberal ideology, feminists' petitions for women's acceptance to university studies, Vienna's intellectuals and Kaffeehaus culture. Recovering the city behind the structure of modern academic institutes tells us a good deal about the context in which intellectual work was developed and its impact on the production of scientific knowledge.

Gender, politics, and radioactivity research in interwar Vienna: the case of the Institute for Radium Research.

This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.