The letter, the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France.

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations). The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755-79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's 'Bureau de traduction de Dijon', devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781-90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation - with both the experiments and the translations - the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.

Propaganda and Philanthropy: The Institute Bento da Rocha Cabral, the Lisbon Site of Biochemistry (1925-1953).

This paper focuses on the internal organization and dynamics of the Institute Bento da Rocha Cabral (IRC) in Lisbon, a privately-funded institution devoted to biomedical research, from the particular vantage point of its laboratory of biochemistry; in particular, the process through which the institution turned from medically-related to chemically-related research in the period spanning from 1925 to 1953. The history of the IRC raises interesting questions regarding the social politics of science as it materialized the desire of leading physicians of the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon to create proper physical facilities for medically-related scientific research. We argue that the process which led to the creation of the IRC coincided with the gradual professional and political ascendance of physicians in Portuguese society initiated in the late nineteenth century, and is closely associated with Portuguese republicanism and the process of Lisbon becoming the scientific capital.

Alliances in Human Biology: The Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology, 1929-1939.

In 1929 the newly-reorganized Rockefeller Foundation funded the work of a cross-disciplinary group at Harvard University called the Committee on Industrial Physiology (CIP). The committee's research and pedagogical work was oriented towards different things for different members of the alliance. The CIP program included a research component in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Elton May's interpretation of the Hawthorne Studies; a pedagogical aspect as part of Wallace Donham's curriculum for Harvard Business School; and Lawrence Henderson's work with the Harvard Pareto Circle, his course Sociology 23, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. The key actors within the CIP alliance shared a concern with training men for elite careers in government service, business leadership, and academic prominence. But the first communications between the CIP and the Rockefeller Foundation did not emphasize training in human biology. Instead, the CIP presented itself as a coordinating body that would be able to organize all the varied work going on at Harvard that did not fit easily into one department, and it was on this basis that the CIP became legible to the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, and to Rockefeller's Division of Social Sciences. The members of the CIP alliance used the term human biology for this project of research, training and institutional coordination.

Blood groups and human groups: collecting and calibrating genetic data after World War Two.

Arthur Mourant's The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups (1954) was an "indispensable" reference book on the "anthropology of blood groups" containing a vast collection of human genetic data. It was based on the results of blood-grouping tests carried out on half-a-million people and drew together studies on diverse populations around the world: from rural communities, to religious exiles, to volunteer transfusion donors. This paper pieces together sequential stages in the production of a small fraction of the blood-group data in Mourant's book, to examine how he and his colleagues made genetic data from people. Using sources from several collecting projects, I follow how blood was encountered, how it was inscribed, and how it was turned into a laboratory resource. I trace Mourant's analytical and representational strategies to make blood groups both credibly 'genetic' and understood as relevant to human ancestry, race and history. In this story, 'populations' were not simply given, but were produced through public health, colonial and post-colonial institutions, and by the labour and expertise of subjects, assistants and mediators. Genetic data were not self-evidently 'biological', but were shaped by existing historical and geographical identities, by political relationships, and by notions of kinship and belonging.

The Plymouth Laboratory and the institutionalization of experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s.

The Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (1884) was founded in 1888. In addition to conducting morphological and other biological research, the founders of the laboratory aimed at promoting research in experimental zoology which will be used in this paper as a synonym for e.g. experimental embryology, comparative physiology or general physiology. This dream was not fully realized until 1920. The Great War and its immediate aftermath had a positive impact on the development of the Plymouth Laboratory. The war greatly upset the operation of the Zoological Station in Naples and the ensuing crisis in its operations was closely related to the establishment of the physiological department in Plymouth in 1920. Two other key factors in the Plymouth story were the establishment of the Development Fund in 1909, which began contributing funds to the Plymouth Laboratory in 1912, and the patronage of the Cambridge zoologist George P. Bidder (1863-1954). This paper will focus on the combined influence of the Development Fund and Bidder on the development of the Plymouth Laboratory from around 1902 through the early 1920s, and the important role the laboratory played in promoting experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s.

Between the laboratory and the deep blue sea: space issues in the marine stations of Naples and Wimereux.

In the 1870s, the life sciences witnessed the rise of a new site for scientific research: the marine station. This new workplace brought the laboratory of the biologist closer to the natural surroundings of the marine organisms that he/she was studying. It was therefore a site where the lab could be 'renaturalized'. In this paper, the extent of this 'renaturalization' is studied with regard to two stations. The first, Anton Dohrn's Stazione zoologica in Naples, was to become an international centre for laboratory research, while the second, Alfred Giard's marine station in Wimereux (France), turned out to be an important hub for field studies. Field-oriented animal life studies could be developed in Wimereux, whereas these were largely outshone by physiological and morphological research in Naples. I argue that differences in the physical and social organization of the two stations - or their 'ecologies' - accounted for the varying practices and types of knowledge found in Naples and Wimereux.

Accreditation for cardiovascular imaging: setting quality standards for patient care.

The accreditation of laboratories performing noninvasive cardiac procedures is now routinely available and often required by insurance companies. In this article, the history of the accreditation for cardiac procedures is reviewed, the process explained, and the number of accredited laboratories listed. Decision pathways are listed, and common reasons for a laboratory being delayed in approval are described specific for the various modalities. Some of the common compliments and concerns received by the Intersocietal Accreditation Commission are described.

"A different kind of beauty": scientific and architectural style in I.M. Pei's Mesa Laboratory and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute.

I.M. Pei's Mesa Laboratory for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, are rare examples of laboratories as celebrated for their architecture as for their scientific contributions. Completed in the mid-1960s, these signature buildings still express the scientific style of their founding directors, Walter Roberts and Jonas Salk. yet in commissioning their laboratories, Roberts and Salk had to work with architects as strong-willed as themselves. A close reading of the two laboratories reveals the ongoing negotiations and tensions in collaborations between visionary scientist and visionary architect. Moreover, Roberts and Salk also had to become architects of atmospheric and biomedical sciences. For laboratory architecture, however flexible in theory, necessarily stabilizes scientific practice, since a philosophy of research is embedded in the very structure of the building and persists far longer than the initial vision and mission that gave it life. Roberts and Salk's experiences suggest that even the most carefully designed laboratories must successfully adapt to new disciplinary configurations, funding opportunities, and research priorities, or risk becoming mere architectural icons.

[La voluntad pedagógica de Cajal, presidente de la Jae]. / The Pedagogical Will of Cajal, President of Jae Institution.

This article has two aims. On one hand, it tries to point out the role of the Santiago Ramón y Cajal in the establishment and development of the "Junta para Ampiación de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientificas" (JAE). On the other hand, it links the leadership of Cajal in this Institution to his teaching authority of young scientifics. This pedagogical will was showed with various facts along his intellectual path. It is appropriate to underline among them his effort in spreading science, his enthusiasm and engagement in order to change the educational structures of Spanish Society and his 25 year long Presidency of JAE, from 1907 until 1932.

Medicines, monopolies and mortars: the chemical laboratory and pharmaceutical trade at the Society of Apothecaries in the eighteenth century.

In 1672, a laboratory was founded by the Society of Apothecaries at its premises in Blackfriars, London, to manufacture chemical medicines. By exploring the society's motivations for constructing a laboratory and its development during the eighteenth century, this paper examines the roles that chemistry played within the activities of the institution. While the chemistry's primary utility was in drug manufacturing for the society's pharmaceutical trade, through its laboratory, the society used chemistry to develop its corporate and educational aims, thus helping to secure its institutional authority in London's medical marketplace.

The moral economy of the drug company-medical scientist collaboration in interwar America.

This paper explores the exchange relationships underlying collaborations between pharmaceutical companies and preclinical (laboratory-based) researchers, in universities and similar contexts, during the interwar period. It also examines the arguments advanced to justify such collaborations in particular contexts as a way of investigating the perceived costs and benefits, especially among the academic parties in these collaborations, and the way these collaborations were regarded in the US biomedical research community.