Daniel J. Kevles (born 2 March 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American historian of science best known for his books on American physics and eugenics and for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on science and technology in modern societies. He is Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus at Yale University and J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. [1] [2]
Kevles received his BA in physics from Princeton University in 1960 and his PhD in history from Princeton in 1964. [3] He taught at the California Institute of Technology from 1964 to 2001 and Yale University from 2001 to 2015. Since 2015, he has held additional appointments at Columbia University and New York University. [4] [5]
In 2001 Kevles received the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, awarded for "a lifetime of scholarly achievement". In 1999 his book The Baltimore Case was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize for best book in the history of science directed to a wide public. Kevles is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society [6] and the Society of American Historians. [7]
In 2000 the mathematician Serge Lang waged an unsuccessful campaign to prevent Kevles from being granted tenure at Yale, asserting that Kevles' book The Baltimore Case was too sympathetic to David Baltimore. [8] [9] [10] [11] Although criticized publicly by Lang and several other scientists, [12] the book was also praised by others for meticulous scholarship and detailed reporting. [13]
Kevles' research has focused primarily on the history of science in America and the interactions between science and society. A central theme in much of his work has been the tension between elite science and the norms of democratic control. He is best known for his accessible and original interpretative histories of physics and eugenics, and for an extensive body of scholarship that ranges widely across the histories of the physical sciences, life sciences, and technology.
His books include The Physicists (1978), [14] a history of the American physics community, In the Name of Eugenics (1985), currently the standard text on the history of eugenics in the United States and Britain, [15] and The Baltimore Case (1998), [16] a study of accusations of scientific fraud. He is also a co-author of the textbook Inventing America: A History of the United States (2002; 2nd edition 2006) [17] and co-editor with Leroy Hood of The Code of Codes (1992), [18] a set of essays that explore scientific and social issues surrounding the Human Genome Project. Recently he has been working on a history of the uses of intellectual property in living organisms from the eighteenth century to the present [19] and a co-authored history of the National Academy of Sciences. [20]
Throughout his career, Kevles has brought the history of science and technology to a broad audience through his contributions to general readership publications. These have included pieces in The New Yorker, [21] The New York Times, [22] The New York Review of Books, [23] Times Literary Supplement, [24] Scientific American, [25] and The Huffington Post, [26] among others. The serialized version of his book In the Name of Eugenics, published in The New Yorker in 1984, received the 1985 Page One Award for excellence in science reporting. [27]
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have altered various human gene frequencies by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups purported to be inferior or promoting that of those purported to be superior.
Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.
David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He founded the Whitehead Institute and directed it from 1982 to 1990. In 2008, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Serge Lang was a French-American mathematician and activist who taught at Yale University for most of his career. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in 1960 and was a member of the Bourbaki group.
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO), located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States, was a research institute that gathered biological and social information about the American population, serving as a center for eugenics and human heredity research from 1910 to 1939. It was established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution, and subsequently administered by its Department of Genetics.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation.
Charles Benedict Davenport was a biologist and eugenicist influential in the American eugenics movement.
The American Eugenics Society (AES) was a pro-eugenics organization dedicated to "furthering the discussion, advancement, and dissemination of knowledge about biological and sociocultural forces which affect the structure and composition of human populations". It endorsed the study and practice of eugenics in the United States. Its original name as the American Eugenics Society lasted from 1922 to 1973, but the group changed their name after open use of the term "eugenics" became disfavored; it was known as the Society for the Study of Social Biology from 1973–2008, and the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology from 2008–2019. The Society was disbanded in 2019.
Edward John Larson is an American historian and legal scholar. He is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He was formerly Herman E. Talmadge Chair of Law and Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia. He continues to serve as a senior fellow of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, and is currently a professor at Pepperdine School of Law, where he teaches several classes including Property for the 1Ls.
Thereza Imanishi-Kari is an associate professor of pathology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the origins of autoimmune diseases, particularly systemic lupus erythematosus, studied using mice as model organisms. Previously she had been a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her role in what became known as the "Baltimore affair", in which a 1986 paper she co-authored with David Baltimore was the subject of research misconduct allegations. Following a series of investigations, she was fully exonerated of the charges in 1996.
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The Pfizer Award is awarded annually by the History of Science Society "in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science"
William Grosvenor Pollard (1911–1989) was an American physicist and an Episcopal priest. He started his career as a professor of physics in 1936 at the University of Tennessee. In 1946 he championed the organization of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (ORINS). He was its executive director until 1974. He was ordained as a priest in 1954. He authored and co-authored a significant amount of material in the areas of Christianity and Science and Religion found in books, book chapters, and journal articles. He was sometimes referred to as the "atomic deacon".
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science is a book written by American science author Natalie Angier.
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Jeremy Bernstein is an American theoretical physicist and popular science writer.
This prize should not be confused with the Watson Davis Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology.
The Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society is awarded yearly for a book published, during the past three years, on the history of science for a wide public. The book should "introduce an entire field, a chronological period, a national tradition, or the work of a noteworthy individual." The book can be written by multiple authors or editors and is required to be written in English and suitable for an audience including undergraduates and readers without specialized, technical knowledge. The author receives 1,000 U.S. dollars and a certificate. The prize, established in 1985, is named in honor of Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis who were science popularizers in the USA.
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