In Landscapes and Labscapes Robert Kohler emphasized the separation between laboratory and field cultures and the creation of new "hybrid" or mixed practices as field sciences matured in the early twentieth century. This article explores related changes in laboratory practices, especially novel designs for the analysis of organism-environment relations in the mid-twentieth century. American ecologist Victor Shelford argued in 1929 that technological improvements and indoor climate control should be applied to ecological laboratories, but his recommendations were too ambitious for the (...) time. In the postwar period Frits W. Went, plant physiologist at the California Institute of Technology, created a new high-tech laboratory, dubbed a "phytotron", in the hope that it would transform plant sciences by allowing for unprecedented control of environmental variables. Went's aspirations, the research conducted in his laboratory, and its impact in initiating an international movement, are considered. Went's laboratory can be seen as a "hybrid culture" evolving in the laboratory, complementing and intersecting with some of the field practices that Kohler describes. It was also a countercultural movement against the reductionist trends of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s. By considering the history of the laboratory in relation to field sciences, we can explore how new funding sources and cross-disciplinary relations affected the development of field sciences, especially in the postwar period. (shrink)

This chapter examines biological practice in relation to agricultural management at the Dutch botanical garden at Buitenzorg, Java. Melchior Treub, Buitenzorg’s director from 1880 to 1909, fundamentally transformed the garden by expanding and developing its facilities, partly in response to the need to control diseases of both plants and humans. The Garden attracted foreign scientists from around the world and became a model for biological stations elsewhere. Garden scientists also led in the disciplinary transformation of morphological science around 1900. In (...) response to problems of tropical biology and agriculture, evolutionary morphology developed into a new kind of science that embraced an ecological approach involving both field and laboratory research. This new conception of morphology departed dramatically from the understanding of morphology as the speculative construction of evolutionary trees, the predominant view in the European university. The Garden provides an exceptionally good location to assess the transformations occurring in biological science around 1900. Instead of the idea that there was a “revolt” from morphology at this time, we can see that there was instead a transformation and reinvention of the morphological orientation, one that depended on a cooperative relationship between more academic and corporate approaches to science, parallel to the study of cooperation processes in the environment itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A rereading of the American scientific literature on sex determination from 1902 to 1926 leads to a different understanding of the construction of the Mendelian‐chromosome theory after 1910. There was significant intellectual continuity, which has not been properly appreciated, underlying this scientific “revolution.” After reexamining the relationship between the ideas of key scientists, in particular Edmund B. Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan, I argue that, contrary to the historical literature, Wilson and Morgan did not adopt opposing views on Mendelism (...) and sex determination. Rather, each preferred a non‐Mendelian explanation of the determination of sex. Around 1910, both integrated the Mendelian and non‐Mendelian theories to create a synthetic theory. One problem was the need to avoid an overly deterministic view of sex while also accepting the validity of Mendelism. Morgan’s discovery of mutations on the X chromosome takes on different significance when set in the context of the debate about sex determination, and Calvin Bridges’s work on sex determination is better seen as a development of Morgan’s ideas, rather than a departure from them. Conclusions point to the role of synthesis within fields as a way to advance scientific theories and reflect on the relationship between synthesis and explanatory “pluralism” in biology. (shrink)

This article examines the study of mind and behavior at the University of Chicago through the career of Charles Judson Herrick, neuroanatomist and psychobiologist. Herrick’s views on human nature, education, and social control are discussed in the context of the progressive evolutionism pervading the university in the early twentieth century. The religious background of Herrick’s work is important to understanding the service ethos that permeated his science, which was also the basis of his interest in pragmatism and of his opposition (...) to certain tenets of behaviorism. Herrick was dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration, which he thought crucial to the development of psychobiology. His relationship with Karl S. Lashley in the 1920s is analyzed. Their disagreements about the relationship between science and humanism, as revealed in their views on behaviorism, did not prevent them from working together to articulate a holistic theory of brain function and learning. (shrink)