Social Relations Of Science Research Articles

Maurice Pierre Crosland (1931-2020): an appreciation.

Following some years of declining health, Professor Maurice Crosland passed away on 30 August 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. Author of four influential scholarly monographs, Maurice played major roles in the British Society for the History of Science during the 1960s and 1970s as an active Member of Council, Honorary Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science (1965-71) and Honorary President of the society (1974-6). His academic career began in 1963 with his appointment to a lectureship in the History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. In 1974 the by-then Reader in History of Science secured a £100,000 Nuffield Foundation Grant with which to establish, for the first time, a dedicated history-of-science group at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Appointed Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Unit for the History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science (known as the 'History of Science Unit' or simply 'the Unit'), his objectives during the five-year Nuffield-funded period were to focus on promoting the research activities of the new group, build up much-needed library resources in a university which was barely ten years old, and effect a transition to a research and teaching Unit that would offer modules to undergraduates in each of the three principal faculties (Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences). His own research centred on French science during and after the Napoleonic period, with particular emphasis on the history of chemistry and the formal institutions and informal networks of Parisian science. In 1984 his work was recognized with the American Chemical Society's award of the Dexter Prize, a rare achievement for a British scholar.

Political Animals: Barren Ground Caribou and the Managers in a “Post-Normal” Age

This article examines barren ground caribou conservation in the Canadian north from the 1940s to the 1980s, reframing it as an important moment in the history of science. I argue that in order to make sense of government management policy, we need to understand conservation as a “crisis science.” The possibility of species extinction impelled biologists to act without knowing all they might have wished to know. To address this uncertainty, new people and perspectives were brought to bear on management. Doing so changed the practices and social relations of science, shaping how we know and what we know.

Relações sociais da Ciência e da Tecnologia: percepções dos professores de formação técnica participantes do PARFOR

Apresenta-se, neste artigo, um estudo sobre a percepção dos professores de formação técnica, participantes do curso PARFOR (Plano Nacional de Formação de Professores da Educação Básica), ofertado pela Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Campus Ponta Grossa (UTFPR-PG), sobre as relações sociais da ciência e da tecnologia. O estudo foi realizado com 15 professores, de diversas disciplinas. A abordagem metodológica foi a pesquisa quantitativa, cujo instrumento de coleta de dados pautou-se no questionário com perguntas abertas. Os principais resultados evidenciam que a grande maioria dos professores apresentou uma visão bastante restrita acerca da ciência e da tecnologia e que consideram que o desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico sempre traz benefícios para a população, própria da visão tradicional/clássica, positivista. Foi evidenciada a necessidade de se promover reflexões sobre as questões sociais da ciência e da tecnologia na educação tecnológica, a fim de formar profissionais conscientes de suas responsabilidades enquanto cidadão em uma era altamente tecnológica. Salienta-se que tais resultados estão registrados na dissertação de mestrado intitulada Alfabetização Cientifica e Tecnológica (ACT), por meio do Enfoque Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS), a partir de filmes comerciais do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ensino de Ciência e Tecnologia da Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR), Campus Ponta Grossa, Brasil.

Timothy Boon, Films of fact: a history of science in documentary films and television, London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2008, pp. xi, 312, illus., £16.99 (paperback 978-1-905674-37-4).

Films of fact by Timothy Boon mends what, up to now, has been a gaping hole in both history of science and media studies—an examination of the specific historical circumstances that determined how, in the twentieth century, science, technology, and medicine were presented to the British public in the form of the moving picture. Boon is Chief Curator at the Science Museum, London, and has published extensively on science, technology, medicine, and film. He persuasively argues that any appreciation of the contemporary public understanding of science requires knowledge of the specific circumstances directing the century-long liaison between science and the moving picture. His book amply demonstrates the intricacies of that two-way relationship as played out in twentieth-century Britain. Films of fact is structured chronologically, beginning with the one-minute film, Cheese mites, first shown in London in 1903 and proceeding through seven chapters to end in 1965 with the popular British television programme, Tomorrow’s world. Each chapter addresses a non-fiction genre (in some cases genres), analysing the larger scientific, technological, social, and cultural forces in play at the time. Through core chapters 2 to 5, Boon adroitly weaves the career of the eminent British filmmaker Paul Rotha. In each chapter, Boon presents his own insightful reading of key films and television programmes, the end result being a comprehensive analysis of science in British non-fiction film. ‘Science, nature and filmmaking’, the first chapter of the book, deals with the beginnings of scientific film in the 1890s as an experimental instrument for scientific and medical research. It goes on to map the science film’s move to theatre and music hall, where film techniques developed in the laboratory, such as microcinematography and slow motion, were presented to the general public in the form of “actualities”, combining the instructional capacities of images with their power to amaze. The next four chapters are devoted primarily to the documentary genre and Rotha’s key role in the development of scientific documentary. In the inter-war years, documentary was constructed by film pioneers such as Dzega Vertov, John Grierson, and Rotha, as a distinctive medium linking science and technology to the citizen and the state in such a way as to reveal the deeper social and political reality underlying the world of appearances. The documentary, utilizing the analytically sophisticated and emotionally literate film technique of dialectical montage, presented to audiences a highly aestheticized account of the ability, power, and responsibility of human beings to transform their world. However, Boon argues that documentary was shaped as powerfully by forces concrete and historical as by the idealist(ic) vision of its founders. In the ensuing chapters, Boon ably supports his argument through his examination of the interface between documentary and the social relations of science, the effect of the Second World War on documentary film production, and the stylistic evolution of the genre through the 1950s and 1960s. His lucid analysis of the development of the documentary mode through its specific historical relationship to science and technology cannot be summarized in a short review. However, one point (of many) worth noting is Boon’s warning that scholars’ too strict adherence to formalist definitions of documentary often obscure the historically contingent relations—between technology and work, science and citizenship, rationality and response—that determine documentary’s iconographic approach to its subjects. The final two chapters of the book document the growth of science in television, a process which variously continued, abandoned, subsumed, and superseded the subjects, techniques, genres, and politics of non-fiction film. A decreased stress on the social relations of science, an increased emphasis on representations of basic science, and the portrayal of science as a way of life and a culture in its own right are some of the trends highlighted by Boon in his analysis of the move to the new medium. Though Films of fact confines itself to British non-fiction film, the scope of its analysis makes it essential reading for historians of science and technology who wish to utilize film, and, by the same token, for media studies scholars who seek engagement with the scientific and the technological.

Lilley revisited: or science and society in the twentieth century

AbstractIn the 1940s the Marxist mathematician and historian of science Samuel Lilley (1914–87) made a substantial contribution to British history of science both intellectually and institutionally. His role, however, has largely gone unnoticed. Lilley is otherwise portrayed either as exemplifying the immaturity of Marxism, most famously by Rupert Hall in ‘Merton revisited’ (1963), or as a tragic figure marginalized during the Cold War because of his communist commitment. But both themes of exclusion and victimization keep Lilley's legacy hidden. By revisiting Lilley and his long-standing commitment to developing our discipline, this essay challenges the notion of radical discontinuity with respect to Lilley's legacy and argues for a more sustained contribution by Marxist historiography of science. This, in turn, requires a more appreciative understanding of the moderate Marxist model developed by Lilley in his popular, political and professional publications on the history of the social relations of science.

The Joint Establishment of the World Federation of Scientific Workers and of UNESCO After World War II

The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFScW) and UNESCO share roots in the Social Relations of Science (SRS) movements and in the Franco-British scientific relations which developed in the 1930s. In this historical context (the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and the Nazi use of science, the social and intellectual fascination for the USSR), a new model of scientific internationalism emerged, where science and politics mixed. Many progressive scientists were involved in the war efforts against Nazism, and tried to prolong their international commitments into peacetime. They contributed to the establishment of the WFScW and of UNESCO in 1945–1946. Neither the WFScW nor UNESCO succeeded in achieving their initial aims. Another world emerged from the immediate post-war years, but it was not the world fancied by the progressive scientists from the mould of scientific internationalism. The aim of this article is to follow the path from the Franco-British networks towards the establishment of the WFScW and UNESCO; from an ideological scientific internationalism towards practical projects. It is to understand how these two bodies came to embody two different scientific internationalisms during the Cold War.

Enacting the social relations of science: historical (anti-)boundary-work of Danish science journalist Børge Michelsen

This article investigates the writings of Danish science journalist Børge Michelsen from 1939 to 1956. As part of the international social relations of science movement in the period, Michelsen transformed science journalism from mere reporting on issues pertaining to science into performing the social function of science journalism: advancing and enacting the social relations of science. Based on analyses of Michelsen's articles and other initiatives, this study suggests that the social function of science journalism practiced by Michelsen showed many new and conflicting aspects. From a boundary-work perspective, it is argued that, through science journalism, Michelsen not only helped establish new cultural boundaries of science, but also did anti-boundary-work. The notion of anti-boundary-work implies breaking down existing barriers between science and society, all the while establishing new links to reinforce mutual relations between scientists and policy-makers, between scientists and journalists, and between science and the public. Finally, in the concluding remarks, the contemporary significance of Michelsen's social function of science journalism is discussed.

Learning from Lomborg: or where do anti‐environmentalists come from?

Whether we think of it as a new mode of knowledge production or as a more general condition of ‘epistemic drift’, there has been a rather significant change in the social relations of science over ...

Universities in the Information Age: Changing Work, Organization, and Values in Academic Science and Engineering

This article discusses a new program for collaborative study of information technology, commercialization intellectual property and transformations of education research practives in universities. Three themes define the program. First, the authors investigate the ways that information technologies shape content, organization, and delivery of faculty work. Second, they examine the interplay of issues of intellectually property, technology, commercialization, and academic research. Third, ethical issues information raise and the values they embody are explored. The research and training undertaken brings together problems usually treated by sepatate disciplines and focuses on technologies used by researchers and advanced students in various disciplines who shape and even create communications technologies. The intent is to explore these questions through research and teaching and in the process develop a new generation of scholars who are cognizant of changing patterns in the social relations of science and technology.

Book Review: Every Life is a Story: The Social Relations of Science, Ecology, and Peace

Book Review: Every Life is a Story: The Social Relations of Science, Ecology, and Peace

To be a Cyborg or a Goddess?

This article confronts North American feminist biologist Donna Haraway’s recommendation of the cyborg (cybernetic organism, i.e., a creature of the modern high-tech world) as a locus of identification for feminist critiques of current social relations of science and technology, with the strategies advocated by the Indian physicist and ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. The author discusses the opposition between Haraway’s cyborg ferminism and the spiritual ecofeminism of Shiva, who links her critique of global power structures and the destructive logic of technoscience to a (re)claiming of the sacred feminine principle prakriti, nature, of ancient Indian cosmology. A deconstruction of the dichotomy between the cyborg and the goddess as critical figures is suggested, based on the argument that feminist critics of the current technoscience-power nexuses need both.

Science and Nature: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences ed. by Michael Shortland, and: The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences by Peter J. Bowler

196 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Science and Nature: Essays in the History ofthe Environmental Sciences. Edited by Michael Shortland. Faringdon: British Society for the History of Science, 1993. Pp. viii+ 291; notes, index. £8.00 (paper). The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences. By PeterJ. Bowler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Pp. xxi+634; illustrations, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $35.00 (cloth); $15.95 (paper). Michael Shortland’s monograph comprises ten essays covering largely unrelated subjects—though “political” difficulties do play a consider­ able part in most of them. Shortland’s editorial foreword is hard-pressed to find links among them, thus they are unlikely to appeal equally to many readers. The two that I found most interesting wereJohn Sheail on “Pollution and the Protection of Inland Fisheries in Inter-War Britain” and Timothy Boon on “The Smoke Menace: Cinema, Sponsorship and the Social Relations of Science in 1937,” also confined to the British case. The first examines the effects ofwater pollution in rivers and their consequent economic and social costs; it sets out the difficulties in persuading ministers of the crown that action by them was necessary. It is salutary to contrast the lofty Olympian indifference and detachment of U.K. ministers in the interwar years with the frenetic efforts of their present-day successors to do nothing about desirable cleanups or their determination to reverse such progress as has occurred, all in the name of deregulation. The second article discusses the use of a then compara­ tively new technology, the film, to expose and explain the health effects and social costs of air pollution in order to influence public opinion. It took twenty years more before an individual parliamentarian, Gerald Nabarro, forced through an effective control measure, with ministers and senior civil servants afterward claiming the credit. Peter Bowler has assayed a more ambitious task in the second volume, to produce the first comprehensive account of the history of the environmental sciences (note the plural). As he admits in his preface, he has emphasized the history of biology, especially evolutionary theory, and that of geology; there is much less on the rest of biology, oceanography, climatology, and meteorology. However, this imbalance is generally offset by successive chapters concentrating on the principal characteristics and issues of each period. In this way, he can be said to have discussed the environmental sciences of the time. Not the least interesting parts are the digressions, part explanatory, part philosophical, which enliven many chapters. These are brought together in the last chapter, which sets out the current position, though many elements are missing. Pollution is not the sole present-day worry; Bowler himselfincludes resource depletion earlier. I add the ozone layer and global warming. These omissions are all the more surprising becauseJames Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, or to my mind poetic fantasy, is discussed not unfavorably in several places. Does Bowler believe that these threats are Gaia’s way of defending herself? I cannot find the more TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 197 orthodox Darwinian response set out at all: that mankind’s environmen­ tal irresponsibility, linked to revival of a disease or two, could render the planet uninhabitable or have, say, the same effect as bubonic plague had on the later Middle Ages. The other difficulty I have with this otherwise stimulating and provocative chapter is the discussion of rival attitudes to, and conclu­ sions about, so many environmental problems. Bowler’s exposition emphasizes that there are opposing views among scientists employed by industry and those who appear to be in independent postions and that their conflicting evidence has shaken public confidence in both of them. Writing as someone who was originally in the latter position, but found himself in later life advising governments on pollution and related problems, I miss in his analysis the fact that most environmental problems are not cut and dried, so that science can rarely be certain about their origins and even less about their solutions. The conflict between industrialists and environmentalists arises in part because of those uncertainties. The two essays noted above in Science and Nature, and several of the others as well, reveal just how complex are the factors that make up...

Education for the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Métiers and the Rise of French Industrial Engineering by Charles R. Day

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 159 scientist on the other, as well as the incorporation of the engineer into industrial and governmental entities which subordinate technical ex­ pertise to their own agendas, are pretty much the same. If correct, what dynamic is effecting this convergence and how does it bear on the autonomy of technology vis-à-vis its local institutionalization? Steven L. Goldman Dr. Goldman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Lehigh University. He teaches and does research in the history, philosophy, and social relations of science and technology. Educationfor the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Metiers and the Rise ofFrench Industrial Engineering. By Charles R. Day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 293; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00. The misleading reference to “industrial engineering” in the subtitle can be forgiven, since Education for the Industrial World is a valuable book, both for the subject it treats and the issues it raises. Current wisdom on French industry and engineering in the 19th century as­ serts that France had a relatively immobile society and its engineers were impractical people saturated with theoretical learning and higher mathematics more useful as a social cachet than applicable to the problems of modern industry. Charles Day implies that historians have been both fixated by the prestige of the elite institutions of technical education like the Ecole Polytechnique and trapped by bureaucratic pigeonholes into ignoring or misjudging a host of humbler intermediate institutions of technical education run by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce rather than the classically inclined mandarins of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Dominant among these schools, and the main focus of Day’s atten­ tion, were the écoles d’arts et métiers, created by Napoleon but with roots stretching back to 1780 when the Duc de la RochefoucauldLiancourt founded a trade school for the sons of soldiers and military orphans. Conceived by Napoleon partly as orphanages and partly as training schools for “petty officers for industry” (p. 71), the image of the schools producing skilled craftsmen and foremen has obscured the fact that graduates soon occupied key positions in production and management in the burgeoning mechanical engineering industries and railways. Long before 1907, when graduates finally received an official engineering diploma, most of them were fulfilling the func­ tions of engineers and executing the responsibilities of technical man­ agers. Much valued for their experience on the shop floor, their ability to work hard, and their education in science and mechanical drawing inculcated in the penal-monastic environment of their dreary board­ ing schools, they played a major role in private industry, small in­ 160 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE dustrial establishments, and even to some extent (like the technical services of the navy) in the public and military spheres dominated by the state engineers from the elite grandes écoles. According to Day, not only were they good practical engineers, workhorses of the French Industrial Revolution, responsible for early French successes in the automobile and aeronautical industries as well as the splendid effort of industrial mobilization during World War I, they also did well for themselves, rising relatively rapidly on the social and economic ladder from their lower-class origins. Indeed, their growing professional prestige and social mobility, as much as the in­ creasing complexity of the curriculum to keep pace with an ever more scientific technology, powered the inevitable evolution of the schools toward their apotheosis in 1974 as a bona fide grande école just a notch below polytechnique. In discussing 19th-century France, it will henceforth be more dif­ ficult to speak of industrial backwardness, of social immobility (at least for that small part of the labor aristocracy that went to the écoles d’arts et métiers), and shortage of practical talent, or to restrict one’s definition of engineer to graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique. Janis Langins 1)r. Langins is currently at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of l.a République avail besoin de savants, a history of the first vear of operation of the...

Technological Education—Technological Style ed. by Melvin Kranzberg

158 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Technological Education—Technological Style. Edited by Melvin Kranzberg . San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1986. Pp. vii + 104; ref­ erences. $10.00 (paper). This slim volume consists of twelve concise essays on the develop­ ment of technical education, primarily in Western Europe and the United States, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. As Melvin Kranzberg notes in his introduction, a common message delivered by the authors is that the direction of technological development in the countries discussed was influenced by the form of their respective institutionalizations of technical education, even as the latter were shaped by prevailing social and cultural values and interests. Four of the essays deal with themes in German technical education, three with French, two with American (U.S.), and one each with Brit­ ish, Indian, and Romanian. Eberhard Wachtler, Wolfgang Weber, and Hans-Joachim Braun give a very useful description of the initiation of technical education in the German states, beginning in the 18th century and continuing through the foundation of the Gewerbeschule and the Technische Hochschule. Wolfgang Konig adds a comple­ mentary discussion of the professionalization of German engineers with the emergence of industrial and state-funded research centers. Jan Sebestik and Alexandre Herlea describe the French commit­ ment to technician education through the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and the role of the Conservatoire in the creation of French industrial research laboratories. Robert Fox discusses the cli­ mate for technical innovation in France at the turn of this century. Kranzberg and Arthur Donovan deal with the evolution of the American engineering curriculum in the course of the 19th century, and Angus Buchanan describes the issue for the British of whether the technical could be the subject of an education, properly speaking, or merely of training. S. N. Sen describes the slow emergence of engineering colleges in India out of narrow technical training pro­ grams established to serve the needs of the Raj, and Stefan Balan very briefly surveys the history of Romanian technical education. These essays constituted an ICOHTEC Symposium on Technical Education that was part of the program at the 17th International Congress of History of Science held at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1985. In spite of their brevity, or perhaps because of it, this is a provocative collection, recalling important foun­ dational issues in technology-society interactions and the need for further reading to build on these aperçus. The cross-national com­ parisons of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States are par­ ticularly suggestive. On the face of it, these four countries institutionalized technical education in quite distinctive ways, and yet it is not at all clear that in the end it made any difference. That is, in all of these, as in Russia and in Eastern Europe, the distinction between engineer and technician on the one side and between engineer and TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 159 scientist on the other, as well as the incorporation of the engineer into industrial and governmental entities which subordinate technical ex­ pertise to their own agendas, are pretty much the same. If correct, what dynamic is effecting this convergence and how does it bear on the autonomy of technology vis-à-vis its local institutionalization? Steven L. Goldman Dr. Goldman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Lehigh University. He teaches and does research in the history, philosophy, and social relations of science and technology. Educationfor the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Metiers and the Rise ofFrench Industrial Engineering. By Charles R. Day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 293; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00. The misleading reference to “industrial engineering” in the subtitle can be forgiven, since Education for the Industrial World is a valuable book, both for the subject it treats and the issues it raises. Current wisdom on French industry and engineering in the 19th century as­ serts that France had a relatively immobile society and its engineers were impractical people saturated with theoretical learning and higher mathematics more useful as a social cachet than applicable to the problems of...

Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science in Great Britain, 1931-1947

Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science in Great Britain, 1931-1947

Science and philanthropy: Wickliffe Rose and the International Education Board.

The early 1920s were years of rapid change in social relations of science, especially academic science. For the first time, both business and philanthropic leaders began to take an interest in developing strong scientific departments in universities. Both were mainly concerned with training scientists, for somewhat different reasons. Industrial firms were interested in a reliable supply of scientists for their research and development laboratories. The officers of foundations were interested in scientists as agents of "rational social change". Neither supported research for its own sake; their aim was to develop scientific institutions, especially those responsible for training future leaders in science. This conception of the value of scientific development was the hallmark of the patronage of science into the 1930s.1 Philanthropists' interest in science was most marked in the Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Institution, and in the Rockefeller boards: the International Education and General Education Boards, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. These organisations concentrated on strengthening centres of graduate training and research by awarding fellowships, making grants for research programmes, and by subventions for co-operative research committees. Foundation officers and their boards of trustees believed that scientists could play important roles in economic growth, mass higher education, and efficient provision of health and social services. These ideals were hardly new in 1920; what was new was their wide currency, and the fervour with which they were espoused. Many of the idealistic humanitarian, Utopian and revolutionary movements that swept Europe in the early 1920s were paralleled in the United States by the belief that the condition of mankind could be improved by the application of scientific knowledge and the use of "scientific methods". Foundation officials, business men and government reformers, looked to science to stabilise and improve European societies shaken by the First World War.2 These optimistic expectations about science as a beneficent force were encouraged by scientists, some of whom had been seeking governmental 1 Kohler, Robert E., "Philanthropy and the Community of Science: The 1920s", Osiris, 3

Scientific Research, Science Policy, and Social Studies of Science and Technology in Australia

Some conditions which are important for the development and institutionalization of studies of science, technology and society have recently been discussed by Ina Spiegel-Rosing. As she rightly points out, the turning point in the relationship between science and power occurred during the Second World War, and the conditions which appear to be necessary for the emergence of special fields of study dealing with the social relations of science have existed since that time. It was inevitable, perhaps, that studies of the development and use of science and technology should eventually appear in those countries of Europe and North America which experienced massive increases in their gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) in the post-war years. There seems to be an unwritten 'law' which states that, in countries where the GERD is about 1 percent of Gross National Product (GNP), the conditions are ripe for them to recognize the need to work out an explicit science policy: to lay down priorities for allocating its financial resources and to decide on national objectives and criteria for choosing between the various options open to them.2 This recognition in turn implies the need for science policy studies to generate the knowledge needed for the development of the national scientific effort. Political awareness of the need for science policy machinery, engendered by expenditure on research and development in excess of about 1 percent of the GNP might, therefore, be seen as an important factor in the stimulation of what I shall henceforward refer to, following Spiegel-Rosing,3 as 'SSTS'. A second factor identified by Spiegel-Rosing as important to the development and institutionalization of SSTS is the apparently widespread disillusionment with science and its products. That SSTS might provide solutions to the problems created by the 'misdirection of science and technology', and has justified itself in these terms is, in her view, an important reason for the con.inued growth in SSTS activity. Finally (and for her most importantly), Spiegel-Rosing regards the professional selfinterest of those who are engaged in SSTS as a critical factor in its development. Thus:

The history and sociology of the scientific study of acupuncture.

Although known to the medical community in some form since the 19th century, acupuncture is only recently receiving concerted research attention from the conventional medical and scientific community. The overall amount of scientific acupuncture research has doubled since the mid 1960's. Employing the approaches of the science, history, sociology and social relations of science, this article explores factors which explain why the present time is conducive to acupuncture research by the scientific and medical community. Perhaps this study of scientific acupuncture research will provide the basis for a later theory of scientific development.

THOUGHTS ON THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN CHINA

THOUGHTS ON THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN CHINA

Science Masters' Association: Annual Meeting

THE annual meeting of the Science Masters' Association will be held during April 9–11 at the City of London School. The president, Mr. C. L. Bryant, will speak on "The Impact of Science on Common Thought". The proceedings will include lectures by Dr. J. McG. Bruckshaw on "Physics and Economic Geology"; Mr. C. Bibby on "Health Education through School Biology"; "Penicillin", by Sir Alexander Fleming; "Scope and Limitations of the Science Teaching Film", by Mr. A. Elton (at the Ministry of Information Theatre); "The Electron Microscope", by Mr. F. W. Cuckow; "Chemistry of Plastics", by Mr. R. Maitland; and a discussion on "The Role of Science in the Future Educational System". There will also be the usual exhibitions. The third lecture on the Science and Citizenship Foundation will be delivered by Mr. J. G. Crowther, who will speak on "The Social Relations of Science"; this lecture is open to the public, and tickets for visitors can be obtained from Mr. W. Ashhurst, Epsom College, Surrey.