Edmund Ramsden

Carving up population science: eugenics, demography and the controversy over the 'biological law' of population growth

Using the analytical framework of boundary-work, I examine how the cultural space of demography, its borders and its territories, were constructed and reconstructed as scientists continuously struggled to maintain, increase, and defend the cognitive authority of science and particular interpretations of reality. While the emerging field of population united both biologists and social scientists in the early 20th century, the controversy over the biologist Raymond Pearl’s logistic curve in the inter-war period became one of the defining features in the development of the population sciences in the United States. Pearl’s use of the logistic curve reflected his biologically determinist vision of human progress and the definition and function of science within that process. Pearl’s critics, the majority numbered among the social sciences, opposed such an imperialistic vision. With the weakening of Pearl’s influence, American demography was clearly defined as a social science. In disciplinary histories, Pearl’s defeat is attributed to scientific progress and the collapse of credibility for the eugenics movement. Thus a history of a scientific progression from biological determinism to social empiricism is combined with a shift from population ideology to population science. Yet the attack on the biological lawsin the 1930s had as much to do with differing opinions as how to best regulate a population according to eugenic standards, as it was a struggle between a biologically determinist eugenics and a social science of reform.

Eugenics from the New Deal to the Great Society: genetics, demography and population quality.

The relationship between biological and social scientists as regards the study of human traits and behavior has often been perceived in terms of mutual distrust, even antipathy. In the interwar period, population study seemed an area that might allow for closer relations between them-united as they were by a concern to improve the eugenic quality of populations. Yet these relations were in tension: by the early post-war era, social demographers were denigrating the contributions of biologists to the study of population problems as embodying the elitist ideology of eugenics. In response to this loss of credibility, the eugenics movement pursued a simultaneous program of withdrawal and expansion: its leaders helped focus concern with biological quality onto the developing field of medical genetics, while at the same moment, extended their scope to improving the social quality of populations through birth control policies, guided by demography. While this approach maintained boundaries between the social and the biological, in the 1960s, a revitalized American Eugenics Society helped reunite leading demographers and geneticists. This paper will assess the reasons for this period of influence for eugenics, and explore its implications for the social and biological study of human populations.

Making organisms model human behavior: situated models in North-American alcohol research, since 1950.

We examine the criteria used to validate the use of nonhuman organisms in North-American alcohol addiction research from the 1950s to the present day. We argue that this field, where the similarities between behaviors in humans and non-humans are particularly difficult to assess, has addressed questions of model validity by transforming the situatedness of non-human organisms into an experimental tool. We demonstrate that model validity does not hinge on the standardization of one type of organism in isolation, as often the case with genetic model organisms. Rather, organisms are viewed as necessarily situated: they cannot be understood as a model for human behavior in isolation from their environmental conditions. Hence the environment itself is standardized as part of the modeling process; and model validity is assessed with reference to the environmental conditions under which organisms are studied.

Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

Stress, Shock, and Adaptation in the Twentieth Century

Stress is one of the most widely utilized medical concepts in modern society. Originally used to describe physiological responses to trauma, it is now applied in a variety of other fields and contexts, such as in the construction and expression of personal identity, social relations, building and engineering, and the various complexities of the competitive capitalist economy. In addition, scientists and medical experts use the concept to explore the relationship between an ever increasing number of environmental stressors and the evolution of an expanding range of mental and chronic organic diseases, such as hypertension, gastric ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and cancer. This edited volume brings together leading scholars to explore the emergence and development of the stress concept and its definitions as they have changed over time. It examines how stress and closely related concepts have been used to connect disciplines such as architecture, ecology, physiology, psychiatry, psychology, public health, urban planning, and a range of social sciences; its application in different settings such as the battlefield, workplace, clinic, hospital, and home; and the advancement of techniques of stress management in a number of different national, sociocultural, and scientific locations. Contributors: Theodore M. Brown, David Cantor, Otniel E. Dror, Rhodri Hayward, Mark Jackson, Robert G. W. Kirk, Junko Kitanaka, Tulley Long, Joseph Melling, Edmund Ramsden, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, Allan Young. David Cantor is acting director, Office of History, National Institutes of Health. Edmund Ramsden is Wellcome Trust University Award Research Fellow at the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London.

From Rodent Utopia to Urban Hell: Population, Pathology, and the Crowded Rats of NIMH

In a series of experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, the animal ecologist John B. Calhoun offered rats everything they needed, except space. The resulting population explosion was followed by a series of “social pathologies”—violence, sexual deviance, and withdrawal. This essay examines the influence of Calhouns experiments among psychologists and sociologists concerned with the effects of the built environment on health and behavior. Some saw evidence of the danger of the crowd in Calhouns “rat cities” and fastened on a method of analysis that could be transferred to the study of urban man. Others, however, cautioned against drawing analogies between rodents and humans. The ensuing dispute saw social scientists involved in a careful negotiation over the structure and meaning of Calhouns experimental systems and, with it, over the significance of the crowd in the laboratory, institution, and city.

The nature of suicide: science and the self-destructive animal

It is commonly assumed that suicide is a distinctly human act. Lacking the capacity to visualise and enact their own deaths, animals are seen to be driven by an instinct of self-preservation. However, discussion over the existence of the self-destructive animal has been long been central to debates over the nature of suicide. By granting animals the capacity to take their own lives, they were granted emotion, intelligence, consciousness. By transgressing boundaries between animal and man, scientists and activists in the 19th century were united by a determination to ensure the welfare of both. For their critics, these boundaries were to be maintained - animal acts of self-destruction were not intentional, but accidental and instinctual responses to stimuli. Nevertheless, reflections on the suicidal animal have continued, less a means of granting consciousness to the non-human, but as symbols and analogies for human acts of self-destruction devoid of thought or intention.

MAKING ANIMALS ALCOHOLIC: SHIFTING LABORATORY MODELS OF ADDICTION

The use of animals as experimental organisms has been critical to the development of addiction research from the nineteenth century. They have been used as a means of generating reliable data regarding the processes of addiction that was not available from the study of human subjects. Their use, however, has been far from straightforward. Through focusing on the study of alcoholism, where the nonhuman animal proved a most reluctant collaborator, this paper will analyze the ways in which scientists attempted to deal with its determined sobriety and account for their consistent failure to replicate the volitional consumption of ethanol to the point of physical dependency. In doing so, we will see how the animal model not only served as a means of interrogating a complex pathology, but also came to embody competing definitions of alcoholism as a disease process, and alternative visions for the very structure and purpose of a research field.

The Suicidal Animal: Science and the Nature of Self-Destruction.

In 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published Suicide, his renowned statistical study that sought to categorize the varying forms of self-destruction as egoistic, fatalistic, anomic or altruistic. Durkheim built upon the work of the English jurist William Wynn Westcott and the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli, who both perceived suicide as a social phenomenon. Although he did not dispute that the vast majority of suicides (barring neurasthenics) intentionally took their own lives, Durkheim argued their actions should be properly regarded as ‘confirmation of a resolve previously formed for reasons unknown to consciousness’. The stability of suicide rates, he concluded, demonstrated the ‘existence of collective tendencies exterior to the individual’. For the historian Olive Anderson, Suicide is thus emblematic of the fin de siècle view that suicide was a social problem — marking a crucial break from the Romantic belief that it was a supremely individualistic act. Stephen Turner, meanwhile, portrays Durkheim as the ‘prodigal child’ of nineteenthcentury positivism, in that he believed statistics could illuminate

Model organisms and model environments: a rodent laboratory in science, medicine and society.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the role of animals in science and medicine. While historians have tended to focus on the processes of standardisation, increasing attention is being given to the surprising and unexpected elements of the model organism. Experimental organisms are, simultaneously, both artefacts and samples of nature.1 Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli put it clearly and succinctly: ‘they are systems that have been engineered and modified to enable the controlled investigation of specific phenomena, yet at the same time they remain largely mysterious products of millennia of evolution, whose behaviours, structures, and physiology are for the most part still relatively ill-understood by scientists.’2 In continuously generating new questions, organisms provide novelty so essential to successful experimental systems. They are, as Hans-Jorg Rheinberger would argue, scientific objects or ‘epistemic things’, not merely predictable ‘technical objects’.3