It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn’t really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from “digital media”. (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
Category Archives: History of science
Science, motherhood, and the Nobel Prize: have things gotten harder?
In a follow-up to her review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women scientists speak out by Emily Monosson, Alison George decided to investigate how many women who won Nobels also did the motherhood thing:
I started at the first Nobel prize awarded to a woman: Marie Curie, in 1903. To my surprise, she had 2 children (as well as 2 Nobel prizes). Her daughter, Irene, only managed one prize in 1935, but also produced two offspring. And so it went on. Gerty Cori (Nobel prize for in physiology or medicine 1947, 1 kid), Maria Geoppert-Mayer (Nobel prize for physics in 1963, 2 kids) Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964, 3 kids), Rosalyn Yolow (Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1977, 2 kids – Yolow writes in her Nobel autobiography that they had sleep-in help until their youngest child was nine – thanks for the tip!)
After this, something strange seems to happen. Five women were awarded Nobel prizes in the 1980s, 1990s and in 2004, but there is no mention of children in their Nobel biographies. Did these women have kids and just not mention it? Or didn’t they have any? Further research revealed that three certainly didn’t have children, but I still don’t know the answer for the other two (and, frankly, it’s none of my business).
Of course, we’re dealing with small numbers here, but this does look like a trend. I don’t know what underlying forces might be responsible, but here are some hypotheses that might be worth investigating:
The line between chemistry and physics during the chemical revolution.
Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad’s about the “fundamental difference” between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical revolution in France, in which Lavoisier mounted a shift from phlogiston theory to a new elemental theory.
When academics IM …
… Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists.
I can’t promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might make you 
TTFN.
Mendeleev rips off French geologist?
The New York Times has taken notice of the history and philosophy of chemistry in a small piece about a new book, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Significance by Eric R. Scerri. In particular, the Times piece notes the issue of whether Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was “borrowing” from the work of others (without acknowledging that he had done so) when he put forward his version of the periodic table of the elements: