Antibiotic development and usage, and antibiotic resistance in particular, are today considered global concerns, simultaneously mandating local and global perspectives and actions. Yet such global considerations have not always been part of antibiotic policy formation, and those who attempt to formulate a globally coordinated response to antibiotic resistance will need to confront a history of heterogeneous, often uncoordinated, and at times conflicting reform efforts, whose legacies remain apparent today. Historical analysis permits us to highlight such entrenched trends and processes, helping (...) to frame contemporary efforts to improve access, conservation and innovation. (shrink)

A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental (...) endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain. (shrink)

This essay presents the early days of human cytogenetics, from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s, as a historical series of images. I propose a chronology moving from photographs of bodies to chromosome sets, to be joined by ultrasound images, which provided a return to bodies, by then focused on the unborn. Images carried ontological significance and, as I will argue, are principal characters in the history of human cytogenetics. Inspired by the historiography of heredity and genetics, studies on (...) visual cultures, the conceptualization of circulation, and the sociology of pregnancy, I suggest that cytogenetics, through its focus on pregnancy, pregnant women, and their offspring, found strategic living materials that stabilized human chromosome studies as a biomedical, post-eugenics practice. The historicity of each path displays a wide circulation of objects, tools, and methods that condensed on images that shared in the centuries-old visual expertise that medicine and botany had manufactured. (shrink)

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

En este artículo se repasan algunas de las líneas de investigación más influyentes en el área de los estudios sobre biología y género y libros publicados al respecto por un grupo creciente de autoras. Como es habitual entre los estudios de género, en este caso los referentes a la biología cuentan con estudios sobre investigadoras en el área de la biología, mujeres que participaron activamente en la generación de saberes y prácticas de esta disciplina, por una parte, y con trabajos (...) sobre los sesgos epistémicos de género y sobre el androcentrismo en el conocimiento biológico, por otra. La genealogía se relaciona con la autoridad y ésta con el género como agencia en las ciencias y las experimentaciones contemporáneas. (shrink)

This essay details a historical crossroad in biochemistry and microbiology in which penicillin was a co-agent. I narrate the trajectory of the bacterial cell wall as the precise target for antibiotic action. As a strategic object of research, the bacterial cell wall remained at the core of experimental practices, scientific narratives and research funding appeals throughout the antibiotic era. The research laboratory was dedicated to the search for new antibiotics while remaining the site at which the mode of action of (...) this new substance was investigated. This combination of circumstances made the bacterial wall an ontology in transit. As invisible as the bacterial wall was for clinical purposes, in the biological laboratory, cellular meaning in regard to the action of penicillin made the bacterial wall visible within both microbiology and biochemistry. As a border to be crossed, some components of the bacterial cell wall and the biochemical destruction produced by penicillin became known during the 1950s and 1960s. The cell wall was constructed piece by piece in a transatlantic circulation of methods, names, and images of the shape of the wall itself. From 1955 onwards, microbiologists and biochemists mobilized new names and associated conceptual meanings. The composition of this thin and rigid layer would account for its shape, growth and destruction. This paper presents a history of biochemical morphology: a chemistry of shape – the shape of bacteria, as provided by its wall – that accounted for biology, for life itself. While penicillin was being established as an industrially-manufactured object, it remained a scientific tool within the research laboratory, contributing to the circulation of further scientific objects. (shrink)

From the mid-1960s onwards, a set of Spanish molecular biology research groups emerged in Spain. The factors contributing to this included: the return of a group of molecular biologists from their postdoctoral period abroad, the negotiations for the return of Spanish-born Nobel prize winner Severo Ochoa from New York, the negotiations for Spanish membership in the European Conference of Molecular Biology, and national policy towards university reform. As a result, the early molecular biologists’ research groups began to be recognised as (...) research schools by Spanish authorities and postgraduate courses and new research centres for molecular biology were set up. Foreign influence in the whole process was crucial. (shrink)

We study twentieth-century biological sciences as experimental sciences by historically reconstructing the uses of experiments. Concepts like artificial, natural, and inventions, are handled so as to show how much current biological thought has been constructed on the basis of the invention of different kinds of experiments, instruments, and technical devices, experimental systems, and ideas concerning the fonctioning of nature. It is suggested that the frontier that may separate the natural from the artificial has already been crossed. Human intervention in the (...) natural phenomena through reproducible experiments hints to a view of current biological knowledge as a permanent invention of nature. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special collection of papers by Angela Creager, Soraya de Chadarevian, Karen Rader, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, and María Jesús Santesmases on the theme "Radiobiology in the Atomic Age.".

A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental (...) endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain. (shrink)