Sharon Kingsland (Johns Hopkins University), The International Phytotron Movement: Botany as Big Science in the Atomic Age
Commentator: Ayelet Shavit (Tel Hai College)
Chair: Ehud Lamm
THE BAR-HILLEL COLLOQUIUM FOR THE HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE
יום ב' 21/5/12 שעה 18:00
בנין גילמן, חדר 449
התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:45, ליד חדר 449
Until the mid-20th century plant physiologists and ecologists lacked well-designed laboratories for the study of whole organisms and their relationship to the environment. In the 1950s the situation improved with the construction of new types of laboratories. A pioneer was the Earhart Laboratory for Plant Research, which opened in 1949 at the California Institute of Technology. The brainchild of Frits W. Went, this laboratory stimulated a worldwide laboratory movement from the 1950s through the 1970s. Went’s laboratory, known as a “phytotron” because its control panel resembled that of a cyclotron, represented biology’s entry into Big Science in the postwar period. Research focused on biochemical, physiological, and ecological topics; one goal was to bring disciplines together and to link basic research to agricultural problems. Israeli scientists were among the first to work in Caltech’s phytotron. Two of the most ambitious phytotrons of the 1950s were those constructed in Moscow (at the Academy of Sciences) and outside Paris (part of the CNRS). The role of these laboratories in promoting modern environmental sciences will be discussed. One hypothesis is that Soviet plant physiologists met the challenge of Lysenkoism successfully by promoting “phytotronics,” as it came to be called.
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