How asylums became the crucible of genetics

The Genetics of How Dogs Became Our Social Allies

How autism became autism

This article argues that the meaning of the word 'autism' experienced a radical shift in the early 1960s in Britain which was contemporaneous with a growth in epidemiological and statistical studies in child psychiatry. The first part of the article explores how 'autism' was used as a category to describe hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life in infants through the work of significant chi...

How Media Became New

On August 19, 1839, the Palace of the Institute in Paris was completely full with curious Parisians who came to hear the formal description of the new reproduction process invented by Louis Daguerre. Daguerre, already well-known for his Diorama, called the new process daguerreotype. 1 According to a contemporary, "a few days later, opticians' shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerr...

How I became a biochemist.

It was a sunny September day in a Madrid that had started to grow after years of stagnation, when I entered a modern red brick building at the corner of Velázquez and Joaquín Costa streets. I had an appointment with someone unknown to me, but whom I had been told was an important enzymologist. I was far from imagining that the encounter with that person would determine my future scientific life...

How Probe Microscopists Became Nanotechnologists

Nanoscale entities are by definition invisible to the unmediated senses. Yet generating images of these objects has been crucial to the rhetoric of nanotech boosters. Thus, bringing microscopes and microscopists under the nano umbrella has been central to the work of nano proponents. No instruments have been more crucial to this process than the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and atomic fo...