The complexity of contemporary biology is a source of wonder, fear, and misunderstanding. Thierry Hoquet reviews the major biological theories to help us think through the social implications of a science that is opening up fascinating, though not inevitable, horizons.
The current craze for trees and their capacity for mutual help owes much to Canadian forestry expert Suzanne Simard, whose book traces her professional and life journey.
Scholars are not just thinking machines. They laugh; they are anxious, angry, or afraid; they become friends with their colleagues. Researchers experience many emotions but these are mainly ignored, as though they had nothing to do with the process that produces knowledge.
How do scientific discoveries and progress come about? Against an idealist and triumphalist conception of the history of science, Simon Schaffer’s oeuvre examines science in the making, in close proximity to its practices and actors. Far from diminishing its prestige, this approach restores science to the central place it occupied in Old Regime societies.
Emma Spary’s new book Feeding France explores the rise of the food expert as public figure from the eighteenth century onwards, considering in particular the life-story of Antoine Parmentier, who introduced the potato into the country. The history of food consumption trends, which remains largely unexplored, tells a tale of persuasion, food crises and controversy.
By comparing the ways in which Paris and London have updated their urban pasts since the seventeenth century, Stéphane Van Damme studies the birth of a science of the city. How has urban archaeology become simultaneously an object of mass consumption and a requirement for public action?
Is scientific progress necessarily moral? In his history of experiments on human guinea pigs, Grégoire Chamayou attempts to show that modern science, although apparently neutral, has a share in the domination and exploitation of individuals whose existence is deemed insignificant.
