Osiris 

Abstract: L'A. extrapole et clarifie les implications et les contributions d'une economie morale en science, qui constitue un systeme logique de forces emotionnelles

Abstract: ions. When an historian studies a particular locality,4 by definition one would expect that locality to become the \"center\" of his or her interest. Yet positivist colonial historians of, say, science in New Spain were, in reality, often writing the larger social and intellectual history of Europe, and not the history of Mexico,5 seeking out local \"traces\" of European ideas and intellectual movements.6 \"'Europe\"' says Dipesh Chakrabarty, \"remains the sovereign theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call 'Indian,' Chinese,' Kenyan,' and so on.\"7 When historians sought richer, deeper, \"thicker\" accounts of science in non-European localities,8 they soon became dissatisfied with analyses in which every standard of truth and rationality was set in Europe, and in which the very meaning of \"rationality,\" \"enlightenment,\" progress,\" and \"useful knowledge\" had been defined on that distant continent. Thus, little by little, historians of local science sloughed off a paradigm of Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999). 3For example, Bruno Latour's writings have made a particularly useful contribution, both by insisting on eliminating the \"great divide\" between science and traditional modes of thought, and by locating the power of modern science in its distinctive international network of institutions. The workings of that network create the conditions that make legible and commensurable (for the center) all the observations, measurements, representations, and texts produced in the various peripheries. See especially Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987). 4In this paper I shall use the terms \"local\" and \"locality\" flexibly to indicate \"places\" in which science is accomplished. A locality may be a region, country, city, or even a single institution, incorporating social, cultural, political, and economic factors and relationships, and including both centers and peripheries. I In fact, Mexican historians have been somewhat less Eurocentric than historians of science in many other colonial localities. Nevertheless, atthe first Mexican colloquium in the field (September, 1963), thirty-four of the sixty-one papers presented were part of a symposium on the European Enlightenment in Latin America. Enrique Beltrdn, ed., Memorias del Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Historia de la Ciencia, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, 1964). The history of Mexican science has a venerable and distinguished disciplinary history with antecedents in the nineteenth century. See Enrique Beltrnn, \"Fuentes mexicanas de la historia de la ciencia,\" Anales de las Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia, 1970, 2:57-112; Juan Jose Saldafia, \"Marcos conceptuales de la historia de las ciencias en Latino America: Positivismo y economicismo,\" El Perfil de la ciencia en America (Mexico City: Sociedad Latinoamericana deHistoria de las Ciencias y la Tecnologia, 1986); and Elias Trabulse, \"Aproximaciones historiogrnficas a la ciencia mexicana,\" Memorias del Primer Congreso Mexicano de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia (Mexico City: Sociedad de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnologia, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 5 1-69. 6 See for example, Roland D. Hussey, \"Traces of French Enlightenment in Colonial Hispanic America,\" in Latin America nd the Enlightenment, ed.Arthur P. Whitaker, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 23-51. This book, originally published in 1942, uncovered useful material but remains a classic example of a project in European history focused on Latin America, and is one that helped set the agenda for writing colonial science history. All six of the distinguished contributing scholars were apparently English speaking and based outside Latin America. 7Dipesh Chakrabarty, \"Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?\" Representations, 1992, 32:1-26. 8 Clifford Geertz referred to the study of local cases as \"thick description,\" without which more general cultural meanings and power relationships cannot be understood. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). LOCALITY IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 223 cultural deficit, replacing it with a paradigm of cultural difference. Within the \"big picture\" Europe was progressively \"decentered,\"9 and in a very real sense, science was also decentered. PERIPHERAL CENTERS AND CENTRAL PERIPHERIES Because modern science arose principally in one geographic locale,'0 historians of science had taken the wheel as the metaphor for its international structure: its center was in Europe (displaced this century to the mid-Atlantic), with the rest of the world revolving around. But the metaphor of the wheel is exceedingly misleading. From the time of its cosmopolitan birth in the correspondence of Marin Mersenne (15881648) and Henry Oldenburg (1618-1677) and in institutions like the much neglected Casa de la Contratacion in Seville (1539?), the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657), and the Royal Society of London (1660), modern science is better understood, both metaphorically and actually, as a polycentric ommunications network.\" During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that network was fully institutionalized, which represented a revolution in knowledge making more significant for both science and society than the theoretical advances of the seventeenth century traditionally known as the Scientific Revolution. Thus, from the very beginnings of the scientific movement, Centrality or peripherality was not primarily a matter of geographical location, but the combined effect of social, scientific, and-not the least-power relations. . .. Scientists, like other people, bore identities, they belonged somewhere, and they were loyal to something. Even more importantly, the daily activities of scientists were carried out in a framework ofinstitutions, agendas, career opportunities, working language, financial support and patronage systems.'2 This is to suggest that the idea of science having a European center and a global periphery perpetrated a confusing, and ultimately spurious, understanding of the relations of science and place. Then and now, Europe had major centers, minor centers, and peripheries; cities like London, indeed, had central institutions and peripheral institutions. Of course, progressively other localities developed scientific enters and peripheries. Furthermore, within Europe and without, centers rose and fell. 9Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, \"Decentring the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modem Science and the Modem Origins of Science,\" British Journal of the History of Science, 1993, 26:407-32. 10 \"Modem science\" as distinguished by its institutions, procedures, and technologies. It See Latour, Science in Action (cit. n. 3), pp. 215-57, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985). Sverker Sorlin has given a clear description of early processes of scientific nternationalization: \"National and International Aspects of Cross-Boundary Science: Scientific Travel in the 18th Century,\" inDenationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice, eds. Elizabeth Crawford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sorlin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), pp. 43-72. See also Lorraine Daston, \"The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,\" Science in Context, 1991, 4:367-86; and for the role of the Casa de la Contrataci6n, see David Turnbull, \"Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,\" Imago Mundi, 1996, 48:7-14, and J. Pulido Rubio, El Piloto mayor de la Casa de Contrataci6n de Sevilla (Sevilla: Escuelade Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1950). 12 Sorlin, \"National and International\" (cit. n. 11), p. 45. 224 DAVID WADE CHAMBERS AND RICHARD GILLESPIE And whenever a scientific center arose within a locality, both science and the locality were changed by the event.'3 Eurocentric explanations of the growth of science received a great boost with the appearance of historian George Basalla's widely known model describing \"the introduction fmodem science into any non-European ation.\"' 4 The model predicted that localities peripheral to the European center would progressively \"receive\" the ideas of Western science, slowly establishing their own scientific organizations and personnel, perhaps producing along the way a few \"heroes of colonial science.\"\"5 In the final stage, after the colony had accomplished \"seven tasks,\" a broad and \"independent\" institutional support base for science would have been established, thus allowing the given locality to compete scientifically in the world of nations. 16 The seven tasks, which are rarely discussed in the critical iterature, included such activities as \"overcoming\" and eventually \"eradicating\" recalcitrant local \"philosophical and religious beliefs,\" founding scientific societies \"patterned after\" the major European organizations, and importing European technologies. This unrelenting Eurocentrism was only one of the many reasons that he Basalla model was finally rejected by most historians.'7 COLONIAL TO NATIONAL TRAJECTORIES Basalla's model was initially attractive b cause it showed-in fact, seemed to prescribe-the straight and narrow path to national scientific development. Each locality was to rise in invariant sequence from a colonial to a national stage, from scientific dependency to autonomy. Colonial science was, in effect, considered a scientific adolescence that might eventually grow with the new nation-states into the maturity that Europe had long since achieved. In countries like Australia, where European settlers predominated, the predictive capacity of the model might, at first glance, seem reliable. In just a little ove

Abstract: The promotion of the benign atom as an instrument of American foreign policy and hegemonic ambitions was important to scientists and policy makers alike who sought to win “hearts and minds” in the early years of the cold war The distribution of radioisotopes to friendly nations for research and medicinal purposes in the late 1940s was followed by Eisenhower’s far more spectacular Atoms for Peace initiative, announced at the United Nations in December 1953 This chapter describes the polyvalent significance of the diffusion first of radioisotopes, then of reactor technology, notably at the famous conference in Geneva in 1955 It places particular emphasis on the role of scientists and their appeal to scientific internationalism to promote national scientific leadership It is stressed that openness and security, sharing knowledge or technology and implementing regimes of surveillance, were two sides of the same coin