The unexpected story of how genetic testing is affecting race in America
We know DNA is a master key that unlocks medical and forensic secrets, but its genealogical life is both revelatory and endlessly fascinating. Tracing genealogy is now the second-most popular hobby amongst Americans, as well as the second-most visited online category. This billion-dollar industry has spawned popular television shows, websites, and Internet communities, and a booming heritage tourism circuit.
The tsunami of interest in genetic ancestry tracing from the African American community has been especially overwhelming. In The Social Life of DNA, Alondra Nelson takes us on an unprecedented journey into how the double helix has wound its way into the heart of the most urgent contemporary social issues around race.
For over a decade, Nelson has deeply studied this phenomenon. Artfully weaving together keenly observed interactions with root-seekers alongside illuminating historical details and revealing personal narrative, she shows that genetic genealogy is a new tool for addressing old and enduring issues. In The Social Life of DNA, she explains how these cutting-edge DNA-based techniques are being used in myriad ways, including grappling with the unfinished business of slavery: to foster reconciliation, to establish ties with African ancestral homelands, to rethink and sometimes alter citizenship, and to make legal claims for slavery reparations specifically based on ancestry.
Nelson incisively shows that DNA is a portal to the past that yields insight for the present and future, shining a light on social traumas and historical injustices that still resonate today. Science can be a crucial ally to activism to spur social change and transform twenty-first-century racial politics. But Nelson warns her readers to be discerning: for the social repair we seek can’t be found in even the most sophisticated science. Engrossing and highly original, The Social Life of DNA is a must-read for anyone interested in race, science, history and how our reckoning with the past may help us to chart a more just course for tomorrow.

In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side.
In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.
“Sigrid Schmalzer creates an entirely new vision of the meaning and significance of “scientific farming” in China during the Mao era.….[A] must-read not only for modern China scholars but also for those who are interested in the history of science as political and social process, and in ongoing efforts to shed light on the possibilities of putting science to work in the service of greater equality and dignity for the world’s rural poor.”
(American Historical Review)
"At its core, this book is about socialist China's uses of science and technology to improve food production and the sociopolitical changes over time that have affected those involved in modern farming and agriculture. Cautioning that the Mao era was not one of unmitigated totalitarian oppression and ecological disaster, historian Schmalzer examines the complex relations of science and politics, raising such issues as who should be regarded as “scientists,” and how agriculture should be organized to maximize its benefits for all. Particularly interesting is the author’s investigation of the “rural scientific experiment movement." By comparing the fortunes of the “green revolution” in India and Africa, Schmalzer offers some unexpected political and social insights, contrasting US interests with those of the Chinese, who have also sought to bring their methods of agriculture and farming to third-world countries where politics is a highly visible concern on both sides of the capitalist-communist divide. Instructive and rewarding reading in recent Chinese history as well as the social politics of agriculture and farming in China and throughout the third world."
(Choice)
"Right on cue, this new work reveals the multifaceted and complex nature of science in the PRC. Red Revolution, Green Revolution looks at agricultural science and the unique and distinctive trajectory of the Chinese green revolution....demonstrates the manifold ways science filtered into the countryside and became the basis of the party’s interactions with the rural populace."
(Cross-Currents)
“Schmalzer’s reconstruction of the lived experiences of those who participated in the mass scientific experiment movement in China serves as a corrective to accounts of science in the years of the Cultural Revolution that emphasize failure, hardship, and suffering…[R]eading Red Revolution, Green Revolution productively upends one’s ideas about the nature of an agricultural experiment.”
(Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
“Upending familiar assumptions about the origins and consequences of the global Green Revolution, Schmalzer breaks important new ground in our understanding of modern Chinese history and the role of science in industrial agriculture. Rather than relying on misleading distinctions between modern and traditional, laboratory and field, politics and science, or even between the capitalist West and socialist East, Schmalzer convincingly draws our attention to the diversity of approaches taken in the effort to revolutionize Chinese agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a sophisticated political history from the ground up.”
(Shane Hamilton, University of Georgia)
“Writing with both elegance and precision, Schmalzer unveils the continuing imbrication of science and politics, not simply in the obviously hyperpolitical Maoist period, but also in the supposedly technologically driven Dengist era. She produces a nuanced, sophisticated description of agricultural scientific practices in the People’s Republic of China, one that challenges our assumptions about both Maoist agriculture and the Maoist period in general. Red Revolution, Green Revolution is a must-read for historians of modern China and historians of socialism, as well as historians of science and agriculture.”
(Fabio Lanza, University of Arizona)
"Agricultural science is inherently political. We may distrust the claim of technocrats and agribusiness that they conduct neutral research for the benefit of all, yet few of us would go so far as to advocate a full politicization of research, putting politics in command of laboratories and experimental fields. This, however, is what Maoist China did—and as Schmalzer demonstrates in her meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Maoist agricultural science worked, producing a socialist Green Revolution that was as impressive as the US-led Green Revolutions in India, Mexico, or the Philippines. Without romanticizing Maoist mass science, Schmalzer not only corrects the oft-repeated myth that Maoists were 'anti-science'; she shows that a different, more democratic and inclusive science was and remains possible."
(Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago)

出身名门（其父范寿康为五四著名文化人，大思想家、教育家），自小饱受传统文化熏陶，后毕业于浙大物理系，学贯中西，文理兼通，范岱年先生被公认为是真正的大师级的学者。他早年即投身革命，大学时代成为中共地下党员，新中国成立后曾负责为中央领导人编辑绝密刊物，是历史上许多重大事件的见证人。同时，作为我国科学哲学研究领域的领头人，他在科学史、科学哲学、科学社会学三大领域系统引进西学资源，建立国际通行的学术规范，重塑了中国自然辩证法(科学技术哲学)的学术形象。本书藉由范先生的生动描述，既可了解20世纪中国科学事业发展的状况和多个侧面，又可窥见中国社会变迁中的真实历史场景。

《神灵世界的余韵纳西族:一个古老民族的变迁》阐述了纳西族传统东巴文化的宇宙观和自然观、传统技术及生存方式；分析了传统文明在与现代文明相遇的过程中，在形而上的解释世界的层面和形而下的联系世界的层面被现代科学和技术取代的过程；分析了传统文明在现代化过程中的得失；讨论了传统文明融入现代社会的可能性；并对传统文明的未来发展模式进行了探讨。《神灵世界的余韵纳西族:一个古老民族的变迁》结合文献研究和田野调查，通过对东巴神话的分析，对传统纳西族的宇宙论和独特的署自然观进行描述和建构，对其建立在传统形而上体系和传统技术之上的生活方式进行了观察和研究，并分析它们在现代化冲击下的变迁。
《神灵世界的余韵纳西族:一个古老民族的变迁》不失为难得的民族史、科学史、技术史方面研究人员极有价值的参考书。

经济学是解开社会之谜的万能钥匙吗，还是说，最近的金融危机已经宣告了经济学的失败？本书正面讨论了关于这个问题的误解与争议。通过对新兴市场的出现、俄罗斯向资本主义的经济转型、全球化以及货币的分析，作者试图表明：在那些问题已经得到良好定义的领域，在那些我们可以采取行动使理论与现实相一致的领域，经济学一直非常成功；而在处理一些更大的问题的时候，经济学取得的成功一直无法让人满意。本书回顾历史，介绍了自二战以来，经济学家为了让经济学成为一门科学而做的努力；探索了科学与意识形态之间纠缠不清的关系，考察了经济学界内部的异端分子。最终本书得出了这样的结论：尽管经济学科存在一些问题，但是人们仍然需要经济学来去除关于经济问题谬见，而那样的谬见俯拾皆是。无论是在中国还是美国，对经济学的“科学性”表示怀疑的声音一直都存在，这在次贷危机爆发之后更是如此。不管是对经济学人来说，还是对普通读者来说，本书都可以引导他们对这个问题有一个严肃的思考。

Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But, in "Atoms and Alchemy", William R. Newman - a historian widely credited for reviving recent interest in alchemy - exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the Scientific Revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle's famous mechanical philosophy, Newman shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors - figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert - provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, Newman argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an "atomic" element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry. "Atoms and Alchemy" thus provokes a refreshing debate about the origins of modern science and will be welcomed - and deliberated - by all who are interested in the development of scientific theory and practice.

"In Promethean Ambitions", William R. Newman uses alchemy as a means to discuss the thinning boundary between the natural and the artificial. Focusing primarily on the period between 1200 and 1700, Newman examines the labors of pioneering alchemists and the impassioned - and often negative - responses to their efforts. Newman also shows that alchemy was not an unformed and capricious precursor to chemistry; it was an art founded on coherent philosophical and empirical principles - with vocal supporters and even louder critics - that attracted individuals of first-rate intellect. The historical relationship that he charts here between human creation and nature has innumerable implications today. "Promethean Ambitions" ably imbues a millennium-old scientific and ethical debate with modern relevance.

Professor Tambiah, one of today's leading anthropologists, is known particularly for his penetrating and scholarly studies of Buddhism. In this accessible and illuminating book he deals with the classical opposition between magic, science and religion. He reviews the great debates in classical Judaism, early Greek science, Renaissance philosophy, the Protestant Reformation, and the scientific revolution, and then reconsiders the three major interpretive approaches to magic in anthropology: the intellectualist and evolutionary theories of Tylor and Frazer, Malinowski's functionalism, and Levy Bruhl's philosophical anthropology, which posited a distinction between mystical and logical mentalities. There follows a wide-ranging and suggestive discussion of rationality and relativism. The book concludes with a discussion of thinking in the history and philosophy of science, which suggests interesting perspectives on the classical opposition between science and magic.

When and where did science begin? Historians have offered different answers to these questions, some pointing to Babylonian observational astronomy, some to the speculations of natural philosophers of ancient Greece. Others have opted for early modern Europe, which saw the triumph of Copernicanism and the birth of experimental science, while yet another view is that the appearance of science was postponed until the nineteenth century. Rather than posit a modern definition of science and search for evidence of it in the past, the contributors to "Wrestling with Nature" examine how students of nature themselves, in various cultures and periods of history, have understood and represented their work. The aim of each chapter is to explain the content, goals, methods, practices, and institutions associated with the investigation of nature and to articulate the strengths, limitations, and boundaries of these efforts from the perspective of the researchers themselves. With contributions from experts representing different historical periods and different disciplinary specializations, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of science and on what it meant, in other times and places, to wrestle with nature.

Today scientific, technological and cultural knowledge is shared worldwide. The extent to which globalized knowledge also existed in the past is an open question and, moreover, a question that is important for understanding present processes of globalization. This book, the first volume of the series "Studies" of the "Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge," the result of an interdisciplinary cooperation launched in 2007 by a Dahlem Conference, offers surprising answers to this question.
Long-distance and intercontinental connections with an attendant spread of knowledge are as old as Homo sapiens themselves. Since its inception, the globalization of knowledge has been a process with its own dynamics, interfering significantly with other processes of intercultural transmission. The four parts of this volume address historical phases in which the production, transmission and transformation of knowledge were crucial for advancing these processes. Part 1 investigates a series of processes in the very early phases of globalization, from the transmission of practical knowledge to the emergence of science. Part 2 explores how knowledge was disseminated as a consequence of the spread of power and belief structures. Part 3 deals with the encounters between culturally specific knowledge and globalized knowledge. Part 4 is dedicated to the globalization of modern science and to the great challenges, such as energy supply and climate change, that humanity faces when dealing with knowledge today
The 97th Dahlem Workshop:
The present volume is based on the 97th Dahlem Workshop on Globalization of Knowledge and its Consequences, Berlin, 18–23 November 2007, coordinated by Katharina Ochse.
Participants:
Ian Baldwin, Angelo Baracca, Fabio Bevilacqua, Maria Emilia Beyer, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Gianluca Bocchi, István M. Bodnár, Jens Erland Braarvig, Chiara Brambilla, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Jacob Dahl, Peter Damerow, Hansjörg Dilger, Kostas Gavroglu, Matteo Gerlini, Denise Gimpel, Gerd Graßhoff, Hans Falk Hoffmann, Dirk Hofäcker, Jarita C. Holbrook, Malcolm D. Hyman, Birgit Krawietz, Manfred Krebernik, Joachim Kurtz, Manolis Patiniotis, Albert Presas I Puig, Daniel T. Potts, Dhruv Raina, Jürgen Renn, Richard Rottenburg, Dagmar Schäfer, Matthias Schemmel, Mark Schiefsky, Meredith Schuman, Gebhard J. Selz, Martina Siebert, Circe Mary Silva da Silva, Ana Simões, Tzveta Sofronieva, Saran Solongo, Karin Tybjerg, Hans Ulrich Vogel, Milena Wazeck, Gerhard Wolf, Harriet T. Zurndorfer

《好奇年代》讲述的是科学史上的一段“接力”，它发生在18世纪末的英国，是科学的浪漫时代。书中主角天文学家赫歇耳和化学家戴维，他们的发现是浪漫时代的代表，他们本人也是不同类型的“浪漫主义”科学家。《好奇年代》生动描述了浪漫科学时代的特征：为了好奇而追求科学发现，在科学发现里洋溢着热情和想象。那年月，诗人是科学家，大自然是他们神秘的缪斯女神。

《日本科学史》全面论述了日本科学技术发展的历史，关于日本近代科技的发展论述尤详。众所周知，日本文化是以引进先进的中国文化和西欧文化加以消化，创造而发展起来的，科学技术也是如此。《日本科学史》的 特色是把科技史纳入了一般历史之中，从政治、社会、思想、文化中探索科技发展的原因。

Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.

Take a stroll through this one-of-a-kind book that offers readers an illustrated tour of how chemistry developed, from alchemy to the emergence of chemistry as a scientific discipline in the early 17th century, and, finally, modern-day chemistry. Discover this rare collection of more than 180 illustrations spanning 400 years of chemical publications, with each illustration accompanied by an essay discussing its significance in the context of historical scientific beliefs as well as modern chemical science. The author's knowledge and enthusiasm for the books, images, and subject matter are clearly reflected throughout the very readable, informative, and frequently funny essays. High-quality, full-page reproductions from the author's art collection, published from 1599 to the present, are eloquently displayed.

《数学史》1968年首次出版，1991年出了修订版，虽都距今甚远，但作为数学史料，并不过时。这正如数学的特征：只有在数学中，不存在重大的修正——只存在拓展。例如一旦希腊人发展出了演绎法，就他们所做的事情而言，他们是正确的，永远正确。欧几里得并不完备，他的工作得到了巨大的扩展，但只是扩展而不需要改正。他的定理，所有定理，到今天都是有效的。
本书把数学几千年的发展浓缩为这本编年史中。从希腊人到哥德尔，数学一直辉煌灿烂，名人辈出，观念的潮涨潮落到处清晰可见。而且，尽管追踪的是欧洲数学的发展，但作者并没有忽视中国文明、印度文明和阿拉伯文明的贡献。毫无疑问，这本书是（而且在很长时期内将会一直是）一部经典的关于数学及创造这门学科的数学家们的单卷本历史著作。既有学术性，又有可读性。
我们为书中的史实、观念、精美插图以及引领我们走过数学发展长河的大师们所折服，遂决定把它引入中国，以飨中国热爱数学、崇尚科学精神的读者。