Last Sunday I went to the recently reopened Kölnisches Stadtmuseum (Cologne City Museum). I did not know about the institution’s recent travails or anything in advance about its “new concept.” As a historian I came away unimpressed by its walls of text, a dearth of objects, and the lack of proofreading the labels. (For example, … Continue reading Of captive portals and QR Codes: The new Kölnisches Stadtmuseum is fine for someone else
Category: historiography
For years, 23andMe pulled the scam of convincing about 12 million people to pay them $99 to sequence “their” genome. They scammed us into believing that “my” genome is “mine” alone, or that “your” genome is “yours” alone. But that’s not how human genomes work. Half of “my” genes are also half of my father’s … Continue reading 23andMe was never about “your” genome
In her 1987 evaluation of the history of Schleiden and Schwann's cell theory, the late Ilse Jahn pointed out that in Berlin in the 1830s and 1840s there were a lot of scientists using advanced microscopes, many of whom were clustered around the Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin. So how much did their microscopes cost? And why was this important in the history of biology?
Here's a book I stumbled upon today that I wish I knew about a long time ago: Gavin Bridson's The History of Natural History: An Annotated Bibliography. It's not just a bibliography of natural history resources, it's a bibliography of history of natural history resources, which means this should go on the top of any … Continue reading Gavin Bridson, The History of Natural History: An Annotated Bibliography (1994)
Not infrequently, histories of cell theory will mention Jan Purkyně (1787–1869) and his student Gabriel Gustav Valentin (1810–1883) as important forerunners to Schleiden and Schwann. Years before Schleiden’s 1838 “Beiträge zur Phytogenesis” and Schwann’s 1839 Mikroskopische Untersuchungen, Purkyně and Valentin both observed nuclei in animal cells, and both suggested a possible homology between plant cells … Continue reading Cell theory historiography and Gustav Gabriel Valentin’s Histiogeniae plantarum atque animalium (Histiogenia comparata) of 1835/37
Daniel Liu, History of Science 