It is my pleasure to announce that the 2007/8 Benjamin Siegel prize has been awarded to Sara Wylie for her paper "Mimetic Designs, Desires, and Disorders: Juvenile." I include a description of the paper, written by Prize Committee Chair Prof. Michael Fischer, below.
The committee also awarded an honorable mention to Chihyung Jeon for his paper "Bringing the Atmosphere Back in the 1920s/ 1930s." Again, a precis by Professor Fischer is below. Please join me in congratulating Sara and Chihyung and for their well-earned recognition for this excellent work. Also, many thanks to the Siegel Prize Committee (Ted Postol, Vincent Lepinay, and Mike Fischer) and to the other students who submitted such lively papers. dm The author:Sara Wylie. The title: Mimetic Designs, Desires, and Disorders: Juvenile Hormones. The winning paper is a wonderfully rich and multi-step analysis using STS tools to tell a larger story about how humans are caught up in ecological connectivities that for a moment the humans (scientists and entrepreneurs) thought they could control as perfect bio-mimicking pesticides. Intimately involved are the following: (1) a tropical human parasite (a beetle) which is the primary vector of Chagas disease by feeding on human blood; (2) the beetle which is given the investigator's arm to feed upon until it can be adapted to lab conditions and set to feed on the shaved bellies of rabbits, and its five larval stages stabilized (thus transformed from companion species to experimental system, or even a reagent-like tool that can be kept on the shelf starved until needed and revived); (3) a neurological hormone which is purified and is thought to be the key to a biological insecticide, which regulates the stages of larval growth, and which subsequently is found to operate in a second experimental system, the silkworm, the manipulation of which can create chimeras composed of different stages of growth; (4) a failure in the lab which leads to the discovery that filter paper made from Balsam fir also contains this neuroendocrinal agent, and thus that inadvertently humans have been helping to disseminate this agent. Indeed hormone-mimicking pesticides have become widespread against mosquitoes, cattle fleas, and cotton white fly pests. These hormone-mimicking pesticides moreover were first produced by Syntex Corporation, the Mexico-based firm that also pioneered human birth control pills (of Carl Djerassi fame). Along the way attention is paid as well to the visual media that made the covers of the Scientific American. We thus have two separate experimental systems (beetle and silkworm) generating a series of surprises, implicated in both medical and agricultural biotechnologies, pioneered in a start-up lab operating in relatively unregulated territory, a story that unfolds across the Western hemisphere (Brazil, Mexio, the U.S.), and a series of experiments and technologies that make the world itself an experimental system though which we discover that, as Michel Serres might say, there are more parasitic levels preying upon and mimicking one another than science at first could have imagined. The use of the mimetic faculties of nature provide a narrative as well as scientific thread. Honorable mention: Chihyng Jeon. For his paper Bringing the Atmosphere Back in the 1920s/ 1930s This is an very nicely written paper that also tells the history of a new epistemic object, the measurable atmosphere, something that comes into being through the interaction of meterology and aeronautics. The title likens the effort to earlier discovery expeditions of bringing back novel scientific objects. The complications of designing airborne meterographs and of disciplining and having specialized pilots proved to be unmanageable for the levels of precision required. These experiments come to a natural end with the development of radiosonde technology. _______________________________________________ Sci-tech-public mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/sci-tech-public
