We all know how Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, but what about the way he lived during the final years of his life?  Just maybe the 16th president suffered from a rare genetic disorder called multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B.

Dr. John Sotos–author of ‘The Physical Lincoln‘ and a consultant on the TV series ‘House‘–would like to run DNA analysis of the president’s blood.  He believes Lincoln was already dying, before the assassination, from cancer.

Why such speculation?  (more…)

I know there’s ours, at the New York Academy of Sciences, on May 9. But now I learn that there’s also something happening in the Cambridge neighborhood: See here. Their conference is entitled “Cultures in Common” and features some top people from the Harvard-MIT orbit, including Sheila Jasanoff, Laurence Tribe, Dan Schrag, Steve Shapin, and so on.

“Cultures in Common” seems a provocative framing, in that I guess the argument will be focused on the existence (or finding) of common ground, rather than on continuing disconnects.

Moreover, the Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State, which was actually founded to bridge the “two cultures” gap (or so I understand), is having a scholarly meeting on this subject at the end of May, to which I’ve been invited. I’m not sure if there’s a webpage yet.

In short, it appears that a lot of people are awakening to the continuing relevance of Snow (including those who disagree strongly with him). The influence of the “Two Cultures” lecture has clearly been profound.

Speaking of which, while we’re close to selling out, I understand there are still some tickets left to the event this coming weekend in NYC, which your co-bloggers conceived of well over a year ago and centrally worked to organize. It’s not too late–and swine flu ain’t all that–so please register!

[This is the third in a series of posts written in anticipation of the May 9 "Two Cultures" conference at the New York Academy of Sciences, which we helped organize.]

Let me apologize for not having done another Snow post since last Tuesday. I did, of course, publish my weekly Science Progress piece on the Snow vs. Leavis battle, and did a Bloggingheads session about Snow with D. Graham Burnett–but I also left us hanging on around p. 12 of the lecture itself. This post is to redress that lapse and get us back on schedule.

I’m only going to do one more post about the first section of the lecture; we also have to deal with sections 2 and 3 this week, which I’ll probably do on Weds and Thurs. But note how this is the point in the analysis where the distinction Snow is making really becomes invidious; where we learn that Snow, far from being even-handed, really sees the literary intellectuals as the bad guys.

This is the stuff that made F.R. Leavis open a can of Whup-Ass.

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Apologies for not keeping up on my C.P. Snow posts as I intended, but perhaps I’ve done one better: I cornered my Princeton prof, D. Graham Burnett, to do a bloggingheads session about the historical and contemporary meaning of C.P. Snow, in anticipation of the New York conference. And I think it went off quite well:

Burnett really kicks ass in a couple of moments: For instance, where he shows that both C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis were kind of clueless about the very real impact of science on the literary work of someone like Joseph Conrad, who totally grokked the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Other topics that come up in the diavlog: What is the history of science and its origins as a field; why do we tell so many cliched stories about the development of knowledge, and the smiting by science of superstition, when the actual history is always more rich, interesting, and complex; and how can we mobilize history of science knowledge in the present moment to weigh in on the global warming or evolution debates.

So, enjoy.

My latest Science Progress column just went up–it is yet another discussion of C.P. Snow, this time with a focus on his famous battle with the literary critic F.R. Leavis. I argue that Leavis really behaved badly–launching various low blows at Snow–but that if you strip away the vitriol, both thinkers had something important to say.

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[This is the third in a series of posts written in anticipation of the May 9 "Two Cultures" conference at the New York Academy of Sciences, which we helped organize.]

As our discussion starts to gather a little steam, I want to focus in closely on just a few pages of the first chapter of “The Two Cultures”: pages 10-12. It is here that Snow performs an intellectual maneuver that has often been criticized, but which also lends considerable power to his argument (if you accept it). The move–or, some might say, the “trick”–lies in his changing, or plastic, definition of the word “culture.”

On p. 10, Snow is still talking about the literary and scientific “cultures” as two relatively small subgroups of people. And he even defines his terms; with respect to the scientific culture in particular, he says: “Without thinking about it, they respond alike. That is what a culture means.”

In other words, here Snow is using “culture” in the sense that most of us generally assume him to be using it: It is a fairly small tight knit group of people who are united by shared assumptions or backgrounds, existing within a broader society.

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[This is the second in a series of posts written in anticipation of the May 9 "Two Cultures" conference at the New York Academy of Sciences, which we helped organize.]

So what did people think of the first section of The Two Cultures?

I’ve read the essay/lecture probably ten times now, and first of all, the prose style always strikes me. C.P. Snow’s arch rival, the literary critic F.R. Leavis, would later smack the quality of his writing; but as a journalist–a craftsman with language, rather than an artist–I’ve always enjoyed the taut simplicity of it, the sense that you’re reading an unpretentious man’s plain and blunt thoughts.

In this first post about the text, I want to confine myself to its opening pages (roughly 1-9). This is heavy enough material, in that it is here that Snow first introduces the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between literary intellectuals and scientists.  I want to begin by raising the question of how Snow presents himself. You’ve read (maybe, anyway) our article about Snow’s background–that he was a scientifically trained novelist, with additional experience in government science advising. Certainly he had a unique pedigree–and he trades on it heavily here. Is he not working hard at the outset of this lecture to construct himself as an expert on other experts, a man with just enough of a foot in two camps that he is simultaneously committed to neither and yet uniquely positioned to observe both?

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Okay, so, I guess there’s a supplemental reading assignment for those wanting to take part in the “Two Cultures” discussion next week. You see, our article about Snow’s life, and the contemporary meaning of his work, has just come out in the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences, in anticipation of the big event in less than a month (which, I hear, is expected to sell out).

The piece provides C.P. Snow’s biography, some intellectual history, and then goes on to interpret the “Two Cultures” lecture not only in the context of Snow’s times, but alongside his other contemporary writings (which are often ignored when folks try to read Snow). An excerpt:

…this lament about two estranged cultures came from a man who had not only studied physics and written novels, but who had spent much of his life, including the terrifying period of World War II, working to ensure that the British government received the best scientific advice possible. That included the secret wartime recruitment of physicists and other scientists to work on weapons and defenses, activities which put Snow high up on the Gestapo’s Black List. So, no: Snow’s words weren’t merely about communication breakdowns between humanists and scientists. They were considerably more ambitious than that—and considerably more urgent, and poignant, and pained.

It helps to think of Snow as an early theorist on a critical modern problem: How can we best translate highly complex information, stored in the minds of often eccentric (if well meaning) scientists, into the process of political decision making at all levels and in all aspects of government, from military to medical? At best that’s a difficult quandary; there are many ways in which the translation can go wrong, and few in which it can go right. Yet World War II had demonstrated beyond question that the nations that best marshal their scientific resources have the best chance of survival and success, making sound science policy an essential component of modern, advanced democracies.

The oft-told story of the atomic bomb, in which a letter from none other than Albert Einstein helped alert President Roosevelt to the danger, makes this point most profoundly. But in a lecture delivered at Harvard little more than a year after his “Two Cultures” address and entitled “Science and Government,” Snow illustrated the same dilemma through the example of radar. He argued that if a small group of British government science ad visers, operating in conditions of high wartime secrecy, had not spearheaded the development and deployment of this technology in close conjunction with the Air Ministry, the pivotal 1940 Battle of Britain—fought in the skies over his nation—would have gone very differently. And Snow went further, identifying a bad guy in the story: Winston Churchill’s science adviser and ally F.A. Lindemann, who Snow described as having succumbed to the “euphoria of gadgets.” Rather than recognizing radar as the only hope to bolster British air defenses, Lindemann favored the fantastical idea of dropping parachute bombs and mines in front of enemy aircraft, and tried (unsuccessfully) to derail the other, pro-radar science advisers. Churchill’s rise to power was an extremely good thing for Britain and the world, but as Snow noted, it’s also fortunate that the radar decision came about be fore Churchill could empower Lindemann as his science czar.

So no wonder Snow opposed any force that might blunt the beneficial influence of science upon high-level decision-making. That force might be a “solitary scientific overlord”—Snow’s term for Lindemann—or it might be something more nebulous and diffuse, such as an overarching culture that disregards science on anything but the most superficial of levels, and so fails to comprehend how the advancement of knowledge and the progress of technology simultaneously threaten us and yet also offer great hope.

You can read the full essay here. Basically, think of it as an ambitious attempt to explain why C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture is not dismissable as merely a Cold War document; but rather, is deeply relevant and resonant today. And post a comment here to let us know if you think we’ve succeeded in making that case.

Science Progress, the science policy zine of the Center for American Progress, has just published a book that’s a collection of some of the most important work from progressives on science policy–an “informed citizen’s essential guide to science policy from the premier progressive think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action.” The book is entitled Science Next: Innovation for the Common Good, and it puts us in a long intellectual tradition:

Science as progressive…boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis is often credited as being the first literary work to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. It was a vision that was to have a profound effect on later seventeenth-century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, they shared the conviction that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton were of one mind as they made their synergistic contributions to America’s identity as a nation dedicated to modernity: Jefferson through the patent statute and Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy, which together have so rewarded and nourished inventiveness.

It is no coincidence that so many of the concepts at the very heart of how America has come to understand itself—ideas such as the frontier and the West—demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. The optimistic “can do” spirit; the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure; the lure of “the road”—all are associated with this sensibility and are at the heart of our veneration of this country’s great inventors, people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates. We hold these truths of perseverance and perspicacity to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.

The Obama administration has very pointedly placed itself in this tradition as well, and many of the folks at the Center for American Progress have been instrumental in articulating and influencing its science policy priorities. And now, the broad outlook is set down within two covers.

You can order ScienceNext here on Amazon. The book contains an essay by yours truly on science communication and the public, as well as writings by many other authors–most centrally, Science Progress’s editor Jonathan Moreno, a leading bioethicist, and Rick Weiss, recently of the Washington Post and Science Progress and now working for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I encourage you to check it out.

I’m blogging from the Princeton Firestone Library’s rare books room, with ancient texts open in front of me. How weird is that? And so, live from 1822 (the date of my particular edition), I bring you the following unforgettable passage from Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent:

I beheld a missionary violently agitated in proving, that Infierno, Hell, and invierno, winter, were not the same thing; but that they were as different as heat and cold. The Chaymas are acquainted with no other winter, than the season of rains; and the Hell of the whites appeared to them a place, where the wicked are exposed to frequent showers. The missionary harangued to no purpose: it was impossible to efface the first impressions, produced by the analogy between the two consonants: and he could not separate in the minds of the neophytes the ideas of rain and Hell, invierno, and Inferno.