• Icons of knowledge
• Two small embryos in spirits of wine
• Like flies on the parlor ceiling
• Drawing and Darwinism
• Illustrating the magic word
• Professors and progress
• Visual strategies
• Schematics, forgery, and the so-called educated
• Imperial grids
• Setting standards
• Forbidden fruit
• Creative copying
• Trials and tributes
• Scandal for the people
• A hundred Haeckels
• The textbook illustration
• Iconoclasm
• The shock of the copy.

Pictures from the past powerfully shape current views of the world. In books, television programs, and websites, new images appear alongside others that have survived from decades ago. Among the most famous are drawings of embryos by the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in which humans and other vertebrates begin identical, then diverge toward their adult forms. But these icons of evolution are notorious, too: within months of their publication in 1868, a colleague alleged fraud, and Haeckel's many enemies have repeated the charge ever since. His embryos nevertheless became a textbook staple until, in 1997, a biologist accused him again, and creationist advocates of intelligent design forced his figures out. How could the most controversial pictures in the history of science have become some of the most widely seen? In Haeckel's Embryos, Nick Hopwood tells this extraordinary story in full for the first time. He tracks the drawings and the charges against them from their genesis in the nineteenth century to their continuing involvement in innovation in the present day, and from Germany to Britain to the United States. Emphasizing the changes worked by circulation and copying, interpretation and debate, Hopwood uses the case to explore how pictures succeed and fail, gain acceptance and spark controversy. Along the way, he reveals how embryonic development was made a process that we can see, compare, and discuss, and how copying - usually dismissed as unoriginal - can be creative, contested, and consequential. With a wealth of expertly contextualized illustrations, Haeckel's Embryos recaptures the shocking novelty of pictures that enthralled schoolchildren and outraged priests, and highlights the remarkable ways these images kept on shaping knowledge as they aged.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780226046945 20160618

How did Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist and the acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, become a human rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize? In his later years, Sakharov noted in his diary that he was "simply a man with an unusual fate." To understand this deceptively straightforward statement by an extraordinary man, The World of Andrei Sakharov, the first authoritative study of Andrei Sakharov as a scientist as well as a public figure, relies on previously inaccessible documents, recently declassified archives, and personal accounts by Sakharov's friends and colleagues to examine the real context of Sakharov's life. In the course of doing so, Gennady Gorelik answers a fascinating question, whether the Soviet hydrogen bomb was really fathered by Sakharov, or whether it was based on stolen American secrets. Gorelik concludes that while espionage did initiate the Soviet effort, the Russian hydrogen bomb was invented independently. Gorelik also elucidates the reasons that brought about the seemingly sudden transformation of the top-secret physicist into a public figure in 1968, when Sakharov's famous essay "Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was distributed in samizdat in the USSR and smuggled out to the West. Recently declassified documents show that Sakharov's metamorphosis was caused by professional concerns, particularly regarding the development of an anti-ballistic missile defense. An insider's view of how the upper echelons of the Soviet regime functioned had led Sakharov to the conclusion that the goals of peace, progress, and human rights were inextricably linked. His free thinking and free feeling were manifested in his hope that scientific thought and religious perception would find a profound synthesis in the future.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780195156201 20160528

Politics and science make strange bedfellows. In politics, perceptions are reality and facts are negotiable. The competing interests, conflicting objectives, and trade-offs of political negotiations often lend themselves to bending the truth and selectively interpreting facts to shape outcomes. In science, facts are reality. This collection examines the conflicts that arise when politics and science converge. In Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, eleven leading scientists describe the politicization - through misapplication or overemphasis of results that favor a political decision or through outright manipulation - of scientific findings and deliberations to advance policy agendas. They show how the consequences of politicization are inflicted on the public, including the diversion of money and research efforts from worthwhile scientific endeavors, the costs of unnecessary regulations, and the losses of useful products - while increased power and prestige flow to those who manipulate science. The authors of three essays describe government diversions of scientific research and the interpretation of scientific findings away from where the evidence leads and toward directions deemed politically desirable. Three more contributions analyze the expensive and extensive efforts devoted to altering images of risk in order to establish linkages in the public's mind between deleterious human health effects and various areas of scientific research. Two essays examine the workings and results of consensus advisory panels and conclude that their recommendations are often based on far-from-certain science and driven by social and political dynamics that substitute group cohesion in favor of independent, critical thinking. Authors of two essays describe the unfortunate results of application of the 'precautionary principle, ' which generally requires proof of no risk before a new product is introduced or an existing product can be continued in use. A concluding essay describes the personal costs of opposing the politicization of science.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817939328 20180530

• Temples of the future: Cyclotron republic
• Practical philosopher's stone
• Useful adviser
• Adventurous time
• Inside the wire: Enormoz
• Question of divided loyalties
• Break, blow, burn
• Stone's throw from despair
• Scientists in gray flannel suits: World in which war will not occur
• Character, association, and loyalty
• Rather puzzled horror
• Desperate urgency here
• Sorcerer's apprentice: Nuclear plenty
• Bad business now threatening
• Descent into the maelstrom
• Not much more than a kangaroo court
• All the evil of the times: Good deed a man has done before
• Like going to a new country
• Cross of atoms.

Brotherhood of the Bomb is the fascinating story of the men who founded the nuclear age, fully told for the first time. The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller -- the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science -- and its practitioners -- enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty -- to country, to science, and to each other -- and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict. - www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com.
In this vital slice of American history, told authoritatively--and grippingly--for the first time, Herken relates the tangled lives and localities of the men who founded the nuclear age: Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.

• Introduction: Some skeptical reflections on research and development / Tibor R. Machan
• Arguments concerning government's investment in research / Oliver Mayo
• The limits of government-funded research: what should they be? / R. Paul Drake
• Federal support of research and development in science and engineering / Michael W. Blasgen
• Scientific research in a free society: some reflections / Eleftheria Maratos-Flier.

Since World War II, it has become generally accepted that most advanced scientific research will be funded by the federal government. But despite the usefulness of some of these expenditures, there remains the question of whether the funds were necessarily deployed in the best way. How would the money have been spent had it remained in private hands? Might some other projects have served more valuable purposes? And could these alternative projects have been pursued by government, or is the private sector better equipped to discern and to pursue such purposes? The contributors to this volume explore the implications of government funding of scientific research and offer alternatives to the heavy reliance on government support that research and development (R&D) currently enjoys. Not every author reaches the same conclusions, but each squarely confronts the problems arising from the idea that government funding of R&D is and ought to be the norm. Contributions include a balanced, in-depth look at the Australian government's investment in research, showing that there is a role for government that is not simply dependent on public good or market failure. The book also offers a discussion of what the limits of government-funded research should be - and why it is critical to separate research and government regulation. It presents an examination of federal research funding in the physical sciences and engineering, showing that it appears to work - but that there is no real principle to justify the spending or establish that the money is spent effectively. And it provides a thoughtful reflection on the role of scientific research in a free society, raising the question: Does state involvement in research lead to more or less freedom?
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817929428 20180530