Conference : ‘Biomedicine in the 20th century: practices, policies, and politics’

The Office of NIH History is sponsoring a major two-day conference on ‘Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics’. It will be held in the Lister Hill Auditorium on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on December 5-6, 2005. The conference is to honor Dr. Victoria A. Harden, Director, Office of NIH History, on her retirement.
The keynote speaker will be evolutionary geneticist and social critic Richard C. Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University, who will discuss “The Effects of the Socialization of Biomedical Research.”
Other speakers, in alphabetical order, are:
• Warwick Anderson, “The Global Reach of United States Biomedical Research”
• Stuart Blume, “The Changing System of Vaccine Innovation, 1950-2000”
• David Cantor, “Radium, Cancer Research and the End of the New Deal”
• Angela Creager, “Virus Research Between Lay Health Organizations and the Government, 1935-1955
• Bernardino Fantini, “From Genetic Diseases to the Genetics of Disease: The Evolution of Theories of Genetic Determinism and the Implications for Health Strategies”
• Gerald Grob, “The National Institute of Mental Health and Mental Health Policy, 1946-1965”
• J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “The Path Dependency of Institutional and Organizational Factors that Shape Major Scientific Discoveries”
• Daniel Kevles, “Genes, Disease, and Patents: Cash and Community in Biomedicine”
• Susan Lederer, “Transplant-Nation: Organ Transplantation in the United States”
• Buhm Soon Park”‘Why Does NIH Need an Intramural Program?’ Biomedical Research in the Federal Government after World War II”
• Guenter Risse, “House of Trials: A Century of Clinical Experimentation in Hospitals”
• Leo Slater, “Chemotherapy and Immunology: Infectious Disease Research in Twentieth-Century Biomedical Science”
• Darwin Stapleton, “The Critical Role of Laboratory Instruments at the Rockefeller: Biomedicine as Biotechnology”
• Carsten Timmermann, “Cancer Research and Therapy in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century: The Role of the British Medical Research Council”
• Keith Wailoo, “The Cultural Politics of Pain and Pain Research in America, 1950-2000”
Scientists, historians of medicine and science, and the interested public are invited. Please mark the dates on your calendars. More information about conference arrangements will be announced later. Questions should be addressed to Dr. Caroline Hannaway, conference organizer, at hannawayc@mail.nih.gov