M. Susan Lindee, Ph.D., Professor
University of Pennsylvania
Department of History and Sociology of Science
Logan Hall, 249 S. 36th Street, Room 365
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Telephone: (215) 898-2271
E-mail
Ph.D., Cornell University
M.S., Cornell University
B.S., University of Texas at Austin
Teaching Fields:
American science, history of genetics, gender and science, science and popular culture, science and war.
Research Interests:
Twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences, radiation biology, human genetics and genomics
Professor Lindee is a native Texan who received her undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a journalist for ten years before she pursued graduate study at Cornell University, where she earned a Ph.D in History and Philosophy of Science. Her research focuses on twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences, particularly radiation biology, human genetics and genomics. She teaches about science and gender, science and war, and the history of American science. She is a sea kayaker and birdwatcher.
Read Professor Lindee’s review of James Watson’s DNA
CURRICULUM VITAE
Professor, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, July 2003-present.
Associate Professor, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. May 1996 to July 2003.
Assistant Professor, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. September 1990 to May 1996.
Research Historian, Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, July 1990 to July 1993.
Journalist, working at various newspapers in Texas, May 1975 to June 1985.
Education:
B.S. in Communications, University of Texas at Austin, May 1975.
M.S. in History and Philosophy of Science,
Cornell University, May 1988.
Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science,
Cornell University, January 1990.
Publications: Books
Moments of Truth: Genetic Disease in American Culture Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming, 2004.
Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two Culture Divide With Alan Goodman and Deborah Heath, edited volume from a Wenner-Gren Foundation Symposium at Teresopolis, Brazil. University of California Press, 2003.
The DNA mystique: The gene as a cultural icon with Dorothy Nelkin. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1995. Translations: Japanese, 1997; French 1998. New issue, University of Michigan Press, 2004.
Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Other publications:
Representing James V. Neel: Voices of the dead in the Yanomami controversy. Forthcoming in an edited volume by Francisco Salzano and Magdalena Hurtado, Lost Paradises and the Ethics of Research and Publication Oxford University Press, 2003.
Genetic Disease in the 1960s: A structural revolution. 30 August 2002, American Journal of Medical Genetics 115:2, 75-82.
Provenance and the pedigree: Victor McKusick’s fieldwork with Ellis van Creveld syndrome in the Pennsylvania Amish. Forthcoming, in edited Wenner-Gren volume (see above) Fall 2003, University of California Press.
Genetic Disease Since 1945. December 2000 Nature Reviews Genetics 1:3, 236-241.
Babies’ Blood: Phenylketonuria and the rise of neonatal testing, 1955-1965. 1999 Chicago Kent Law Review 75:1, 113-133.
The repatriation of atomic bomb victim body parts to Japan, 1967-1973: Natural objects and diplomacy. 1999. In Morris Low, ed. Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia. Osiris, Volume 13, 376-409.
Atonement: Understanding the no-treatment policy of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. 1994. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68:454-490.
What is a mutation? The problem of the mutant locus in the genetics project of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. 1992. Journal of the History of Biology Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 231-255.
Cloning in the popular imagination. 2001. With Dorothy Nelkin. In Arlene Judith Klotzko, ed.,The Cloning Sourcebook. Oxford University Press. 83-93.
James Van Gundia Neel (1915-2000) American Anthropologist. 2001 103:2 pp 502-5.
Review, Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado. Current Anthropology. April 2001.
History and the Darkness Controversy. Summer 2001, Center for the History of Recent Science Newsletter, Essay.
Good genes and bad genes. With Dorothy Nelkin. 1999. Michael Fortun and Everett Mendelsohn, eds. The practices of human genetics. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 155-167.
The Conversation: History and History as it happens. 1997. In Thomas Soderqvist, ed., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology. Harwood Academic Publishers. 39-50.
Wars of out-describing. Spring 1997 Social Text. 50: 139-142. For follow-up issue on the Sokal/Science Wars affair.
Creating Natural Distinctions. With Dorothy Nelkin. 1997. In Martin Duberman, ed. A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press.
The cultural powers of the gene: Identity, destiny and the social meaning of heredity. 1997. In Johannes Wirz and Edith Lammerts van Buren, eds., The future of DNA Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Genes made me do it: The appeal of biological explanations. With Dorothy Nelkin, March 1996. Politics and the Life Sciences 15:95-7.
The American Career of Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry, 1806-1853. 1991. Isis 82:8-23. Reprinted, 1995, in Hamilton Cravens, Alan I. Marcus and David M. Katzman, eds., Technical knowledge in American culture: Science, technology and medicine since the early 1800s Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
A Guide to the Human Genome Project: Technologies, people and institutions with Susan Speaker. Philadelphia: The Chemical Heritage Foundation, 1993.
Reviews:
Review, Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces. Isis 91:2, June 2000.
Review, Joan Fujimura. Crafting Cancer. Isis. 90:2, June 1999.
Review: Timothy F. Murphy. Gay Science: The ethics of sexual orientation research. In Medical Humanities Review. 12:2, Fall 1998. 89-91.
Review, Evelyn Fox Keller Refiguring Life in Technology and Culture April 1997.
Review, Jonathan M. Weisgall Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll in Isis 86:2, June 1995, 353-355.
Essay review, Scientific outsiders and the Human Genome Project. in Medical Humanities Review 9:1, Spring 1995, 38-44.
Review, Jonathan Harwood Styles of Scientific Thought: The German genetics community, 1900-1933 in Journal of the History of Biology 1995, 28:170-172.
Review, Sheldon H. Harris Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1995, 69: 156-158.
Essay review, The ELSI Hypothesis. 1994 Isis 85:293-296.
Review, Howard Ball Cancer Factories: America's Tragic Quest for Uranium Self-Sufficiency in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1994 68:353-355.
Dissertation Students Supervised
Elizabeth Hanson, 1996.
Nature Civilized: The Cultural History of American Zoos
Hanson’s book was released by Princeton University Press in October, 2002, as Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos. She is historian and senior writer at the Rockefeller University and the author of The Rockefeller University Achievements: A Century of Science for the Benefit of Mankind, 1901-2001 Rockefeller University Press, 2001.
John Terino, April 2001
Quaker Science in the Early Cold War: The role of military sponsored research at the University of Pennsylvania, 1950-1970
Terino is a history professor at the U.S. Air Force University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. He came to Penn’s graduate program on an Air Force fellowship and holds the rank of major.
Susan A. Miller, May 2001
Girls in Nature and the Nature of Girls:
Summer camps of the Girl Scouts, YWCA and Campfire Girls, 1890-1939
Miller is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at Rollins College, a liberal arts college near Orlando at Winter Park, Florida.
Erin McLeary, May 2002.
Organize, classify, arrange and display:
Medical Museums in America, 1863-1951
McLeary’s dissertation looks at the rise of the medical museum, the networks of trade medical bodily materials, and the subsequent reconfiguration of these museums as public facilities in the 1910s and 1920s. She has curatorial experience and has been working in Philadelphia this fall on curatorial and research projects.
Audra Wolfe, July 2002
Speaking for Nature and Nation: American biologists as Cold War Intellectuals, 1947-1972
Wolfe’s work examines biologists who were active public intellectuals in the Cold War period. She is now the new acquisitions editor in the history of science at Rutgers University Press.
Second reader for:
Joshua Buhs, February 2001
The Earth Dwellers: A history of the imported fire ant in North America, 1918-1983
Buhs won the Schuman Prize of the History of Science Society in 2001 for a paper drawn from this dissertation, and he has just published a paper in Environmental History.
Joanna Kempner, Sociology. Expected completion December 2003
What a headache: Gender and the study of pain.
Kempner is comparing medical and patient narratives in migraines and cluster headaches, exploring how the two conditions are gendered (female and male).
Third reader for:
Noriko Horiguchi, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, 2002 .
The Body Politic in Japanese Women’s Literature from the 1910s to 1940s.
Horiguchi has joined the faculty at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Other students in earlier stages:
Chloe Silverman, who is beginning a dissertation on autism.
Dominique Tobbell, a second-year, who is interested in science and public culture.
Paul Burnett, a second-year who is interested in transgender surgery.
Grants and awards:
Burroughs Wellcome Fund 40th Anniversary Award, 1996.
National Institutes of Health, National Center for Human Genome Research, June 1992 through December 1994
Post-doctoral fellowship, National Science Foundation, 1991.
Schuman Prize, History of Science Society, 1988.
Center for International Studies, Cornell University, research support.
In a ten-year career as a journalist, 1975-1985, I was also awarded writing and reporting awards by the Associated Press, Hearst Foundation, Sigma Delta Chi, United Press International and Women In Communications.
Selected papers presented:
The original clones: Twin science and the rise of behavioral genetics. Swarthmore College Symposium on Science and Society, 25 April 2002.
Two peas in a pod: Twin science and the rise of behavioral genetics. Cornell University, 15 April 2002.
Invited commentator, Wenner Gren Foundation Symposium, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico 1-7 March 2002. Beyond Ethics: Anthropology and the Darkness Controversy. This is an elite international conference at which participants focus on a major question in anthropology. I attended and presented a closing commentary.
Genetic disease in the postwar period. New Frontiers of Biomedical Research Conference at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md., 29 October 2001
The voices of the dead in the Yanomami controversy. New York Academy of Medicine, 11 October 2001.
Representing James Neel: Bioethics, History and the Darkness in El Dorado controversy. Harvard University, 16 February 2001.
James Neel’s work in Venezuela, 1968. Presented at a special symposium at the American Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco, November 2000, in reaction to the controversy over the book, Darkness in El Dorado.
Squashed spiders: Cytogenetics in the 1960s. History Department, University of Texas at Austin. 16 October 2000.
Genomic confections. July 1999 European Molecular Biology Organization, Heidelberg, Germany.
Words and blood. June 1999 Presentation to a Wenner-Gren symposium on Anthropology in the Age of Genetics in Teresopolis, Brazil.
Natural objects and diplomacy. Carnegie Mellon University Cold War Symposium, Pittsburgh, PA. 24 April 1998.
The seductions of natural theology: A commentary on Genes, Genesis and God. Templeton Symposium on Religion and Science, University of Pennsylvania. 19 April 1999.
The repatriation of atomic bomb victim autopsy materials to Japan. University of Minnesota Medical School and Department of History, 5 March 1998.
The repatriation of atomic bomb victim autopsy materials to Japan. Yale University, History of Medicine Program. 24 February 1999.
Recruiting little girls: Images of science in juvenile biographies of Marie Curie 15 February 1998, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Philadelphia, PA.
Natural objects and diplomacy. 14 November 1996, Harvard University.
The cultural powers of the gene. 3 October 1996, Ifgene Conference, Dornach, Switzerland.
The eugenics of personal choice: Narratives of DNA in popular culture. 1 October 1994, Presidential Symposium, Haverford College, Haverford, PA.
ET's DNA: The gene as sacred in popular culture. November 1993, Society for Social Studies of Science Meeting, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.
Other activities:
Speaker, Biological weapons since 1400, at Dealing with the new normal Trustees Council of Penn Women. 5 April 2002 .
Commentator, Joint Atlantic Seminar in the Commentator, Joint Atlantic Seminar in the Physical Sciences, held at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. 29 September 2001.
Organized Cold War Science symposium at Penn, 9-11 November 2000, with support from Penn Research Foundation.
Commentator, Genetic Disease in America Session, History of Science Society Meeting, Kansas City, 24 October 1998.
To speak for nature: Science and gender since the scientific revolution. Camden Community College. 24 February 1998.
Boards, service, etc.
Graduate Chair, 1999-2001, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.
Undergraduate Chair, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, 1998-99 and 2002-
Committee on Conduct, Faculty Senate, University of Pennsylvania, 1997..
U. Penn. Committee on the General Requirement, 2002-2004
Health Professions Advisory Board, University of Pennsylvania, 2002---
Osiris Editorial Board, 2001-2004
Chair, History of Science Society Committee on Publications, 1999 to present (Chair 2002-2003). This is the most demanding HSS committee, meets twice a year and actively oversees the publications of the society including Isis and Osiris.
History of Science Society Council, elected 2001 for term 2002-2005.
Women in Science Prize committee, History of Science Society, 1998-2001.
Isis Editorial Board, 1998-2000.
Recruitment talk to 16-17 year olds, for Bruce Chamberlain. 6 April 1999. University of Pennsylvania.
Chair, Committee on Research and the Profession, History of Science Society, 1995-1996.
Advisory Board, National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics (NIREHG), Georgetown University. This is a project to document the activities of contemporary science, particularly the Human Genome Project and related projects in molecular genetics.
Adviser, Sloan Foundation Projection, Dibner Institute, February 2001.
Women’s Studies Faculty Advisory Board , 1997-Present
Women’s Studies Fellowship Committee, 2002.
Bioethics Center Faculty Advisory Board, 2000-present
Faculty Advisor, Delta Upsilon Fraternity, 1998 to present.
Workshop organizer, Department of History and Sociology of Science, 1994-1997.
Freshman Adviser, 1994-1996, 1998-99, 1999-2000.
Referee for:
National Science Foundation
Isis
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University Press
Princeton University Press
Media appearances:
Interview, August 2002, for Lancet article that appeared 7 September 2002, on censorship in war.
Interview, WHYY, on biological weapons. November 20, 2001.
Many interviews with journalists (print, television, radio) around the world, September-November 2000 in relation to the controversy over geneticist James Neel’s work with the Yanomami in Venezuela in 1968.
Interviewed for French television program on genetic testing, 16 March 1999.
NHK (national television network of Japan), interview for documentary about the dropping of the atomic bomb and the American response to the survivors. Conducted 3 June 1995, aired on Japanese network television August 6, 1995.
Science Fridays National Public Radio, 24 March 1995, live interview about Marie Curie.
