The Current Challenges of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

     I attended a roundtable discussion hosted by Soraya de Chadarevian, professor in the Department of History at UCLA, that focused on the current challenges of the history of science, technology, and medicine. The first speaker was Terrance Keel from UCLA on the “The Demographic Future of the History of Science” and he touched on multiple themes we have discussed in class. He began by acknowledging that colonialism is embedded in the collections held in natural history museums and how the preservation of imprecise science has justified the idea of hierarchies between ‘racial’ groups. He also spoke about the role that universities play in maintaining the legacies of colonialism. He focused on the UC system and how they have recently dropped affirmative action, multiplying the fact that universities are not reflective to the Californian population. Even so, Professor Keel believes that the history of science has the potential to be one of the leading anti-racist disciplines. I found his presentation to be very thought-provoking, but the portion of the roundtable that surprised me the most was the responses by some of the scholars. One stated that “of course we should not be racist, but does science need to be anti-racist.” A chemist mentioned that chemistry is “neutral and should not pick sides.” This displayed to me the reality of people in academia, stuck within their very particular speciality but ignoring the world around them. Professor Keel responded gracefully and explained how science can not possibly be removed from society. Colonial medicine is one of the reasons as to why COVID is disproportionately affecting Black and Brown Americans, the European empirical relationship with the environment is one of the main reasons we are continuously degrading our habitat, etc. This gave me both hope and distrust for the future of the history of science. 

The second presenter was Cathy Gere from UCSD on “The Climate Crisis and Professional Equity in History of Science.” She spoke of “one of academias most kept secrets,” flying. She mentioned that virtual conferences tend to produce one percent of the usual pollution produced by in-person conferences. Aside from the environmental benefits, she references the other benefits of virtual conferences. They have been able to break great barriers of elitism in academia, usually being cheaper and easier to access. Secondly, people who face anxiety or social anxiety can more easily attend these conferences. Lastly, we are able to create better and more collaborative local networks. In national and international conferences, you create professional relationships that are often shallow and do not transcend the meeting. With a hybrid of virtual and local meetings, we can begin to incorporate voices that have been previously ignored. This was a topic that I had not previously heard about, but I loved learning about the local networks.