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Correction: The winner of the Siegel Prize is named Salo Vinocur
Coslovsky or, more briefly, Salo Coslovsky (as he is known among his DUSP
colleagues). I apologize for Salo for this error. I have corrected the
text of the committee letter below.<br><br>
RHW<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
I am delighted to announce that Salo Vinocur Coslovsky of the Department
of Urban Studies and Planning has been named the winner of this year's
Siegel Prize, an award of $2500 given annually for the best essay on
issues relating to science, technology, and society written by an MIT
student in the previous year. Natasha Myers, of the HASTS doctoral
program, was awarded an honorable mention. The Siegel Prize is
administered by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, so I
have the pleasure of announcing these awards as Director of the STS
Program on behalf of this year's prize committee: Marcia Bartusiak
(Writing), Christopher Capozzola (History) and, serving as chair, Hugh
Gusterson (Anthropology and STS). Here is the citation submitted by
the committee:<br><br>
<br><br>
<u>Siegel Prize for Best Student Essay on Science and Technology
2005<br><br>
</u><x-tab> </x-tab>This
year we received the second highest number of submissions ever for the
Siegel Prize: 27 in all. The essays read by the committee covered a
wide range of topics from the free software movement in Peru to birth
narratives from the West Bank and the economic disincentives for
pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics. <br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>The
selection committee consisted of three members: Marcia Bartusiak
(Writing), Christopher Capozzola (History) and, serving as chair, Hugh
Gusterson (Anthropology and STS). The committee narrowed its
choices down to eight finalists, then chose a winner and a second essay
for an honorable mention.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>The
winning paper is by Salo Vinocur Coslovsky of the Department of Urban
Studies and Planning, and it is titled “The Rise and Decline of the
Amazonian Rubber Shoe Industry: A tale of technology, international
trade, and industrialization in the early nineteenth century.” The
paper’s title belies a fascinating and counterintuitive story about
Brazilian rubber tappers in the early nineteenth century. These
rubber tappers, driven deep into the rainforest by domestic repression,
had developed a technique for making rubber goods, especially shoes, far
superior to the state of the art anywhere else in the world until Charles
Goodyear’s invention of vulcanization in mid-century. Thanks to a
network of connections with New England traders, the rubber tappers could
sell their shoes in America until Thomas Jefferson’s policies decimated
the New England shipping industry. Drawing inventively on disparate
sources in the archives of two continents, Coslovsky weaves together
Brazilian politics, American trade policy, and the technical details of
the rubber industry to retrieve this compelling lost story.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>An
honorable mention also goes to Natasha Myers of the doctoral Program in
History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society for her paper
“Animating Mechanisms, Enlivening Models: ‘Intra-Animacy’ in the Lively
Arts of Protein Modeling.” A rich ethnographic account of
contemporary crystallographers, the paper uses an evocation of the
embodied relationship of researchers with protein models to explore the
limitations of language and codes in the description of
proteins.<br><br>
<br><br>
I want to thank all 27 students who took the time and care to submit
papers for this competition. I also want to thank the committee for its
time and care in evaluating the papers. The quality and quantity of the
submissions indicate that there is widespread interest at MIT in sts
(science, technology, and society as a general field) well beyond the
official "capital letters" STS Program. This is good news for
us all.<br><br>
Congratulations to Salo and Natasha,<br>
Rosalind Williams<br><br>
<br><br>
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<br>
<div>---------------------------------------</div>
<div>Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing</div>
<div>Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society</div>
<div>President, Society for the History of Technology</div>
<br>
<div>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</div>
<div>77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E51-185</div>
<div>Cambridge, MA 02139</div>
<br>
<div>phone: (617) 253-4062</div>
<div>FAX: (617) 258-8118</div>
<div> </div>
email: rhwill@mit.edu
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