[Sci-tech-public] good news

[Rosalind H. Williams]

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.

RHW






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:



Siegel Prize for Best Student Essay on Science and Technology 2005

         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.

         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.

         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.

         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.



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.

Congratulations to Salo and Natasha,
Rosalind Williams




---------------------------------------
Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing
Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
President, Society for the History of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room E51-185
Cambridge, MA 02139

phone: (617) 253-4062
FAX: (617) 258-8118

email: rhwill at mit.edu 
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