[Sci-tech-public] Siegel Prize

[David Mindell]

It is my pleasure to announce that the 2007/8 Benjamin Siegel prize has been
awarded to Sara Wylie for her paper "Mimetic Designs, Desires, and
Disorders: Juvenile." I include a description of the paper, written by Prize
Committee Chair Prof. Michael Fischer, below. 

The committee also awarded an honorable mention to Chihyung Jeon
for his paper "Bringing the Atmosphere Back in the 1920s/ 1930s." Again, a
precis by Professor Fischer is below. 

Please join me in congratulating Sara and Chihyung and for their well-earned
recognition for this excellent work. Also, many thanks to the Siegel Prize
Committee (Ted Postol, Vincent Lepinay, and Mike  Fischer) and to the other
students who submitted such lively papers. 


dm


The author:Sara Wylie.
The title: Mimetic Designs, Desires, and Disorders: Juvenile  
Hormones.


The winning paper is a wonderfully rich and multi-step analysis using  
STS tools to tell a larger story about how humans are caught up in  
ecological connectivities that for a moment the humans (scientists and  
entrepreneurs) thought they could control as perfect bio-mimicking  
pesticides.  Intimately involved are the following: (1) a tropical  
human parasite (a beetle) which is the primary vector of Chagas  
disease by feeding on human blood; (2)  the beetle which is given the  
investigator's arm to feed upon until it can be adapted to lab  
conditions and set to feed on the shaved bellies of rabbits, and its  
five larval stages stabilized (thus transformed from companion species  
to experimental system, or even a reagent-like tool that can be kept  
on the shelf starved until needed and revived); (3) a neurological  
hormone which is purified and is thought to be the key to a biological  
insecticide, which regulates the stages of larval growth, and which  
subsequently is found to operate in a second experimental system, the  
silkworm, the manipulation of which can create chimeras composed of  
different stages of growth; (4) a failure in the lab which leads to  
the discovery that filter paper made from Balsam fir also contains  
this neuroendocrinal agent, and thus that inadvertently humans have  
been helping to disseminate this agent.  Indeed hormone-mimicking  
pesticides have become widespread against mosquitoes, cattle fleas,  
and cotton white fly pests.  These hormone-mimicking pesticides  
moreover were first produced by Syntex Corporation, the Mexico-based  
firm that also pioneered human birth control pills (of Carl Djerassi  
fame).  Along the way attention is paid as well to the visual media  
that made the covers of the Scientific American.  We thus have two  
separate experimental systems (beetle and silkworm) generating a  
series of surprises, implicated in both medical and agricultural  
biotechnologies, pioneered in a start-up lab operating in relatively  
unregulated territory, a story that unfolds across the Western  
hemisphere (Brazil, Mexio, the U.S.), and a series of experiments and  
technologies that make the world itself an experimental system though  
which we discover that, as Michel Serres might say, there are more  
parasitic levels preying upon and mimicking one another than science  
at first could have imagined.  The use of the mimetic faculties of  
nature provide a narrative as well as scientific thread.


Honorable mention: Chihyng Jeon.
For his paper Bringing the Atmosphere Back in the 1920s/ 1930s

This is an very nicely written paper that also tells the history of a  
new epistemic object, the measurable atmosphere, something that comes  
into being through the interaction of  meterology and aeronautics.   
The title likens the effort to earlier discovery expeditions of  
bringing back novel scientific objects.  The complications of  
designing airborne meterographs and of disciplining and having  
specialized pilots proved to be unmanageable for the levels of  
precision required.  These experiments come to a natural end with the  
development of radiosonde technology.