Institutions that support the history of science make strategic choices about how they go about their work. These can include drawing boundaries around their subject matter, as AIP does with the physical sciences, but they also have to decide on matters like whether they will have a preservation mission, and, if so, what sorts of items to preserve. They, moreover, have to decide what audiences they will serve and how best to engage with them.

The Science History Institute in Philadelphia focuses on chemistry and the life sciences, and, like AIP, it serves historical researchers, but, as a museum, it also places a strong emphasis on engaging students and the science-curious public. We posed some questions to Judy Kaplan, public historian of science at SHI, to learn more about their mission, our shared interests, and potential avenues for future collaboration.

Anna Doel: A public historian of science—what does it mean? Which part of your work brings you the most joy? What challenges are involved?

Judy Kaplan: I’m so glad you mentioned joy, because that’s exactly how I feel about this work!

Most of my time in the past few years has been devoted to an online collection of scientific biographies. These stories are written primarily with students in mind. We’ve been trying to think quite intentionally about how they can be used to support historical inquiry, beyond our traditional focus on STEM education. Sometimes people reach out to pitch biographies they would like to write, and it is such a privilege to have all these new ideas directed my way. I will often work closely with authors on the research and have learned so much in the process. In one instance, falling down the rabbit hole meant learning about the ways musicology and chemistry fit together for Thomas Talley —a pioneering African American chemist and educator, who tackled the mysterious bromine hydrides. I want stories like his to open up new questions for people, rather than provide ready-made answers. I often think about biographical subjects as historical tour guides—they will hold a door open, take you to see a cool vista, introduce you to a colleague or friend...

As for the challenges, well, I’m having to learn a lot about chemistry! My background is in the history of the human sciences, which is pretty far afield in terms of subject matter. But I’m trying to hold on to the fact that not having specialist knowledge is actually a strength when communicating with broader audiences. Wait, IR Spec, what’s that again?! The point is that we’re all in this together.

Doel: What are some of your ongoing projects?

Kaplan: In addition to the biographies, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working with folks in the museum. Here, too, we’re trying to put the history back into “history of science.” For instance, we’re trying to send a message to social studies teachers that they can get a lot of mileage out of case studies from the history of science. This is a group charged with getting kids to think about how civic deliberation works, about the importance of relativizing claims to local perspectives, about the limits of archives and specific sources. We historians of science are very good at these things!

With this in mind, I’ve been working with the museum education team to expand our tour program to signal our relevance to folks who have history, rather than STEM, as their primary responsibility. I’m also working on a few upcoming exhibitions, which are similarly trying to center the history of science for audiences who might be new to it: philanthropists and visual artists, for example.

Doel: Professional scientific societies—first and foremost, perhaps, the American Chemical Society—must be at the core of research at the SHI. How do you engage with their history?

Kaplan: Early on, when Arnold Thackray was establishing the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry—what would become the CHF and later the SHI—he recognized that support from the ACS and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers would be advantageous. From the founding, then, there was this tight connection. It helps to explain some of the choices in our museum, which was originally designed for practitioners rather than the general public. Our archives, perhaps unsurprisingly, preserve records of both organizations, so there is history there waiting to be made.

Fast-forward to today. We still have a robust connection with groups like the ACS and AIChE. Both organizations are represented on our Affiliates Council. Our podcast, Distillations, has just collaborated with the ACS podcast, Tiny Matters. I’ve just started a term on the ACS National Historical Landmarks Sub-Committee. We hope to keep deepening our public-facing collaborations with both organizations.

Doel: Where do you see chemistry and physics cross paths in the past?

Kaplan: I mean, I see them overlapping all the time! I think the boundaries are very fluid in terms of the research that was done and with respect to the stories we should be telling.

I was working with a student intern over the summer on updating the biography we have on our website of J. J. Thomson. She is a physics major, for context, and I think she did a wonderful job. I am always seeking to show how science is a communal practice with these biographies, rather than the accomplishment of lone geniuses. So we got to talking about some kind of synthetic storytelling that we might be able to do—looking at the development of atomic models across several discrete biographies. Turns out, we’d have a hard time telling this story without adding additional biographies that are perhaps missing from our collection because they’ve been recruited to the history of physics rather than chemistry!

This has also been coming up a lot lately as we’ve started working in earnest with our new History of Molecular Biology Collection. If you want to tell the story of x-ray crystallography, you’re going to have to cross the boundaries of contemporary disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, industry… they’re all in the mix. I think institutions like SHI and AIP can certainly share resources to paint the bigger picture. I take it this is something your founder, Gerald Holton recognized early on in his association with the Smithsonian—the need to communicate something of the “coherence and unity” of our subjects.

Doel: When do you think will be time to explore our own institutional histories or does a professional group need to hit a centennial mark to qualify for one?

Kaplan: Commemorative events often seem like the bread and butter of public history. We’ve just seen this play out with the nation’s 250th. It primed broad audiences to think historically about aspects of their everyday lives that might otherwise be taken for granted. But in terms of exploring our own institutional histories, that might have less of a public justification and more of a payoff among historians. I can give you an example: I spent some time earlier this year researching the ACS connection to “Science in American Life,” a massive permanent exhibition on the history of science that was at the National Museum of American History from 1994 to 2011. It was humbling to see so much overlap between the scripts for that show and the work we are still doing today at the SHI. This, for me, was a nudge to think about why some of those stories—about food adulteration or cold fusion, for instance—still have purchase today.

But even if I think institutional histories of places like AIP and SHI might be pretty niche, that’s not to say I think we shouldn’t prioritize institutional history. This seems like an especially important time to be documenting those places that steward sources for the history of science as so much of the public infrastructure for memory, analysis, and shared truth is being dismantled.

Doel: Earth sciences can easily win the poster child of interdisciplinarity award, would you agree? Do you see a way for us to collaborate on that history?

Kaplan: I would definitely agree! Have you ever seen an org chart for Earth Systems Science? It has a node for Science and Technology Studies built right in! With so much human instability in the world today, it is easy to take one’s eye off the climate crisis. At the SHI, we’re finding that it’s possible to reinterpret instruments like PH meters and key publications like that of Photo 51 with a view to Earth sciences, broadly defined. The question becomes: how can we know things on a planetary scale? What tools do we need, what tools can we imagine? I’ve been hearing a lot of interest too, anecdotally speaking, from visitors who want to think about what happens to materials in outer space. Life sciences in space might be a fun topic for collaboration.

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Anna Doel
American Institute of Physics
adoel@aip.org

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