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- All Subjects: history
- Creators: Maienschein, Jane
Jane Marion Oppenheimer, embryologist and historian of science and medicine, was born on 19 September 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Sylvia Stern and James H. Oppenheimer. After studying zoology at Bryn Mawr College, Oppenheimer received her AB degree in 1932. Oppenheimer received her PhD in embryology at Yale University in 1935 and worked as a research fellow from 1935-1936. While at Yale she was influenced by the work of Ross Granville Harrison and John Spangler Nicholas, the latter of whom was Oppenheimer's PhD advisor. While working with Nicholas, she studied the embryology of killifish (Fundulus hereoclitus) using Nicholas s method for dechorionating the embryo, which made it possible to perform precise experimental manipulations on teleost embryos. Oppenheimer became interested in teleosts after studying the history of biology as a graduate student and published a part of her dissertation, "Historical Introduction to the Study of Teleostean Development," in the History of Science Society journal Osiris. From 1934-1937 she published numerous noteworthy papers discussing Fundulus embryology. Oppenheimer performed fate mapping experiments and developed a staging series for Fundulus embryos. When the United States and the USSR developed Apollo-Soyuz as a joint space venture, Oppenheimer used Fundulus embryos to design an experiment that tested the effects of a zero-gravity environment on embryonic development.
I begin by examining interdisciplinarity with a small scope, the research university. This study uses metadata to create co-authorship networks and examine how a change in university policies to increase interdisciplinarity can be successful. The New American University Initiative (NAUI) at Arizona State University (ASU) set forth the goal of making ASU a world hub for interdisciplinary research. This kind of interdisciplinarity is produced from a deliberate, engineered, reorganization of the individuals within the university and the knowledge they contain. By using a set of social network analysis measurements, I created an algorithm to measure the changes to the co-authorship networks that resulted from increased university support for interdisciplinary research.
The second case study increases the scope of interdisciplinarity from individual universities to a single scientific discourse, the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene began as an idea about the need for a new geological epoch and underwent unsupervised interdisciplinary expansion due to climate change integrating itself into the core of the discourse. In contrast to the NAUI which was specifically engineered to increase interdisciplinarity, the I use keyword co-occurrence networks to measure how the Anthropocene discourse increases its interdisciplinarity through unsupervised expansion after climate change becomes a core keyword within the network and behaves as an anchor point for new disciplines to connect and join the discourse.
The scope of interdisciplinarity increases again with the final case study about the field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a case of engineered interdisciplinary integration between evolutionary biology and medicine. The primary goal of evolutionary medicine is to better understand "why we get sick" through the lens of evolutionary biology. This makes it an excellent candidate to understand large-scale interdisciplinarity. I show through multiple type of networks and metadata analyses that evolutionary medicine successfully integrates the concepts of evolutionary biology into medicine.
By increasing our knowledge of interdisciplinarity at various scales and how it behaves in different initial conditions, we are better able to understand the elusive nature of innovation. Interdisciplinary can mean different things depending on how its defined. I show that a pluralistic approach to defining and measuring interdisciplinarity is not only appropriate but necessary if our goal is to increase interdisciplinarity, the frequency of innovations, and our understanding of the evolution of knowledge.
illnesses and injuries in prehospital settings, and transport patients to definitive care if needed. EMS originated during warfare. The practice of rescuing wounded soldiers started during the Byzantine Empire, and developed along with other medical advances to the present day. Civilian EMS in the United States grew rapidly starting in the 1960s. Following the landmark National Research Council white paper of “Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society”, the nation addressed the key issues and problems faced in delivering emergency medical services. Today, colleges and universities often sponsor EMS organizations to serve populations concentrated in complex campuses. These are collectively known as Collegiate-Based Emergency Medical Services (CBEMS). By September 2018, there were 252 registered CBEMS organizations in the United States. Most are affiliated with the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation (NCEMSF), which advocates, encourages, and provides support for CBEMS organizations. A survey repeating prior work (1996 and 2005) was sent to all NCEMSF registered CBEMS organizations, and 24 responded. The survey included questions on demographics, response capacities, coverage, organization, and logistics information. Locally, Arizona State University Student Emergency Medical Services (SEMS at ASU) began as an all-student-run volunteer organization in 2008. In 2018, SEMS at ASU became ASU EMS, as an official subdivision of the ASU Environmental Health Safety (EH&S) Department. This study summarizes the history of EMS, investigates the current status of CBEMS organizations and traces the history of ASU EMS from a volunteer group to an official department.
Physicists, who gained training in electronics during World War II, led the early push for the development of image tubes in astronomy. Vannevar Bush’s concern for scientific prestige led him to form a committee to investigate image tube technology, and postwar federal funding for the sciences helped the CITC sustain development efforts for a decade. During those development years, the CITC acted as a mediator between the astronomical community and the image tube producers but failed to engage astronomers concerning various development paths, resulting in a user group without real buy-in on the final product.
After a decade of development efforts, the CITC designed an image tube, which Radio Corporation of American manufactured, and, with additional funding from the National Science Foundation, the committee distributed to observatories around the world. While excited about the potential of electronic imaging, few astronomers used the Carnegie-developed device regularly. Although the CITC’s efforts did not result in an overwhelming adoption of image tubes by the astronomical community, examining the design, funding, production, and marketing of the Carnegie image tube shows the many and varied processes through which astronomers have acquired new tools. Astronomers’ use of the Carnegie image tube to acquire useful scientific data illustrates factors that contribute to astronomers’ adoption or non-adoption of those new tools.