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Once perceived as an unimportant occurrence in living organisms, cell degeneration was reconfigured as an important biological phenomenon in development, aging, health, and diseases in the twentieth century. This dissertation tells a twentieth-century history of scientific investigations on cell degeneration, including cell death and aging. By describing four central developments

Once perceived as an unimportant occurrence in living organisms, cell degeneration was reconfigured as an important biological phenomenon in development, aging, health, and diseases in the twentieth century. This dissertation tells a twentieth-century history of scientific investigations on cell degeneration, including cell death and aging. By describing four central developments in cell degeneration research with the four major chapters, I trace the emergence of the degenerating cell as a scientific object, describe the generations of a variety of concepts, interpretations and usages associated with cell death and aging, and analyze the transforming influences of the rising cell degeneration research. Particularly, the four chapters show how the changing scientific practices about cellular life in embryology, cell culture, aging research, and molecular biology of Caenorhabditis elegans shaped the interpretations about cell degeneration in the twentieth-century as life-shaping, limit-setting, complex, yet regulated. These events created and consolidated important concepts in life sciences such as programmed cell death, the Hayflick limit, apoptosis, and death genes. These cases also transformed the material and epistemic practices about the end of cellular life subsequently and led to the formations of new research communities. The four cases together show the ways cell degeneration became a shared subject between molecular cell biology, developmental biology, gerontology, oncology, and pathology of degenerative diseases. These practices and perspectives created a special kind of interconnectivity between different fields and led to a level of interdisciplinarity within cell degeneration research by the early 1990s.
ContributorsJiang, Lijing (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / White, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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The study of wasp societies (family Vespidae) has played a central role in advancing our knowledge of why social life evolves and how it functions. This dissertation asks: How have scientists generated and evaluated new concepts and theories about social life and its evolution by investigating wasp societies? It addresses

The study of wasp societies (family Vespidae) has played a central role in advancing our knowledge of why social life evolves and how it functions. This dissertation asks: How have scientists generated and evaluated new concepts and theories about social life and its evolution by investigating wasp societies? It addresses this question both from a narrative/historical and from a reflective/epistemological perspective. The historical narratives reconstruct the investigative pathways of the Italian entomologist Leo Pardi (1915-1990) and the British evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton (1936-2000). The works of these two scientists represent respectively the beginning of our current understanding of immediate and evolutionary causes of social life. Chapter 1 shows how Pardi, in the 1940s, generated a conceptual framework to explain how wasp colonies function in terms of social and reproductive dominance. Chapter 2 shows how Hamilton, in the 1960s, attempted to evaluate his own theory of inclusive fitness by investigating social wasps. The epistemological reflections revolve around the idea of investigative framework for theory evaluation. Chapter 3 draws on the analysis of important studies on social wasps from the 1960s and 1970s and provides an account of theory evaluation in the form of an investigative framework. The framework shows how inferences from empirical data (bottom-up) and inferences from the theory (top-down) inform one another in the generation of hypotheses, predictions and statements about phenomena of social evolution. It provides an alternative to existing philosophical accounts of scientific inquiry and theory evaluation, which keep a strong, hierarchical distinction between inferences from the theory and inferences from the data. The historical narratives in this dissertation show that important scientists have advanced our knowledge of complex biological phenomena by constantly interweaving empirical, conceptual, and theoretical work. The epistemological reflections argue that we need holistic frameworks that account for how multiple scientific practices synergistically contribute to advance our knowledge of complex phenomena. Both narratives and reflections aim to inspire and inform future work in social evolution capitalizing on lessons learnt from the past.
ContributorsCaniglia, Guido (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Mitchell, Sandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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How is knowledge created at the intersections between basic science, biotechnology, and industry? Gene drives are an interesting example, as they combine a long-standing interest with a recent technological breakthrough and a new set of commercial applications. Gene drives are genes engineered such that they are preferentially inherited at a

How is knowledge created at the intersections between basic science, biotechnology, and industry? Gene drives are an interesting example, as they combine a long-standing interest with a recent technological breakthrough and a new set of commercial applications. Gene drives are genes engineered such that they are preferentially inherited at a frequency greater than the typical Mendelian fifty percent ratio. During the historical and conceptual evolution of gene drives beginning in the 1960s, there have been many innovations and publications. Along with that, gene drive science developed considerable public attention, explosion of new scientists, and variation in the way the topic is discussed. It is now time to look at this new organization of science using a systematic approach to characterize the system that has enabled knowledge to grow in this scientific field. This project breaks new ground in how knowledge advances in genetic engineering science, and how scientists understand what a “gene drive” is through analysis of language, communities, and other social factors. In effect, this research will advance multiple fields and enable a deeper understanding of knowledge and complexity. This project documents patterns of publication, collaborative relationships, linguistic variation, innovation, and knowledge expansion. The results of computational analysis provide an in-depth and complete characterization of the structure, dynamics, and evolution of scientific knowledge found in the gene drive technology. Further, time series analysis of the multiple layers of discourse enabled a diachronic connective mapping of collaborative relationships and tracked linguistic variation and change, highlighting where ambiguous language may appear, improving and creating more cohesive scientific language. Overall, depicting the structure, dynamics, and evolution of scientific knowledge during a novel eruption of scientific complexity can shed light on the factors that can lead to: (1) improved scientific communication, (2) reduction of scientific progress, (3) new knowledge, and (4) novel collaborative relationships. Therefore, characterizing the current technological, methodological, and social contexts that can influence scientific knowledge.
ContributorsOToole, Cody Lane (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Collins, James P (Committee member) / Simeone, Michael (Committee member) / Evans, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Scientific researchers have studied microorganisms since the emergence of the single lens microscope in the 17th century. Since then, researchers designed and published many thousands of images to record and share their observations, including hand-drawn diagrams, photomicrographs, and photographs. Images shaped how researchers conceived of microorganisms, their concepts of microorganisms

Scientific researchers have studied microorganisms since the emergence of the single lens microscope in the 17th century. Since then, researchers designed and published many thousands of images to record and share their observations, including hand-drawn diagrams, photomicrographs, and photographs. Images shaped how researchers conceived of microorganisms, their concepts of microorganisms shaped their images, and their images and concepts were shaped by the contexts in which they were working. Over time, the interplay of images and concepts in various research contexts participated in the development of new concepts related to microorganisms, like the “biofilm” concept, or the idea that bacteria exist in nature as complex aggregates attached to surfaces via extracellular polymeric matrices. Many histories of microbiology locate the origin of the biofilm concept in the 1970s, but that date obscures the rich history of research about attached microbial aggregates that occurred throughout the history of microbiology. I discovered how the interplay of images and concepts related to bacteria participated in the development of the biofilm concept by documenting when and why researchers used different visual features to represent changing concepts related to microorganisms. I specifically examined how and why scientists represented evolving concepts related to bacteria during the 17th century (Chapter 1), from the late 17th century to the early 20th century (Chapter 2), and during the first seventy-four years of the 20th century (Chapter 3). I discovered the biofilm concept developed in at least three unique research contexts during the 20th century, and how images reflected and shaped the concept’s development in each case. The narrative and collection of images generated from this work serve as a visual history of the development of scientists’ ideas about the nature of bacteria over 300 years.
ContributorsGuerrero, Anna Clemencia (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Laubichler, Manfred (Committee member) / Sterner, Beckett (Committee member) / Matlin, Karl (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023