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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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Cervical cancer, which many physicians of 2019 consider to be a success in terms of establishing widely used forms of early preventative and diagnostic technologies, experienced a reduction in incidence rates in women by over fifty percent between 1975 and 2016. Cervical cancer does not often present in women with

Cervical cancer, which many physicians of 2019 consider to be a success in terms of establishing widely used forms of early preventative and diagnostic technologies, experienced a reduction in incidence rates in women by over fifty percent between 1975 and 2016. Cervical cancer does not often present in women with symptoms until it has entered a later stage of the disease. Because of this fact, in the early twentieth century, physicians were often only able to diagnose cervical cancer when either the woman reported complaints or there was a visual confirmation of lesions on the cervix. The symptoms women often reported included vague abdominal pain, bleeding after sex, and abnormal amounts of vaginal discharge, all of which are non-specific symptoms, making it even harder for women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer. This thesis answers the following question: How does the history of cervical cancer show that prevention helps reduce rates of cancer-related deaths among women? By studying the history of cervical cancer, people can understand how a cancer that was once one of the top killers of women in the US has declined to become one of the lowest through the establishment of and effective communication of early prevention and diagnostics, both among the general public and within the medical community itself. This thesis is organized based on key episodes which were pertinent to the history of cervical cancer, primarily within the United States and Europe. The episodes are organized in context of the shifts in thought regarding cervical cancer and include topics such as vaccine technologies like the Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines, social awareness movements that educated women on the importance of early detection, and analyses of the early preventative strategies and attempts at treating cervical cancer. After analyzing eleven key episodes, the thesis determined that, through the narrative of early attempts to treat cervical cancer, shifting the societal thought on cancer, evolving the importance of early detection, and, finally, obtaining a means of prevention, the history of cervical cancer does demonstrate that the development of preventative strategies has resulted in reducing cancer-related deaths among women. Understanding what it took for physicians to evolve from simply detecting cervical cancer to being able to prevent it entirely matters because it can change the way we think about managing other forms of cancer.
ContributorsDarby, Alexis Renee (Co-author) / Darby, Alexis (Co-author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Abboud, Carolina (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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Background: Breast cancer affects about 12% of women in the US. Arguably, it is one of the most advertised cancers. Mammography became a popular tool of breast cancer screening in the 1970s, and patient-geared guidelines came from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the US Preventative Task Force (USPSTF). This

Background: Breast cancer affects about 12% of women in the US. Arguably, it is one of the most advertised cancers. Mammography became a popular tool of breast cancer screening in the 1970s, and patient-geared guidelines came from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the US Preventative Task Force (USPSTF). This research focuses on ACS guidelines, as they were the earliest as well as the most changed guidelines. Mammography guidelines changed over time due to multiple factors. This research has tracked possible causes of those changes. Methods: Research began with an extensive literature search of clinical trials, the New York Times and the Washington Post archives, systematic reviews, ACS and USPSTF archives. Results and Discussion: ACS was the first organization to provide easily accessible patient geared mammography guidelines. The guidelines have changed six times since 1976. The first came after a large clinical trial, which screened 60,000 women and showed that mammography use decreased breast cancer deaths by 30%. During the 1980s and 1990s, anti-cancer lobbyists and health insurance companies were in conflict, as the former pushed for more frequent mammography screening while the latter pushed for less. The USPSTF published their first guidelines in 2002, separated women into different age groups, and suggested screening intervals, but also included a rating of evidence quality (A-I) that supported the screening recommendation. They changed in 2009 and 2016. The frequent changes had different, not all purely scientific and evidence-based causes. The political influence of anti-cancer activists, as well as media coverage, increased public interest in mammography, which in turn influenced changes in mammography guidelines, sometimes against scientific evidence. Most changes moved towards more frequent screening for women older than 40, and less frequently for younger women, probably because multiple clinical trials had found that mammography was not useful for younger women with no history of breast cancer. There was also growing evidence of overdiagnosis and overtreatment risks from frequent mammography use. Conclusions: The patient-geared mammography guidelines have changed due to multiple and not always well-grounded factors, such as public interpretations of mammography usefulness, social attention to mammography, and influence of different stakeholders at the time. Some changes have resulted solely from political and social factors, disregarding building scientific and clinical evidence against frequent mammography use.
ContributorsZiganshina, Dina Ayratovna (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Abboud, Alexis (Committee member) / Abboud, Carolina (Committee member) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Description
Systems biology studies complex biological systems. It is an interdisciplinary field, with biologists working with non-biologists such as computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to address research problems applying systems’ perspectives. How these different researchers and their disciplines differently contributed to the advancement of this field over time is a

Systems biology studies complex biological systems. It is an interdisciplinary field, with biologists working with non-biologists such as computer scientists, engineers, chemists, and mathematicians to address research problems applying systems’ perspectives. How these different researchers and their disciplines differently contributed to the advancement of this field over time is a question worth examining. Did systems biology become a systems-oriented science or a biology-oriented science from 1992 to 2013?

This project utilized computational tools to analyze large data sets and interpreted the results from historical and philosophical perspectives. Tools deployed were derived from scientometrics, corpus linguistics, text-based analysis, network analysis, and GIS analysis to analyze more than 9000 articles (metadata and text) on systems biology. The application of these tools to a HPS project represents a novel approach.

The dissertation shows that systems biology has transitioned from a more mathematical, computational, and engineering-oriented discipline focusing on modeling to a more biology-oriented discipline that uses modeling as a means to address real biological problems. Also, the results show that bioengineering and medical research has increased within systems biology. This is reflected in the increase of the centrality of biology-related concepts such as cancer, over time. The dissertation also compares the development of systems biology in China with some other parts of the world, and reveals regional differences, such as a unique trajectory of systems biology in China related to a focus on traditional Chinese medicine.

This dissertation adds to the historiography of modern biology where few studies have focused on systems biology compared with the history of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.
ContributorsZou, Yawen (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Newfeld, Stuart (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Computational tools in the digital humanities often either work on the macro-scale, enabling researchers to analyze huge amounts of data, or on the micro-scale, supporting scholars in the interpretation and analysis of individual documents. The proposed research system that was developed in the context of this dissertation ("Quadriga System") works

Computational tools in the digital humanities often either work on the macro-scale, enabling researchers to analyze huge amounts of data, or on the micro-scale, supporting scholars in the interpretation and analysis of individual documents. The proposed research system that was developed in the context of this dissertation ("Quadriga System") works to bridge these two extremes by offering tools to support close reading and interpretation of texts, while at the same time providing a means for collaboration and data collection that could lead to analyses based on big datasets. In the field of history of science, researchers usually use unstructured data such as texts or images. To computationally analyze such data, it first has to be transformed into a machine-understandable format. The Quadriga System is based on the idea to represent texts as graphs of contextualized triples (or quadruples). Those graphs (or networks) can then be mathematically analyzed and visualized. This dissertation describes two projects that use the Quadriga System for the analysis and exploration of texts and the creation of social networks. Furthermore, a model for digital humanities education is proposed that brings together students from the humanities and computer science in order to develop user-oriented, innovative tools, methods, and infrastructures.
ContributorsDamerow, Julia (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Hooper, Wallace (Committee member) / Renn, Jürgen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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How fast is evolution? In this dissertation I document a profound change that occurred around the middle of the 20th century in the way that ecologists conceptualized the temporal and spatial scales of adaptive evolution, through the lens of British plant ecologist Anthony David Bradshaw (1926–2008). In the early 1960s,

How fast is evolution? In this dissertation I document a profound change that occurred around the middle of the 20th century in the way that ecologists conceptualized the temporal and spatial scales of adaptive evolution, through the lens of British plant ecologist Anthony David Bradshaw (1926–2008). In the early 1960s, one prominent ecologist distinguished what he called “ecological time”—around ten generations—from “evolutionary time”— around half of a million years. For most ecologists working in the first half of the 20th century, evolution by natural selection was indeed a slow and plodding process, tangible in its products but not in its processes, and inconsequential for explaining most ecological phenomena. During the 1960s, however, many ecologists began to see evolution as potentially rapid and observable. Natural selection moved from the distant past—a remote explanans for both extant biological diversity and paleontological phenomena—to a measurable, quantifiable mechanism molding populations in real time.

The idea that adaptive evolution could be rapid and highly localized was a significant enabling condition for the emergence of ecological genetics in the second half of the 20th century. Most of what historians know about that conceptual shift and the rise of ecological genetics centers on the work of Oxford zoologist E. B. Ford and his students on polymorphism in Lepidotera, especially industrial melanism in Biston betularia. I argue that ecological genetics in Britain was not the brainchild of an infamous patriarch (Ford), but rather the outgrowth of a long tradition of pastureland research at plant breeding stations in Scotland and Wales, part of a discipline known as “genecology” or “experimental taxonomy.” Bradshaw’s investigative activities between 1948 and 1968 were an outgrowth of the specific brand of plant genecology practiced at the Welsh and Scottish Plant Breeding stations. Bradshaw generated evidence that plant populations with negligible reproductive isolation—separated by just a few meters—could diverge and adapt to contrasting environmental conditions in just a few generations. In Bradshaw’s research one can observe the crystallization of a new concept of rapid adaptive evolution, and the methodological and conceptual transformation of genecology into ecological genetics.
ContributorsPeirson, Bruce Richard Erick (Author) / Laubichler, Manfred D (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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In 1997, developmental biologist Michael Richardson compared his research team's embryo photographs to Ernst Haeckel's 1874 embryo drawings and called Haeckel's work noncredible.Science soon published <“>Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,<”> and Richardson's comments further reinvigorated criticism of Haeckel by others with articles in The American Biology Teacher, <“>Haeckel's Embryos and Evolution:

In 1997, developmental biologist Michael Richardson compared his research team's embryo photographs to Ernst Haeckel's 1874 embryo drawings and called Haeckel's work noncredible.Science soon published <“>Haeckel's Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,<”> and Richardson's comments further reinvigorated criticism of Haeckel by others with articles in The American Biology Teacher, <“>Haeckel's Embryos and Evolution: Setting the Record Straight <”> and the New York Times, <“>Biology Text Illustrations more Fiction than Fact.<”> Meanwhile, others emphatically stated that the goal of comparative embryology was not to resurrect Haeckel's work. At the center of the controversy was Haeckel's no-longer-accepted idea of recapitulation. Haeckel believed that the development of an embryo revealed the adult stages of the organism's ancestors. Haeckel represented this idea with drawings of vertebrate embryos at similar developmental stages. This is Haeckel's embryo grid, the most common of all illustrations in biology textbooks. Yet, Haeckel's embryo grids are much more complex than any textbook explanation. I examined 240 high school biology textbooks, from 1907 to 2010, for embryo grids. I coded and categorized the grids according to accompanying discussion of (a) embryonic similarities (b) recapitulation, (c) common ancestors, and (d) evolution. The textbooks show changing narratives. Embryo grids gained prominence in the 1940s, and the trend continued until criticisms of Haeckel reemerged in the late 1990s, resulting in (a) grids with fewer organisms and developmental stages or (b) no grid at all. Discussion about embryos and evolution dropped significantly.
ContributorsWellner, Karen L (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Ellison, Karin D. (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Robert, Jason S. (Committee member) / Laubichler, Manfred D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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This dissertation is an historical analysis of the science of human origins, paleoanthropology, examining the intersection of science and culture around fossil human ancestors (hominins) over the last century and a half. Focusing on fossils as scientific objects, this work examines three controversial fossils from the science’s history asking, how

This dissertation is an historical analysis of the science of human origins, paleoanthropology, examining the intersection of science and culture around fossil human ancestors (hominins) over the last century and a half. Focusing on fossils as scientific objects, this work examines three controversial fossils from the science’s history asking, how do fossils formulate, challenge, and reconfigure notions of what it means to be human? The introduction reviews the historiography of paleoanthropology and the gaps that exist in the literature. Chapter two examines the first case study, the type specimen of Homo neanderthalensis, known as the Feldhofer Neanderthal, providing a biography of the object from its discovery in Germany in 1856 until its species designation in 1864. Chapter three briefly links the Neanderthal’s story in time and space to the next fossil’s story. Chapter four picks up the story of paleoanthropology in 1924 in South Africa, with the discovery and initial analysis of a specimen nicknamed the Taungs Baby, which was labeled a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus. Chapter five is another brief chapter connecting the Taungs Baby story in time and space to the final specimen examined in this work at the end of the century. Chapter six examines the final case study, a specimen discovered in 2003 in Indonesia, designated a new species named Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the Hobbit. Through comparing contrasting, and connecting the stories of these three specimens, three major conclusions emerge about the field. First, the fossils themselves play an important role in knowledge production about the hominin past. Second, scientific practice shaped both interpretations of fossils and larger questions of what it means to be human. Third, the scientific practice is itself shaped by local culture, which continually interacts with attempts to establish a global perspective about the human past. The perspective gleaned through the eyes of these three fossils therefore reveals the way shifting, rather than eternally true, claims are embedded in culture and intertwined with the perspectives of the humans conducting the science.
ContributorsMadison, Paige (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis advisor) / Kimbel, William (Committee member) / Creath, Richard (Committee member) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Laubichler, Mandred (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020