Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna

by Cheryl A. Logan

Overview

In the early twentieth century, arguments between “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones and explores the dynamic of failure in science through both scientific and social lenses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813559704
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2013
Series:	Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

CHERYL A. LOGAN is professor emerita of psychology and history at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Three Failed Scientists

Part I: Constructing Heredity

2. Rehabilitating Sexuality: Degeneration versus Development
3. Paul Kammerer and Flexible Heredity
4. Sex, Race, and Heat Rats: Somatic Induction and the Double Gonad
5. "Productive" Eugenics: Harnessing the Energies of Development

Part II: Reform Eugenics

6. Heredity, Glands, and Human Constitutions
7. Tandler's Eugenic Enigmas
8. Working Jewish in Vienna
9. Asymmetry, Failure, and Flexible Heredity
Epilogue

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Cheryl Logan’s wonderfully composed and very readable book is recommended for everyone interested in the political history of science, the genealogy of epigenetics, and the early work in human enhancement—one of the main objectives behind the experiments at the Vivarium."

Isis

"An insightful and sympathetic story of three high-minded, but ill-fated researchers at the intersection of science, medicine, and social reform, in the cultural laboratory that was post-imperial Vienna."

Indiana University - Sander Gliboff

"This terrifically inventive and important story is one of the first to examine physiological attempts to understand heredity in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a beautiful rendering of the intersection of science and politics."

University of Florida - Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

"An insightful and sympathetic story of three high-minded, but ill-fated researchers at the intersection of science, medicine, and social reform, in the cultural laboratory that was post-imperial Vienna."

From the Publisher

"An insightful and sympathetic story of three high-minded, but ill-fated researchers at the intersection of science, medicine, and social reform, in the cultural laboratory that was post-imperial Vienna."

— Sander Gliboff

Indiana University

"This terrifically inventive and important story is one of the first to examine physiological attempts to understand heredity in the first half of the twentieth century, offering a beautiful rendering of the intersection of science and politics."
— Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis

University of Florida