Title: AIDS: the burdens of history 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: The AIDS epidemic has posed more urgent historical questions than any other disease of modern times. How have societies responded to epidemics in the past? Why did the disease emerge when and where it did? How has it spread among members of particular groups? And how will the past affect the future - in particular, what does the history of medical science and public health tell us about our ability to control the epidemic and eventually to cure the disease?Historical methods of inquiry change, and people who use these methods often disagree on theory and practice. Indeed, the contributors to this volume hold a variety of opinions on controversial historiographic issues. But they share three important principles: cautious adherence to the "social constructionist" view of past and present; profound skepticism about historicism's idea of progress; and wariness about "presentism," the distortion of the past by seeing it only from the point of view of the present.Each of the twelve essays addresses an aspect of the burdens of history during the AIDS epidemic. By "burdens" is meant the inescapable significance of events in the past for the present. All of these events are related in some way to the current epidemic and can help clarify the complex social and cultural responses to the crisis of AIDS.This collection illuminates present concerns directly and forcefully without sacrificing attention to historical detail and to the differences between past and present situations. It reminds us that many of the issues now being debated - quarantine, exclusion, public needs and private rights - have their parallels in the past. This will be an important book for social historians and general readers as well as for historians of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: Analogies between analogies: the mathematical reports of S.M. Ulam and his Los Alamos collaborators 
Author: Ulam, Stanislaw M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | Mathematics | Physical Sciences
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Title: Beyond second opinions: making choices about fertility treatment 
Author: Turiel, Judith Steinberg 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Beyond Second Opinions is both an exposé of the risks, errors, and distortions surrounding fertility medicine and an authoritative guide for people seeking treatment. Accessible, comprehensive, and extremely well-informed, this book takes the reader beyond hype to the hard data on diagnoses and treatments. Judith Steinberg Turiel, a consumer health activist and herself a veteran of fertility treatments, uses the most up-to-date medical literature to shed new light on difficult decisions patients face today and on reproductive questions society must begin to address now. Those who are seeking a more balanced perspective to help them make better, more informed decisions will find a wealth of information about current reproductive interventions - from simple fertility pills to dazzling experimental options - as well as a discussion of the non-medical forces (economic and political) that shape an individual's treatment choices and reproductive outcomes. Despite quantities of information showered upon patients, they remain woefully misinformed; some fertility treatments may actually reduce chances for a successful pregnancy and threaten a patient's health. Turiel looks beyond surface claims to the real information, often uncovering counterintuitive findings and sometimes scandalous revelations. She exposes a realm of unregulated expansion, unscientific experimentation, and recent scandal over stolen embryos. Weaving together first-hand accounts, compelling stories, a range of scientific information, and lively anecdotes, Turiel addresses the persistent gulfs that separate medical professionals and health care consumers. In the process she arms laypeople with what they might not learn about infertility practices from doctors, patient education brochures, and the newspaper.   [brief]
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Title: The Bug Creek problem and the Cretaceous-Tertiary transition at McGuire Creek, Montana 
Author: Lofgren, Donald L 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Science | Paleontology
Publisher's Description: Bug Creek assemblages from Montana, transitional in composition between typical Cretaceous and Paleocene vertebrate faunas, are critical to K-T extinction debates because they have been used to support both gradual and catastrophic K-T extinction scenarios. Geological and palynological data from McGuire Creek indicate that Bug Creek assemblages are Paleocene and restricted to channel fills entrenched into older sediments, suggesting that the Cretaceous component of the assemblage was reworked. Thus, the author concludes, "Paleocene dinosaurs" are an illusion and the K-T survival rate of mammals is low because the presence of Cretaceous mammals in Bug Creek assemblages is also the result of reworking.   [brief]
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Title: Burying uncertainty: risk and the case against geological disposal of nuclear waste 
Author: Shrader-Frechette, K. S. (Kristin Sharon)
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | Ecology | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Shrader-Frechette looks at current U.S. government policy regarding the nation's high-level radioactive waste both scientifically and ethically.What should be done with our nation's high-level radioactive waste, which will remain hazardous for thousands of years? This is one of the most pressing problems faced by the nuclear power industry, and current U.S. government policy is to bury "radwastes" in specially designed deep repositories.K. S. Shrader-Frechette argues that this policy is profoundly misguided on both scientific and ethical grounds. Scientifically - because we cannot trust the precision of 10,000-year predictions that promise containment of the waste. Ethically - because geological disposal ignores the rights of present and future generations to equal treatment, due process, and free informed consent.Shrader-Frechette focuses her argument on the world's first proposed high-level radioactive waste facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Analyzing a mass of technical literature, she demonstrates the weaknesses in the professional risk-assessors' arguments that claim the site is sufficiently safe for such a plan. We should postpone the question of geological disposal for at least a century and use monitored, retrievable, above-ground storage of the waste until then. Her message regarding radwaste is clear: what you can't see can hurt you.   [brief]
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Title: Darwin in Russian thought 
Author: Vucinich, Alexander 1914-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Darwin in Russian Thought represents the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Darwin's influence on Russian thought from the early 1860s to the October Revolution. While concentrating on the role of Darwin's theory in the development of Russian science and philosophy, Vucinich also explores the dominant ideological and sociological interpretations of evolutionary thought, providing a deft analysis of the views held by the leaders of Russian nihilism, populism, anarchism, and marxism.Darwin's thinking profoundly influenced intellectual discourse in Russia: it effected the emergence of "theoretical theology," a modern effort to provide theological responses to the revolutionary changes in the natural sciences, contributed to the evolution of a modern scientific community, and spurred the rapidly growing concern with the epistemological and ethical foundations of science in general. Scholarly battles were waged among the critics of Darwin - Karl von Baer, Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii and Sergei Ivanovich Korzhinskii, and others - and the defenders of the faith.Vucinich is able to delineate the distinctive national characteristics of Russian Darwinism: the strong influence of Lamarckian thought, the delayed recognition of the contributions of genetics, the near-universal rejection of Social Darwinism, the early anticipation of the triumph of "evolutionary synthesis," and the heavy concentration on the social and moral aspects of evolutionary thought. Vividly argued and rich in detail, Darwin in Russian Thought provides a unique glimpse into the Russian psyche.   [brief]
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Title: Elephant seals: population ecology, behavior, and physiology 
Author: Le Boeuf, Burney J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Science | Natural History | Biology | Ecology
Publisher's Description: The largest of all seals, elephant seals rank among the most impressive of marine mammals. They are renowned for their spectacular recovery from near-extinction at the end of the nineteenth century when seal hunters nearly eliminated the entire northern species. No other vertebrate has come so close to extinction and made such a complete recovery. The physiological extremes that elephant seals can tolerate are also remarkable: females fast for a month while lactating, and the largest breeding males fast for over one hundred days during the breeding seasons, at which times both sexes lose forty percent of their body weight. Elephant seals dive constantly during their long foraging migrations, spending more time under water than most whales and diving deeper and longer than any other marine mammal.This first book-length discussion of elephant seals brings together worldwide expertise from scientists who describe and debate recent research, including the history and status of various populations, their life-history tactics, and other findings obtained with the help of modern microcomputer diving instruments attached to free-ranging seals. Essential for all marine mammalogists for its information and its methodological innovations, Elephant Seals will also illuminate current debates about species extinctions and possible means of preventing them.   [brief]
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Title: The forgiving air: understanding environmental change 
Author: Somerville, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Ecology | Earth Sciences | Science
Publisher's Description: The Forgiving Air is an authoritative, up-to-date handbook on global change. Written by a scientist for nonscientists, this primer humanizes the great environmental issues of our time - the hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and air pollution - and explains everything in accessible prose. A new preface takes into account developments in environmental policy that have occurred since publication. Highlighting the interrelatedness of human activity and global change, Richard Somerville stresses the importance of an educated public in a world where the role of science is increasingly critical.   [brief]
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Title: Frontiers of supercomputing II: a national reassessment 
Author: Ames, Karyn R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Science | Computer Science | Physics
Publisher's Description: This uniquely comprehensive book brings together the vast amount of technical, economic, and political information and the analyses of supercomputing that have hitherto been buried in the frequently inaccessible "gray literature." Seventy-nine distinguished participants in the second Frontiers of Su . . . [more]
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Title: Hypochondria: woeful imaginatings 
Author: Baur, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: Writing with grace, humor, and an expert's eye for revealing detail, Susan Baur illuminates the processes by which hypochondriacs come to adopt and maintain illness as a way of life.
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Title: The key to Newton's dynamics: the Kepler problem and the Principia: containing an English translation of sections 1, 2, and 3 of book one from the first (1687) edition of Newton's Mathematical principles of natural philosophy 
Author: Brackenridge, J. Bruce 1927-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Science | Physics | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: While much has been written on the ramifications of Newton's dynamics, until now the details of Newton's solution were available only to the physics expert. The Key to Newton's Dynamics clearly explains the surprisingly simple analytical structure that underlies the determination of the force necessary to maintain ideal planetary motion. J. Bruce Brackenridge sets the problem in historical and conceptual perspective, showing the physicist's debt to the works of both Descartes and Galileo. He tracks Newton's work on the Kepler problem from its early stages at Cambridge before 1669, through the revival of his interest ten years later, to its fruition in the first three sections of the first edition of the Principia .   [brief]
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Title: Lawrence and his laboratory: a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory 
Author: Heilbron, J. L
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: The Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, was the birthplace of particle accelerators, radioisotopes, and modern big science. This first volume of its history is a saga of physics and finance in the Great Depression, when a new kind of science was born.Here we learn how Ernest Lawrence used local and national technological, economic, and manpower resources to build the cyclotron, which enabled scientists to produce high-voltage particles without high voltages. The cyclotron brought Lawrence forcibly and permanently to the attention of leaders of international physics in Brussels at the Solvay Congress of 1933. Ever since, the Rad Lab has played a prominent part on the world stage.The book tells of the birth of nuclear chemistry and nuclear medicine in the Laboratory, the discoveries of new isotopes and the transuranic elements, the construction of the ultimate cyclotron, Lawrence's Nobel Prize, and the energy, enthusiasm, and enterprise of Laboratory staff. Two more volumes are planned to carry the story through the Second World War, the establishment of the system of national laboratories, and the loss of Berkeley's dominance of high-energy physics.   [brief]
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Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia 
Author: Schwartz, William B 1922-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.   [brief]
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Title: A mind always in motion: the autobiography of Emilio Segrè 
Author: Segrè, Emilio
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science | Physics | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: The renowned physicist Emilio Segrè (1905-1989) left his memoirs to be published posthumously because, he said, "I tell the truth the way it was and not the way many of my colleagues wish it had been." This compelling autobiography offers a personal account of his fascinating life as well as candid portraits of some of this century's most important scientists, such as Enrico Fermi, E. O. Lawrence, and Robert Oppenheimer.Born in Italy to a well-to-do Jewish family, Segrè showed early signs of scientific genius - at age seven he began a notebook of physics experiments. He became Fermi's first graduate student in 1928 and contributed to the discovery of slow neutrons, and later was appointed director of the physics laboratory at the University of Palermo. While visiting the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley in 1938, he learned that he had been dismissed from his Palermo post by Mussolini's Fascist regime. Lawrence then hired him to work on the cyclotron at Berkeley with Luis Alvarez, Edwin McMillan, and Glenn Seaborg. Segrè was one of the first to join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, where he became a group leader on the Manhattan Project. His account of that mysterious enclave of scientists, all working feverishly to develop the atomic bomb before the Nazis did, includes his description of the first explosion at Alamogordo.Segrè writes movingly of the personal devastation wrought by the Nazis, his struggles with fellow scientists, and his love of nature. His book offers an intimate glimpse into a bygone era as well as a unique perspective on some of the most important scientific developments of this century.   [brief]
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Title: Mind games: American culture and the birth of psychotherapy 
Author: Caplan, Eric 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | United States History | American Studies | Science | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors - none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city - compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. By the time Freud first set foot on American soil in 1909, as Caplan demonstrates, psychotherapy was already integrally woven into the fabric of American culture and medicine.What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much - indeed most - of which was generated by the medical profession itself. Caplan examines the contentious interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists, and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat - and compete - effectively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace. Mind Games shows how psychotherapy came to occupy its central position in mainstream American culture.   [brief]
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Title: The molecular biology of plant cells 
Author: Smith, H. (Harry) 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: Science | Botany | Biology
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Title: The nuclear seduction: why the arms race doesn't matter and what does 
Author: Schwartz, William A
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Social Problems | Public Policy | Science
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Title: Observatory seismology: an anniversary symposium on the occasion of the centennial of the University of California at Berkeley seismographic stations 
Author: Litehiser, J. J. (Joe J.)
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | Geology
Publisher's Description: The first effective seismographs were built between 1879 and 1890. In 1885, E. S. Holden, an astronomer and then president of the University of California, instigated the purchase of the best available instruments of the time "to keep a register of all earthquake shocks in order to be able to control the positions of astronomical instruments." These seismographs were installed two years later at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton and at the Berkeley campus of the University. Over the years those stations have been upgraded and joined by other seismographic stations administered at Berkeley, to become the oldest continuously operating stations in the Western Hemisphere. The first hundred years of the Seismographic Stations of the University of California at Berkeley, years in which seismology has often assumed an unforeseen role in issues of societal and political importance, ended in 1987.To celebrate the centennial a distinguished group of fellows, staff, and friends of the Stations met on the Berkeley campus in May 1987. The papers they presented are gathered in this book, a distillation of the current state of the art in observatory seismology. Ranging through subjects of past, present, and future seismological interest, they provide a benchmark reference for years to come.   [brief]
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Title: The Quantifying spirit in the 18th century 
Author: Frängsmyr, Tore 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science | Intellectual History
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Title: The quiet revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the science of organic chemistry 
Author: Rocke, Alan J 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | History and Philosophy of Science | Physical Sciences | European History
Publisher's Description: Organic chemist Hermann Kolbe (1818-1884) is the subject of this vigorously contextualized biography, which combines the approaches of cognitive and social history of science. Kolbe was one of the most outstanding chemists during the remarkable period in which German science, like the wider manifestations of German industrial and political power, rose to a position of world dominance.Rocke portrays Kolbe as a leading actor in the transformation of the institutional and pedagological dimensions of the physical sciences, as well as in the rapid growth of technologically powerful pure sciences. In all these areas there was a sharp inflection point around 1860 when, as Rocke persuasively argues, the primary discipline in the drama was organic chemistry.   [brief]
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