Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Rhetoric & Technical Communication
Toscano, Aaron, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Dept. of English

Resources and Daily Activities

  • Conference Presentations
    • PCA/ACA Conference Presentation 2022
    • PCAS/ACAS Presentation 2021
    • SEACS 2021 Presentation
    • SEACS 2022 Presentation
    • SEACS 2023 Presentation
    • South Atlantic MLA Conference 2022
  • Dr. Toscano’s Homepage
  • ENGL 2116-014: Introduction to Technical Communication
    • February 13th: Introduction to User Design
    • February 15th: Instructions for Users
      • Making Résumés and Cover Letters More Effective
    • February 1st: Reflection on Workplace Messages
    • February 20th: The Rhetoric of Technology
    • February 22nd: Social Constructions of Technology
    • February 6th: Plain Language
    • January 11th: More Introduction to Class
    • January 18th: Audience & Purpose
    • January 23rd: Résumés and Cover Letters
      • Duty Format for Résumés
      • Peter Profit’s Cover Letter
    • January 25th: More on Résumés and Cover Letters
    • January 30th: Achieving a Readable Style
      • Euphemisms
      • Prose Practice for Next Class
      • Prose Revision Assignment
      • Revising Prose: Efficiency, Accuracy, and Good
      • Sentence Clarity
    • January 9th: Introduction to the Class
    • Major Assignments
    • March 13th: Introduction to Information Design
    • March 15th: More on Information Design
    • March 20th: Reporting Technical Information
    • March 27th: The Great I, Robot Analysis
  • ENGL 4182/5182: Information Design & Digital Publishing
    • August 21st: Introduction to the Course
      • Rhetorical Principles of Information Design
    • August 28th: Introduction to Information Design
      • Prejudice and Rhetoric
      • Robin Williams’s Principles of Design
    • Classmates Webpages (Fall 2017)
    • December 4th: Presentations
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4182/5182 (Fall 2017)
    • November 13th: More on Color
      • Designing with Color
      • Important Images
    • November 20th: Extra-Textual Elements
    • November 27th: Presentation/Portfolio Workshop
    • November 6th: In Living Color
    • October 16th: Type Fever
      • Typography
    • October 23rd: More on Type
    • October 2nd: MIDTERM FUN!!!
    • October 30th: Working with Graphics
      • Beerknurd Calendar 2018
    • September 11th: Talking about Design without Using “Thingy”
      • Theory, theory, practice
    • September 18th: The Whole Document
    • September 25th: Page Design
  • ENGL 4183/5183: Editing with Digital Technologies
    • August 24th: Introduction to the Class
    • August 31st: Rhetoric, Words, and Composing
    • Major Assignments for ENGL 4183/5183 (Fall 2022)
      • Rhetoric of Fear
    • November 16th: Voice and Other Nebulous Writing Terms
      • Finding Dominant Rhetorical Appeals
    • November 2nd: Rhetorical Effects of Punctuation
    • November 30th: Words and Word Classes
    • November 9th: Cohesive Rhythm
    • October 12th: Choosing Adjectivals
    • October 19th: Choosing Nominals
    • October 26th: Stylistic Variations
    • October 5th: Midterm Exam
    • September 14th: Verb is the Word!
    • September 21st: Coordination and Subordination
    • September 28th: Form and Function
    • September 7th: Sentence Patterns
  • ENGL 4275: Rhetoric of Technology
    • April 13th: Authorities in Science and Technology
    • April 15th: Articles on Violence in Video Games
    • April 20th: Presentations
    • April 6th: Technology in the home
    • April 8th: Writing Discussion
    • Assignments for ENGL 4275
    • February 10th: Religion of Technology Part 3 of 3
    • February 12th: Is Love a Technology?
    • February 17th: Technology and Gender
    • February 19th: Technology and Expediency
    • February 24th: Semester Review
    • February 3rd: Religion of Technology Part 1 of 3
    • February 5th: Religion of Technology Part 2 of 3
    • January 13th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective
    • January 15th: Technology and Democracy
    • January 22nd: The Politics of Technology
    • January 27th: Discussion on Writing as Thinking
    • January 29th: Technology and Postmodernism
    • January 8th: Introduction to the Course
    • March 11th: Writing and Other Fun
    • March 16th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 1 of 2
    • March 18th: Neuromancer (1984) Day 2 of 2
    • March 23rd: Inception (2010)
    • March 25th: Writing and Reflecting Discussion
    • March 30th & April 1st: Count Zero
    • March 9th: William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
  • ENGL 6166: Rhetorical Theory
    • April 12th: Knoblauch. Ch. 4 and Ch. 5
    • April 19th: Jacques Derrida’s Positions
    • April 26th:  Feminisms and Rhetorics
    • April 5th: Knoblauch. Ch. 3 and More Constitutive Rhetoric
    • February 15th: Isocrates (Part 2)
    • February 1st: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Books 2 & 3
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 2
      • Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, Book 3
    • February 22nd: St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine [Rhetoric]
    • February 8th: Isocrates (Part 1)-2nd Half of Class
    • January 11th: Introduction to Class
    • January 18th: Plato’s Phaedrus
    • January 25th: Aristotle’s On Rhetoric Book 1
    • March 15th: Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method
    • March 1st: Knoblauch. Ch. 1 and 2
    • March 22nd: Mary Wollstonecraft
    • March 29th: Second Wave Feminist Rhetoric
    • May 3rd: Knoblauch. Ch. 6, 7, and “Afterword”
    • Rhetorical Theory Assignments
  • ENGL/COMM/WRDS: The Rhetoric of Fear
    • February 14th: Fascism and Other Valentine’s Day Atrocities
    • February 21st: Fascism Part 2
    • February 7th: Fallacies Part 3 and American Politics Part 2
    • January 10th: Introduction to the Class
    • January 17th: Scapegoats & Conspiracies
    • January 24th: The Rhetoric of Fear and Fallacies Part 1
    • January 31st: Fallacies Part 2 and American Politics Part 1
    • Major Assignments
    • March 7th: Fascism Part 3
  • LBST 2212-124, 125, 126, & 127
    • August 21st: Introduction to Class
    • August 23rd: Humanistic Approach to Science Fiction
    • August 26th: Robots and Zombies
    • August 28th: Futurism, an Introduction
    • August 30th: R. A. Lafferty “Slow Tuesday Night” (1965)
    • December 2nd: Technological Augmentation
    • December 4th: Posthumanism
    • November 11th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2)
    • November 13th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 2 con’t)
    • November 18th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 1)
      • More Questions than Answers
    • November 1st: Games Reality Plays (part II)
    • November 20th: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Part 2)
    • November 6th: Salt Fish Girl (Week 1)
    • October 14th: More Autonomous Fun
    • October 16th: Autonomous Conclusion
    • October 21st: Sci Fi in the Domestic Sphere
    • October 23rd: Social Aphasia
    • October 25th: Dust in the Wind
    • October 28th: Gender Liminality and Roles
    • October 2nd: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • October 30th: Games Reality Plays (part I)
    • October 9th: Approaching Autonomous
      • Analyzing Prose in Autonomous
    • September 11th: The Time Machine
    • September 16th: The Alien Other
    • September 18th: Post-apocalyptic Worlds
    • September 20th: Dystopian Visions
    • September 23rd: World’s Beyond
    • September 25th: Gender Studies and Science Fiction
    • September 30th: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
    • September 4th: Science Fiction and Social Breakdown
      • More on Ellison
      • More on Forster
    • September 9th: The Time Machine
  • LBST 2213-110: Science, Technology, and Society
    • August 22nd: Science and Technology from a Humanistic Perspective
    • August 24th: Science and Technology, a Humanistic Approach
    • August 29th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 2
    • August 31st: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4
    • December 5th: Video Games and Violence, a more nuanced view
    • November 14th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes. (1964) Ch. 27-end
    • November 16th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Preface-Ch. 8
    • November 21st: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Ch. 9-Ch. 16
    • November 28th: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ch. 17-Ch. 24
    • November 30th: Violence in Video Games
    • November 7th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes Ch. 1-17
    • November 9th: Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes, Ch. 18-26
    • October 12th: Lies Economics Tells
    • October 17th: Brief Histories of Medicine, Salerno, and Galen
    • October 19th: Politicizing Science and Medicine
    • October 24th: COVID-19 Facial Covering Rhetoric
    • October 26th: Wells, H. G. Time Machine. Ch. 1-5
    • October 31st: Wells, H. G. The Time Machine Ch. 6-The End
    • October 3rd: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • September 12th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 7 and Conclusion
    • September 19th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Prefaces and Ch. 1
    • September 26th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 2
    • September 28th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem at Large (Technology), Ch. 5 and 6
    • September 7th: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 5 and 6
  • New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology (Spring 2021)
    • April 13th: Virtually ‘Real’ Environments
    • April 20th: Rhetoric/Composition Defines New Media
    • April 27th: Sub/Cultural Politics, Hegemony, and Agency
    • April 6th: Capitalist Realism
    • February 16: Misunderstanding the Internet
    • February 23rd: Our Public Sphere and the Media
    • February 2nd: Introduction to Cultural Studies
    • January 26th: Introduction to New Media
    • Major Assignments for New Media (Spring 2021)
    • March 16th: Identity Politics
    • March 23rd: Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality
    • March 2nd: Foundational Thinkers in Cultural Studies
    • March 30th: Hyperreality
    • March 9th: Globalization & Postmodernism
    • May 4th: Wrapping Up The Semester
      • Jodi Dean “The The Illusion of Democracy” & “Communicative Capitalism”
      • Social Construction of Sexuality
  • Science Fiction in American Culture (Summer I–2020)
    • Assignments for Science Fiction in American Culture
    • Cultural Studies and Science Fiction Films
    • June 10th: Interstellar and Exploration themes
    • June 11th: Bicentennial Man
    • June 15th: I’m Only Human…Or am I?
    • June 16th: Wall-E and Environment
    • June 17th: Wall-E (2008) and Technology
    • June 18th: Interactivity in Video Games
    • June 1st: Firefly (2002) and Myth
    • June 2nd: “Johnny Mnemonic”
    • June 3rd: “New Rose Hotel”
    • June 4th: “Burning Chrome”
    • June 8th: Conformity and Monotony
    • June 9th: Cultural Constructions of Beauty
    • May 18th: Introduction to Class
    • May 19th: American Culture, an Introduction
    • May 20th: The Matrix
    • May 21st: Gender and Science Fiction
    • May 25th: Goals for I, Robot
    • May 26th: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot
    • May 27th: Hackers and Slackers
    • May 30th: Inception
  • Teaching Portfolio
  • Topics for Analysis
    • A Practical Editing Situation
    • American Culture, an Introduction
    • Efficiency in Writing Reviews
    • Feminism, An Introduction
    • Fordism/Taylorism
    • Frankenstein Part I
    • Frankenstein Part II
    • Futurism Introduction
    • How to Lie with Statistics
    • Isaac Asimov’s “A Cult of Ignorance”
    • Langdon Winner Summary: The Politics of Technology
    • Marxist Theory (cultural analysis)
    • Oral Presentations
    • Oratory and Argument Analysis
    • Our Public Sphere
    • Postmodernism Introduction
    • Protesting Confederate Place
    • Punctuation Refresher
    • QT, the Existential Robot
    • Religion of Technology Discussion
    • Rhetoric, an Introduction
      • Analyzing the Culture of Technical Writer Ads
      • Rhetoric of Technology
      • Visual Culture
      • Visual Perception
      • Visual Perception, Culture, and Rhetoric
      • Visual Rhetoric
      • Visuals for Technical Communication
      • World War I Propaganda
    • The Great I, Robot Discussion
      • I, Robot Short Essay Topics
    • The Rhetoric of Video Games: A Cultural Perspective
      • Civilization, an Analysis
    • The Sopranos
    • Why Science Fiction?
    • Zombies and Consumption Satire
  • Video Games & American Culture
    • April 14th: Phallocentrism
    • April 21st: Video Games and Neoliberalism
    • April 7th: Video Games and Conquest
    • Assignments for Video Games & American Culture
    • February 10th: Aesthetics and Culture
    • February 17th: Narrative and Catharsis
    • February 24th: Serious Games
    • February 3rd: More History of Video Games
    • January 13th: Introduction to the course
    • January 20th: Introduction to Video Game Studies
    • January 27th: Games & Culture
      • Marxism for Video Game Analysis
      • Postmodernism for Video Game Analysis
    • March 24th: Realism, Interpretation(s), and Meaning Making
    • March 31st: Feminist Perspectives and Politics
    • March 3rd: Risky Business?

Contact Me

Office: Fretwell 255F
Email: atoscano@uncc.edu
LBST 2213-110: Science, Technology, and Society » August 31st: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4

August 31st: Collins & Pinch’s The Golem (Science), Ch. 3 and 4

Don’t forget to post your Canvas response by 11:00 pm Friday! (9/02)
AND CHECK THAT IT POSTED PROPERLY!

Plan For Today

  • What is energy, and why is it so valuable?
    • Just a question to contemplate
  • Our Readings for Today
  • Politics of Science
  • “What is” vs “What should be”

Ch. 3: The Sun in a Test Tube: The Story of Cold Fusion

Take away 3 things

  1. Scientific credit is competitive. Under the guise of objectivity, it shouldn’t matter who discovers what—observation should be neutral. However, status in one’s field is powerful.
  2. Chemists tend to favor how the field of chemistry (therefore, other chemists) establishes knowledge, and physicists tend to favor how the field of physics establishes knowledge.
  3. The reasons behind not replicating another scientist’s experiments could depend on perspective: If one doesn’t replicate the experiment, they could believe the original results are wrong; on the other hand, those originally doing the experiment could believe those replicating their experiment failed to follow their guidelines.
    • Why else might a chemist not follow a physicist’s model of experiment?
    • Even though we lump sciences together and claim they all follow the scientific method, there are both similarities and differences.

Interesting thought: What is energy? What energy do you use daily, and where does that energy come from? Just contemplate this for a moment or two.


Besides knowing what happened (or didn’t) related to cold fusion, it’s also important to consider why scientists even put forth the effort to conduct experiments to find new sources of energy. This might seem obvious, but it’s an often overlooked assumption: Science doesn’t spring from scientists doing experiments in isolation. There is usually a social demand driving research. That “demand” could be hegemonic and favor powerful groups’ agendas, but it still conforms to ideology. Nuclear fusion (cold or hot) is fusing hydrogen atoms into helium, which releases tons of energy. Why would having cold fusion technology—an energy source that, in theory, gives off more energy than it uses—be of value to our world? What commodities seem to literally “drive” the engines of the world?

Key Quotations for Discussion

  • p. 59: Exciting the public, “It was ‘science by press conference’ as scientists queued up to announce their latest findings to the media.”
  • Jones’s motivation and, perhaps, belief that cold fusion was theoretically possible stemmed from his work with the “Los Alamos particle accelerator. [He and his team] found far more evidence of such fusions than theory would have led them to expect.”
    • Unfortunately, that’s not the same as finding a new, commercially viable energy source.
  • p. 63-64: The two Utah teams were in competition to discover a viable cold fusion process. “In view of the obvious commercial payoff…it meant that a certain amount of rivalry and suspicion arose between the two groups.”
  • p. 65: Guilt by association—Jones wasn’t claiming to have discovered a revolutionary new source of energy. However, he was grouped with Pons and Fleischmann and “has been inevitably subject to the same suspicions.”
  • p. 66: “Though fusion researchers, well-used to spectacular claims, and with their own billion-dollar research programs to protect, were incredulous, other scientists were more willing to take their work seriously.
    • We’ll come back to this below when we talk about funding.
  • p. 69: Pons and Fleischmann believed failure to replicate their experiments was due to the fact that “many cells were being set up with incorrect parameters and dimensions.”

The Politics of Science

Let’s consider the communication and vetting process of the cold fusion “discovery.” Think about the many actors–not in the spotlight–who weighed in on the validity of  Pons and Fleischmann’s findings. I’m putting this under “politics” because that’s the best word for saying “the social rules governing the system and providing resources and/or credit.”

Think about the phrase “office politics.” What does that mean? Well, in any office, there are employee expectations, procedures, and authority concerns. Dress codes, working late expectations, communication preferences, etc. have written and unwritten rules. More importantly, whose voice(s) is respected and even who should or shouldn’t speak are aspects of political power (or lack thereof) in an office. Another way to think of “politics” is how and why and by whom are resources divided.

If you’re interested on reading the differences between two different workplaces, check out these different offices and consider the office politics based on the job ads. This isn’t required reading, but, if either job interests you or if technical writing in general interests you, please see me about our Professional/Technical Writing Program.

Otherwise…back to the reading!

  • Historical discussion
    • Fritz Paneth and Kurt Peters wanted to produce more helium in the 1920s for “German industry because the USA…refused to sell helium to Germany after [WWI].”
    • International politics plays a role in science and technology.
  • p. 60: Authorities in the field: “An MIT group claimed…”; “a prestigious California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) group reported…”; “and finally a Cal Tech theorist pronounced that cold fusion was extremely improbable theoretically…”
    • What do all three statements have in common? All three are scientific authorities in the field who claim Pons and Fleischmann’s results are suspect or delusional.
    • Such statements carry weight in the scientific community and, most likely, for journalists and the public.
    • Without knowing the scientific details, those authorities are able to persuade the public that Pons and Fleischmann didn’t find what they claimed to find–cold fusion.
  • p. 66: “the levels of neutrons produced should have been more than enough to kill Pons and Fleischmann and anyone else” nearby.
  • p. 72: “Steve Koonin and Mike Nauenberg…discovered errors which increased the rate of deuterium;” however, “fusion in palladium in the amount needed to produce excess heat is extremely unlikely.”
  • p. 73: because the experiments weren’t decisive or the results weren’t accepted, the “standard theory” dominated “and none of the alternative theories gained widespread acceptance.”
  • p. 74: Pons and Fleischmann’s claims “tread upon the toes of the nuclear physicists and fusion physicists who had already laid claim to the area.”
  • p. 69: Pons and Fleischmann believed failure to replicate their experiments was due to the fact that “many cells were being set up with incorrect parameters and dimensions.”
  • p. 66: One’s discipline guided whether or not one believed the experiments. “Pons and Fleischmann have fared better with their colleagues in chemistry where, after all, they were acknowledged experts.”

Cold Fusion might have been discredited, but the finding of excess heat measurements seems to have been lost as valuable knowledge. Pons & Fleischmann published a paper on calorimetry (heat measurements) and not on nuclear measurements (p. 77). Unfortunately, physicists were excited initially by the claims, and they were interested in the nuclear reactions (not) taking place. According to Collins & Pinch, that “left the excess heat measurements as mere anomalies” (p. 77), so physicists weren’t as interested in those findings. Early framing of the scientific discussion, as with any discussion, guides future discussions. It’s very difficult to change the meaning of experiments when a rhetorical approach dominates.

Funding Motivation

I’m asking you to think critically about scientists motivated by funding. There’s a view that scientists are trumping up claims about climate change in order to get funding. While we might be able to find instances where that was a motivation for scientists studying a variety of sciences, if a large portion of scientists (more than 5% I’ll say with no statistical accuracy) did such a thing, there would be very little “real” science. Think of the medical procedures that would fail; the microwaves that would blow up; the airplanes that would fall from the sky. Dismissing scientific research because you want to believe the scientists are out for money is irresponsible and intellectually dull. Fake science doesn’t last very long as the above Cold Fusion case study shows.

Collins & Pinch mention something about possible funding worries of physicists. Don’t assume legitimate worries are nefarious motives for scientists who want to get all the grants and exclude others from the funding sources. Collins & Pinch state that the fusion physicists rejection was not “merely a matter of wanting to maintain billion-dollar investments (although with the Department of Energy threatening to transfer hot fusion funding to cold fusion research, there was a direct threat to their interests)” (p. 74). Sure, transferring funding from hot to cold fusion would have affected the research labs of many physicists. The “self-interests” of scientists are motivated by their research goals, and, as experts, they’re probably the best ones to explain the value of their work. Rethink the situation as they’re motivated for scientific discovery, which requires money to conduct. They’re not just pocketing it and going to Vegas (even if that might have happened once or twice).

Where are they today?

  • Martin Fleischmann
  • Stanley Pons (Born in Valdese, NC!)
  • Steven E. Jones

Ch. 4: The Germs of Dissent: Louis Pasteur and the Origins of Life

Take away 3 things from Pasteur-Pouchet Debate

  1. Scientific Authority stacked in favor of Pasteur
    1. The Académie des Sciences, the official French body adjudicating scientific disputes, had two commissions made up of pro-Pasteur/anti-Spontaneous Generation members.
    2. Consider this a government peer-review process.
  2. Erroneously, they also wanted to dismiss Félix-Archimède Pouchet and the idea of Spontaneous Generation because they felt it would strike the final blow to Darwinism.
    1. Of course, this is a misreading of Darwin and Evolution, a science in its infancy in 1864.
    2. Spontaneous generation doesn’t have to be the key to evolution, and it certainly didn’t debunk Darwin’s theory of decent through natural selection.
  3. p. 85: “Pasteur was so committed in his opposition to spontaneous generation that he preferred to believe there was some unknown flaw in his work than to publish the results.”
    1. He couldn’t prove what the flaw was, but he was committed to the belief that life doesn’t generate spontaneously from nothing.
    2. Although Louis Pasteur was correct, he couldn’t prove it through a decisive experiment or point to the particular flaw.

Key quotations

  • p. 79: The Pasteur-Pouchet debate to determine whether or not spontaneous generation existed “was a controversial issue, especially in nineteenth-century France because it touched upon deeply rooted religious and political sensibilities.”
    *Collins & Pinch discuss the religious issue surrounding evolution, but they don’t explicitly identify the political issue. They mean the politics of the French scientific community. The governing authority set up how science was vetted, and, in this case, the vetting process favored Pasteur and was “unsympathetic” to Pouchet.
  • p. 80: “As in so many other scientific controversies, it was neither facts nor reason, but death and weight of numbers that defeated the minority view; facts and reasons, as always, were ambiguous.”
    *Ambiguity—“because you know sometimes words have two meanings” Led Zeppelin
  • p. 81: “[I]n the nineteenth century the techniques for determining what was sterile and what was living were being established.” Therefore, it wasn’t universally accepted what constituted a sterile environment.
    • In fact, what does constitute a sterile environment? Which of the following is the most sterile environment? Salad bar, hospital, refrigerator, keyboard on a library computer, cat, recently washed dishes…
  • p. 83: Interpretations of Spontaneous Generation Experiments table “allowed Pasteur virtually to define all air that gave rise to life in the flasks as contaminated.”
  • p. 86: Pasteur’s “20 flasks exposed to air at 2000 metres on a glacier in the French Alps [had] only one affected.” Pouchet’s eight flasks all were contaminated, and “he had used a heated file instead of pincers to open the flasks.”
    What does Pasteur get to say about that?
  • p. 87: “By accident or design, all members of the commission were unsympathetic to Pouchet’s ideas and some announced their conclusion before examining the entries.”
    “The second commission too was composed of members whose view were known to be strongly and uniformly opposed to those of Pouchet.”
  • p. 88: Modern commentators…have suggested that Pouchet might have been successful if he had stayed the course—albeit for the wrong reasons!”
  • p. 89: “It was thought at the time that Darwinism rested upon the idea of spontaneous generation….Pasteur, then, was taken to have dealt a final blow to the theory of evolution with the same stroke as he struck down the spontaneous generation of life.”
    *Is it any surprise that the French Académie des Sciences was opposed to the theory proposed by Darwin and Alfred Wallace, both British scientists (or naturalists)?

Pasteur-Pouchet Debate Speculation

Experimental Controls: Yeast vs. Hay Infusions

It seems Collins & Pinch, when initially describing Pouchet’s Pyrenean experiment (p.86), held out that he used hay infusions as the “nutritive medium” as well as a heated file to open the flasks (p. 88). It’s quite possible the heated file had nothing to do with the contamination Pouchet found. Instead, “[i]t was not until 1876 that it was discovered that hay infusions support a spore that is not easily killed by boiling” (p. 88). Pasteur used yeast as the “nutritive medium” that was sterilized, and he may or may not have conducted the experiment with hay infusions.

Had he used hay infusions and found putrescence, how might he conclude? Would he throw up his hands and say, “yes, Pouchet, you are correct”? Or “Oui vous avez raison.”

  • How would he deal with this anomaly?
  • Is it ethical for a scientist to allow assumptions to condition conclusions?
  • Is “healthy skepticism” the same as doubting or dismissing what you can’t explain?

Just topics to consider for further thought. Again, Pasteur was correct, but he couldn’t fully explain the reason through experimentation. The scientific authority concluded in his favor but not because the science won them over—it was political.

Pasteur’s Brilliance

In order to appreciate Louis Pasteur’s brilliance,* we need to recognize his cutting-edge science in context. Today, we understand germs, microbes, bacteria, viruses, and how they’re spread. Pasteur had to convince the scientific community and the public that invisible microbes were responsible for infections and many diseases. He’s best known for pasteurization, which means we get wine and milk prepared in such a way to stop bacterial contamination. The knowledge of microscopic organisms–not observable by the naked eye–is pretty amazing for a time period (mid-to-late 19th Century) where average citizens wouldn’t be learning these facts in schools the way we learn them today.

The American Civil War had more casualties because of disease than wounds from battle or being killed in battle (for an analysis on Union Army deaths, see Gilchrist, Michael. “Disease & Infection in the American Civil War.” The American Biology Teacher, 60.4 [Apr., 1998]: pp. 258-262). A major reason was because of the non-sterile, dirty environment of field hospitals and poor sanitation (Gilchrist 259). The medical community wasn’t aware of the need for sterile environments, so patients often died from surgery with unclean instruments than from the issues that they went to the hospital to get treated.

*Although Pasteur wasn’t the first to propose germ theory (c.f. Agostino Bassi), he certainly did plenty of work in the field and helped bring new science and technology to the world, making humans safer, healthier, and disease resistant.

Question for Class

It’s not surprising that the federal government has a role in science and technology. One goal of General Education (and LBST courses specifically) is to consider “What is” vs “What should be.” I have four questions for us:

  • What is the Government’s role in science?
    • What should be the Government’s role in science?
  • What is the Government’s role in technology?
    • What should be the Government’s role in technology?

Basically, when we discuss “what is,” we’re describing the contemporary situation. When we discuss “what should be,” we’re making arguments for (or against) certain policies based on sound, logical evidence and reasoning.

Many of you are probably aware of President Trump’s gag order on federal agencies (from a few years back) that bans them from communicating directly with non-governmental entities. How is that similar to The Academie des Sciences in the Pasteur-Pouchet debate?

Speaking of an Academia in Europe…stay tuned for the Study Abroad Program on the Amalfi Coast (more details in the future).

Next Class

Keep up with the reading. You’ll have Ch. 5 & 6 for Wednesday, 9/7. I won’t have a webpage up for 9/5 in observance of Labor Day, but, of course, you have plenty to read, so catch up if needed. Also, your Canvas post for this week is up and ready, so post it! After 11:00 pm on Friday, 9/02, you won’t be able to post. If you haven’t set that weekly reminder, do so now.

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