BSc Biology with Industrial/Professional Experience / Course details

This course aims to provide you with a broad perspective on how today’s life sciences have grown out of past investigations of living nature and the nature of life. By focusing on "objects": topics of inquiry and tools used to carry out these inquiries we will bring biology’s past to life, as something that helps us understand our present. Looking at these objects can tell us a great deal about how biology works, how it has changed, and even how it may develop in the 21st century. You will gain insight to the motivations that inspired scholars in the past to study living things and the circumstances in which such research was pursued.

1. To gain a broad perspective on how today’s life sciences have grown out of past investigations of living nature and the nature of life.
2. To bring biology’s past to life as something that helps us understand our present by focusing on ’objects’: topics of inquiry and tools used to carry out these inquiries.
3. To understand how biology works, how it has changed, and how it may develop in the 21st century.
4. To gain insight into the motivations that inspired scholars in the past to study living things and the circumstances in which such research was pursued.

We will address the following central questions:

1. What did it mean to investigate living nature, to develop a science of life at various points in history?
2. Who was interested in this?
3. How was it done, in different historical, national, social or institutional settings?
4. Why did biology develop in the way it did?

The course will look and feel different from history courses that students may remember from school. We are not particularly interested in the deeds of great men and women and their dates of birth or death. Lectures will be organised around "objects": topics of inquiry, key organisms or research tools.

There will be 20 lectures on the history of selected objects.

Objects include:

• Life
• The human body (as studied by anatomists since antiquity)
• Sex (and reproduction)
• Plants (collected and classified by botanists)
• Skeletons and Embryos (exhibited in museums)
• The Field (and voyages of discovery)
• The Cell (one of the unifying concepts in modern biology)
• The Kymograph (an important device used by experimental physiologists)
• The Pigeon (and other animals studied by Darwin)
• The Gene (another unifying concept)
• Behaviour (Pavlov, Skinner and others)
• Populations (and the role of statistics in biology)
• Standardised laboratory animals
• The ultracentrifuge (and the birth of molecular biology)
• Information (and the structure of DNA)
• Genomics

Feedback will be provided as follows:

• Students have the opportunity to work on their group projects in a series of workshop meetings with the lecturer. They submit project proposals, on which they receive feedback.
• Students are invited to submit and receive feedback on a practice essay to prepare for the essay question in the exam. (This is optional, not compulsory)

• Allen, Garland E., Life Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
• Bowler, Peter J. and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
• Cobb, Matthew, The Egg & Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists who unlocked the Secrets of Sex and Growth (The Free Press, 2006).
• Coleman, William, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function and Transformation (Wiley 1971).
• Mayr, Ernst, This is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Belknap Press, 1997).