While historians have shown the importance of networks in nineteenth and early twentieth century European science, women’s networks have hardly been examined. This paper aims to promote a fuller understanding of scientific communities by analysing the intricate connections between gender, class, and imperialism through a reconstruction of four British female entomologists’ networks. Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (1862-1940), Emily Mary Bowdler Sharpe (186?-192?), Mary de la Beche Nicholl (1839-1922), and Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828-1901) all developed their own networks for different purposes. Fountaine and Nicholl used colonial connections to travel and collect lepidoptera in exotic places. Ormerod used her network to obtain information on insects which were harmful to agriculture and to found the new scientific discipline of economic entomology in Britain. Sharpe meanwhile, became a well-known cataloguer and describer of new species, and constructed a network in which she mediated between buyers, sellers, and the British Museum. In this paper I will look at the strategies women employed to develop their networks, the purposes to which they used these networks, how they engaged in the entomological community, and their position within its hierarchy. By examining their networks I will argue that empire, gender, and class played an important role in the hierarchies of scientific communities in Britain at the time, much more than professionalisation.

Despite a surge of recent scholarship on the long and broad history of biotechnology, the Edwardian era does not immediately spring to mind when considering the engineering of life. Yet the early twentieth century saw an ambitious attempt to artificially cultivate and disseminate the parasitic Empusa muscae fungus to destroy the housefly (Musca domestica). This paper argues that the development of Edwardian biotechnology and its modern legacy, or lack thereof, can be explained with reference to the septic fringe: a zone at the periphery of human settlements associated with waste, vermin and disease vectors. During the late nineteenth century, bacteriological techniques established that the housefly spread disease, indelibly linking it, along with the microorganisms it carried, to the septic fringe. Yet in 1912 Edgar Hesse successfully cultivated Empusa muscae at the Working Men's College in London. His ambition to use the fungi to exterminate the housefly was short lived, thwarted by technical difficulties and the realisation that the fungus also carried harmful pathogens. Although Empusa muscae was ultimately relegated to the septic fringe, its counterfactual history offers us a glimpse at a little-known, yet surprisingly familiar, world of biotechnological aspiration and controversy.

Historians of science have long recognized the centrality of collections such as cabinets of curiosity, gardens, and museums to the study of natural history. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that, as the life sciences became ‘modern,’ the importance of such collections was eclipsed by that of experiments. Rather than collect, describe, and arrange specimens, so the story goes, investigators opted to experiment with strategically-chosen model organisms, using them to elucidate biological mechanisms present in wide swaths of the living world. In the meantime, scholars like Robert Kohler and Bruno Strasser have challenged this view, drawing attention to the pervasiveness of scientific collections throughout the modern life sciences. In this paper, I provide a panoramic view of microbial culture collections from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s, arguing that the curation of these collections was not only useful for taxonomic purposes, but also indispensable for shedding light on the biochemical mechanisms of living cells. Using these libraries of life, microbiologists compared and contrasted microbes’ metabolic processes, substantiating what I refer to as ‘the chemical order of nature.’ In conclusion, I suggest that further scrutiny of collections of laboratory-cultured life forms will help rectify an imbalance in the historiography of the twentieth century life sciences, which tends to foreground histories of genetics, evolution, and heredity, while neglecting those of physiology, biochemistry, and metabolism. When histories of the twentieth century life sciences focus predominately on a handful of standardized model organisms, they only tell part of the story.

This paper examines a scientific career of one of the most prominent genetic engineering scientists in South Korea, Dr. Jin-soo Kim. As he often introduces himself, he is “an entrepreneur and chemist-turned-biologist.” He is quite renowned for his work on genome editing at Seoul National University, and for his founding of ToolGen, one of the largest gene editing companies in South Korea. I will follow his career within the context of the rise of academic capitalism in South Korea. I will first examine his early career from a research scientist at a private research institute to a founder of a biotech company within the context of the rise of the venture capital industry in South Korea. The Korean government, faced with an economic crisis, tried to promote venture business to restructure the Korean industry. Then I will analyze his return to an academic post at Seoul National University in the early 2000s, at a time when the university tried to institutionalize academic capitalism. In many ways, his return came to be regarded as an attempt to correct academic life toward economic development. By 2014, he has emerged as one of the most prominent entrepreneurial scientists at Seoul National University, directing cutting-edge research teams both at the Institute for Basic Science and ToolGen. By reflecting on his boundary crossing between the academy and industry, this paper ends with a brief discussion on a recent controversy over the ownership of the CRISPR patents development at Seoul National University.