This article traces the visual culture of human genetic engineering over the past decade, focusing on the CRISPR genome editing technology. We argue that the representations surrounding CRISPR exemplify, and to an extent define, this visual culture. We examine the history of CRISPR, particularly its human applications from 2012 to 2022, through a periodization that includes the CRISPR craze, gene therapy initiatives, the He Jiankui controversy and clinical trials. Employing an expanded interpretation of intermediality within science communication, this work addresses the role of figuration across the relationships between specialist science reporting and the mainstream press and between traditional and social media. Using a mixed-methods approach combining visual and social-media analysis, the article presents an empirical analysis of three key figures – the double helix, the scientist and the human subject – and their roles across the discussed phases. The study concludes by articulating the stabilizing, amplifying and affective functions of intermedial figuration within science communication.

Audiences for science in the media live and operate, as agents who endow science with social and cultural meanings, in an intermedial world. Following cultural tracers through time and across media, and attending to a key actors’ category, intermediality, historians of the public culture of science can access the social dimension of the mediation of science. Adopting an intermedial approach allows us to attune the historiography of the public culture of science to the evolution of science communication scholarship over the past three decades, and understand the role of audiences in the production of cultural meanings about science.

This paper reevaluates Friedrich Max Müller’s interactions with his British detractors from the early 1860s to the early 1890s. By offering a re-examination of their disputes concerning language and mind, it first and foremost illuminates a transformation in the research methods, standards of evidence, and forms of explanation that were seen as scientifically legitimate in the human sciences in late Victorian Britain. To use Müller’s language, this entailed a shift in the balance of power between “historical” and “theoretical” schools of thought, which came to privilege the latter over the former. No less importantly, this paper also demonstrates how the history of philology can contribute to the history of science by revealing the extent to which Müller and his opponents were ultimately searching for the same thing – knowledge about human origins and development. Additionally, by taking seriously Müller’s arguments as a philologist, this paper refutes the pernicious view that his objections to Darwin’s account of languages were motivated by his religious beliefs.

In 1679, the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini published a large print detailing the entire visible surface of the moon with unprecedented meticulousness. This Grand Selenography is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular pictures ever produced within the Académie royale des sciences. However, it has remained widely neglected by historians up to now. This study offers the first account of the making and early reception of the print. It argues that the Grand Selenography remains uncompleted because it failed to satisfy Cassini and his contemporaries. Furthermore, its history allows us to shed new light on the range of issues that scientific pictures might have raised during Louis XIV’s reign.

In the United States, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the reforming institutions of the horse-drawn-carriage trade prescribed descriptive geometry to their workshops in order to modernize the drawing process for modern carriages. This injunction, institutionally supported by the builder’s national association, professional newspapers, and education, was part of a wider movement to organize production at a time when the carriage trade was booming. In order to facilitate the circulation of theoretical knowledge within workshops that were reluctant to mathematize their environment, two trade journals translated, in the space of a few years, and on three occasions (once by one journal and twice by the other), the same French treatise on descriptive geometry written by a Parisian carriage woodworker. This paper highlights the process of creation of a mathematical translation in a professional environment. It emphasizes the significant role of the industrial and technical context that influenced the choice of translators, the writing style, and the speed with which a translation was produced and published. In the case of mathematical content that did not belong to the common culture of the trade, international circulation allowed for the direct transfer of knowledge from one national industry to another, without relying on academic sources as intermediaries.

This article maps out the challenges of public global health communication in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an overview of the shifting media of health communication from the post-Second World War era to the present. The article explores the communication of science in real-time or live media of film, television, video and digital social media during three emerging infectious-disease (EID) outbreaks to place COVID-19 health communication in historical perspective. Examination of the transition from centralized, top-down communications to distributed, many-to-many, mobile communication illuminates challenges to expertise, authority and control of health narratives and imagery. Through theories of intermediality, the article explores the central function of gaps in communication networks. The article considers three cases of crisis communications amid EIDs: the influenza outbreak of 1957, HIV/AIDS around 1990 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s, and the challenges posed by scientific uncertainty under these circumstances of live, intermedial health communication. The article concludes that ‘liveness’ in intermedial health communications may have an inherently destabilizing effect on scientific authority.

In 1967, the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions launched the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), which lasted until 1982. The primary goals of the programme were international cooperation in global atmospheric observation to improve weather forecasting and to study climatic changes. This article examines the development phase of GARP from approximately 1961 to 1967, focusing on the US meteorologists Jule Charney and Thomas Malone and the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, who contributed to its organization. It shows a variety of relationships between science and politics, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s call for scientific cooperation to ease international political tensions, followed by the diverse efforts of Charney, Malone, Bolin and others to help secure political support, and finally the protracted negotiations within the International Council of Scientific Unions to shape and organize the Global Atmospheric Research Program.

This article explores the dispute between the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the physician Johann Daniel Metzger over the moral autonomy of individuals with mental illness. Situating the debate within the broader context of the evolving philosophical and medical professions in eighteenth-century Germany, the article examines how a professional conflict emerged over who – the physician or the philosopher – should serve as the legal authority in cases where moral responsibility was in question. The analysis shows that this was not merely a theoretical issue for Kant, but a practical one, brought to the fore by the infanticide trial of Margarethe Kaveczynska, in which Kant’s friend, Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, presided as judge. The article argues that while Kant’s vision for the practical application of his anthropology influenced his conception of moral autonomy, he ultimately lost ground to the rising authority of the medical profession.