The Germans occupying Paris arrested Emile Borel and three other members of the Académie des Sciences in October 1941 and released them about five weeks later. Drawing on German and French archives and other sources, we argue that these events illustrate the complexity of the motivations and tactics of the occupiers and the occupied. While Borel and his colleagues were genuine members of the Resistance, and those who arrested them were full participants in a brutal occupation, both sides respected a bargain, of no small importance to the Vichy regime, that allowed the university to pursue its work if its members avoided overt acts of opposition.

Space projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals.

The heuristic value of evolutionary biology for economics is still much under debate. We suggest that in addition to analytical considerations, socio-cultural values can well be at stake in this issue. To demonstrate it, we use a historical case and focus on the criticism of biological analogies in the theory of the firm formulated by economist Edith Penrose in postwar United States. We find that in addition to the analytical arguments developed in her paper, she perceived that biological analogies were suspect of a conservative bias – as in social Darwinism. We explain this perception by documenting the broader context of Edith Penrose's personal and professional evolution, from her student days at Berkeley to her defense of Owen Lattimore against McCarthyism. We conclude that in the case under study at least, science and values were certainly intertwined in accounting for her skepticism towards biological analogies – insight we develop in the conclusion about today's relationships between biology and economics.

A growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell's The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science.

We expand upon the notion of the “credibility cycle” through a study of credibility engineering by the food industry. Research and development (R&D) as well as marketing contribute to the credibility of the food company Unilever and its claims. Innovation encompasses the development, marketing, and sales of products. These are directed towards three distinct audiences: scientific peers, regulators, and consumers. R&D uses scientific articles to create credit for itself amongst peers and regulators. These articles are used to support health claims on products. However, R&D, regulation, and marketing are not separate realms. A single strategy of credibility engineering connects health claims to a specific public through linking that public to a health issue and a food product.

This paper argues that the 1953 double-helix solution to the problem of DNA structure was understood, at the time, as a blow within a fiercely fought dispute over the material nature of life. The paper examines the debates, between those for whom life was a purely material phenomenon and religious people for whom it had a spiritual significance, that were waged from the aftermath of the First World War to the 1960s. It looks at the developing arguments of early promoters of molecular biology, including J.D. Bernal, his pupil Max Perutz and his pupil Francis Crick, on the one side, and of the so-called ‘Inkling’ cluster of writers including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other. This debate was conducted through polemical works, journalism, and science fiction and through the Festival of Britain and can be followed through the commentary of Jacob Bronowski. The paper concludes with the model of the double helix now at the Science Museum, which can be considered an archaeological relic of a battle in a war which is still being fought.

UK defence R & D played a leading role in the development of gallium arsenide and other III–V semiconductor materials. Often touted as the semiconductor of the future because of its potential for high-speed computing, gallium arsenide had unique properties compared to silicon that made it attractive for military applications. Some consumer applications were also developed, and these eventually became significant with its use in mobile phone handsets in the mid-1990s. However, despite the apparent advantage of close links to the defence establishments and early access to expertise in III–V technologies, UK companies had limited success in these civil markets, preferring instead to focus on defence procurement.

It has been traditionally held that the idea of a prime matter of metals was abandoned in the eighteenth century, especially after the failure of Hermann Boerhaave to find it in mercury. However, documents tell a different story: the search for the metalliferous principle, in the form of an odd substance known as Gur, Guhr, Ghur or Bur, was very much alive in the 1700s. This was a project that involved Boerhaave himself, as is shown by his correspondence with J.B. Bassand. The first mention of this strange material appears in Sarepta, a collection of sermons by the sixteenth-century Bohemian preacher Johannes Mathesius, sometimes mentioned in the specialized literature but rarely studied. This paper discusses the various conceptions of this material held as the prime matter of metals, from Mathesius to the eighteenth century, involving reputed authors such as John Webster, Jan B. van Helmont, Georg E. Stahl and Boerhaave.