This essay explores how Viennese physicists who specialized in radioactivity research embodied visions of their new discipline in material terms, through the architectural design and the urban location of their institute. These visions concerned not only the experimental culture of radioactivity, or the interdisciplinarity of the field, but also the gendered experiences of those working in the institute's laboratories, many of who were women. In designing the Institute for Radium Research at the end of the 1910s – the first such specialized institute in Europe – physicists and architects were also designing the new discipline in a strong sense. In the architectural form of the building one can trace the aesthetics of the new discipline, the scientific exchanges of its personnel and the image of a newly formed community in which women were more than welcomed.

This text draws attention to former ideologies of the scientific hero in order to explore the leading features of Charles Darwin's fame, both during his lifetime and beyond. Emphasis is laid on the material record of celebrity, including popular mementoes, statues and visual images. Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey and the main commemorations and centenary celebrations, as well as the opening of Down House as a museum in 1929, are discussed and the changing agendas behind each event outlined. It is proposed that common-place assumptions about Darwin's commitment to evidence, his impartiality and hard work contributed substantially to his rise to celebrity in the emerging domain of professional science in Britain.

The science historian Charles Singer might seem to have shared with positivists a widely held commitment to observation as the foundation of knowledge. Yet in fact Singer's historiography was peculiarly unconcerned with instruments, models and other artefacts. Such tools might have been expected to present crucial empirical evidence for the historical arguments and ideal material for the didactics which pioneers such as Singer associated with their mission of a ‘scientific humanism’. In their hands, physical things did not translate into epistemic things. This was deliberate. Yet while the configuration of science history which would distance it from material objects seems to speak of a shift from the visual to texts, the ocular technologies deployed in Singer's histories rather point to a co-existence of different kinds of visuality in that period's scholarship. As the academic and the museological aspects of science history pulled apart, the visuality of the museum came to be complemented by texts that vitally relied on images. The function of such images was to create proximity with the cognitive desires around whose traffic these histories became paper theatres of knowing. In bypassing material theatres and crafting realities that he understood to be empirically undemonstrable, Singer purposefully developed a non-authoritarian approach to the legacy of the scientific enterprise. He presented the story of understanding nature not as entailing obedience to its established results, but instead as embodying an attitude of continuing enquiry.

Historians of science have often presented the inter-war period as a time when British scientific communities radically questioned existing scholarship on ‘race’. The ascendancy of genetics, and the perceived need to challenge Nazi ‘racial’ theory have been highlighted as pivotal issues in shaping this British revision of ‘racial’ ideas. This article offers a detailed analysis of British scientific thinking in the inter-war period. It questions whether historians have exaggerated or oversimplified the prevalence of anti-‘racial’ reform. It uses a wide range of scientific writings to consider issues of continuity and change in ‘racial’ thinking in mainstream British scientific communities. The article probes the relationship between science and politics, focusing on the extent to which ideological factors affected both the scientific agenda and conclusions as regards ‘racial’ issues. Far from dismissing the idea that events in the inter-war period triggered changes in the way in which British scientists dealt with ‘race’, the article argues that the seeds of the post-Second World War international scientific rejection of ‘race’ were sown in inter-war Britain amid considerable ambivalence and discord.

We must remember that the investigator, whether a biologist, an economist, or a sociologist, is himself a part of history, and that if he ever forgets he is a part of history he will deceive his audience and deceive himself.J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics, 1938