Cyrus Mody

Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, History, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

Interests

Uploads

Papers by Cyrus Mody

Setting an Agenda for the Social Studies of Nanotechnology: A Summary of the Joint Wharton-Chemical Heritage Foundation Symposium on Social Studies of Nanotechnology

Science and Engineering Careers in the United States: An Analysis of Markets and Employment: Instruments of Commerce and Knowledge: Probe Microscopy, 1980-2000

How Probe Microscopists Became Nanotechnologists

ABSTRACT

Instruments of Commerce and Knowledge: Probe Microscopy, 1980-2000

Longstanding debates about the role of the university in national culture and the global economy ... more Longstanding debates about the role of the university in national culture and the global economy have entered a new phase in the past decade in most industrialized, and several industrializing, countries. One important focus of this debate is corporate involvement in academic scientific research. Proponents of the academic capitalism say that corporate involvement makes the university leaner, more agile, better able to respond to the needs of the day. Critics say that corporate involvement leaves society without the independent, critical voices traditionally lodged in universities. I argue that a science and technology studies perspective, using case studies of research communities, can push this debate in directions envisioned by neither proponents nor critics. I use the development and commercialization of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope as an example of how research communities continually redraw the line between corporate and academic institutions. Cyrus C. M. Mody Center for Contemporary History and Policy Chemical Heritage Foundation 315 Chestnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19106 [email protected] Instruments of Commerce and Knowledge: Probe Microscopy, 1980-2000 Cyrus C. M. Mody Chemical Heritage Foundation Introduction The voices of editorialists and analysts excoriating or praising commercialization of products of higher education has recently grown very loud. 1 Yet this debate too often proceeds at an abstract level divorced from the small-scale settings where commercialization actually occurs. The questions asked are too stark, and the dangers and benefits of academic entrepreneurialism are amplified beyond recognition. As Steven Shapin notes in a recent survey, proponents' and nay-sayers' limited historical horizons lead to, among other things, ludicrous over-praising of incentives to patent academic research and over-dire warnings about the corporate university. 2 The few

format_quoteProbe microscopy development illustrates complex corporate-academic connections shaping research, commerce, and entrepreneurial ecosystems.format_quote

Download

Scientific Training and the Creation of Scientific Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Managing Path-Breaking Innovations: CERN-ATLAS, Airbus, and Stem Cell Research (review)

Technology and Culture, 2008

ABSTRACT

Nanotechnology and the Modern University

Practicing Anthropology, 2006

Faster-than-light reading

Social Studies of Science

Review of Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience by Lillian Hoddeson; Adrienne W. Kolb; Catherine Westfall

Technology and Culture

Corporations, Universities, and Instrumental Communities: Commercializing Probe Microscopy, 1981-1996

Technology and Culture, 2006

format_quoteProbe microscopy illustrates intricate interconnections between corporate and academic worlds, challenging narrow definitions of "academic research" and "commerce."format_quote

Download

Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth (review)

Technology and Culture, 2006

ABSTRACT

A New Way of Flying': Differance, Rhetoric and the Autogiro in Interwar Aviation

Social Studies of Science, 2000

The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice

Science, Technology & Human Values, 2005

have repeatedly pointed to the importance of the visual in scientific practice. STS has also expl... more have repeatedly pointed to the importance of the visual in scientific practice. STS has also explicated how embodied practice generates scientific knowledge. I aim to supplement this literature by pointing out how sound and hearing are integral aspects of experimentation. Sound helps define how and when lab work is done, and in what kinds of spaces. It structures experimental experience. It affords interactions between researchers and instruments that are richer than could be obtained with vision alone. And it is a site for tacit knowledge, providing a resource for the replication of results, and the transmission of knowledge, and the construction of social boundaries within instrumental communities.

Download

Failures to Compute

Science, 2013

The larger world of nano

Physics Today, 2008

Santa Barbara, physics, and the long 1970s

Physics Today, 2013

“A Towering Virtue of Necessity”: Interdisciplinarity and the Rise of Computer Music at Vietnam-Era Stanford

Osiris, 2013

ABSTRACT Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a... more ABSTRACT Stanford, more than most American universities, transformed in the early Cold War into a research powerhouse tied to national security priorities. The budgetary and legitimacy crises that beset the military-industrial-academic research complex in the 1960s thus struck Stanford so deeply that many feared the university itself might not survive. We argue that these crises facilitated the rise of a new kind of interdisciplinarity at Stanford, as evidenced in particular by the founding of the university’s computer music center. Focusing on the “multivocal technology” of computer music, we investigate the relationships between Stanford’s broader institutional environment and the interactions among musicians, engineers, administrators, activists, and funders in order to explain the emergence of one of the most creative and profitable loci for Stanford’s contributions to industry and the arts.

Fact and friction

Metascience, 2010

Download

Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science

Journal of American History, 2011

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the Nuclear Reactor, the Computer, Ham Radio, and Recombinant DNA: Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research ; Science in Flux: NASA's Nuclear Program at Plum Brook Station, 1955–20...

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2008

Cyrus Mody

Uploads

Papers by Cyrus Mody

Log In