Everett Mendelsohn, one of America’s foremost historians of science, will deliver the Thomas Hall Lecture as part of the Assembly Series at 4 p.m. Nov. 13 in Rebstock Hall, Room 215.
His talk is titled “Dolly and the Historians: Science, Politics and Ethics of Cloning.”
Mendelsohn is professor of the history of science at Harvard University, where he has been on the faculty since 1960. He has worked extensively on the history of the life sciences, as well as on aspects of the social and sociological history of science and the relation of science and modern societies.
He has recently focused on human cloning and the fluctuating public interest in what he calls the “eugenic temptation.”
Mendelsohn has never confined himself to the ivory tower. For the past 20 years, working with either the Quakers or with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has traveled to the Middle East to join discussions between Arabs and Israelis and to help produce reports on matters relevant to their conflict.
He is the founder and former editor of the Journal of the History of Biology and serves on editorial boards of several other scientific journals.
Among recent publications are the jointly edited volumes The Practices of Human Genetics (1999), Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism (1993) and Science, Technology and the Military (1988).
Assembly Series talks are free and open to the public. For more information, call 935-4620 or go online to wupa.wustl.edu/assembly.
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