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This spotlight issue encourages reflection on the current COVID-19 pandemic, not simply through comparisons with previous epidemics, but also by illustrating that epidemics deserve study within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Epidemics are not solely a function of pathogens; they are also a function of how society is structured, how political power is wielded in the name of public health, how quantitative data is collected, how diseases are categorised and modelled, and how histories of disease are narrated. Each of these activities has its own history. As historians of science and medicine have long pointed out, even the most basic methodologies that underpin scientific research—observation, trust in numbers, the use of models, even the experimental method itself—have a history. They should not be taken as a given, but understood as processes, or even strategies, that were negotiated, argued for and against, and developed within particular historical contexts and explanatory schemes. Knowing the history of something—whether of numbers, narratives, or disease—enables us to see a broader range of trajectories available to us. These varied histories also remind us that we are currently in the midst of a chaotic drama of uncertainty, within our own unstable and unfolding narrative.

This spotlight issue encourages reflection on the current COVID-19 pandemic not simply through comparisons with previous epidemics, but also by illustrating that epidemics deserve study within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Epidemics are not solely a function of pathogens; they are also a function of how society is structured, how political power is wielded in the name of public health, how quantitative data is collected, how diseases are categorised and modelled, and how histories of disease are narrated. Each of these activities has its own history. As historians of science and medicine have long pointed out, even the most basic methodologies that underpin scientific research – observation, trust in numbers, the use of models, even the experimental method itself – have a history. They should not be taken as a given, but understood as processes, or even strategies, that were negotiated, argued for and against, and developed within particular historical contexts and explanatory schemes. Knowing the history of something – whether of numbers, narratives, or disease – enables us to see a broader range of trajectories available to us. These varied histories also remind us that we are currently in the midst of a chaotic drama of uncertainty, within our own unstable and unfolding narrative.

Introduction: writing the transnational history of science and technology / John Krige -- The US regulatory state

Recent scholarship on the history of science in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has provided new horizons for exploring questions about the nature and epistemology of socialist science, its epistemic virtues, its knowledge-producing practices, its geographical imagination and networks of communication and exchange, and its relations to the Chinese state and state building. In this essay the author uses a focus on practice to extrapolate implications and tendencies that he sees as unifying recent studies, and he clarifies their contributions to the current understanding of the history of science in the PRC. Particularly with respect to Chinese state-science relations and the nature of Maoist mass science, a focus on practice illuminates how recent scholarship has queried and interrogated unitary conceptions of the Chinese state and science, highlighted transnational connections and movements, and deepened our understanding of Maoist mass science.

Abstract In this article we reflect on the development of an educational fieldwork conducted along the Ipiranga River, in which we bring the debates concerning History of Science and Environmental Education closer together, by problematizing the social and environmental issues in the city of São Paulo in a contextualized and critical way. To that end, we established the limits for the hydrographic basin by highlighting the headwaters of the Ipiranga River and the changes it has undergone, as well as the political, sanitary and environmental meanings throughout the 20th Century. We associated the environmental issues with the history of two important institutions located along the river: The Botanical Garden and the Museu Paulista's [São Paulo Museum] arboretum. We highlighted the practices, techniques and scientific representations that were developed on the sites, by valuing them as cultural heritage of the Brazilian science.

History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contributions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production—a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships—and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three‐dimensional world.

Therise of large-scale laboratory research in nineteenth-century Germany has often been portrayed as a continuous success story. Taken as indicative are the two sciences on the leading edge of the trend, chemistry and physiology; developments in biology, physics, and the technical fields are then depicted either as imitations of or as the results of knowledge or personnel transfer from the leading disciplines. At first glance, the founding in 1879 of the world's first continuously operating psychological laboratory in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, a physiologist turned philosopher, seems to fit this model very well. In one study, Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins assert that this instance of "role hybridization," as they call it, marked experimental psychology's "take-off into sustained growth" as a scientific discipline.