IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB780219826

A Visit to Biotopia: Genre, Genetics and Gardening in the Early Twentieth Century (2018)

British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 51
Issue: 3
Pages: 423-455

DOI: 10.1017/S000708741800047X

URI: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/visit-to-biotopia-genre-genetics-and-gardening-in-the-early-twentieth-century/BFB996938A7185EA7F50C1AE80C6D3A2

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Science and society Genetics Utopias Biology 20th century, early Great Britain United States

The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology and its ability to improve the world. A major catalyst for this enthusiasm was new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries's mutation theory and Mendel's newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers (from elite scientists to journalists and writers of fiction) took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas, using a wide range of genres to help their fellow citizens make sense of biology's promise. From these miscellaneous writings a new and distinctive kind of utopianism emerged – the biotopia. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was – for the first time – offering humanity unprecedented control over life. Biotopias often visualized the world as a garden perfected for human use, but this vision was tinged with gendered violence, as it became clear that realizing it entailed dispossessing, or even killing, ‘Mother Nature’. Biotopian themes are apparent in journalism, scientific reports and even textbooks, and these non-fiction sources shared many characteristics with intentionally prophetic or utopian fictions. Biotopian themes can be traced back and forth across the porous boundaries between popular and elite writing, showing how biology came to function as public culture. This analysis reveals not only how the historical significance of science is invariably determined outside the scientific world, but also that the ways in which biology was debated during this period continue to characterize today's debates over new biological breakthroughs.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB780219826/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Endersby, Jim; (2013)
Mutant Utopias: Evening Primroses and Imagined Futures in Early Twentieth-Century America (/isis/citation/CBB001321212/)

Book Shelley Z. Reuter; (2016)
Testing Fate: Tay-Sachs Disease and the Right to Be Responsible (/isis/citation/CBB751314117/)

Book Amir Teicher; (2019)
Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany, 1900-1948 (/isis/citation/CBB585433440/)

Chapter Opitz, Donald L.; (2011)
Cultivating Genetics in the Country: Whittingehame Lodge, Cambridge (/isis/citation/CBB001231556/)

Article Creager, Angela N. H.; Santesmases, María Jesús; (2006)
Introduction: Radiobiology in the Atomic Age: Changing Research Practices and Policies in Comparative Perspective (/isis/citation/CBB000671450/)

Article Laubichler, Manfred D.; (2008)
Conrad Hal Waddington: Forefather of Theoretical EvoDevo (/isis/citation/CBB001230124/)

Article Radick, Gregory; (2011)
Physics in the Galtonian Sciences of Heredity (/isis/citation/CBB001023997/)

Article Bard, Jonathan B. L.; (2008)
Waddington's Legacy to Developmental and Theoretical Biology (/isis/citation/CBB001230125/)

Book Currell, Susan; Cogdell, Christina; (2006)
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (/isis/citation/CBB000774027/)

Book DeJong-Lambert, William; (2012)
The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair (/isis/citation/CBB001213212/)

Book Brush, Stephen G.; (2009)
Choosing Selection: The Revival of Natural Selection in Anglo-American Evolutionary Biology, 1930--1970 (/isis/citation/CBB001020903/)

Book Thurtle, Phillip; (2007)
Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB000830502/)

Article Kingsland, Sharon E.; (2007)
Maintaining Continuity through a Scientific Revolution: A Rereading of E. B. Wilson and T. H. Morgan on Sex Determination and Mendelism (/isis/citation/CBB000773116/)

Article deJong-Lambert, William; Krementsov, Nikolai; (2012)
On Labels and Issues: The Lysenko Controversy and the Cold War (/isis/citation/CBB001250824/)

Thesis Varno, Theodore James; (2011)
The Nature of Tomorrow: Inbreeding in Industrial Agriculture and Evolutionary Thought in Britain and the United States, 1859--1925 (/isis/citation/CBB001567261/)

Article Brandt, Christina; (2010)
Zeitschichten des Klons. Anmerkungen zu einer Begriffsgeschichte (/isis/citation/CBB001021197/)

Book Shapiro, Adam R.; (2013)
Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools (/isis/citation/CBB001213141/)

Article Oliver Hill-Andrews; (2019)
‘A New and Hopeful Type of Social Organism’: Julian Huxley, J.G. Crowther and Lancelot Hogben on Roosevelt's New Deal (/isis/citation/CBB017487408/)

Book Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt; (2018)
The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950 (/isis/citation/CBB428499522/)

Thesis Stickgold-Sarah, Jessie; (2011)
The Textual Body: Genetics and Dystopia in American Fiction (/isis/citation/CBB001562734/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}