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BOOK REVIEW: Audra Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in the Cold War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Back in 2011, AmericanScience interviewed writer and editor Audra Wolfe about her work cataloging the papers of American geneticist Bentley Glass. When asked whether the Glass papers indicated that "the 'story' we have about Cold War science is wrong," Wolfe suggested that we'd have to get back to her in a year or so.

Well, it seems that we now have a chance to learn Wolfe's take on Cold War science – not from her research on Bentley Glass, which is ongoing, but from her book Competing with the Soviets, a short, textbook-style history of science and technology in the United States during the Cold War. The book examines the role that science and scientists played in maintaining state power, and how Cold War concerns shaped individuals, institutions, funding streams and research agendas.

The book hits on many of the …

We asked Myrna Perez, whose work focuses on the public role of evolutionary biology during the last quarter of the twentieth century, to reflect on that topic in a post. She's currently writing a dissertation about Stephen Jay Gould; you can find out more about her work here.
What is so compelling about returning to our evolutionary origins? Why do we think that getting back to an earlier period in human history will make us healthier, happier and more fulfilled? In Wednesday's post, Lukas explored the appeal and historic origins of “paleo-diets” in order to make the intriguing suggestion that our attraction to these evolutionary narratives reveals a kind of ambivalent anxiety about modernity. 
When I think of these “cave-man diets” I’m struck by another aspect of this evolutionary origin story: namely, what they imply about human sex difference. The image of the cave-man offers a certain type of uncivilized, rugged masculinity – one that has been hemmed in by the advent of agri…