The "New Man" in Soviet Biology and Medicine

描述:

DESCRIPTION: This proposal is to spend two years preparing a book manuscript provisionally entitled, 'Revolutionary Experiments: The "New Man" in Soviet Biology and Medicine.1 This book will explore the role of the concept of the "new man" in the institutional, intellectual, and cultural development of experimental biology and experimental medicine in Soviet Russia during the 1920s and 1930s. It aims to uncover the ways in which this concept mediated the dialogue between Russian researchers and their Bolshevik patrons. How exactly were the Bolsheviks' changing "visions" of the "new man" translated into particular institutions and research programs in experimental biology and medicine? How was the dialogue between scientists and their patrons conducted? Were Russian "bourgeois" scientists simply using the Bolsheviks' revolutionary rhetoric as a means of survival under the new "proletarian" regime? Or was there genuine overlapping between scientists' "visionary biology" and their patrons' "revolutionary dreams"? The search for answers to these questions forms the core of this project. The book will include eight chapters, covering various lines of research in endocrinology, biophysics, brain morphology and physiology, biochemistry, hematology, eugenics, and medical genetics. The research for this book will require extensive exploration of documents preserved in the archives of various Soviet agencies involved with experimental biology and medicine, as well as personal papers of numerous scientists, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. It will also require a careful examination of published sources, ranging from scholarly journals, popular magazines, and monographs to institutional reports and newspapers, many of which are unavailable outside of Russia.