Features
Prof Combines Love of History, Science
Historian studies methodology in biology, examining the different approaches, methods and tools biologists use to answer questions about organisms
BY DAVID DICENZO
 |
| As a historian of biology, Prof. Tara Abraham gets to meld her two diverse interests. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Prof. Tara Abraham, History, admits she can be a bit of a perfectionist at times. That trait ended up playing a significant role in the development of her academic career, drawing the Welland, Ont., native away from the field of biology and into a broader journey through the history of science.
Abraham, who joined U of G last summer, had an early interest in biology and history, excelling at both in high school. She opted to pursue the former at McMaster University, but by her fourth year, she was thinking it was time for a change. She could spend a week on an experiment and, despite being as precise as possible, the results sometimes just weren't there.
“I'd have to go back and retrace my steps, and I found that really frustrating,” says Abraham. “Over time, I decided I liked thinking about science rather than doing science. I didn't want to turn my back on science, however. I wanted to be part of it, but from a humanistic perspective rather than being in a lab all day.”
A history of science elective she took at McMaster struck a chord and was influential in steering her academic path, she says.
After completing her science degree in Hamilton in 1992, Abraham went west, spending two years in Vancouver, where she worked at the Granville Island Market while contemplating where to do her graduate work. By 2000, she had completed both an MA and PhD in the history and philosophy of science and technology at the University of Toronto. She followed that up with post-doctoral stints at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
She has great memories of her time at Dibner, which was established in the late 1980s as a place where senior fellows, more established scholars, and post-doctoral and doctoral fellows could go and be part of a community devoted exclusively to the history of science.
“It was just a really rich environment to be in,” Abraham says of the institute, which closed its doors last year. “Someone once referred to it as the Grand Central Station in the history of the science profession because it was just such a huge exchange of ideas, with people coming and going.”
After completing her post-doctoral work, Abraham spent two years at York University before arriving at U of G. With her love of science and history now melded into a career as a historian of biology, she is focusing on 20th-century life sciences, primarily in the United States. Her main interest is methodology in biology, examining the different approaches, methods and tools biologists use to answer questions about organisms.
But she's also intrigued by the clashes in thought that have existed between hands-on and theoretical biologists in the past century. That area of research introduced her to cybernetics, a transdisciplinary movement of mid-20th century America that brought together mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, neurologists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, all interested in understanding purposeful behaviour in both organisms and machines.
“Methodologically, many cyberneticians believed that math and formal modelling were the best ways to pursue knowledge about organisms and their complex functioning,” says Abraham. “This was true especially of Warren McCulloch (an American Ivy League-educated cybernetician), who, although he was trained as an experimental neurophysiologist, took a highly theoretical approach to the brain and the mind.”
She recently presented a paper on McCulloch at a conference in Vancouver. “He was a bit of a maverick and asked big questions, much to the chagrin of more traditional brain scientists.”
In the classroom, Abraham continually stresses to her students that science doesn't exist in a vacuum.
“We have these images of scientists as these separate figures in lab coats. People also have the idea that scientific ideas are all black and white, with no room for debate. What I try to show the students is that there are a lot of grey areas. The science they do — and the knowledge that's produced by scientists — is shaped by social, cultural and political values. There's really an interplay between science and society — you can't separate the development of science from society.”
Although examining the history and role of science in our world is her main passion, Abraham also has an artistic side. She's been interested in acting since performing in a high school production called Twelve Angry Jurors. Since then, she's done a number of plays and was featured in Toronto filmmaker Mishann Lau's short Come and Go and, most recently, a dramatic reading of Marianne Fedunkiw's historical play The Influence of Beauty: Dr. Dorothea Maude and the Serbs in WWI.
Acting has been on the backburner for a while, but she hopes to get back to it.
“It helps with my teaching,” she says. “Teaching is theatrical in a way. Sometimes to psych myself up, I think of it as a performance. It's also about getting out of your head, where you're not so worried about what's going to happen next. Improv exercises, which I really find challenging, are about getting out of your head and just being in the moment. That's an asset in teaching, as well — to just really let go.”