Can the Scientific Community Survive?
Together with Columbia Global Reports the DWIH New York is delighted to host a science for society event featuring a lecture by Lorraine Daston followed by lunch and networking.
The communal part of the scientific community was always fragile, menaced by personal rivalries, national hostilities, and the centrifugal forces of long distances and many languages. Yet in the late nineteenth century, scientists managed to create an international community that survived two world wars, the Cold War, and the huge increase in the number of researchers almost everywhere. Now the scientific community faces public distrust, political attacks, predatory journals, and the possibility that generative AI will be used to write and review research articles. Can the scientific community meet these challenges?
This event is by invitation only. If you are working in the fields of the history of science or science diplomacy and would like to attend, please: e-mail events@dwih.org.
Agenda
12:30 PM – Guest Arrival
12:45 PM – Welcome and Introduction
12:50 PM – Keynote
1:10 PM – Lunch & Informal Discussion
2:00 PM – Event Ends
Speaker
Lorraine Daston is Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, and the moral authority of nature. Her scholarship has been recognized by the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society (2012), the Dan David Prize in the History of Science (2018), the Heineken Prize for History of the Royal Netherlands Academy (2020), and the Balzan Prize (2024). Her most recent books are Against Nature (2019), Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Leopoldina, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the British Academy.Lorraine Daston
Event Information
April 24, 2026, 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM
German House 871 1st Ave, New York
Organizer(s): DWIH New York