Title:
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Building Manchester biology 1851-1963 : national agendas, provincial strategies
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This thesis examines the development of biology as an academic discipline in
Manchester from the second half of the nineteenth century until the early 1960s.
During the late nineteenth century, as has been well documented by a number of
studies, the life sciences underwent rapid and radical change. However, as this
thesis emphasises, the opening decades of the twentieth century were also crucial
to the institutionalization of biology, bringing as they did the rise of applied
biology and the growth of specialization. Biological departments are the locus of
the discipline-building process. The changes that transformed biology over the
decades in question are therefore explored as they manifested themselves in the
growth and development of the Botany and Zoology departments of Manchester
University. The study situates Manchester within the wider national institutional
and disciplinary context and examines the influence of political and economic
factors on Manchester Biology. While others have examined aspects of the
history of British biology through studies of individual institutions, the present
study is the first to explore the particular dynamics involved in building biology in
a civic university. The study therefore brings a much needed `provincial'
perspective to bear on a national picture characterized by an uneven distribution of
resources. The thesis therefore has broader relevance for the question of the
changing relationship between science, the universities and the state in the
twentieth century.
This thesis is concerned with three major currents of change that shaped the
content and organization of academic biology in the period under study: the `New
Biology' of the late nineteenth century, the rise of applied biology in the early
twentieth century and the growth of `experimental zoology' in the interwar period.
The emphasis is on research, although pedagogical change is also considered at
particular points. The first shift took biology into the laboratory. The rise of
applied biology led to the mobilization of state funds for biology and widened
career opportunities for biologists. The third current is associated with
specialization and the move beyond whole organism biology: for example, to the
cellular and molecular levels.
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