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The development of radio and ionospheric physics in Australia is inseparable from that of the Empire. But specific circumstances of time and place, however, coloured local advances in different ways. As in Britain, two deep-seated research traditions converged in Australia. The British influence on these fields reached its peak in the early stages and then suffered a continued decline. But in this regression the Australian community showed a mixture of longing for rivalry and a certain traditional veneration for British scientific authority, in contrast to increasingly profound respect for American technological expertise. Before nationhood was achieved in Australia, the modest community of radiophysicists managed to reconcile a sense of nationality with the openness to international stimulus, beyond the imperial horizon. The transit from a dependent Dominion towards independence had, therefore, its scientific echoes.

This chapter situates hoodia within the longer history of the creation of healing plant Diasporas in South Africa from San settlement up through the process of plant prospecting at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. This story emphasizes that both plants and people move, and questions the extent to which hoodia is indelibly “San”, given that it did not figure prominently in earlier depictions of Bushmen nutrition and that Afrikaaner communities historically used hoodia, too. The chapter examines herbarium records and the research of the Marshall family, Richard Borshay Lee, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Kalahari Study and finds little mention of Hoodia among San in the Kalahari. This shows the pitfalls of tying plant property to specific communities through benefit sharing in Southern Africa. The chapter indicates traditional knowledge has been constituted in the context of scientific research, building on studies of nutrition and health in South Africa.

Ghanaian scientists and healers vied for rights to a promising treatment for drug-resistant malaria, Cryptolepis sanguinolenta. During the colonial period, healers developed therapies for malaria even though government did not see the disease as a problem for Africans. Ghanaian scientists then re-examined traditional therapies for malaria and other diseases through a nationalized plant screening exercise in the 1950s and 60s. The co-founders of Ghana’s Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine, the physician Oku Ampofo and pharmacist Albert Nii Tackie led research on roots of Cryptolepis. Given economic and political setbacks in the 1980s and 1990s, the team privatized their research through the US-based firm Phyto-Riker, leading to tensions with healers and other scientists. Because harvesting the plant’s roots is unsustainable, Ghanaian plant experts fear this promising treatment for malaria will flounder, even as the world looks increasingly to plant-based cures for the disease.

Do the changes in the scientific article incident on Internet publication constitute a revolution in representation and communication? John Stewart MacKenzie Owen insists that they do not. In The Scientific Article in the Age of Digitization, he argues that contrary to claims about the impact of digitization on scientific communication, “the journal article as a communicative form for reporting on research and disseminating scientific knowledge does not seem to have been transformed by … [the Internet]: it remains a digital copy of the printed form.” Owen views the current situation as preserving and extending “existing functions and values rather than as an innovation that radically transforms a communicative practice that has evolved over the centuries.” The conclusion Owen draws cannot be faulted. We do not doubt that the articles and journals in his sample are, on average, to quote Stevan Harnad, “mere clones of paper journals, ghosts in another medium.” We do, however, question Owen’s sample of online scientific journals. While he includes such journals as the Brazilian Electronic Journal of Economics, Internet Journal of Chemistry, and Journal of Cotton Science (all three now defunct), he excludes the most highly cited scientific journals producing printed and electronic issues, like Nature, Physical Review, Journal of the American Chemical Society, or such highly successful open-access journals as those of the Public Library of Science. It is the latter set that contains the journals we need to scrutinize if we are to discover what innovations, if any, have surfaced and are likely to be widely adopted in the future. These journals have the robust readership, the prestige, the financial resources, and the technical capacity necessary to introduce web-based innovations on a large scale. It is in these that the Internet revolution is now most visible. Still, among all scientific journals today, whether print or electronic, there remains a conservative core at this revolution’s center, a still point in the turning world of knowledge generation and communication.

This chapter investigates the debates surrounding possible exploitation of minerals in Antarctica between 1969 and 1977. In the late 1960s several mineral and oil companies began investigating whether Antarctica could be exploited. This worried the Antarctic Treaty parties, for there was no agreed upon framework for regulating mineral exploitation. In the context of (apparent) global resource scarcity and the spread of offshore oil exploitation in the Arctic, the treaty parties tried to develop a framework for managing mineral exploitation. Although by 1977 they had only agreed on a moratorium, this chapter demonstrates the contours of their debates, especially the temporalities of their negotiations (focused on the future), and the centrality of the concept of “environmental impact” in the conceptual frameworks of both scientists and diplomats.

This chapter investigates the scientific arguments for and diplomatic negotiation of the conservation of Antarctic wildlife between 1959 and 1964. The subject of wildlife conservation was raised by biologists working within the newly created Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), and they proposed a series of measures to the Antarctic Treaty consultative parties. The treaty parties negotiated the matter, passing the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora in 1964. This chapter argues that nature conservation became a tool of advancement and power both for biologists, who wanted institutional standing within the Antarctic scientific community, and for diplomats, who wanted to fill the gaps and silences of the Antarctic Treaty with meaning and with structures for controlling each other. The Agreed Measures were the first step away from the geophysical conception of Antarctica that undergirded the negotiation of the Antarctic Treaty.

This chapter discusses how to analyze and write up a qualitative diary research report. In qualitative diary studies, the summative narrative developed by the researcher is as integral to the report as is the more elaborated narrative provided by each diarist. Distilling individual diaries into a cohesive and concise report and many other challenges face researchers writing reports using complex diary data. After considering some of the practical aspects of writing up diary research studies, such as targeting and tailoring reports to non-academic, applied, or scholarly outlets, the majority of the chapter will turn to analyzing and coding of diary data and report-writing specifically for scholarly outlets. Data analysis and report writing are treated together because these are typically concurrent tasks in qualitative research studies.

This chapter analyzes the scientific and diplomatic debates on the question of sealing and seal conservation from 1964 to 1972, particularly the negotiation of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals. Because the Antarctic Treaty did not apply to the high seas, both scientists and diplomats noted that their 1964 conservation efforts did not cover animals, such as seals and penguins, when they were in the ocean. This gap seemed problematic when there was a push in the mid-1960s to renew commercial sealing in the Antarctic. The Antarctic Treaty parties thus committed to negotiating a treaty to cover seals in the high seas. They persisted in negotiating this agreement even when the prospect of renewed sealing lapsed, because seals and sealing became a useful subject by which the treaty parties, and scientists within SCAR, could continue to mark out their authority and positions for the Antarctic.

In this chapter we review some of the ideas Max Boisot developed about the organizational and strategic aspects of big science projects and their application to the understanding of big science projects like ATLAS. First, we will look at some fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge and its differentiation from the concepts of data and information. Second, we have a look at Boisot's published research on big science, represented mainly by the article "Generating knowledge in a connected world: The case of the ATLAS experiment at CERN", reproduced in this book, and the book "Collisions and Collaboration". Issues in this part range from learning, culture or leadership to new management research models or e-science. Finally, we overview some of the ideas on which Boisot was working in the last months of his research about big science, and that may constitute avenues for future research.