Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on January 29, 2027 in order to attend this event.
Please join the East Central European Center, the Harriman Institute, and the Center for Science and Society for a book talk by William de Jong Lambert. Stuart Firestein will serve as discussant, and the talk will be moderated by Małgorzata Mazurek.
This book tells the story of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s genetics laboratory at Columbia university, where he presided over a handful of students and a roomful of fruit flies. The laboratory proved to be a refuge for researchers unable to study genetic inheritance in the Soviet Union. The Fly Room, a collective biography of the men and women who formalized the study of genetics in Morgan’s laboratory, weaves together scientific, social, and cultural history for a fascinating narrative of how Morgan learned to reject all that he thought was true and validate theories considered unserious.
William deJong-Lambert is a Historian of Science whose research focuses on evolution and heredity. In 2009 and 2012 he organized the first-ever workshops devoted to the history of Lysenkoism, and has since gone on to publish widely on the evolutionary synthesis of genetics and natural selection. His current research focuses on the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and the history of Brazilian genetics.
Stuart Firestein, is a Professor at the Columbia University Department of Biological Sciences. Firestein is now studying the sense of smell. In his neuroscience lab, he investigates how the brain works, using the nose as a “model system” to understanding a smaller piece of the brain. In 2012 he released the book Ignorance: How it Drives Science, and in 2015, Failure: Why Science Is So Successful.
