Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 320
Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅜
978-0-7425-2696-9 • Hardback • September 2003 • $159.00 • (£123.00)
978-0-7425-5306-4 • Paperback • October 2005 • $62.00 • (£48.00)
Laurence Schneider is professor emeritus of Chinese history at Washington University in St. Louis.
Part 1 Introduction: Controlling Nature, Science, and Scientists
Part 2 Part I: The Republican Era, 1911-1949
Chapter 3 Prologue: Independence through Dependence
Chapter 4 Chapter 1: Biology at National Central, the Model University
Chapter 5 Chapter 2: Genetics at Yanjing and Nanjing Universities
Chapter 6 Chapter 3: War, Revolution, and Science
Part 7 Part II: Mao's China, 1949-1976
Chapter 8 Chapter 4: Learning from the Soviet Union: Lysenkoism and the Suppression of Genetics
Chapter 9 Chapter 5: Lysenkoism as Official Party Doctrine
Chapter 10 Chapter 6: The Double Hundred Policy and the Restoration of Genetics
Chapter 11 Chapter 7: One Step Forward, Two Back: Genetics from the Double Hundred through the Cultural Revolution
Part 12 Part III: Deng's China, 1976-2000
Chapter 13 Chapter 8: Science Reforms and the Recovery of Genetics
Chapter 14 Chapter 9: Biotechnology Becomes a Developmental Priority
Chapter 15 Conclusion: Biology-with Chinese Characteristics
Biology and Revolution is both an erudite labor of love and an absorbing examination of the struggle for control of scientific endeavor, and deserves a wide readership.
— The China Journal
Excellent.
— American Historical Review
This book contains a rare but detailed analysis of how institutional, social, and political factors influenced not only Chinese professional lives, but also their institutions, universities, and laboratories. A concluding chapter offers a thoughtful, critical survey of events. Carefully researched writing; chapter bibliographical notes; glossary of Chinese names; list of 24 scientists interviewed by Schneider; bibliography in English and Chinese. Highly recommended.
— Choice Reviews
The intellectual content of this book is intriguing.
— Journal Of The History Of Biology
In this comprehensive history of biological science in modern China, Laurence Schneider undertakes to explain the origins, developments, deviations, and triumphs—including China's role in sequencing the human genome—of Chinese genetics and evolutionary theory across the twentieth century. Tracing this history from the 1920s through the 1990s, Professor Schneider's volume adds to the small but growing number of monographs that cross the 1949 divide as well as to the handful of studies about twentieth-century Chinese science.
— Journal of Asian Studies
The four central chapters on Lysenkoism...provid[e] invaluable information and detailed analyses of the role of biology in a period of revolutionary upheaval.
— China Quarterly
A most welcome contribution by a pioneer scholar....The first English-language history of a natural scientific discipline across the twentieth century in China, [this book] will be a standard text in the field for many years to come....Schneider convincingly and elegantly brings the material together under the overarching theme of control....As a pioneering effort in a growing field in the history of science, this book will help inspire much future research........[A] tremendous contribution to our understanding of science in twentieth-century China.
— Isis
Biology and Revolution is a remarkable achievement that serves as both an excellent introduction to the history of science in twentieth-century China and an in-depth historical study of Chinese genetics and society. It's clearly written and well-organized.
— East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine