Daniel Kevles

Jerome Daniel Kevles ( born March 2, 1939 in Philadelphia ) is an American historian of science. He is a professor at Yale University.

Kevles studied at Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1960 and was there received his doctorate in 1964 in history. From 1964 he was an associate professor and later professor at Caltech, from 1986 Koepfli Professor of Humanities. 1995 to 1997 he served on the Board of the Faculty. In 2001 he was Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale.

It deals with American and British history of science (especially physics and genetics ), where he examines the relationship between science and society. One of his books deals with the handling of fraud and forgery in science at the example of a case in which the Nobel laureate David Baltimore was involved - this supported a professor and ex- employee who was in his view erroneously accused of academic dishonesty and lost by 1991 his post as president of Rockefeller University. The book was a Kevles criticism from mathematician and Yale professor Serge Lang, who said that Kevles would be too strong for Baltimore take sides and then in one of his campaigns in vain tried to prevent a permanent job ( tenure ) of Kevles at Yale. He also wrote a standard work on the history of eugenics in the United States and a book on the history of physics in the United States. More recently, he dealt with the history intellectual property in the life sciences since the 18th century.

In 2001 he received the George Sarton Medal, in 1979 the Natural History Society Prize, and the 1999 Watson Davis Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He has been married since 1961 and has three children.

Writings

• The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character, Norton, 1998
• The Physicists: the history of a scientific community in modern America, Alfred Knopf 1978, Vintage Books 1979, Harvard University Press 1995
• In the name of Eugenics: genetics and the use of human heredity, Harvard University Press, 1985, 2nd edition 1995
• Published by Leroy Hood: The Code of codes: scientific and social issues in the Human Genome Project, Harvard University Press 1992
• A history of patenting life in the United States with comparative attention to Europe and Canada: a report to the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, European Commission 1992