M. Susan Lindee

The tile and mirror wall mural at the C.W. Henry Elementary School near my home depicts soaring planets, swirling stars, and embedded ceramic portraits of scientific luminaries. The ceramic Mae Jemison (first African American woman in space) appears lodged in the concrete above the ceramic Albert Einstein (needs no introduction). Wernher von Braun (Nazi rocket scientist recruited to the United States through Project Paperclip) appears near Guion Bluford (first African American astronaut). 

I love that mural. I am charmed by its depiction of the beauty and wonder of scientific discovery, and its gentle references to the vexed moral quandaries of the actual history of science. Von Braun was close to both Hitler and Kennedy; African American physicians, scientists and engineers have been undermined by every important scientific institution; and the barriers to women scientists are, even today, strange and sad. Scientific methods, furthermore, have been enlisted to reinforce injustice. The elementary school mural captures, perhaps unintentionally, both the beauty and the tragedy of modern science. 

Yes, I know, that is not what most people see when they look at a sparkly wall mural at an elementary school. But I am a historian of science. My scholarship explores science in the Cold War, particularly those sciences engaged with nuclear weapons and radiation risk. I also study and teach about scientific racism, sexism, and colonialism. These are “difficult subjects” that invite careful and sustained attention to injustice and suffering. I have struggled to teach students about these subjects without destroying their faith in science or in humanity: The point of such teaching cannot be to enrage students. 

I hope instead that these historical realities can help them see the world with unclouded eyes, or, in the phrase apparently borrowed from the Brits, but widely used in my Texas childhood, to help them learn to “keep their eyes peeled.”

What do I mean? In my teaching, I call attention to the selective use of data in virtually all race sciences: Those intent on proving inferiority chose to count whatever could suggest it. Quantification, I want them to see, is as slippery as any other language. I ask them to notice how some people intervened by creating compensatory new prizes intended for those who never won the “real” prizes. I let them read letters of recommendation gushing about what a “ladies’ man,” an aging-but-single male scientist was, to provoke them to wonder why the status of anyone as a “ladies man” was relevant to a job recommendation (anyone known to be gay would not be hired, especially if security clearance were required). And I ask them to consider the cognitive dissonance of an expert who helped build nuclear weapons and also proclaimed in soulful and poetic public lectures that science was a force for peace. 

Peeled eyes, perhaps, are attentive to the whole story rather than the narrow experiences of the elite few, willing to see what was opaque to historical actors themselves, and equipped to recognize possible strategies that could interrupt unjust systems. Seeing things clearly is the first step toward developing critical thinking skills and useful theoretical perspectives, and the first step toward acting clearly in the present. Unclouded, peeled eyes can perhaps find the right questions to tell the truth about difficult to understand events—questions that might even illuminate how to swerve the future. 

Remember that the brilliant Manya Sklodowska went to Paris to study physics because she could not attend University in Poland. She was rejected by Polish Universities not because she lacked scientific talent (her two-time Nobel Prize winning work as Marie Curie would indicate otherwise), but because women were not welcome. Such reinforcements of social order are true of many other institutions (not just scientific) but with science, for me, the dissonance burns. Science has a reputation as an elevated human intellectual endeavor, intended to gain trustworthy new knowledge, grounded in pure rationality, fair, open to the best minds, and operating as a full meritocracy. This reputation is only partially earned.  

I am proud to work at Penn. But Penn, a scientific powerhouse respected around the world, has held for decades about 1,300 skulls used at one time to rank human groups by race, many collected by Philadelphia’s nineteenth century pro-slavery race scientist Samuel George Morton. Included were stolen remains of Native Americans, African Americans, and others. Penn acquired the Morton collection as a loan from the Academy of Natural Sciences in the 1960s, long after Morton was gone, and long after his ideas and data were recognized as deeply flawed. By the 1990s, when Penn finally accepted the collection as a formal gift from the Academy, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act was already in effect (1990). Faculty here used the skulls to do research and to teach anthropology for decades until 2020, displaying many openly in a general classroom. My point is that the Penn Museum and the University apparently failed for decades to see clearly what that collection really was and what it meant. That failure was a failure of clouded eyes. In 2021, the museum finally announced plans to repatriate or rebury more than 50 skulls that belonged to enslaved people from Cuba and the United States—a first step. 

Then there is the question of service to the state and militarized knowledge. Many scientists, engineers, and physicians have turned their considerable intelligence to building weapons systems. People with excellent cognitive skills—arguably some of the greatest minds in history—again and again devoted their brilliance to producing human injury. This is, or should be, puzzling. 

In my course on global radiation risk, I invite students to understand the militarization of knowledge from “the ground.” At the Peace Park in Hiroshima, there is a virtual reality tour that permits visitors to experience the bombing through headsets and sound effects. Standing near the Aioi Bridge, the actual target in 1945, visitors can “look up” to watch the bomb detonate. I invite my students to stand on that bridge when we study the Cold War, often defined as a period when the world narrowly avoided the use of nuclear weapons. In fact, 2,056 nuclear weapons were used in the Cold War, in “tests” that damaged people unable to retaliate. The Cold War was a limited nuclear war waged unilaterally against people with whom no one was actually at war. In my course, we stand with those global hibakusha. 

What do students need to understand about militarized knowledge systems, racist biologists, and initiatives that blocked, thwarted, and undermined the intellectual ambitions of talented people who were marked by race, sexuality, gender, and class? The one thing I want them to see most of all is that helping science live up to its partially earned reputation is a worthwhile endeavor. 

Might it upset the mostly minority students at Charles W. Henry Elementary School that the well-known “great minds” of astronomy in the mural were mostly white guys? Might they imagine that this history reflects their own potential? Mae Jemison, Guion Bluford, and others in the mural contradict that idea, and in their cheerful presence they stand up for the kids in that schoolyard. 

So I enjoy the buoyancy of the mural, the bright celebration of ceramic tiles and mirrors, and the honest way that it unintentionally calls our attention—our eyes—to the glories and contradictions of the scientific enterprise. 

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M. Susan Lindee is the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science and chair of the department of history and sociology of science. 

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.