The Public Biologist: The Life and Legacy of Geneticist Bentley Glass

Wolfe Audra J, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This two-year project investigates the life and legacy of geneticist Bentley Glass (1906-2005), a prominent American educator, administrator, and civil libertarian. Based on previously unexplored materials at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, this biographical project uses the methods of archival history to explore what it meant to be simultaneously a public intellectual and a scientist in Cold War America. Intellectual Merit Glass's public and professional choices present a challenge of historians' understandings of the life of a Cold War scientist. Glass held leadership roles in an extraordinarily wide range of public, private, and professional organizations, from the Maryland American Civil Liberties Union, to the Baltimore Board of School Commissioners, to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. He was particularly outspoken on academic freedom and civil rights during a time when political statements more typically resulted in scientists' professional marginalization, yet his career thrived. An understanding of Glass's experiences is therefore particularly relevant to the strands of scholarship on postwar science that deal with academic freedom, race, education, and scientific authority. Potential Broader Impact Glass's life and legacy hold relevance for many contemporary debates about the proper relationship between science and society, including the role of experts in a democracy, the uses of genetic testing, and the teaching of evolution in the schools. As a sort of geneticist "everyman," Glass's career provides a lens into the growth of institutional structures that continue to characterize science today. Given his involvement in science, politics, civil rights, and civil liberties, a study of his life offers the potential to connect the history of Cold War science with the broader story of American political, social, and cultural history in the postwar period.