M. Susan Lindee

M. Susan Lindee’s work explores the history of genetics, radiation, and science and technology in the twentieth century. The Janice and Julian Bers Chair of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, her books include Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War (Harvard, 2020); Suffering Made Real (Chicago, 1994), The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995) and Moments of Truth in Genetic Medicine (Hopkins, 2005). Honors include the Schuman Prize of the History of Science Society, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. She has been Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and at the Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC), Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. She has also been Ship’s Historian for a Lindblad Galapagos trip; and participated in Penn’s Galapagos Project as an instructor in the islands; and in Spring 2023 taught a Penn Global Seminar that brought 16 undergraduates to Hiroshima and Tokyo. She is working now on a study of the history of the Atchafalaya River, a Louisiana swamp where she has family origins. She is a member of the History of Science Society, the Louisiana Historical Association, American Society for Environmental History, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Negotiating Radiation Protection in the Nuclear Age

Edited By Maria Rentetzi, Angela N. H. Creager, M. Susan Lindee

The development of nuclear technologies for war, medicine, and energy production dramatically increased the number of people exposed to artificial radioactivity and raised new stakes and questions about protecting them. This volume examines how the establishment of standards and protocols for radiation protection was not only a technical process, but also the byproduct of extensive and ongoing negotiations among scientists, states, international bodies, lawyers, economists, companies, unions, and activists. Over time, exposed individuals—whether Japanese survivors, accident or fallout victims, atomic veterans, or workers—have leveraged their own experiences of radiation exposure to challenge powerful institutions and their standards. Contributors explore radiation risk and protection policies across the globe, from Japan to Canada, Britain to North Africa, and Spain to Greece. They excavate the legal, scientific, diplomatic, and personal challenges posed by radiation protection. Chapters move from the individual and institutional to the global level, arguing that issues of radiation exposure, like so many other forms of risk, are never merely personal but deeply, often invisibly, political and diplomatic.