Nathaniel Comfort, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
History of biology, especially genetics, molecular biology and biomedicine; history of recent science; oral history and interviewing.

Current project: History of human and medical genetics in America.

Institute of the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
1900 East Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205

Phone: 443-287-6146
E-mail: comfort@jhmi.edu

Research:

I am working on a history of human and medical genetics in America, with a focus on the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1940s, human genetics was an impoverished backwater of agricultural science. In half a century, it became the core discipline of biomedicine. How did that happen? It is a shift that affects everyone today who has a baby, gets a job, buys insurance, or reads a newspaper. I am trying to explain it by looking at social networks, conceptual and technological change, and the ideological commitments of the practitioners. In addition to traditional published and archival sources, I am conducting and using oral histories with many of the historical actors.

Recent Publications:

(ed.) The Panda's Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

"'Polyhybrid heterogeneous bastards': promoting medical genetics in America in the 1930s and 1940s." Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61, no. 4 (2006): 415-55.

"Zelig (recent biographies of Francis Galton)." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 2 (2006): 348-63.

"Barbara McClintock's controlling elements: premature discovery or stillborn theory?," In Ernest B. Hook, Ed. Prematurity in Scientific Discovery (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 175-199

The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

"'The real point is control': The reception of Barbara McClintock's controlling elements," Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1999): 133-162

"Two genes, no enzyme: a second look at Barbara McClintock and the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium," Genetics 140 (1995): 1161-6

Courses:

150.713 Oral History Theory and Method

140.143 Genetics in Medicine and Society

History of Twentieth Century Biomedicine (with Daniel Todes)

Popular Writings:

"Reptile: Galapagos tortoise." The Believer 2, no. 3 (2004): 42-43.

"Suddenly you know the answer," Natural History Oct. 2001 (2001): 90.

"Are genes real?," Natural History June 2001 (2001): 28-38.

"The stuff of life," New York Times Book Review ( 9 Sept., 2001): 22.

Commentary on the 50th anniversary of the double helix, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 28 February 2003.