Science, Medicine and Technology since 1900
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from
Section A and three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal
weighting.
Begin each answer on a separate sheet.
Write legibly and on only one side of the paper.
Answers must be tied up in separate bundles, marked 1, 2, 3, etc.
according to the number of the question.
Attach a completed coversheet to each bundle and complete a master
coversheet listing all questions attempted. It is essential that you write
your examination number and not your name on the coversheet and on
each bundle.
You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent
pages of this question paper until instructed to do so by the
invigilator.
Page 2 of 3
SECTION A
1. In what ways, and to what extent, did military demands drive scientific
and medical development in the twentieth century?
2. “We should understand the twentieth century as a coherent epoch in the
history of science.” Assess this claim.
3. In what ways did patrons and funders influence scientific, technological
and medical research in the twentieth century?
SECTION B
4. “The early twentieth-century medical elite rejected laboratory science.”
Assess this claim.
5. “‘Pure science’ does not exist, but ‘pure science’ is still an influential
historical category.” Assess this claim.
6. What can the histories of relativity and the atomic bomb tell us about the
relations between science and politics in the early twentieth century?
7. Compare the contributions of big physics and small physics to American
society.
8. Why, and with what consequences, were the reproductive sciences
considered “illegitimate” in the twentieth century? To what extent did that
change?
9. How did Bukharin and other Soviet thinkers criticise Western
understandings of science?
10. Discuss the role of patents in the development of biotechnology.
11. “The experimental approach to the challenge of disease assures us that
the Golden Age of Medicine we now enjoy will extend far into the future”
(President of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1956). Discuss the
significance of such claims for the history of twentieth-century medicine.
12. How did medical and scientific research in early twentieth-century Africa
reflect and/or subvert imperial projects?
13. Why did health policymakers advocate for “health for all” in the 1970s?
14. Compare the trajectories of biology and physics through the second half
of the twentieth century.
Page 3 of 3
15. How, between 1918 and 1945, were new medicines brought to market
and what roles did academic researchers, pharmaceutical companies,
clinicians and governments play?