Angels lead researcher to Berlin

by Nicole Findlay

Stumbling across a 1947 pamphlet promoting a children’s play, put Robyn Smith on the path to a postdoctoral fellowship in Berlin.

The doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology has recently been awarded a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. This October, Smith will move to Berlin to begin the two-year fellowship in the department of Experimental Systems and Spaces of Knowledge.

Smith examines the emergence of scientific research in vitamins during the turn of the twentieth century. Although scientists hadn’t identified vitamins as such in their early examination of food, they were able to identify elements that contributed to nutrition. Smith’s dissertation addresses how scientists were able to develop research methodology around a set of factors that they had not yet defined. When she begins the fellowship, she will expand her thesis to focus on British vitamin research during WWI.

It was a series of coincidences that put Smith on the trajectory for the fellowship. While preparing for her doctorate, she was reading the work of Michel Serres, a philosopher and historian of science, in whose work Hermes and angels figure prominently. One afternoon, Smith found a League of Nations document that referred to vitamins as food hormones. According to the document, the word hormone is a derivative of the name Hermes. Later the same day, she discovered the pamphlet for An Argument in the Kitchen, a play in which various food groups competed over their nutritional value to children.

“The vitamins, to my surprise and sheer delight, were represented by angels,” said Smith. “So there was this resonance between the theory of the history of science I was reading and this scientific object, the vitamins. It was too good to pass up.”

Beyond the next two years, Smith plans to remain in academia. However, she will leave the location to chance.