Science under Scrutiny  Science under Scrutiny  How Endangered
Species Protection Reshaped Twentieth-Century Field Biology  By
Etienne Benson  Scientists played a central role in the
emergence of a movement to protect endangered species from
extinction in the twentieth century. This movement, in turn,
reshaped scientific practices, communities, and personas and
reoriented research toward new goals. Among other things, vast
databases of species were constructed that both reflected the
state of the art in biological knowledge and helped to determine
the future paths of, and legal constraints on, biological
research. Endangered species became objects simultaneously of
intense epistemological interest and of special ethical care.
This entanglement of ethics and epistemology, social movements
and scientific knowledge, is the subject of ongoing research
affiliated with the Sciences of the Archive project in
Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science.  In 1986, a young biologist from the Un