1. See my articles: “Biology in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1953–1965: A Case Study in Soviet Science Policy”, in Soviet Science and Technology: Domestic and Foreign Perspectives, J.R. Thomas and U.M. Kruse-Vaucienne, eds. (Washington: NSF/George Washington University, 1977), pp. 161–188; and “Biology After Stalin: A Case Study”, Survey: A Journal of East and West Studies, 102 (winter 197778 ), pp. 53–80.
2. See especially the monthly issues of Priroda [Nature], 1989–1998, which include heroic biographical treatments of more than half of the scientists in the listing above, each detailing, among their other accomplishments, their struggles to protect and cultivate genetics.
3. For a fine survey of actor-network theory, and criticisms of it, see Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 37–43. Those familiar with the theory will be aware that the epistemic concerns of these approaches distinguish them from my own use of network, which refers rather to an informal, voluntaristic, private, and fluid set of interlinking personal relations and associations based on ties of trust, family, friendship, “old school ties”, shared concerns, common fascinations, and so forth. Here, I am consciously using “networks” and “networking” in the evocative way the word has come to be used in everyday speech, which I find simpler, looser, richer, and more metaphorical, useful, and suggestive than the technical ways various theoretical specialties — including our own — sometimes use the term. The same, of course, is also true of my use of the terms “discipline” and “institution”, which have also been given technical meanings by sociologists and others. (Just to be clear, my use of “institution” here does not include either “marriage” or “the family”, but refers to organizations that have names, administrators, and various ranks or positions, are usually housed in buildings, employ people, organize work or practice of some kind, and spend money that has to be gotten from somewhere.) If we are to rescue our own field from the fragmentation of subspecialization, and keep our own “theory and practice” together, there is much to be gained by using terms in ways that all historians can understand and relate to.
4. See, for example, the memoirs of Richard Goldschmidt, Portraits from Memory:Recollections of a Zoologist (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1956) for his vivid descriptions of the ways long-lasting associations were formed among students in Europe at the turn of the century, ranging from student drinking and dueling groups, to the “groupies” collecting around certain prominent professors, to the bondings that occurred at various marine zoological stations, such as those at Naples and Villefranche.
5. In a pathbreaking article (“The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers”, American Historical Review, 79 (1974), pp. 445–469), for example, Kendall Bailes has demonstrated that the Shakhty Trial and the so-called “Industrial Party Affair” (which marked the “Great Break” and the advent of Stalinism) were not simply arbitrary in their victimization; however unfair the charges of “sabotage”, the trials targeted a network of professionals who had been active in Russia’s technocracy movement.