Documenting "the Future History of Biomedical Science"
In the sub-project 'Documenting "the future history of biomedical science“‘, Lara Keuck and Christof Sendhardt have started to study the establishment of the Pew Biomedical Scholars Oral History Program in the late 1980s. The Pew trusts combined their biomedical scholarships with detailed documentation of the scholars research work carried out by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, thus creating one of the most extensive corpora of Oral History in the biomedical sciences.
Lara and Christof trace the Program's documentation strategies that oscillated between narratives of "writing and making history while it happens" and the ambition to provide the grounds for a historiography yet to come. They aim to take this prompt as a reason not only to elucidate the origin of the conducted oral history interviews as historical sources, but to reflect on the role of historiographic arguments and practices in the formation of biomedical sciences.