Kaori IIDA Associate Professor

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ResearchMap: http://researchmap.jp/iida_k/

History of Science

All processes of science including its production and use are embedded in our society.  History of science is one way to see how science develops in the social context.  I am currently examining the history of biology in Japan in the first half of the 20th century.  In particular, I am interested in how genetics has developed through various Japanese social contexts such as modernization, wartime, the U.S. Occupation, and Cold War.

Our program offers an opportunity for graduate students in biology to write a "sub-thesis" in science and society.  Through the writing requirement, students will analyze various problems in science in the past and present.  It is our hope that young biologists after the completion of our program will continue developing a keen sense of the complexity surrounding their own research and science in general.

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Papers and publications

  1. Iida K, Proctor RN (2018) ‘The industry must be inconspicuous’: Japan Tobacco’s corruption of science and health policy via the Smoking Research Foundation. Tobacco Control (Online First).
  2. Iida K (2015) A controversial idea as a cultural resource: The Lysenko controversy and discussions of genetics as a ‘democratic’ science in postwar Japan. Social Studies of Science 45 no.4: 546-569.
  3. Iida K (2015) Genetics and ‘breeding as a science’: Kihara Hitoshi and the development of genetics in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. In D. Phillips and S. Kingsland eds. New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture (Archimedes 40, Springer International Publishing Switzerland), pp. 439-458.
  4. Iida K (2010) Practice and politics in Japanese Science: Hitoshi Kihara and the formation of a genetics discipline.  Journal of the History of Biology 43: 529-570.
  5. Iida K and Proctor RN (2004) Learning from Philip Morris: Japan Tobacco’s strategies regarding evidence of tobacco health harms as revealed in internal documents from the American tobacco industry.  Lancet 363: 1820-1824.  
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