ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Control and Communication in Living Cells. Engelbert Broda, biocybernetics and science communication

• In Event: Rewiring Humans 1: Biology, Psychotherapy, and Philosophy in the Age of Digital Computers

English Abstract

The Austrian physical chemist Engelbert Broda (1910–1983) is probably best known as “the spy who got away” – a communist scientist who informed the Soviet Union on Western nuclear science, never found out during his lifetime. His scientific career has received little historical attention, however. After his exile in Britain, where he’d fled in 1938, Broda returned to Vienna in the late 1940s. He founded the Radiochemical Department (later, Institute for Physical Chemistry) at the University of Vienna and worked on radioactivity and viruses before turning to bioenergetics. Broda’s physicochemical and biochemical research culminated in the publication “The Evolution of the Bioenergetic Processes” (1975).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Broda communicated this research to both scientific and non-specialist audiences. Especially in the context of the latter, he explicitly used (bio)cybernetics and its concepts of information, regulation and feedback to frame the topic of bioenergetics. This talk will explore how Broda approached science communication and what role (bio)cybernetics played in this. A major source will be his largely unexplored personal papers, which include typescripts and correspondence. How did Broda adapt his writing to different audiences? Is (bio)cybernetics more than a framing device for him; was he, for instance, actively following and engaging with cybernetics research, given that he wasn’t a cybernetician himself? Does this change over time, when the popularity of cybernetics – called both “Mode und Methode”, i.e. both a “fashion/fad“ and a “method”, by historian Philip Aumann – began to wane?

Author

• Helen Piel