War, nature and technoscience

This issue of Notes and Records contains three papers and an essay review. The papers may be read, in rather different ways, as commentaries on the relationship between science, technology, medicine and war. War appears in these studies as an opportunity for the display of diverse technologies in the Crimea; as the unavoidable context for chemical work in the first half of the twentieth century; and as a chilling metaphor—Rachel Carson's ‘war against nature’—for the potentially devastating effect of pesticides and other chemicals on the natural world. The three papers comment, also, on the changing status and perception of technocracy—by throwing new light on the complex interplay of scientific innovation, large-scale industry and …