The Callebaut Prize was established in 2015, and is awarded every two years. It is intended to advance the careers of recent graduates working at the intersection of the fields represented by ISHPSSB by recognizing the best manuscript utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISH meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. The prize is named in honor of Werner Callebaut, whose untimely death in 2014 was mourned by the philosophy of biology community worldwide and particularly ISH members, and who made considerable contributions to the promotion of constructive dialogue and reciprocal respect in philosophical and scientific work, hence making a prize focused on interdisciplinarity most appropriate.
We are grateful to individual donors who have supported this prize, as well as to the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) for support for the first three prizes.
For the 2021 Prize, the Prize Committee received 18 submissions from a variety of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, which well-represented the diversity and creativity characterising the work of ISH members, as well as the effective integration of detailed understandings of biological research into historical and philosophical research which our society encourages and supports. Despite the strong field and the high number of excellent candidates, a clear and convincing winner emerged.
This year’s Werner Callebaut Prize is awarded to Marina DiMarco for her paper “(re)Producing mtEve”, which was presented at the 2019 ISHPSSB meeting in Oslo. A revised version of the paper was published in the journal Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Part C: Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences in 2020. Marina is expected to complete her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2022.
The Callebaut Prize honors a paper that stands out for its interdisciplinarity. The committee agreed that DiMarco’s paper does that to a high standard while meeting equally high standards for clarity of argument, fluid and articulate writing style, and ability to tell a good story. Her essay draws substantially on historical archives and brings social studies of science perspectives on the historicity, objectivity, and co-production of knowledge together with philosophically informed analysis, including feminist critique, of the formation of a concept that is both scientific and popular: ‘mitochondrial Eve’. DiMarco reconstructs the history surrounding a key paper in the history of genomics, by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson in 1987, “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution”. She shows that the concept of mitochondrial Eve was a co-production of scientists and popular media sources responding to and re-envisioning
the work and the findings of the paper, to such an extent that the scientist-authors lost control of the narrative around the concept and even the interpretation of the findings, which then fed back into the further trajectory of the field thereafter. Not only does the paper integrate theoretical and technological developments in molecular biology, but it also considers how available computational methods both enabled and limited the research, as well as how popular assumptions informed the science. Particularly fascinating is DiMarco’s attention to the researchers’ publishing strategies and to how the selection of publication venues shapes and constrains the argument and style of the publication. The resulting account is multifaceted, compelling, and engagingly written. Weaving narratives from several confluent scientific fields and practices, from biochemistry and molecular biology, molecular phylogenetics, and population and evolutionary genetics, together with a characterization of the roles of scientists in collecting blood and placental samples from subject populations, DiMarco uncovers a story of concept construction that turns as much on popular certainty of maternal inheritance and uncertainty of paternity, and narratives of primitiveness of some peoples, as it did on new molecular and computational tools to make this ‘breakthrough’ paper possible.
On behalf of ISHPSSB, I am pleased to award the 2021 Callebaut Prize to Marina DiMarco.
Sabina Leonelli, Chair of the Werner Callebaut Prize Committee 2019–2021