The Palmyra Portrait Project

Portrait

Born in 1944, I grew up in a world in which polio was both a gripping fear and real threat. Then in a matter of a few years-polio was eradicated by a vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. Later I learned that Salk's efforts were built on pioneering work of many others, including John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins (Nobelists, 1954), and David Bodian, who pioneered studies of polio patho...

The mind's self-portrait.

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind's self-portrait has as a central fea...

The rediscovery of Palmyra and its dissemination in Philosophical Transactions

This paper examines the first publicly documented western encounter with the ancient city of Palmyra as an archaeological site. This encounter was achieved in the late seventeenth century by a group of British merchants, who reached Palmyra and made drawings and reports of its ruins. The reports were then published in Philosophical Transactions in the mid 1690s. This paper points to the ways in...

Google Portrait

Portrait of the Coveted Cinchona

celebrated for her meticulous attention to detail, form, and color. Her collection of 833 paintings, which portray more than 900 species of plants, comprises her life’s work and is on permanent display in the Marianne North gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom. Because North painted with oils, rather than with watercolors, and because she predates color photography, her bod...