Daniel Kevles

Daniel J. Kevles (born 2 March 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American historian of science. He is J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1964 to 2001 and served as faculty chair. Since 2001, he is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus and adjunct professor of law at Yale University. In his retirement, Kevles holds additional appointments at Columbia University (visiting professor of history; scholar in residence, Columbia Law School) and New York University (interdisciplinary fellow, New York University School of Law).
His research interests have been primarily on the history of science in America, the interactions between science and society, and environmentalism. He is best known for his survey works, which generalize large amounts of historical information into readable and coherent narratives. His books include The Physicists (1978), a history of the American physics community, In the Name of Eugenics (1985), currently the standard text on the history of eugenics in the United States, and The Baltimore Case (1998), a study of accusations of scientific fraud.
The mathematician Serge Lang subsequently waged an unsuccessful campaign to prevent Kevles from being granted tenure at Yale, claiming that Kevles' book was too sympathetic to David Baltimore. A the time that Kevles published his defense of Baltimore, Kevles was a faculty member at Caltech and David Baltimore had recently become the President of Caltech. Although sharply criticized by Lang and some others as well, it was generally praised for meticulous scholarship and detailed reporting.
In 2001 Kevles was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society. Recently he has been working on a history of the uses of intellectual property in relation to the life sciences from the eighteenth century to the present.