Myles Jackson

Myles W. Jackson (born Paterson, New Jersey on 25 November 1964) is currently the Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of the History of Science at New York University-Gallatin, Professor of History of the Faculty of Arts and Science of New York University, Professor of the Division of Medical Bioethics of NYU-Langone School of Medicine, Faculty Affiliate of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, NYU School of Law, and Director of Science and Society of the College of Arts and Science at NYU. He was the inaugural Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2007 to 2012. The chair is named after Bern Dibner (1897 – 1988), an electrical engineer, industrialist, historian of science and technology and alumnus of Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

He received his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University with Simon Schaffer in 1991, with a thesis entitled "Goethean Law and Order: Art and Nature in Die Wahlverwandtschaften". He has been a Senior Fellow of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. In 1998, he was appointed an assistant professor of the history of science at Willamette University at Salem (Oregon). He became an associate professor and full professor at the same university in 2002 and 2007, respectively.

He is the author of numerous articles on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and technology, with a particular emphasis on the cultural history of nineteenth-century German physics. He has also authored two books, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germanyand Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics, which won the Paul Bunge Prize of the German Chemical Society for the best work on the history of scientific instruments in 2005 and the Hans Sauer Prize for the best work on the history of inventors and inventions in 2007. Spectrum of Belief has been translated into German, Fraunhofers Spektren: Die Präzisionsoptik als Handwerkskunst. He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Music, Sound, and the Laboratory, with the University of Chicago Press published in 2013. He is the editor of Perspectives on Science: Gene Patenting (MIT Press, 2015). And his new monograph, The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race, was published by MIT Press in 2015.

He was elected member of the Erfurt Academy of Sciences in 2009. He was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences - Leopoldina (Halle) in December 2011. In 2012 he was elected corresponding member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Science. He has worked on issues of genetic privacy and the effects of intellectual property law and the patenting of human genes on research in molecular biology and served as an expert for the ACLU in their lawsuit against Myriad Genetics on the BRCA 1 and 2 gene patents. He has been the recipient of an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship, and in 2010 he received the Francis Bacon Prize in the History of Science and Technology from Caltech. And he has published on the theme of race and genomics. He was the Francis Bacon Visiting Professor of History of Science and Technology at Caltech in 2012. In 2014 he received the Reimar Lüst/Humboldt Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was named Bosch Public Policy Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He will be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin for the academic year 2016-17. He is currently working on an undergraduate text exploring the interrelationships between music, science, and technology from the eighteenth century to the present.