In July 2025, I am participating in The Oxford Food Symposium, where I’ll be giving a paper on the history of an obsolete emergency, the world protein gap. The theme of this year’s event is Food and the Elements. My paper considers how the history of a panic over global protein supplies, and the resulting efforts to discover or create new sources of protein, including from leaves and by feeding microbes on the byproducts of oil refining, has important lessons for today.
The menu below is for a lunch served to Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food, at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, demonstrating a range of foods on which the country could subsist in the event of total blockade. It included Leaf Protein Soup. Woolton was not impressed. He recorded in his diary that he had to resort to a Turkish bath and massage to rid his liver of the protein he’d consumed as part of the ‘purely scientific lunch.’ (from Norman Pirie papers, RS, NWP c.149, at Bodleian Library, Oxford).
In June 2025, a second edition of my biography of Marie Curie is being brought out by Haus Publishing, 22 years after the first! It has a new introduction in which I consider Curie’s intense antipathy to attention and why we should still be interested in her, though she is a terrible role model in many respects.
In May 2025 I signed a contract with Princeton University Press to publish The Woman Who Took on the World: Dana Meadows, the Limits to Growth, and the Invention of Systems Thinking (world rights). I am extremely pleased to be working with the Press, and in particular with Eric Crahan, who edits their history of science list in addition to serving as Editorial Director for humanities and social sciences. With thanks to Peter Tallack, of Curious Minds, for getting this over the line.
On April 14, 2025, I participated in a symposium to celebrate the life and scholarship of my friend Catherine Will. It was moving and inspiring to hear from all those with whom Catherine worked.
In November 2024, I attended the History of Science Society meeting in Mérida, Mexico, the centenary of the society. I gave a paper titled ‘Time is a Resource: How Should We Spend It? On History, Climate and Activism,’ in which I considered how scientists and historians have used different temporal concepts, including deep time, crisis, emergency and dynamics.
While I was there, I rode the new Tren Maya between Cancun and Mérida, a fascinating and enjoyable experience.
On April 11 2024, I participated in a terrific workshop on ‘Disciplinary Crossroads: Between History of Science and Environmental History,‘ organized by Carolina Granado (PhD(c) iHC-UAB), Hèctor Isern (PhD(c) iHC-UAB), Max Bautista (PhD(c) UCLouvain). My paper was an opportunity to this about climate science, history and activism, with a focus on some interesting papers published on systems history of technology in Technology and Culture by Pete Drucker (below) and others.
In June 2023 I spoke on “How interdisciplinarity saved the world: global problems and climate change at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 1972-1988” at a conference on Practice and Place in History of science and knowledge hosted by the Finnish Literature Society and the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
West Churchman was a philosopher who helped found the discipline of management science and wrote influential books on systems thinking. He wanted to better understand the relationship between systems and ethical human relationships so that systems thinking might have a chance of bringing about positive and lasting change into the world.
In this short film I made about Churchman, he asks a few disarmingly simple questions about the ‘good’ of systems. Churchman was often to be found knitting during academic seminars. With thanks to Kristo Ivanov, who generously gave me permission to use footage from his 1987 interview with Churchman.
An event was held in China on March 31, 2022 to mark the 295th anniversary of Newton’s death. Three books on Newton recently published in Chinese were highlighted, including my The Newton Papers, recently translated into Chinese.
More than 43,000 people attended the online event.
On March 12, 2022, I spoke at a conference on “The History of Climate Science Ideas and their Applications,” organised by the history section of the Royal Meteorological Society.
On December 1, 2021, I spoke about what historians can offer to public discussions of climate change with Mogens Laerke of the Maison Française Oxford in his “Science and the Public Sphere Seminar.”
On Friday, September 24, 2021, I participated in an online discussion of the three heavy-hitters held in the collections of Cambridge University Library–Newton, Darwin, Hawking.
On October 2, 2021, I spoke with Aminul Hoque on a panel on “Science museums and the ‘culture war’ ” chaired by Sara Abdulla and sponsored by the Association of British Science Writers.
In February 2020, I gave a talk on “Waters of the World: The Story of Climate in Six Lives” at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
In April 2019, I spoke about the Newton manuscripts held by Cambridge University Library.
Sarah Dry 