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Dr Robert Bud
Visiting Professorial Fellow

Location: The Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2D
email: robert.bud@sciencemuseum.org.uk
Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 4200

Robert Bud is an historian of science, technology and medicine. Also the Principal Curator of Medicine at the Science Museum, he has worked at the Museum in a variety of roles, for 30 years. He was educated in Liberal Studies in Science in Manchester, one of the world’s first science studies departments, and in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he took his doctorate. Fascinated by the process of story telling in the Museum medium he has directed the development of major narrative and collections based websites at the Science Museum as well as several major exhibitions.

Research interests:

An interest in the faith placed in science as a solution to major practical problems has been a unifying concern linking Dr Bud's studies of the history of chemistry, instruments, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. Much of his earlier work was on the 19th century and he organised the major 2001 ‘Locating the Victorians’ meeting. In his most recent studies he has examined the social and cultural history of penicillin, and he is working with colleagues at Queen Mary on better understanding of the place of science in post-war Britain. A lecture series on energy and policy since the War is being cosponsored by the Mile End Institute, the Science Museum and the British Academy.

Publications:

Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Cold War Hot Science: Applied Research in Britain’s Defence Establishments, 1945-1990 (Harwood, 1999) edited with Philip Gummett

Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines (Harwood, 1999) edited with Barney Finn and Helmuth Trischler

Instruments of Science: An Historical Encyclopedia (Garland, 1998) edited with Deborah Warner; Awarded the Bunge Prize 1997; Japanese edition 2005

The Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology (Cambridge University Press, 1993), German edition, 1995.

Invisible Connections: Instruments, Institutions and Science (Bellingham: SPIE, 1991) edited with Susan Cozzens

Chemistry in America 1876-1976: Historical Indicators (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), with Arnold Thackray, Jeffrey L Sturchio and P Thomas Carroll

Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), with G K Roberts