Of Euclid’s lost manuscripts, few have elicited as much scholarly attention as the Porisms, of which a couple of brief summaries by late-Antiquity commentators are extant. Despite the lack of textual sources, attempts at restoring the content of this absent volume became numerous in early-modern Europe, following the diffusion of ancient mathematical manuscripts preserved in the Arabic world. Later, one similar attempt was that of French geometer Michel Chasles (1793–1880). This paper investigates the historiographical tenets and practices involved in Chasles’ restoration of the porisms, as well as the philosophical and mathematical claims tentatively buttressed therewith. Echoes of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and of a long-standing debate on the authority and usefulness of the past, are shown to have decisively shaped Chasles’ enterprise—and, with it, his integration of mathematical and historical research.

When Japan faced the world after the collapse of its feudal system, it had to invent its own modern identity in which the Tokyo Cherry became the National Flower. Despite being a garden plant, it received a Latin scientific species name as if it was an endemic species. After Japan’s colonial conquest of Korea, exploring the flora of the peninsula became part of imperial knowledge practices of Japan. In the wild, a different cherry was discovered in Korea that was proposed as the endemic parent of the Tokyo Cherry, supporting imperialist policies. Following Japan’s defeat after the Pacific War, South Korea in turn entered its search for cultural identity. The supposed parent of the Tokyo Cherry was now successfully acclaimed as the parent species of the colonial oppressor’s Tokyo Cherry and named the King Cherry. Such scientific practice into cherries smoothly intertwined with nationalism and its legacy continues to interfere with research today.

In this article we examine how a leading Israeli hospital gradually became a large biomedical research facility, resembling a huge laboratory. For Chaim Sheba (1908-1971), the founder and first director of Tel-Hashomer Hospital, the massive immigration to Israel in the 1950s was a unique opportunity for research of diverse human populations, especially Jews who had arrived to Israel from Asia and Africa. The paper focuses on the way research and medical practices were integrated and their boundaries blurred, and studies the conditions under which an entire hospital became a research field. Using the case of one of Israel’s prominent medical institutes, we explore and expand upon the idea of “the hospital as a laboratory,” arguing that, for Sheba, it was not only the hospital but the entire country that functioned as a great research site—a vast laboratory that “had no walls.”

This article discusses two approaches to save the European white stork populations from extinction that emerged after 1980. Despite the shared objective to devise transnational, science-based conservation measures, the two approaches’ geographical focus was radically different. Projects by the World Wildlife Fund and the International Council for Bird Preservation focused firmly on the stork’s wintering areas on the African continent. Interventions by a second group of ornithologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell concentrated on the Middle East as a migration bottleneck. Based on archival research, interviews and correspondence with involved ornithologists, the article examines stork representations as an important lens for investigating the professional politics of ecology and conservation. It shows that representations of white storks, the birds’ ecology, and derived conservation hotspots became part of the boundary work used by European ornithologists in the creation of changing scientific and institutional identities.