Daniel Kevles

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Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science. He is currently the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, a position he assumed in 2001. He was previously a professor of the humanities at the California Institute of Technology, where he also served as faculty chair, from 1964 to 2001.

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 physical 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. Because he sympathized with David Baltimore in the latter book, he became the target of some ire from mathematician Serge Lang, who waged an unsuccessful campaign against Kevles being granted tenure at Yale.

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.