Mary Jo Nye is Professor of History Emerita at Oregon State University. She is the author of Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (to be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2011). She is also the author of Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (Harvard University Press, paperback, 1999) and is the editor of The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences (2002).