Problems of Growth
Nine teenth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences
Biblio teca Antoniana, Ischia, Italy, 28 June – 5 July 2026

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Applications are invited for thi s week-long summer school, which provides advanced training in history of t he life sciences through lectures, seminars and discussions in a histo rically rich and naturally beautiful setting. The theme for 2026 is 'Pro blems of Growth’. The deadline is Friday 27 Fe bruary 2026.

Organizers: Christiane Groe ben (Naples, local organizer), Nick Hopwood (Camb ridge), Erika L. Milam (Princeton), Staffan M üller-Wille (Cambridge) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn

Confirmed faculty: Daryn Lehoux&nbs p;(Queen’s, Canada), Dániel Margócsy (Cambridge), He Bian (Princeton), Patrick Anthony (Uppsala),&n bsp;Alison Bashford (UNSW), Hannah Landecker ( UCLA), Edna Suárez-Díaz (UNAM), Sabina Leonelli (TU München)

For funding we are most grat eful to Cambridge HPS, Cambridge Intesa Sanpao lo Fund, George Loudon, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Dohrn Foundation, Science History In stitute, Centro Etnografico delle Isole Campane, Ce nter on Science and Technology at Princeton University ;and the Italian Society for the History of Science.

More information: <http://ischiasummersc hool.org/>

About the school
The&n bsp;Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences prov ides advanced training in a lively international field that offers a l ong-term perspective on some of the most significant ideas, pract ices and institutions in the world today. The school, which has a trad ition of association with the Naples Zoological Station, was revi ved in 2005 after a break of two decades and has run every other year since then other than during the coronavirus pandemic. We can accommod ate up to 26 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The event pro vides a structured learning experience plus extensive opportunities fo r participation and interaction. English is the working language and w e encourage exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, nat ional cultures and historical periods. Spending the week on an island, staying in the same hotel and sharing breaks and meals maximizes ;opportunities for exchange. These are enhanced through social events, including a welcome reception and a day trip to Naples, the morning s pent learning about the history and current research of the Stati on, the afternoon free for sightseeing. There will also be a free afte rnoon to explore Ischia itself.

Introduction to the theme

Growth affords hope and attracts fear. Balanced growth feeds populatio ns, fuels prosperity and imparts purpose to individual and collective lives . The unfettered growth of cells, pathogens, parasites and populations thre atens physiological, economic and ecological collapse. Even balance may be a problematic ideal: norms of flourishing and beauty have guided discrimina tion by vaunting harmonious over retarded, excessive or monstrous growth. T he sustainability of life on Earth, attempts ‘to change the story of cancer ’ and the politics of human diversity: growth is at the heart of them all. Yet compared with other vital processes, notably inheritance, development a nd reproduction, growth in the life sciences has lacked status and attentio n. This summer school provides an opportunity to explore knowledges and pra ctices of growth between antiquity and the present day while bringing toget her problems usually kept apart.< /span>

For Arist otle, vegetative growth was the lowest function of the soul and for that re ason fundamental to plants, beasts and humans. Unlike fire, vegetative grow th had a natural limit. Where minerals grew by external accretion or juxtap osition, living beings had the distinctive ability to expand by assimilatio n of nutrients from the inside out, whether organ by organ or from a prefor med seed. Surgeons tried to remove those tumours, cankers and warts that re sulted from an imbalance of humours among other causes. Generation, which w as hard to imagine in mechanical terms, was often framed as a special form of growth. Late medieval philosophers brought together generation, projecti le movement and the accumulation of capital as sharing the same basic probl em, how a movement severed from its mover could continue to produce. In a b alanced world, gain in one part was compensated by loss elsewhere. Large an imals, according to Aristotle, produced fewer offspring, and the relative g rowth of one organ entailed the diminution of another. At Italian universit ies during the Renaissance, these ancient ideas were taken up and reformed by scholars including Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, Andrea Cesalpino an d Marcello Malpighi in attempts to reground the systematic study of nature and naturalize growth and development.

By contrast, it seems, modern approaches to growth, in biology as in economics , aimed for an overall increase—in size, in number of individuals and in pr oductivity. As the ultimate source of economic progress the physiocrats pos tulated an inherent capacity of nature to reproduce. Naturalists like Lazza ro Spallanzani located the same reproductive and regenerative capacities in minute parts that made up animal bodies. But proper growth was also reckon ed to occur within certain limits. In the principle of population Thomas Ro bert Malthus expressed the limit set for the potentially geometric growth o f human numbers by the merely arithmetic growth of food supplied from the l and. More generally, in the hands of the population biologist Raymond Pearl the S-shaped curve came to capture the colonization of a new space, with s low initial acceleration towards exponential growth and then deceleration a s environmental resistance increased and the ‘carrying capacity’ was reache d. Based on computer simulations of the catastrophic consequences of runawa y population and economic growth, the Club of Rome’s bestselling report&nbs p;The Limits to Growth (1972) is a point of origin for debate o ver ‘degrowth’ and ‘sustainable growth’.

C lassical discussion of growth within organisms had been informed by the can ons of beauty appropriate to each stage of life, with more attention to pro portion than size. Beginning in the eighteenth century, longitudinal measur ements of human growth aligned with demands for military manpower and proje cts of social reform. Measurement fed debate over the roles of heredity and environment. On the one hand, anthropometry ultimately produced distinct g rowth equations for groups defined by age, sex and race. Unbalanced growth was associated with monstrosity and other ways of falling short of the whit e, male model. On the other, failure to grow became an index of deprivation , most obviously, as physiologist Angelo Mosso argued, in the stunting of f actory children. Eugenicists, notably criminologist Cesare Lombroso, were c oncerned with imbalance at the level of populations.

Standards justified clinical intervention in pathologies of grow th. James Tanner, who led the Harpenden study into growth through puberty i nto adulthood, pioneered the treatment with growth hormone of children who looked set to miss out on the advantages of height. Since the 1980s ultraso und measurements of fetuses have identified growth restrictions on an ever larger scale. Yet even after major surveys from Turin to Nairobi, it is con troversial to what extent the standards should be universal or tailored to demographic groups.

In the nineteenth cent ury the knotty issues involved in defining individuals that were explored p roductively at the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli made growth hard to disting uish from maintenance and reproduction. An influential formulation held tha t reproduction represented growth beyond the individual limit. From the 186 0s embryonic development was discussed in terms of the differential growth of parts. Inspired by D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form ;(1917), Julian Huxley set an agenda with Problems of Relative Grow th (1932) and the notion of allometry, or the shape-changing growt h of a part at a different rate from the organism as a whole. Mechanisms co uld be studied in ontogeny or changing patterns traced in phylogeny. In a f amous essay, ‘On being the right size’, J.B.S. Haldane proposed that ‘Compa rative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume’: more complicated forms enable the larger sizes that maintain body temperature at lower metabolic rates.< /div>

Within a species, tissues and organs must somehow ‘know’ when to stop growing. The cell theory framed organismal growth as the division and expansion of these elementary parts. Cancer, the disease that made biomedic ine, came to be understood as a pathology of malignant growth. Research elu cidated factors, not least growth factors, notably nerve growth factor disc overed by Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini, that promoted, regulated and interfered with cell division. Alongside chemotherapies, weedkillers we re developed that acted by causing rapid, uncontrolled growth. Synthetic au xins, the hormones that regulate cell division and expansion in plants, bec ame notorious as the defoliant Agent Orange used by the British in the Mala yan Emergency and the United States in the Vietnam War.

This sketch raises large questions. Should understandings and practices of growth be seen as having first sought balance, then promoted unlimited increase before recognition of the costs of growth called the who le framework into question? Or did gospels of growth acknowledge the need f or some balance? Should we grasp growth as a modern or capitalist imperativ e, a potentially relentless power and a creative one through the transforma tion of quantity into quality? Or is a reason for its neglect in reflection on the life sciences (as distinct from economics and agronomy) that growth implies mere increase in size or number while the truly remarkable changes have seemed to result from qualitative alterations? Reflexively, reservati ons about growth apply to knowledge, too; simply accumulating data has seem ed inadequate when we might need a whole new paradigm. A long-term theme an d implicated in urgent problems, growth in and around the life sciences pro vides a rich field for historical deliberation and for trade between discip lines.

Programme
The school starts with registration and a reception on the a fternoon of Sunday 28 June, and ends after dinner the following Saturday ni ght. Departure is on Sunday 5 July. Lectures last for up to 30 minutes in one-hour slots, leaving at least 30 minutes for discussion.&n bsp;Seminars focus on pre-circulated texts. Groups of students will pr epare each one with the seminar leader.

Daryn Lehoux (Queen’s, Canada)

Lecture: Aristotle on nutrition, growth, residues and seed

Seminar: The ‘faculty’ of growth in Galen

Dániel Margócsy&nbs p;(Cambridge)

Lecture: Soil, vermin and gh osts: The limits to growth in agriculture and medicine in early modern Euro pe and Indonesia

Seminar: Humans and horse s: Theorising size in early modern European Medicine

He Bian (Pri nceton)

Lecture: Growth and regeneration i n early modern Chinese thought

Seminar: Gr owing empire, coining new names: Manchu as a language for flora and fauna n omenclature

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Patrick Anthony (Uppsala)

Lecture: Toward a history of extractive sciences—and the end of the m ineral frontier

Seminar: From bio-geograph y to necro-geography: Sciences of life and death during the Circassian geno cide

Alison Bashford (UNSW)

Lecture: Growth, limits and the afterlife of Malthus

Seminar: Fertility decline and modernity’s great deceler ation: Where is reproduction/population in degrowth scholarship?

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Hannah La ndecker (UCLA)

Lecture: The butcher’s philosophy: Transmuting knowledge of life into knowledge of growt h in modern agriculture and medicine

Semin ar: Practical approaches to working with visual documents: Exploring cases and patterns in an industrial trade journal archive< /div>

Edna Suárez-Díaz&n bsp;(UNAM)

Lecture: Geographies of&nb sp;malnutrition: The clinic, the lab and the committee

Seminar: Traditions of knowledge and intervention: Studying ma lnutrition and mental development in the land of Zapata

Sabina Leonelli (TU München)

Lecture: Growing data crops: Extractivism and agriculture

Semina r: Colonial trends in agricultural data sharing

Public lecture: Intelligenza ambientale: Come usarla per salvare il p ianeta

Cost
The fee for stude nts is €400 each, which includes hotel accommodation and all meals for the week. Students need to pay for their own travel to Ischia. The di rectors will consider requests to waive the fee for accepted students unabl e to raise the money themselves, when supported by a detailed financia l statement and a letter from their department head.

< b>Applications
Applications should be sent by email to <administrator@ischiasummersch <wbr< a=""> />ool.org</wbr<>> and should includ e, please:

• a statement specifying academic experience and interest in the course topic (max. 300 words),

• a ;brief CV,

• a letter of recommendation.

The deadl ine for applications is midnight CET on Friday 27 Febru ary and applicants will be notified of the outcome by 13 March 202 6.