Philip J. Pauly has examined many aspects of the history of the biological sciences in United States, with particular emphasis on the influence of life scientists on society and politics. He is the author of Controlling Life, a biography of the experimental biologist Jacques Loeb, and of Biologists and the Promise of American Life, a history of ways in which biologists influenced American national development. He has also investigated the relations between alcohol research and Prohibition, the origins of high school biology, and the founding of the National Geographic Society. He is currently completing a history of the horticultural transformation of North America from the 1700s to the present, focusing on the tensions between plant introduction and pest exclusion.

Pauly holds a PhD in history of science from the Johns Hopkins University. He has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, from the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He was a member of AAAS’s Sesquicentennial Advisory Committee.