In this Issue
- Features
  
  Winter 2024
  
  AI’s Unanswered Questions
  Wellesley faculty and alumnae are on the forefront of shaping how we coexist with AI—a space that has quickly become ripe for innovation, regulation, and deep thinking on ethics.More
  
  An Artist Comes Home
  Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And —the first retrospective of the acclaimed conceptual artist, cultural critic, and Wellesley ’55 alumna—is the debut exhibition at the newly reopened Davis Museum.More
  
  The Matter of Things
  A novelist contemplates the beauty and impermanence of this world as she works to absorb the loss her of father.More
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Heirloom Science Instruction

John Cameron, professor emeritus of biology, has cataloged some 1,600 objects from labs past. As Wellesley looks to the future of science on campus, Cameron showed us some of his favorite items from its past.

By Lisa Scanlon Mogolov ’99
Photography by Lisa Abitbol

Window on Wellesley,

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Antique wooden hydrodeik

College Hall Relic

Cameron spotted this tool in the Science Center’s collection, a hygrodeik that measures humidity, in a photo of its previous life in College Hall’s library. Cameron suspects that the instrument was saved from the library during the 1914 fire.

Rare Bird

Many of the taxidermied animals that overlooked the Focus have found homes at other institutions, but Wellesley kept those whose species are extinct: a passenger pigeon (above) and a Carolina parakeet.

Budding Interest

Henry Durant personally ordered a complete set of larger-than-life papier-mâché botanical teaching models made by Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux in France. Some of the collection now resides near Global Flora.

Early X-Rays

Shortly after Wellesley physics professor Sarah Frances Whiting learned in 1886 about Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, she used this Crookes tube to make her own.

Face Off

Another Auzoux piece in Wellesley’s collection is a life-sized model of a human head. The College also has a life-sized model of a female body, one of only a handful in existence.

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Science+Technology

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