Emily Klancher Merchant
Dr. Merchant is a historian of science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the quantitative human sciences and technologies of human measurement. Her first book, Building the Population Bomb (Oxford 2021), examines how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the 20th century. She is currently working on the history of genetic thought and genomic data in the American social sciences over the past hundred years.
Society incorrectly blamed a “population bomb” for problems that had other causes. A wrong diagnosis produces ineffective solutions.