Nineteenth Ischia Summer School

28 June – 5 July 2026

Problems of Growth

Course organizers

Christiane Groeben (Naples, local organizer), Nick Hopwood (University of Cambridge), Erika L. Milam (Princeton University), Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Cambridge) and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn

Faculty

Patrick Anthony (Uppsala), Alison Bashford (UNSW), He Bian (Princeton), Hannah Landecker (UCLA), Daryn Lehoux (Queen’s, Canada), Sabina Leonelli (TU München), Dániel Margócsy (Cambridge), and Edna Suárez-Díaz (UNAM).

Introduction to the theme

Growth affords hope and attracts fear. Balanced growth feeds populations, fuels prosperity and imparts purpose to individual and collective lives. The unfettered growth of cells, pathogens, parasites and populations threatens physiological, economic and ecological collapse. Even balance may be a problematic ideal: norms of flourishing and beauty have guided discrimination by vaunting harmonious over retarded, excessive or monstrous growth. The 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 and reproduction, growth in the life sciences has lacked status and attention. This summer school provides an opportunity to explore knowledges and practices of growth between antiquity and the present day while bringing together problems usually kept apart.

For Aristotle, vegetative growth was the lowest function of the soul and for that reason fundamental to plants, beasts and humans. Unlike fire, vegetative growth had a natural limit. Where minerals grew by external accretion or juxtaposition, living beings had the distinctive ability to expand by assimilation of nutrients from the inside out, whether organ by organ or from a preformed seed. Surgeons tried to remove those tumours, cankers and warts that resulted from an imbalance of humours among other causes. Generation, which was hard to imagine in mechanical terms, was often framed as a special form of growth. Late medieval philosophers brought together generation, projectile movement and the accumulation of capital as sharing the same basic problem, how a movement severed from its mover could continue to produce. In a balanced world, gain in one part was compensated by loss elsewhere. Large animals, according to Aristotle, produced fewer offspring, and the relative growth of one organ entailed the diminution of another. At Italian universities during the Renaissance, these ancient ideas were taken up and reformed by scholars including Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente, Andrea Cesalpino and 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 productivity. As the ultimate source of economic progress the physiocrats postulated an inherent capacity of nature to reproduce. Naturalists like Lazzaro Spallanzani located the same reproductive and regenerative capacities in minute parts that made up animal bodies. But proper growth was also reckoned to occur within certain limits. In the principle of population Thomas Robert Malthus expressed the limit set for the potentially geometric growth of human numbers by the merely arithmetic growth of food supplied from the land. 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 slow initial acceleration towards exponential growth and then deceleration as environmental resistance increased and the ‘carrying capacity’ was reached. Based on computer simulations of the catastrophic consequences of runaway population and economic growth, the Club of Rome’s bestselling report The Limits to Growth (1972) is a point of origin for debate over ‘degrowth’ and ‘sustainable growth’.

Classical discussion of growth within organisms had been informed by the canons of beauty appropriate to each stage of life, with more attention to proportion than size. Beginning in the eighteenth century, longitudinal measurements of human growth aligned with demands for military manpower and projects of social reform. Measurement fed debate over the roles of heredity and environment. On the one hand, anthropometry ultimately produced distinct growth equations for groups defined by age, sex and race. Unbalanced growth was associated with monstrosity and other ways of falling short of the white, male model. On the other, failure to grow became an index of deprivation, most obviously, as physiologist Angelo Mosso argued, in the stunting of factory children. Eugenicists, notably criminologist Cesare Lombroso, were concerned with imbalance at the level of populations.

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

In the nineteenth century the knotty issues involved in defining individuals that were explored productively at the Stazione Zoologica di Napoli made growth hard to distinguish from maintenance and reproduction. An influential formulation held that reproduction represented growth beyond the individual limit. From the 1860s 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 Growth (1932) and the notion of allometry, or the shape-changing growth of a part at a different rate from the organism as a whole. Mechanisms could be studied in ontogeny or changing patterns traced in phylogeny. In a famous essay, “On being the right size”, J.B.S. Haldane proposed that ‘Comparative 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.

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 biomedicine, came to be understood as a pathology of malignant growth. Research elucidated factors, not least growth factors, notably nerve growth factor discovered by Stanley Cohen and Rita Levi-Montalcini, that promoted, regulated and interfered with cell division. Alongside chemotherapies, weedkillers were developed that acted by causing rapid, uncontrolled growth. Synthetic auxins, the hormones that regulate cell division and expansion in plants, became notorious as the defoliant Agent Orange used by the British in the Malayan 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 whole framework into question? Or did gospels of growth acknowledge the need for some balance? Should we grasp growth as a modern or capitalist imperative, a potentially relentless power and a creative one through the transformation 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, reservations about growth apply to knowledge, too; simply accumulating data has seemed inadequate when we might need a whole new paradigm. A long-term theme and implicated in urgent problems, growth in and around the life sciences provides a rich field for historical deliberation and for trade between disciplines.

Funding

We thank HPS Cambridge, the Intesa Sanpaolo Fund, the Dohrn Foundation, the collector George Loudon, the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, the Science History Institute, the Centro Etnografico delle isole Campane, the Center on Science and Technology at Princeton University, and the Italian Society for the History of Science for their financial support.

Programme

The School starts with registration and a reception on the afternoon of Sunday 28 June 2026, and ends after dinner the following Saturday night. Given ferry times, this means departure on Sunday 5 July. Lectures last for up to 30 minutes in one-hour slots. Seminars, each one prepared by faculty member and a group of students, focus on pre-circulated texts.

Cost

The fee is €400 per student, which includes hotel accommodation and all meals for the week. The directors will consider requests to waive the fee for accepted students unable to raise the money themselves, where supported by a detailed financial statement and a letter from their department head. Students need to pay for their own travel to Ischia.

Applications

Applications should include:

1. a statement specifying academic experience and interest in the course topic (max. 300 words),
2. a brief cv,
3. a letter of recommendation.

Application timetable:

27 February 2026

Deadline for applications – applications must have been received by Midnight CET,

16 March 2026

Students were notified of application outcome (accepted/declined/reserve). Please let us know if you haven't received this mail!

1 May 2026

Registration fees and registration forms due.

Application procedure:

Please send applications to:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The body of the email should start with the applicant’s full name (surname, first name, and middle names or initials if desired). The 300-word application, the CV and the recommendation letter should be attached as files (preferably in PDF format), named with the student's surname+firstname and should indicate whether it’s their application (‘app’), CV (‘cv’), or recommendation (‘rec’).

Example: Applicant Alfred E. Neumann attaches to an email (1) their 300-word statement of interest named NeumannAlfred-app.pdf, (2) their brief CV named NeumannAlfred-cv.pdf, as well as (3) their supervisor’s recommendation letter named NeumannAlfred-rec.pdf.

After submitting, applicants will receive confirmation within 24 hours that their attachments arrived in readable form.

If (as is usual) the 'sponsor' prefers not to share the recommendation letter with the applicant, then the applicant sends only the application and CV as above, with the recommendation emailed separately by the sponsor. Then we will confirm to both the applicant and the sponsor that the recommendation was received.

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