A unique ISU program combining history and science has drawn students from across the country to pursue graduate study.The program, History of Technology and Science, emphasizes the history of technology, science and medicine in the United States and Europe since the late 18th century.It was initially created as a graduate program, said Alan Marcus, director of the HOTS program, and is the first program to grant a doctorate degree in the humanities.”For the first 120 years at Iowa State, there was no graduate program offered in humanities,” said Marcus, professor of history.Currently, three doctorate programs are offered in the humanities, but most are in hard sciences and social sciences, he said.In November 1980, the state Board of Regents approved the program, Marcus said. In 1986, the first doctorate degree was awarded to a man who is now a NASA historian, he said.”We use the strengths of the university to branch in the humanities,” he said. “We hope to explain science and technology in terms of their human creators. We see them as human activities like art, like painting, all of which express social concepts.”Marcus said there is an inherent link between social and science education.”What is science as a way of seeing the world?” he said. “What is technology as a way of manipulating it?”Students in the program look at factors influencing science and technology, such as “why science and technology did what they did in history, and how cultural values shaped science and technology,” Marcus said.Through the HOTS program, graduate students can obtain a master’s degree or a doctorate. They “come missing something,” having one of two backgrounds, either in history or in science or engineering, he said.”Few come with master’s degrees,” Marcus said, because it is more traditional for history majors to get a master’s than it is for science majors. Marcus said three or four new students are admitted into the program each year, and there are 15 to 20 students in the program at a time. “This way we can devote one-on-one attention to our students,” he said, which they may not get at other universities on the coasts. Similar history of technology and science programs are also offered at other universities such as Stanford, Harvard and Johns Hopkins University.HOTS student David Seim, graduate student in history, is in his third semester in the program.”What I like the most about the program is that you’re allowed to study things, even though they may be controversial,” said Seim, who studied business at Indiana University before he received his master’s degree in economics from Colorado State.Seim’s specific research concerns are “learning how to study general history focusing on particular threads of inventions and society’s responses to inventions,” and “how internal conflicts between economists caused policy choices based on incomplete assessments.”