This talk on historicising science and literature since 1950 grows out of research for a book on American poetry and science in the Cold War. The project began with the conviction that epistemic values played a much larger part in the poetry of the avant-garde than has been recognised by literary studies, andspeculation that these epistemic values have been developed in relation to the ever growing authority of the sciences. I conjectured that some changes in poetic styles were due to the shift from one publicly dominant model of science to another, as high-energy physics gave way in public esteem to molecular biology, a shift from energy to information. What I have found is that there have been major shifts in the organisation, methods, and values of the sciences. Science communication has become highly formalised, creating new challenges for the public understanding of science. Theories and philosophies of science have proliferated and influenced many fields of inquiry, including literary theory, making self-reflexive awareness of the indebtedness to these theories essential for any theorising of this cultural history. As for values, Steven Shapin has demonstrated that old beliefs about the moral superiority of scientists have given way to the assumption that scientists and their research are at best morally neutral. One overriding feature of this period of the history of science and literature is competition for epistemological authority, often a conflict over the rights to employ dominant epistemic (and often reductionist) metaphors such as particles, fields, codes, and genes. This competition is not only driven by the search for funding; competition is also the result of an altogether darker unease about the viability of any grand theory, whether of matter or the organism.