Updates. After reading some more sources, I expanded the History & Significance sections. Click the link to read the whole thing & provide feedback (by directly editing or discussing in the Talk page), but some notes in this thread. https://twitter.com/drlynnchiu/status/1333211449196425218

ISHPSSB was founded by Marjorie Grene and Richard Burian. They received funding in 1981 from the Council of Philosophical Studies to run a seminal meeting in 1982 at Cornell University.

Same year, Burian organized an interest group with attendees from a four-society meeting (History of Science, History of Technology, Philosophy of Science, and Social Studies of Science), which decided to organize an informal summer meeting in 1983.

Accounts here differ on where the 1983 meeting was held. Some say Kenyon College. Some say Denison University. Some say Virginia Tech (this last one is likely wrong).

The vision of Marjorie Grene was "philsci in practice." Philbio requires "intimate contact with bio, history of bio, and the social, institutional, and technological settings in which bio work was done," Intimate contact must be established with professionals in each discipline.

That is why ISH is famously informal. The first few meetings of the society were involved a changing mix of biologists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists organized around thematic sessions to break through barriers that block collaboration and mutual understanding.

As a former student rep of ISH (from Werner Callebaut era, Montreal conference), I can attest that ISH does not reject papers. This led to "uncontrollable growth," (Callebaut) thus presenting difficult logistic challenges for meeting organizers.

Finally, the history of ISH still awaits proper documentation. Maienschein: "it is amusing that a society that includes History in its title hasn't done such a great job of recording and writing its own history" The link on the ISH site leading to Burian's account is inactive.

Oh, another fun fact. The first official resolution of the society was that ISHPSSB would never meet in a place that had sodomy, that is, anti-sodomy, laws, a "political" resolution that was passed with no dissents or questions. This was proposed by David Hull :)