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Scientific Biography

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Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiographies of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

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Abstract

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man”, wrote Twain, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written”. In this chapter, with due deference to Twain, I examine how scientific biographies – of both men and women – have been written historically, ever since the Greeks, and how they have evolved over time, in and out of step with the history of science. Notions of truth, objectivity, and the role of science in society are reflected in biography, as are literary fashions, rendering biography a valuable prism through which to evaluate our ever-changing cultural mores and norms. So, too, are biographers here examined, to consider the alchemy between subject and portrayer. To what uses have biographies been made? Is biography writing an art or a craft? And what will be its future? These and other questions are addressed in this historiography of “scientific biography”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A 2011 Harris poll found that 76% of Americans who read at least one book a year report reading both fiction and nonfiction, with 29% of the nonfiction accounted for by biography.

  2. 2.

    Söderqvist goes so far as to state: “It is not too far fetched to suggest that scientific biography as a whole may in fact have had a stronger cultural and political impact than any other genre of metascientific writing in the last four hundred years.”

  3. 3.

    More attention has been afforded to literary and art biography, even biographies of economists, as genres. See, for example, Backschneider (1999), France and St. Clair (2002), Weintraub and Forget (2007), and Cline and Angier (2010); also, as examples of reflection coming from practitioners of the genre, Holroyd (2002) and Hamilton (2007). There are academic groups advancing biography writing and research, such as the Zentrum für Biographik at Humboldt University, the dedicated Journal of Historical Biography based in Cadana and Journal: Life Writing in Australia, and, for the last thirty years, the interdisciplinary quarterly, Biography, from the University of Hawaii Press, featuring articles exploring the “theoretical, generic, historical, and cultural dimensions of life-writing; and the integration of literature, history, the arts, and the social sciences as they relate to biography.”

  4. 4.

    A good example is Hessenbruch 2000. One exception is Fullmer 1967; another is Hankins 1979, further discussed below.

  5. 5.

    Besides the above exceptions (Söderqvist 2007a, b; Govoni and Franceschi 2014), examples include La Vergata 1995; Shortland and Yeo 1996; Richards 2006; Harman 2011a.

  6. 6.

    Thomas Söderqvist 2007a, b deserves credit for breathing life into the subject. Biography, however, continues to be virtually ignored as a historiographical category in science studies and STS. An exception is Kragh 1987, and more recently, Kragh 2015. Further exceptions are discussed below.

  7. 7.

    On the uses and perils of Medieval biography writing, see Chance 2005.

  8. 8.

    It was Marcel Mauss 1938 who first argued that the very notion of personhood was a Roman invention, and has been developing since.

  9. 9.

    Many of the sources in the following section come from this account.

  10. 10.

    The historiography of science didn’t come into its own until the turn of the nineteenth century (see Lauden 1993).

  11. 11.

    In effect, they suggested that biography become to social history what Aquinas had suggested philosophy is to theology, a handmaiden, or ancilla. See Hankins 1979 and Young 1987.

  12. 12.

    On the ways in which this development reflected, and came on the heels of, changes in science itself and its practitioner’s own perceptions, see Shapin 2010.

  13. 13.

    This has been termed the “Sobel effect” by Miller (2002) in reference to Dana Sobel’s international bestseller, Longitude 1995. One could add Isaacson 2007, 2011, 2017 to the list, Gleick 1992, Bird and Sherwin 2006, and many others.

  14. 14.

    For a wonderful historiography of Galileo and his trial, see Finocchiaro 2007.

  15. 15.

    On the factors that tend to stabilize biographical accounts, see Kragh 2007.

  16. 16.

    See the thoughtful essay by the graduate student Bonnie Goodman, “Has Scandal Taken its Toll on Joseph Ellis?”, History News Network, 11/21/2004, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/8656, in which she suggests that Ellis’s biography of George Washington, which he began writing while on suspension leave from Mount Holyoke, may too owe its success to Ellis being the right person to puncture the myth of Washington as “a man who could tell no lie.”

  17. 17.

    Nye (2015) suggests that there are three principle forms of biography: the life of the scientist, the scientific life, and lives of scientific collaboration. We consider alternative groupings.

  18. 18.

    Another example is Rupke 2005.

  19. 19.

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=life+and+letters%2Clife+and+times&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Clife%20and%20letters%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Clife%20and%20times%3B%2Cc0

  20. 20.

    There are innumerous examples. For an interesting sample, compare Medvedev 1969, Joravsky 1970, and Nils Roll-Hansen 2004; also, Koerner 2001, Anker 2002, Canales 2015, Ferry 1998, Kevles 1998, as well Chilvers 2007, Selya 2007, Schiebinger 2014, and Abir-Am 2014.

  21. 21.

    And genealogy. See Nye 2009.

  22. 22.

    Kandel 2006 can be read as a companion to Kandel 2012. Another autobiographical example is Bishop 2003. A complex biographical example is Stoltzenberg 2004.

  23. 23.

    As one editor once said to me, “every further equation cuts the readership in half.”

  24. 24.

    The use of portraits, or alternatively original art, is just two of the many tools biographers have marshaled. See Fara 2007 and Redniss 2010.

  25. 25.

    A curious exception is Lovelock 2000.

  26. 26.

    Two nonscientific collective biographies that stand out as effective vehicles for explicating the birth of American pragmatism, on the one hand, and European utopianism, on the other hand, are Menand 2001 and Manuel 1962.

  27. 27.

    Also, Oxford University Press’s series, Biographies of Disease, on Asthma, Diabetes, etc.

  28. 28.

    William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act 5 Scene 5.

  29. 29.

    Examples include projects launched by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Royal Society, the American Institute of Physics, the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, the British Library, and many more.

  30. 30.

    Attributed to Thornton Wilder.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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  1. Oren Harman
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Correspondence to Oren Harman .

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  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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Harman, O. (2018). Scientific Biography. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiographies of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_16-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_16-1

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