Writing Scientific Biography

Writing Scientific Biography

MOTT T. GREENEHonors Program CMB 1061University of Puget Sound1500 N. Warner StTacoma, WA, 98416 USAE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. Much writing on scientific biography focuses on the legitimacy and utility ofthis genre. In contrast, this essay discusses a variety of genre conventions and imper-atives which continue to exert a powerful influence on the selection of biographicalsubjects, and to control the plot and structure of the ensuing biographies. Theseimperatives include the following: the plot templates of the Bildungsroman (the realisticnovel of individual self-development), the life trajectories of Weberian ideal types, andthe functional elements and personae of the folkloric tale of the ‘‘hero!s quest.’’ Theessay discusses the nature and application of these genre conventions in some detail,with the conclusion that biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distortinginfluence on the image of how most science gets done.

Keywords: Bildungsroman, folktale, genre convention, ideal type, scientific biography

There are three rules for writing a novel.Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham

Biography is and always has been one of the principal narrative modesof the history of science, and reflection on biography, and its role inscholarship, is also an ongoing tradition of our discipline. The recentdecision by Charles Scribner!s Sons to revise and extend the Dictionaryof Scientific Biography, and to produce an electronic version of that 40-year-old reference work, has occasioned a new round of reflections onthe place of biography in the history of science.1

Much writing on the biography is produced, not surprisingly, bybiographers, and some reflection on both the craft a biography and its

1 Mary Jo Nye, ‘‘Scientific Biography: History of Science by Another Means?,’’ Isis 97(2006): 322–329, Theodore M. Porter, ‘‘Is the Life of a Scientist a Scientific Unit?,’’ Isis97 (2006): 314–321, Mary Terrall, ‘‘Biography as Cultural History of Science,’’ Isis(2006): 306–313.

Journal of the History of Biology (2007) 40:727–759 ! Springer 2007DOI 10.1007/s10739-007-9124-x

historiographical position seem almost obligatory for those who haveattempted this puzzling and even paradoxical genre of historical writing.This essay is no exception, and comes from my own experience inproducing a biography of the German geophysicist, meteorologist, andclimatologist Alfred Wegener, an on-again o!-again project spanning20 years of my career as a historian.

It is not the purpose of this essay to decide whether biography is agood idea or not, or to tell anyone what they ought or ought not to do.My aim has been to talk about some of the more peculiar characteristicsof biography as a historical and literary genre, and the rules – generallyimplicit, but powerful and quite real – which govern its writing, andinform the selection of which lives get written. My treatment of thesubject makes no claim to completeness, but there are observations herethat I do not recall having seen elsewhere in this abundant literature andwhich may be of some use to those currently writing a biography of ascientist, or contemplating such an undertaking.

Biography as ‘‘Weak History’’

L!histoire biographique et anecdotique, qui est tout en bas de l!e-chelle, est une historie faible, qui ne contient pas en elle-meme... sapropre intelligibilite, laquelle lui vient seulement quand on latransporte en bloc au sein d!une historie plus fort qu!elle...

Claude Levi-StraussLa Pensee Sauvage2

Biographical history is weak history: Levi-Strauss is right. A single lifemay be rich with vivid and absorbing detail, but it acquires historicalmeaning and importance only when it is folded into a narrative strongerthan itself. When a biography rests comfortably within some strongernarrative, we get instantiation of that narrative with details, shades ofcharacter, and complex motives: all the elements missing from andabolished in ‘‘stronger history.’’ But we also invest the biographical

2 Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensee Sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), p. 340!. ‘‘Biographicaland anecdotal history, which is at the bottom of the ladder, is weak history that does notcontain...its own intelligibility, which it gets only when it is carried en bloc into a historystronger than itself...’’ quoted in Paul Veyne, Writing History. Essay on Epistemology,trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press,1984(French Original 1971)), p. 15.

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subject with significance: the life becomes an exemplary instance of thestrong narrative in which it resides.

Biography acquires meaning from the narrative in which it is placedand, as it settles into place, it serves to strengthen the claims of thatstronger narrative: it ultimately makes strong history stronger. Anexample of this is what happens to our understanding of the history ofmodern Germany when we turn from a survey like Gordon Craig!sGermany 1866–1945, to Peter Nettl!s Rosa Luxemburg, the majorbiography of the economist, socialist politician, and revolutionary.3 Westop rushing from month to month and year to year and move insidehours and days. Once there, we have leisure to be reminded that in themiddle of great events like the outbreak of World War I, importantthinkers and political actors also went on vacation, wrote love letters,and fired their cooks. These elements are, after all, not missing fromlives in which going to prison for ones convictions, writing great eco-nomic treatises, doing battle with both the Kaiser and Lenin, and finallybeing murdered in the middle of a revolution, are the ‘‘life story’’ thatsurvives in the strong history. They have been eliminated from thestrong narrative not because they are not true or not interesting, butbecause there is ‘‘no room.’’ In biography, we restore the textures of lifeas it is actually lived and are thereby (and not inconsequentially) able tosee ourselves in the history and to reconnect history with life.

What biography also accomplishes, that a study of disembodiedhistorical ‘‘movements’’ or of published papers and books does notallow, is specific knowledge of how cultural movements and political orscientific developments come together in a given time and place. It al-lows this by recreating the conjunction of these entities, motives, ideas,events, and perceptions in the life and mind of a single subject. In otherwords, if we wish to do more than conjecture how events might gotogether, or how they might have gone together – how some philosophyor some political movement might have had a part in some scientificdevelopment or the converse– we have few alternatives to finding themintegrated in the mind of single significant individual, and then docu-menting that integration.4

In short, the direct route to demonstration as opposed to suppositionis the re-creation of character. The building of a character – (the story ofhow an individual!s character was built) is the biographer!s job. This is

3 Gordon Alexander Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), J.P.Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).4 Thomas Hankins, ‘‘In Defense of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History ofScience,’’ History of Science xvii (1979): 1–16.

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very much like the process that an actor goes through in building acharacter according to the method of Stanislavski. Both serve to makethe performance real. If, in the case of actors, this character-building is aprocess of invention, for biographers it is meant to be a process ofdiscovery. One tries to recreate a biographical subject within a historicalcontext and then have the context of the subject!s creative work ex-plained, to some extent, by the activities of the subject.

Biography as Historical Novel

The reciprocal re-creation of character and context in the course ofwriting a biography leads us to a somewhat odd but important way oflooking at this process: to write a biography is almost inevitably to writea historical novel, albeit a historical novel constructed according to ademanding set of rules. This claim, at first apparently rather silly, im-proves on acquaintance. To begin to appreciate this, we may considerthat a historical novel is mostly history, that a historical novel is, insome sense, an extended historical counterfactual proposition. UmbertoEco suggested this view of things 20 years ago; doubtless others havesuggested it as well. For Eco, the Count of Monte Cristo is essentially theproposition: ‘‘what would 19th century France have been like if some-one named the Count of Monte Cristo had lived there?’’ What isimportant for us here is what does not change in the telling of the tale:the history of France, the nature of Christianity, the conventions ofromantic love, the kinds of swords, costumes, and foods, the names ofstreets, the form of government, the architecture of prisons, and thepsychology of human motivation, with special attention to revenge. Insuch a historical novel everything is real except our hero.

If a biography is indeed a historical novel written according tospecial rules, what then are these rules? They are actually rather simple,in outline. First and foremost, all characters and events must be real.This is the rule of veracity. Then all the events in the life of the subject(which find their way into the story) must be told in the order in whichthey transpired and may not be reordered for dramatic impact or e!ect.This is the rule of sequence. It is, of course, possible to jump about in alife, but not to claim that something that is known to have happenedwhen the subject was thirty happened when she was twenty, forinstance. Third, all important acts and events must be present and maynot be excluded, altered, minimized, or exaggerated, no matter howmuch the author may wish they had not happened. This is the rule of

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entirety. Heidegger did join the Nazi party, Heisenberg did work on theGerman bomb, Wittgenstein did beat and slap his mathematics pupils inhis brief stint as a school teacher. These cannot be left out of a biog-raphy, even though Heidegger, Heisenberg, and Wittgenstein all wishedthese hadn!t happened, a wish shared by many (though not all) of theirbiographers.

Because biography is, even if novelistic in form, still a part ofscholarly history in the academic sense, the biographer must, addi-tionally, provide access to documents demonstrating the reality andorder of the events presented. This is the rule of verifiability. On theother side of this coin, the strict rules of biography stipulate that noevents or facts or statements for which there is no historical docu-mentary record may be inferred (‘‘Darwin must have known...’’ andetc.), without first admitting their hypothetical character.

That biographers regularly break some or all of these rules does notstop these rules from being the criteria which distinguish this specialform of the historical novel from its less restrictive forms. Recently,there have been interesting signs that these rules are being relaxed inpart. Pat Shipman!s recent biography of paleontologist Eugene Duboiscontains long internal monologues by Dubois which may be plausibleconsidering his life, but are Shipman!s invention through and through,with no documentary basis.5 Nevertheless, her book came through thescholarly review process with positive notices, and barely a mention ofthis artifice. Her success notwithstanding, it remains generally acceptedthat these implicit rules of biography are essentially identical to the rulesof scholarly history, generally considered, and must be obeyed in thesame degree. This may seem too obvious, but we are approachingbiography here not from the side of history, but of the novel. From thisstandpoint, these are not ordinary rules of scholarship, but stringentdemands upon a novelist.

A writer prepared to observe the special rules for writing the sort ofnovel we call a biography, must still, however, write something we mayrecognize as a novel. A historical novel is not like a Japanese kabukiplay, which (by convention) proceeds on stage in real time. Life in abiography is accelerated and compressed, as is life in other historicalnovels, and novels in general; a published biography is not a record of alife, but an algorithm of that record. A biographer chooses which eventsto relate out of myriad remnants of a life, and of those selected, electswhich to treat in detail, and which not. Within the bounds of the rules of

5 Pat Shipman, The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugene Dubois and His LifelongQuest to Prove Darwin Right (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).


veracity, sequence, entirety, and verifiability, there is vast room forexclusion and inclusion, beginnings and endings. The size of theresulting book, its scope, scale, style, tone, mood, attitude, language,number of climaxes and turning points, all rest with the biographer.Above all, the author is free (though compelled to be free) to choose theplot of the life.

Biography as Bildungsroman

The need for a biography to have a plot, and to be much more than analgorithmic chronicle, brings us to the most powerful constraint uponthe form, and the most di"cult struggle for the biographer: to follow theadditional constraints of shaping the life of a biographical subject into a‘‘good story.’’

Here, more than anywhere else, the near identity of a biography anda novel (as literary forms) is evident. One might think that the rules forbiography – rules that hold the author tightly to actual transpired eventsin sequence – would either prevent extensive plotting, or obviate itsnecessity; in practice this is not so. Fortunately for biographers, thereare rules of procedure here too: a formulaic summary of what makes a‘‘good story’’ for a biography is rather easy to generate. This is becausethe ‘‘good story’’ template for a biography is, in most cases, virtuallyidentical to the rules of the Bildungsroman – the nineteenth-centurynaturalistic novel of individual self-development. There are numerousplot developments and motifs deemed essential to such novels, andbiographies must follow these genre peculiarities if they are to succeedwith readers! and reviewers! expectations.

Ideas of a ‘‘life well-lived’’ governing the writing of biography exist attwo levels: there are general rules which govern the genre as a whole, andspecific sub-plots and devices within these general rules. Both of theselevels are worth attending, because both exert enormous cultural poweron writers and readers. Biographies are, in their way, marvelous enginesof self-fulfilling prophesy. Biographers are forced by genre conventionsinto a certain constructions of the lives of their subjects (within theconstraints of the rules of veracity). Once a life is accomplished in termsof these genre conventions, however, it reinforces the very cultural normsthat gave rise to the conventions that governed its writing. Every timeanother life is made to fit the pattern, the pattern is further validatedhistorically. The general rules shaping biographies are so powerful thatthey might well be described as ‘‘biographical imperatives.’’ If we enquire

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into their source, we soon see that these imperatives are nothing less thanthe cultural ideals of modernity. They are summarized below.

The first biographical imperative that the author of such a work mustobserve is that of consistency. A successful biography should show somesort of psychological and intellectual consistency in its subject throughlarge portions of her or his life span. Typically, this begins in the magni-fication of formative experiences that shaped the early character andimprinted a durable pattern. Biographies are nearly unanimous inasserting that the seeds of adult achievement are visible in childhood: ‘‘thechild is the parent of the adult.’’ This can be abbreviated, but is rarelyabsent, and occasionally reaches for a visible continuity from the firstrecorded childhood utterance to the last expostulation of someone!sdotage.

The second biographical imperative is that of autonomy. Whereverconsistency cannot be maintained while observing the rules of sequence,veracity, and verifiability, the biographer has the default alternative ofautonomy. Here inconsistency, autonomously generated, may also be-come normative. A sudden or even gradual departure from a previousconsistency may be o!ered as evidence of determination to be free ofconvention, to push beyond barriers. In some ways, autonomy is pref-erable to mere consistency in Bildungsroman terms. The biographer thenhas access to motifs of courageous response to obstacles, and evenmore: the shift to autonomy suggests self-knowledge, conscious andcontextual grasp of the historical situation that the biographical subjectfinds himself immersed in, and the heady idea of the individual as‘‘author of his own life.’’ Most biographies consist, in large part, ofdemonstrated consistency leavened by creative autonomy.

These are the general rules for all biographies. There are, however,significant additional rules for the lives of artists, intellectuals and sci-entists.

The first additional rule for the lives of artists, intellectuals and sci-entists, is that the combination of consistency and autonomy must leadto a view of the life of the subject that instantiates, in the life-work of thesubject, the discovery or invention of some important principle in thelife of the culture, and which can function as the origin story of somebelief, idea, or convention. A biography of Luther leads inevitably tothe formulation of his idea of the ‘‘priesthood of all believers.’’ A life ofNewton establishes a new view of science as about "what! rather than"why.! The life story of James Joyce must tell us about the birth of a newkind of writing. Darwin!s life must show us mankind folded into nature,


not reigning above it. Here the consistency is a line of inquiry, theautonomy, the new answer.

The second additional rule for biographies of artists, scientists, andintellectuals, and the sine qua non of biographical writing in this sub-genre, is that in every creative life worth telling there must be anautonomous creative act, a turning point, a crystallizing experience, amoment of enlightenment, a ‘‘Eureka!’’ experience. A biography of acreative individual which satisfies the rule that the life-work mustinclude a major discovery, but which does not unlock or uncover thespecific moment and dynamic of its creation, is generally deemed byreviewers and audiences alike to have failed, no matter how successful itmay be in every other aspect of chronicling and analyzing the life of thesubject.

The unlocking of the ‘‘creative moment’’ is so important thatsometimes this moment is the only fact of the subject!s career that seemsreally to matter. Here are examples of such stories that have survivedwithin the context of even the most meticulous, restrained, and schol-arly treatments of their subjects. There is ‘‘Newton!s apple’’ the momentwhen, sitting under a tree looking at the moon, Newton saw an applefall and had the intuition that the force which drew the apple to theearth also kept the moon in its orbit. There is ‘‘Kekule!s snake,’’ seengrabbing its tail in its mouth in a dream, giving Kekule the idea of thering-structure of carbon. There is ‘‘Archimedes!s bath,’’ in which step-ping into the bath and seeing the water displaced provided the key to animportant problem in hydrostatics. We have ‘‘Galileo!s chandelier,’’ inwhich the swinging of a chandelier above Galileo!s head during a churchservice led him to the idea of the isochrony of the pendulum. We have‘‘Darwin!s finches,’’ in which the beak shapes of these GalapagosIslands birds provided for Darwin, once he understood them, the key tonatural selection. We have Einstein!s imagined ‘‘spaceship ride’’ as herode away from the town clock on a tram car, leading him to thinkabout time signals and the speed of light. We have Werner Heisenberg!s‘‘dark night of the soul’’ on an island in the North Sea that led him tothe formulation of quantum mechanics. We have Alfred Wegener!s‘‘jigsaw fit’’ of the outline of the Atlantic continents which led to theidea of continental drift. We have Michael Faraday!s discovery, onobserving the galvanometer as he connected the circuit, that for elec-tromagnetic induction to occur, part of the system must be in motion.There is the ‘‘wobbling saucer’’ tossed across the room in the dining hallat Los Alamos which led Richard Feynman to both Feynman Diagramsand to quantum electrodynamics. We have Rosalind Franklin!s X-ray

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crystallographic image of the apex of the DNA molecule, revealing itsstructure. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that for someconsiderable time the enterprise of the history of science consisted lar-gely of stringing together these Eureka! moments within some traditionof investigation.

We may now briefly reprise the constraints under which scientificbiography can be seen to operate. We have, first of all, the general rulesfor all biography: the rule of veracity, the rule of sequence, the rule ofentirety, and the rule of verifiability. To this we have added theimperatives of consistency and autonomy, and beyond that, thedemands that the life instantiate the discovery or invention of someimportant principle in the life of the culture, and that the biographerdiscover the unique creative moment in the life of the biographicalsubject when this discovery or invention first appeared.

These various constraints on biography, in conjunction with theimperatives of the novel of self-development, are a heritage of the cul-tural ideals of the 19th century. Let us consider some of the culturalsources of these ideals, which extend back to the Enlightenment andbeyond. From the Reformation, European civilization inherited a robustform of the Lutheran doctrine of life work as ‘‘vocation.’’ To this notionof vocation we have seen successively appended, without subtraction, anumber of other images and ideals of life-history and conduct. We haveJohn Locke!s ideal and image of the self-creating individual, juridicallyenshrined in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. We have Goethe!sFaust ideal, of the figure who risks even his own soul for knowledge.Goethe!s 19th century extension of this Renaissance conception wasbrought further forward into the 20th century in the work of OswaldSpengler, who argued that this Faust ideal was the normative form ofcreative life for all European civilization since the Renaissance. To thiswe could add Hegel!s view of history as the story of emergent self-consciousness, (Walter Kau!man called Hegel!s Phenomenology a ‘‘greatnovel of culture’’). For the history of science we must consider AugustComte!s story of history as the maturation of the human species, a plotso beloved by George Sarton that it served as the organizing principle forthe original Isis bibliographies. There are numerous additional culturalthemes which could be added, including the unity of individual freedomand destiny in the creation of new values (Nietzsche, and the novels ofHermann Hesse). There is Freud!s notion of civilization as organizedrepression from which we may seek liberation through rational self-overcoming and self-understanding. Last, but not least, there is thesociologist and historian Max Weber!s ‘‘ideal types’’ of humanity.


Biography as the Study of Weberian Ideal Types

While all of the above roster of cultural ideals could be profitably un-packed in order to shed light on the thematic guidance biographers seemto get from their cultural background (without ever giving a moment!sthought to the process) I should like to turn to the last of these, MaxWeber!s theory of ideal types, through which the cultural ideals ofmodernity and the conventions of the individual novel of self-develop-ment became powerfully scientized in the work of an influential thinker.

Max Weber!s theory of ideal types is currently one of the moreprofound subterranean influences on the conception of the ‘‘goodstory,’’ in the form of a ‘‘good life,’’ at least in the Euro-Americancontext. As in the case of other genre rules and conventions, this con-ception obtains its exceptional power via the unreflective allegiance ofwriters and scholars for whom it is one of the myriad pieces of the‘‘furniture of life.’’ This is to say that the idea is understood and used,without knowing or reflecting on its origin, history, and original func-tion, or sometimes even of its existence. The fundamental premise of theconcept of ideal types, as a theoretical construct, is that each individ-uality has a logic which is restrained or halted, from reaching its limitingvalue and full potential growth, by obstacles and accidents. It is aconception of the ‘‘perfect individual’’ that helps us to understand theimperfect individual who is the subject of our biographical treatment.6

It also provides a narrative structure whereby the creative potential ofthe individual is realized through successful struggle to overcomeobstacles. The notion of creativity as a constrained quantity, whichmust be unleashed and emancipated in order to be realized, is a psy-chological motif of considerable power in European and North Amer-ican intellectual and literary history.

One of the things that makes the motif of the ideal type attractive toa biographer is that it is a conception – and this was deliberate onWeber!s part – halfway between the subjective stance of literaryhumanism and the objective stance of social science. The variety of idealtypes employed by biographers are essentially social roles that could berecognized and endorsed by the biographical subjects themselves aspersonal ideals. Sometimes an ideal type may be very elaborate. Anexample might be: ‘‘the perfect German academic Mandarin physicsprofessor of the first decade of the 20th century.’’ Sometimes an idealtype might be very simple: ‘‘a lone wolf.’’ It is immediately evident howuseful a conception this is to biographer, since it provides a line of

6 Veyne, Writing History. Essay on Epistemology. pp. 142–143.

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attack whereby the narrative strategy of the biographer and the careeror life strategy documented for the biographical subject, may be seen tobe one in the same. This makes biography as ideal type seem not onlysymmetrical, but true.

While this is not the place for a full discussion of Max Weber!simpact on the writing of scientific biography, or on the history of sciencegenerally, a few further remarks are in order. The first is that MaxWeber did not imagine himself to have invented a new method ofinvestigation in his use of the concept of the ideal type, but merely tohave characterized and given a name to a practice embodied in thesocial scientific knowledge of his contemporaries. Weber was a Kantian,by which description one indicates that he assumed that all knowledge isacquired through process of abstraction from reality, and that thisprocess of abstraction is what we he would normally call ‘‘conceptual-ization.’’7 Conceptions of appropriate roles and the way they are to befilled are socially communicated as narratives of good lives, and it isfrom these materials that Weber extracted the theory of ideal types. Thistheory of ideal types guides the writing of biography not least because itis itself founded in biographical writing. Here again we have the re-ciprocal creation of character and historical context noted at thebeginning of this essay.

It was Weber!s notion that social science is ‘‘subjectifying’’ – set apartfrom the natural sciences – ‘‘because it deals exclusively with values,subjective meaning, and other "imprecise! phenomena.’’ Even if contem-porary sociology has further scientized and objectified its practices, thesocial sciences on Weber!s model are still sciences, and a form of publicand shared knowledge rather than private and individual experience.Weber!s early 20th century version ofKantian social science, then, lives inwhat the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert described as a‘‘twilight zone of investigation.’’8 This intellectual location betweenhumanities on the one hand andnatural sciences on the other is exactly thesot of place which biographers find fruitful, and which gives them a greatdeal of freedom to invent and to roam; this makes most contemporarywriters of scientific biography ‘‘Weberians’’ whether they know it or not.

It is important, in speaking of scientific biography, to note thatWeber!s notion of ideal types had nothing to do with the descriptionof ‘‘average’’ types. Weber was interested in the sorts of social actorswho filled highly significant leadership roles within the German

7 Susan J. Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (NotreDame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 20.8 Ibid. p. 22.


society of his day (or Ancient India, or China, or ReformationEurope), and this, of course, must also make his approach congenialto the enterprise of scientific biography, which, with few exceptions,is devoted to the study of extraordinary individuals who achievedpositions of influence and leadership within the scientific communitiesin which they took part.9

The theory of ideal types is so embedded in the practice of the writingof biographies of artists, intellectuals and scientists that it is di"cult toimagine what other sorts of narrative strategies might be employed inplace of this scientized and generalized version of the characteristic plotof the Bildungroman. Not only does a typical biography emphasize theovercoming of obstacles leading to great and important creativeachievements, but it is quite common, especially in older biographies, todetail the obstacles and happenstances of creative lives that forestalledeven greater achievements: witness E. T. Bell!s judgment that hadNewton not gone o! to be Warden of the Mint we would have had thecalculus of variations a century sooner, or E. J. Dijkterhuis!s lamentthat no matter how revolutionary a thinker Newton was, he was still tooconservative and restrained by his world view, theology, and personalityto realize all the scientific possibilities that lay before him.10

Biography as ‘‘The Hero!s Quest’’

Scientific biography, even when structured by recourse to the novelisticdevices of the Bildungsroman, or through witting or unwitting use ofMax Weber!s theory of ideal types, may still be methodologically andhistoriographically sophisticated in a large variety of ways, and beempirically sound and well-founded. One could, for instance, be adevotee of actor- network theory or the strong program of the sociologyof scientific knowledge (in contradistinction to some older internalistversion of the history of science) and still employ these structural plotdevices. These devices specify the form of a life, but not its content.They do not suggest what were the obstacles to be overcome, how theywere overcome, what the circumstances were which formed the char-acter of the biographical subject, and so on. They do not specify howthe discovery was achieved, nor its context, nor its details, nor its fate.

9 Ibid. p. 32.10 E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), E. J.Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1961).

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They specify only that a canonical narrative of a scientific life will betold in the form of the overcoming of certain obstacles, and the failureto overcome others.

The notion of ‘‘biographical imperatives’’ as formal constraints onnarrative structure leads us to consideration of yet another detailed andinfluential constraint on the structuring of biographies: the folk-tale orfairy tale of the ‘‘hero!s quest.’’ Some years ago, the anthropologistMisia Landau published an article entitled ‘‘Human Evolution asNarrative,’’ in which she made a persuasive argument that a number ofscientific accounts of human paleo-anthropology followed, to a strikingdegree, the plot elements of a folk tale, described in the work of theRussian folklorist Vladimir Propp, as the ‘‘hero!s quest.’’11 What fol-lows here is a compacted version of what Misia Landau describes as thefolkloric version of the human paleo-anthropological story. The hero,an arboreal primate, smaller and weaker than the other animals, isdislodged from his home (comes down from the tree). As he moves intothis new realm the hero must survive a series of tests (climate, preda-tors). ‘‘It is by means of these self-imposed tests, and entailed by thehero!s growing intelligence or upright posture – that is, his burgeoninghumanity – that man seems to "make himself.’’12 At some point in thefolkloric recounting of a hero!s quest the hero receives a gift. In anactual folk tale this might be a magic cloak, a sword, or a ring. In thestory of human evolution, this gift might be the opposable thumb, ortools, or the ability to reason, or the capacity for language, or evenmoral sense. Armed with these additional capacities the hero is testedagain, and undergoes further development.

What is fascinating about the sequence is that though the order of theelements of the hero!s quest may be juggled, they are all present inalmost every textbook account of human emergence in the scientificliterature. As Landau points out, we begin the construction of the paleo-anthropological narrative with its conclusion; we know the end of thestory: the achievement of our humanity. Knowing that this will be thehero!s final triumph, our narrative work consists almost entirely ingetting the hero from some unknown beginning point to a known sig-nificant endpoint. It is foreknowledge of the end point that makes this

11 Misia Landau, ‘‘Human Evolution as Narrative,’’ American Scientist 72 (1984): 262–268, Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,1991), V(ladimir) Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, revised andedited by Louis A. Wagner, 2nd ed., vol. 9, Publications of the American FolkloreSociety, Inc. Bibliography and Special Series (Austin: University of Texas Press,1968(Russian Original 1928)).12 Landau, ‘‘Human Evolution as Narrative.’’ p. 263.


folkloric analysis applicable to the subject at hand: biography.13 Weknow which scientists made great discoveries, and that is why we writeand read their lives. The work of biography is to get our creative sub-jects from their unknown beginning to their known triumphs.

Landau took her analytical apparatus from the book Morphology ofthe Folktale, written by Vladimir Propp in 1928.14 An examination ofPropp!s detailed treatment of the theme of the ‘‘hero!s quest’’ in folkloreprovides a number of additional plot elements, which shed even morelight on the imperative conventions of biographical story-telling. Proppanalyzed folktales in terms of two sorts of elements – the characters, or‘‘dramatis personae,’’ on the one hand, and a series of plots elementsand developments or ‘‘functions,’’ on the other.

Propp!s treatment was rather elaborate, and has recently been mademore elaborate still by Wiktor Stoczkowski, but for our purposes thefull range of folk or fairy tale personae and functions is not the point,nor need we attempt to validate Propp!s claims about the universality ofsome of his functional sequences.15 The role of the ‘‘villain,’’ forinstance, while very important in the folktale of a hero!s quest, may haveno counterpart in a scientific biography; though our hero may havemany adversaries, and even a nemesis or two, generally the structure ofa scientific life does not depend on vanquishing a malevolent enemy.

Nevertheless, a number of the functions, and the sequence of func-tions put forward in Propp!s morphological analysis of folktales, doseem virtually universal as thematic constraints guiding the plot devel-opment of the scientific biography and biography generally, and of theselection of episodes and anecdotes for inclusion in them. It is thereforeworthwhile to consider such a sequence in some detail.

The following seems to be the essential series of functions portrayedin a scientific biography, in terms borrowed from Propp. We begin withPropp!s plot element or function of a ‘‘lack.’’16 It is made known thatsomething is lacking in the family or the community or the kingdom (or,in our case, in our science or knowledge of the world). In an actualfolktale tale this ‘‘lack’’ might be a bride, or a horse, or a lost child. In a

13 Ibid.14 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale.15 Wictor Stoczkowski, Explaining Human Origins. Myth, Imagination and Conjecture,trans. Mary Turton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (Original French,1994)).16 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale. The discussion of elements in this folktale spanspp. 26–65.

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scientific biography, however, it is invariably an item of knowledge ofthe world, or some technique to investigate it.

The next story ‘‘function,’’ in Propp!s sequence, transpires when thislack is announced and made known to the hero, and the hero is allowedto, or urged to go on a quest. Before he can profitably set out, our heromust be aware of the nature of the quest and of what he is questing for.It is equally clear that a scientific biography must explain how the herois informed (or discovers) the ‘‘lack’’ it will be his quest to remedy. Howdoes Kepler learn that the planetary orbits are ‘‘the problem’’? Howdoes Darwin learn that the origin of species remains to be discovered?How does Einstein learn to be concerned about the asymmetry in ourexplanations of magnetism and electricity in moving bodies? Docu-menting the seeker!s knowledge of the lacking thing or item of knowl-edge is necessary as a demonstration that his eventual discovery orinvention (his remedy for the lack) was the result of his deliberate quest.

The announcement of the lack, and the hero!s recognition of thedesirability of a quest to remedy it, brings us to the next element, nec-essarily the core and heart of a biography: ‘‘the hero!s quest’’ itself. Atthe outset of the quest narrative, we are told how the hero comes toleave home. The heroic function of leaving home in a biography may beliteral (as in the case of Darwin) or figurative (Lavoisier abandoning atheory and looking for a new one). If the scientist in question is famousfor several discoveries, each of these will follow the same pattern: a lack,an announcement of lack, and a departure on a search.

The next element follows immediately and naturally: ‘‘the hero istested, interrogated, attacked, which prepares the way for receiving ahelper.’’ This is Propp!s ‘‘donor function.’’ Almost all ‘‘discovery andinvention’’ stories contain a period of frustration and failure, in which ahero!s fortitude and steadfastness (in the face of this opposition andtesting) are demonstrated, and this theme forms an extended topicalsection in most scientific biographies. Such tests often manifest in sci-entific biographies as stories of blind alleys of investigation, failedexperiments, inexplicable results. They often also include criticism bysuperiors or colleagues or political and religious authorities of the questitself, or the conduct of the quest (which the hero steadfastly ignores).More often than not the tests are multiple and varied, in both biographyand folktale.

The narrative element of the hero!s testing (in the course of thequest) is always, in science and fairy tales, followed by a functionalelement whereby ‘‘the hero acquires the use of a magical agent.’’ Themagic agent of a folktale signifies an object of power which produces


immediate and extraordinary results where vast labor (without it) ex-pended on the quest led only to repeated frustration. In a scientificbiography, this agent is usually a technique, an instrument, or a new aconception arriving in the hero!s mind,. It might be something dis-covered in a book, or an object discovered in the world, in the course ofan exploration or experiment. This object may be given to the hero, orfound by chance. It may appear of its own accord. It may be presentedby another: ‘‘an incantation or formula’’ which will invoke the objectsought.

Here we are in the true heart of the scientific biography: ‘‘the hero istransferred or led to the whereabouts of an object of search.’’ The heromay fly (‘‘a flight of imagination’’), the hero may travel across groundor water, the hero may be led, or have a route shown to him; he may usea variety of means of advance, he may climb the stairway (proceed step-by-step), or use a hidden passage (see a way around the usual obstacles).

The scientist-hero, armed with his ‘‘magical’’ object, thus arrives atthe whereabouts of an object of search. Yet, in both folktale and sci-entific biography, a great struggle must yet ensue for the story to holdour interest. Armed with Tycho Brahe!s data on Mars, Keplerapproaches the problem of the planetary orbits. Newton!s falling apple,Kekule!s rolling snake, Galileo!s swinging chandelier, Darwin!s finches!beaks, Preistley!s recomposition of mercury by burning mercuric oxidewith a new burning glass, all involve ‘‘magical objects’’ which do notthemselves bring victory, but lead our heroes to their arenas of climacticstruggle.

As the hero arrives at the location of what is lacking or lost, the greatstruggle ensues, and now comes Propp!s next obligatory story function:‘‘the struggle.’’ In a fairy tale it is the villain with whom the herostruggles, in a scientific biography it is typically ‘‘the problem’’ itself.The hero must now fight using tenacity and cleverness. He or she mayhave to gamble. It is through this struggle that we reach the function:‘‘initial misfortune or lack is liquidated.’’ The object of search may beachieved, as in Propp!s fairy tales, by force (perspiration) or cleverness(inspiration) or both.

This is a complex functional element, and Propp outlines no fewerthan eleven major plot solutions as to how the hero prevails. In scientificbiographies it is much the same. Our interest in a scientific biographylies in the particular strategy the scientist-hero uses to outwit hisproblem. This might be the action of struggle itself, by the use of themagic agent (the new instrument or conception), by the breaking of aspell (breaking the power of an old conception over others! minds), or

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the revival of something or someone slain (the bringing back a pre-maturely discarded conception).

The parallelism between this crudely schematic folkloric morphologyof functions and the plot of most biographies should by now be quiteapparent. Yet it is just here that the connection between these narrativegenres converges even more directly and forcefully. Now that the questis complete, the hero, with his magical object, and with the lost orlacking object as well, (the new conception, theory, or technique) mustreturn home. The return however, is never easy or smooth, and consistsin one or more of the following elements in this order. ‘‘The hero ispursued or attacked’’ (resistance to discovery). ‘‘The hero is rescued.’’This might – in biography as well as in a fable – be via the discovery of asecond object of power, or the arrival of further helpers (Huxley to theaid of Darwin).

Either with or without pursuit and rescue ‘‘the hero is recognized,and arrives home.’’ Yet for the hero to be recognized as ‘‘the hero,’’both in the typical folkloric hero!s tale and in its biographical coun-terpart, there are a variety of obstacles still to be overcome. A false heromay arise presenting unfounded claims to be the actual hero, usually theclaim to have found the prize). At this point a further di"cult task isoften proposed to decide between the true and false claimants, and asPropp notes, ‘‘this is one of the tale!s favorite elements.’’ Now the heromust pass an ordeal, guess a riddle, make a discovery or a revealingchoice, must pass a test of fortitude, strength, and endurance, or mustsupply or manufacture something. The hero of a folktale must nowshow the utility of the discovery: bring a medicine, build a bridge, ordeliver an elixir. It is much the same in a scientific biography. Thescientist-hero must prove that the discovery is a worthy discovery, thatthe found object is in fact an object long-sought, and that he was its truefinder.

When the task is resolved the false hero, if there is one, is immedi-ately vanquished as soon as the hero is recognized. The hero is thengiven a new appearance and may be transfigured, or given new gar-ments, and may receive a prize or even ascend a throne: Einstein iscalled to professorships, puts on his academic robes, gets the NobelPrize, and ascends to successive thrones in Berlin, Pasadena, and finallyPrinceton.

Why should we be interested in similarity between the morphology ofa folktale and the morphology of the biography? One idea comes tomind immediately: the cognitive and intuitive discomfort, expressedagain and again by historians of science about ‘‘heroic biography,’’ here


finds its root cause. To some extent, the parallelism of dramatis personaeand functions in a hero!s tale in a folkloric setting on the one hand, andwhat transpires in a scholarly biography on the other, documents theintuition, or perhaps the suspicion, that the facts of the world (the livesof biographical subjects) are systematically distorted in the telling byturning them into hero tales. Such documentation and specification ofthe basis of our discomfort with scientific biography (as a hero!s quest)might suggest that we abandon biography altogether as a principalnarrative mode for the representation of the history of science, espe-cially if we are disinclined to believe that science is the product of theactions of a string of isolated hero geniuses rising in age after age abovea legion of ‘‘turnspits.’’

That the parallelism exists need not, however, lead us to abandonthis narrative structure for a biography. We should consider carefullythe suggestion made by Alan Dundes that the hero!s quest, in itsstructure, may be durable precisely because it is, in fact, identical to thestructure of the ‘‘ideal success story’’ of European culture (and science)generally since the Renaissance.17

Closer to our theme, however, is the new light that the folktalestructure sheds on Max Weber!s theory of ideal types, discussed above.It now appears that struggle of some professional creator, knowledgeworker, or functionary to succeed in his profession by overcomingobstacles, is a scientized and rationalized form, not just of the Bil-dungsroman, but of the folkloric hero!s tale. It is little wonder that thehistory of sociological theory treats Weber!s ideal types as having inintermediate status between humanistic and scientific ideals (privateinterior experience as well as public knowledge). Nor is it surprising thatWeber!s deployment of the idea contains some of the individual moraldimension ascribed to literature-as-belles-lettres by a long line of criticsfrom Matthew Arnold to F. R. Leavis, as well as exemplifying theobjective and public dimension ascribed to science by an equally longline of their opponents, from T. H. Huxley, to C. P. Snow.

The open creative ‘‘middle ground’’ between personal and publicknowledge, the ‘‘twilight zone of investigation’’ in Weber!s ideal types,in which the interplay of idiosyncratic personhood and the structure ofpublic scientific knowledge is extensively explored, is the home groundof scientific biography. The history of science, positioned for most of itsexistence between the sciences and the humanities, has found thebiography a persuasive means of fulfilling its mission of uniting these

17 Ibid. Introduction p. xv.

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two cultural realms. To write a scientific biography is to document theheroic transformation of inner experience into public knowledge.

Biography and Master Narrative

The phrase ‘‘master narrative’’ first appeared in debates about the his-tory of science in the middle and later 1980s. The critic and literarytheorist Fredric Jameson was the most popular expositor of the shift(back) from considering historiography as the application of theory tolife, to historiography as the elaboration of an overarching story about‘‘what happens in history.’’18 Many of the cultural ideals of the 19thcentury – those of Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, FriedrichNietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and many others, often treated as theoriesof history, are described by Jameson and others as ‘‘master narratives.’’Students of ‘‘master narratives,’’ like Jameson, were following the leadof the French historian Paul Veyne, who pointed out in 1971 that anytheoretical description is, in fact, a ‘‘compacted narrative,’’ a mnemonicdevice and name for a story that canonizes the sequence of events thetheory later claims to predict, and from which the theory generalizesbeyond the original narrative. The story of the French Revolution andof 1848 becomes the master narrative defining ‘‘bourgeois democraticrevolution’’ in Marxist theory. The theory of gravity is a name for thenarratives of Newton about apples and the moon!s orbit, and of Cou-lomb!s and many others! narratives about the rotation of suspendedmassive bodies. Veyne noted that much unintentional hilarity has beenproduced in historical writing by authors pointing to historical episodesas ‘‘proof’’ of a theory, when these episodes were in fact the verynarratives on which the theories in question were based.19

The choice of a master narrative seems as if it ought to be ofimportance to our story. If a biography is truly weak history and onlygets its meaning from the stronger narrative in which it is embedded, weshould wonder about the e!ect, on the structure of a biography, of thechoice of a master narrative. It appears, however, contrary to what wemight have expected, the choice of a master narrative is completelyirrelevant to the structure of a biography. Certainly, with a di!erentmaster narrative, we will see di!erent criteria of selection employed todetermine whose story gets told and what is considered heroic and

18 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1982).19 Veyne, Writing History. Essay on Epistemology. Chapter VII, passim.


exemplary practice within the confines of that master narrative. Ourbiographical subjects will behave di!erently in one master narrativethan they do in another with respect to certain kinds of cultural ideals.Yet because the exemplary tales retold in biographies embedded inmaster narratives are still those of the heroes of that narrative, theirstories will be heroes! tales irrespective of the content and direction ofthat narrative, and will be constructed according to the principles whichgovern the hero!s tale universally. The character of ‘‘Lucky Jim’’ inJames Watson!s autobiographical novella The Double Helix, becomesthe misogynist villain and receiver of stolen goods in Anne Sayre!sRosalind Franklin and DNA, in which Rosalind Franklin is now themuch-wronged heroine of the DNA story. The books have invertedroles for their dramatis personae, but identical sequences of functions asheroic tales.20

Consequently, we come to the surprising conclusion that nearly all ofthe historiographic work of the last 30 or 40 years has had very littleimpact on the plotting and structure of scientific biographies, or on thebiographies of artists or intellectuals considered more generally. Onehastens to add that this does not mean that biographies written todayare not di!erent in any way from biographies written decades ago;clearly, they are. Nevertheless, the structural picture of a striving heroovercoming obstacles in the service of her or his self-development, andachieving the goals outlined as those appropriate to the trajectory of themaster narrative, will still be the stories the biographies tell. Consideredin this way, the durability of biography as a narrative genre within thehistory of science, in spite of the many and often repeated reservationsand criticisms about the representation of science as a series of heroicquests, seems both natural and obvious.

The Issue of Selection Pressure

Given that the choice of master narrative is fundamentally irrelevant tothe story of the hero!s quest as the apparently irrevocable structure ofthe biography of an artist, or intellectual, or scientist, we may still askwhat e!ect this sort of template for a life ‘‘well-lived’’ has on the historyof science. Is there a distorting e!ect produced by the employment, as

20 Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (New York: Norton, 1975), James D.Watson, The Double Helix; a Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA(New York Atheneum, 1968).

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the narrative strategy of the biography, of the functional narrative se-quence of a hero!s quest?

The extent to which the conventions of the biographical novel, orthe theory of ideal types, or the notion of the hero!s quest, govern thewriting a biography (with regard to both who is selected and how thestories are told) becomes almost painfully obvious when we considerthe case of Darwin and Mendel. Richard Lewontin, in an extended 1985essay review, in the New York Review of Books, of the first volume of theDarwin correspondence, and of several books about Darwin, noted thedisparity in Harvard University!s library holdings between books byand about Darwin on the one hand, and books by and about Mendel onthe other.21 He argued that this disparity could not be explained by theidea that Mendel!s theory is less significant than Darwin!s. Indeed, heinsisted, the story of evolutionary biology in the first half of the 20thcentury is the conversion of Darwin!s intuition concerning naturalselection into an actual and quantifiable scientific theory of descent withmodification, through the combination of the work of Darwin andMendel. Lewontin argued that, in e!ect, Darwin!s theory and Mendel!stheory are the same theory with regard to the action of the mechanismof selection.

Lewontin!s search for books on Darwin and Mendel in the library atHarvard in 1985 turned up 184 books about Darwin, and 172 volumesof Darwin!s own work. Books by or about Gregor Mendel numbered17.22 Twenty-one years later, an online catalog search of the Harvardlibrary system reveals 316 books about Darwin, and 559 volumes byhim, while the total for books by and about Mendel rests at 47, withonly 30 added since 1985. While one might argue that interest in the-oretical population genetics today occupies working biologists to avastly greater extent than classical Darwinian phenotypic selection,nevertheless the increase in the number of volumes about Darwin andMendel is linear: the 2006 total represents very nearly 2 1/2 times that of1985 in both cases. The significant datum here is that there has been noshift in historical interest toward Mendel, even as modern biology hasmoved toward his work.23

21 Richard Lewontin, ‘‘Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind,’’ in It Ain’t Necessarily So. TheDream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, ed. Richard Lewontin (New York:New York Review Books, 2001), pp. 75–108.22 Ibid p. 76.23 In conducting this search, it was virtually impossible to get stable numbers in suc-cessive searches, but my numbers are probably accurate within 2 or 3 volumes.


Lewontin was clearly making a rhetorical point, of course.. Darwinwas already a well-known author of several widely read and admiredbooks at the time the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, This book,which created an immediate sensation, intersected with a number ofcultural and religious debates still underway today, which have madeDarwin part of a historical ‘‘set-piece’’ about the relationship of scienceand religion in the Anglo-American world. It is from this vantage not atall surprising that Darwin should remain the focus of attention, bio-graphical and otherwise, in English language history of science, and thatMendel should remain underrepresented in the library, and somewhatunderstudied in the scholarly literature.

Beyond Lewontin!s rhetorical point, however, lies an importantsubstantive issue concerning biography. In Lewontin!s view, the asym-metry in biographical treatment between Darwin and Mendel can beexplained by a residual addiction among historians of science to the‘‘Great Man theory of history,’’ and a tendency of modern historians‘‘still to be dazzled by Victorian values.’’24 Another way to look at this,however, is from the standpoint of what sort of life can be written ofDarwin, and of Mendel. It is immediately apparent that Darwin!s life isstructured like a hero!s quest, and Mendel!s is not.

Let us (briefly) consider lives of Darwin. Among the recent English-language lives of Darwin, two are particularly outstanding: that ofAdrian Desmond and James Moore, and that of Janet Browne.25 In thefirst of these narratives, that of Desmond and Moore, Darwin is still amonumental and original thinker, but he is, in every sense, ‘‘a product ofhis time,’’ and the world makes him as thoroughly as he makes his world.He is the hero of a master narrative which has a sociological and politicalcharacter, in which issues of class, power, and empire are all in theforeground. In this story, Darwin departs with his family from Londonfor Down House not simply because he desires the peace of a countryestate for his reading and reflection, but because he fears for his family!ssafety in a time of urban political turmoil. In terms of literary exemplars,one would have to say that this is the ‘‘Dickensian’’ life of Darwin.

In contrast to the Desmond and Moore biography of Darwin, that ofJanet Browne features a Darwin who is a self-made man: ‘‘Much of thelasting fascination of Darwin!s life story surely lies in the relationshipbetween this prolific inner world of the mind and the private and public

24 Lewontin, ‘‘Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind.’’ pp. 87, 92.25 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin. The Power of Place, vol. II of a Biography (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin. The Life ofa Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).

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lives that he created for himself.’’26 Browne!s stipulation that Darwin isself-creating is very much to the point. As for the literary exemplars forthis biography, we may take the author!s own characterization, from theopening words of the second volume of her biography: ‘‘If CharlesDarwin had spent the first half of his life in the world of Jane Austen, henow stepped forward into the pages of Anthony Trollope.’’27

In spite of the sharply contrasting master narratives of these two livesof Darwin, set in very di!erent political and literary contexts, and withdi!erent dynamics driving them, there is no question that the life ofDarwin in both takes the form of a hero!s quest and that Darwin!s lifefits the folkloric template constructed for this kind of the tale to anextraordinary degree. It is this ‘‘fit,’’ rather than a ‘‘great man’’ theoryof history, or a bedazzlement with Victorian values, that determines thesuitability of Darwin!s life for biographical treatment.

Let us now briefly consider lives of Mendel, of which there are veryfew. The first to come into English was Hugo Iltis!s 1924 German lan-guage biography, which appeared in 1932 as Life of Mendel.28 Thisbook is remarkable not least for its attempt to turn a life which does notfit the story of the hero!s quest at all well, into a hero!s quest. In Iltis!sbook Mendel enters the monastery at Brno, at the age of 21, because heis poor and has no other opportunity. Here he converses with ‘‘sage andtranquil fathers’’ and roams through the monastery garden. Lack ofspace confines his experiments on peas to a cramped plot assigned bythe abbot, next to the monastery wall. Only when he himself becamehead of the monastery 25 years later could he enlarge his experimentaldomain.29 Here our hero, smaller and weaker than the rest has manytrials and tribulations and etc. etc. etc..

In contrast, Vitezslav Orel!s: Gregor Mendel, the First Geneticist(1996) gives a very di!erent story in which a young Gregor Mendelenters a monastery which is a well-known agricultural research estab-lishment, using the power of science to ‘‘transform nature and promoteeconomic and social progress.’’30 Here the abbot of the monasterybecomes a scientific patron to a bright young man, and sends him to

26 Browne, Charles Darwin. The Power of Place. p. 7.27 Ibid. p. 3.28 Hugo Iltis, Life of Mendel, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, English ed. (New York:Hafner Publishing Company, 1966 (1924)).29 Lewontin, ‘‘Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind.’’ pp. 89 and 90 referencing Iltis!s life ofMendel pages 49 to 51).30 Vitezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996).


Vienna for advanced study in physics. ‘‘Far from grudgingly restrictingMendel to a narrow garden plot for the pursuit of his intellectual hobby,Napp [the abbot] built a greenhouse in 1855 in which Mendel and tworesearch assistants from among the monks also worked.’’31 The mon-astery in this version turns out not to be a tranquil cloister, but a majorscientific center with a library of 20,000 volumes and a huge herbarium.When Mendel succeeded as abbot in 1868 he extended the researchwork of the monastery in a number of directions, and he was among thefounding members of the Austrian Meteorological Society, then theleading organization of its kind in the world.32 This is all interesting andworth knowing, but going to graduate school in Vienna is hardly ahero!s quest, and a close examination of Mendel!s life shows that almostevery major folkloric element which might recommend it for bio-graphical treatment is completely missing from the life he lived.

In viewing these two lives of Mendel, we see an early attempt to makeMendel!s life fit the hero!s quest. The failure of this attempt to conform toany of the salient facts ofMendel!s life does not immediately lead to a newlife of Mendel, but to the abandonment of Mendel as a biographicalsubject: only in the last 10 years has a significant biography emerged, thatofOrel. In this latter life ofMendel, as Lewontin points out: ‘‘we recognizein Mendel the 19th century version of the professional research scientistwho, at the same time, as department chairman, is in constant conflictwithhigher authorities on questions of budget and recruitment.’’33

There are, of course, some pragmatic reasons why the Darwin alsocompletely overshadowsMendel as a biographical subject, in addition tohis suitability with regard to the template of the ideal type, and the hero!squest, and the manifold cultural implications which stem directly fromthe debate about his scientific work. Not least of these pragmatic reasonsis the availability of materials documenting the inner life of Darwin, asopposed to the nearly complete absence of those which might documentthe inner life of Mendel. Darwin left an enormous correspondence whichis still in the process of publication after many years and many tens ofmillions of dollars. Darwin left many sketches and notebooks which alsoserve as historical sources. Most of Mendel!s notes and papers, on thecontrary, were deliberately destroyed in 1884, at the time of his death.34

Insofar as a scientific biography is an attempt to chart the transformationof inner experience into public knowledge, and chronicle the formation of

31 Lewontin, ‘‘Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind.’’ p. 91.32 Ibid.33 Lewontin, ‘‘Darwin, Mendel, and the Mind.’’ p. 91.34 Ibid p. 87.

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character, it would seem that an abundant correspondence is a necessaryprecondition to producing a biography.

This is, however, not the case. It is my own experience, working on abiography of Alfred Wegener, that it is possible, though quite laborious,to reconstruct the intellectual life of the subject from quite fragmentaryremains. All of Wegener!s personal papers and manuscripts weredestroyed at the end of World War II. A few hundred letters, many ofthem intellectually trivial birthday greetings and so on, survive, as dothe expedition notebooks from his Greenland work. There is an inter-esting if quite limited correspondence with his father-in-law WladimirKoppen. Wegener was not interested in his own ‘‘inner life’’ and kept nopersonal diaries except when on expedition. Yet it is been possible toproduce a life which maps intellectual development onto the publishedwork, which situates Wegener within the communities of his time, andwhich fulfills all the genre criteria for a scientific biography given above,including an account of the ‘‘moment of discovery’’ of continental drift.Nevertheless, scientists who leave abundant literary remains concerningtheir personal lives and their own scientific development tend to bepreferred as biographical subjects precisely because of the way theintersection of private and public is the focus of the scientific biographyas it is generally produced.

Examination of a large number of biographies of scientists written byprofessional historians of science indicates that while lives will be scan-ned for the presence of narrative elements which fit the functions anddramatis personae of the hero!s quest, these elements are generally nei-ther invented nor inserted into lives that do not possess them. Lives maybe tweaked, but are generally not deliberately distorted in the telling.

However, biography does create an extensive distortion in the rep-resentation of the normal work of science, precisely because biographyis not meant to construct or represent normal or average performance.Whether it comes in the form of a Bildungsroman, a Weberian ideal-typenarrative, or an out-and-out hero!s quest, biographies are meant torecord and retail notable and extraordinary performances. It is not thatindividuals! lives are altered or doctored in order to make them‘‘heroic.’’ What produces the most common form of distortion is thatcreative workers whose lives do not fit the template of the hero!s questare denied biographical treatment because their lives do not fulfill thegenre conventions of a ‘‘good story,’’ or of the ‘‘ideal success story’’ ofEuro-American culture.

The lives told in scientific biographies are interesting, and sometimeseven enlightening, but to the extent that they chronicle extraordinary


achievements by extraordinary people they do not show us the structureor development of ordinary achievements of ordinary people. Since thesciences, like all other forms of human activity, are mostly ordinarypeople doing ordinary things in ordinary ways, the conclusion mustfollow the biography cannot, by its very nature, provide a picture ofhow science actually works most of the time. This is not a trivial dis-tortion: rather, it is quite massive in is impact on the on the way thesciences are understood, evaluated, and pursued.

This point may be made more explicit if we consider RussellMcCormmach!s immensely successful Night Thoughts of a ClassicalPhysicist, which is a biography of a nonexistent person, created as acomposite of real life events of 19th century physicists, almost none ofthem of the first rank.35 This construction obtains its considerablepower and cachet through the fact that each biographical item, retold asthe experience of a single fictional biographical subject, is a documentedbiographical event in the life of some real, ordinary, and second-rankphysicist of the later 19th century. McCormmach!s book is one of themost influential and telling biographical treatments ever produced in thehistory of science, because what he gives us is not an extraordinary life,but a life exemplary in its ordinariness. McCormmach has created a newkind of Weberian ideal type: the ‘‘ordinary type.’’ What makes thisbook so useful in teaching the history of science is the realism of itspresentation of the situation in 19th century pre-relativistic physics,already told in McCormmach book co-authored with Christa Jung-nickel: The Intellectual Mastery of Nature.36 In the Night Thoughts of aClassical Physicist, this discursive narrative treatment is embodied in abiography of a fictional physicist, who meets many obstacles andovercomes none of them, or so few of them, as to make his biographicalstory a good story, precisely because it is not a ‘‘good story.’’

This leads us to a further consideration: one first raised in 1974 byhistorian Stephen Brush in an article entitled ‘‘Should the History ofScience Be Rated X?’’37 In this fascinating piece Brush, a historian of thekinetic theory of gases, planetary physics, and quantum mechanics,made the argument that history of science should indeed be rated X for

35 Russell McCormmach, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1982).36 Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, The Intellectual Mastery of Nature:Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago press,1986).37 Stephen G. Brush, ‘‘Should the History of Science Be Rated X.?,’’ Science 183, no.No.4130 (1974): 1164–1172.

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science students.38 His reasoning was as follows. The scientists selectedfor biographical inclusion in science textbooks are chosen as inspira-tional figures based on their exemplary achievements: thus a physicstextbook that references history at all is likely to contain biographicalmaterial on Einstein. However, a close examination of the actual, asopposed to the hagiographical textbook life of Einstein, or of many otherscientists of the first rank, as conducted by historians of science, showsthat they made their greatest achievements, at least in part, by creativelybreaking the rules of science, and even making rules of their own.

Brush pointed out that if one of the aims of science instruction is toinculcate a good ideology of scientific practice (it is), and good scientificpractice includes meticulous following of the rules, then one should notencourage or teach rule-breaking as exemplary conduct. To the extentthat creative and successful rule-breaking is likely only to be the productof extraordinary minds and talents, one should not want to encouragethose of ordinary talent to break rules – because in breaking the rulesthey are more likely to produce bad science than great achievements.

Here again, we face the paradox that what the greatest scientists havedone is not what most scientists do, and that the stories we most like totell are those least like the actual practice of science by most workers, andare confined instead to a series of idealizing and exemplary cases ofextraordinary performance. Scientific biography must constantly steer acourse between the Scylla of ordinariness, which renders it pointless, andthe Charybdis of hagiography, which renders it inaccurate and unhelpful.

Future Prospects for Biography: The Question of Authorship

Looking to the future, we may wonder how much longer biography cansustain itself as a means of doing history of science, and still maintaincontact with the sciences. For the immediate future things look prom-ising. The updating of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography will containmany new entries from various periods of the history of science. Thestipulation that only scientists who are deceased may be considered forinclusion pushes back the active career span, for most scientists con-sidered, into the 1980s and earlier, and thus into an era of scientificproduction in which a single-authored papers, or jointly-authoredpapers with two or three authors and a clearly delineated responsibilityfor intellectual production, would still characterize almost every field of

38 At the time of Brush!s writing, 1974, an X-rating was not an age limit, it meant a filmcould not be legally screened at all.


science with the possible exception of particle physics, and someemerging fields of the biological sciences.

Twenty-five years from now, the situation will be very much di!er-ent. I have before me the 26 October 2006 number of Nature. It containsa sole, single-author contribution, and this is a retraction of a claimmade in a previous multi-authored paper. Among the actual researchcontributions, the minimum number of authors is two, and the maxi-mum number is 37; the modal number is eight. This distribution ofauthorship is quite typical of Nature and Science these days, and it iswell-known that the rank ordering of authors from first to last is a verypoor indicator of who did most of the work, although it is a very goodindicator of who raised most of the money. In such an environment,where a lifetime of publications by a given scientist may include only afew book reviews, review articles, and think pieces as single-authore!orts, it becomes quite di"cult to see how biography will find thematerials to get its job done.

The landscape of scientific authorship is much changed in the last fewdecades, though historians and philosophers of science have beensomewhat slower than our sociologist colleagues to adjust to thesechanges.39 Corporate authorship, concealed authorship, and even a lackof specified authorship for major scientific products all characterize thecurrent scene. Since much of the work of a biography is following theevolution of the oeuvre of some specific individual through his or her lifecourse, ambiguity of authorship is a direct challenge to the majorstructural principle governing biographical work, other than the genreconventions themselves.

The landscape of intellectual property and its law is radically changedas well, and new courses, on the books in elite law schools, are forced tocontend with open source production, the notion of a General PublicLicense, open access journals, open source biology, user-created valueand virtual economies of science, and user-created and edited encyclo-pedic undertakings such asWikipedia.40 Science and Technology Studies

39 Mario Biagioli, ‘‘The Instability of Authorship. Credit and Responsibility in Con-temporary Biomedicine,’’ in Science Bought and Sold. Essays in the Economics of Sci-ence, ed. Philip Mirowaski and Esther-Mirjam Sent (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2002), pp. 486–514. represents a serious attempt.40 In the fall of 2006 the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, featured acourse cross listed as InfoSys 296/Law 276, taught by Professor Pamela Samuelson anda number of her colleagues in law and information systems theory, which had thesetopics on the syllabus. The syllabus and the lectures themselves were available as videoand audio Podcasts through the University directly, or through iTunes, for free, andwithout registration anywhere in the world.

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has its own Wiki site, which went online in December 2005. It wascreated by Bryan Pfa!enberger, an associate professor in the Depart-ment of Science Technology and Society at the University of Virginia,and is managed by Pfa!enberger with the assistance of a team of editors.This is a non-profit venture in which the principal outlay has been the$150 that Pfa!enberger put forward to protect the domain name for thenext 10 years. One would expect that this site, or one very much like it,will become the template for much future production in science studies.One mentions this e!ort in particular, because it represents the road nottaken by the history of science when the first edition of the Dictionary ofScientific Biography was planned. The editorial introduction to the firstvolume of that work makes it quite clear that the decision to go withlives, rather than with topics and ideas was to be defended on thegrounds that lives represent stable entities while the deployment oftopics, ideas, and subfields is more subject to change. The actual ratio-nale actually went much further than this, and included the argumentthat ‘‘the history of science like other aspects of history is made by menand not by themes and abstractions.’’41 Whatever the merits of thisargument, the issue at hand was constrained in its consideration by thenotion of relatively fixed and permanent bound-book presentation ofscholarly results. One expects, on the contrary, that into the indefinitefuture, topical and idea-based Internet compendia of material on sciencestudies will be continuously updated and made contemporary as is thecase with the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The ori-ginal rationale for a biographical organization of the history of scienceclearly no longer exists, insofar as it was pragmatic and technological.

The disappearance of the technological rationale for organizing thehistory of science biographically, on the one hand, and the di"culty ofparsing out the contributions of individual authors in the study of recentscience on the other, does not seem to have had the e!ect of reducing thecommitment of historians of science to biography. It does seem, how-ever, to have had the e!ect of turning them away from the present andvery recent past. Throughout the second half of the 20th century it wasevident that all subfields of the history of modern science were workingtheir way toward the present. Even as late as the time when the Dic-tionary of Scientific Biography began to appear, most history of science,and most scientific biographies, were located in the mid-19th-centuryand before – except in the case of a few contemporary individuals ofextraordinary stature or immediate relevance. The subsequent steady

41 Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 1 (New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p. x.


forward march of history of science into the later 19th century, the early20th century and the middle 20th century, gave one the sense that by thelater 1980s, the enterprises of science, and history of science, werebecoming chronologically convergent; history of science would work itsway right up to the present. While this did happen, the convergence didnot consolidate itself in a large number of areas.

Anecdotal evidence, including regular reading of the Isis CriticalBibliography, seems to indicate that instead of a focus on very recentwork, there has been a turn by many historians back towards therethinking and retelling of the history of the sciences before the middle ofthe 20th century. This is true even of historians whose training and earlyworks were in very recent and near contemporary science. This devel-opment is sometimes ascribed to the reluctance of historians of science toengage the technical details of modern science, or even an incapacity todo so. Whether or not this is true, it is irrelevant. I suspect, rather, thatone could fix, for each subfield of science, the tendency of the historianswho study it to arrest the forward chronological development of theirwork at precisely that point in time when their historical subject-field ofscience was abandoning single-authored journal article publication. I fur-ther suspect that this arrest of development is intimately tied to theconundrum of how to continue to write biography in this strikinglyaltered intellectual universe, where each piece of newly produced ‘‘publicknowledge’’ represents the transformation of the inner experiences of atleast two scientists, more often six or eight scientists, and quite commonlytens or even scores of scientists – or is produced in corporate laboratoriesand defense establishments, by a person or persons unknown.

It is not at all clear what the intellectual function of the individualbiography will be in this sort of an environment, or how much longer itcan persist as a means of doing the history of science, if history ofscience is to maintain any connection at all with the research front ofcontemporary science.

It is perhaps time now to sum up some of the considerations herepresented. To the extent that science is seen as a cumulative and pro-gressive enterprise, scientific biography serves a variety of functionswithin it. It provides the origin stories for conceptual, instrumental, andother developments in science, considered by the community at large tobe important. It provides a way to explain how the inner experience ofsome individuals, deemed significant in the story of scientific progress,becomes public knowledge. It also has the function of providingexemplary lives for the edification of apprentice scientists, as algorithmsof ‘‘scientific lives well lived,’’ and thus provide a focus for aspiration.

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We have seen that the writing of a biography is controlled by complexand extensive genre conventions, which are independent of historio-graphic stance and even of the choice of a historical master narrative.Biographies, novelistic in form, are subject to the genre conventions of theBildungsroman, and to the conceptual frame of the Weberian theory ofideal types, and are descended in both these lines from the folkloric con-ventions of the tale of the ‘‘hero!s quest,’’ anatomized by Vladimir Proppand others. We have seen that these genre conventions exert a powerfulselection pressure that determines whether or not a scientist!s life getswritten, sometimes irrespective of the importance of that scientists work.

For all the good that biography does and has done, one would haveto say that history of science in the form of biographies of extraordinaryindividuals cannot, by its very nature, portray most scientific careers andcannot therefore instantiate the general development or movement ofthe sciences. History of science as a collection of heroic quests certainlyworks against the attempt to portray science as a collaborative socialenterprise preceding incrementally. If told accurately, scientific lives mayalso undermine the socialization of young scientists by encouraginginappropriate and ine!ective rule-breaking: Brush!s ‘‘X-rated’’ princi-ple. Finally, by exalting supernormal performance, biography mayunintentionally degrade and devalue normal performance and actuallydemoralize beginners.

Were scientific biography the only means and method of pursuingstudies of the history of science, this would be of more concern. Butclearly the robust presence of the sociological study of science, ‘‘the-enterprise-formerly-known-as-externalism’’ does study science as anincremental and collective activity, and it does show us how most sci-entific careers proceed. Moreover, modern biographical treatments ofscientific lives which bother to situate their subjects in the institutionsand networks that made their careers possible, serve to balance thedistortions created by the genre conventions.

There is the additional consideration that in recent years history ofscience and the sciences themselves have parted company somewhat.The content analysis of the Darwin Centennial of 1982, carried out byWassersug and Rose, indicated that most of the commemorations werenot closely correlated with biological, but rather with historical entities.The authors concluded that the Darwin industry, although an entirelyacademic enterprise, is quite independent of the enterprise of biology inits institutional framework.42 This is certainly even more the case today,

42 Richard J. Wassersug and Michael R. Rose, ‘‘A Reader’s Guide and Retrospective tothe 1982 Darwin Centennial,’’ The Quarterly Review of Biology 59 (1984): 417–437.


as we witness the preparations for the Darwin bicentennial in 2008. Thisis to say that while certain of the distortions created by the biographicalenterprise might be of concern with regard to their impact on science,the increasing distance between science and history of science may wellrender this question moot in the near future.

References

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Craig, Gordon Alexander. 1978. Germany, 1866–1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Desmond, Adrian and James, Moore. 1991. Darwin. The Life of a Tormented Evolu-

tionist. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.Dijksterhuis, E. J. 1961. The Mechanization of the World Picture. Translated by C.

Dikshoorn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Charles Coulston Gillispie, (ed.), 1970. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. vol. 1 New

York: Charles Scribner!s Sons.Hankins, Thomas. 1979. ‘‘In Defense of Biography: The Use of Biography in the

History of Science.’’ History of Science xvii: 1–16.Hekman, Susan J. 1983. Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory. Notre

Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.Iltis, Hugo. 1966. Life of Mendel. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. English ed. New

York: Hafner Publishing Company (1924).Jameson, Fredric. 1982. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.Jungnickel, Christa and Russell, McCormmach.. 1986. The Intellectual Mastery of

Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein. vol. 2 Chicago: University ofChicago press.

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Nye, Mary Jo. 2006. ‘‘Scientific Biography: History of Science by Another Means?’’ Isis97: 322–329.

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Writing Scientific Biography

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