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Biography and the Changing Representations of Charles Darwin Many Branches Of Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xl:3 (Winter, 2010), 347–373. MAKING DARWIN Janet Browne Making Darwin: Biography and the Changing Representations of Charles Darwin Many branches of the intellectual world apparently feel that biography is a slightly problematical academic genre. Even though the heyday of con- struing history as the lives of “great ªgures” has passed, and life Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 writings have in recent years arrived at a much more sociological perspective, we still tend to consider biographical studies as liable to adopt lesser professional standards than monographs—playing to a popular audience rather than to academic peers. Important is- sues relating to matters of construction and interpretation con- tinue to be debated, such as the application of narrative structures like “quest” or “tragedy” to a life story, the permissible extent of imaginative reconstruction, and the purpose and place of an indi- vidual life in modern critical analysis. In the last few years, the genre has also been applied to nonliving subjects (salt, the pencil, artworks) or nonhuman life stories (rhinoceros, ant, salmon), gen- erating an interesting discussion about agency in historical ac- counts. Above and beyond are longstanding problems of subjec- tivity. Is it legitimate for one person to believe that he or she can recreate the mind of another? Faced with these questions in 1938, Sartre asked, “Is biography even possible?”1 Such questions have added punch when applied to scientiªc Janet Browne is Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She is the author of a biography of Charles Darwin in two volumes—Voyaging (New York, 1995); The Power of Place (New York, 2002). © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 Thomas Söderqvist, “A New Look at the Genre of Scientiªc Biography” and “No Genre of History Fell under More Odium than That of Biography: The Delicate Relations between Scientiªc Biography and the Historiography of Science,” in idem (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientiªc Biography (Burlington, 2007), 1–15, 241–262. See also Thomas L. Hankins’ early call for more biographical research, “In Defence of Biography: The Use of Biography in the History of Science,” History of Science, XVII (1979), 1–16. From a large literature about biog- raphy in general, see Peter France and William St. Clair (eds.), Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biog- raphy (New York, 2002); Anthony M. Friedson (ed.), New Directions in Biography (Honolulu, 1981); Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes (eds.), Biographical Passages: Essays in Victorian and Mod- ernist Biography (Columbia, Mo., 2000). For nonhuman subjects, see Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientiªc Objects (Chicago, 2000), and the series of animal histories issued by Reaktion Press, London. Jean Paul Sartre, quoted in David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York, 2000), 137. 348 | JANET BROWNE biography, but two others become pressing when matters of sci- ence are involved: How should a writer deal with those parts of a person’s mental life that may be hard to understand or too abstract for the projected audience? Should a book be written with the sci- ence left out? This kind of biography—a life without the difªcult details—has a long, and often distinguished, history but hardly does justice to the commitment and emotional investment of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 those men or women whose lives will thus be only partially repre- sented. Another signiªcant feature of scientiªc biography is the deªnition of science that comes into play. Historians of science are alert to the manner in which these deªnitions have changed over time, though not all authors working in biography may be. Until very recently, science was thought to advance through a sequence of discoveries, whether great or small; such discoveries were what made a scientist worth writing or reading about. Many biographi- cal accounts are accordingly framed around a “discovery” moment and possess strong narrative sweep, offering readers plenty of op- portunities to engage with the creative impetus that drives scien- tiªc research. The authors of these accounts work at the interface between science and the human imagination. They investigate the creative processes of an individual intellect, the metaphors that stimulate fresh insight, the long haul at the lab bench, and the struggle to capture thoughts in words, diagrams, and numbers. In- sightful studies of the imaginative mind of scientists such as Lavoi- sier, Krebs, Franklin, and Oppenheimer have materially enhanced our understanding of the way in which these men and women ap- proached major turning points in their lives. This interpretive style is familiar through the writings of literary biographers like Michael Holroyd and Richard Holmes.2 Since the 1970s, science has also been regarded as a social pro- cess. Suddenly an individual life—and collective lives—assume 2 Frederic L Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry Of Life: An Exploration Of Scientiªc Creativity (Madison, 1985); idem, Hans Krebs (New York, 1991–1993) 2v.; Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London, 2002); Robert Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, 2008); Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven, 2003). The case of Robert Oppenheimer is rich ground for writers, as explored by Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Cambridge, Mass, 2008); Abraham Pais, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life (New York, 2006); Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago, 2006); Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Trag- edy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 2005). MAKING DARWIN | 349 fresh consequence. Biography from this standpoint can illuminate the networks that unite individual ªgures with larger groups of scientiªc practitioners, the journals and other publications that broadcast their work, the circulation of ideas through overlapping circles of friendship or correspondence, the reward systems in play, and the emergence of self-identiªcation as a “scientist.” Such an approach invites reºection about the relationship between local- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ized knowledge—for example, a key experiment or observation— and its transformation into products for a wider audience who will eventually judge it. Smith and Wise’s joint biography of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, is one such pioneering study. When knowledge creation is treated as a process, the social, intellectual, and biographical characteristics of the people concerned are re- vealed as closely interwoven with the larger professional setting in which they operate. Such forms of scientiªc biography can there- fore provide historiographically signiªcant space in which to ex- plore institutional norms and the social expectations demanded of science.3 Studies of groups of co-workers and research schools are a valuable way forward along this front, as demonstrated by Kohler in his account of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “ºy room” at Columbia University in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on otherwise relatively disparate people united by a speciªc scientiªc problem is another, as explored in Rudwick’s Great Devonian Con- troversy, and Morrell and Thackray’s Gentlemen of Science. Scientiªc partnership through marriage is discussed in Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am’s Creative Couples in the Sciences. When scientiªc biogra- phers pay attention to the many intersecting domains in which in- dividuals operate, they open the door to a robust historical analysis 3 For a review of early work on science as a social process, see Everett Mendelsohn et al., The Social Production Of Scientiªc Knowledge (Dordrecht, 1977); Andrew Pickering, Ian Hacking, et al., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992). Key works on the study of scientiªc biography are Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (eds.), Telling Lives in Science: Es- says on Scientiªc Biography (New York, 1996), and Söderqvist (ed.), The History and Poetics of Scientiªc Biography (Burlington, 2007). On scientiªc identity, see the essays in Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (eds.), Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowl- edge (Chicago, 1998). A classic study of the kind is Alan J. Friedman and Carol C. Donley, Einstein as Myth and Muse (New York, 1985). See also Freeman J. Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York, 2006). Noted scientiªc biographies that address these points are Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (New York, 1989); Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (London, 1998); Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge Mass., 2000); Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, 2003). 350 | JANET BROWNE of the nature of science itself. To study a person’s success or fail- ure, celebrity or notoriety, recognition or humiliation is to ex- plore the consolidation of ideas around what it meant to be a sci- entist at any particular time.4 These studies are also signiªcant in that they broach the ques- tion of the abstract nature of science. One of the qualifying fea- tures of modern science is that facts and theories are held to be ob- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/40/3/347/1698445/jinh.2010.40.3.347.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 jective and universal—or, putting it around another way, that each item of current knowledge can be successfully divorced from the people who ªrst made the inferences or presented the proposals.
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