COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS We see this in spellbinding biographies, from Georgina Ferry’s Dorothy Hodgkin (Granta; 1998) and Walter Isaacson’s Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2007) to Graham Farmelo’s award-winning biography of Paul Dirac, PHYS./SPL AM. INST. The Strangest Man (Faber and Faber, 2009) — which drew praise from readers as varied as Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard and Martin Rees. THE EVOLUTION OF A THEORY A whole spectrum of books on Charles Darwin, published to mark the 2009 bicen- tenary of his birth, illuminated the debate surrounding the emergence and implica- tions of evolutionary theory. Led by Janet Browne, who treated On The Origin itself as a biographical subject, and Adrian Desmond and James Moore, who looked at Darwin’s work on human origins, this biographic experimentation expanded in original ways. Rebecca Stott’s Darwin’s Ghosts (Blooms- bury, 2012), for example, is a prequel consist- ing of vivid portraits of early evolutionists, starting with Aristotle doing marine biology on the isle of Lesbos. Stott’s book is part of a growing trend for group biographies of scientists. These use teamwork, competition and personal rivalry to reframe science as a kind of social history. Outstanding examples cover group- ings in every century. Arabic trailblazers of the ‘dark’ ages and people of the early The history of science is about people such as Paul Dirac, as well as the discoveries they made. medieval period star in Jim Al-Khalili’s Pathfinders (Allan Lane, 2010). Lisa Jar- BIOGRAPHY dine’s Ingenious Pursuits (Little, Brown and Co., 1999) focuses on seventeenth-century European natural philosophers, and Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (Faber and Faber, The scientist 2002) displays the enlightened industrial- ists of the eighteenth century. We can relish the pioneering efforts of nineteenth-century palaeontologists in Deborah Cadbury’s The within Dinosaur Hunters (Fourth Estate, 2000), and marvel at the groundbreaking work of twentieth-century physicists in Manjit Richard Holmes celebrates today’s revival of science Kumar’s Quantum (Icon Books, 2008). biography, a tradition spanning 300 years. Mathematics could be seen as the hard- est nut to crack biographically because of its abstract language. Yet Simon Singh rendered early two decades on from the emerged. We want to read about scientific it thrilling in his treasure-hunt of a group explosion in popular-science pub- work as part of a life story — to know what biography over four centuries, Fermat’s Last lishing, books by luminaries such as makes a scientist tick, and what set them Theorem (Fourth Estate, 1997). NStephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins are ticking. We are intrigued to learn that Dawk- still selling in six figures, and authors such as ins, the eminent biologist and atheist, had “a PROFILE PIONEERS Brian Cox and Rebecca Skloot are drawing normal Anglican upbringing”, was inspired But what of that earlier tradition of science a younger generation of readers. But I am by the Dr Doolittle books and taught in biography? The word ‘scientist’ was coined struck by a new emphasis — on popular- 1960s San Francisco, in the time of flower only in 1834, and there is a popular miscon- science biography. As I learned while power and demonstrations against the war ception that individual scientific ‘lives’ — researching my book The Age of Wonder in Vietnam. such as Henry Mayhew’s Young Humphry (Harper, 2008), the “life scientific” can be The form is currently undergoing unprec- Davy (1855) — are an extraordinarily gripping adventure. edented transformation. Biographers are essentially a Victorian NATURE.COM There is a noble tradition of science biog- tackling highly complex and challenging creation. In fact, as For an author’s raphy stretching back to the 1600s. Recently, areas such as X-ray crystallography, general with literary biogra- take on writing a fresh hunger to understand the making of relativity and quantum physics, explaining phy, these go back well biography, see: science through the making of scientists has them as pure adventures of the human spirit. over 300 years. In the go.nature.com/xgb9tg 498 | NATURE | VOL 489 | 27 SEPTEMBER 2012 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT 1680s, John Aubrey wrote Brief Lives of Wil- here have been adapting an image from characteristics can be linked to the ener- liam Harvey, Edmund Halley and Robert Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Regained — gies that both inspired and occasionally Boyle, as well as of Shakespeare and Milton. the observation that “wise men” may think impeded their research. A surprising pioneer of the form in the themselves “deep versed” in research, yet in Fourth, biographies show that error and eighteenth century was Samuel Johnson. reality may be “as children gath’ring pebbles uncertainty are central to discovery, in a Along with his dictionary and The Lives on the shore”. way that is lost in ‘the literature’, that offi- of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), cial record of scientific endeavour. Victo- Johnson also wrote The Life of Dr Herman SETBACKS AND SERENDIPITIES rian histories of science tended to propose Boerhaave (1739), a vivid short biography In what ways do biographies, whether writ- models of unbroken, cumulative progress, of the great Dutch botanist and medical ten last year or in the seventeenth century, which encouraged the alarming triumphal- doctor who founded clinical teaching at throw light on science and scientists? The ism of classical science in the early twenti- Leiden, improved diagnostic techniques Royal Society, announcing a historic sym- eth century. Contemporary ‘scientism’ has and isolated urea. posium, Writing Scientific Biography, in perhaps inherited something of this bias. Johnson perceived that Boerhaave’s child- 2008, observed that such works “show us By contrast, individual biography reveals hood was essential to his adult science. He the human face of science: the motivations, doubt, scepticism and the historically shift- writes, for instance, of Boerhaave’s gruesome set-backs, serendipities and moments of ing boundaries of teenage leg ulcer: “his own pain taught him enlightenment in the quest for knowledge”. “There is interpretation and to compassionate others, and his experience I think they do more. First, they show a popular truth. The forthcom- of the inefficacy of the methods then in use, the crucial shaping power of childhood and misconception ing life of the nuclear incited him to attempt the discovery of oth- youth, where the scientific vocation and that individual physicist J. Robert ers more certain.” vision begin to emerge. Second, they exam- science ‘lives’ Oppenheimer by Ray Similarly, William Stukeley in his Life of ine the nature of the creative breakthrough. are essentially Monk (the inspired Newton (1752) is careful to cite “the extraor- Eureka moments are only one manifesta- a Victorian biographer of Lud- dinary pregnancy of his genius, whilst a tion. Discovery may equally be the product creation.” wig Wittgenstein and b o y ”. Stukeley gives vivid descriptions of of painful years of research, experiment and Bertrand Russell) Newton’s boyish windmills, counter levers thought, as with Darwin or Dirac. Or it may reveals just such a powerful field of political, and water clocks. Stukeley also relates the be the result of a short but intense period financial and ethical ambiguities surround- first known version of the young Newton’s of competition and rivalry, as with Francis ing US science during the cold war. famous vision of “universal gravitation” in Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin Biographies can also probe originality the orchard at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and Linus Pauling, in the race to discover and disputed cases of priority, as in the “dis- as he contemplates the falling of an apple the structure of DNA. covery” of oxygen by Antoine Lavoisier, or from a tree: “Why shd it not go sideways, Third, biographies point to the impor- Joseph Priestley or Carl Scheele; or the the- or upwards? but constantly to the earths tance of the inner, imaginative and emo- ory of evolution by Darwin or Alfred Russel centre? ... there must be a drawing power tional life. They contradict the fallacy that Wallace. They show that at particular times, in matter. & the sum of the drawing power all scientists are icy rationalists. The great certain areas of science are intensely active in the matter of the earth must be in the US physicist Richard Feynman played and open to discovery — currently, cosmol- earths center, not in any side of the earth.” the bongos. The famously elusive chem- ogy, neuroscience and nanotechnology — (Stukeley’s original manuscript, one of the ist Henry Cavendish was a secret member while others are comparatively dormant. It treasures of the Royal Society, can be read of the notorious Cat and Bagpipes Club. is in these active areas that the linked forces at http://royalsociety.org/library/moments/ Michael Faraday was an elder of the Sande- of teamwork and rivalry are most fiercely newton-apple). manian church. James Clerk Maxwell wrote alive, and their consequences can be best The growing fascination with scientific Scottish poetry and accompanied himself understood. biography in the nineteenth century is illus- on the guitar. Alan Turing was an outstand- In The Strangest Man, for instance, Gra- trated by the supplements to the fourth, ing marathon runner. All these traits and ham Farmelo memorably compares the fifth and sixth editions of the Encyclopae- development of quantum mechanics in the dia Britannica, completed in 1824. Of 165 1920s by a team of 50 physicists to “a group lives selected for individual treatment, 35% of construction workers” labouring on an were broadly scientific. Another landmark enormous building site occupying much of was David Brewster’s The Life of Sir Isaac northern Europe. “Virtually all the builders Newton (1831), which presented the natural were male, under thirty, intensely competi- BRIDGEMANART.COM philosopher as a secular saint, “the high- tive and craving the respect of their peers as priest of science” and a man of universal well as the blessing of posterity.” genius.