Using the blog as an archive
The time-stamp feature makes it possible to antedate a post and thus create an on-line searchable text archive. I will begin putting my old texts on representations of individuality in biomedicine in antedated posts. For example, I've just posted the manuscript for a seminar paper that I wrote in September 1991 (gosh, that's along time ago!) and antedated it as if it was written then -- although blogs didn't exist at that time.
Plutarchian versus Socratic scientific biography
I was working on a draft to the first chapter of my biography of Niels Jerne (note 1) when his elder son called me on a Friday morning in October 1994 to tell me that Jerne had died during the night. The funeral would take place on the following Monday. I hastened to say that I was on my way to a History of Science Society meeting in New Orleans and that biographers oughtn’t attend their subjects’ funerals anyway (except perhaps discreetly observing the event from a distance). My excuses were accepted without further ado.
Two days later, while waiting for my connecting flight at the JFK, I bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times which to my pleasant surprise carried a half-page obituary of Jerne, a nice piece of top-notch science journalism. And when arriving at the conference hotel a few hours later, I realized that many other historians of science too had read the obituary, because friends and colleagues who knew about my project came up and gave me their condolences. “I’m so sorry”, said one. “Bad news about Jerne”, said another. “You must be devastated”, said a third. I felt somewhat uneasy, didn’t know what to think, even less what to say.
I got my keys and was just about to go up to my room and get a night’s well-deserved sleep when a tall, white-haired, handsome man in his sixties wearing a worn tweed jacket came out of the restaurant. He caught my eyes, strolled up to me, somewhat hesitantly, and greeted me with a shy smile on his bearded face: “Thomas, you must be relieved!”
In my jet-lagged state I didn’t quite hear if he was serious or in a joking mode. Whatever, his words hit a chord inside me. I stretched out as if to embrace him, then realized that this was perhaps not quite proper procedure, and cried out so that everyone around could hear: “At last, someone who understands how I feel!” That someone was Sam.
Silvan S. Schweber, of all people at the HSS meeting, understood. Not only because he is one of those rare members of American academia who listens to, contemplates and understands what you tell him (another member of this rare breed of academics was the late Larry Holmes). But also because Sam too was living with a problem that had bothered me for years, viz., how to research and write the biography of a living scientist.
A few months before the HSS meeting, we had both attended a meeting at Stanford on oral history of science. Sam and I were the only participants who were writing biographies. I talked about my ongoing study of Jerne, Sam about his work with Hans Bethe. We discovered that not only had we both devoured our subjects’ scientific publications and delved into their personal document files, but also interviewed them at length. And more importantly, we were both interested in the moral lives of our subjects.
To me ethical questions were something new. Sam on the other hand had already spent the better part of a lifetime reflecting on the moral landscape of science, in his case bomb physics (note 2). He was, of course, never involved in any bomb work himself, but the moral aspects of physics have nevertheless loomed large in his intellectual development. Already when arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1949 to do graduate studies in theoretical physics, he was confronted with the debate on whether to develop a hydrogen bomb; he continued as a postdoc with Bethe at Cornell and later became actively involved in the creation of the physics department at Brandeis.
The student unrest that followed in the wake of the escalating Vietnam war in the late 1960s got him even more deeply involved in the moral issues of academia. In the course of this journey Sam has also made a significant detour to the moral grove of biography. In the Shadow of the Bomb (2000) summarizes many years of close insights into the development of theoretical and nuclear physics. In the form of a parallell biography — or rather a sort of modernized, i.e., strongly contextualized, version of the classical Plutarchian format — Sam analyzes the shaping of Bethe’s and Robert Oppenheimer’s moral outlooks and their ensuing struggle with the ethical and political aspects of the new knowledge and technology of atomic fission and its consequences for humankind. Was the Enlightenment ideal still valid? Was knowledge always a good in itself? Should some knowledge be forbidden?
The gist of a Plutarchian biography is the ethical evaluation of two political actors who handle similar kinds of problems in different ways. Oppenheimer and Bethe had much in common, including a strong faith in reason, a conviction that science is always good, and that shared knowledge will sooner or later lead to progress. But they also differed in important respects, and in Sam’s interpretation this was most evident in the way they positioned themselves in the spectrum between individuality and communality.
Whereas Oppenheimer tended to seek individualistic solutions to moral problems and became “a lonely and somewhat solitary personage” (p. 184), Bethe sought solutions at the level of community. Whereas Oppenheimer could so eloquently voice (“and perhaps only voice”) love and the care of mankind, almost as if he were a poet, Bethe created a strong community around him that gave him “sustenance, fortitude, and caritas” ( p. 27).
If Sam would have to choose between the two, he would undoubtedly turn up on Bethe’s side. He does indeed respect Oppenheimer, but his former mentor at Cornell — the subject of the full biography yet to come — is closer to his heart. Even for those of us who do not know Sam well personally, it is evident that Bethe’s ideals are also his. In this sense In the Shadow of the Bomb is a labor of love and a practical demonstration of a central aspect of the Plutarchian biographical tradition, viz., to be edifying. Sam has been edified and wants us to be too.
Much as I sympathize with Sam’s biographical position, however, I am not sure that the future of biography’s edifying capacities lies here. Not because In the Shadow of the Bomb focuses on great men as such and their theories that shook the world; after all, this seems to be a valid account of the situation at the time. But rather because this great men/big theories/dire consequences-kind of biographical poetics may be difficult to apply outside the atomic age, which is unique in that the chain of events could have resulted in the eradication of all of humankind in one singular political act (as it perhaps almost did during the Cuban crisis).
The ethical problems involved in, say, the present development of the biomedical sciences, seem to be of a quite different kind. Unlike classical big physics, biomedicine is a network-like pattern of interaction between the demands of millions of consumers of biomedical products and hundreds of thousands of more or less proletarianized laboratory scientists (with few theoreticians or classical intellectuals among their ranks) in both public and private laboratories; the two sides are mediated by a large number of private biotech companies operating against the backdrop of a volatile stock market. In this scenario there is hardly any place for noble theoreticians who feel responsible for the catastrophic consequences of scientific discoveries.
In other words, even though Sam’s biographical project is commendable for giving us an understanding of the moral dilemmas and responsibilites of scientists in the state-driven atomic era, I believe that today’s fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic and market-driven global technoscientific culture calls for a different sort of ethically-oriented life writing. In short, I suggest that the future for biography as an ethical genre — in contrast to the standard function of the genre as an ancilla historiae, i.e., a way of writing the history of science by other means, or
as sophisticated entertainment á la Dava Sobel — relies on its ability to resonate with the technoscientific culture of the twenty-first century. This resonance lies, I believe, in its capacity for being a Socratic exercise, i.e., for being a genre devoted to the project of “knowing oneself”.
Whereas Plutarchian moral biography has raised monuments to model scientists for us lesser mortals to gaze upon with awe, a renewed Socratic genre of scientific biography (single or double) would rather consist in portraits of how members of the new global technoscientific network (it is rather difficult to see it as a community in the old Mertonian sense), create their scientific and life projects. Such portraits do not have to be restricted to books — in the last decade the film format has proved an increasingly interesting medium for biographical portraits (note 3).
A theoretical and methodological grounding for such a Socratic approach to a renewed ethical biographical genre might be developed with reference to works such as Martha Nussbaum’s, which involves reading fiction as a continuation of the Hellenistic practice of “therapy of desire”, and Pierre Hadot’s — who inspired Michael Foucault to the concept of “souci de soi” (“care of self ”) — proposal that the ancient role of philosophy as a genre for the cultivation of “spiritual exercises” has interesting late modern repercussions (note 4).
By viewing/reading about the cognitive yearnings, professional passions, and life choices of other actors on the technoscientific stage, twenty-first century scientists may thus learn to be more reflexive in their daily life-practices and more willing to engage in practical virtue ethical training. In that way scientific biography might help undo some of the a-morality that permeats today’s global technoscience, not least its biomedical sector (note 5).
Notes:
1. Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven: Yale University Press 2003).
2. I have borrowed the phrase “moral landscape of bomb physics” from Gregg Herken’s review of Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000) in American Scientist, vol. 88, nr 4 (July–August), 2000 (quoted from on-line version: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926).
3. Like Richard Eyre’s A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (2001). I must confess, however, that I rather prefer Helen Mirren’s portrait of the daily life and work and moral quanderies of fictional detective chief inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (1991–1996) to Russell Crowe’s quasi-realistic and sentimental rendering of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001).
4. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994); Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press 2002); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard 1984).
5. For a more extensive discussion of scientific biography as a genre of virtue theoretically based research ethics, see, e.g., Thomas Söderqvist, “Immunology á la Plutarch: biographies of immunologists as an ethical genre,” pp. 287–301 in: Anne-Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology (Paris: Elsevier 2001), Thomas Söderqvist, “Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetishe Gattung,” pp. 287–325 in: Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie Schreiben (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2003), and Thomas Söderqvist, “What is the use of writing lives of recent scientists,” pp. 99–127 in: Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds., The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine (London: Routledge 2006).
(manuscript to be published in J. Renn and K. Gavroglu (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, Springer (2007). Thanks to Finn Aaserud, Adam Bencard, Janet Browne and Ron Doel for constructive remarks. [Added in May 2007: The volume has now been published!]
Two days later, while waiting for my connecting flight at the JFK, I bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times which to my pleasant surprise carried a half-page obituary of Jerne, a nice piece of top-notch science journalism. And when arriving at the conference hotel a few hours later, I realized that many other historians of science too had read the obituary, because friends and colleagues who knew about my project came up and gave me their condolences. “I’m so sorry”, said one. “Bad news about Jerne”, said another. “You must be devastated”, said a third. I felt somewhat uneasy, didn’t know what to think, even less what to say.
I got my keys and was just about to go up to my room and get a night’s well-deserved sleep when a tall, white-haired, handsome man in his sixties wearing a worn tweed jacket came out of the restaurant. He caught my eyes, strolled up to me, somewhat hesitantly, and greeted me with a shy smile on his bearded face: “Thomas, you must be relieved!”
In my jet-lagged state I didn’t quite hear if he was serious or in a joking mode. Whatever, his words hit a chord inside me. I stretched out as if to embrace him, then realized that this was perhaps not quite proper procedure, and cried out so that everyone around could hear: “At last, someone who understands how I feel!” That someone was Sam.
Silvan S. Schweber, of all people at the HSS meeting, understood. Not only because he is one of those rare members of American academia who listens to, contemplates and understands what you tell him (another member of this rare breed of academics was the late Larry Holmes). But also because Sam too was living with a problem that had bothered me for years, viz., how to research and write the biography of a living scientist.
A few months before the HSS meeting, we had both attended a meeting at Stanford on oral history of science. Sam and I were the only participants who were writing biographies. I talked about my ongoing study of Jerne, Sam about his work with Hans Bethe. We discovered that not only had we both devoured our subjects’ scientific publications and delved into their personal document files, but also interviewed them at length. And more importantly, we were both interested in the moral lives of our subjects.
To me ethical questions were something new. Sam on the other hand had already spent the better part of a lifetime reflecting on the moral landscape of science, in his case bomb physics (note 2). He was, of course, never involved in any bomb work himself, but the moral aspects of physics have nevertheless loomed large in his intellectual development. Already when arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1949 to do graduate studies in theoretical physics, he was confronted with the debate on whether to develop a hydrogen bomb; he continued as a postdoc with Bethe at Cornell and later became actively involved in the creation of the physics department at Brandeis.
The student unrest that followed in the wake of the escalating Vietnam war in the late 1960s got him even more deeply involved in the moral issues of academia. In the course of this journey Sam has also made a significant detour to the moral grove of biography. In the Shadow of the Bomb (2000) summarizes many years of close insights into the development of theoretical and nuclear physics. In the form of a parallell biography — or rather a sort of modernized, i.e., strongly contextualized, version of the classical Plutarchian format — Sam analyzes the shaping of Bethe’s and Robert Oppenheimer’s moral outlooks and their ensuing struggle with the ethical and political aspects of the new knowledge and technology of atomic fission and its consequences for humankind. Was the Enlightenment ideal still valid? Was knowledge always a good in itself? Should some knowledge be forbidden?
The gist of a Plutarchian biography is the ethical evaluation of two political actors who handle similar kinds of problems in different ways. Oppenheimer and Bethe had much in common, including a strong faith in reason, a conviction that science is always good, and that shared knowledge will sooner or later lead to progress. But they also differed in important respects, and in Sam’s interpretation this was most evident in the way they positioned themselves in the spectrum between individuality and communality.
Whereas Oppenheimer tended to seek individualistic solutions to moral problems and became “a lonely and somewhat solitary personage” (p. 184), Bethe sought solutions at the level of community. Whereas Oppenheimer could so eloquently voice (“and perhaps only voice”) love and the care of mankind, almost as if he were a poet, Bethe created a strong community around him that gave him “sustenance, fortitude, and caritas” ( p. 27).
If Sam would have to choose between the two, he would undoubtedly turn up on Bethe’s side. He does indeed respect Oppenheimer, but his former mentor at Cornell — the subject of the full biography yet to come — is closer to his heart. Even for those of us who do not know Sam well personally, it is evident that Bethe’s ideals are also his. In this sense In the Shadow of the Bomb is a labor of love and a practical demonstration of a central aspect of the Plutarchian biographical tradition, viz., to be edifying. Sam has been edified and wants us to be too.
Much as I sympathize with Sam’s biographical position, however, I am not sure that the future of biography’s edifying capacities lies here. Not because In the Shadow of the Bomb focuses on great men as such and their theories that shook the world; after all, this seems to be a valid account of the situation at the time. But rather because this great men/big theories/dire consequences-kind of biographical poetics may be difficult to apply outside the atomic age, which is unique in that the chain of events could have resulted in the eradication of all of humankind in one singular political act (as it perhaps almost did during the Cuban crisis).
The ethical problems involved in, say, the present development of the biomedical sciences, seem to be of a quite different kind. Unlike classical big physics, biomedicine is a network-like pattern of interaction between the demands of millions of consumers of biomedical products and hundreds of thousands of more or less proletarianized laboratory scientists (with few theoreticians or classical intellectuals among their ranks) in both public and private laboratories; the two sides are mediated by a large number of private biotech companies operating against the backdrop of a volatile stock market. In this scenario there is hardly any place for noble theoreticians who feel responsible for the catastrophic consequences of scientific discoveries.
In other words, even though Sam’s biographical project is commendable for giving us an understanding of the moral dilemmas and responsibilites of scientists in the state-driven atomic era, I believe that today’s fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic and market-driven global technoscientific culture calls for a different sort of ethically-oriented life writing. In short, I suggest that the future for biography as an ethical genre — in contrast to the standard function of the genre as an ancilla historiae, i.e., a way of writing the history of science by other means, or
as sophisticated entertainment á la Dava Sobel — relies on its ability to resonate with the technoscientific culture of the twenty-first century. This resonance lies, I believe, in its capacity for being a Socratic exercise, i.e., for being a genre devoted to the project of “knowing oneself”.
Whereas Plutarchian moral biography has raised monuments to model scientists for us lesser mortals to gaze upon with awe, a renewed Socratic genre of scientific biography (single or double) would rather consist in portraits of how members of the new global technoscientific network (it is rather difficult to see it as a community in the old Mertonian sense), create their scientific and life projects. Such portraits do not have to be restricted to books — in the last decade the film format has proved an increasingly interesting medium for biographical portraits (note 3).
A theoretical and methodological grounding for such a Socratic approach to a renewed ethical biographical genre might be developed with reference to works such as Martha Nussbaum’s, which involves reading fiction as a continuation of the Hellenistic practice of “therapy of desire”, and Pierre Hadot’s — who inspired Michael Foucault to the concept of “souci de soi” (“care of self ”) — proposal that the ancient role of philosophy as a genre for the cultivation of “spiritual exercises” has interesting late modern repercussions (note 4).
By viewing/reading about the cognitive yearnings, professional passions, and life choices of other actors on the technoscientific stage, twenty-first century scientists may thus learn to be more reflexive in their daily life-practices and more willing to engage in practical virtue ethical training. In that way scientific biography might help undo some of the a-morality that permeats today’s global technoscience, not least its biomedical sector (note 5).
Notes:
1. Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven: Yale University Press 2003).
2. I have borrowed the phrase “moral landscape of bomb physics” from Gregg Herken’s review of Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000) in American Scientist, vol. 88, nr 4 (July–August), 2000 (quoted from on-line version: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926).
3. Like Richard Eyre’s A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (2001). I must confess, however, that I rather prefer Helen Mirren’s portrait of the daily life and work and moral quanderies of fictional detective chief inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (1991–1996) to Russell Crowe’s quasi-realistic and sentimental rendering of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001).
4. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994); Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press 2002); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard 1984).
5. For a more extensive discussion of scientific biography as a genre of virtue theoretically based research ethics, see, e.g., Thomas Söderqvist, “Immunology á la Plutarch: biographies of immunologists as an ethical genre,” pp. 287–301 in: Anne-Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology (Paris: Elsevier 2001), Thomas Söderqvist, “Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetishe Gattung,” pp. 287–325 in: Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie Schreiben (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2003), and Thomas Söderqvist, “What is the use of writing lives of recent scientists,” pp. 99–127 in: Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds., The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine (London: Routledge 2006).
(manuscript to be published in J. Renn and K. Gavroglu (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, Springer (2007). Thanks to Finn Aaserud, Adam Bencard, Janet Browne and Ron Doel for constructive remarks. [Added in May 2007: The volume has now been published!]
Combining wikis and blogs for joint document editing
When thinking about possible ways of working out an on-line writing project of this kind, I was inspired by Laura Cohen's post "Why Can't a Wiki Be More Like a Blog?" on her blog Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective. Wikis are great for collective editing, but discourages people who "just" want to add comments. Blogs on the other hand don't have the collective editing feature. Why not create a mix, a sort of Wikiblog? An example of a half-way solution that Laura Cohen mentions is the annotated edition of The Iraq Study Group Report which shows a very nice comment system where you can open windows and comment on each paragraph in the document. Says Laura: "Wikis and blogs could benefit from incorporating each others' features. This could move us toward a truly full-featured integrated publishing platform in which the best of both systems are available".
Metabiography
As the number of biographies has grown over the centuries, so has the number of famous people whose lives have been subjected to several or many renditions; some popular historical figures have in fact occasioned more than a hundred biographies (an anonymous blogger recently proclaimed that she had nearly one hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies on her shelves “and I never get bored reading them”). Thus the emergence of a supergenre, the “metabiography,” which does not restrict itself to writing yet another and infinitesimally “truer” version of a life (perhaps based on a newly discovered letter or diary) but primarily analyzes earlier versions to make a critical appraisal of the tradition of life-writing about a particular subject. An excellent recent example is Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2004) which is not so much a biography of the Brontës as a book about biography where the author demonstrates how generations of literary historians and life-writers have remolded the Brontë sisters to fit their own agendas.
Scientists have had their metabiographers too. More than fifty years ago, Henry Guerlac (1954) set the example with an essay on Lavoisier and his biographers. He was followed by Dorinda Outram (1976) on the tradition for Cuvier-éloges; David Cassidy (1979) on biographies of Einstein; Marilyn Marshall (1980) on Fechner-studies; Steven Jacyna (1983) on the succession of nineteenth-century images of John Hunter; Frederick Churchill (1982) and Marjorie Greene (1993) on the Darwin-biographical tradtion; and L. Pearce Williams (1991) on Faraday-biographies. The first scientific metabiography in monograph form was probably A. Rupert Hall’s study on eighteenth-century biographies of Newton (1999). The entries on individual scientists in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (ed., Arne Hessenbruch, 2000) follows the same pattern — it is not primarily the details of the life and work of the scientist but the changing interpretations by different biographers that is in focus.
Although Nicolaas Rupke was apparently not aware of this emerging metabiographical literature when completing his study of the Humboldt phenomenon in Germany (Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2005) his book fits nicely into the tradition. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is a good choice for a metabiographer. A celebrated naturalist, scientific traveller-explorer, physical geographer, and intellectual, indeed one the best known figures in the history of German science and learning, he has been the subject of a huge publication industry. Fellow scientists, science popularizers, journalists, and to some extent historians, have contributed to the facets of the many Humboldt portraits.
“Who did the many writers about Humboldt think he really was?” (p. 17), asks Rupke and answers the question by identifying a number of political camps in modern German history that have appropriated Humboldt over more than 150 years and “aggressively recreated” his life and work “to suit contemporary needs” (p. 208). There is Humboldt the national hero of the revolutionaries of 1848; the subversive democrat at the Prussian court; the culture chauvinist of the Weimar republic; and the Aryan supremacist of the Nazi period. Postwar Humboldts include the antislavery marxist of the East Germans; the cosmopolitan friend of the Jews; and today’s pioneer of globalization (there is, of course, even a “green” and a gay Humboldt). Each of these get a separate chapter in Rupke’s well-researched (the list of printed sources is 75 pages long), densely written and fact-heavy study. The only significant political institutions in Germany that have not been involved in the cultural construction of their own Humboldt are the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
Rupke concludes that a study of the Humboldt phenomenon is attractive as a means for understanding changing modern German identities. Humboldt’s life and work was an “agora” that shaped a discourse not only about the natural world, but as much about his own nation, enabling Germans to deal with “national ambitions, shortcomings, guilt complexes and the like” (p. 206). He also concludes that all the Humboldts — whether good or bad, scholarly or popular — are the product of institutional cultures. The task of metabiography, in Rupke’s view, thus is primarily to explore the ideological embeddedness of biographies, not to settles issues of their authenticity.
Despite a concluding section on metabiographical reflections and “an inevitable moment of self-reflection” (p. 217), Rupke never really becomes self-reflexive, however. He reprimands biographers who thought they were only describing the facts of Humboldt’s life; yet he basically treats the political and ideological circumstances around the successive Humboldt constructions in an similar down-to-earth factual manner. And he does not seem to realize that the phrase “In historiography there does not exist an Archimedean point” (p. 217) is as strongly ideologically embedded in contemporary Western culture as the Humboldt-authors whose writings he has so skilfully analyzed. This is a minor point, however. In general, Rupke’s study is a clear improvement of the earlier scientific metabiographical tradition from Henry Guerlac to A. Rupert Hall. It is well-written, (albeit not elegantly) and will doubtlessly become a standard reference for the Humboldt industry and for writers of scientific metabiographies to come.
Scientists have had their metabiographers too. More than fifty years ago, Henry Guerlac (1954) set the example with an essay on Lavoisier and his biographers. He was followed by Dorinda Outram (1976) on the tradition for Cuvier-éloges; David Cassidy (1979) on biographies of Einstein; Marilyn Marshall (1980) on Fechner-studies; Steven Jacyna (1983) on the succession of nineteenth-century images of John Hunter; Frederick Churchill (1982) and Marjorie Greene (1993) on the Darwin-biographical tradtion; and L. Pearce Williams (1991) on Faraday-biographies. The first scientific metabiography in monograph form was probably A. Rupert Hall’s study on eighteenth-century biographies of Newton (1999). The entries on individual scientists in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (ed., Arne Hessenbruch, 2000) follows the same pattern — it is not primarily the details of the life and work of the scientist but the changing interpretations by different biographers that is in focus.
Although Nicolaas Rupke was apparently not aware of this emerging metabiographical literature when completing his study of the Humboldt phenomenon in Germany (Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2005) his book fits nicely into the tradition. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is a good choice for a metabiographer. A celebrated naturalist, scientific traveller-explorer, physical geographer, and intellectual, indeed one the best known figures in the history of German science and learning, he has been the subject of a huge publication industry. Fellow scientists, science popularizers, journalists, and to some extent historians, have contributed to the facets of the many Humboldt portraits.
“Who did the many writers about Humboldt think he really was?” (p. 17), asks Rupke and answers the question by identifying a number of political camps in modern German history that have appropriated Humboldt over more than 150 years and “aggressively recreated” his life and work “to suit contemporary needs” (p. 208). There is Humboldt the national hero of the revolutionaries of 1848; the subversive democrat at the Prussian court; the culture chauvinist of the Weimar republic; and the Aryan supremacist of the Nazi period. Postwar Humboldts include the antislavery marxist of the East Germans; the cosmopolitan friend of the Jews; and today’s pioneer of globalization (there is, of course, even a “green” and a gay Humboldt). Each of these get a separate chapter in Rupke’s well-researched (the list of printed sources is 75 pages long), densely written and fact-heavy study. The only significant political institutions in Germany that have not been involved in the cultural construction of their own Humboldt are the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
Rupke concludes that a study of the Humboldt phenomenon is attractive as a means for understanding changing modern German identities. Humboldt’s life and work was an “agora” that shaped a discourse not only about the natural world, but as much about his own nation, enabling Germans to deal with “national ambitions, shortcomings, guilt complexes and the like” (p. 206). He also concludes that all the Humboldts — whether good or bad, scholarly or popular — are the product of institutional cultures. The task of metabiography, in Rupke’s view, thus is primarily to explore the ideological embeddedness of biographies, not to settles issues of their authenticity.
Despite a concluding section on metabiographical reflections and “an inevitable moment of self-reflection” (p. 217), Rupke never really becomes self-reflexive, however. He reprimands biographers who thought they were only describing the facts of Humboldt’s life; yet he basically treats the political and ideological circumstances around the successive Humboldt constructions in an similar down-to-earth factual manner. And he does not seem to realize that the phrase “In historiography there does not exist an Archimedean point” (p. 217) is as strongly ideologically embedded in contemporary Western culture as the Humboldt-authors whose writings he has so skilfully analyzed. This is a minor point, however. In general, Rupke’s study is a clear improvement of the earlier scientific metabiographical tradition from Henry Guerlac to A. Rupert Hall. It is well-written, (albeit not elegantly) and will doubtlessly become a standard reference for the Humboldt industry and for writers of scientific metabiographies to come.
Dictionary of Medical Biography
I 
just want to announce the publication of the five volumes of Dictionary of Medical Biography, edited by Bill and Helen Bynum for Greenwood Press. It came out the day before New Year's Eve (30 Dec. 2006), so I haven't seen it in print yet.
Several of my present and former colleagues here at Medical Museion (and myself) have written articles for it (in addition I was area editor for the Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; unfortunately no Icelandic medical doctors are included). The Bynums allowed for 38 entries from the Nordic countries out of a total of approx. 1100, so we had to make some pretty tough decisions -- in fact, not even all medical Nobel prize winners have been incorporated.
I'm curious to read the Bynums' editorial introduction. Judging from the original author instructions back in 2004, this is a fairly conventional biographical dictionary. But I will postpone all critical remarks until I have received my area editor's copy (wouldn't dream of buying it myself; it costs 750 USD! -- hopefully major libraries will buy it, though)
just want to announce the publication of the five volumes of Dictionary of Medical Biography, edited by Bill and Helen Bynum for Greenwood Press. It came out the day before New Year's Eve (30 Dec. 2006), so I haven't seen it in print yet.Several of my present and former colleagues here at Medical Museion (and myself) have written articles for it (in addition I was area editor for the Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; unfortunately no Icelandic medical doctors are included). The Bynums allowed for 38 entries from the Nordic countries out of a total of approx. 1100, so we had to make some pretty tough decisions -- in fact, not even all medical Nobel prize winners have been incorporated.
I'm curious to read the Bynums' editorial introduction. Judging from the original author instructions back in 2004, this is a fairly conventional biographical dictionary. But I will postpone all critical remarks until I have received my area editor's copy (wouldn't dream of buying it myself; it costs 750 USD! -- hopefully major libraries will buy it, though)
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