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!]