Your day job is as a geneticist studying the sense of smell, but you also write and translate history books. What is it that attracts you to history and, in particular, to the history of science?
It’s a bit of a cliché, but if we don’t understand where we’ve come from, it’s very hard to know where we’re going. just as dobzhansky said “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution” i don’t think much makes sense about all aspects of human culture including science unless you know something about its history and where it came from comes from.
You are reading: History of science books
is there anything in particular about science where its history tends to be ignored? It’s important to understand history, because that’s how we know what we know, right?
the key to scientific knowledge is that science is cumulative: we know more about the world now, better than we did 100 years ago. that does not apply to artistic creation. so, for example, we cannot prove that keats was a better writer than shakespeare. ‘better’ doesn’t really mean anything in that context. science is progressive, in the sense that it builds on prior knowledge. what is interesting, and what scientists are aware of, is that such progress is incredibly non-linear. you make mistakes all the time and the path you don’t take is often, in hindsight, the interesting one. however, when scientists describe what the history of their subject is like, especially in textbook accounts, everything is linear and inevitably leads us to where we are today. that is the main reason why historians are very frustrated with scientists who write history. professional historians are trained to be very critical and to think very richly about their subject, in a way that scientists generally do not.
“You are not allowed to think that people in the past were stupid. most of the people I write about were much smarter than we will ever be. and yet they often believed all sorts of nonsense.”
In my first book, I drew a parallel between the way science develops and the way each of us grew from a single cell to an adult human being. It seems like it was inevitable that we would end up the way we are, but there was really nothing inevitable about it. there’s a whole set of possibilities that could have produced completely different versions of us that don’t exist. if you’re trying to untangle the processes involved in the development of an organism, then you need to understand all those conditionalities. otherwise, you’ll end up with a very simple and unavoidable view of what’s going on.
You have books by historians and scientists on your list. We’ll start with the first one, which is John Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine published in 2000. Why did you choose this one?
john died last year. he was a very good friend and colleague here at the university of manchester. When I started thinking about the history of science in the late 1990s, I wanted an anchor to understand the big picture of how science developed. in fact, “science” covers a whole set of disciplines: scientific discoveries mix with technological discoveries and, vice versa, technology allows us to discover things. we also have many scientific applications in the form of medicine. John’s book looks at all of these, largely through the lens of universities, which are the places where many of the key discoveries have been made over the last 100 years, using Manchester as one of the examples. I found it extremely enlightening. It made me realize that much of what I used to see as the classic structure of scientific research—you’re funded by the state, you go and get the money, you do the research, you publish your paper, and you move on to the next project—is actually a description of a very particular period, perhaps three decades, in the second half of the 20th century. prior to that, the interpenetration of business interests and more focused research were extremely important. now we are at that stage again: we are under great pressure to make an impact, preferably financially in terms of patents and new processes. For those of us who don’t work in areas that lend themselves to such immediate exploitation, this can be a challenge.
what john also does is focus on science as a form of work. Many academics may not think of their research in terms of work (after all, it is a fantastic and privileged form of work), but we do work, we work collectively, and we try to relate to and understand the world. john draws a parallel to developments in industry, where you start with very simple craft techniques that gradually built into large-scale industry. Similar changes can be seen in various scientific disciplines: molecular biology is a very good example. it started with very simple and relatively crude techniques performed by a handful of people. then there was a wave of “industrialization” with the creation of ever larger research groups. finally, we end up with machines that took over much of what were extremely important human technical skills for much of the second half of the 20th century, much of which is now forgotten. no one knows how to do them anymore and it doesn’t really matter, just like we don’t know how to fix our washing machine or our car. there are parallels in these different aspects of culture that I found really interesting. the book anchors science as a form of culture, a very unusual form, but a form that has similarities to other things we do.
The history of science often tends to analyze different disciplines individually. you can get a story from genetics or a story from physics, but you’ve really integrated them.
yes, this book takes a very broad view, which is extremely impressive. I write stories about things I understand; I would find it very difficult to cover the history of technology or physics in detail. Before John could accomplish this in his book, he had to master a wide variety of material and then be able to present it in a very readable way. John was originally a physiologist before going down in history. he masters all these areas of science and is able to explain them in a simple way. it’s an excellent read.
your next book is completely different: the illustrated and annotated version of jim watson’s double helix. This is Watson’s account of his role in discovering the structure of DNA. Before we talk about the book, can you tell us a bit about that discovery because I know you’ve written about it? why was it so important?
lives up to darwin’s theory of natural selection. Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the discovery of cosmic background radiation. one of the great advances of human knowledge. Before Watson and Crick began their work, they realized that genes are made of DNA; the double helix structure revealed two things. First, it tells us how genes replicate, which was what Watson was particularly obsessed with, because the two strands of the molecule are reciprocal, and so if the cell can read what’s on one strand, it can copy it and get two. double daughters. threads that’s what’s happening in the cell every second, it’s happening in your cells right now. What I think is even more exciting is that Watson and Crick realized that the order of the bases, the rungs that hold the DNA ladder together, is very important. the sequence of those bases is what they called in their second 1953 article in Nature (after they had described the double helix structure) “genetic information”. this is what genes contain. this realization was an incredible moment in human history. In his book, Watson described what was a very exciting time to have been alive. Anyone who reads the double helix is drawn into this world of competition, excitement, and academic existence, much of which no longer exists due to changes in the way science is done and the increasing pressure on academic time from various sources. sources.
Watson’s account is very personal. He talks about picking up girls at parties, he is quite rude to some of his colleagues. Do you think that is a strength or a weakness?
They are both. I think this is a fantastic book. it’s malicious, it’s extremely stubborn, and it’s also unreliable because it’s watson’s personal account. crick didn’t want me to publish it; in the mid-1960s they had a big argument about whether it should be published. Crick thought the book was ill-conceived because it was so personal. this could be a difference between cambridge and harvard in how you should behave, or even a difference between uk and us attitudes. Watson was presenting events as he saw them at the time. this is one of the problems with the book: why it is so powerful and also why it misleads so many people. He is famous for the horrible way Watson treated Rosalind Franklin, even calling her ‘Rosie’ throughout, which is a name he never used. but if you read the book to the end, there’s a pretty long epilogue in which watson, the mature man in his late 40s in the late 1960s, reminisces about his younger self (appearing as an incredibly smart jackass who brays ) and moderates what he wrote in the book. As a glimpse into the mind of an incredibly smart, ambitious, and irritating young man at a key moment in history, this book is unparalleled. but you must not take everything that is there as truth. It is Watson’s account as he saw it at the time, filtered through twenty years of subsequent reflection. In that sense it is a very honest book. if crick had prevailed and watson had written a more measured story, it probably would have been less interesting.
You chose the illustrated and annotated version, so there are lots of supporting notes, but also lots of photographs and copies of the original cards where you can see their handwriting. what does that add for you?
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This additional footage helped bring the period to life. the writing is very dynamic, very exciting, but when you really see the people and places involved, it all comes into focus. Jan Witkowski and Alexander Gann of Cold Spring Harbor worked with Watson on this edition, going through the archives and extracting all material. In writing my book, I found this additional material invaluable. some of the notes give you additional information about people. For example, it turned out that one of Watson’s colleagues in Denmark was having an affair, which meant things were difficult in the lab; That was one of the reasons Watson ended up in Cambridge. photos, notes, reproductions of archival material, provide additional insight into some of the characters found in the book.
So science really is a human endeavor.
absolutely. with all its flaws. In a way, Watson deserved credit for describing himself as he was. he maybe he didn’t realize how annoying he was. his casual sexism was certainly very typical of the times. An overlooked issue is how young he was: he was only 25 years old when he published the articles in Nature. Franklin was 8 years older than him, and she must have found him intensely annoying. describes how she scared him, how she thought she was going to hit him. and I thought ‘well yeah, I can imagine that happening because you have this woman who is in her early thirties who is set up in front of this brilliant idiot who laughs at her and is annoying.’ even a saint would lose his temper under such circumstances. , I think.
Next on your list is another classic: Stephen Shapin’s Scientific Revolution, published in 1998. Can you tell me about this?
Shapin’s book is probably the best short introduction to what science is and how and when it came about. it begins, famously enough, with a sentence that is enough to make many people roll their eyes: “there was no such thing as the scientific revolution and this is a book about it.” be very irritating, especially for scientists who like to keep things straight, but it is incredibly rich and interesting. shapin describes what happened during the scientific revolution, but it is above all a discussion about literature, historiography. discusses how attitudes towards the scientific revolution have changed and where the term came from. Indeed, the idea emerged in the mid-20th century when scientists who turned to history began to look back to the period when Newton and Boyle were working.
what shapin has done in this book, and in other parts of his work, is to question the narrative that scientists use when they project what they think they do today into the past, when people behaved differently and believed very different things. For example, some of the seventeenth-century thinkers I have written about offered material explanations for the origin of life, but they were primarily motivated by religious sentiments. his argument was that spontaneous generation could not exist. organisms couldn’t come out of nothing because that would contradict the idea that the universe was ordered and the reason the universe was ordered was because god had created it. the thinkers of the seventeenth century had very contradictory points of view; if you just read back, imagining newton was like brian cox, you won’t really understand what was going on. Newton held what might appear to be highly contradictory views, in addition to establishing a mathematical basis for fundamental physical phenomena, he also believed in alchemy, etc. To fully understand Newton, we need to appreciate these interconnections and contradictions.
that is why the shapin book is an extremely important work. I don’t agree with all that; For example, I do think there was a scientific revolution, but it didn’t fit the caricature of a single event that produced modern science overnight. This is not surprising: the French Revolution cannot be summed up in the events of July 14, 1789. Revolutions are very long, spread out things that are contradictory, and rarely develop in a linear or coherent way, but they do produce nonetheless. transformations in thought, behavior, organization. That’s what was happening during what historians might call the “long 17th century,” which stretched from the 16th century, when people were beginning to research anatomy and astronomy using modern techniques, all the way back to Darwin. this was a very long period when much of what we now recognize as science was slowly freezing and materialistic explanations were sought and found in all areas of inquiry.
is arguing that the development of science as we know it was a much longer and more complicated process than we usually think. but, if I have understood correctly, we often assume that science has to be as it is and that it is this kind of direct and unquestionable route to true knowledge. he’s saying, ‘no wait, it’s full of human biases, assumptions and hidden agreements’. do you agree with that?
yes and no. the book was written in 1998, just after the height of the “science wars” in academia, when the dominance of postmodern ideas in sociology and history led some to suggest that all knowledge was available. Among the more extreme views put forward by sociologists of science were some who argued that science was just another story, no more valid than the myths of peoples around the world. Shapin’s book does not present this point of view, but it challenges our assumptions and makes us think about what science is and how it got to be the way it is. scientists would obviously argue that it is no accident that science and technology actually work.
Science isn’t just a story we tell ourselves, it’s an increasingly accurate representation of how the universe works. It is striking that scientists simultaneously have two discourses on this issue. On the one hand, we have knowledge, we know how things work. but we also say that we doubt things and that there is nothing better than being wrong, that is, the root of progress is that we do not know how things work. the really exciting part of science is realizing what we don’t know and how we can find out. for example, it’s technically possible that evolution by natural selection turns out to be wrong, but given the mass of evidence, that possibility is so unlikely that I’m not going to worry about it. if we find out tomorrow that he is wrong, of course that would be very exciting, just as physicists get very excited about the possibility that einstein is wrong, it would open up a new challenge.
In general, however, we are moving step by step towards greater knowledge. For example, the validity of Newtonian mechanics was not negated by Einstein’s discoveries: it simply became applicable to a particular domain. Despite our later discoveries, we use equations derived from Newton’s laws to send probes to distant planets or moons like Enceladus. my disagreement with shapin is that i think science is different from other forms of human knowledge, and there are things that we definitely know. I think.
you just mentioned enceladus, so speaking of space missions, let’s move on to your next book: william burrows’s this new ocean: the story of the first space age published in 1998. what do you like about this book?
space! rockets! when it came out i was about to go on vacation and wanted a thick book to read. Burrows is a science journalist: not a historian or a scientist. I find it incredibly readable, very exciting. Although it was written by an American, he made no secret of the fact that Wernher von Braun, the mastermind behind the Apollo program, was a Nazi party member who was acquitted for his involvement in the Hitler regime because he could build ICBMs. the book contains a good account, as good as there could be at the time, given that the archives in the ussr had not been fully opened, of the enormous advances the russians made, which became apparent when they first blew up sputnik and then they put the first man in space. It seems to me an extremely entertaining account of a time in which I grew up, almost like a novel. I wasn’t reading it with a professional eye because I don’t know much about the history of space.
Burrows’ book is very dramatic, especially some of the moments like the first moon landing.
I remember! I was 11 years old at the time. i was watching it with my uncle brian in the middle of the night. Although I remember the thrill of seeing Neil Armstrong’s feet hitting the ground, I was equally surprised by the fact that Brian was eating four Weetabix at three in the morning. we have lost much of the enthusiasm for space flight. A year ago, NASA tested the Orion space capsule, which they can use to fly to Mars. The launch was in the middle of one of my lectures, so I decided to take a short break and show the students the NASA live feed. you don’t watch rocket launches on live tv anymore. the space shuttle has been scrapped and while there are rockets going to the space station and private companies like spacex and blue origin developing reusable rockets, they don’t enjoy the same media attention as they did in the 60’s and 70’s. so we all sit back and we saw it, the students were very excited.
do you think there is an important role, then, for history books written by people who are not historians? What can non-historians bring to a history book that you can’t get from an academic historian?
I hope so. As you may know, I have also written a couple of books on the history of the second world war. one of the leading historians of the time wrote a very good review of my second book, on the liberation of paris, in which he tackled exactly this question. he argued that because nonprofessional historians write for a popular audience, we can bring things to life in a way that academic historians tend not to. we focus on individuals, use quotes and maybe even occasionally slightly creative writing about smells or sounds or other things you can infer from historical sources. for example, in all my books I see if I can find out what the weather was like on a particular day, to see if that can contribute to my description, for example, when a particular meeting in royal society took place in the 17th century. . that helped set the scene before moving on to what was actually discussed.
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I think professionally trained historians, who amaze me with their ability to integrate very complex issues, may miss that simpler detail that the average reader enjoys. The main thing in writing history is that it is a narrative. you know where the beginning is, you know where the end is. I’ve sometimes thought about being tricky and trying to tell a story backwards or group chapters by topic, but each time I’ve decided it’s best for the reader to know where the story begins and ends.
For his latest book, we’re going straight back to the ancient world: Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by Christopher Gill, Tim Whitmarsh, and John Wilkins beginning in 2012. This is quite an academic book. why did you choose it?
yes, this is a purely academic book, although the writing is not. the book i’m writing right now is about the brain and how we know what we know about this amazing structure. I needed to understand some of the early studies on brain function, in particular by Galen, who conducted a series of remarkable and extremely harrowing experiments that showed that the brain controlled movement. these were public events, not laboratory studies. this is something that stephen shapin talks about: scientists have to find a way to convince other people that their results are valid. as the motto of the royal society goes, ‘nullius in verba’, don’t take anyone else’s word. Galen did the experiments on him in front of an audience to prove to the great and good that the brain, not the heart, controlled movement. these experiments were performed on live pigs and were extremely distressing. He was both horrified and amazed at Galen’s audacity and at the power of what he displayed. Interestingly, he did not resolve the question of whether the heart or the brain was in charge; it would be another 1500 years before it was finally resolved. and we can still see the traces of this argument in the words we use in English: “heartfelt”, “broken-hearted”, “spoke from the heart”. the argument lives in our language and in our thinking, a kind of intellectual fossil.
This book impressed me by showing how wonderful Galen was as a thinker. he had a vague idea that his main legacy was the concept of the four “humours”, which dominated medical thought for some 1500 years. In fact, Galen wrote about all sorts of areas, not just medicine. he was a leading philosopher of the 1st and 2nd centuries ad and had a fantastic library, much of which has unfortunately been lost. there is a fascinating chapter about his lost library in the book.
The chapter on Galen’s pig experiments is by Maud W. Gleason and is called, “Shock and Awe: The Performance Dimension of Galen’s Anatomy Demonstrations.” you’re absolutely right, that’s exactly what it was: an act. He also points out that there is a character completely absent from Galen’s descriptions of what he did: the pig. what should have been in the center, it does not describe at all. one explanation is that he found the experiments extremely distressing. he said that he couldn’t do these experiments on monkeys because their expressions were too anguished, too horrible.
This raises a general question about our morality and that of people in the past. surely these people must have been heartless beasts: how could they go and see Christians thrown to lions or people hacked to death with machetes? and yet, of course, they were not fundamentally different from us. Galen had initially served as surgeon to the gladiators, so he knew all about the terrible wounds and their aftermath; this is how he discovered that the recurrent laryngeal nerves control the voice. Gleason’s close reading of Galen’s work shows the complexity of the ideas and events that were involved; provides what historians call a “thick” description by placing the work in its social and cultural context so you can better understand it.
That seems to be a theme in many of his books: science as something inseparable from that social, political and military context.
Yes, science is part of culture and is affected by other aspects of society. the metaphors we use to explain things are taken from culture and, in particular, from technology.
You have written about the scientists who unraveled reproduction in the egg and sperm race and the race to crack the genetic code in Life’s Greatest Secret, published this year.
I try to describe scientific problems as people saw them at the time, without the benefit of modern knowledge. in the books I have written, I describe people from the past who are fighting, either in a scientific context or, in the case of my books on the French resistance, in a political-military context. They didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. to describe that uncertainty to the reader, and to explain why people thought what they did and did what they did, the writer must try to forget what is to come. following this kind of rule means there are certain things you can’t say, which can make things difficult.
What attracted you to each of these stories? Is it the opportunity to put you and the reader in this mindset and worldview very different from the one we have now?
i wanted to write the sperm and egg race because i became obsessed with a 17th century microscopist named jan swammerdam. I really wanted to write a biography about him, but it became clear that no publisher, not even an academic, was interested. then I thought of a popular science book, focusing on one aspect of his work, which dealt with the importance of ovules in what we now call reproduction. the book deals with the discovery of the ovum and sperm, but also extends to ideas about the origin of animals such as insects. when I write I try to go back in time and understand the choices that people made, whether they were political choices about what they were going to do, moral choices in the event of war, or scientific choices. also, in the case of science, why people believed the seemingly outrageous things they did. because one thing I always emphasize to students is that they are not allowed to think that people in the past were stupid. most of the people I write about were much smarter than we will ever be. and yet they often believed all sorts of nonsense.
“Science is not just a story we tell ourselves, it is an increasingly accurate representation of how the universe works.”
why was that? how could these highly intelligent people believe things that we now consider so palpably false? How did we get to where we understand things today? what was the process to do that, you need to try to reconstruct what people thought; one of the ways to do it is to banish all the words and concepts that come from later. so in the seventeenth century book you couldn’t talk about ‘reproduction’ because it wasn’t a seventeenth century term—people talked about ‘generation’. that is what we would call ‘reproduction’ and ‘development’ together in one word. in the same way, one cannot speak of inheritance before the nineteenth century. heredity only takes on a biological meaning in the 1830s: people didn’t have a word to describe the relationship between parents and children. then you realize that there is a reason why people can’t see things: they don’t have the words, the ideas. the concepts are not there and therefore you cannot think of them.
I was very lucky and lived 18 years in Paris. I went with absolutely horrible French and ended up practically bilingual. one of the things that I realized is that when you can speak another language, you can think things that you can’t think in your mother tongue. words and thoughts are interconnected. that’s something I tried to bring to my books, trying to see what people were thinking at different times and how ideas and concepts limited them or ultimately allowed them to understand things in a richer way.
does it make you more humble about the belief we have now, to have that perspective from the past?
That’s the contradiction! on the one hand I am very sure that I know what I know! however, I know that in the future people will look back and say, “how did they do it so badly?” I suppose that, just as Newton was not wrong in terms of the laws of motion, that new analysis, reinterpretation—is going to be biased. however, there are enormous challenges ahead. physicists don’t know what 95% of the universe is made of, and we have very little understanding of how the brain works. so on a macro and micro level, our ignorance runs deep! there is a long way to go.
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