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Towards a History of Biology in the Twentieth Century: Directed Autobiographies as Historical Sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Nicholas Russell
Nicholas Russell
Affiliation:
Department of Life Sciences, Bromley College of Technology, Rookery Lane, Bromley, Kent BR2 8HE, U.K.
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Extract

Interest in contemporary scientific history has concentrated on physics and engineering and its most obvious growth has been in America. By contrast, there has been a relative neglect of the biological sciences, especially in Great Britain. This concern with contemporary scientific history has been an autonomous growth among physical scientists and engineers. There has not yet been any significant development of an historical dimension among modern biologists. Most of those who do study the history of biology are concerned with natural history in the nineteenth century and before, with the largest group concentrating on the Darwinian Revolution. Students of the history of twentieth century biology are just beginning to emerge, but may find themselves uniquely disadvantaged compared with observers of the sciences from earlier centuries, or even of the physical sciences and engineering in the twentieth century, unless certain things are done rather quickly.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 77 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1988

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References

1 Garland Allen is the only author so far to attempt any sort of overview of twentieth century biology. See Allen, G., Life Science in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1978Google Scholar; and the early chapters of Thomas Hunt Morgan. The Man and His Science, Princeton, 1979.Google Scholar

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19 Details of the working procedures through sample documents from the Space Astronomy Oral History Project were kindly provided by its manager, David DeVorkin, Chairman of the Space Science and Exploration Department of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington.

20 Gortler, L., 1986, op. cit., (18), pp. 78–79Google Scholar ‘Doing Oral History 2’.

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24 Much of this work could be read with advantage by any historian setting out to uncover a piece of history by interview or questionnaire. As a single example of the genre, see Woolgar, S.W., ‘Writing an intellectual history of scientific development. The use of discovery accounts’, Social Studies in Science, (1976), 6, pp. 395–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Even scientists themselves come to realize this when they find themselves wearing historical hats. Todd has had considerable experience in composing obituaries for his F.R.S. colleagues and reports how difficult it is to write about them as personalities if documents are not available. These problems tempted him to write his own autobiography, including those aspects of personality which he found so hard to describe in his subjects. McCarty laments the absence of personal documents to remind him of the motivations of his own youth and others which could have provided inside information about Avery and MacLeod's work at the Rockefeller laboratory before he arrived there.

26 Berry, R.J., ‘Is divided biology weakened biology?’, Biologist, (1985), 32, pp. 211–212.Google Scholar

27 Rosenberg, N., Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 3–33.Google Scholar

28 Russell, N., ‘Report of the meeting on Heredity and Animal Breeding’, Institute of Biology History Group Newsletter and Proceedings, (in press).Google Scholar