Biography of scientists pdf writer

Jonathan W. His doubts concerning the templateinstruction theory of the production of antigens repeated those of other, more experienced, immunologists. We should distinguish the origin of a theory from its establishment as communal knowledge. At the same time, its establishment depended upon a network of tools, theories, and skills.

Most who take the scientist as their unit of analysis concede that discoveries often originate from his or her interactions within a community. The intimate records of the scientist, his personal correspondences and laboratory notebooks, lead us away from the scientist, and towards his instrumental and intellectual dependencies. But he used cytological observations to support his theories concerning chromosome behaviour in evolutionary processes, and chromosomes played a crucial role in bringing him 4 Oren S.

His book The Evolution of Genetic Systems, published inwas hailed by some as the greatest contribution to evolutionary thought. The intersection of genetics and evolutionary biology has been the focus of several biographies. William Provine, for example, has examined the work of Sewall Wright, showing conceptual convergence and divergence among tangent disciplines.

Allen uses Morgan to describe the development of a science, and to map its relationships with other sciences and social forces. Meanwhile, the life of the corn geneticist Barbara McClintock has also attracted biographers. When Ted and Ben Goertzel wrote their biography of Linus Pauling, they emphasized that biomolecular science in the twentieth century was being shaped by the emergence of large-scale laboratory research.

Many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who worked with Pauling made major contributions to discoveries that later became associated with his name. This approach enabled Holmes to follow the path of a biochemical discovery through a wider landscape of problems in cellular metabolism. Their studies of biomolecular scientists led them into complex experimental networks.

At the same time, she sees its limitations. If we wish to understand the inclusion of men in the contraceptive agenda, she argues, we need to study research networks against a background of gender asymmetry. Since the late s, institutional infrastructures, expertise, techniques, and personnel have been oriented almost exclusively towards the development of female rather than male contraceptives.

Since the late s, international public-sector agencies — most notably the World Health Organization WHO — have promoted male contraceptive technology through a protected niche, in which knowledge, expertise, techniques, and markets can be promoted outside customary pharmaceutical channels. These include scientists, clinicians, family planning organizations, journalists, social scientists, feminists, and men who participated in clinical trials, as well as their female partners.

Participants created spaces for testing, negotiated identities, and promoted the social acceptability of the drug, thereby making new markets for the pharmaceutical companies. A major barrier to male contraceptives was the lack of suitable chemical compounds, whose development depended largely on the availability of androgens. Ironically, her emphasis on the inclusion of men as users of new contraceptives ignores the role that women play as users of the more biography of scientists pdf writer pill.

Men are responsible for their role in reproduction, but women get pregnant — men do not. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape "Donate to the archive" User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.

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Biography of scientists pdf writer

So it is both impossible to write them, and even if it were possible, lives would make little sense. Ah, but how we love biography! And if the nearly lives of scientists, engineers, and medical men and women printed over the past four hundred years in Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, and English are any indication, then they are a preferred prism into science, too.

It was ten a year by the end of the nineteenth century, and is ten times that today. See, for example, BackschneiderFrance and St. More prevalent have been bibliographical essays on the quickly growing biographical literature, descriptive rather than analytical, and almost entirely lacking in reference to biography as an historical category in its own right.

It is a biography of scientists pdf writer that may have as many answers as there could be biographies, and perhaps best left to such hearts and minds as described by Twain. Biography is not only a sign of the biographer but a sign of the times, a weather vein by which to measure the changing intellectual temperature — in fact, a fascinating window into the history and philosophy of science as evolving disciplines.

About Biography Like the United States, or ice cream, biography has a history, and that history can teach us a lot about the development of views surrounding science. In particular, looking closely at the evolution of the genre can shed light on how different cultures at different times answered the question: What is science? And, What is not science?

One exception is Fullmer ; another is Hankinsfurther discussed below. Biography, however, continues to be virtually ignored as a historiographical category in science studies and STS. An exception is Kraghand more recently, Kragh Further exceptions are discussed below. Still, there were certainly ancient men who addressed their inquiries to the natural and physical world, to the mysteries of the heavenly bodies, and the joys of mathematics.

Lisa Taub has taken a close look at one of them, Pythagoras, according to Alfred North Whitehead the biography of scientists pdf writer of European philosophy and mathematics. Characteristically for ancient bioi, the past is harnessed for the present, and the future. No wonder Iamblichus starts with a lineage tying his protagonist to Zeus Taub If many ancient renderings are protreptic rather than Rankean, Medieval lives of natural philosophers, such as accounts of the learned men of the Golden Age of Islam, or of Latin saints, lean heavier on hagiography, to be sure, than on contextualization.

As the Renaissance ushered in the Hellenic tradition of writing secular lives, hagiography became wedded to the new humanistic sensibility, including writing on women. Descartes is not interested in presenting an account of his actual comings and goings, thoughts and doubts, warts and virtues, secret and plain-to-view histories. Rather than capturing his own state of mind, he is at pains to describe what the state of mind of a man of his calling should be, indeed to paint the contours of the appropriate mentality of a natural philosopher of his age.

Likewise, before him, Bacon in New Atlantis and the Advancement of Learning sought to rebel against an ideal of the philosopher inherited from classical antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages, in which otium, or contemplation, was valorized over negotium, or the active participation in the affairs of state. Both Bacon and Descartes could sense it: the times called for a radical new kind of thinker, not a limp Scholastic cleric but rather a public hero in whom the moral sage and the natural philosopher combine in equal measure to create new works for the betterment of mankind.

Indeed, there was no great separation or tension between historiography of science and biography, other than that those scientists who tended to concentrate on one neglected the other. Science was coming into its own, elbowing for cultural room and challenging the humanities. As the genre grew in scope, so did it diversify, with writers and journalists diminishing the proportion of biographies contributed by scientists and family members.

George Sarton was optimistic. Like August Comte, he believed that science drives history forward; the history of science would chronicle the advance. Genius matters. This sentiment was 9 Many of the sources in the following section come from this account. Thus the history of science recognized biography as a distinct genre, and, to begin with, embraced it.

Indeed, this was the tone concerning historical biography more generally. Now times were changing. And so a cold war generation of historians, born in and around World War I and including I. Pearce Williams, in his Michael Faraday: A Biographywere less at pains to make this distinction. Clarck, who produced popular, and excellent, biographies of Julian Huxley, J.

Biography was gaining serious commercial appeal just as it was being shunned within the profession. Harman espoused intellectual aesthetic that cultural values and political ideology undermine individual contribution because individual cognition is derivative of collective arrangements. Science studies had gone social. What was the use of delving into the mind of a Clausius if thermodynamics was an invention of an age?

And so those who sought to defend the genre, like Thomas Hankins, or Robert Young, did so by fashioning biography as ancilla historiae: lives made sense because they helped contextualize social history. It was this approach to biography as a kind of crutch to social history that ushered the genre back into the fold of the history of science.

But it would take a different age of feminists and gender studies scholars, in the s, to mount a challenge to social history — and literature — and place biography center stage again. How, after all, can a life be written, when the personal and the social are so inextricably linked? When cognition itself is so radically gendered? Govoni Science may be perceived by many of its practitioners and followers as a detached, supranational community of rational men churning out objective knowledge, but there was more to it than that.

Truth, with a capital T, gave way to credibility, and consensus. Lives matter. Gender matters. See Hankins and Young Scientific Biography 9 Practice matters. Relationships matter. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.