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ON HISTORY: LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE SCIENTISTS

It is time for better books about how scientists have thought and lived. "Living, intelligent biography should connect, somehow, to the central concerns of civilisation. Ours is a science-based one," writes Andew Marr in his latest history column ...


From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Winter 2008

Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Humphry Davy. Are these the names which point to the next biography boom? A botanist, an astronomer and a chemist form the chain of characters in a recent book by Richard Holmes, “The Age of Wonder”. Holmes, who has been called Britain’s finest romantic biographer, is best known for his books on mainstream literary figures, Dr Johnson, Shelley and above all Coleridge. But in an epilogue to his new book, he makes a passionate plea for a fresh appreciation of the creativity of scientists: “they are increasingly vital to any culture of progressive knowledge, to the education of young people…and to our understanding of the planet and its future.”

He wants, in short, better books about how scientists have thought and lived. Like most good thoughts, it has been had at roughly the same time by others. I have spotted a growing flow of scientific biographies, often group ones—Leo Hollis’s “The Phoenix” about Wren, Robert Hooke and others of the post-civil war generation; plus much of Lisa Jardine’s work, and a lot of writing about the heroic period in particle physics, the age of Niels Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg. Going back a bit further, to 1992, there was the fabulous biography of Richard Feynman, “Genius” by James Gleick, which set a new standard.

Yet Holmes’s basic premise, that we have a disproportionately meagre historical focus on the imagination of scientists, is both timely and right. In Victorian days biographies tended to be of statesmen, clerics, monarchs and a small zoo of literary lions. The clerics have dropped out, but serious biography today still lavishes undue attention on politicians, writers of all kinds, aristocratic celebrities and military leaders. So great, apparently, is the demand that what we might call “the standard lives”—a canon centred on people such as Lincoln, Lloyd George, Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, Wordsworth—are repackaged year after year, far beyond the value of any shreds of new information about them. If I never read another biography of bloody Henry VIII, it will be far too soon.

Historical biography should aspire to more than easy entertainment, a relaxing, sub-cultural background muzak of familiar stories. (The biography industry long since elbowed aside the reading of poetry, of philosophy and political science. Why struggle with the original work? Read “Keynes”, not Keynes.) Living, intelligent biography should connect, somehow, to the central concerns of civilisation. Ours is a science-based one. The challenges of overpopulation, pollution, climate change and nuclear proliferation were handed to us by scientists.

Their research, vaccines, weapons and technologies, mass-manufactured and distributed by the market economy, have brought us here. Where there are answers, for solving water shortages, slowing global warming, increasing food production and protecting us from missile or terror attacks, they rely on science. Just as important, our last universal and guiding idea about progress is based not on political perfection but scientific advance. Our present plight and chances are far better revealed by tracing the development of scientific thinking in the 20th and preceding centuries than by reading biographies of Great War generals or romantic poets.

Many will respond that, though worthy, this is not realistic. Don’t scientists lead dull lives? Isn’t their creativity shrouded in algebra and impenetrable specialist language? This is like saying that it isn’t worth knowing about Dickens or Steinbeck because, in the end, they just sat around writing. In other words, it’s tosh. The lives of Lavoisier, Curie, Turing or Fermi were as dramatic and human as those of Roosevelt, Byron, Montgomery, Jane Austen or Queen Victoria. (All right, not as dramatic as Byron’s. But then again, more dramatic than Austen’s.)

I have been working on a television series about the impact of Darwinism on politics, faith and culture. Charles Darwin himself has always struck me as one of the most interesting, dramatic and lovable figures in British history. After researching the tragic life of the American evolutionary scientist George Price, who converted to Christianity, gave all that he had to the poor and eventually killed himself with a pair of nail scissors, and his polymathic friend, the luminously wise Bill Hamilton, I can attest that evolutionary science in the 1960s had figures who represented that period as usefully as any rock star or beat poet.

We need ways of writing that illuminate something of the science for the general reader. This is not intrinsically more difficult than bringing alive 19th-century diplomacy or the disputes between renaissance painters over patronage and subject matter. Indeed, it has already been achieved in the popularising books of people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley, Gleick and Richard Fortey. Such explainers have given us some of the best prose of the past three decades.

If you doubt the case for a new golden age of science biography, why not turn to the book I started with, Holmes’s “Age of Wonder”. There you will find wild-eyed, risk-taking, courageous romantics who turn out to be just as interesting as Shelley or Wordsworth—certainly than the latter’s dreary old age—but whose work connects more directly to the world we live in now. Publishers! Authors! Please give us never again another “new” life of Mary Queen of Scots, General Patton or a Mitford. There is much richer territory on every side.

Picture credit: Illustration by Harry Malt: photograph by Sam Barker

(Andrew Marr presents "The Andrew Marr Show" on BBC1 and "Start the Week" on Radio 4. His "History of Modern Britain" has been a bestseller. He is a former editor of the Independent. His last column for Intelligent Life magazine was "History is Finally Sexy".)

on history  Winter 2008