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Holmes’ “Between Biology and Medicine”

I just gave my 20th century biology lecture yesterday–not much to report except that I argued that a productive way to approach the subject is to figure out how biology emerges as something independent of medicine, physiology, and chemistry. I look to the emergence of a full-throttled biochemistry (a chemistry specific to life) situated around 1900: enzymes, understanding proteins, biochemical pathways, and all that. This merges with the more physiological/evolutionary genetics with DNA in the new field of molecular biology mid-century.

But, after a bit of scraping, my best guide to all this turned out to be a mightily interesting 1992 book (collecting four 1990 lectures) by Frederic Holmes called (of all titles): “Between Biology and Medicine: The Formation of Intermediary Metabolism”. It sounds very arcane, but turned out to be riveting, because it deals pretty head-on with some of the questions I’ve been thinking about here. Basically, Holmes wrote (an absurdly detailed) two-volume book on Hans Krebs, trying to tease out the origins of intermediary metabolism in the 1930s, and, as so-often happens, he had the trap-door open beneath him as he found that intermediary metabolism has “predecessors” in the first half of the 1800s.

Now, Holmes is rightly suspicious about this “predecessors” question, and ends up tackling some very deep issues about how to write history. I have a lecture coming up tomorrow on R&D (another very bloggable topic), so I’m going to leave this here, but I’m going to come back to this in the next few posts.

Also, Jenny’s long-awaited online debate thing is due to go forward on the 23rd–stay tuned! (seriously)

Understanding Scientific Communities

To elaborate a bit on Friday’s post, this chart

represents a fairly wide study of a lot of different communities–understanding their official organizational relationships, understanding who the players are, what their backgrounds are, who they talked with, and understanding what they thought the purpose of their work was. It is impossible to simply take a text produced by one part of this chart and understand its historical significance, without understanding what the other people on this chart were doing. In other words, it would be almost impossible to really understand the historical development of a field like operations research (OR) if presented in a case study format. This is why I think it’s so important that journal articles do as much work as possible to guide the audience around a historical milieu.

Understanding a community and its culture is really a challenge, and I’d love to see some intriguing new ways of writing about it. On the subject of OR, Paul Ceruzzi was just telling me about his new book on the development of military contractors (OR, R&D, etc…) in the Tyson’s Corner area of the DC suburbs, which I think is a pretty illuminating approach to studying a poorly-defined community. Dave Kaiser’s new book on the postwar physics bubble looks at shifts in physics pedagogy reflecting a shifting physics demography. David Edgerton’s Warfare State comes off as a bit clunky, but it’s an important new perspective on the British state-sponsored scientific community (and others). Several months ago, I mentioned an internet project we’re hoping to get some funding for here at the AIP to try and create an internet guide to the postwar American physics elite. But this is an old question–back in the ’70s, for example, Steve Shapin and Arnold Thackray were pushing prosopography as an important method of studying what we mean by a scientific community–but prosopography has had only a few champions since. Are there any other exemplars out there?

National Air and Space Museum Talk

Last night I went down to the National Air and Space Museum to give a talk on some of my current work. What a kick! The NASM and American History Museum crowd are a really lively bunch, and give you very probing questions. I even got a chance to debate at a highly theoretical level with Paul Forman. I was talking with him about the new SEE stuff; he seems to feel it’s a retreat to a modernistic frame of thought, with which I agree, but which I see as inevitable and thus healthy, since there are no really viable alternatives–a topic I’ve also been throwing out in my class as food for thought (you’ll never convince me that postmodernism represents a coherent or original way forward). Of course, this is not interpreting modernism in the same way as, say, Latour. But I digress… It was a good time.

I just wanted to post a few slides from that talk that generated a lot of discussion, since I think they get at why I hold the convictions that I do, which inform a lot of my posts here. A lot of work on mid-twentieth century policy science considers policy scientists and their patrons to have held a rationalistic view of the science-politics relationship (actually, Latour accuses “us all” of that pretty explicitly):
Click on the pictures if you want a bigger version. Anyway, science studies seem to have replaced this picture with an alternative:

My argument is that this still assumes a science-politics barrier: it is we scholars who are wise to how science actually functions in a society. But I think this model totally misrepresents how the policy scientists conceive of themselves, their epistemology, and their intellectual role. In particular, it lumps the sciences together, and assumes that they are all operating on the same epistemological basis (“science”), and that they think they are all producing rationalized conclusions that policymakers are expected to follow. But I claim we really need to fairly portray the intellectual terrain as they actually saw it:

In this picture there are no clear intellectual divides between the scientists and the policymakers. Some, necessarily, speak in idioms very similar to those of the policymakers. Others speak in idioms that are more purely mathematical. Now, this chart doesn’t work algorithmically like a machine. Each entry is self-sustaining, occasionally absorbing insights from the other areas on the charts (roughly in accord with the kind of arrow I’ve drawn)–think Galison on “intercalation”. What is most important is that there is an assignment of responsibilities. This chart represents perspectives on rationality–no one claims to have access to some kind of scientific truth. The social relationships are geared toward critique and improvement, not monolithic proclamation, and each does so in full cognizance of their relationship to the other areas on the chart at least immediately connected to them. (Note that the mathematical theoreticians are in no way directly connected to policy.) My claim is that this is how policy scientists and policymakers actually saw themselves–it is not a prescription; it is a reflection of a historical reality.

Now, this, I think, is just what Collins and Evans are on about with their idea of interactive expertise. Notably, this entire system of critique is predicated on the ideas that 1) decisions must be made (C & E say “the speed of politics exceeds the speed of science” but I think this still places too much emphasis on the science-politics divide); 2) some decisions will fulfill stated goals better than others, and to choose the best means is the operative definition of rationality–not some external access to an objective “true and impersonal” solution; and 3) all decisions will be revised on a subsequent occasion in light of more recent information and analysis.

As I said, fun stuff!

Binzley on Catholic Science

Awhile ago I promised a look at Ronald Binzley’s recent Isis piece on the Albertus Magnus Guild, a mid-2oth century American Catholic science society. So I thought I better just go ahead and write it up. Basically, I like the piece in the same way I like a good magazine article: it does a great job of informing me about a topic I know nothing about. Indeed, Binzley makes a good case that no one knows much about his topic’s general area. Footnote 6 is the key, where he discusses the large amount of interest in the relationship between science and religion, and how, in the historical space in question, almost all the literature is on Protestantism. Plus I’m from a Catholic background myself, so there’s some automatic interest there.

So the piece is chewy and delicious, but is it nutritious? That question hinges on the way Binzley frames his inquiry. Basically, what does the article, a case study, tell us about Catholic science in America? According to Binzley, near the end of his article, not much: “The [AMG], though short lived, provides historians with an important case study for understanding the development of Catholic science education and the relationship between the American Catholic Church and the sciences….” Yet: “How representative the guild’s viewpoint truly was of Catholics working in the sciences during the mid-twentieth century is a question that we will be able to answer only with additional studies of the Catholic institutions and individuals involved with the sciences during this period.”

OK, so why is the case study “important” then? Well, there is an argument at work here. Binzley chooses to argue in terms of the traditional view of the Catholic Church as hostile to science: “At first glance, the character of science departments in twentieth-century American Catholic institutions of higher learning seems to conform to the conflict interpretation of Catholicism’s relationship to science…. [Next paragraph]: Despite this sociological consensus, I believe a careful consideration of the historical development of Catholic science departments will yield a more nuanced assessment.” I mentioned once before that the word “nuance” will often signal a nearby naive position. Binzley is very honest about this. Two paragraphs earlier: “The historiography on the relationship of the Catholic Church to the sciences has undergone substantial revision in the last several decades.” It is well known to anyone who has been paying attention that the Church has not been hostile to science. The piece mostly serves to extend this assessment to more recent periods (not just early modern Jesuit natural history and philosophy, or whatever).

The issue of the economy of writing comes up. I have been told by wise men never to use the word “gap” when explicating the importance of my piece. Here: “It is my hope that this essay, beyond filling a gap in the literature, will help awaken more historians to the need for additional research on the interaction of American Catholicism and science during the twentieth century.” This, in my mind, is the crucial point in the defense of the piece’s formulation as a case study. However, if we are honest about our understanding of 20th century science, we’ll admit we have an ocean with islands, not a jigsaw puzzle with gaps. I mentioned we know nothing about 20th c. Catholic science, but we also know nothing about a lot of things.

Why study Catholic science, then? The piece presents itself as, while not really settling much in and of itself, being the pebble that sets off the avalanche. But the history of science field’s not big, and I don’t foresee a sudden explosion of interest in the topic. Therefore, it seems to me, if we’re going to write on the topic, we should try and set out some sort of scheme, however flawed, for saying something about the topic in a general sense. What are the most important set of concerns in the history of modern Catholic science, and how were these concerns typically answered? From this perspective the brief general discussion of Catholic science education on pp. 699-700 is by far the most interesting part of the piece for me.

So, basically, this all amounts to another thrown stone in my campaign against the case study. I think case studies play it too safe, that they hide from criticism by making narrow absolute claims, while attacking straw man naive positions to justify themselves. I don’t think we should be afraid to be a little sloppy in making broad claims–but I suspect that creating this kind of study means massive methodological changes. We would no longer be able to rely on one or two magic archival files to produce a quality piece of academic work. We would have to be more adventurous in assembling porous data from a wide variety of sources.

History of History

I’ve noticed lately that my meanderings have been delving a lot into the history of the history of science lately. I think we need to study the history of our profession for the same reason that it’s useful to know about the history of science: because practices have deep roots in argumentative traditions. So, I made the claim that we claim to get a lot out of the sociology of science (like our close focus on practice) that we could have probably also gotten from elsewhere, like mainstream cultural history, without all of sociology’s hangups about understanding actual scientific results.

Could this have happened? It’s an interesting question, because the history of science profession (at least in America) is rooted not in mainstream history, but in a close tie to the philosophy of science, the value of which the sociologists questioned, because what the philosophers (and “Wave One” sociologists) said happened in science was not actually evident “on the ground”–Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life was supposed to be a bit of a bombshell for this reason (if I understand my metahistory right). According to this story, so hung up were we on narratives emphasizing 1) the march of theories, 2) the growth of theories from crucial experiments, or 3) the continual interplay of theory and experiment, that we failed to pay any attention to what actually happens in science.

According to this narrative, we would not have thought to incorporate the insights of cultural history and Skinner, etc., into our work, because of our insistence on the special, algorithmic nature of science, predicated on our roots in philosophy. The ordinary rules of historical investigation would not have been thought to apply without the insights of the strong program. I think this probably mischaracterizes the historical work being done in the late ’70s. But another reason for studying history is so that we can better learn how to escape it. If I am right in saying that we justify case studies, simply because they demonstrate how 1), 2), and 3) above are not how science works (“I choose, D, None of the Above”), then we may have bound ourselves up more than we’ve released ourselves. A further review of the “old” history, like what I was doing with Heilbron, may be in order.

Discourse on Style

Since I eventually rejected Buffon’s “Discourse on Style” as a title for the blog (no clear science reference), here’s a few quick thoughts on what has always seemed to me to be the most important reason for reflecting on “the issues”. That is improvement in style. These thoughts aren’t well refined, so I may post some clarification later.

In his response to me (below), Matt Stanley brings up the important observation (that I haven’t seen too much myself) that popular writing by scholars is often panned by other scholars. Now, I haven’t heard too much criticism of Alder’s Measure of All Things or Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps (except by nitpickers on the history of telegraphy), so I’m not too sure if it’s a universal revulsion (and it’s not the first time I’ve heard calls for bringing our craft to the masses). But I think it also goes to reinforce my point that there seems to be some sort of professional need to guard “our” style against corruption, because apparently we think that our intellectual gains are fragile.

But what’s in style? I was previously a bit mean to Actor-Network Theory and Pickering’s “mangle”, saying that, by contrast, the new SEE may be “worth historians’ time”. This question of worth ought to be clarified. I do not mean that ANT and the mangle (a punk revival band name?) have no worth–I think they’re fine for those who are interested in those kinds of theories. But I think their impact on how we write history is pretty negligible. Even though we all love Latour very much, I don’t see his jargon or even his concepts getting deployed too much in the historical literature. In fact, I’d say that the bulk of the impact of sociology has been avoiding clumsy statements.

Let’s go to the literature. Here are the first three sentences of John Heilbron’s 1979 book Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries (which I used for my lecture on “Invention and the Industrial Revolution”): “The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century did not affect the several branches of natural philosophy equally. Some sciences, like astronomy, mechanics and geometrical optics, already far advanced in antiquity, were then transformed into prototypes of modern, quantitative, instrumentalist physics. Other sciences, like chemistry, exchanged one set of unproductive concepts for another.”

Now, all right-thinking historians will cover their ears in pain at some of those statements. Bowler and Morus’ Making Modern Science textbook that I’m using goes out of its way to reject the idea that the “scientific revolution” (whatever that is) came to chemistry late. But here’s the thing: Heilbron’s book is actually pretty damn good, and commits very few Whiggish heresies. Yes, he drops some of these discordant sentences on us, and, yes, the sociology of science has trained us to avoid them, but that’s actually not a very substantive stylistic improvement for the sheer amount of praise showered on sociology. Again, I’m not saying the sociologists are wrong and shouldn’t exist, just that their importance for the writing of history is overstated, especially since we never mention prior historical theorists like Quentin Skinner, who offer many of the same lessons without all the quasi-philosophical hoopla. [edit: “contemporaneous” is probably more accurate than “prior”]

Matt Stanley on Reviewing “Pop” Lit

In response to a previous post on whether it’s worth our while to combat typical pop fallacies in scholarly reviews, I’ve asked Michigan State historian Matt Stanley (a former grad student colleague of mine at Harvard) to give us a reply regarding his recent HSNS review of four new Einstein books, which I used as an illustration. He’s generously taken the time to give us a good one. Here it is:

Before I get started, thanks to Will for starting up this blog and offering me a chance to join the conversation. I think there are two points I would like to bring up in response to Will’s thoughts on Us vs. Them.

First, the issue of whether historians should spend their time critiquing “pop historians.” I can tell you that reviewing that kind writing isn’t much fun – it can actually be kind of painful, as I hope my HSNS review made clear. But I do think we have an obligation to do so. To the vast majority of literate people out there, books like Isaacson’s are the only exposure they will have to the history of science. That means that their ideas of how science works will be shaped not by cutting-edge historiography, but by tired tropes and long-exposed myths. Presumably as scholars we have some obligation to use our knowledge to improve the general social understanding of our field, and one way to do that is to review books that will easily sell a hundred times as many copies as our monographs. It’s surely the case that it would be more useful to put such a review in the NY Times rather than in a scholarly journal, but we don’t always have the audiences we might like. So in short, I think reviewing popular books is an important obligation. This also raises the issue of whether historians should perhaps write for wider audiences – perhaps we can talk about that another day (after tenure, maybe).

Second, the issue of whether we should instead be “sharpen[ing] our abilities” by instead focusing on scholarly books. Personally, I’m not sure the purpose of writing reviews is to sharpen one’s critical abilities. That’s surely a result of review writing, but I’m skeptical that that should be the purpose. I see reviews as performing the valuable service of providing information on books that someone might not have the chance to read themselves, and possibly induce them to pick up the book or stay away from it at all costs. A secondary function, I think, is to make historiographical or substantive points regarding the book or its subject that don’t quite merit a full-length journal article on their own.

I don’t see my essay review as taking any kind of Us vs. Them perspective. On the most basic level, half of the authors I discuss are well-established professional historians (Rowe and Schulmann). On the more substantial level, I hope I made my objections to Isaacson and Neffe on well-supported points of analysis and substance, and not simply that they should stay on their side of the railroad tracks. Indeed, I would be quite embarrassed to see a review of Neffe’s book that dismissed it just based on the author’s credentials rather than its actual merits (or lack thereof). I think Us vs. Them appears quite a bit in our profession, but I usually see it go the other way – that is, historians taking flak from their colleagues for writing books aimed at popular audiences. I’m all for crossing that line in both directions, but I don’t think non-historians’ books should get a free ride from critical reviews.

Writing about Scientific Culture: Hentschel

I did my 19th century physics lecture yesterday. Mostly I used Mary Jo Nye’s invaluable Before Big Science overview, which also does a nice job of keeping the histories of physics and chemistry interlinked. I was planning on saying more about spectral analysis, but, 19th century physics being kind of a big topic, I didn’t even get the chance to bring up Kirchhoff–so it was basically: “the wave-like properties of light had been an important part of scientific practice for some time, like in the analysis of spectra [45 second description of spectra]. Now, here’s Hertz!”

But, preparing the lecture, I found two books on spectra, McGucken’s 1969 Nineteenth-Century Spectroscopy and Klaus Hentschel’s 2002 Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching. Hentschel’s book is definitely going on my to-read-in-full list. Based on a preliminary survey, this looks like really exciting history. Here’s why I think so.

1) Significance is clear. If you know anything about practice in physics, astronomy, and chemistry after 1850 or so, you’ll know that spectral analysis is absolutely central. Given its centrality, there seems to be an absurdly small amount of literature on it.
2) The internal significance of method is clear. Hentschel differentiates himself from McGucken by noting that McG doesn’t really discuss spectroscopy as a visual culture–yet it very clearly is.
3) He follows cultural traditions–this isn’t a snapshot that says: visual culture is a part of spectroscopy (that much is obvious). It says, here’s how visual culture is an integral part of the history of spectroscopy. (That “research and teaching” bit in the subtitle is important–for some reason you can usually hit a home run talking about pedagogy).

One of the greatest challenges we have is to write about science as culture. The sociology of science has undoubtedly helped us to do that. (I think reception studies have probably benefited the most). But, in my mind, it’s not enough to simply portray science as a culture and call it day; you have to make a case for how culture changed and why. It’s difficult to escape discussing epistemological convictions in such cases.

Can this be done in short form? Is it the case that our books are good and our articles are bad? I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. If it is the case, I definitely don’t think it has to be that way. In my class I have now systematically abused every facet of science from the medieval era to the 1800s by chopping them up into snappy 45-5o minute overviews, but I think I’ve managed to assemble a big picture of cultural change, where you can see different traditions flowing and interacting in the production of disciplines and knowledge. From a personal perspective, it’s been massively educational!

Postmodern equivocation

Here’s that Zammito quote, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, pp. 262-263; on Stanley Fish’s reply to Alan Sokal at the height of the science wars:

“Stanley Fish, before he resorted to ad hominem self-righteousness [Zammito does not pull punches], also offered a defense of the postmodernist stance. He wrote: ‘What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed–fashioned by human beings–which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.’ This is a remarkable piece of writing. If, indeed, science studies took the stance that Fish represented, there would be nothing radical whatever about it. That is, in fact, why Fish is unbelievable, for science studies does seek to be radical. Indeed, a careful study of Collins, of Pickering, and above all of Latour–to say nothing of Harding and Haraway–suggests not only that they would repudiate Fish’s intervention but recognize it for what it is–disingenuous rhetoric. There is a characteristic move here, one which features in much postmodernist posturing. Extreme positions are taken; when challenged, authors deny the extremity and affirm they really meant a far more modest posture.”

Zammito is astute here and what he says jibes well with what I’ve seen in my short career in the history of science. It shows the instability of ideas* in the sociology of science, which devolves into one of two states, call them “spin up” and “spin down” to use the idea from physics that “intermediate” quantum states cannot exist.

Spin up is the radical “strong program” that I refer to as a parlor game, which states that science-society relations are understandable without reference to epistemology. The problem is that the stance totally fails to explain historical events, which cannot be understood without reference to the robustness of scientific (or really any) ideas and the incentive to agreement that robustness provides (more on “robustness” later). Hence the need for epistemological “cheats” as I called them yesterday.

Spin down is the banal “science is not context-independent” critique which sets up prior scholarship (and a general “society’s view” often referred to using the pronoun “we”) as a straw man that presumes a naive philosophical (“algorithmic”) viewpoint toward science, that nobody holds (I think we could include even the Wave One’ers here, although Collins and Evans insist on keeping them naive). Spin down informs the majority of professional history of science writing today.

So, by refusing to take any positions between spin up and spin down, sociologists are faced with either being interesting and wrong, or uninteresting and right, and will tend to vacillate between the positions as it suits their interests. However, Zammito goes on: “At least in Collins, Pickering, and Latour we have authors strong enough in their convictions, whatever others think of their claims, to refuse to water them down and escape criticism.”

Notably, all three of these individuals have tried to break out of the constraints of the spin up-spin down duality. Latour with Actor Network Theory, Pickering with the “mangle” (which I want to discuss later), and now Collins and Evans with SEE. I have my reasons for thinking that SEE is actually worth historians’ time.

*I love the term “instability of ideas”; in “Fog of War”, LBJ, in a conversation with Robert McNamara re: Vietnam, quoted a senator saying it.

Scientists and Historians, Take 3

Refining my thoughts about the relationship between scientists and historians, I think I can now make my case a bit more succinctly. The main question is: what counts as history? For historians, almost everything now counts as history: culture, epistemology, practice, physical objects, and so forth. And, going back to the historical record, historians can see that scientists have had high level (if sometimes poorly articulated) discussions about the relationship between institutions, practices, and knowledge. This is one reason why Peter Galison’s Image and Logic is one of my favorite history of science books; it’s not because of the trading zones and pidgins and creoles; it’s because in Chapters 2 through 8, while he doesn’t constrain himself to “actor’s categories”, he does let the actors work the issues out amongst themselves rather than describe the “tensions inherent in their work” or something like that. I think it’s the fact that these actors do work these issues out and develop new socio-epistemological cultures that gives the book its fairly unique optimistic tone. One of Galison’s main stylistic points is that he refuses to bemoan whatever trend there might currently be that threatens to consume science. He is not the analyst-as-enlightened-external-observer.

The unfortunate bit is that scientists have not tended to see these discussions as the really historically interesting things that they do. It’s just the petty details of institution-building, or whatever. For them, it’s still primarily about big discoveries and Nobel Prizes or hagiographies telling the “human side of the story” or whatever. And now, here we are, finally, with a pretty good grip on these issues, and we’ve gone and scared all those deep thinking scientists off. It’d make the writing of the history of 21st century science a lot easier if they had a strong interest in publicizing their debates about these deeper issues and articulating them better. So, that’s, I think, what I was trying to get at yesterday.