Science

Most of the dictionary's research 'areas' are chronological in nature, but during planning art, literature, business, medicine and science were singled out as subject areas, each governed by consultant editors and managed by research editors recruited for their specialist expertise. Professor Pietro Corsi of the Sorbonne was consultant editor for science, and initially worked closely with Joseph Gross as research editor from 1994 to 1997; Joe's expertise lay in the history of natural philosophy and mechanics in the early-modern period. A second research editor, Dr Peter Osborne, joined the area in 1996; as a working scientist, with a doctorate in oceanography, he brought current research experience to bear on historical issues, as well as project knowledge from previous freelance work for the dictionary. On completion of the science area in December 1998, Peter went on to create the first website for the project, using his other skills as a website architect. Meanwhile Joseph Gross was succeeded as research editor in 1997 by Dr Anita McConnell who took a doctorate on the history of oceanographic instruments, and worked as a Curator at the Science Museum until she went freelance in 1987. She has been a research editor with the dictionary since 1994, and has written more of our 50,000 articles than anyone else: about 600.

The science area runs from 1500 to 1990 and includes 2467 biographical subjects, of whom 430 are new. More science subjects crop up in two others among the dictionary's growth-areas, medicine and business, not to mention many more who have been recruited into our general chronological areas. Examples of the latter are military engineers, or the eighteenth-century scientists and botanical artists who accompanied the navy's scientific voyages and were assigned to the Hanoverian or art areas.

How does the new dictionary compare with the old in this area? As with all other areas, it includes all subjects in the old DNB, whose selection of scientists seems to the modern eye unduly slanted towards gentlemanly and often amateur activity. It included 181 geologists, for example, and only 135 engineers. The inventors and engineers who were so crucial in the first industrial revolution were classified with tradesmen and were not seen as members of the scientific elite. This has now been put right. We also now do more justice to geology in its practical dimension: to the fossil collectors whose great opportunity came with the building of the canals and railways, to mining prospectors, geologists employed by contractors and curators of museums and botanical gardens.

The new DNB's approach is also less whiggish. We must allow for the fact that not until the mid-nineteenth century did the word 'scientist' become an umbrella term to cover the broad group of people earlier described as 'natural philosophers' or (when especially inquisitive) 'experimental philosophers'. So the new DNB gives due attention to the astrologers, alchemists and devotees of the occult from whom emerged the pioneering figures acknowledged by modern scientists as predecessors, as well as some of their more mystical rivals in later periods such as Aleister Crowley. And it takes care not to neglect those scientists who, imprudently for their later reputation, opposed theories that ultimately prevailed: the opponents of Darwin, for example. In science, as in politics and elsewhere, we in the dictionary share the interest felt by all historians in so-called 'dead ends' and 'lost causes': their story illuminates the unpredictability of human events, and the many possible courses of action and thought that seem available at any one time. The achievement of the individual scientist cannot be appreciated unless the strength of the theories he challenges receives its due.

In seeking to avoid whiggishness, though, we sometimes land ourselves in difficulty when seeking justice for areas of scholarly study which for some reason have gone out of fashion, for the numbers studying the history of science are small, and mineralogy, meteorology and comparative anatomy presented us with special difficulties. On the other hand, mathematics is not at all out of fashion, yet its prosperity denies us historians for another reason: the opportunities in the subject are so great that, like lawyers and economists, mathematicians tend to gravitate to areas more rewarding than history. Still, this hasn't prevented us from doing full justice to the mathematician George Boole (1815-64) and Alan Turing (1912-54) who received short shrift from the old DNB, but who gain retrospective significance (and therefore more space) as a result of the extraordinary growth in computer technology during our own time.

Do we approach the scientist's career any differently? We now place less individualist emphasis on the Eureka moment, and are more preoccupied with context at several levels. We seek to set the individual scientist in overall context, to show how ideas emerged from a specific overall political and social situation. We are concerned to secure intellectual context, which can help to explain why the same discovery so often occurs simultaneously in more than one place. We have been less successful than we would have liked in clarifying the scientists' more immediate laboratory context. We wanted to include some laboratory assistants or technicians from the modern period to complement the old DNB's Christopher White (c.1650-1695?), 'a new kind of professional chemist, combining the skills of the alchemist, the apothecary and the 'philosophical' experimenter'. Despite coming up with a few names of people who were vividly recalled, we obtained an article on only one, whose name will be revealed in due time. It is worth recalling Darwin's comment, in The Origin of Species, on his association 'with several eminent fanciers', and on the fact that he had 'been permitted to join two of the London pigeon clubs'. We have, however, managed to include more instrument makers, without whom many discoveries could not have been made; these were often men of science in their own right, though were not always viewed as gentlemen. We have also included more popularizers of science, for children and adults. Lastly, there is the personal context. As with all our other subjects we seek fully-rounded portraits of scientists, for they were not just disembodied intellects - they needed incomes and usually had spouses. How would Darwin himself have coped without a wife to shield him from annoyance and distraction? Nor has women's role by any means been only complementary: the new DNB includes 100 women scientists among its 430 new subjects. One of them, Dorothy Hodgkin, will be the subject of this term's second DNB seminar on 13 February.

I have got into the habit of ending my messages with the interestingly inconsequential. Among the new DNB's trophies is the inventor of the Nissen hut, three collectors of prehistoric implements, and a meteorologist who for two summers climbed Ben Nevis daily to take upper-air temperature measurements.

Brian Harrison