Scientific biographies in the Oxford DNB

The Oxford DNB defines 'science' in its broadest sense. Our authors and editors were conscious that 'scientist' is a nineteenth-century term (coined, in fact, by the Cambridge scientist William Whewell) that postdates the much more diverse and eclectic medieval and early modern interests in natural history and natural philosophy. Consequently those whom we categorize as 'scientists' must perforce include a very broad range: practitioners in the mathematical disciplines including pure and applied mathematics, astronomy, and computing; in the physical sciences including electricity, magnetism, and nuclear physics; in the organic and inorganic chemical sciences; in zoology and botany; in the earth sciences; and in civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. The majority of subjects in the dictionary are principally those individuals—amateur and professional—who are notable for their achievements in, or their devotion to, these diverse aspects of science. We have added those who served as catalysts or supporters of science, among them translators and editors of scholarly works, gentlemen patrons, and officials engaged in the organization of research. We have also included detractors of science and sceptics (religious and secular) who have contributed to scientific debate.

As at October 2007, the number of subjects in the Oxford DNB whom we categorize as having been active in a field of scientific enquiry was 3311; in engineering there are 973 subjects and in medicine 3085, making a total of 7368 or approximately 13 per cent of the content of the dictionary—a very respectable proportion, I would venture, amounting to approximately eight million words of 'scientific biography'.

One way to appreciate the characteristics of the Oxford DNB's coverage of science is to compare it with the Victorian DNB. Entries in the DNB reflected not so much the scientific practice of the time as the cultivated public image of science then prevalent. Mathematics was regarded as the highest science, with botany, zoology, collecting, and museum activities taking the lion's share of entries by virtue of their popular appeal. Many subjects in the old DNB were recognized for their amateur activities linked to their high social status rather than for their contributions to knowledge. Geologists outnumbered engineers, but the majority were professors, gentlemen, and clergymen devoted to earth sciences rather than mining prospectors or fossil collectors. Among the natural historians the DNB contained more than enough clerics who did valuable field work on plants and insects, but those who studied birds and marine life were under-represented. In the nation leading the industrial revolution, engineers and inventors were accorded the status of tradesmen and belonged to economic or industrial history, being socially unworthy of placement among the scientific élite.

Many of the subjects in the original DNB fell into close-knit circles around the major figures of their day. The Oxford DNB has tried to cast the net wider and it includes lone scholars and figures who worked outside the main scientific networks and coteries. The original DNB devoted very considerable space to the most brilliant scientists and to eulogies of gentlemen naturalists. In the latter case the subjects were often notable for the wealth that had allowed them to travel, to engage in gentlemanly pursuits, and to belong to élite scientific societies. Their DNB memoirs generally praised the role of the disinterested amateur in the spread of knowledge and the moral appreciation of the natural world. The biographies of the geniuses, meanwhile, were composed as the setting for a dramatic recreation of the famous scene leading to the great scientific breakthrough—the 'eureka moment' we might say. These articles then traced the cursus honorum that inevitably followed. Oxford DNB biographies are more than a listing of achievements. In all cases we encourage contributors to explore the personal lives of their subjects and to appreciate their characters, physical qualities, and interests as well as their professional and public roles.

The dictionary's coverage of scientists is also notable for its chronological breadth. Practitioners of mathematics predominate among earlier subjects, with many developing the potential of Arabic numerals introduced to England by John de Sacrobosco (d. c.1236) in his Algorismus. Later scholars like John Ashenden (d. in or before 1368) or William Batecumbe (fl. 1348) continued these advances, making use of the positional system, the zero, and symbols for addition or subtraction either in astrological writings or the compilation of astronomical tables. Richard Wallingford (1292-1336), abbot of St Albans, merits 3000 words in recognition of his skills as an astronomer and as the designer of the oldest mechanical astronomical clock of which there is detailed knowledge. Alchemists like Sir Thomas Ashton (c.1403-c.1460), Samuel Norton (1546-1621), and Thomas Vaughan (1621-1666) demonstrate the proximity and durability of types of experimentation that blurred the boundaries of science and the occult during the middle ages and early modern period. While the Victorian DNB rigorously excluded astrologers, alchemists, and magicians who lacked any clear connection with the established history of science, the Oxford DNB has included them in their own right. It has also expanded the often inadequate treatment of those 'para-scientists' whom the Victorians did include.

The dictionary's early modern coverage also makes clear the various routes—institutional patronage, private wealth, or business speculation—by which practitioners entered their respective fields. Many subjects before the eighteenth century enjoyed royal, ecclesiastical, university, or other patronage; others gained the necessary money and leisure from inherited landholdings or business speculations. Three examples of such amateurs are John Napier (1550-1617), the inventor of logarithms, whose income was derived from landholding; Luke Howard (1782-1864), a prosperous manufacturing chemist, who devised the first practical system for describing cloud types and wrote on the climate of London; and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who both inherited and married into money. It is often said that the astronomer royal John Flamsteed (1646-1719) was Britain's first paid scientist; however, this is to overlook such other salaried men as Henry Briggs (1561-1631), professor of geometry at Gresham College, London, or Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who became curator of experiments at the Royal Society. For others, experimental work arose from business or governmental commissions, not least in the development of Tudor and Stuart sanitation, navigation, and fortification, as in the examples of Peter Morris (d. 1588), who constructed the great wheel to supply London with piped water, and Thomas Bedwell (1547-1595), who developed Dover harbour and coastal defences.

A later combination of scientific enquiry with exploration and imperialism is evident in entries on James Cook (1728-1779) and George Vancouver (1757-1798) in the Pacific, Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) in the southern oceans, and John Ross (1777-1856) and the whaling captain William Scorseby junior (1789-1857) in the Arctic. These and other explorers and mariners made notable contributions to astronomy, meteorology, geomagnetism, and marine sciences, though many were not classed as 'scientists' in the compilation of the dictionary. This takes us back to my opening remarks on the difficulty of defining 'science' and 'scientist': many subjects in the Oxford DNB made contributions to scientific organization and knowledge but are better known for other public services.

Contemporaries often saw exploration and investigation as evidence of national superiority. Yet the dictionary reveals the clear influence of many non-British subjects who contributed to the country's reputation for scientific experimentation and its close connection with practical issues of commerce, politics, or defence. Subjects from the early modern period include the Hungarian Stephen von Haschenperg (fl. 1511-1571) and the Italian Giovanni Portinari (1502-1572), both of whom constructed military fortifications, or the Dutch-born mechanical engineer Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633), whose achievements include an oar-driven submarine by which he travelled from Westminster to Greenwich in 1620. Later foreign contributors to a British scientific enlightenment include the Portuguese poet and physician Isaac Samuda (1681-1729), the first Jewish fellow of the Royal Society, and the Italian disseminators and popularizers of scientific knowledge Paolo Rolli (1687-1765) and Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764). Algarotti published that seminal work Newtonianismo per la dame. Also included is the Swedish naturalist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) who, though only resident in England for a month, was endorsed by a series of British correspondents and whose collection resides in the London headquarters of the Linnean Society, established in 1780.

The Oxford DNB's coverage of British colonial society has prompted the inclusion of a number of scientists whose work was undertaken overseas. Prominent American colonials include the Harvard professor of mathematics John Winthrop (1714-1779), the astronomer Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), the scientific instrument maker David Rittenhouse (1732-1796), famous for his three orreries, and, of course, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who is rightly commemorated as both a politician and an influential natural philosopher. Representatives from other parts of the empire include Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837), a prominent student of Indian and Sanskrit mathematics and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society; Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892), natural historian of Amazonia; the German-born Sir Dietrich Brandis (1824-1907), who developed the science of forest management in Burma; and the Hong Kong civil servant Henry Fletcher (1827-1886), who bequeathed his vast herbarium of Chinese specimens to the Natural History Museum.

Two problems were encountered in dealing with modern scientific biographies: the issue of categorization and definition, and an occasional difficulty with sources. Those editors commissioning entries in the modern biological sciences encountered considerable overlap with other areas of the dictionary, such as medicine, where there is hardly any visible boundary between practitioners: biochemists, geneticists, virologists, and medical statisticians, to name but a few sub-disciplines, are not easily distinguished today. There was a similar overlap with the business sections of the dictionary, for example in circumstances where scientists founded their own companies. There were also cases of overlap when scientists had moved from scientific to non-scientific employment by choice, or had been moved into government employ during the war and then preferred to remain there or to move into university administration. Once again, the issues here are all related to the fundamental problem of defining science and the scientist.

A further issue in the selection of new subjects for the dictionary was the availability of biographical documentation. Some new subjects were chosen as representative of the wider community of physicians and scientists because, unusually, comparatively rich primary archives were available that documented their lives. Conversely it was impossible to make good the deficiencies in the DNB supplements' articles on those British physicists, chemists, and mathematicians who had been involved with the Los Alamos project to construct the atomic bomb, since the relevant personal files, held in the National Archives, are still closed. We have searched long and hard to find a laboratory technician who might exemplify this particular branch of scientific endeavour but few technicians left behind significant personal papers. We believe we may have now found one, a gentleman called Albert Norman (1882-1964), who we hope will enter the dictionary soon.

Finally, the DNB's increased coverage of twentieth-century science has led to a welcome expansion in the number of female scientists. Only 1 per cent of the scientific lives in the old DNB were women. The expansion in the number of women's lives in the dictionary is a development common to all periods, though the cultural and financial restrictions faced by early modern women tended to confine their contributions to a limited number of subjects, principally botany. Examples of early natural historians include Eleanor Glanville (1654-1709), Anna Blackburne (1726-1793), and Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), sister of the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Two of the newly admitted women were spouses of famous geologists who made their own contributions to this science: Mary Buckland (1797-1857) and Charlotte, Lady Murchison (1788-1869). Other women contributed to subjects hitherto the preserve of men, ranging from the mathematician Mary Somerville (1780-1872) to the microscopist Mary Ward (1827-1869) and the astronomer and meteorologist Elizabeth Brown (1827-1899). Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific research was characterized by an expansion in the number of opportunities for women, reflected in the increased areas of renown for the dictionary's modern female subjects. Thus alongside substantial new articles on the leading figures—among them Dame Helen Vaughan (1879-1967), Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), and Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958)—the Oxford DNB also includes female practitioners in engineering, zoology, physics, mycology, genetics, computing, metallurgy, and palaeontology.

Many of the figures we have recently added to the dictionary from among those dying after 2000 have been scientists, among them five Nobel laureates: the molecular biologist César Milstein, biochemist Archer Martin, physiologist Bernard Katz, and the chemists George Porter and Max Perutz. We have also been filling in, publishing important scientific biographies from the more distant past that have been suggested to us since publication. To give one example of a 'missing scientist' added to the Oxford DNB, the dictionary now contains the biography of Alec Reeves (1902-1971), an engineer and inventor and one of the unsung heroes of the information revolution who was responsible for some truly pathbreaking technical developments leading to the present digital age. To give another, the Oxford DNB now includes the life of William Erasmus Darwin, the first of Charles Darwin's ten children, born in 1839 and the object of Darwin's close observation, making him the first subject of a 'fully scientific study of psychological development from birth to early childhood'.

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