Oral histories in meteoritics and planetary science: A commentary

Abstract

Between 2001 and 2004, Ursula Marvin published the oral histories of thirteen persons noted for their contributions to meteoritics and planetary science (Table 1). With her encouragement, and with the support of the editor of MAPS and NASA, I am continuing the series and the first article appears in this issue of MAPS. Oral histories have seen an increase in popularity in the last few decades. There are now several books on their objectives and execution. There was a time when historians shied away from them, believing them to be unreliable and lacking objectivity. Documents were what mattered. However, there is now a realization that despite their obvious drawbacks, they have a unique role to play in writing history. Several major scientific organizations have programs to obtain and archive oral histories, among them NASA (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/ history/oral_histories/oral_histories.htm) and the American Institute of Physics (e.g., http://www.aip.org/history/ ohilist/4849.html). Never has the value of oral histories been more apparent than in documenting the history of the Apollo program, and there is hardly a serious book on the Apollo program that does not cite them. Of course, oral histories do not replace the documentary resources, the published and the unpublished papers cataloged in our libraries and museums. The oral histories complement the documentary histories. In a sense, the oral histories describe the sometimes subtle canvas on which the scientific advances were made. They identify the forces for change––intellectual, political, societal, and personal––that drove the scientific advances. This has always been true of science, and is true today. The Apollo program happened because World War II gave us the V2 and the Cold War, but writing on this canvas were the personalities of Von Braun, Jack Kennedy, James Webb, and many others. Writing on the canvas were also James Van Allen and Gerard Kuiper, so space and planetary science, as we now know this area of research, are also driven by space missions, politics, and national budgets. Does anyone doubt that remarkable evolution ofmeteorite research since the SecondWorldWarwas not duemainly to the space programand federal budgetary support? Reading the scientific publications and tracing the dendritic interconnections between published papers tells us what happened in the history of science, it does not tell us how and why. It is by understanding how all these forces interplay, intellectual, political, societal, and personal, that we write the history of science. What the oral histories are not are biographies, but to understand what drives a person we need to know their biography. What the oral histories are not are descriptions of publication lists, although we obviously need to understand the interviewee’s major contributions. What the oral histories are not is gossip, but we need to understand the small things that helped to set the scene and describe the personal dynamics that make us the scientists we are. Lastly, the oral histories are not an opportunity for self-promotion or short-cutting the peer review system in the publication of new work. This is not to say that the oral histories are not peer reviewed. They are, but they are reviewed as history, not science. There are a great many textbooks describing how an oral history should be prepared. There is even a history of oral history. Oral history papers are essentially a report of an interview. The interviewer should be prepared by reading the subject’s CV and publication list and reading or at least skimming some of the major publications. It is my practice to ask the interviewees to send me a list of their favorite twelve papers, to prepare them for the interview and provide some outline for discussing science progress. I am also including four or five figures that are intended to elaborate, clarify, or serve as a guide to the content of the interview. The textbooks say that the interviewer should be a historian and not a researcher in the field, and in this respect, I am