Scientific Persona Research Articles

The ‘seductive scientist’: the emergence of a new persona centred on virility and joy in twentieth-century scientific memoirs

This text investigates the twentieth-century scientific memoir genre from the perspective of two of its perhaps most influential contributors, the American Nobel laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, by using theoretical tools from masculinity studies and the studies of scientific personae. The term ‘the seductive scientist’ is proposed to describe the main innovation to scientific personae that Watson introduces and Feynman perfects: a scientist who is brutally honest, openly seeks joy and fun, and is interested in sexual conquests. To include these topics is deliberately provocative in relation to earlier scientific personae, most importantly ‘the reverential scientist’, aiming for gravitas and depicting the scientific life as revolving around awe. As is shown, however, the seductive scientist, for all its bravado, is actually a persona which only promotes mild, non-disruptive rebellion. Rather than actually challenging the system, it incorporates several aspects of counter-cultural critique against science, showing it to not be pompous, conformist and boring, but rather fun, exciting and full of life. This reconfiguration of self-presentations by scientists, then, strongly influences the scientific memoir as a genre, affecting the ability of scientists to speak in the name of science.

„Bila sam neznalica, ali sam postala tražiteljica“ – Mirjana Gross i „znanstvene persone“

The aim of the paper is to examine the persona of the historian based on the example of Mirjana Gross and using the theoretical framework of scientific personae. The latter was introduced in 2003 in an article by Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, who defined scientific personae as mediators between individual biography and social institution, and as a cultural identity that simultaneously shapes the individual and creates a collective with a recognizable and shared physiognomy. Following the work of Daston and Sibum, this paper elaborates of the concept of the persona of the historian by Herman Paul, which defines three approaches. The first approach studies the “scholarly” persona at the micro level, i.e., individual biographies. The second approach refers to the analysis of scientists within the framework of patterns and models of good scholarly conduct, de facto striving to establish an ideal-type model of persona as a universal category. Finally, the third approach is the meso-level approach, which views scientists as individuals whose actions are influenced by the time and place in which they operate, as well as their specific habits, virtues and skills. This framework relies heavily on the concept of “epistemic virtues” as crucial professional and personal characteristics that define the personae and set them apart from other practitioners of a discipline. Thus, the aim of this paper is to establish the persona of the historian Mirjana Gross by analyzing her writing on the theory and methodology of history, her observations of her own work, and her writings on history in general. The paper analyzes the modes in which the tasks and roles of historians and historical science in a society are understood, and how Gross observed her own role as a historian.

‘We the Tormentors’

This paper combines the history of scientific collecting with the history of emotion. It does so by using a unique combination of private and public sources – the diaries and articles of entomologist Margaret Elizabeth Fountaine (1862–1940). Fountaine practiced entomology at a time when there were few women in science, and in particular in entomology, requiring each woman to make her own way and devise her own strategies and scientific persona. Fountaine’s emotions towards collecting insects were ambivalent, and while collecting was a source of great pleasure to her, it was also at times a source of guilt and pain. Indeed, in her diaries she exhibited a range of emotions, including pity for the insects. However, in her articles she exhibited a more limited emotional palette, as the scientific persona she chose to construct was built from two narratives – the objective researcher and the white imperial huntress – and these, while bestowing authority upon her, only allowed for the expression of certain emotions. In addition to showing how Fountaine had to tailor the emotions she exhibited, this paper also suggests that objectivity in collecting was another kind of emotion. It was an attempt to distance the collector from the subjects of collection by using instruments and interacting with them in a supposedly emotionless way. This paper argues that when examining the making of scientific knowledge we should look at both its cerebral aspects and its emotional aspects, as the latter also played an important role.

A life in science – marriage as an epistemic relationship and the joint scientific persona of Astri and John Runnström

This article analyses an unpublished (auto)biographical account by Astri Runnström, wife of the internationally renowned Swedish zoologist John Runnström (1888-1971). Runnström pioneered his research area in Sweden, experimental zoology and cellular physiology. His research was based on long, recurring stays at marine biological stations in Sweden and abroad. Astri Runnström (1897-1978) accompanied her husband on these stays and worked as an assistant in his laboratory, without compensation and without ever gaining recognition in the creation of his successful career. I argue that Astri Runnström’s biography on John can be read as an autobiographical narrative, with the aim of negotiating Astri a place in her husband’s scientific legacy. Astri Runnström’s textual strategy was to create a joint scientific persona for the two of them and present marriage as an epistemic relationship, without which John Runnström’s scientific achievements would not have been possible to carry out.

Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Country House Science, and Personae for British Women in Science at the turn of the Twentieth Century

Higher education for women in the fields of science and mathematics significantly expanded in the United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. A major force in that expansion was Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (1845–1934), the mathematically talented head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and researcher in experimental physics at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. In this article I examine Sidgwick’s role in advancing science education for women, focusing on her construction of a scientific persona for British women that drew upon her evangelical Anglican values of family and domesticity. I argue that Sidgwick’s work contributed to an enterprise of ‘country house science’ in which other members of her extended family were engaged, and that her case contributes to a reorientation of the historiography from a focus on recovery of women’s peripheral contributions to the positioning of the work of science education for women more centrally in our narratives about women in science.

The Scientific Persona and the Patrimonialization of Contemporary Personal Archives: A Discussion of the Case of Jean Leray

La présente étude de cas soulève une série de questions historiographiques et archivistiques induites par une enquête que nous avons consacrée à la patrimonialisation des papiers personnels de Jean Leray (1906-1998). Nous entendons tout d’abord reconstituer la persona scientifique de Jean Leray telle qu’elle ressort des notices biographiques produites en particulier après son décès. Le récit que nous a livré Leray sur sa captivité durant la seconde guerre mondiale y est alors reproduit et amplifié. Nous établissons ensuite que le tri des papiers de Leray est contemporain de ces éloges et qu’il a été mené sous l’étroit contrôle du mathématicien et académicien Paul Malliavin. Nous formulons ce faisant quelques hypothèses sur les principes ayant conduit ce dernier à n’en déposer que quelques fragments dans trois bibliothèques de mathématiques distinctes. Pour finir, nous replaçons le récit de captivité de Leray dans le contexte des relations étroites que certains membres de l’Académie des sciences, dont Gaston Julia et Henri Villat, entretenaient avec l’université en captivité de l’Oflag XVII-A durant l’Occupation.

Johann Reinhold Forster and the Making of Natural History on Cook's Second Voyage, 1772–1775 by Anne Mariss

Reviewed by: Johann Reinhold Forster and the Making of Natural History on Cook's Second Voyage, 1772–1775 by Anne Mariss Antoine Gallay Anne Mariss, Johann Reinhold Forster and the Making of Natural History on Cook's Second Voyage, 1772–1775 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019). Pp. 240. $100 cloth. Published in 2015, Anne Mariss's doctoral dissertation A world of new things": Praktiken der Naturgeschichte bei Johann Reinhold Forster was the first comprehensive study of the career of German naturalist and scholar Johann Reinhold Forster since Michael Hoare's biography published almost half a century ago. The book reviewed here is an extensively revised version of her dissertation's fourth chapter, whose translation from German to English has been made possible by a grant awarded by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. This is a very welcome choice: not only does Mariss's new book offer a valuable study about an influential and yet overlooked figure, but it most crucially presents numerous insightful analyses of the way new knowledge in natural history was produced and processed during exploratory voyages. As the book's introduction reminds us, the development of natural history widely benefitted from travels outside Europe: discoveries were not just additions to an ever-growing knowledge, but they constantly reshaped the discipline itself. While this phenomenon has already been widely discussed, the various practices involved in knowledge-making aboard the ship still deserve to be investigated. In order to do so, Mariss was able to gather a vast amount of material, both textual and pictorial, which she has carefully dissected in this book. The two first chapters of the book are rather introductory. After a helpful synthesis of James Cook's three famous voyages of exploration, Mariss presents general issues on how knowledge was produced, processed, and transferred during long-distance voyages. In chapter 3, she turns to a closer analysis of the economic motivations behind the practice of natural history in a non-Western environment, and she stresses how the specific conditions of such travels could have led to the making of a distinctive scientific persona, whose traditional gentlemanly virtues were mingled with more heroic virtues. The way Forster shaped his own identity by distinguishing himself from seamen is further studied in chapter 4. It covers the way seamen's knowledge contributed to the naturalists' scientific endeavors. While naturalists heavily relied on seamen to identify the properties of local flora and fauna as well as understand the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples, they also had to clearly distinguish their own thoroughly-processed knowledge from the seamen's heterogeneous one. Chapter 5 focuses on the specific relationship developed between seamen, naturalists, and local peoples through the exchange of curiosities. Because of their commercial value, artifacts and natural rarities were avidly sought by the entire crew: officers began to collect them as a hobby, seamen expected to sell them back in Europe or directly on the ship, and naturalists complained that this craze impeded them from gathering many unknown objects. Again, Forster was prompt to distinguish the laymen's greedy accumulations from his own virtuous practices of collecting. However, Mariss accurately stresses that the exchange and display of rarities also played a crucial role in shaping Forster's social network (as well as this chapter, see 183–187). In order to understand the function of the various objects collected, naturalists such as Forster heavily relied on local informants, as is further discussed in chapter 6. The difficulties in understanding the characteristics [End Page 564] of various local specimens and communicating with indigenous peoples were partly removed thanks to the crucial role of some knowledgeable Polynesians, such as the famous Tupaia during Cook's first voyage, or Hitihiti with whom Forster got closely acquainted. While local knowledge was far from being neglected, it needed to be carefully refashioned to be considered legitimate and ready for use in Europe. Chapter 7 is devoted to the various practices involved in the identification of observed specimens. When specimens could not be classified in preexisting categories, they were considered members of new species whose names had to be coined and quickly made available to other naturalists in Europe. The issues raised by the...

Science, religion, and the nation: de-scienticizing Nobel Prize scientist Aziz Sancar

ABSTRACT This article examines the emergence of Nobel Prize-winning Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar as a scientific persona model. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 2015, Sancar’s nationalistic tendencies and close relationship with incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) leaders opened up a wide range of discussions on how a scientist’s relationship with politics should be intellectually interpreted. Focusing on the case of Aziz Sancar, this article examines the specific contextual conditions in which a scientist expresses his identity and how it is interpreted by the public. To this end, the aim of this work is to present an in-depth analysis of the discussions that took place in Ekşi Sözlük, a popular social media platform acting as an online forum in Turkey, and news from the national media and to scrutinize how a scientific persona is conceived in Turkey and how Aziz Sancar has been ‘de-scienticized’ in the heavy polarized Turkish political atmosphere.

Constructing the persona of the Naturwissenschaftler – German book reviews on galvanism

Scientific book reviews were an important genre in late-18thcentury German journals. The mostly anonymous reviewers regarded themselves as voices of the scientific community, judging the quality of new publications for its benefit. However, as this paper shows, some reviewers aspired to more than judging the books’ content. The reviewers of Christian Heinrich Pfaff ’s, Alexander von Humboldt’s, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s monographs on galvanism, published between 1796 and 1805, used the language of epistemic virtues and vices to present their readership with their ideal scientific persona meant to support the development of the empirical sciences.

Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context.

In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.

The masking and making of fieldworkers and data in postcolonial Global Health research contexts

ABSTRACTThis paper centres on the roles and contributions of fieldworkers-local data-collectors in Global Health research in postcolonial contexts. It is informed by two separate ethnographies, conducted in two different East African biomedical research institutions. It discusses how common characterisations of fieldworkers as ‘low-skilled’ and ‘local’ make them attractive to research institutions in two important ways – as community-embedded data-collectors thus facilitating community participation and as being unlikely to fabricate data because they lack the skills to avoid detection. This paper questions these assumptions. It draws on Daston’s idea of the ‘scientific persona’ and Fanon’s concepts of mask-making to explore how fieldworkers construct identities and data within their liminal roles. Fieldworkers create particular pseudo-personae or masks for getting and staying employed. They dumb-down CVs and emphasise their similarities with community members in ways which are partially ‘real’ but also ‘fake’. These constructed identities provide fieldworkers with a persona that allows them to fabricate or modify data without raising suspicions. They frequently engage in practices known as ‘genuine fake’ data fabrication which is data perceived as factually correct and verifiable yet methodologically incorrect, hence it is real and fake in varying degrees. We understand the ‘pseudo’ as the blurry space between real and fake where fieldworkers construct their identities and data. Given the seemingly laudable aims of Global Health, we argue that fieldworkers’ masking and making up data signal the need for greater attention by those designing its research, to better understand and address why and how these practices unfold.

SCIENTIFIC PERSONAS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE – WAYS OF CREATING SCIENTIFIC, SCHOLARLY, AND ARTISTIC IDENTITIES

The concept of scientific persona was developed by historians of science at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin fifteen years ago in order to understand how science works and how it can be conducted in a credible way. The Latin word persona means mask and the discussions of the term were elaborations of Marcel Mauss´s introduction of the concept in an article published in 1938 (Mauss 1938). In Mauss´s conceptualisation, persona was a feature that characterized societies in an evolutionary stage—a stage where members of the society had started to perceive themselves as individuals, but were still expected to fulfill certain, culturally defined roles. In such contexts, persona was not mask to cover the ‘real’ self of the performer, but a mask that enhanced certain features of the person. Transferring Mauss’s approach to the scientific world, Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum (2003) defined, in an often cited article in Science in Context, scientific persona as an intermediate between individual biography and social (scientific) institution: it is a cultural identity that forms the individual in body and mind, and creates a collective with a shared and recognizable physiognomy (ways to be and to behave). Daston and Sibum characterized scientific personas as templates that emerge and develop in historical contexts and used the concept to investigate the creation of certain types of scientists: when, how and why have distinct “scientific personae” emerged?

Enacting Self and Scientific Personas: Models for Women Health Professionals in Dr. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life

In this essay, I call on scientific persona and autobiographical discourse theory to examine Dr. Sara Josephine Baker’s 1939 autobiography Fighting for Life. Through this framework, I consider how Baker and other U.S. women health professionals conceived of individual identity and collective persona during the early twentieth century. Baker helped to revolutionise well-baby and well-child care in the U.S., and in Fighting for Life, she relates the genesis and evolution of her ground-breaking work. Like her contemporaries, Baker was engaged in the research, practice, teaching, and administration of medicine and public health. Presently, scientific persona has been theorized as a conglomerate of dispositions, practices, and characteristics that are associated with scholar-practitioners of the human and natural sciences; it therefore offers a novel lens for the individual and collective fashioning of women health professionals like Baker whose work traversed disciplines and institutions. By considering how Fighting for Life, as autobiography, facilitates Baker’s conception of self and persona, I show that Baker adopts prevailing personas for women health professionals as well as women working in other fields. At the same time, Baker in her autobiography also emphasizes why and how these models transform in actual practice. Thus, scientific personas tend to emerge as subtle variations of previous forms, while Baker’s autobiography also bears witness to the rise of new personas for women health professionals, as demonstrated by her radical reconfiguration of expert knowledge and scientific motherhood.

“How excellent… for a woman”? The fellowship program of the International Federation of University Women in the interwar period

Funding bodies and their fellowship programmes became a cornerstone of the scientific world in the twentieth century, not only providing scholars with the means to conduct their research in practice, but also decisively influencing the perception of their scientific persona as an expression of their expertise. Although women were increasingly entering the scientific realm at the time, few succeeded in obtaining such fellowships. In this article, I shall take a closer look at the fellowship programme of the International Federation of University Women during the interwar period, which was specifically designed to enable women to continue their research abroad. By focussing in particular on the selection process, as evidenced by the minutes of committee meetings and the fellows’ files, I shall explore the implicit norms and expectations to which candidates were subject in order to reconstruct the ideal type of woman scientist. The fellowship programme was meant to function as a meritocratic and excellence-oriented system, in which personal and non-scientific characteristics did not serve as criteria in the allocation of funding. Deliberately understating aspects of gender and developing a strictly meritocratic discourse, the Federation promoted a “disembodied" type of scientific persona as a strategy aimed at overcoming a long-standing bias against the alleged amateurism of women scientists. Whereas other funding bodies such as the Rockefeller Foundation contributed to the shape of a masculine persona, the IFUW sought to promote a universal model, in which women could be recognised as legitimate scientists.

Chewing Demosthenes’ Pebbles: Embodied Experience Making the Scientist’s Persona, ca.1830-1910

This paper argues for an embodied approach to the scientist’s persona, using ‘experience’ as its focal point. Rather than noting that embodied experiences influenced scientists’ practices and identities amidst (or despite) ideals of objectivity, I want to draw attention to the ways in which personal, embodied experiences were celebrated in nineteenth century science, and presented as primordial for the practice of competent research.I am focusing on those scientists involved in the study of the voice in order to do so. Because the physical workings of the voice are largely hidden inside the body, fields such as laryngology and phoniatry developed a number of touch-based, experiential scientific practices before and alongside tools of visual observation. These non-visual practices were very closely connected to researchers’ sensations of their own bodies, and connected to their identity (as a middle-class amateur singer, a hoarse professor, a stammerer, etc.). As scientific disciplines studying the voice developed over the century, personal ‘experience’ (understood both as particular practices and notions of personal background and identity) was increasingly brought forward as a unique source of understanding and expertise. This resulted in a highly diverse field of experts on the voice, in which otherwise non-elite researchers could participate and even rise to fame. They did so because, and not despite, their physical and social impediments. Studying the experiential practices and memories brought forward by this network of experts allows me to look at the construction of their scientific personae from an intersectional perspective. A focus on the nineteenth century notion of ‘experience’ and its inclusion in scientific discourse allows us an insight into the various constituent elements of a ‘persona’ built within the context of a particular field, and drawing liberally on aspects of identification that do not always fit the classic categories of gender, class, age, health, etc.

When Artists Became Intellectuals: Science as a Significant Other for the Female Artistic Persona

The increasing appreciation of science posed an interesting challenge to art in the late 19th Century. Modernisation, professionalisation, secularisation and technical novelties all seemed to question the social status of the artist. Arguing that one possible way for individual artists to meet this challenge was to incorporate elements of the scientific persona with their artistic self, this article focuses on the Swedish-speaking, Finnish artist and writer Helena Westermarck (1857–1938). While constructing an intellectual comradeship with her brother, the internationally well-known sociologist and anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1862–1939), Helena Westermarck often referred to the exceptional intellectual and analytical capacities of the artist. Arguing that the prestige of science could be used to lend credibility to the artistic persona, the article will discuss some of the ideas that led Westermarck to gradually fashion her public appearance as an artist into the persona of a public intellectual, writer and self-supporting (single) woman on equal terms with her brother.

The Exchange Programme of the Belgian American Educational Foundation: An Institutional Perspective on Scientific Persona Formation (1920-1940)

In this article we propose an institutional perspective on persona formation. Not unlike individual scientists, institutions such as funding bodies took an active interest in shaping the scientific persona. As a case in point, we discuss the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) that sent hundreds of aspiring Belgian scientists to the United States during the Interwar period. The BAEF went to great lengths to optimise its selection procedure and formulated conditions pertaining to both the mental and physical fitness of its grantees. In this way, the BAEF cut off some repertoires of being a scientist and encouraged its fellows to demonstrate certain qualities when in front of the funding body. This, we argue, points to the performative and occasional character of scientific personae. This article is part of the special issue ' Scholarly Personae '. Geschikt om te reizen. Het uitwisselingsprogramma van de Belgian American Education Foundation. Een institutioneel perspectief op de vorming van wetenschappelijke personae (1920-1940) In dit artikel benaderen wij de vorming van personae vanuit een institutioneel perspectief. Net als individuele wetenschappers zijn instituties zoals funding bodies actief betrokken bij het scheppen en in standhouden van wetenschappelijke personae. Als voorbeeld hiervan bespreken wij de Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF). In het Interbellum zond de BAEF honderden wetenschappers-in-wording naar de Verenigde Staten. Daarbij getroostte de organisatie zich veel moeite om de selectieprocedure te optimaliseren en stelde zij voorwaarden aan zowel de mentale als fysieke conditie van haar fellows. De BAEF maakte hiermee sommige repertoires van het wetenschapper-zijn onmogelijk, terwijl zij haar fellows aanmoedigde om bepaalde andere kwaliteiten voor het voetlicht te brengen voor de ogen van de funding body. Dit toont aan, zo betogen wij, dat de wetenschappelijke persona gesitueerd en performatief is. Dit artikel maakt deel uit van het themanummer ' Scholarly Personae '.

Persona and the Performance of Identity Parallel Developments in the Biographical Historiography of Science and Gender, and the Related Uses of Self Narrative

In this article Bosch explores the parallel development in scientific and gender biography to shed light on the relation between the individual and the collective, the self and society. In the history of science the relational/collective scientific self and the concept of the scientific persona (or mask) were developed in order to gain insight in the co-construction of the individual scientist and the collective scientific enterprise. In gender studies theatrical metaphors came into use to understand collective and relational aspects of (gender) identity formation. Doing or performing science as shown in the cases of Boyle and Harris, and doing or performing gender as shown in the cases of Lady Dilke and Marguerite Durand simultaneously entered the stage of biographical representations of scientists and subjects of feminist inquiries. They inform what can be called the ‘new biography’. This study of identity formation investigates self representations and self narrative in a variety of texts from autobiographies to travelogues and house hold accounts to scientific works. It interprets these texts not as unreliable subjective sources but as key texts crucial to comprehend the situated historical subject.

Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War

This essay brings together and builds upon histories of cold war American science and studies of objectivity, scientific personae, and the self by exploring the physicist Merle A. Tuve‘s career in the late 1940s and 1950s as a history of selfhood and the emotional dimensions of scientific identity. As director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II, Tuve followed a convoluted path through the institutions, politics, identities, and sensibilities of science in the cold war, and he struggled to preserve a sense of meaning and identity centered on the humanistic and aesthetic possibilities of scientific inquiry in an era of rapidly growing instrumentalism. His predicament highlights not just the political and institutional shifts within postwar science, but also the intricate entanglements between feeling, selfhood, and the cold war order.

The Authority of Practice in the Alchemy of Sir John Heydon (1588–1653)

The social, ideological and personal contours of Lieutenant-General John Heydon’s alchemy provide a case study of how philosophical questions and solutions arise from intertwined practice, theory, and scientific persona. The development of Heydon’s alchemical theory in an unpublished manuscript, A Synopsis of the Universall Entity of Ideas or of ye Systemes of the Maeteriall and Immateriall World, illuminates theories concerning generation and the maintenance of life through aerial nitre theory, which links the early seventeenth-century investigations of Michael Sendivogius and Cornelis Drebbel with later writers such as Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. It also provides the context for the early use of thermostatically controlled ovens. Practical concerns within the Ordnance Office could help to explain such interests in saltpetre and efficient ovens. Such practical concerns, however, do not determine the shape that Heydon’s theories took. Rather, theory also shaped Heydon’s notions of practice. Heydon’s particular strand of vitalism granted philosophical authority to experimental practitioners, whether or not they were learned in a traditional sense.