Jimena Canales's Reading List

"Disclosures first: Browne is a mentor and friend, so I know a little more about how her personal interests intersected with historiographic preoccupations that drive her narrative. She succeeds in giving us a full picture of the man but, like my own Einstein bio, it bites the genre and expands it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, she does, and she also underscores throughout her book the importance of the infrastructure, ranging from the postal system to his home, wife and children, that subtend these collective networks. Her biography is even more generous than most group biographies in that it changes how we must think about “life and work.” In the first pages, she tells us explicitly that Darwin “not only lived his own life, he lived also in the lives of others.” She is not only thinking about human lives. More radically, she ends the book not with Darwin’s own death, but with that of his dog, Polly, a few days later."

"The book is an ambitious contribution that starts off by comparing accounts of the great scientist with those of Napoleon to try to figure out what is special about how we narrate the lives of scientists compared to those of others, including generals or political figures, but it quickly goes even farther in its historiographic contributions. Microbes enter into the narrative. The book’s “hylozoism,” or its inclusion of non-human agents, seemed heretical at the time it was published. Still, no one can deny that Pasteur was only successful in his scientific work because he managed to make microbes work for him. In the era of COVID-19, where we are all concerned with making viruses behave in our favor with vaccinations, masks and other strategies pioneered by Pasteur, the book is a must read. The Pasteurization of France is one of Bruno’s early books (in my opinion those are the best), which came after Laboratory Life and Science in Action . It marked him as one of the most creative and controversial thinkers in the field of science studies. I know Bruno personally and have also heard mouthfuls about him from his most severe critics. His Pasteur “biography” was amply criticized by historians who admittedly knew much more about that time period. Simon Schaffer, also one of my mentors, wrote a scathing review titled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour.” Sociologists of science went after him mercilessly as well, often protesting that the book was not sufficiently Marxist or materialistic in its approach. But those faults are also its strength, and its bad press only helped its author sharpen his message."

"Biographies , sometimes starting with autobiographies , are essential for consecration and canonization. For example, readers mostly took Darwin’s own autobiography at face value as testament to his greatness—until a close reading by Janet Browne disclosed how it was evidently not written for his immediate family, although it claimed to be so. Einstein similarly used biography and autobiography very effectively to crown himself as an exceptional thinker. The first Einstein biography to consecrate him in this way was actually pseudonymously written by his son-in-law, predictably portraying him as a lonely and modest (even shabbily dressed) genius. Like Darwin before him, Einstein was so concerned with his self-image that when his ex-wife proposed to write her memoirs of their life together, he threatened to give her a good thrashing if she went through with her plan. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Madame Curie also serves a hagiographic function, but the biography is different because the reason for her worship is not confined to her work and mind, or even to her roles as Polish immigrant, wife, or mother. It is movingly written by her daughter, Eve, and the author convinces us to care about her because she is human and fragile: “exceptional not only in her genius, but by her humanity, by her innate refusal of all vulgarity and littleness.” I hope not—she is such a tragic role model. I do believe that the book does offer a different picture of “the mind” than we are used to in biographies of scientists. It is much more embodied. Eve’s descriptions of her own fleshy-and-boney scientists-parents comes with a strange upside for readers. There is more gore in her book than I have ever read in scientists’ biographies. Of her father’s death, she writes: beneath the feet of the powerful horses. Pedestrians cried “Stop! Stop!” The driver pulled on the reins, but in vain: the team of horses kept on. Pierre was down, but alive and unhurt. He did not cry out and hardly moved. His body passed between the feet of the horses without even being touched, and then between the two front wheels of the wagon. A miracle was possible. But the enormous mass, dragged on by its weight of six tons, continued for several yards more. The left back wheel encountered a feeble obstacle which it crushed in passing: a forehead, a human head. The cranium was shattered and a red, viscous matter trickled in all directions in the mud: the brain of Pierre Curie. The retelling of her mom’s difficult death is no less chilling. It is no surprise to me that one of the first biographies of a scientist that emphasized general human qualities in its subject was of a female scientist, written by her female offspring. Yes, there is a joke among historians of science that funding needs to be added to the so-called scientific method. Getting money (and the relation of science to capitalism more generally) is one of many aspects of science, along with the self-fashioning practitioners engage in, that is often obscured in accounts about them."

"Scientific biographies most often focus on Great Famous Men—but most scientists reach neither fame nor glory. Lab Girl reminds us how the profession of the scientist has changed, how hard and unglamourous it is. In some senses, it is a book that annihilates with a single, first-person-punch the entire genre of biographies of luminaries such as Newton , Galileo and Einstein meant to glorify. Being a scientist is really very different for most people. Most of the biographical accounts have given us a deceptive view of the profession. Most biographies are rife with conjectures (usually implicit) about the respective influence of upbringing, innate psychology , and the broader environment. Yet we also now know that it is impossible to parse out these elements in fixed and abstract terms across all time and history. Nature and nurture have been taken to polarizing extremes that are commonly used to ascribe blame or take credit. For this reason, I love biographies that confront “life and work” in a way that problematizes those labels. They can not only help us realize that nature requires nurture and nurture nature, but to move beyond those tired questions to think about the emergence of the categories we use to organize knowledge more generally, and to choose ones that do not drive us into such impasses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter To answer your second question: Can being a scientist be inherited? I am sure you mean it as a joke or provocation, but the history of science is rife with scientific dynasties which trace their lineage from great-great grandparents. This takes us back to your opening question of the interview: being a scientist today requires very specific credentials. anti-Trump, science-matters movements rightfully insist that scientific expertise belongs to those who hold those credentials. Many plots in scientific biographies hinge around the confrontation between ignorance and reason— think of the Galileo fable —but now is also a time to remember how dangerous those moments are when the learned look down on the lay."

"Hawking Incorporated is essential reading for anyone interested in “distributed cognition,” the idea that thinking mostly takes place outside of our minds—but it is also a great story of how a severely mobility-challenged being was able to escape from his constraints to do something which contemporary science currently prohibits: to remain active in the universe even after death. A typical trope in scientific biographies, starting with those of Newton, stresses how geniuses often work in isolation, lost in thoughts that are not concerned with the mundane. This characteristic tells us a lot about how the scientific persona has been constructed throughout history, but it gives us a distorted view of what scientific work actually entails."