Reviewed by John Maddox

If war is too important to be left to the generals, then surely the research community should be on its guard against leaving the history of discovery to the historians of science who have recently captured their eponymous field. That must surely be the reasonable person’s first reading of this well intentioned but shapeless book. The second reading may be a little more sympathetic: there is some good stuff buried in these 939 pages, but it has to be winkled for – not easy with a object that weighs more than 2.2 kg, the upper limit of the Maddox kitchen scales.

The declared intention gives the game away. The editors say in their introduction that “what is science?” is the first question that “anyone has in mind” when opening a book entitled Science in the 20th Century. (It isn’t, of course: people who buy this type of book believe they know what science is, although they may be surprised and even disillusioned by what they read in what they buy.) The editors begin their next paragraph by saying “The current definition which scientists give is one answer…”, but then add that they “cannot but give particular weight to it”, saying that it would be “unwise to reject…out of hand” the opinions of “epistemologists, historians, sociologists, engineers, professional popularizers, politicians…or the ‘man in the street'”. (Why engineers are in such dubious company is not explained.) In fact, the 48 chapters that follow give far less than “particular weight” to the opinions of the practitioners, but indulge the sociologists ad lib.

By now, of course, the whole world knows that there has recently been a revolution in the history of science. Academic practitioners of the trade have rejected the idea that their job is to sing the praises of great men and women and celebrate their intellectual achievements. Instead, the “social context” is what matters now. From there it is only a short step to the view that the content of science is moulded by the prevailing social context, and that it has no greater force than any other “point of view”.

The more polite components of this message are spelled out by Michael Aaron Dennis from the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in his introductory chapter entitled “The Historiography of Science”. This turns out to be an account of the revolution in the history of science before and after the Second World War. Like others, Dennis places the seeds of revolution in the second international congress of the history of science held in London in 1931, and in particular in a paper on Newton read at the congress by Boris Hessen, one of a substantial Soviet delegation.

Nobody denies the interest and importance of that occasion. Hessen’s paper made two points at great length – namely that Newton would have formulated the principle of energy conservation if only the steam engine had already been invented, and that Newton’s Principia was not so much a work of genius as a response to the military needs of the time. Nothing in what follows in this review should be taken to suggest that these are improper lines of inquiry. Indeed, they are of great interest. However, the question is whether those who follow these inquiries prove their case as often as they would like the rest of us to believe. And, in any case, can contextual studies of that kind validly be passed off as the history of science?

Dennis is especially revealing in his discussion of the history of science in the US during and immediately after the Second World War, culminating in the publication of Science: The Endless Frontier – the influential argument by Vannevar Bush in favour of US government support for basic research. Like a real historian, Dennis uncovers the origins of this document, in which the physicist- historian Bernard Cohen and the historian George Sarton had an important hand.

Dennis tells how James Conant (in his role as president of Harvard) sought to make the history of science a “servant of science” when he was planning his undergraduate course “NatSci-4”, which introduced non-scientists to science. A dedicated band of Harvard acolytes set about preparing case histories of discovery that were, in Dennis’ opinion, a pedagogical failure. People like the physicist Gerald Holton come poorly out of the episode; the hero is Thomas Kuhn, who was following the course, saw through the sham and later (when at Yale) wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That too, says Dennis, was when historians of science saw that the history of science is a discipline in its own right, and not dependent on the sciences.

With marching orders like these, it is not surprising that the contributions that follow are a disparate collection, hardly likely to give any kind of reader a connected account of science in the 20th century. The chapters are divided into two main sections, one labelled “Science and the Social Fabric”, and the second called “Research Dynamics”. The second is the more interesting, but often suffers from the fact that the contributors feel they need to give sociological considerations their due. Moreover, some contributors write of the disciplinary history of their subjects – for example, which institutions sprang up, where and when – rather than writing about the intellectual content.

Thus Harmke Kamminga from the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Cambridge University, writing on “Biochemistry, Molecules and Macromolecules”, marvels that biochemistry had such diverse beginnings (animal metabolism, nutrition, chemical pathology and so on) and at its continuing “permeability” to influences from other fields of science (genetics, for example, now). Historians, he says, are hard-pressed to define biochemistry and will not be able to do so until there has been a detailed and comparative analysis of the “stated intentions of those who self-consciously promoted and practised the new biochemistry…” and of “changes of major objectives over time”. Really?

That difficulty is also said to be relevant to understanding why biochemistry sprang into life in the first decade of this century. Curiously, Kamminga does not mention Emil Fischer. His work on carbohydrates, proteins and even nucleic acids is likely to have set competitive juices flowing in all kinds of university departments outside Germany. (Fischer does, however, rate a mention in Mary Joe Nye’s chapter entitled “Atomic and Molecular Science 1900-1960”.)

For my money, one of the best chapters is the one on high-energy physics by Sam Schweber from the physics department at Brandeis University. At the outset, he takes a self-denying ordinance, saying that “big science” inevitably has political connotations because of the costs, and that he will therefore ignore them. But quite what people other than those in the field will make of ideas such as “symmetry breaking”, which is not fully explained, is anybody’s guess. Michael Mahoney of Princeton University also gives an excellent account of the search for theories of computation, which has the virtue of emphasizing the link with Chomsky’s theories of language.

On the other side of the coin are the more general articles such as “From Eugenics to Genetic Manipulation” by Daniel Kevles of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at California Institute of Technology. It is true that the term “eugenics” was invented by Francis Galton in Britain in 1883, but is it constructive – let alone fair – to describe everything that has happened since then in applied human genetics (including the pre-natal diagnosis of fetuses with Down’s syndrome) as part of the waxing and waning of Galton’s naïve ambition? And what exactly does it mean to conclude, as Kevles does, that “…the flow of history compels us to think and act anew – not about eugenics, but about the control of human genetic information by geneticists, the media, insurers, employers and government”?

This monumental volume is thus a disappointment, to say the least. (“Monumental” is not a cheap reviewer’s joke: the sheer bulk of the printed pages detached one of the covers in my copy. The weight arises from the publishers’ decision – no doubt in response to a demand for the facility to place illustrations anywhere in the text – to print it on heavily coated paper, which also means that the text must be read in uniform light.) I can think of no category of reader who would read through cover to cover and have the feeling that he or she then knew something in the large about science in the 20th century that they did no know before. Nor would a newcomer to science have a sense of what were the great landmarks of the century almost past – such as relativity, quantum mechanics, Hubble’s law and the structure of DNA. The aftertaste is more likely to be the sense of having read an extra-large issue of a journal such as Social Studies in Science.

With that said, the book does serve both by declaration and example to make the ambitions of the new historians explicit. In my opinion, studies of the social, political and ethical connotations of science are interesting, important and entirely legitimate. Moreover, in open societies, there is no way in which they can be suppressed. But there is also a need for an “internal” history of science, to use the language of this book. In other words, we need an account of the remarkable developments of the past 100 years that reflects the recurring difficulty of solving problems that have not been formulated at earlier times – and of the endless false starts that arise as a consequence. That is what the research community could do for itself. It could also do more to demand that its independent academic colleagues in the history of science submit their publications to the rigorous peer-review that is commonplace in science proper.