What’s the best way to recognize the death of an eminent scientist? The Royal Society memorializes its late members – as do many other national scientific academies – by commissioning colleagues to write what are known as “biographical memoirs”. Each article, which aims to provide a “definitive account” of that person’s life and work, is peer-reviewed and published in a journal called the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society.

Free to read online, the memoirs are supposed to focus on “science and scientific endeavour, while also shining a light on the human side of scientific success [and] offering a fascinating insight into the character and personalities of the individuals involved”. According to the Royal Society, this remit makes the memoirs “a valuable resource for both scientists and historians of science”. The University of Cambridge astrophysicist Malcolm Longair – current editor-in-chief of the Biographical Memoirs – says they contain “the DNA of the society”.

In a lecture on the Royal Society’s website, Longair set outs his philosophy of what the memoirs are trying to achieve. Unlike the obituaries you might find in national newspapers, which are aimed at the non-specialist, the memoirs are “written by scientists for scientists”. They focus on the deceased’s scientific contributions and personality but steer clear of any philosophical and sociological concerns. If an article can capture the scientist’s individual genius, Longair adds, it might inspire young people to enter their field.

I’ve never written a biographical memoir for the Royal Society, but I have done three equivalent articles for the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which adopts a similar approach. Natalie Shanklin, who works in the NAS communications team, told me its biographical memoirs are meant to offer an “in-depth and scholarly lens on the research and career of the NAS member”. Being written by someone who knows the subject well, they add colour by including “more sentimentality and sometimes anecdotal asides”. Overall, the NAS memoirs aim to provide “a biographical history of science in America”.

Technically, I wasn’t a colleague of the three people I’ve written about but in each case I did have a connection with them. For the nuclear physicist Robert Serber (1909–1997), who had worked on the Manhattan atomic-bomb project, I had helped him write and publish his recollections. For the physicist and historian Abraham Pais (1918–2000), I had been recruited to complete his unfinished biography of Robert Oppenheimer. As for Maurice Goldhaber (1911–2011), who is best known for discovering that neutrinos have a left-handed helicity, I had interviewed him extensively for other projects.

A long history

Over in France, the Paris Academy of Sciences began publishing éloges or eulogies about recently deceased members as long ago as 1699. In his book Science and Immortality, the US historian Charles B Paul examines the first century of these articles, which were initiated by the French essayist and scholar Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, who had towering ambition. He conceived the memoirs not as storehouses of historical and biographical information, but as a means to extoll “the moral virtues of the post-Renaissance sciences and their practitioners”. He wanted to elevate scientists to the status of the “political, military and religious heroes memorialized since the beginning of time”.

Tensions persist in biographical memoirs, for they have incohesive, almost oxymoronic goals – “biographical” suggests something third-person and objective, while “memoirs” suggests first-person and subjective

If today’s biographical memoirs are less daring, that’s largely due to the success of the tradition started by Fontenelle. However, tensions persist in biographical memoirs, for they have incohesive, almost oxymoronic goals. The word “biographical” suggests something third-person and objective, while “memoirs” suggests first-person and subjective. They are also aimed simultaneously at non-scientists, scientists, biographers and historians alike.

I have recently been asked to write two further biographical memoirs. One is for the Royal Society to honour the British experimental physicist Francis Farley (1920–2018), who worked on the first four g-2 experiments, which were designed to test the soundness of quantum electrodynamics via a measure of the muon spin. The other will be for the NAS on the theoretical physicist Toichiro Kinoshita (1925–2023), who pioneered the theory of g-2 calculations. I knew Farley and had interviewed him at length, while Kinoshita was a personal friend, as I mentioned in a recent column. Still, I will be writing the memoir of each person with one of their scientific collaborators.

But despite my personal connections with both people, I find composing these memoirs no easier than others I have written. As well as trying to address the seemingly competing aims for biographical memoirs, I recognize what I think is yet another purpose. The most important goal of a biographical memoir, in my opinion, is not just to be a “valuable resource” but also to memorialize the person – to craft something that lives after that person that prompts us to remember them as a full human being.

The critical point

When I write a biographical memoir, my goal is to make readers wish that they had known, learned from and conversed with the subject about both personal and scientific matters. I try to make readers wish they’d known the person as a friend, and even have invited them over for, say, drinks or a family dinner. I want to show that who that person was and what they did belong together – and that whatever honours that person received were the natural thing to bestow on them.

Doing this is of value for a national academy, I think, because it addresses a recognition that its members have of themselves. They are not just people who sit on committees and work on problems but communities of diverse, highly skilled and carefully chosen scientists joining forces on valuable, shared goals. The aim of memorializing someone might not be explicitly acknowledged in the instructions for writing a memoir, and it’s a hard piece of advice to put into words. Still, it’s why writing a good biographical memoir is both worthwhile and not as easy as it sounds.