Biographies of scientists are important for three reasons: (1) They present scientists as humans with personalities and relationships beyond their work, (2) They show how scientific knowledge is created within social and historical contexts, and (3) Highlighting obscure scientists provides insights into why certain scientists are overlooked due to biases. Biographies can vary in their level of detail and purpose, from brief factual summaries to in-depth analyses of a scientist's life and work. Examining biographies of women scientists reveals the gender-based challenges they overcame during their careers.

1. Biographies of Scientists
HSS 102

2. • Biography: from medieval Greek words ‘bios’ meaning life +
‘graphia’ meaning writing
- a usually written history of a person
- an account of the life of something (such as an animal, a coin, or a
building)
• Hagiography: from Greek ‘hagio-’ meaning saintly or holy +
‘graphia’ meaning writing
- a biography of saints or venerated persons
- idealizing or idolizing biography
• Memoir: a book or other piece of writing based on the writer's
personal knowledge of famous people, places, or events​
- focuses on certain memories, experiences or particular aspects of
someone's life.
- a written record of a usually famous person's own life and
experiences

3. “No species of writing seems more worthy of
cultivation than biography, since none can be
more delightful or more useful, none can more
certainly enchain the heart by irresistible
interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to
every diversity of condition.”
– Samuel Johnson, 1750

4. “As biographers some of us don’t just look into
the door, we open it…get into wardrobes…look
into papers…get under the bed…under the linen
and then tell the person look this is who you
are. Whoever you might be this is what we think
you are and you are good enough for the world”
– Sankarshan Thakur (biographer of Indian politicians
such as Nitish Kumar and Laloo Prasad Yadav)

5. Why are biographies of scientists important?
• A different story of science
• Presents scientists as people, with emotions and
personalities, and personal relationships that go
beyond (but influence) their scientific careers
• Shows scientists in their social, cultural,
historical, racial, national, gendered contexts
• Provides insight into the complex creation of
scientific knowledge and its dissemination
crisscrossed with other contexts

8. Different intents and effects
“In the late summer or early
autumn of 1859, Whitwell
Elwin, editor of the respected
British journal the Quarterly
Review, was sent an advance
copy of a new book by the
naturalist Charles Darwin.
Elwin read the book with
interest and agreed that it had
merit, but feared that the
subject matter was too
narrow to attract a wide
audience. He urged Darwin to
write a book about pigeons
instead. “Everyone is
interested in pigeons,” he
observed helpfully.” - Bryson
“Charles Robert Darwin
(February 12, 1809 to April 19,
1882) was a naturalist and
biologist known for his theory
of evolution and the process
of natural selection. Born in
Shrewsbury, England, in 1831
he embarked on a five-year
survey voyage around the
world on the HMS Beagle; his
studies of specimens led him
to formulate his theories. In
1859, he published On the
Origin of Species.”
– biography.com

9. Darwin as a student
Darwin enjoyed every advantage of upbringing,
but continually pained his widowed father with
his lackluster academic performance. “You care
for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,
and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all
your family,” his father wrote in a line that
nearly always appears just about here in any
review of Darwin’s early life. Although his
inclination was to natural history, for his father’s
sake he tried to study medicine at Edinburgh
University but couldn’t bear the blood and
suffering. The experience of witnessing an
operation on an understandably distressed
child—this was in the days before anesthetics,
of course—left him permanently traumatized.
He tried law instead, but found that
insupportably dull and finally managed, more or
less by default, to acquire a degree in divinity
from Cambridge.
- Bryson
His father, considering the 16-year-old a
wastrel interested only in game shooting,
sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh
University in 1825. Later in life, Darwin
gave the impression that he had learned
little during his two years at Edinburgh.
In fact, it was a formative experience.
There was no better science education in
a British university. He was taught to
understand the chemistry of cooling
rocks on the primitive Earth and how to
classify plants by the modern “natural
system.” At the Edinburgh Museum he
was taught to stuff birds by John
Edmonstone, a freed South American
slave, and to identify the rock strata and
colonial flora and fauna.
- Britannica.com

10. From Bryson
“The most enigmatic character of all was Franklin.
In a severely unflattering portrait, Watson in The
Double Helix depicted Franklin as a woman who
was unreasonable, secretive, chronically
uncooperative, and—this seemed especially to
irritate him—almost willfully unsexy. He allowed
that she “was not unattractive and might have been
quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in
clothes,” but in this she disappointed all
expectations. She didn’t even use lipstick, he noted
in wonder, while her dress sense “showed all the
imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.”1”

11. Why are obscure scientists obscure?

13. Out of the 51 “famous scientists” that a preliminary Google search throws up,
only 3 are women

15. Emilie du Chatelet
• 1706-1749, Paris
• Educated at home, but learned from prominent mathematicians and
physicists
• Did her own experiments at home
• Had a flair for gambling, used her math skills to win and used the money
to buy books and equipment!
• 1737: wrote on a paper on the nature of light, heat, and fire, suggested
that different colours of light carry different heating powers, anticipated
infrared radiation
• Greatly interested in Newton’s work; co-authored Elements of Newton’s
Philosophy (not credited)
• Did experiments and corrected Newton’s statement that energy is
proportional to mv to mv2
• Translated and commented on Newton’s Principia, adding clarifications,
explanations, and experimental data—her translation remains definitive
even today
• Is responsible for having encouraged Newtonian science (over Descartian
science) in France

16. Agnes Pockels
• 1862- 1935, Venice
• Pioneer in surface tension studies
• No formal training in the sciences; carried out
experiments in the kitchen using buttons and trays
with soaps and oils while taking care of her parents
• Was not allowed to study science in college; her
brother helped her out by sending his books
• Experimented to study the effects of impurities on
surface tensions of liquids
• Invented Pockels trough (eventually developed by
Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir) to measure surface
tension
• Had her research published in Nature
• 1932: honorary doctorate from the Technical University
of Braunschweig

18. Henrietta Swan Leavitt
• 1868 – 1921, Massachusetts
• One of Harvard’s “Computers”- their job was to study photographic
plates for fundamental properties of stars (worked for salaries that men
would not accept for the amount of work done)
• Discovered close to 2400 variable stars
• Her discovery about Cepheid stars enabled Edward Hubble to measure
galaxy distances in the 1920s
• Considered now to be “the woman who discovered how to measure the
Universe”
• Her research was published by her boss Edward Charles Pickering under
his name
• Her research helped Harlow Shapley find out distances around the Milky
Way but he did not credit her
• 1924: Gosta Mittag-Leffler of the Swedish Academy of Sciences tried to
nominate her for the Nobel Prize, not knowing that she had already died
• 2011: Nobel Laureate (Physics) Adam Reiss credited Leavitt’s work as the
best tool to study the universe
• Her discovery of luminosity and position is now called Leavitt’s Law

20. Janaki Ammal
1897-1984, Tellichery (Kerala)
• A pioneering botanist and cytogeneticist (study of chromosomes and inheritance);
also researched ecology, biodiversity, medicinal plants,
and sustainable agricultural practices in higher altitudes in India
• One of the first women to win the Padma Shri (1977)
• Got her PhD from Michigan University in 1931
(possibly the first woman to get a PhD in botany in the US)
• Honored with a honorary DSc from the U of Michigan
• Created newer varieties of sugarcane through selective crossbreeding of hybrids at the Sugarcane
Breeding Station, Coimbatore; discovered the S. Spontaneum variety is native to India
• Studied chromosomes of thousands of species of flowering plants
• Colleagues at Coimbatore did not like her because she was an unmarried woman and from a caste
lower than theirs; facing discrimination, she joined the John Innes Horticultural Institute, London
• 1935: CV Raman invited her to be a research fellow at IAS
• Invited to be a cytologist at Wisley (near Kew Gardens) by the Royal Horticulture Society, England
• Co-authored The Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants
• 1951: Jawaharlal Nehru invited her back to India to head the Botanical Survey of India
• An ardent environmentalist, she opposed the building of a hydro-power plant in Kerala’s Silent Valley
• 1955: Only woman to be invited to the International Symposium on Environmental History at Princeton
• 2000: the Ministry of Environment and Forestry created the National Award of Taxonomy in her name
• A herbarium with 25,000 species in Jammu Tawi is named after her

21. Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal

22. Take Away
• The lives of scientists teach us a lot about societies, histories,
and human worlds
• A biography is only one of several ways of knowing about a
larger picture; and no narrative can ever tell us everything
• Biographies are written differently for different purposes,
audiences, and carry different types of information
• Most obscure scientists are obscure because history and
institutions tend not to remember them or given them due
importance due to inherent biases
• The women scientists we have looked at are case studies
that show the struggle against gender based prejudices
from society, family, colleagues, teachers, and institutions;
their lives show us our own social, historical, and personal
contexts and changes!