Evelyn Fox Keller wrote first biography of the Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock in which Keller discussed how McClintock felt being rejected by her peers in the 1950s because she questioned the dominant idea of the particulate gene and instead proposed that the genetic material jumped positions on the chromosome which indicated that the gene did not control but was controlled by the cellular environment. Keller’s story of McClintock’s life is an account of a woman scientist’s conception of science (...) and how her unorthodox views isolated her from the main stream science. Keller’s biography was read by many in a way that made McClintock a feminist icon by showing how women scientists “see” scientific objects differently and how their science is holistic and hence radically different from the reductionism of male-dominated science. The second biographer Nathaniel Comfort calls this story a myth. In his detailed intellectual biography, Comfort embarks on an energetic journey to separate fact from fiction to dismantle what he calls the McClintock myth. The difference between two biographers is not entirely about evidences or about separating fact from fiction but about their adoption of two contrasting paradigms of scientist’s subjectivity: Keller foregrounds McClintock’s affective self and Comfort her rational. In this commentary I have closely and comparatively read both biographies to revisit Keller’s “myth” and Comfort’s “truth” and to provide yet another interpretation of McClintock’s life and work from the perspective of object relations theories in psychoanalysis. Instead of figuring out the extent to which the myth bears truth as Comfort does, I have asked questions: How and why this private myth was in the making throughout McClintock’s life and work? How this private myth was related to the making of her science? By using developmental psychoanalytical approach, I show that what Comfort calls McClintock’s private myth was not something that was partly fictional and hence incorrect or wrong but it emerged from a deeply and compellingly affective place in McClintock’s life. This so called myth was integral to and fundamentally formative of who she was, a woman and a scientist, and that this myth formatively shaped McClintock’s relationship with science’s objects and science’s subjects. This commentary aims to show the relevance and usefulness of psychoanalytical theories for understanding scientific subjectivities and provides a revision to the neo-Kantian idea of scientist subject—a unified and wilful, self-determined, self-regulated, active, autonomous, and rational subject wilfully driven by social and scientific ethos—generally popular among historians of science. (shrink)

It is now twenty years since James Watson published his personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA and triggered the growing scholarly study of the roots of molecular biology. Watson himself was not concerned with the study of nucleic acids before he became directly involved but at least three detailed histories of the early development of molecular biology have subsequently appeared, together with books, papers and reviews from others who took part, or their partisan representatives. Of these (...) three histories, only one does justice to Avery's work. His surviving DNA collaborator, MacLyn McCarty, believes that only Olby inThe Path to the Double Helixdeals adequately with Avery's contribution. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more (...) recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn. (shrink)