Thoughts on history and science

In a number of cases recently, I have been struck at how ahistorical scientists are about their own discipline or field. For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as if there was a rolling wall of fog following medical research at a five year remove. Some papers were cited before then - they were like distant mountains that one could see above the fog, the giants of the past.

One such paper was the paper by John Kerr and his colleagues in 1972 on apoptosis. It was cited more than just about any other paper ever published, and at one point apoptosis itself had one paper per day being published, around the late 1990s (according to David Vaux, one of the leading apoptosis researchers, who shared his data with me), on account of it being implicated in cancer and possible treatments.

Vaux himself, and other researchers, scoured the literature, and found that it had been discovered at least five times, including Kerr's discovery, most recently before that in 1950. Why is this information lost and rediscovered so often? Why are scientists so ignorant of the past?

They have to be. If they weren't, then they'd be historians (and usually, when scientists do history, they do it poorly, honourable exceptions like the later A. J. Cain and Michael Ghislein, and my own PhD Adviser Gary Nelson, notwithstanding), and worse, they'd be constrained in their research by the mistakes of older researchers. Imagine if every would-be geneticist in the 1900s was forced to follow Mendel's late example and work with hawkweed (which often doubles its genome)... no Mendelian genetics for anyone then. By selectively ignoring prior work, they are driven by the hope of complete novelty, and not forced into past mistakes.

But once they have discovered something, the rules of priority in science mean that anyone who did come up with something similar is to be credited. Darwin wrote a Historical Sketch (but his publisher did not include it in the first two editions of the Origin of Species) to indicate those who came close. The Mendelians cited Mendel (largely to ensure that none of their competitors got priority). Ever since the unseemly dispute between Newton and Leibniz on the priority of calculus, priority has been the very currency of scientific work.

The crucial aspect of the use of history by science is that it not be too myopic, nor too far sighted. Scientists need freedom, but they need to appeal to the past, for science is an accretive process. Just not too accretive.

But there's another, less savoury, use of history by scientists. It is the polemic use of history to convince others that credit is really due to some modern, despite the prior use of ideas in science. It is a rhetorical trope used to gain credit, somewhat illicitly. This is usually demonstrated by creeping precursoritis, in which all manner of respected scientists almost got to the same conclusion that we now, enlightened, have, courtesy of the historian or the historian's hero.

Another hallmark of this abuse of history is the identification of villains. Lamarck, Aristotle, Goethe, the Catholic Church, the Anglican hierarchy (but not ordinary Anglicans for some reason), have all been tagged. But as I find when reading the supposed villains, they are usually no worse than their supposed opponent heroes. Sometimes they are appreciably better. Some of the medieval scholastics, like Albertus Magnus, were better naturalists than the post-renaissance humanists.

So when you encounter historical claims in a textbook of science, or a work of popular science, and it is written by a scientist, you would do well to recall the words of Thomas Kuhn (who, in a case of historical irony, did some of this very thing himself):

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the imge of science by which we are now possessed. That image has previously been drawn, even by scientists themselves, mainly from the study of finished scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently in the textbooks from which each new generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more like to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of national cultre drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text. [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p1]

Kerr, J. F., A. H. Wyllie, and A. R. Currie. 1972. Apoptosis: a basic biological phenomenon with wide-ranging implications in tissue kinetics. Br J Cancer 26 (4):239-257.