Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

The editors have gotten this project very right, since they have talked 20 authors (including themselves) into writing first-rate essays about individual scientists who challenged the established science of the day. These contributors approach their tasks in different ways, just as the 19 scientists discussed carried out their nonconformity in different ways. The rich diversity of stories makes biological science exciting. The collection works because the essays are not intended as mini-biographies but rather as studies of episodes of “rebellion” that made a difference in biology. As an added bonus, Richard Lewontin’s epilogue makes clear that the 19 are, in fact, scientists who found their part within a larger scientific community rather than working from outside altogether.

The group of scientists includes two women: Barbara McClintock, who is acknowledged as a mainstream researcher who had an astonishing idea; and Thelma Rowell, who insisted that her challenging ideas about dominance relationships in primates were a result of her having been trained always to question authority. As Nathaniel Comfort shows, McClintock was quite widely respected and accepted as a brilliant scientific leader—it’s just that with her transposons she went farther than others were prepared to go at the time. Vinciane Despret shows that Roswell’s distinction lay in doing the same sorts of things others scientists were doing but for far longer, which enabled her to see more and different results.

Some of the figures discussed here won Nobel Prizes and other major awards, so they were hardly the forsaken outliers that other sorts of rebels became. Many had a great idea, and it just took a lot of energetic effort to get others to accept it, while still others, such as Richard Goldschmidt, had productive ideas that were never accepted as such. Rather than repeating the stories here, I urge you to read the book.

Although the title of the book suggests that we will hear about rebels and mavericks and heretics, it seems that the mission morphed as the project proceeded. The focus is on rebels and iconoclasts, although there is much discussion about how we cannot very clearly or precisely define what those are. We are told that “rebel is far from a well-defined term” (p. 9). Or “‘scientific rebel’ is almost an anticategory, or rather a noncategory” (p. 7). What about iconoclasm? If the icon is “a central organizing assumption about which there is consensus within a discipline” (p. 12), then iconoclasts challenge iconic thought. They do this in any of several ways—methodologically, conceptually, or experimentally—with a range of ways of carrying out their challenges. Some of the iconoclastic rebels profiled here are very successful and established scientists, with nice, well-paid positions at places like Harvard. What then, we are led to ask, is this book really [End Page 470] about? And why does the book work so well, given its somewhat ill-defined or perhaps undefined theme?

Rebels and iconoclasts engage in challenge to established iconic thinking. As Lewontin points out, lots of people can make challenges, and some are creative while others are crazy. The challenges that “take” in science are those that work from within science. The challengers must already have some status—perhaps because of past successes, as in McClintock’s case, or perhaps because of tremendous abilities, as in the case of Motoo Kimura’s mathematical abilities and creative insights, or Carl Woese’s ability to ask questions about something that others weren’t even thinking of as a phenomenon.

In the end, what this book is really about is challenging established scientific views from within science in ways that are successful. It is about creativity, nonconformity, and innovation. Some of the individuals featured did not fit into society easily and others did not fit into the professional science of the day, but they all did well enough to be accepted by the scientific establishment at some point. What all of them did that was significant was to provide something more and...