Rebels? No, Simply Scientists

The problem of creativity is common to the arts and sciences. What distinguishes geniuses from ordinary mortals? In the arts, from Mozart to van Gogh, creativity has frequently been associated with the artist’s opposition to the society of their time. A good artist is a rebel. Paradoxically, whereas science might appear as a progressive rational construction of new knowledge, the same relation has been postulated between rebellion and scientific creativity. There are many historical accounts of how scientists who made decisive breakthroughs saw their ideas rejected, and became “rebels.” Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology presents a collection of essays by different authors on biologists who were, in one way or another, considered rebels [1]. What do they have in common? Is it possible to find biographical clues to the forging of this spirit of rebellion? This book can be appreciated from three different points of view. The first is simply to consider it as a rich collection of studies of scientists who played a significant, although sometimes marginal, role in the development of the life sciences in the 20th century. The contributions of some of them have already been studied, but there are new figures sketched here such as Carl Woese, who discovered a third branch of life, Motoo Kimura, who radically modified our vision of evolution, and Raymond Arthur Dart, who dramatically revised the scenarios on the origin of modern humans. The originality of the book is also in the comparable size and format of the presentations. A good balance has been reached between a short biographical introduction and a longer presentation of the original work accomplished and the obstacles and opposition encountered. The authors of these short essays have diverse training and skills, but the quite rigid organization of the book facilitates comparison of the different chapters. One great merit of this book is to have included figures from diverse biological disciplines, ranging from molecular to evolutionary biology, ecology, and neurophysiology. Such diversity is rare and gives this book a particular flavor. The quality and importance of the authors (among them Garland Allen, David Hull, and Michael Ruse) is another richness, which should convince all those interested in the development of the life sciences over the last century to buy this book and read and browse at their own pace. But the ambitions of the editors of this collective work were higher. The aim was to write the history of 20th century biology from the perspectives of the rebels, the mavericks, and the heretics. There is a strong trend in present-day historical studies to give a voice to the “small man,” to those who go unheard, to those who lost out. By adopting such an approach, one can hope not only to obtain a different, renewed historical vision, but also to create a sort of “counterfactual” history likely to allow testing of the hypotheses that have been produced to explain such historical developments. Consider, for instance, the highly different view that Erwin Chargaff provided of the discovery of the double helix [2] in comparison with that proposed by Jim Watson [3]. Chargaff emphasized the huge role that biochemical work played in the progressive description of the DNA molecule, a role largely ignored by Jim Watson. The second ambition of this book was to draw the characteristics of the special class of scientists called “rebels” or “mavericks.” As most of these rebels produced important results, it is a way to question the relations between rebellion and creativity in science. Are there more rebels in biology than in other sciences? This book is clearly not intended to provide an answer. But if one of the ways leading to rebellion is “focusing on exceptions” instead of “focusing on rules” (p. 11), the biological sciences, with their wealth of exceptions, could be favorable ground. Does this book achieve its ambitions? In their introduction, Oren Harman and Michael Dietrich raise serious doubts about the possibility of defining a category of “rebels” or “heretics” in science. As they say, “the category of rebel may be elusive and nebulous” (p. 3). One should add that the words used to describe the figures portrayed in this book frequently seem excessive. In many instances, they might have been advantageously replaced simply by “original,” without any loss of meaning. Many of the