Interviews in the history of science

Historians of science have a very well-developed, highly sophisticated literature dealing with science biography and autobiography. In this literature, the analyses are very attentive to ways in which writers of science biography (and makers of science biopics) draw, more or less knowingly, on a range of narrative forms and conventions. Mott Greene, for example, argues that in addition to the ‘genre convention’ of biographical ‘consistency’, writers of science biography tend to favour subjects in which it is possible to include a period of difficulty (‘stories of blind alleys of investigation, failed experiments, inexplicable results … criticism by superiors or colleagues’) and the involvement of a ‘magical agent’ in the path to eventual success: ‘in a scientific biography, this agent … might be something discovered in a book, or an object discovered in the world, in the course of an exploration or experiment. The object may be given to the hero, or found by chance’.Footnote ² Others writing, or writing about, science biography have engaged in detailed debates on the extent to which biographical writing should emphasize individual agency (psychological or existential) or instead emphasize the way in which individual lives expose social, economic and cultural contexts in which science is practised.Footnote ³ Work on science autobiography is equally nuanced, illuminating what Dorinda Outram calls ‘pressures’ acting on the writing, including prevailing models of the self and familiar narrative forms.Footnote ⁴ In the case of European biologists, Pnina Abir-Am concentrates on the way in which their autobiographies draw on fairy-tale narratives:

Historians of science have not extended this critical analysis to interviews with scientists. Instead, there is an expectation that in talking to an interviewer, scientists provide rather straightforward access to their lives and experiences. Charles Weiner states, for example, that ‘oral history interviews can tell us how scientists got that way … interviewers can probe scientists’ family backgrounds; the origins of their interest in their subjects’ and they can ‘document how scientists actually spend their time’.Footnote ⁶ He goes on,

Spencer Weart and David DeVorkin write of the American Institute of Physics's interviews with astronomers and astrophysicists that ‘the personal feelings and philosophies, the educational experiences, and the attitudes towards the public of people who have been restructuring modern astronomy and cosmology are usually readily accessible in interviews’, and they imply that accounts of careers are relatively unproblematic: ‘a person might not remember why he wrote a particular term in an equation, but he rarely forgot how he got his first job’.Footnote ⁸ And Nicholas Russell sees oral-history interviews or ‘directed autobiographies’ as ways of getting to ‘the scientific inner life’ and ‘insight into the “behind the scenes” processes of science’.Footnote ⁹

This somewhat direct or straightforward conception of interviews is found elsewhere in the history and sociology of science. Steven Shapin regards his ‘interviews and conversations’ with scientists as a way of reaching ‘internal’ features of a certain field of recent science, distinct from ‘beliefs about science circulating in the general culture’ that are ‘external’.Footnote ¹⁰ He writes, ‘I wanted to retrieve from the frontlines of present-day technoscientific knowledge-making something of what it feels like to those trying to make a career, to make knowledge, and to make sense of the … institutional worlds they inhabit’.Footnote ¹¹ The interviews, he suggests, record ‘concrete realities’ that can be held up to – compared with – discourse:

In another example, Andrew Pickering's model of the ‘mangle of practice’ depends upon the assumption that it is possible to use Peter Galison's account of the development of the bubble chamber by Donald Glaser – which is partly based on Galison's interviews with Glaser – as providing straightforward access to Glaser's experience, in particular his goals and his experience of the affordances and resistances of particles and instruments.Footnote ¹³ Pickering writes, ‘there exists an excellent account of the history of the bubble chamber published by Peter Galison (1985) on which I can draw to establish my central points’.Footnote ¹⁴ He draws on it as raw material – an ‘excellent’ record of Glaser's goals and experience – to propose a theory of agency in the production of scientific knowledge:

There is no sense that what Pickering calls the ‘temporal emergence’ of resistances, ‘appearing as if by chance’, could have, for Glaser or for Galison, a narrative function or appeal. Like Shapin, Pickering uses (though in this case at one stage removed) interviews as if they provided a more or less direct record of experience.

Finally, Joseph Hermanowicz's work on the ‘satisfaction’ of physicists, based on interviews, is attentive to the ways in which three different ‘social worlds’ of academic science in North America (three kinds of university that he labels ‘elite’, ‘pluralist’ and ‘communitarian’) induce different ‘general ways of constructing and narrating a career’, so that the scientists in each understand who they are ‘over time and with others who are also presenting versions of a socially-shared script’.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, like Shapin, Hermanowicz seems confident that interviews collect ‘details of “what life is like” on the inside’ of science in each of these ‘social worlds’, including ‘the personal, undisclosed rather than publicly professed side of work’.Footnote ¹⁷ What interviewees say is taken to be direct evidence of their ‘experience of the career’, of ‘how the academic life is subjectively experienced’, including ‘levels of meaning they assign to work’.Footnote ¹⁸

Interviews in oral history

I suggest that historians of science should extend their critical analysis of biographical and autobiographical texts to interviews with scientists. One way to do this would be to engage more deeply with oral history, in particular with aspects of oral-history theory. Since the 1980s oral historians – themselves learning from analysts in fields such as anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics and psychology – have developed and practised forms of analysis in which the responses of interviewees are understood as intricately formed, drawing on all kinds of resources circulating in ‘culture’ (from narrative forms to specific features of popular history), spoken with certain audiences in mind, and serving particular psychological needs. This approach to interviews is often reflected on by oral historians as a positive transition to a new state or even ‘paradigm’.Footnote ¹⁹ Penny Summerfield, for example, writes that before this shift,

It is not possible to do justice here to the full range of influences involved since the 1980s in – to use Lynn Abrams's words – ‘transforming oral history through theory’, but two stand out.Footnote ²¹ One is linguist Charlotte Linde's work on transcripts of interviews about career choice, in which she shows that interviewees seek to claim forms of coherence over time, and across different parts of their lives, often relying on specific ‘coherence systems’.Footnote ²² A second is cultural historian Graham Dawson's concept of ‘composure’ – a cultural reading of Kleinian psychoanalysis in which individuals are understood to experience psychological composure (a positive state) when they are successful in composing personal narratives that are in accordance with prevailing discourses:

Abrams observes that ‘this theory of composure’ is ‘now widely used within oral history analysis’.Footnote ²⁴ A view of interviews as narratives drawing on a range of discursive resources, subject to psychological and social pressures, clearly resonates with the literature on biography and autobiography in the history of science, discussed above. Indeed, Summerfield characterizes oral history's theoretical turn as the realization of ‘oral history as an autobiographical practice’.Footnote ²⁵

In the next two sections, I show that oral-history interviews with scientists – recorded between 2011 and 2016 for An Oral History of British Science at the British Library – are readily understood as narratives possessing all of the complexity claimed by historians of science for biographies and autobiographies. I focus on two aspects of these interviews in particular: accounts of becoming and continuing as scientists, and accounts of successful scientific work. In order to stay very close to the material, it has been necessary to be very selective; I discuss extracts from a very small proportion of a collection of over one hundred interviews. However, the examples I highlight are exceptional only in that they provide especially clear examples of the features of the interview material that I wish to emphasize; they are not exceptional in having these features. In other words, the arguments I make are supported by other interviews in the collection, the majority of which can be accessed online in full.Footnote ²⁶

Accounts of becoming scientists

Elsewhere I have shown that scientists tend to tell stories of their childhoods that claim a correspondence between early interests and their scientific career.Footnote ²⁷ We might say, in line with aspects of oral-history theory sketched above, that such stories offer narrative and personal coherence (career choice explained by childhood interests) and that they offer psychological composure through alignment with certain prevailing assumptions about scientists’ childhoods. In some cases, interviewees state that not being able to tell such stories produces a feeling of what Summerfield calls ‘discomposure’.Footnote ²⁸ Consider the following from the interview with biochemist Charlotte Armah:

Asked why she wishes she could tell such stories of childhood chemistry, she says,

She is clearly aware of the elements of the standard story and expresses feelings of some discontent that she is unable to produce them in her own case.

While Armah states that she is simply not in a position to tell the standard story of scientific career prefigured in childhood, others attempt to tell such stories even when the material for the telling isn't especially rich. For example, oceanographer David Cartwright uses the very first minutes of his interview to attempt to claim a connection between his career in oceanography and a coastal childhood, as follows:

His deployment, later in the interview, of another narrative form – a version of the Cinderella narrative identified by Abir-Am in the case of scientists’ autobiographies – is more successful. He explains that in 1951 he started his career in the Royal Naval Scientific Service (RNSS) in the Admiralty's Department of Naval Construction, where he felt much underused.Footnote ³² His transfer from here to Group W (Waves) – where he feels he realized himself as a scientist – was secured by the patronage of a senior scientific ‘saviour’, the group's head, George Deacon: ‘Dr Deacon … was a saviour of many people, people who seemed to have nothing – nothing useful they could do [in RNSS]. Although under his guidance they did extremely well’.Footnote ³³

Periods of difficulty followed by rescue are strongly present, too, in Lewis Wolpert's account of becoming an embryologist. First he was saved by a friend who helped him move from soil mechanics to cell biology:

Wolpert says that the letter from Wilfred Stein was ‘amazing’ and ‘I've thanked him many, many times for changing my life’.Footnote ³⁵ Having entered biology in this way, Wolpert found himself, he tells us, in another difficult patch, to the extent that he might not have persevered with the work for which he is now best known in science – the ‘French flag’ model of pattern formation in embryology – if he had not been saved by a chance meeting in the sea:

Wolpert's story is perhaps influenced by his own experience of conducting a biographical interview with Brenner, who tells a similar story from a different position: ‘This idea of Lewis's was very novel, but he didn't get much interest in it. I can remember finding him in Woods Hole in the late 1960s very depressed, saying that he'd given these lectures and no one paid any attention to him.’Footnote ³⁷ One set of events allows the two men to cover biographical ground in a way that achieves a good ‘fit’, in Greene's sense, with certain expected features of science biography.Footnote ³⁸ Narrative and personal composure are afforded by the closeness of this ‘fit’.

Accounts of successful scientific work

Like accounts of career beginnings, the accounts of scientific work in life-story oral histories are readily understood as narratives that draw on a range of discursive content, including those story forms and genre conventions identified by historians of science in biography and autobiography. In this section I briefly consider four accounts of scientific work in An Oral History of British Science. In the first two, the interviewees are able to achieve composure because their accounts contain what Greene identifies as standard features of good science biography: struggle and eventual success, afforded by a ‘magical agent’. In the other two accounts, the shape of what happened maps more awkwardly onto this model, producing signs of discomposure.

On the evening of 9 June 1966, John Houghton was involved in a balloon-flight trial of a remote-sensing instrument that he and others had made and which they wanted to be among those included on NASA's Nimbus 4 mission. NASA's deadline for submissions, which had to include details of a successful trial, was the following day:

Houghton's interpretation is that God used narrative suspense to show that he was helping with balloon three:

Notice that Houghton says, ‘if that makes sense to you’. While the faith in a form of interventionist Christian God may well be surprising for the interviewer, Houghton can be reasonably confident that the shape of the story is familiar.

The events of one evening provide Houghton with the opportunity to tell a story containing what Greene identifies as desirable elements in narratives of scientific achievement. For Mike Baillie, similar features are spread over years (the late 1960s to the mid-1980s) in an account of his work on the development of a ‘long’ dendrochronology for Ireland. He takes care to stress that the task was physically and practically difficult and regarded by certain senior scientists as unlikely to succeed:

They were first urged on by the gift of oak itself:

What is Baillie looking over his shoulder for, if not the ‘magical agent’ in Greene's set of conventions? The story continues because – in spite of this initial, uncanny help – Baillie and his team were repeatedly thwarted, as they worked through the 1960s and 1970s, by the absence of oaks for certain key periods: ‘what we found was that we were merely reproducing the same chronologies and the same gaps were still there’.Footnote ⁴³ The closing of one of the gaps, in particular, affords the telling of a story that Baillie has confidence in, in part because it has worked well with other audiences.Footnote ⁴⁴

Using the reference he found the site with ‘this heap of beautiful bog oaks, long-lived, regularly grown’, closing the gap (the others were closed by 1986).Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, at this beautiful heap, comes the end to a period of scientific work that lends itself to narrative containing a strong mix of elements of desirable science biography, very readily delivered by the speaker.

If we can understand Houghton and Baillie's accounts of successful scientific work as affording psychological composure due to the way in which these accounts match up with what Greene calls the ‘genre conventions’ of scientific biography, then we might expect to detect discomposure in interviews with scientists whose accounts do not quite contain what is required (their stories do not, in Greene's terms, ‘fit’).Footnote ⁴⁷ There is some evidence that, in An Oral History of British Science, this is what we find. Consider, for example, Nicholas Humphrey's account of the way in which his discovery, in the late 1960s, of ‘blindsight’ in monkeys was aided by the presence,Footnote ⁴⁸ in the University of Cambridge's Psychological Laboratory, of an especially helpful monkey (named Helen). He begins,

He goes on to recall counterfactual reflection with senior colleague Larry Weizcranz (who went on to discover blindsight in humans):

But while other scientists can tell stories of the arrival of a magical agent only after a significant struggle, Humphrey seems to worry that, in his case, luck arrived too soon or too readily: ‘But, I mean, you know, I don't take credit for the good fortune of having worked with Helen’.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, glaciologist Stanley Evans seems uncomfortable with the ease with which a technique for the radio echo sounding (RES) of glaciers was confirmed by the sites at which early testing took place.

Next, the airborne RES equipment was taken to Antarctica with US funding and aircraft. Speaking of its use here, Evans suggests that like the Gilman Glacier in Canada, Antarctica made it ‘easy’ in a way that – in the telling – makes him feel uncomfortable:

If conventional, circulating narratives of science require struggle before resolution experienced as luck, then luck arriving too soon prompts a feeling, in the storyteller, of falling short. For Evans, radio echo sounding worked too well too soon, presenting some discomposure (albeit rather mild and marked by laughter) in the retelling.

The examples examined above suggest that historians of science should extend their nuanced analysis of scientific biography and autobiography to the analysis of interviews with scientists and that this would not be difficult to do. We turn next to consider why they have not already done so, and what oral historians can learn from the way in which historians of science have tended to value interviews with scientists.

What oral historians can learn from historians of science

Historians of science have tended to value interviews with scientists for what they tell us about aspects of past action and experience, rather than for what they tell us about narrative and personal composure. Soraya de Chadarevian expresses this focus very vividly in her comments on her experience of an oral-history training course at the British Library:

Indeed, in her book Designs for Life, which was published subsequently, de Chadarevian uses her own and other interviews with scientists not to further an understanding of how and why scientists give certain accounts of the past and not others, but instead as first-person accounts of events, people, objects and practices in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge over three decades. She writes that she has ‘used interviews … mainly as a guide to archival work and to test interpretations’ and to ‘elicit information from some of the actors’.Footnote ⁵⁵ When interviews are referred to in the book, it is often to support statements of occurrence, for example, ‘Crick and Kendrew in particular singled out the Hardy Club as a very useful forum’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Generally prevailing attitudes are also identified through interview: ‘Most “professional” crystallographers considered protein crystallography … a hopeless undertaking and a “waste of time”, a view that prevailed well into the 1950s’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Individual points of view are also discovered: ‘Max [Perutz] … didn't trust it’ (a densitometer instrument), as are experiences of experimental work: ‘As [John] Kendrew put it … “you could spend an immense time arriving at the final result because the machine would go wrong”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ De Chadarevian is not concerned with why John Kendrew might like to tell her stories of the difficulty of running computer calculations, or of starting work on a technique viewed by others (like dendrochronology in Ireland) as a hopeless undertaking. Similarly, when he tells her that two encounters early in his career – one in the jungle with J.D. Bernal and another at Caltech with Linus Pauling – turned him immediately onto protein crystallography, she is more interested in whether this account is accurate, than in why this is the account that is given:

De Chadarevian's focus on what oral histories reveal about past occurrence – what people did and thought and felt in the past – is shared by Ronald Doel, even while he calls for historians of science to use interview collections in new ways. Though he observes that, in the history of science generally, ‘Concern with sheer documentation of what happened has been supplanted by heightened curiosity about text and memory itself’,Footnote ⁶⁰ his suggestions for the expanded use of archive oral-history collections are not concerned primarily with matters of ‘text and memory’, but rather with expanding the range of historical contexts and past experiences that interviews can be informative about:

De Chadarevian and Doel, then, say loudly and clearly that they value oral-history interviews for what they reveal about past action, thought, experience, context and so on. This is their focus – a focus which cannot be described as ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’, because they are interested in the personal experience of their subjects. Their focus is on past action and experience, rather than on the construction, in the present, of accounts of the past. This interest in the reconstruction or ‘recovery’ of past individual and social life is, of course, a long-standing interest of oral historians, and did not disappear from the profession as it was transformed by theoretical innovations from the 1980s. Oral historians have continued to value – and sometimes even stress the value of – oral history as the creation and analysis of, in Joanna Bornat's words, ‘this rich resource of witness accounts about the past’.Footnote ⁶² Paul Thompson's interest in exploring (with Mary Chamberlain) ‘genre and narrative in life stories’Footnote ⁶³ in oral history ran alongside other work (with Daniel Bertaux) in which

Many other examples could be presented. Nevertheless, it remains the case that studies concerned less with ‘factual and interpretative information’ and more with how interviewees’ narratives are composed have enjoyed a particularly high status in oral history in recent decades. There is some evidence, though, that oral historians – including those most associated with applying and developing ‘composure theory’ – worry that the value of interviews as providing information about the past has been downplayed. Writing under the title ‘Making the most of memories: the empirical and subjective value of oral history’ in 1999, Alistair Thomson responded to perceived ‘rumblings that perhaps … theoreticism has gone too far, and that the important initial motivations for oral history – to provide empirical evidence about undocumented experience … were being submerged under the weight of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Here he points out that his own study of Australian men who fought in the First World War, though principally valued in oral history for its analysis of interviewee composure and discomposure in relation to forms of popular memory, also has valuable ‘empirical’ content, useful for understanding ‘how and why [particular] young Australians joined the army and went overseas to fight on the European Western Front’.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the case of interviewee Fred Farrell, for example, Thomson explains that ‘listening … and reading between the lines of memory’ affords a view of ‘factors’ that, in fact, motivated enlistment, concluding that ‘as historians we want empirical evidence about what happened in the past; but we also want to explore how past events have impacted upon individuals and societies, and to understand the subjective meanings of those events for participants, at the time and over the years’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This is a restatement of the purchase of oral-history interviews on ‘what happened in the past’ and subjective experience ‘at the time’.

Writing more recently, Summerfield – whose work on women in the Second World War is, like Thomson's, often cited as an exemplar for others wishing to explore composure in oral history – has argued that the power of recent oral-history theory, developed in the last few decades, should not be allowed to crowd out more long-standing aims for oral history:

As examples of these more deeply rooted approaches she suggests the ‘collection of folklore’ and other kinds of ‘recovery history’: ‘The oral history movement demanded a reorientation of history, ending the neglect of the ordinary person by insisting that if records did not exist they would have to be created with the help of the new technology of the portable tape recorder’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Like Thomson, Summerfield reinterprets her own work with a stress on what it reveals not just about the construction of personal narrative, but about features of past situation, occurrence, presence and experience. Thus she points out that her oral histories with women in the Home Guard did not only show how certain women struggled to compose themselves and their stories in relation to generally accepted popular histories, they also allowed her to ‘revise the historical record’. In particular, ‘oral history provides evidence that British women joined the Home Guard, and were taught to use weapons, in spite of the official ban’.Footnote ⁷⁰ She includes quotations from interviews that are taken to be descriptions of past experience (‘you did get quite an impact on your shoulder from them’ [rifles]) and strikes a similar note to Thomson: ‘The value of oral history derives both from evidence of, and information about, what happened to people in the past (which as we have seen is often not recoverable by other means), and also from the way in which interviewees remember and express their experience’.Footnote ⁷¹

Oral historians seem to be taking another look at what their interviews capture and what kinds of analysis they afford, re-emphasizing views of, to use Summerfield's words, ‘what happened to people in the past’. In doing so, they may find it useful to engage with and contribute to a field, such as the history of science, in which the use of interviews as a documentary source has a high status.