Samuel Loncar: I think you make an extremely compelling case for history and the history of science particularly as a kind of science in the broad sense of a very technical, rigorous discipline. However, as you know, in the natural scientific community, historians of science are not a standard part of their education. I wonder, and this is a large topic, but do you think that it’s a mistake in the current natural scientific community that the history of science, based on what you said, is ignored?
Lorraine Daston: I do, and I hope that doesn’t sound like provincial special pleading for my own discipline. Let me explain why I think it’s a mistake. We often have at the institute that until recently I co-directed in Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, scientists, young scientists, coming to us after they have finished a PhD in physics or biology or chemistry, but especially the life sciences, and wanting to do some kind of postdoc with us. It’s certainly of no use to them whatsoever professionally; on the contrary, I’m sure on their CVs, it would stand out like a sore thumb. But the reason is that, because of the combination of the narrowness of research specialization and the intense pressure to produce results quickly, they have no overview of their field. Or perhaps to put it more provocatively, they don’t know why they’re working on what they’re working on. Moreover, they don’t know what the alternatives are.
The history of science has always served two purposes. One purpose has been to give that kind of orientation, really in the Kantian sense: Here’s how the field has developed; this is why it has taken this path rather than another path. In some disciplines—psychology might be a good candidate for this—there were roads not taken or abandoned, which perhaps are more promising in retrospect because they showed very robust empirical effects. I’m thinking of Gestalt psychology, for example.
So that’s one important use of the history of science: to train scientists. Another use, of course, is for almost any science, to prepare scientists for decisions that no science textbook can prepare them for, namely, ethical decisions. Increasingly, especially in the biomedical sciences, but one thinks also of the Manhattan Project—involving, physics and chemistry—scientists will be confronted with decisions about research that has ethical implications. The history of science is not an ethics course, but it can offer case studies of how scientists have dealt well or badly with this in the past and what the consequences have been. One might describe this as a form of sensitization about the importance of making these decisions in a somewhat wider context.