Much writing on scientific biography focuses on the legitimacy and utility of this genre. In contrast, this essay discusses a variety of genre conventions and imperatives which continue to exert a powerful influence on the selection of biographical subjects, and to control the plot and structure of the ensuing biographies. These imperatives include the following: the plot templates of the Bildungsroman (the realistic novel of individual self-development), the life trajectories of Weberian ideal types, and the functional elements and personae of (...) the folkloric tale of the "hero's quest." The essay discusses the nature and application of these genre conventions in some detail, with the conclusion that biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distorting influence on the image of how most science gets done. (shrink)

The revolt against expertise is a novel aspect of a larger and longer-standing discontent with the power of managerial elites within modern democracies. In the United States, scientific expertise is contested adversarially on the model of a public trial. In broadcast media, expert disagreement proceeds via staged debates with opposing sides (generally representing extremes of more complex debates) arguing scientific questions bearing on public policy. By the mid-20th century many observers agreed that this broadcast format had transformed the active ‘public’ (...) – the target audience of these debates – into a passive ‘mass society’ that could listen to or view them, but had few or no means, outside of electoral politics, to engage with them. Two recent developments have challenged the traditional approach to public debates of scientific expertise, and challenged that expertise itself. The first is the rapid privatization of science since about 1980, changing public perception of scientists from disinterested servants of truth to spokespersons for government or economic interests. The second (since about 2007) is the combination of the universality of smartphones and direct access to internet discussion platforms not controlled by managerial elites, which have transformed the mute ‘mass’ into a highly vocal assortment of selforganizing publics (like those imagined in classical democratic theory) demanding to be heard directly on scientific questions. The matter of who now is a scientific expert, for whom, and under what circumstances, is a pressing question for historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. (shrink)