Article ID: CBB001220956

When Your Sources Talk Back: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Scientific Biography (2011)

unapi

Comfort, Nathaniel C. (Author)


Journal of the History of Biology
Volume: 44
Pages: 651--669


Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Part of a special issue: “Scientific Biography: A Many Faced Art Form”
Language: English

Interviewing offers the biographer unique opportunities for gathering data. I offer three examples. The emphatic bacterial geneticist Norton Zinder confronted me with an interpretation of Barbara McClintock's science that was as surprising as it proved to be robust. The relaxed setting of the human geneticist Walter Nance's rural summer home contributed to an unusually improvisational oral history that produced insights into his experimental and thinking style. And embedding myself with the biochemical geneticist Charles Scriver in his home, workplace, and city enabled me to experience the social networks that drive the practical events of his career, which in turn helped me explain the theoretical basis of his science. Face-to-face interaction and multisensory experience will shape each biographer's experience uniquely. Recent developments in sensory physiology suggest that the experience of integrating sense data encourages different patterns of observation and reflection. It is reasonable, then, to think that biography based on face-to-face interviews will, for a given author, have a different character than one based entirely on documents. I reflect on how interviewing shapes my own writing and I encourage the reader to do the same.

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Article Harman, Oren (2011) Introduction to the Special Issue---“Scientific Biography: A Many Faced Art Form”. Journal of the History of Biology (p. 607). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001220956/

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Authors & Contributors
Demuz, Inna
Merchant, Paul
Weimin, Xiong
Borodai, Iryna
Wilson, F. J. H.
Decker, M O
Concepts
Oral history
Interviews
Biographies
Historical method
Historiography
History of science, as a discipline
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
Medieval
20th century, early
19th century
Places
China
Great Britain
Lisbon (Portugal)
São Paulo (Brazil)
Ukraine
United States
Institutions
Chinese Academy of Sciences
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