Rebels No, Simply Scientists 英文参考文献.docVIP

Book Review/Science in the Media Rebels? No, Simply Scientists Michel Morange T he 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.” 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