WHAT did gentleman scientist Robert Hooke see when he looked at a piece of
cork down a microscope? His sketches from 1665 show the cavities we now know
would have once contained living cells. Hooke even calls these spaces “cells”
(from the Latin for a small room).

But don’t be tempted to turn this Englishman into the father of cells. To
him, these cells were no more than channels through which the sap passed: he
never imagined them to be skeletons of the basic unit of life itself.

In fact, according to Henry Harris in The Birth of the Cell, none of
the traditional heroes of cell theory—Matthias Schleiden, Theodor Schwann
and Rudolf Virchow—deserve much credit. While textbooks still sometimes
refer to “the cell theory of Schleiden and Schwann”, Harris dedicates only a
single chapter to the German duo and disparages Virchow’s disdainful attitude to
his contemporaries.

The real (and forgotten) heroes, says Harris, are the Frenchmen, such as
Henri Milne-Edwards, who noted that some animal tissues, like plants, were
made of “corpuscles”, and Réné-Joachim-Henri Dutrochet, whose
studies of plant cells in the 1820s led him to believe the cell was the basic
unit of metabolic exchange.

Meanwhile, their compatriot, François-Vincent Raspail, went as far
as to state in Histoire Naturelle de la Santé et de la Maladie,
published in 1843, that the cell was “a laboratory within which all tissues
organise and grow”.

Meanwhile, in Breslau, again ahead of Schwann, Jan Evangelista Purkyné
(Harris insists on the Czech spelling rather than the Germanic Purkinje) and
Gabriel Gustav Valentin had already noted the similarities between plant and
animal cells. Purkyné was convinced that cells were the primary constituent of
living tissue. Purkyné has cells, fibres and figures named after him, but
Schwann got the glory: his is the name we associate with cell theory.

Schwann’s idea that cells are the fundamental unit of all living tissues
seems now unimpressive, a mere repetition of Purkyné’s position. Harris
concentrates on exposing Schwann’s idea about how cells are formed—cells
coalesced around free nuclei—for the error it was. The German heroes
display little merit, and certainly do not deserve the credit that tradition
ascribes to them.

Virchow’s reputation suffers a similar fate as Harris focuses on the work and
theories of the Pole Robert Remak. Unlike Schwann, Remak thought that cells were
produced by division. For Harris, Remak deserves the credit; Virchow’s famed
Cellularpathologie is nothing less than an unacknowledged exposition of
Remak’s own ideas.

Harris bombards us with a phalanx of little-known scientists with a purpose:
he aims to redress the balance. He wants to give credit where it is due to those
whom history has previously ignored. He says he is interested in those who made
the discovery rather than those who elaborated on it. Thus, he asserts that
“Purkyné and Remak were the discoverers, but their voices were drowned in the
publicity unleashed by the works of the colonisers, Schwann and Virchow”.

Henry Harris, an excellent historian and an eminent medical scientist, clings
to his scientific upbringing. He focuses on the scientific aspects of the cell
theory. From the composition of tissue and cell generation to the role of the
nucleus and chromosomes, he traces the history of ideas thoroughly.

But behind the science runs another story in which personalities, politics
and prejudice damage the edifice of pure and objective science. That Dutrochet
was French and Purkyné Czech, that Valentin was Jewish and Raspail a
Republican, had greater influence on their careers than all the merits of their
scientific techniques. Harris touches on these underlying themes, but
unfortunately does not explore them in any great depth.

A year passes. I’m now the possessor of an MSc and have a fat dissertation to
prove it. And I’m still asking “Does history of science have anything to offer
scientists apart from bedtime reading?”

The answer would have been simpler a year ago. As an undergraduate
biochemist, my genetics course began with Mendel’s experiments on peas. Our
introduction to atomic structure started with Rutherford’s alpha-particle
scattering results. The teaching of science relied on history to explain the
present through the past.

But now I know that this rosy picture of a nice, tidy, linear progression
through the ages is not what professional historians think of as history. They
tell a very different story. They’re trying to understand how scientists and
scientific ideas functioned in their day, avoiding retrospective judgements of
their work. So, for them, the focus is on the social and cultural environments
in which scientists worked and how these forces shaped their research.

Take Darwin. They would argue that it took more than finches and barnacles
for Darwin to come up with natural selection. His reading of Malthus, his
religious beliefs and his friendships also shaped his theories. That notion
tends to turn all those stories of great discovery, deductive reasoning and
scientific genius that I’d been fed at school into myths. And some in the area
of “science studies” go even further, arguing that science is just a social
construction rather than a means of uncovering objective reality.

No wonder that historians often encounter a hostile audience among the
scientific community. I was frequently told that history is not out to tear
science to the ground. But can you really blame the scientists for their
derision?

Partway through my MSc, I was to see that derision turn to ridicule. To howls
of approval from certain scientists, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s
Intellectual Impostures savaged sociologists of science for their sloppy
use of scientific terms and satirised their efforts to analyse scientific
thinking and theories. Personally, I have never bought into the extreme
relativist approach attacked by Sokal and Bricmont. But, I do firmly believe
that my scientific colleagues would benefit from taking the history of science
seriously rather than ridiculing it.

One reason is that a little history will teach scientists to be more
self-conscious about what they are doing and questionsome underlying assumptions
of their work. “What for?” scientists might reply. “Let the academic historians
quibble over the objectivity of science while we continue to solve humanity’s
problems. History of science won’t help to discover a cure for cancer.”

But it just might make you ask yourself why it is cancer rather than any
other debilitating disease or health problems in the Third World that attracts
so much attention. Or why the public understanding of science is lauded as
worthwhile. It might help you to see that scientific development doesn’t just
happen. It rests on a whole series of individual and collective decisions
—decisions that can be queried and criticised.

If you really want a cynical view of how wonderful it can be that scientists
don’t question what they do, listen to Albert Speer, the man who made Hitler’s
armament programme run on time. Speer accounted for the technological
achievements of the Third Reich thus: “We owed the success of our programmes to
thousands of technicians with special achievements to their credit . . .
Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion
to his task.” For “blind devotion”, read “unquestioning acceptance”.

So that eminent particle physicist was wrong. History of science does have
something important to say. Unfortunately, however, his joke was spot-on: the
scientists scoff, and the best chance for historians to influence scientists may
well be when they are tucked up in bed with a book. As storytellers, historians
can provide those particle physicists with a compelling read—the Trojan
Horse needed to change their views. But is anyone willing to get off their high
horse and do the job?

Alan Sokal rose to fame for his spoof paper on the sociology of science, in
the journal Social Text despite being “built around the silliest quotations
about mathematics and physics and the philosophy of maths and physics that I
could find from prominent French and American intellectuals”. This he expanded
into the book Intellectual Impostures.

His prime motivation, he told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ in London, was political. He saw
a doctrine of relativism, that reality and all “truths” are socially
constructed, threatening not only science but also rational political judgment:
“Relativism is an extremely weak foundation to build a critique of the social
order.” He clearly found delight in exposing the gobbledegook of revered figures
such as Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard. He is also angry at
their abuse of the imagery of science and at their attempts “to criticise the
content of scientific theories without having a clear understanding of what they
were about”.

Are these good enough grounds, however, to condemn the sociologists of
science and all their works? Their metaphors may be mistaken, and their
discourse difficult to decipher. But how well do scientists tackle the
philosophically hard problem of understanding precisely what it is that
scientists do?

Not too well, we suspect. And as Bruno Latour, one of the French
intellectuals that Sokal criticises, explained on a visit to our offices:
“There’s no reason they [scientists] should like what we do . . . what does a
chimp feel when studied by an anthropologist? We want to be judged by the task
that we do.”

To Latour, the question of whether reality is “constructed”, or “out there”
to be discovered, is a tiresome shibboleth meriting a short answer: yes. “People
say `you’re against objectivity’ and I answer I’m studying objectivity, I want
to see how it’s made!”