scientific self essay

The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics

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• Published: 18 July 2017
• Volume 24 , pages 1379–1392, ( 2018 )

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• Herman Paul   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9365-6329 1  

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How can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond the standard narrative of codification—a story that does not reach back beyond World War II—without becoming so broad as to lose all distinctiveness? This article proposes a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competencies, qualities, or dispositions. Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology, the article argues that the “revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. They tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. These ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. The project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are their scientific selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

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Introduction

The history of research ethics has often been reduced to the history of its codification. It has been reduced, more specifically, to codification in scientific codes of conduct such as the Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Textbooks on research ethics testify to the enduring power of this view when they trace the history of their field back to codification issued in response to medical experiments in Nazi Germany (e.g. Flynn and Goldsmith 2013 : 9; Boddington 2012 : 16; Fisher and Anushku 2008 : 95; Wassenaar 2006 : 61; Reiser 2002 : 3; Bulger 2002 : 117; Barnbaum and Byron 2001 : 3). As long as research ethics is regarded as a realm of reflection different from scientific work itself—that is, different from data collection, hypothesis testing, statistical modelling, and the like—such an historical account is not implausible. Specifically, as long as historical inquiry is charged only with the task of providing historical antecedents to what is currently understood as research ethics—a key assumption of what the historian Herbert Butterfield ( 1931 ) called “Whig history”—there is little reason to question this textbook narrative.

The picture becomes considerably more complicated, however, as soon as we replace the closed-ended question “When has research ethics as we currently know it come into being?” with the open-ended question “How did scientists prior to the 1940s reflect on the ethical dimensions of their research?” Four recent trends in the history of medical ethics, as conveniently summarized by Robert Baker and Laurence McCullough ( 2009 ), illustrate just how much complexity this change of question adds to the history of research ethics. First, historians of medical ethics are expanding their subject matter to a variety of ethical discourses. Instead of focusing merely on language of rights and duties such as used in much of contemporary ethical reflection, they are increasingly also paying attention to older ethical discourses, including languages of honor, virtue, and “decorum” (Jonsen 2000 ; Baker 1999 : 36–41; Haber 1991 : 274–293). This is partly because, in the second place, historians of medical ethics are widening their range of source material. In a time when codes of conduct were still rare, ethical reflection on scientific conduct took place primarily in other genres, such as textbooks and professorial addresses on the scientific vocation (Baker 2013 ; Jonsen 2000 : vi, xi). From this it follows, thirdly, that research ethics is much older than the term itself. Arguably, physicians in Renaissance Europe were already engaged in medical ethics when they reflected on the marks of a responsible doctor (Jonsen 2000 : 43–56; Schleiner 1995 ). Finally, if research ethics amounts to reflection on the normative aspects of scientific conduct, there is no reason to maintain a traditional focus on “big issues” such as human experimentation (Schmidt and Frewer 2007 ). As Martin Pernick ( 2009 : 16) argues, “value issues at stake in the nondramatic daily events” of scientific practice or health care are just as important a subject matter for historians of research ethics as the question “Should the doctor pull the plug?”

Perhaps the most important implication of this rewriting of the history of medical ethics is that research ethics is no longer regarded as distinct from science or medicine as such, but seen as permeating every aspect of the medical-scientific enterprise. The new approach thus challenges conventional distinctions between “scientific morality” (what scientists believe to be ethically responsible conduct) and “research ethics” (rules of conduct laid down in official ethical codes) (Baker 2013 : 9–10) by recognizing ethical commitments in all normative assumptions as to how to engage responsibly in scientific research. This revisionism, however, also has a potential danger. If research ethics is becoming all-pervading, simply because all scientific activity is value-laden (Laudan 1986 ), then research ethics runs a risk of becoming indistinguishable from science itself. At some point, the word “ethics” ceases to have a distinct referent in historical reality.

So how can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond codification (the standard narrative) without losing all distinctiveness (the risk implied in the revisionist approach)? This article offers a way out of the dilemma by proposing a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competences, qualities, or dispositions (Paul 2016b ; Dumont 2008 : 32–53; Daston and Galison 2007 : 35–39, 198–205). This proposal has three advantages. First, by focusing on the scientific self and its defining qualities, it joins recent historians of medical ethics in challenging artificial distinctions between the history of science and the history of research ethics. Secondly, it expands the horizon beyond medicine so as to include other fields, from chemistry and philology to psychology and geography. Finally, and arguably most importantly, it allows for long-term histories, sensitive to variety in ethical idioms, while keeping a focus on the qualities believed to be conducive to responsible scientific conduct. The proposal thus allows for a wide scope, but also offers a focus.

Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology—Leopold Ranke’s Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber (Critique of Modern Historians, 1824 ), Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species ( 1859 ), and Émile Durkheim’s Les règles de la méthode sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895)—this article argues that the “scientific revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. All three authors tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. This article subsequently shows that these ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. By way of conclusion, it is argued that the project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are our selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

Three Classics

Darwin’s Origin of Species , to start with, is usually read as “one long argument” about natural selection as a primary mechanism for biological evolution. Yet at the same time, Darwin’s book is a treatise about the study of nature and, more specifically, the character traits that its author regarded as indispensable for a scientific naturalist. Judging by the opening paragraph, in which Darwin described the years of study that had gone into the book, patience and perseverance were prominent among these character traits: “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision” (Darwin 1859 : 1). If haste was detrimental to biological study as Darwin conceived of it, so were incautiousness, partiality, and “preconceived opinion.” Throughout the book, Darwin emphasized the importance of cautiousness, “dispassionate judgment,” and “flexibility of mind”—character traits that may be labelled “epistemic virtues” in so far as Darwin believed them to be indispensable for the epistemic project of understanding the nature of nature (Darwin 1859 : 2, 6, 460, 482). More specifically, with clever rhetorical ploys, Darwin stylized himself as an author actually embodying these virtues (Levine 2011 ). The first person singular that emerges from Darwin’s pages is an “I” intent on overcoming “the blindness of preconceived opinion”—not by force or genius, but by cautious, patient, and open-minded inquiry (Darwin 1859 : 483).

In the context of nineteenth-century England, this appeal to virtues conventionally associated with Isaac Newton, the undisputed hero of Victorian science (Higgitt 2007 ; Fara 2002 ; Yeo 1988 ), served two purposes at once. On the one hand, it was a defensive strategy, aimed at convincing skeptical readers that Darwin’s evolutionary theory strictly adhered to Newtonian principles of investigation (Bellon 2014 : 223–224; Ruse 1999 : 176). Unsurprisingly, this strategy worked only to an extent: it did not prevent critics from observing that Darwin had a proclivity for going where angels feared to tread. Although no one could object to open-mindedness as such—in Victorian England, “unflinching courage to declare the truths… how far soever removed from ordinary apprehension” even counted as a Newtonian virtue (Brougham 1858 : 90)—the entomologist Thomas Vernon Wollaston was one among many who read the Origin of Species as a book full of “bold hypotheses and philosophical suggestions” (Wollaston 1860 : 139), while the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart, in response to The Descent of Man (1871), emphasized Darwin’s “extraordinarily active imagination” in developing bold hypotheses (Mivart 1871 : 47; cf. Hull 1973 : 135, 354).

More important, therefore, was Darwin’s second aim in emphasizing open-mindedness and independence of judgment as remedies to the “blindness of preconceived opinion.” These virtues not only befitted a man skeptical about received religious doctrine (Moore 1988 ), but also were of special importance to a scientist who preferred to work in the seclusion of his private estate, far away from universities and in cherished independence from colleagues or employers (White 2016 ). The virtue of open-mindedness in particular was central to a conception of scientific selfhood that privileged critical reasoning over dependence from peers, deference to senior colleagues, and respect for public sensitivities. No one grasped this better than Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog,” whose extensive praise for Darwin was part of a campaign to establish a “new code of scientific conduct,” focused on rigorous inquiry more than on gentlemanly behavior (White 2003 : 45). What interested Huxley most was not natural selection per se , but Darwin as “the incorporated ideal of a man of science,” characterized by virtues such as independence, courage, and an “almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were irradiated” (Huxley 1882 : 597). For Huxley, then, Darwin symbolized the emergence of a new scientific persona: the “professional scientist” for whom solving scientific questions was more important than fulfilling civic responsibilities—even if Darwin’s financial independence was out of reach for most emerging “scientists” (Mody 2016 ).

Similar concerns about the scientific self permeated Ranke’s “critique of modern historians,” which appeared at a time when Darwin was still at school and Ranke still a gymnasium teacher. The book is as rhetorically ingenious as Darwin’s and has arguably been as influential among historians as the Origin of Species has been among biologists. At first sight, it offers nothing more than a case-by-case examination of what Ranke calls the “trustworthiness” of early modern historians such as Francesco Guicciardini. Yet the results at which Ranke arrived had important implications for the historian’s self. When Ranke found the Florentine humanist guilty of “modification of facts” and “forgery of truth,” mostly caused by uncritical reliance on other authors, this implied that Guicciardini failed to live up to Ranke’s “modern” idea of what a historian should be (Ranke 1824 : 24, 26). Even the most illustrious of early modern historians appeared no longer suitable as a model that modern historians could follow.

Like Darwin, therefore, Ranke proposed an alternative conception of selfhood, which he largely described in terms of virtues. “Trustworthiness,” for Ranke, required unflagging commitment to “naked truth without any adornment, thorough research of particulars… [and] no fabrication, not even in details” (Ranke 1824 : 28). In highlighting these virtues, Ranke distanced himself not only from Renaissance historians, but also from older contemporaries such as G. W. F. Hegel, whose grand-scale philosophical history had little patience for “research of particulars,” and Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, whose moralizing habits obscured the “naked truth” as Ranke envisioned it. Initially, this revolutionary agenda was not particularly appreciated: colleagues such as Heinrich Leo ridiculed Ranke for his obsession with factual accuracy, while others saw Ranke as lacking “philosophical and religious seriousness” (Juhnke 2015 : 54–55, 60; Baur 1998 : 112–123). This criticism had little effect, though, as accuracy and precision were important qualities for a new type of historian that the mid-nineteenth century saw emerge: a source collector who spent long days in archival depositories, exploring the documentary record of the national past (Paul 2013 ). Thanks to a proliferating demand for source editions, in Germany as well as elsewhere, many of Ranke’s students found employment in projects that demanded philological virtues rather than philosophical vision or moral conviction (Weber 1984 ). Consequently, these students had little trouble turning Ranke into a model of “scientific history,” in comparison to which Leo’s Hegelian approach appeared as “pre-scientific.” In particular, Ranke was stylized into an epitome of “criticism,” “precision,” and “penetration,” as one pupil phrased it (Waitz 1867 : 4), or into an embodiment of “objectivity,” as later generations would put it (Iggers 1962 ; Krill 1962 ; Paul 2017 ).

Objectivity was a key virtue for Durkheim, too, even though the rationalist leanings of the French sociologist lent this virtue a color different from Ranke’s. Les règles de la méthode sociologique is a passionate defense of research untainted by prejudice and fixed opinion. Cautioning against “the promptings of common sense,” “naivety,” “speculation,” and “dogmatism” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 31, 32, 37, 38), the book articulates a view of science that revolves around “mechanical objectivity” (Daston and Galison 2007 : 121). For Durkheim, this implied, among other things, that a scientific sociologist has to “escape from the dominance of commonly held notions and to direct his attention to the facts” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 74).

This was more than a nineteenth-century update of Francis Bacon’s classic warning against “idols of the mind.” By contrasting “ideas” and “facts,” Durkheim engaged in no less than three polemics at once. At a most general level, he criticized a Cartesian-inspired type of philosophizing that he perceived as prioritizing generalization over patient collection of data. More specifically, he distanced himself from sociology as practiced by Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, both of whom he judged guilty of uncritically relying on philosophical generalizations for which no sociological evidence existed (Comte’s law of the three stages serves as an example: Durkheim 1982 /1895: 64, 140). Closer to home, finally, Durkheim’s “explosive document” (Gane 1988 : 19) was targeted against sociologists like Gabriel Tarde, who worked with a concept of individual agency that Durkheim reckoned among the unexamined ideas that scientists should abandon in favor of facts (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 59). Durkheimian sociology, in short, was a rebellion against several inherited traditions of reflection on the social, characterized by firm rejection of all “vague impressions, prejudices, and passions” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 66).

At the same time, Durkheim was advocating a catalog of virtues that matched the kind of research that he organized around the Année sociologique —a journal that sought to enhance scientific standards through cooperation and mutual criticism between its contributors (Heilbron 2015 : 82–91; Besnard 1983 ; Clark 1973 : 181–186). Whereas Ranke’s philological virtues were most at home in a scientific culture that put a premium value on the collecting and editing of historical source material, Durkheim’s mechanical objectivity best fitted the collective research environment that the French sociologist created around the Année sociologique . This shows that the scientific self cannot be seen apart from its institutional contexts, on the one hand, and from the kind of research pursued in those contexts, on the other. The scientific self is being shaped by its environment, just as research questions and methods make their demands on it.

Disciplining the Scientific Self

So here we have three scientific manifestos, from three different disciplines in three European countries, all of which called for a “revolution” in their respective fields of inquiry. Although, especially in Darwin’s case, these revolutions primarily challenged inherited scientific theories, the new interpretative models corresponded to a new conception of scientific selfhood. That is why all three authors located part of their revolutions within the self. At least to some extent, they sought to change science by changing the scientist—that is, by molding his (not yet her) dispositions or character traits. But how could this be done? How could virtues be acquired and vices be unlearned, especially if this challenged established views on the nature of a good scientist?

Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim all dwelt at length on the efforts this required, meanwhile offering psychological explanations as to why their intended revolutions were long overdue and unlikely to win many hearts. Durkheim most explicitly pointed to the power of unconsciously acquired mental habits when he argued that no scientist is likely to overcome all prejudice: “The mind has such a natural disposition to fail to recognise” the power of preconceptions “that inevitably we will relapse into past errors” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72). Darwin, too, elaborated on “the chief cause of our natural unwillingness” to accept such radical ideas as that evolution proceeds through natural selection: “[W]e are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps” (Darwin 1859 : 481). Ranke, finally, added that historians have reasons for altering historical truth: they care about the dramatic qualities of their narratives and seek to please their readers (Ranke 1824 : 72, 76).

To justify their fights against these psychological obstacles, all three authors positioned themselves in long-term narratives of slow but steady scientific progress. Their rhetoric abounds with phrases like “as yet unexplained,” “much remains obscure,” and “still less do we know” (Darwin 1859 : 6). Ignorance, indeed, is a key term in the Origin of Species (“nor do we know how ignorant we are”) (Darwin 1859 : 466; see also Wallace 1995 ). Similar phrases—“we are virtually ignorant,” “we are only just beginning to perceive a few glimmers of light”—appear throughout Durkheim’s Règles (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 38). Apparently, the scientific revolutions required scientists to subject their “prescientific selves” (Kaufman-Osborn 1987 : 642) to strict scientific demands.

This led Durkheim to emphasize the importance of “rigorous discipline,” with all the Foucauldian connotations of that term: “Only sustained and special practice can prevent such shortcomings” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72, 31). While Ranke provided such training in his historische Übungen —an informal seminar for advanced students that soon acquired the symbolic significance of a rite of initiation into the historians’ guild (Eskildsen 2007 ; Huttner 2001 ; Pandel 1994 )—Durkheim’s educational facility was the Année sociologique , a journal (as we saw above) that socialized emerging sociologists into an ethos of objectivity by making them cooperate with each other, under Durkheim’s supervision. Darwin’s followers, too, agreed on the importance of “mental discipline,” although Huxley added that “enthusiasm for truth” is usually best kindled by exemplary figures who show in concrete detail what a scientific self looks like (Huxley 1874 : 665). Unsurprisingly, Huxley used the occasion of the unveiling of a Darwin statue in the British Museum of Natural History to argue that Darwin, more than anybody else, embodied “the ideal according to which [future students of nature] must shape their lives” (Huxley 1885 : 535).

Moral Economies of Science

To what extent does such disciplining of scientific selves qualify as belonging to the realm of research ethics? From the perspective of the standard narrative summarized above, quarrels between competing scientific schools on the marks of a good scientist seem to be of only marginal relevance. However, if we follow recent historians of medical ethics in broadening research ethics so as to include the “moral economies of science,” defined as webs of emotionally charged values that cultivate “mental habits, methods of investigation, and even characters of a distinctive stamp” (Daston 1995 : 23), then there are four reasons as to why the molding of scientific selves is an integral part of research ethics.

Although cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity are often classified as epistemic virtues, they were also heavily charged with moral meaning—to such an extent that the “epistemic” and the “moral” are often difficult to disentangle (Creyghton et al. 2016 ). For Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity were virtues demarcating the difference between appropriate and inappropriate scientific conduct. Virtues were thus no supererogatory qualities, but preconditions for proper scientific work. The fact that not all scientists possessed those qualities to the same extent is no argument against them: virtue language specified the “ought,” not the “is” (Saarloos 2016 ; Paul 2012 ). Consequently, when nineteenth-century scientists debated the character traits characteristic of a “man of science,” they were discussing research ethical standards. In their eyes, skepticism towards established authority, detachment from political engagement, and indifference to monetary profit were markers of devotion to responsible scientific research.

The critical responses that Ranke’s, Darwin’s, and Durkheim’s manifestos elicited (Henz 2014 : 127–133; Hull 1973 ; Gane 1988 : 75–86) illustrate, among other things, that standards of virtue were not seldom contested. Even if few critics doubted the need for impartiality or criticism as such, scientists frequently found themselves disagreeing over the relative importance of these virtues (Paul 2015 ). Consequently, moral economies were not universally shared: they existed in the plural (Daston 1995 : 3), as did the models that scientists invoked as embodiments of their ethics (Paul 2017 ). Such diversity of opinion about the marks of a scientific self does not distract, however, from their ethical significance. To the contrary, judging by the strong moral language sometimes used to criticize adherents of alternative models—“renegades who do not belong in the sanctuary of… science” (Lehmann 1895 : 79)—it seems that the scientific self was subject to debate precisely because of its key position in a virtue-oriented type of research ethics.

The severity of the ethical issues at stake is apparent from the consequences that those involved were sometimes prepared to draw. When Huxley charged Richard Owen with not living up to Darwinian standards, he not only criticized his senior colleague in print, but also tried to block his election to the Royal Society Council on the ground that this would be a moral mistake (White 2003 : 54). Likewise, Max Lehmann, one of Ranke’s students, not only drew public attention to what he perceived as the “unscientific” working manners of his intended Marburg successor, Albert Naudé, but also worked behind the scenes to prevent his appointment (Lehmann 1894 : 129; Paul 2016a ). Consequently, there was no lack of ethical boundary work, defined as deliberate attempts to exclude colleagues suspected of “unethical” conduct from the realm of science (Wainwright et al. 2006 ; Hesketh 2008 ).

For students, finally, ideals of virtue had tangible implications to the extent that they translated into pedagogical regimes. Part of academic socialization in nineteenth-century fashion consisted of ethical formation focused on the cultivation of character traits believed to be conducive to the practice of responsible science. Such cultivation of virtues not only took place in seminars and laboratories (Eskildsen 2007 ; Jardine 1992 ; Olesko 1991 ), but also ranked high among the aims of academic mentoring (Manteufel 2016 ) and, perhaps less obvious, team sports of the sort fervently played by students at Oxbridge colleges (Warwick 2003 : 176–226). Although these practices obviously served more than research ethical goals, they were believed to contribute to ethical formation by fostering relevant character traits, not least including self-discipline and devotion to a common cause (Levine 2002 ; Anderson 2001 ). Research ethics was not usually the subject of special courses, but a matter of character formation to which informal academic socialization contributed at least as much as formal educational practices (Eskildsen 2015 , 2016 ).

Beyond the Nineteenth Century

If the analysis so far lends plausibility to the view that nineteenth-century scientists conceived of research ethics in terms of virtues or character traits, further argument is needed to sustain the claim that the scientific self is a suitable focus for a long-term history of research ethics. Specifically, two closely related issues need to be addressed: (1) Assuming that virtue language largely fell into disuse in the twentieth century, how do the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim relate to the moral language prevalent in twentieth-century codes of conduct? Specifically, is there sufficient continuity to allow for long-term comparison? (2) Virtue is a relevant category as long as individuals can put their stamp on scientific research. But to what extent was that the case in the Cold War military-industrial-scientific complex, or is that the case in today’s globally entangled world of science? Does the scientific self still matter in an age of “science 3.0” (Miedema 2012 )?

As for the first question, the assumption that virtue language has disappeared in the course of the twentieth century is in need of empirical testing. Whereas the generic term “virtue” has come to be imbued with Victorian connotations, this is not typically the case for dispositions conventionally classified as virtues, such as accuracy, precision, and objectivity. Whether scientists in, say, 1970 spoke less often about accuracy, precision, or objectivity than their predecessors in 1870 is a question still awaiting detailed historical inquiry. Additionally, it would be erroneous to think that codes of conduct had no space for virtue language. Codes of conduct were, and are, a heterogeneous genre, especially in that they often drew eclectically on several moral languages at once. Although it seems that early codes, such as those issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 1927 ) and the American Chemical Society ( 1947 ), used categories of virtue and honor more prominently than late twentieth-century ones, as late as 1980, the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics combined “deontology, decorum, and politic ethics,” as Albert Jonsen ( 2000 : 117) has shown. Even the American Psychological Association, whose 1981 code clearly favored a language of “skills” and “competences,” could not resist invoking classic epistemic virtues, such as objectivity, carefulness, and accuracy ( 1981 : 633, 634). Arguably, therefore, the story of virtue language in twentieth-century research ethics is more complicated than assumed in simple narratives of decline.

Secondly, even if detailed follow-up research would demonstrate an overall decline in virtue language, this would not imply that scientific selfhood became obsolete in an age of “science 3.0.” As Steven Shapin forcefully argues, the increase in scale and complexity characteristic of twentieth-century scientific research in and outside of academia did not produce an “elimination of the personal” of a sort proclaimed by conservative and progressive social theorists alike. To the contrary, it made increasing demands on individuals’ personal abilities to navigate complex professional environments. Although twentieth-century research managers might have smiled at the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, or Durkheim, their job advertisements reveal how much they continued to care about “imagination, initiative, resourcefulness, energy, persistence, judgment, honesty, accuracy, dependability, loyalty and cooperativeness”—all of which are personal dispositions (Shapin 2008 : 184). Likewise, whenever scientists in more recent decades tried to persuade venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars into research projects aimed at curing cancer, they made strategic use of time-honored repertoires of respectability and trustworthiness (Shapin 2008 : 270). All this leads Shapin to conclude that the scientific self has anything but become obsolete, even if categories of virtue have frequently been replaced by skills and competences. “The closer you get to the heart of technoscience… the greater is the acknowledged role of the personal, the familiar, and even the charismatic” (Shapin 2008 : 5).

A history of research ethics focused on the scientific self is therefore not a history of virtues alone, but a history of multiple discourses and practices on which scientists in various times and places drew in articulating, advocating, and implementing their research ethical standards. These discourses, in turn, were not confined to particular genres: they were used in different contexts, varying from informal historische Übungen to formalized codes of conduct. Yet what all these genres, discourses, and practices had in common is that they defined the scientific self and specified the expectations that scientists had to meet in order to be recognized as professionals. This, then, offers a suitable prism for a history of research ethics able to cover various periods, regions, scientific disciplines, and linguistic conventions. The history of research ethics proposed in this article is a history of demands placed upon the scientific self, in multiple languages, in several scientific genres, and in various research and educational practices.

This implies, by way of conclusion, that a history of research ethics focusing on the scientific self expands the standard narrative, according to which research ethics emerged in response to World War II atrocities, into a longer and more intricate story about the demands that changing moral economies place upon scientists. Also, it broadens the subject matter of the history of research ethics by expanding its subject matter beyond ethical protocols. By putting the scientific self at center stage, it locates ethical reflection and formation right in the heart of scientific activity. Strategically, this encourages cooperation between historians of science and historians of research ethics. It invites the former to take seriously the ethical aspects of the scientific revolutions associated with the names of Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, just as it invites the latter to recognize that virtues such as advocated by these scientists were markers of a research ethics avant la lettre .

Finally, by way of coda, a study of moral demands made on scientists in times and places other than ours is not an antiquarian project. Examining how scientific selves were shaped and disciplined in earlier periods of history implicitly raises the question how scientific selfhood is molded in our days. What kind of ethical standards are implied in today’s academic reward structures? What sort of scientific conduct do competitive research funding schemes encourage (Mountz et al. 2015 ; Anderson et al. 2007 )? How do social media and research evaluation protocols contribute to what is called a “quantified academic self” (Hammarfelt, De Rijcke, and Rushforth 2016 )? Or what are the ethical subtexts of books like Donald Hall’s The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual ( 2002 )? Historical research of the kind proposed in this article holds up a mirror to present-day scientists, thereby encouraging them to examine the ethical implications inherent to current models of scientific selfhood.

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Acknowledgments

This article presents some of the main findings of a research project on “The Scholarly Self: Character, Habit, and Virtue in the Humanities, 1860–1930,” carried out at Leiden University and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grant No. 276-69-003). The author would like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous readers for their useful feedback.

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Paul, H. The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 24 , 1379–1392 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9945-8

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Frankenstein and the Scientific Self Frankenstein ’s enduring popularity rests in part on our continued belief that hubris and empathy co-exist as a necessary duality in the modern ideal of a scientist.

Erika Lorraine Milam

M ary Shelley’s Frankenstein opens in the frigid Arctic. We first meet not Victor Frankenstein, but a young Robert Walton, an eager explorer hoping to discover an un-iced passage, hewing close to the Pole, to the northern Pacific Ocean. Shelley had crafted her novel as a first-person narrative embedded within an epistolary exchange—we learn of Frankenstein’s tale of hubris and loss through letters written by Walton to his sister back in England that recount the tribulations related by this strange new acquaintance.

The enduring legacy of the novel, as is clear from other essays in this collection, rests in part on the inner story, the narrative of the relationship between a man and the creature he created. Shelley added the outer, Arctic frame only when expanding her original ghost story into a novel of publishable length. Like Frankenstein, Walton committed himself to revealing Nature’s secrets, and both shared a passion for discovery that separated them from other men. Unlike Frankenstein, Walton tempered his ambition with empathy. Although the word “scientist” would not be coined until the 1830s, well over a decade after Shelley’s work electrified its readers, the intertwined fates of Frankenstein and Walton warned of the consequences of unfettered intellectual desire.

…the intertwined fates of Frankenstein and Walton warned of the consequences of unfettered intellectual desire.

Frankenstein joined a host of works that deemed some individuals more fit for the study of Nature than others, prescribed appropriate comportment for those who would pronounce on its laws, or imagined the consequences of a world shaped by reason alone. By tracing these precepts both backward and forward in time, we can locate Shelley’s novel within a long tradition of identifying the aspirations and dangers of the quest for knowledge. Shelley both drew on this tradition and articulated a resonant image of the scientific self that echoes even today.

Walton had expected loneliness on his journey to the Arctic, believing that any true success required a denial of comfort and through that a steeling of the mind and body. Writing to his sister he confessed, “How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow! I have no friend, Margaret. When I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection… I bitterly feel the want of a friend.” Walton was hardly alone, of course. He had surrounded himself with “sailors possessed of dauntless courage.” However, he penned, these men lacked the balance of a cultivated and capacious mind, a gentle and courageous spirit. He felt the press of his loneliness “as a most severe evil.” 1

Rather than following the path of destruction, consider the confluence of physical and intellectual strain, the abandonment of personal connection, and the single-minded drive that allowed Frankenstein to succeed at the cost of everything and everyone else in his life.

Five months later, having set out from Archangel by sea, “so strange an accident” occurred that Walton at once started another letter to his sister, although he deemed it probable that she would see him before having the chance to read it. Surrounded by a thick fog, the men on board the ship perceived in the near distance a figure of “gigantic stature” on a sled driven by dogs, heading north across the “vast… irregular plains of ice.” The following morning, Walton awoke to discover his men talking off the side of the ship with a second figure who had drifted close in the night. The sailors encouraged the man to come aboard, as he had only one dog left alive and was adrift on a large piece of ice. He did so, but only after ascertaining that they, too, were headed toward the Pole. Over the course of the next five weeks, the gentleman shared pieces of his story, all of which Walton committed to paper. In other circumstances, Walton imagined, “before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed [him] as the brother of my heart.”

Frankenstein, the gentleman Walton met on the ship, had as a young man been inspired by reading alchemical authors—in his account he named Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus—and had set himself the goal of discovering the “elixir of life.” When he reached university, however, the natural philosophers there looked askance at his reading habits. He feared he would be “required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.” Combining the proficiency of “modern masters” who worked on small chemical conundrums with the passion of natural philosophy more broadly rendered, Frankenstein labored day and night, eating rarely, never visiting home. After a few years, he succeeded in discovering the very cause of life. He became capable “of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” The discovery, he told Walton, left him pale and emaciated. He had toiled in secret, driven by a “frantic impulse” to create a living being “as complex and wonderful as man.” Then, in the first paragraph of the fourth chapter, Frankenstein “saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” 2 (This is surely the most quoted line from the novel.) Shelley’s tale of scientific pursuit is but the setup and the novel is transformed into a story of unforeseen consequences. A similar journey is repeated when the Creature asked Frankenstein to make him a companion so that he might not be alone in the world—a request Frankenstein denied.

Rather than following the path of destruction, consider the confluence of physical and intellectual strain, the abandonment of personal connection, and the single-minded drive that allowed Frankenstein to succeed at the cost of everything and everyone else in his life. Frankenstein’s instantaneous misery at the moment of the creature’s awakening served as a warning both to Walton and to Shelley’s readers. What, then, can we learn of  what it meant for Shelley to devote one’s life to studying the intricacies of  nature? That single-minded pursuit of knowledge, if divorced from human sympathy, could lead to personal ruination.

Before the modern novel emerged as a stable genre, natural philosophers and explorers wrote about their experiences, too, although in the seventeenth century, the line between philosophy and fantasy was far more malleable. 3 Astronomer Johannes Kepler, for example, wrote numerous treatises that included everything from positional tables to the fanciful Somnium. Born in 1571, Kepler came of age in a Europe wrestling with the Reformation. He trained to be a Calvinist theologian—a sure way of obtaining an education for a scholarly young man of little means—and found the astronomical sciences, where he excelled. Kepler would later recall two moments from his childhood that fixed his interest in the stars: the great comet of 1577, seen from a hill with his mother, and an evening lunar eclipse observed three years later with his father. 4 Memory is a funny thing and it matters little whether Kepler embellished these events only in retrospect. In March of 1594, he gave up his theological studies to accept a teaching position in mathematics at the Protestant seminary in Graz.

Figure 1. Frankenstein contemplating the wisdom of creating a second, female creature. From Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, illustrated by Lynd Ward (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), 187.

Kepler dedicated each of his major astronomical works to a patron, a lasting reminder of the key role played by benefactors throughout the early modern period. Even one of his most whimsical essays—a 24-page exploration of the six-sided nature of snowflakes—took the form of a letter to a friend, mathematician and court advisor in Prague, Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackenfels. 5 He wrote another lighthearted story for his friend, too, Somnium . Typically translated as “The Dream,” Somnium found its way to print in 1634, just after Kepler’s death, although the manuscript itself had a long history. 6 As a student in  Tübingen he had begun to conceptualize how the Earth and other planets would appear to an observer positioned on the moon. He later refined these thoughts in conversation with Wackher, composing a “moon-geography” for him in 1609. 7

In the opening paragraph of this charming story, Kepler wrote that one night he had fallen into a very deep sleep after staying up late to watch the stars and the moon. In his dream, he came across a book by a fictional Icelandic astronomer named Duracotus, who had worked, like Kepler, with the very real Tycho Brahe: “I, who had come from an entirely destitute background in a half-savage country, acquired knowledge of the most divine science, and this knowledge paved my way for greater things.” (The parallels with Kepler’s own life were anything but accidental.) As Somnium progressed, Duracotus met a “daemon of Levania” through the help of his mother. After Duracotus and his mother made the necessary preparations for the journey, they covered their heads with their clothing and this daemon, glossed in his notes as an embodiment of the science of astronomy, came to them in their dreams. It was possible for them to visit Levania themselves, the daemon explained, but difficult. In Kepler’s notes, at the mention of the Island of Levania, he calculated the distance to the moon, making it clear that this was the celestial body the daemon was describing, 50,000 German miles up in the ether.

The daemon waxed on, noting his preference for hearty travelers, “those who spend their time in the constant practice of horsemanship or often sail to the Indies, inured to subsisting on hardtack, garlic, dried fish, and unappetizing victuals.” He added, “We especially like dried-up old women, experienced from an early age in riding he-goats at night or forked sticks or threadbare cloaks, and in traversing immense expanses of the earth.” Lest someone take his comments about witches too seriously, Kepler added a note. “It was my intention merely to joke and reason jocularly. If it is true, as most courts hold with regard to witches, that they are transported through the air, I say that maybe it will be possible also, for some body to be violently removed from the earth and carried to the moon.”

The scientific self, in other words, played a key role here, too. Kepler described the necessary physical heartiness required of those who would choose to embark on such a dangerous venture. They must be so singleminded in their pursuit of truth that they forsook fleshy pleasures and remained wiry. Physical bodies were taken as signs of masculine prowess and feminine fortitude, self-control as evidenced through self-denial.

The astronomical daemon insisted, “We admit to this company”–and we can infer that he spoke of the company of astronomers–“nobody who is lethargic, fat, or tender.” 8  Once on the moon, Duracotus marveled at the creatures and landscapes he beheld. The dark patches of the lunar surface, clearly visible to the naked eye on Earth, were great seas that heated to almost boiling during the lunar day as a result of the sun’s unremitting rays. At night, the waters cooled, allowing the return of creatures that had fled to shelter in nearby caves.

On the moon, Kepler reasoned, all living beings attained great height due to the reduced force of gravity. The following year, Kepler learned from his friend that Galileo Galilei had trained a new spyglass at the moon and concluded instead that the dark patches were mere shadows of towering mountains and giant craters. It was from Wackher that Kepler learned, too, of Galileo’s discovery of four moons around Jupiter. 9

In 1620, the year after his friend’s death, Kepler revisited Somnium and, to highlight the astronomical, philosophical, and historical problems it contained, added 223 explanatory notes that far exceeded the length of the original story. In adding his footnotes, Kepler made visible to less intimate potential readers the philosophical heft behind his fantastical story. We can hear, too, anger and perhaps caution in his note about those who would take witchcraft seriously. His mother had been accused of being a witch in 1616, the culmination of a local feud over her treatment of a sick woman in the town where she lived. She was arrested while sleeping in the middle of a summer night in 1620 and her trial lasted well into the following year, leaving her chained in prison for fourteen months. Although acquitted, she died several months later. 10

Duracotus and Kepler were equally passionate about their desire to understand the order governing the cosmos. Through the change of perspective intimately associated with travel both came to see the provinciality of their original cosmological outlooks. Somnium was serious didactic business, designed to nudge readers toward dismissing the foolishness of beliefs that the Earth lay at the center of the universe. The result was a twinned intellectual and physical journey, from which both Duracotus and then Kepler awoke with new perspective: “When I had reached this point in my dream, a wind arose with the rattle of rain … I returned to myself and found my head really covered with the pillow and my body with the blankets.” 11

In the four centuries since Somnium , and the two that have followed Shelley’s publication of Frankenstein , many other books have taken up the goal of representing the travails of the scientific life. A great many have been written by scientists. Among them, Jim Watson’s autobiographical yarn, The Double Helix , published in 1968, stands out for its frank discussion of competition among research groups. 12 We can think of Watson as the anti-Frankenstein. Frankenstein brooded; Watson played tennis. Frankenstein spent long hours alone in his laboratory; Watson left early for pints at the Eagle with his co-conspirator Francis Crick. Frankenstein traveled to distant lands to extend his training. Okay, Watson did that, too, but he also made time for picnics with dates, train rides to hear friends give talks, and sailing. There is no evidence in Watson’s narrative of self-denial, only the limitations posed by his stipend.

We can think of Watson as the anti-Frankenstein. Frankenstein brooded; Watson played tennis.

James Dewey Watson had grown up in Chicago, earned his Ph.D. at Indiana University, spent a year in Copenhagen as a postdoctoral fellow, and then started a second fellowship at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. Among the lessons he later recalled learning as a young boy were, “when intellectually panicking, get help quickly,” and “find a young hero to emulate.” 13 At Cambridge, he met Francis Crick. In The Double Helix  Watson described Crick as oscillating between states of boredom and enormous excitement about a novel idea. Crick’s manic enthusiasm was catching, Watson explained, partly because of the volume at which he spoke: “he talked louder and faster than anyone else and, when he laughed, his location within the Cavendish was obvious.”

Watson never described Crick’s physical appearance. He instead spoke of his sharp mind racing to reduce facts into coherent patterns at dizzying speed—whether in his own research or, when looking for distractions, in that of others. Not taking themselves too seriously, Watson and Crick managed to discover the structure of DNA. In 1962 they shared the stage in Stockholm with Maurice Wilkins as recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rosalind Franklin, who contributed crucial data to the discovery, had died of cancer four years earlier. Franklin and Wilkins overlapped at the Cavendish with Watson and Crick—in fact, they were hard at work on the problem of DNA’s molecular structure. Crick was supposed to be investigating the structure of hemoglobin and Watson’s postdoctoral sponsor had hoped he would devote his time to myoglobin. As a result, neither generated new data on DNA but spent hours discussing the X-ray photographs of light passed through DNA produced by Franklin and Wilkins, as well as the theories of Linus Pauling, whose laboratory at the California Institute of Technology was equally invested in the puzzle of DNA’s structure. In Watson’s telling, the ideal scientific self looked rather like Crick’s quick wit, natural bravado, and intrepid willingness to devote considerable swaths of time to conundrums technically assigned to other people.

Many of Watson’s colleagues hated the book. Crick and Wilkins deemed it so outrageous they eventually penned their own accounts of these same events. Some reviewers frowned upon his depiction of science as equal parts leisure and intellectual dabbling. Those who had known Franklin objected to Watson’s demeaning portrayal of her as “Rosy.” Attending a research seminar in which Franklin presented her X-ray photographs of DNA crystals, Watson had written that he had found himself wondering “how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.” Franklin was “strong” and had a “good brain,” he added, but was also “belligerent” and could not “keep her emotions under control.”

Tensions came to a head when one day Watson “implied she was incompetent in interpreting X-ray pictures”—the core of Franklin’s research project at King’s. “Suddenly Rosy came from behind the lab bench that separated us and began moving toward me. Fearing that in her  hot anger she might strike me, I grabbed up the Pauling manuscript and hastily retreated to the open door.” If Watson’s tale contained a monster, Franklin was it: emotional, unbalanced, and dangerous. In his words, “the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.” How ironic that his depiction of “Rosy” (who bore scant resemblance to Franklin) was less sympathetic than Shelley’s depiction of Frankenstein’s creature and equally a product of his imagination. He feared what Rosy might do.

In an epilogue written after he completed the manuscript (at the urging of his editor), Watson admitted that his initial impressions of Franklin “were often wrong” and that “[t]he X-ray work she did at King’s is increasingly regarded as superb.” Watson appreciated years too late, he confessed, “the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking.” 14 The epilogue thus worked to situate Watson’s account as the perspective of the 23-year-old he had been at the time rather than the matured reflections of a retrospective autobiography.

The most common contemporary objection to Watson’s book, however, was the competitive spirit he imparted to the race for truth. When he and Crick learned that Linus Pauling’s American research team on the other side of the Atlantic had produced a three-chained model of the structure of DNA, their spirits at first sank. Pauling had dispatched copies of his paper simultaneously to the Proceedings of the National Academy , to await the review of his peers, to his son Peter, and to the head of the Cavendish Laboratory where he knew people were working on similar problems. Crick and Watson read Peter’s copy of the manuscript and realized that the chemistry would not hold. Watson then rushed from lab to lab, confirming their evaluation and sharing in the joy that Pauling had failed. “Then, as the stimulation of the past several hours had made further work impossible,” he wrote, “Francis and I went over to the Eagle. The moment its doors opened for the evening, we were there to drink a toast to the Pauling failure.” 15

In the end, of course, Watson and Crick indeed succeeded. Triangulating a structure from X-ray data and the laws of stereochemistry, they built a double helix by soldering metal plates of purine and pyrimidine amino acids onto a sugar-phosphate backbone. With the knowledge that they had beaten Pauling firmly in place, Watson left to play tennis. A week later he traveled to Paris and was pleased to be the first to tell their French colleagues the news.

Watson had rejected chimeras of boundless grandeur for grubby competition. One reviewer commented, “There has never been anything quite like this tactless and truly remarkable book.” 16 Another enjoyed Watson’s brashness, noting that both he and Crick “possess it supremely, that eye for the deep, gay conjunction of truth and beauty, a conjunction ultimately mathematical, be it in women or dinghies or in the structure of amino acids.” 17 Strikingly, other readers saw in Watson a remarkable callousness towards his fellow scientists. One reviewer even found it “saddening.” The Double Helix reminded him of something he would rather forget, “that in Homo sapiens brilliance need not be coupled with compassion, nor ambition with concern.” 18 Watson in these readings was very much like Frankenstein: all hubris, no empathy.

The difficulty of turning scientists from cultural icons into fallible people struck a chord in 1968. Americans worried about the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. By contributing to a conversation about science in public discourse, Watson’s book raised ongoing questions about the contested role of scientists in times of war and the increasingly tarnished image of science as entangled in political intrigue. Cultural concerns over the destructive power of scientific discoveries ran deep.

By way of conclusion, recall Frankenstein dying slowly on the Arctic sea. Walton’s own single-minded pursuit of glory had involved pushing his men of “dauntless courage” to the deep north to find a Northeast Passage. Frankenstein’s arrival and the tragic story he related between bouts of fever saved Walton from a similar fate. When the sailors threatened mutiny if Walton did not head south once the ship was freed of the ice, Frankenstein brought them to heel by reminding them they would return to England heroes—even in his broken state, he urged others to glory and destruction. Yet the companionship of even this broken man provided Walton with the affective connection he so desperately craved. Well, that and an explicit warning: “Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.” Frankenstein then uttered his last words. “Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” 19 Walton abandoned his quest and returned to England. In so doing he surely saved the lives of himself and his crew.

Frankenstein’s enduring popularity … rests in part on our continued belief that hubris and empathy co-exist as a necessary duality in the modern ideal of a scientist.

Later in the evening after Frankenstein’s midnight demise, Walton heard sounds from the cabin where the body of his friend remained. Upon entering he discovered a gigantic, uncouth form looming over the coffin. The creature attempted to explain that companionship was all he had ever craved. He argued that Frankenstein had never spared him any love, either personally or in the manufacture of a companion. Regretting even so that he had hastened Frankenstein’s death, the creature promised that he, too, would soon die, replacing his own agony with peaceful sleep.

In Frankenstein’s death, we catch a final glimpse of Shelley’s admonition to avoid ambition at the cost of personal intimacy. That she chose to frame these fears in a tale of scientific inquiry says much about the Romantic sensibilities of her era. Her descriptions of the scientific self,  however, had their own historical roots, as we can see in Kepler’s Somnium , and remarkable staying power, as evidenced in Watson’s self-fashioned maverick in The Double Helix .

Frankenstein ’s enduring popularity, I believe, rests in part on our continued belief that hubris and empathy co-exist as a necessary duality in the modern ideal of a scientist. This of course says far more about our social expectations than about actual scientists, who have continued (above all else) to be human. As our cultural imagination imbues scientists with ever greater capacity to transform the world, we continue to hope that they balance this weighty prerogative with moral virtue—lest they unthinkingly create monsters.

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism , ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2012), 10. See also, Janice Cavell, “The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein ,” Arctic 70/3 (2017), 295-307.

2. Shelley, Frankenstein , 13-14, 23, 28, and 35.

3. Frederique Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century , translated by Susan Emanuel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

4. Max Caspar, Kepler , translated and edited by C. Doris Hellman, with a new introduction and references by Owen Gingerich (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 37.

5. Johannes Kepler, The Six-Cornered Snowflake: A New Year’s Gift (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2010).

6. Johannes Kepler, Somnium; The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy , translated with a commentary by Edward Rosen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).

7. Caspar, Kepler , 351.

8. Kepler, Somnium , 5, 59, 60, 65, and 15.

9. Miguel Granada, “Kepler and Bruno on the Infinity of the Universe and of Solar Systems,”  Journal for the History of Astronomy 39 (2008), 469-495.

10. Caspar, Kepler , 239-257.

11. Kepler, Somnium , 29.

12. James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA: Text, Commentary, Reviews, Original Papers , ed. Guenther S. Stent (New York: Norton, 1980).

13. James D. Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19-20.

14. Preceding quotes, Watson, The Double Helix , 9, 69, 166, 20, 226 and 223. Anne Sayre directly refutes Watson’s portrayal in Rosalind Franklin and DNA (New York: Norton, 1975); for a more balanced account of her life and scientific contributions see Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

15. Watson, The Double Helix , 163.

16. Alex Comfort, “Two Cultures No More,” Manchester Guardian (May 16, 1968), 10.

17. F. R. S., “Notes of a Not-Watson,” Encounter (July 1968), 60-65.

18. Robert L. Sinsheimer, “The Double Helix (1968),” Science and Engineering (September 1968), 4-6.

19. Shelley, Frankenstein , 157.

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How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self

One brain region is crucial for our ability to form and maintain a consistent identity both now and when thinking about the future

By Robert Martone

W e are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections among the nerve cells in our brain are recalibrated to accommodate these experiences. It's as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory.

Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also experience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memories and then journey into the future by imagining what tomorrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and envision how we will be.

A study published in 2021 in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience ( SCAN ) explores how one particular brain region helps to knit together memories of the present and future self. When people sustain an injury to this area, it leads to an impaired sense of identity. The region—called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce a fundamental model of the person and place it in mental time. When the region does so, this study suggests, it may be the source of our sense of self.

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Psychologists have long noticed that a person's mind handles information about oneself differently from other details. Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other forms of memory. They benefit from what researchers have called a self-reference effect, in which information related to oneself is privileged and more salient in that person's thoughts. Self-related memories are distinct from both episodic memory, the category of recollections that pertains to specific events and experiences, and semantic memory, which connects to more general knowledge, such as the color of grass and the characteristics of the seasons.

Self-reference effects, then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely. For example, previous research employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that uses blood flow and oxygen consumption in specific brain areas as a measure of neural activity, to identify regions that were activated by self-reference. These studies identified the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a brain region related to self-thought.

This area, the mPFC, can be further divided into upper and lower regions (called dorsal and ventral, respectively), and it turns out that each one makes different contributions to self-related thought. The dorsal section plays a role in distinguishing self from other and appears to be task-related, whereas the ventral section, the vmPFC, contributes more to emotional processing.

In the SCAN study, the researchers used the self-reference effect to assess memories of present and future selves among people who had brain lesions to the vmPFC. The scientists worked with seven people who had lesions to this area and then compared them with a control group made up of eight people with injuries to other parts of the brain, as well as 23 healthy individuals without brain injuries. By comparing these groups, the scientists could investigate whether brain lesions in general or those to the vmPFC specifically might affect self-reference. All people in the study underwent a thorough neuropsychological evaluation, which confirmed that they were within normal ranges for a variety of cognitive assessments, including measures of verbal fluency and spatial short-term memory. The researchers then asked the participants to list adjectives to describe themselves and a well-known celebrity, both in the present and 10 years in the future. Later, the participants had to recall these same traits.

The researchers discovered that people in their control group could recall more adjectives linked to themselves in the present and future than adjectives linked to the celebrity. In other words, scientists found that the self-reference effect extends to both the future and the present self. Although there was some variation in the group—people with brain injuries to areas other than the vmPFC were somewhat less able to recall details about their future self compared with noninjured participants—the self-reference effect still held true.

Results were distinctly different, however, for the participants with injuries to the vmPFC. People with lesions in this area had little or no ability to recall references to the self, regardless of the context of time. Their identification of adjectives for celebrities in the present or future was also significantly impaired compared with the rest of the participants' responses. In addition, people with vmPFC lesions had less confidence about an individual's ability to possess traits than other people in the study. All of this evidence points to a central role for the vmPFC in the formation and maintenance of identity.

These findings are intriguing for several reasons. Brain lesions can help us understand the normal function of the region involved. Lesions of the vmPFC are associated with altered personality, blunted emotions, and a number of changes in emotional and executive function. Injury to this area is most often associated with confabulations: false memories that people recite to listeners with great confidence. Although it may be tempting for someone to view confabulations as deliberate or creative falsehoods, people who tell them actually are unaware that their stories are false. Instead it is possible their confusion could stem from misfunctioning memory retrieval and monitoring mechanisms.

More broadly, the study helps us understand how self-related memories—recollections key to maintaining our core sense of identity—depend on the function of the vmPFC. But what about our past selves? Curiously, in previous studies that asked people to consider their past selves, there was no more activation of the mPFC than when considering someone else. Our past selves seem foreign to us, as if they were individuals apart from us.

One idea that scientists have put forward to understand this distinction is that perhaps we are not very kind in our judgments of our past selves. Instead we may be rather critical and harshly judgmental of our previous behavior, emotions and personal traits. In these situations, we may use our past primarily to construct a more positive self-image in the present. Put another way, because we may recognize flaws in our past self's behavior, we tend to distance ourselves from the person we once were.

Bringing the present and future into the spotlight, then, is central to understanding the way our brain and thoughts shape our current identities. In many ways, it makes sense that the mPFC is key in this process of recalling present details and imagining future ones that build on our memories. The prefrontal cortex, including the mPFC and its subdivisions, forms a network in the brain that is involved in future planning.

That network also includes the hippocampus, a brain structure that is central to episodic memory formation and that can track moments as sequential events in time. In earlier work, researchers found that manipulating the activity of the hippocampus alters creative and future imaginings, which suggests an important role for brain structures supporting memory in imagining the future. In fact, although we often think of memory as the brain's accurate and dispassionate recording device, some scholars have characterized it as a form of imagination.

Future thought is a vital component of being human. Its importance in our culture is embodied in the mythological figure and pre-Olympian god Prometheus (whose name means “fore-thinker”), patron of the arts and sciences. According to Greek legend, he shaped humans out of clay and bestowed them with fire and the skills of craftsmanship. These are acts that illustrate the power of imagining a novel future. Although there is debate as to whether thinking about the future is an exclusively human feature—birds such as Western Scrub-Jays, for example, appear to anticipate and plan for future food needs—it is clear that future thought has played a significant role in human evolution. This ability may have contributed to the development of language, and it has a key part in human interactions, where the vmPFC is central to evaluating and taking advantage of social context.

Now, thanks to this research, we have a better idea than ever about the way a small region within our brain is able to build and hold this core ability to maintain our identity.

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We, like many animals, are conscious of our environment, both physical and social. We think about and experience the objects and people that the world contains. But at the same time, those very thoughts and experiences can themselves become the objects of conscious thought and experience, so that we can think critically about them. When this happens, we are often thinking about ourselves—holding ourselves to account by evaluating our own reasoning, for example. According to a long philosophical tradition, rationality and self-consciousness go hand in hand. A rational thinker is one who constantly monitors her own thoughts and updates her beliefs in the light of changing evidence in order to ensure consistency and to increase the likelihood that they will track the truth.

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The Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the History of Research Ethics

Herman paul.

Institute for History, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands

How can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond the standard narrative of codification—a story that does not reach back beyond World War II—without becoming so broad as to lose all distinctiveness? This article proposes a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competencies, qualities, or dispositions. Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology, the article argues that the “revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. They tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. These ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. The project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are their scientific selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

Introduction

The history of research ethics has often been reduced to the history of its codification. It has been reduced, more specifically, to codification in scientific codes of conduct such as the Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Textbooks on research ethics testify to the enduring power of this view when they trace the history of their field back to codification issued in response to medical experiments in Nazi Germany (e.g. Flynn and Goldsmith 2013 : 9; Boddington 2012 : 16; Fisher and Anushku 2008 : 95; Wassenaar 2006 : 61; Reiser 2002 : 3; Bulger 2002 : 117; Barnbaum and Byron 2001 : 3). As long as research ethics is regarded as a realm of reflection different from scientific work itself—that is, different from data collection, hypothesis testing, statistical modelling, and the like—such an historical account is not implausible. Specifically, as long as historical inquiry is charged only with the task of providing historical antecedents to what is currently understood as research ethics—a key assumption of what the historian Herbert Butterfield ( 1931 ) called “Whig history”—there is little reason to question this textbook narrative.

The picture becomes considerably more complicated, however, as soon as we replace the closed-ended question “When has research ethics as we currently know it come into being?” with the open-ended question “How did scientists prior to the 1940s reflect on the ethical dimensions of their research?” Four recent trends in the history of medical ethics, as conveniently summarized by Robert Baker and Laurence McCullough ( 2009 ), illustrate just how much complexity this change of question adds to the history of research ethics. First, historians of medical ethics are expanding their subject matter to a variety of ethical discourses. Instead of focusing merely on language of rights and duties such as used in much of contemporary ethical reflection, they are increasingly also paying attention to older ethical discourses, including languages of honor, virtue, and “decorum” (Jonsen 2000 ; Baker 1999 : 36–41; Haber 1991 : 274–293). This is partly because, in the second place, historians of medical ethics are widening their range of source material. In a time when codes of conduct were still rare, ethical reflection on scientific conduct took place primarily in other genres, such as textbooks and professorial addresses on the scientific vocation (Baker 2013 ; Jonsen 2000 : vi, xi). From this it follows, thirdly, that research ethics is much older than the term itself. Arguably, physicians in Renaissance Europe were already engaged in medical ethics when they reflected on the marks of a responsible doctor (Jonsen 2000 : 43–56; Schleiner 1995 ). Finally, if research ethics amounts to reflection on the normative aspects of scientific conduct, there is no reason to maintain a traditional focus on “big issues” such as human experimentation (Schmidt and Frewer 2007 ). As Martin Pernick ( 2009 : 16) argues, “value issues at stake in the nondramatic daily events” of scientific practice or health care are just as important a subject matter for historians of research ethics as the question “Should the doctor pull the plug?”

Perhaps the most important implication of this rewriting of the history of medical ethics is that research ethics is no longer regarded as distinct from science or medicine as such, but seen as permeating every aspect of the medical-scientific enterprise. The new approach thus challenges conventional distinctions between “scientific morality” (what scientists believe to be ethically responsible conduct) and “research ethics” (rules of conduct laid down in official ethical codes) (Baker 2013 : 9–10) by recognizing ethical commitments in all normative assumptions as to how to engage responsibly in scientific research. This revisionism, however, also has a potential danger. If research ethics is becoming all-pervading, simply because all scientific activity is value-laden (Laudan 1986 ), then research ethics runs a risk of becoming indistinguishable from science itself. At some point, the word “ethics” ceases to have a distinct referent in historical reality.

So how can the history of research ethics be expanded beyond codification (the standard narrative) without losing all distinctiveness (the risk implied in the revisionist approach)? This article offers a way out of the dilemma by proposing a history of research ethics focused on the “scientific self,” that is, the role-specific identity of scientists as typically described in terms of skills, competences, qualities, or dispositions (Paul 2016b ; Dumont 2008 : 32–53; Daston and Galison 2007 : 35–39, 198–205). This proposal has three advantages. First, by focusing on the scientific self and its defining qualities, it joins recent historians of medical ethics in challenging artificial distinctions between the history of science and the history of research ethics. Secondly, it expands the horizon beyond medicine so as to include other fields, from chemistry and philology to psychology and geography. Finally, and arguably most importantly, it allows for long-term histories, sensitive to variety in ethical idioms, while keeping a focus on the qualities believed to be conducive to responsible scientific conduct. The proposal thus allows for a wide scope, but also offers a focus.

Drawing on three agenda-setting texts from nineteenth-century history, biology, and sociology—Leopold Ranke’s Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber (Critique of Modern Historians, 1824 ), Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species ( 1859 ), and Émile Durkheim’s Les règles de la méthode sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895)—this article argues that the “scientific revolutions” these books sought to unleash were, among other things, revolts against inherited conceptions of scientific selfhood. All three authors tried to redefine the scientific self in their respective fields of inquiry by advocating particular catalogs of virtues or character traits. This article subsequently shows that these ideals of selfhood, their contested nature notwithstanding, translated into practice in so far as they influenced hiring and selection policies and found their way into educational systems. By way of conclusion, it is argued that the project of reclaiming the scientific self as an important subject of study in the history of research ethics is not an antiquarian pursuit, but related to an ethical question faced by scientists today: How are our selves being shaped by funding schemes, research evaluation protocols, and academic hiring policies?

Three Classics

Darwin’s Origin of Species , to start with, is usually read as “one long argument” about natural selection as a primary mechanism for biological evolution. Yet at the same time, Darwin’s book is a treatise about the study of nature and, more specifically, the character traits that its author regarded as indispensable for a scientific naturalist. Judging by the opening paragraph, in which Darwin described the years of study that had gone into the book, patience and perseverance were prominent among these character traits: “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision” (Darwin 1859 : 1). If haste was detrimental to biological study as Darwin conceived of it, so were incautiousness, partiality, and “preconceived opinion.” Throughout the book, Darwin emphasized the importance of cautiousness, “dispassionate judgment,” and “flexibility of mind”—character traits that may be labelled “epistemic virtues” in so far as Darwin believed them to be indispensable for the epistemic project of understanding the nature of nature (Darwin 1859 : 2, 6, 460, 482). More specifically, with clever rhetorical ploys, Darwin stylized himself as an author actually embodying these virtues (Levine 2011 ). The first person singular that emerges from Darwin’s pages is an “I” intent on overcoming “the blindness of preconceived opinion”—not by force or genius, but by cautious, patient, and open-minded inquiry (Darwin 1859 : 483).

In the context of nineteenth-century England, this appeal to virtues conventionally associated with Isaac Newton, the undisputed hero of Victorian science (Higgitt 2007 ; Fara 2002 ; Yeo 1988 ), served two purposes at once. On the one hand, it was a defensive strategy, aimed at convincing skeptical readers that Darwin’s evolutionary theory strictly adhered to Newtonian principles of investigation (Bellon 2014 : 223–224; Ruse 1999 : 176). Unsurprisingly, this strategy worked only to an extent: it did not prevent critics from observing that Darwin had a proclivity for going where angels feared to tread. Although no one could object to open-mindedness as such—in Victorian England, “unflinching courage to declare the truths… how far soever removed from ordinary apprehension” even counted as a Newtonian virtue (Brougham 1858 : 90)—the entomologist Thomas Vernon Wollaston was one among many who read the Origin of Species as a book full of “bold hypotheses and philosophical suggestions” (Wollaston 1860 : 139), while the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart, in response to The Descent of Man (1871), emphasized Darwin’s “extraordinarily active imagination” in developing bold hypotheses (Mivart 1871 : 47; cf. Hull 1973 : 135, 354).

More important, therefore, was Darwin’s second aim in emphasizing open-mindedness and independence of judgment as remedies to the “blindness of preconceived opinion.” These virtues not only befitted a man skeptical about received religious doctrine (Moore 1988 ), but also were of special importance to a scientist who preferred to work in the seclusion of his private estate, far away from universities and in cherished independence from colleagues or employers (White 2016 ). The virtue of open-mindedness in particular was central to a conception of scientific selfhood that privileged critical reasoning over dependence from peers, deference to senior colleagues, and respect for public sensitivities. No one grasped this better than Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog,” whose extensive praise for Darwin was part of a campaign to establish a “new code of scientific conduct,” focused on rigorous inquiry more than on gentlemanly behavior (White 2003 : 45). What interested Huxley most was not natural selection per se , but Darwin as “the incorporated ideal of a man of science,” characterized by virtues such as independence, courage, and an “almost passionate honesty by which all his thoughts and actions were irradiated” (Huxley 1882 : 597). For Huxley, then, Darwin symbolized the emergence of a new scientific persona: the “professional scientist” for whom solving scientific questions was more important than fulfilling civic responsibilities—even if Darwin’s financial independence was out of reach for most emerging “scientists” (Mody 2016 ).

Similar concerns about the scientific self permeated Ranke’s “critique of modern historians,” which appeared at a time when Darwin was still at school and Ranke still a gymnasium teacher. The book is as rhetorically ingenious as Darwin’s and has arguably been as influential among historians as the Origin of Species has been among biologists. At first sight, it offers nothing more than a case-by-case examination of what Ranke calls the “trustworthiness” of early modern historians such as Francesco Guicciardini. Yet the results at which Ranke arrived had important implications for the historian’s self. When Ranke found the Florentine humanist guilty of “modification of facts” and “forgery of truth,” mostly caused by uncritical reliance on other authors, this implied that Guicciardini failed to live up to Ranke’s “modern” idea of what a historian should be (Ranke 1824 : 24, 26). Even the most illustrious of early modern historians appeared no longer suitable as a model that modern historians could follow.

Like Darwin, therefore, Ranke proposed an alternative conception of selfhood, which he largely described in terms of virtues. “Trustworthiness,” for Ranke, required unflagging commitment to “naked truth without any adornment, thorough research of particulars… [and] no fabrication, not even in details” (Ranke 1824 : 28). In highlighting these virtues, Ranke distanced himself not only from Renaissance historians, but also from older contemporaries such as G. W. F. Hegel, whose grand-scale philosophical history had little patience for “research of particulars,” and Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, whose moralizing habits obscured the “naked truth” as Ranke envisioned it. Initially, this revolutionary agenda was not particularly appreciated: colleagues such as Heinrich Leo ridiculed Ranke for his obsession with factual accuracy, while others saw Ranke as lacking “philosophical and religious seriousness” (Juhnke 2015 : 54–55, 60; Baur 1998 : 112–123). This criticism had little effect, though, as accuracy and precision were important qualities for a new type of historian that the mid-nineteenth century saw emerge: a source collector who spent long days in archival depositories, exploring the documentary record of the national past (Paul 2013 ). Thanks to a proliferating demand for source editions, in Germany as well as elsewhere, many of Ranke’s students found employment in projects that demanded philological virtues rather than philosophical vision or moral conviction (Weber 1984 ). Consequently, these students had little trouble turning Ranke into a model of “scientific history,” in comparison to which Leo’s Hegelian approach appeared as “pre-scientific.” In particular, Ranke was stylized into an epitome of “criticism,” “precision,” and “penetration,” as one pupil phrased it (Waitz 1867 : 4), or into an embodiment of “objectivity,” as later generations would put it (Iggers 1962 ; Krill 1962 ; Paul 2017 ).

Objectivity was a key virtue for Durkheim, too, even though the rationalist leanings of the French sociologist lent this virtue a color different from Ranke’s. Les règles de la méthode sociologique is a passionate defense of research untainted by prejudice and fixed opinion. Cautioning against “the promptings of common sense,” “naivety,” “speculation,” and “dogmatism” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 31, 32, 37, 38), the book articulates a view of science that revolves around “mechanical objectivity” (Daston and Galison 2007 : 121). For Durkheim, this implied, among other things, that a scientific sociologist has to “escape from the dominance of commonly held notions and to direct his attention to the facts” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 74).

This was more than a nineteenth-century update of Francis Bacon’s classic warning against “idols of the mind.” By contrasting “ideas” and “facts,” Durkheim engaged in no less than three polemics at once. At a most general level, he criticized a Cartesian-inspired type of philosophizing that he perceived as prioritizing generalization over patient collection of data. More specifically, he distanced himself from sociology as practiced by Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte, both of whom he judged guilty of uncritically relying on philosophical generalizations for which no sociological evidence existed (Comte’s law of the three stages serves as an example: Durkheim 1982 /1895: 64, 140). Closer to home, finally, Durkheim’s “explosive document” (Gane 1988 : 19) was targeted against sociologists like Gabriel Tarde, who worked with a concept of individual agency that Durkheim reckoned among the unexamined ideas that scientists should abandon in favor of facts (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 59). Durkheimian sociology, in short, was a rebellion against several inherited traditions of reflection on the social, characterized by firm rejection of all “vague impressions, prejudices, and passions” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 66).

At the same time, Durkheim was advocating a catalog of virtues that matched the kind of research that he organized around the Année sociologique —a journal that sought to enhance scientific standards through cooperation and mutual criticism between its contributors (Heilbron 2015 : 82–91; Besnard 1983 ; Clark 1973 : 181–186). Whereas Ranke’s philological virtues were most at home in a scientific culture that put a premium value on the collecting and editing of historical source material, Durkheim’s mechanical objectivity best fitted the collective research environment that the French sociologist created around the Année sociologique . This shows that the scientific self cannot be seen apart from its institutional contexts, on the one hand, and from the kind of research pursued in those contexts, on the other. The scientific self is being shaped by its environment, just as research questions and methods make their demands on it.

Disciplining the Scientific Self

So here we have three scientific manifestos, from three different disciplines in three European countries, all of which called for a “revolution” in their respective fields of inquiry. Although, especially in Darwin’s case, these revolutions primarily challenged inherited scientific theories, the new interpretative models corresponded to a new conception of scientific selfhood. That is why all three authors located part of their revolutions within the self. At least to some extent, they sought to change science by changing the scientist—that is, by molding his (not yet her) dispositions or character traits. But how could this be done? How could virtues be acquired and vices be unlearned, especially if this challenged established views on the nature of a good scientist?

Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim all dwelt at length on the efforts this required, meanwhile offering psychological explanations as to why their intended revolutions were long overdue and unlikely to win many hearts. Durkheim most explicitly pointed to the power of unconsciously acquired mental habits when he argued that no scientist is likely to overcome all prejudice: “The mind has such a natural disposition to fail to recognise” the power of preconceptions “that inevitably we will relapse into past errors” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72). Darwin, too, elaborated on “the chief cause of our natural unwillingness” to accept such radical ideas as that evolution proceeds through natural selection: “[W]e are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps” (Darwin 1859 : 481). Ranke, finally, added that historians have reasons for altering historical truth: they care about the dramatic qualities of their narratives and seek to please their readers (Ranke 1824 : 72, 76).

To justify their fights against these psychological obstacles, all three authors positioned themselves in long-term narratives of slow but steady scientific progress. Their rhetoric abounds with phrases like “as yet unexplained,” “much remains obscure,” and “still less do we know” (Darwin 1859 : 6). Ignorance, indeed, is a key term in the Origin of Species (“nor do we know how ignorant we are”) (Darwin 1859 : 466; see also Wallace 1995 ). Similar phrases—“we are virtually ignorant,” “we are only just beginning to perceive a few glimmers of light”—appear throughout Durkheim’s Règles (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 38). Apparently, the scientific revolutions required scientists to subject their “prescientific selves” (Kaufman-Osborn 1987 : 642) to strict scientific demands.

This led Durkheim to emphasize the importance of “rigorous discipline,” with all the Foucauldian connotations of that term: “Only sustained and special practice can prevent such shortcomings” (Durkheim 1982 /1895: 72, 31). While Ranke provided such training in his historische Übungen —an informal seminar for advanced students that soon acquired the symbolic significance of a rite of initiation into the historians’ guild (Eskildsen 2007 ; Huttner 2001 ; Pandel 1994 )—Durkheim’s educational facility was the Année sociologique , a journal (as we saw above) that socialized emerging sociologists into an ethos of objectivity by making them cooperate with each other, under Durkheim’s supervision. Darwin’s followers, too, agreed on the importance of “mental discipline,” although Huxley added that “enthusiasm for truth” is usually best kindled by exemplary figures who show in concrete detail what a scientific self looks like (Huxley 1874 : 665). Unsurprisingly, Huxley used the occasion of the unveiling of a Darwin statue in the British Museum of Natural History to argue that Darwin, more than anybody else, embodied “the ideal according to which [future students of nature] must shape their lives” (Huxley 1885 : 535).

Moral Economies of Science

To what extent does such disciplining of scientific selves qualify as belonging to the realm of research ethics? From the perspective of the standard narrative summarized above, quarrels between competing scientific schools on the marks of a good scientist seem to be of only marginal relevance. However, if we follow recent historians of medical ethics in broadening research ethics so as to include the “moral economies of science,” defined as webs of emotionally charged values that cultivate “mental habits, methods of investigation, and even characters of a distinctive stamp” (Daston 1995 : 23), then there are four reasons as to why the molding of scientific selves is an integral part of research ethics.

• Although cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity are often classified as epistemic virtues, they were also heavily charged with moral meaning—to such an extent that the “epistemic” and the “moral” are often difficult to disentangle (Creyghton et al. 2016 ). For Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, cautiousness, criticism, and objectivity were virtues demarcating the difference between appropriate and inappropriate scientific conduct. Virtues were thus no supererogatory qualities, but preconditions for proper scientific work. The fact that not all scientists possessed those qualities to the same extent is no argument against them: virtue language specified the “ought,” not the “is” (Saarloos 2016 ; Paul 2012 ). Consequently, when nineteenth-century scientists debated the character traits characteristic of a “man of science,” they were discussing research ethical standards. In their eyes, skepticism towards established authority, detachment from political engagement, and indifference to monetary profit were markers of devotion to responsible scientific research.
• The critical responses that Ranke’s, Darwin’s, and Durkheim’s manifestos elicited (Henz 2014 : 127–133; Hull 1973 ; Gane 1988 : 75–86) illustrate, among other things, that standards of virtue were not seldom contested. Even if few critics doubted the need for impartiality or criticism as such, scientists frequently found themselves disagreeing over the relative importance of these virtues (Paul 2015 ). Consequently, moral economies were not universally shared: they existed in the plural (Daston 1995 : 3), as did the models that scientists invoked as embodiments of their ethics (Paul 2017 ). Such diversity of opinion about the marks of a scientific self does not distract, however, from their ethical significance. To the contrary, judging by the strong moral language sometimes used to criticize adherents of alternative models—“renegades who do not belong in the sanctuary of… science” (Lehmann 1895 : 79)—it seems that the scientific self was subject to debate precisely because of its key position in a virtue-oriented type of research ethics.
• The severity of the ethical issues at stake is apparent from the consequences that those involved were sometimes prepared to draw. When Huxley charged Richard Owen with not living up to Darwinian standards, he not only criticized his senior colleague in print, but also tried to block his election to the Royal Society Council on the ground that this would be a moral mistake (White 2003 : 54). Likewise, Max Lehmann, one of Ranke’s students, not only drew public attention to what he perceived as the “unscientific” working manners of his intended Marburg successor, Albert Naudé, but also worked behind the scenes to prevent his appointment (Lehmann 1894 : 129; Paul 2016a ). Consequently, there was no lack of ethical boundary work, defined as deliberate attempts to exclude colleagues suspected of “unethical” conduct from the realm of science (Wainwright et al. 2006 ; Hesketh 2008 ).
• For students, finally, ideals of virtue had tangible implications to the extent that they translated into pedagogical regimes. Part of academic socialization in nineteenth-century fashion consisted of ethical formation focused on the cultivation of character traits believed to be conducive to the practice of responsible science. Such cultivation of virtues not only took place in seminars and laboratories (Eskildsen 2007 ; Jardine 1992 ; Olesko 1991 ), but also ranked high among the aims of academic mentoring (Manteufel 2016 ) and, perhaps less obvious, team sports of the sort fervently played by students at Oxbridge colleges (Warwick 2003 : 176–226). Although these practices obviously served more than research ethical goals, they were believed to contribute to ethical formation by fostering relevant character traits, not least including self-discipline and devotion to a common cause (Levine 2002 ; Anderson 2001 ). Research ethics was not usually the subject of special courses, but a matter of character formation to which informal academic socialization contributed at least as much as formal educational practices (Eskildsen 2015 , 2016 ).

Beyond the Nineteenth Century

If the analysis so far lends plausibility to the view that nineteenth-century scientists conceived of research ethics in terms of virtues or character traits, further argument is needed to sustain the claim that the scientific self is a suitable focus for a long-term history of research ethics. Specifically, two closely related issues need to be addressed: (1) Assuming that virtue language largely fell into disuse in the twentieth century, how do the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim relate to the moral language prevalent in twentieth-century codes of conduct? Specifically, is there sufficient continuity to allow for long-term comparison? (2) Virtue is a relevant category as long as individuals can put their stamp on scientific research. But to what extent was that the case in the Cold War military-industrial-scientific complex, or is that the case in today’s globally entangled world of science? Does the scientific self still matter in an age of “science 3.0” (Miedema 2012 )?

As for the first question, the assumption that virtue language has disappeared in the course of the twentieth century is in need of empirical testing. Whereas the generic term “virtue” has come to be imbued with Victorian connotations, this is not typically the case for dispositions conventionally classified as virtues, such as accuracy, precision, and objectivity. Whether scientists in, say, 1970 spoke less often about accuracy, precision, or objectivity than their predecessors in 1870 is a question still awaiting detailed historical inquiry. Additionally, it would be erroneous to think that codes of conduct had no space for virtue language. Codes of conduct were, and are, a heterogeneous genre, especially in that they often drew eclectically on several moral languages at once. Although it seems that early codes, such as those issued by the American Association for the Advancement of Science ( 1927 ) and the American Chemical Society ( 1947 ), used categories of virtue and honor more prominently than late twentieth-century ones, as late as 1980, the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics combined “deontology, decorum, and politic ethics,” as Albert Jonsen ( 2000 : 117) has shown. Even the American Psychological Association, whose 1981 code clearly favored a language of “skills” and “competences,” could not resist invoking classic epistemic virtues, such as objectivity, carefulness, and accuracy ( 1981 : 633, 634). Arguably, therefore, the story of virtue language in twentieth-century research ethics is more complicated than assumed in simple narratives of decline.

Secondly, even if detailed follow-up research would demonstrate an overall decline in virtue language, this would not imply that scientific selfhood became obsolete in an age of “science 3.0.” As Steven Shapin forcefully argues, the increase in scale and complexity characteristic of twentieth-century scientific research in and outside of academia did not produce an “elimination of the personal” of a sort proclaimed by conservative and progressive social theorists alike. To the contrary, it made increasing demands on individuals’ personal abilities to navigate complex professional environments. Although twentieth-century research managers might have smiled at the virtues advocated by Ranke, Darwin, or Durkheim, their job advertisements reveal how much they continued to care about “imagination, initiative, resourcefulness, energy, persistence, judgment, honesty, accuracy, dependability, loyalty and cooperativeness”—all of which are personal dispositions (Shapin 2008 : 184). Likewise, whenever scientists in more recent decades tried to persuade venture capitalists to invest millions of dollars into research projects aimed at curing cancer, they made strategic use of time-honored repertoires of respectability and trustworthiness (Shapin 2008 : 270). All this leads Shapin to conclude that the scientific self has anything but become obsolete, even if categories of virtue have frequently been replaced by skills and competences. “The closer you get to the heart of technoscience… the greater is the acknowledged role of the personal, the familiar, and even the charismatic” (Shapin 2008 : 5).

A history of research ethics focused on the scientific self is therefore not a history of virtues alone, but a history of multiple discourses and practices on which scientists in various times and places drew in articulating, advocating, and implementing their research ethical standards. These discourses, in turn, were not confined to particular genres: they were used in different contexts, varying from informal historische Übungen to formalized codes of conduct. Yet what all these genres, discourses, and practices had in common is that they defined the scientific self and specified the expectations that scientists had to meet in order to be recognized as professionals. This, then, offers a suitable prism for a history of research ethics able to cover various periods, regions, scientific disciplines, and linguistic conventions. The history of research ethics proposed in this article is a history of demands placed upon the scientific self, in multiple languages, in several scientific genres, and in various research and educational practices.

This implies, by way of conclusion, that a history of research ethics focusing on the scientific self expands the standard narrative, according to which research ethics emerged in response to World War II atrocities, into a longer and more intricate story about the demands that changing moral economies place upon scientists. Also, it broadens the subject matter of the history of research ethics by expanding its subject matter beyond ethical protocols. By putting the scientific self at center stage, it locates ethical reflection and formation right in the heart of scientific activity. Strategically, this encourages cooperation between historians of science and historians of research ethics. It invites the former to take seriously the ethical aspects of the scientific revolutions associated with the names of Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim, just as it invites the latter to recognize that virtues such as advocated by these scientists were markers of a research ethics avant la lettre .

Finally, by way of coda, a study of moral demands made on scientists in times and places other than ours is not an antiquarian project. Examining how scientific selves were shaped and disciplined in earlier periods of history implicitly raises the question how scientific selfhood is molded in our days. What kind of ethical standards are implied in today’s academic reward structures? What sort of scientific conduct do competitive research funding schemes encourage (Mountz et al. 2015 ; Anderson et al. 2007 )? How do social media and research evaluation protocols contribute to what is called a “quantified academic self” (Hammarfelt, De Rijcke, and Rushforth 2016 )? Or what are the ethical subtexts of books like Donald Hall’s The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual ( 2002 )? Historical research of the kind proposed in this article holds up a mirror to present-day scientists, thereby encouraging them to examine the ethical implications inherent to current models of scientific selfhood.

Acknowledgments

This article presents some of the main findings of a research project on “The Scholarly Self: Character, Habit, and Virtue in the Humanities, 1860–1930,” carried out at Leiden University and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grant No. 276-69-003). The author would like to thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous readers for their useful feedback.

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1.4: Cultivating a Self in the Essay

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Chapter 3: Cultivating a Self in the Essay

We take the opinions and the knowledge of others into our keeping, and that is all. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, should go and find some at his neighbor’s house, and, having found a fine big fire there, should stop there and warm himself, forgetting to carry any back home. What good does it do to us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger?

- Michel de Montaigne, “Of Pedantry”

As I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2, not long ago, I had a student who jeered at the rape and murder of women in the essays he submitted to me and to the class. When I first met with the student to talk about the content in his essays, he was hostile: “But this is who I really am!” he exclaimed. “I have a twisted sense of humor!” In taking this case to several of my rhetoric and composition colleagues, the most consistent bit of advice I got from them was to steer the student away from thinking about his self-on-the-page as a constitutive act of voice (an expression or a textual re-presentation of the “real” writer) and, instead, as a construction of ethos. With this shift in perspective, the assumption was that he would be able to see the self-on-the-page as his audience might see it. Then, we could talk about the ineffectiveness of that ethos and about how to revise so that the essay’s ethos would be more effective. Of course, what was implied in their advice, too, was that the student would then see the error of his ways, for inevitably, he would find that the more effective ethos would be one that aligned with the values, morals, and codes of conduct deemed acceptable by an audience of me and of upper-level English majors.

The problem with this implication is, I hope, obvious: that the student would be required to conform to institutionally accepted values, if he wanted to produce an effective essay. This would not necessarily be a problem if those values only involved his use of the conventions of a “good” essay—e.g., those mentioned in Chapter 1 (freedom, walking, and voice). Instead, in this particular case, what counted as a good/effective essay involved the rendering of a particular kind of voice or textual self—one that embodied the values and ethical practices that would be deemed appropriate, that would be accepted by a group of his peers and by me. Consequently, by asking the student to examine the ethos in his writing in order to deploy it more effectively, I would not have been asking him simply to reflect further (on) the voice-on-the-page or his textual self; I would have been teaching him to align his voice/textual self with particular socio-political values so that the ethos would be perceived to be reliable. 24 As such, I would have become a part of a system where the disciplining practices of our field take a turn toward the silencing practices of intellectual tyranny—just the sort of practices with which any voice scholar and/or teacher would take serious issue.

No doubt, one could argue (as I often do, myself) that it’s more important to teach students to be attentive, respectful, socially-responsible, and critical thinkers than it is to give them the space to “be their own persons,” which in my student’s case, would translate to being a person who participates in and perpetuates some of the most horrible ‘isms’ that exist today. Yet, doesn’t that privileging fly in the face of the real work of the personal essay as the last “free” space for self-expression? Perhaps even more importantly, by teaching said values, how am I much better than the kind of person whose ideology I’m trying to disempower?

Certainly, I know—and can argue—the difference between the self-righteousness that I am invoking and the self-righteousness articulated in the rape-celebrating essay written by my student. I can argue that in asking my student to revise the ethos of his essay and that in explaining why he needs to revise that ethos, I would be inserting myself into discourses that perpetuate dangerous hierarchies and abuse; I would be trying to create a disruption, trying to break a chain forged over centuries of problematic thinking, talking, and acting along perilous conceptions of gender roles. But after making such attempts over a decade of teaching, I know for certain that if students read such an attempt as me trying to silence them, then my attempts at “disruption” only persuade them to shut down the exchange (and, ironically, often in the name of “self-expression”).

In part, the problem seems to stem from our modern-day conceptions of self. To be more specific, as Crowley and Hawhee explain to rhetoric and writing students in their textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, “Americans tend to link a person’s opinions to her identity. We assume that someone’s opinions result from her personal experience, and hence that those opinions are somehow ‘hers’—that she alone ‘owns’ them” (5). Thus, folks tend to get very upset when their opinions are challenged because the assumption is that their opinions are not all that is at stake in a discussion; their identities, their selfhoods, are.

The presence of this assumption about opinion-as-identity in personal essay courses, in writing pedagogies, and even in writing and essay scholarship is, arguably, the residual effect of an institutional purchase of (with all the associated advertising for) romanticism and its hero, the romantic subject. Borrowing the wording of John Muckelbauer in his work on imitation (and the humanities’ resistance to it), we are seeing the effects of “the institutional emergence of romantic subjectivity, an ethos that emphasizes creativity , originality , and genius ” (52, emphasis added). One of those effects can be seen in the fact that conceptions of the essayist, especially, are bound up in the belief in “opinion-as-identity.”

To explain with regards to agency, as it is forwarded in Chapters 1 and 2, if we buy the concept of the essential or socially constructed self, then we tend to see our subjectivities as entirely dependent on our ability to have and to interpret our experiences, as if how we experience and what we experience happen in a subject-object relation (i.e., me vs. the experience). When we enter into a relation with the object-that-is-experience, we interpret it and become, in that act, agents that can control it. In this relation, “life” becomes a series of events to be interpreted. We possess those interpretations by imposing on them a narrative (enter “creativity”) that is the product of our unique perspective (enter “originality”), which is unique because of the unique constellation of experiences that have been interpreted by our individual selves (enter “genius”). 25

The upshot of this tangle is that we get to see ourselves as agents in this world—not simply as actors but as unique entities that necessarily interpret and possess experience differently. What we also get is the belief that my perspective is who I am and that any challenge to that perspective—which, ironically, can be represented by groups to which I belong, e.g., institutions, families, etc.—is a threat to my very existence. One can easily see this belief in opinion-as-identity at work in my student’s argument for his voice, his true/honest self, on the page. One can easily see it in the failed attempts on my part to interject in a discourse in which that voice is implicated.

If we give in to the “implacable I” of the essayist, as Joan Didion calls it, or the “it’s all about me ethic,” as I called it in Chapter 2, and if we, consequently, dismiss any responsibility to the people who may be belittled or silenced by that implacability, then just how valuable can the essay really be? What is it likely to contribute to any discourse it participates in? Is it likely to be rigorous, skeptical, profound? I’d argue “no” because, contrary to popular belief, the essay would not be freed by the essentialized or socially-constructed self that is expressed or re-presented in an essay; rather, the essay would be limited by that self—and in dangerous ways.

For the purposes of this chapter, then, I would like “to make visible a bygone way of approaching the self and others which might suggest possibilities for the present” (Rabinow xxvii)—in particular, possibilities for how one might conceive of subjectivity in the essay. To do this work, I turn to the work of Michel Foucault. The practices that will be examined in this chapter are described best in Foucault’s piece, titled “Self Writing.” In it, he introduces self writing as a series of practices in which the writer participates in order to constitute and “cultivate” his/her self. Through this exploration of Foucault’s work on subjectivity, I hope to describe a compelling and progressive study of subjectivity in essaying, one that enables productive debate and, even, self-transformation, one that does not send writers right back into the traps created by the theories of the writer-page relationship that I articulated in the first two chapters of this project.

Foucault’s work, however, only provides the system of thought—the skeleton, so to speak, around which one can shape the conception/articulation of an actual subject-in-writing. In order to provide a few subjects-in-writing in which to examine relevant writing practices and in order to flesh-out this particular version of subjectivity, I have chosen to take up the essays of Montaigne. I’ve chosen his works for at least a few important reasons: the most important reason being that Montaigne is considered the “father” of the genre; the second reason being that his essays are often quoted to support each of the conceptions of the relationship between the writer and the self-on-the-page that I described in Chapters 1 and 2. As I will demonstrate, however, reading his essays as evidence of either conception of that relationship is a misreading, and as such, we have missed a very real, very productive possibility for conceiving of that relationship in the essay.

Self Writing

In “Self Writing,” Foucault looks at “the role of writing in philosophical cultivation of the self just before Christianity: its close link with companionship, its application to the impulses of thought, its role as a truth test” (208). Specifically, he studies the practices of self writing in the works of Seneca, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius. What he finds is that the “close link with companionship,” as well as self writing’s “application to the impulses of thought” and “its role as a truth test,” are all elements found in the works of these writers. These three elements should sound familiar to essayists and essay scholars, for essay writing involves conversing with the writer and with a reader (companionship), expressing or constructing “the mind on the page” (the application of writing to the impulses of thought), and experimenting with and/or exploring ideas (truth tests). The difference, though, between Foucault’s articulation of these elements and more common articulations is that the former involves the privileging of practices—of conversing, of applying, of testing—not the sovereignty of the writer, as the creator of companionship, as the creator of the application of writing to thought, as the creator of the truth test.

To explain, much of Foucault’s work focuses on several modes of objectivation, modes through which the subject “subjects” his/her self. “Subjecting,” however, does not simply imply “making into an object,” as the term “objectification” might suggest. Rather, a different process happens in that subjecting, so that the subject-on-the-page is constituted, not reflected or constructed. The distinction I want to make here between “constituted” and “constructed” is one of agency: i.e., saying a subject is “constructed” puts more emphasis on the writer (or the culture) that is doing the constructing, while “constituted” emphasizes the processes of subjection, the practices within which a subject is subjected. 26

For example, the practices of self writing, at least pre-Christian self writing, are driven not by the creative genius or essence of the expressive writer but by the cultivation of “the art of living.” 27 Foucault argues that according to the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, and the Cynics, “the art of living” can only be acquired with exercise, via “a training of the self by oneself” (“Self Writing” 208). This training is a way of caring for the self. Foucault states, “In Greek and Roman texts, the injunction of having to know yourself was always associated with the other principle of having to take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim [Know thyself] into operation” (“Technologies” 20). In other words, self writing is not simply the process of figuring out what I already know, who I already am. Rather, care of the self, which involves multiple practices that shape the self, makes possible knowledge of one’s self. In the ancient world, such practices often included the use of hupomnēmata, which, according to Foucault, were written for the purpose of meditation; as I will show, this, too, is precisely what Montaigne’s essays were written for.

The Hupomnēmata

Examples of hupomnēmata include “account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids.” These memory aids were used, though, not simply for the purpose of aiding memory but for the primary purpose of being “guides for conduct” (“Self Writing” 209). In “Self Writing” Foucault states, “They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent reading and meditation” (209). He explains further that they were “a material and a framework” for the exercises of “reading, rereading, meditating, [and] conversing with oneself and with others” (210). In other words, these texts were not written out, (re)read, and referenced simply for the sake of recollection but, to quote Plutarch, to “[elevate] the voice and [silence] the passions like a master who with one word hushes the growling of dogs” (qtd. in “Self Writing” 210). So, for example, in high school, I kept a quote journal, which was comprised of lines from texts I found to be particularly compelling. I returned to them when I needed them—usually for ideas for paper topics, but also for good advice when confronting complicated situations in my personal relationships, schooling, etc. This is [a simplification of] what I think Plutarch meant by “hush[ing] the growling of dogs”—the dogs, in this case, being conflicts and deadlines, for example.

The primary purpose, however, of the hupomnēmata is “to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as possible” (“Self Writing” 211). As to how that collection becomes a means to establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, the process is complicated. To start by putting this relationship into more general terms (and work down to the specifics), the truths constituted in these texts are—through the practice of meditation—“planted in” the soul: that is, “the soul must make them not merely its own but itself ” (“Self Writing” 210, emphasis added). To understand this process and to practice it, one must shift away from thinking about subjectivity in terms of the socially constructed self or the natural/essential self, and toward a different version.

In these more common conceptions of self, the assumption that the soul makes these truths its own would have been true. Students would accept and own the truths they encounter in readings, or they would reject them. In turn, when writing about those truths, the writer would become the owner of those beliefs by interpreting and rendering them through his/her own unique perspective. However, in stating that the soul does not merely make particular truths its own but “makes them itself,” the distinction is as follows: the soul does not create, possess, and/or wield truths; rather, the soul is constituted in the practices of reading, rereading, and writing about those truths. 28

As shown in Chapter 1, essay writing is often used in contemporary writing classrooms as a tool for expressing the innermost self, as a tool for expressing what is hidden/secret, what is oppressed/silenced in the self—the “stuff” of the soul that we own but have not owned up to, so to speak. Despite this common conception of the essay, though, in Montaigne’s work, expression does not actually seem to be the purpose. Rather, Montaigne’s essays work much like the hupomnēmata , which were written “for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (“Self Writing” 211). Montaigne admits to this project in “Of Giving the Lie.” He states,

And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time […]? In modeling this figure [this book] upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author […]. (504)

In effect, he is saying that in writing his book, he’s not expressed a self; instead, in writing his book, the writing has cultivated his self. 29

The Practices of Reading and Writing: “Returning to the Hive”

Montaigne further describes at least a part of this process as such: “I have not studied one bit to make a book; but I have studied a bit because I had made it, if it is studying a bit to skim over and pinch, by his head or his feet, now one author, now another…” (“Of Giving” 505, emphasis added). Accordingly, it is not that he simply studied other works and then wrote about them; rather, as I will show, in the making of the book, Montaigne meditated on other authors’ works, and they became a part of the constitution of his book/self. For example, in “Of Books” he talks about “transplanting” original ideas (e.g., from the works of Seneca) into his own “soil” and “confound[ing]” them with his own (296).

In this context, I can imagine that the hupomnēmata can be used like personal diaries or writers’ notebooks, much like Didion describes in “On Keeping a Notebook,” where writers collect material for reflection and/or for future writings. 30 However, it’s worth noting that there’s a difference between collections like Didion’s notebooks and my students’ diaries. The latter, at least according to my students, are often simply collections of confessions, which have very little use-value beyond the act of confession (and in fact, are oftentimes impossible, even, to understand after any considerable lapse of time because of their opaquely self/situation-referential prose). The writer rarely returns to them. The hupomnēmata, on the other hand, are supposed to be guidebooks. As such, the students’ confessions would have to be used for meditative purposes—as material to later reflect on (in reading and in writing), to test the truth of by recontextualizing them in other experiences/scenarios, and if necessary, to revise.

The hupomnēmata are not, however, just another practice in pop-psychology. They are not simply collections of affirmations I repeat to myself in order to feel okay about myself or my life. Rather, in the act of meditating on those texts, a disciplining, a cultivating, of self occurs, for in that act, a relationship of oneself with oneself is established, a relationship that should be “as adequate and accomplished as possible”—i.e., one that makes possible a relation between the two (subjected) subjects so that they work agonistically toward an end that belongs to “an ethics of control” ( Care 65). This ethic in practice, in process, is a bit like Heracles wrestling the Nemean lion, which (if I may make a somewhat obscure reference) is described in The Mythic Tarot as a symbolic struggle between Heracles and his ego. It is an encounter of oneself to oneself, the latter of which is in relation to the former but not as its reflection, not even as its equal. Rather, the two are constituted in the encounter and struggle agonistically toward an end that is the conversion of the self. Thus, the end that belongs to an ethic of control is not an end where Heracles slays the lion or vice versa. Instead, he masters it. It is submitted, as is he, in the encounter that involves a series of practices—perhaps of tactical maneuvers of fatal bites and pinched veins. In fact, in Greene and Sharman-Burke’s reading of the story in The Mythic Tarot , neither player can be negated or rejected; to convert/transform, neither can be killed.

To come at this relationship another way, one of the ways that one can cultivate that relationship so that it is “as adequate and accomplished as possible” is to practice “turning back,” fixing the past in such a way that it can be studied. In this practice, the writer can, in turn, prepare for the future. To explain further this emphasis on composing a self capable of adapting to future events, I point to Foucault’s analysis of dreams in the first chapter of The Care of the Self. There, he quotes from Achilles Tatius’s The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon to show how the analysis of dreams was a life practice, practiced for the purpose not of controlling or outwitting one’s destiny but of preparing for it. Tatius states, “[…F]or when disasters come all together and unexpectedly, they strike the spirit with so severe and sudden a blow that they overwhelm it; while if they are anticipated, the mind, by dwelling on them beforehand, is able little by little to turn the edge of sorrow” (5). This practice of studying dreams relates to the practice of self writing, for in both, the self is constituted within practices that are used for the purpose of disciplining the self—in this case, to discipline the self in order to abate sorrow or to avoid the debilitating effects of suffering.

In another example, in “Of Presumption” Montaigne states, “Not being able to rule events [or ‘Fortune’], I rule myself, and adapt myself to them if they do not adapt themselves to me” (488). In other words, he cannot control the future, so instead, he cultivates a self that can adapt to the events that may happen in the future. In describing how one can work toward this self, in “Of Experience,” Montaigne states, “He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition” (822). In that remembering, in meditating on the past, and in preparing for the future, he practices control, and because of it, he also will be able to practice control in whatever future struggles he encounters.

The Practices of the Disparate (the Truth Test)

To the question, again, then: How does one “write” the self, particularly a more vigilant or less susceptible self? In part, one does so by collecting material, reading it repeatedly, reflecting on it, and writing about it. However, that is not enough. In order for the writing to work—in order for it to actually create a more disciplined or at least a different self—the truths (the maxims) of the writings being meditated on and the truths generated in that meditation must be tested.

Again, self writing is not repeating affirmations (“I am a good scholar. I am a good scholar”). In order for it to work, in order for that relationship between writer and page to transform the self of the writer, truths (e.g., quotes from my quote-journal or entries from a student’s diary) must be put to the test. Consequently, they are not “adopted” as the writer’s own, but in the process of testing them, the writer is disciplined in them. To put this is Foucault’s terms, “the writing of the hupomnēmata is also (and must remain) a regular and deliberate practice of the disparate” (“Self Writing 212). The “practice of the disparate” is a way “of combining the traditional authority of the already-said with the singularity of the truth that is affirmed therein and the particularity of the circumstances that determine its use” (“Self Writing” 212). In other words, writing becomes a practice of meditation in which the writer considers the selected passage as a maxim that may be true, suitable, and useful to a particular situation—or not. The purpose in practicing the disparate is mastery of the self—not via a conclusive and utterly naked revelation of self, as is so often argued about Montaigne’s work, but “through the acquisition and assimilation of truth.”

For example, in “Of Experience,” Montaigne finds that in all of the interpretations that might occur in the “art” of language, there is not one universally “true” interpretation. However, this does not discourage him from the practice of the disparate, for while belying the possibility of clear, irrefutable meaning in the language-use of, say, lawyers and doctors, Montaigne quotes Seneca (which is an example of the already-said, of a maxim): “What is broken up into dust becomes confused” (816). He explores this maxim at length in the next paragraph, applying it to the language-use of lawyers in contract sand wills. In the end, he explains that by picking apart the language of such contracts and wills, by debating the meaning, “[lawyers] make the world fructify and teem with uncertainty and quarrels, as the earth is made more fertile the more it is crumbled and deeply plowed” (816). This is an excellent example of the writer testing a maxim’s truth, suitability, and usefulness in a particular context: in ultimately arguing that there is no single, absolute interpretation for a text, Montaigne finds Seneca’s statement to be true, suitable, and useful to his point. He has brought together his experience and Seneca’s insight and tested the truth of the latter in the context of the former.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our student essayists approached the essays we have them read in the same way? Instead of inserting quotes that have been taken out of context, reduced to isolated entities, and thrust among the students’ own essays like fence posts, they might actually test out the truth, the validity, of some essayist’s insight. They might meditate on it, try to apply it to some situation in their own lives, bring it into relation with other insights from other essayists and test out the relation between multiple insights when brought into another relationship with some situation. I, for one, would much rather read those essays than the ones where students write what they already think they know, while simultaneously practicing reduction or outright misrepresentation of others’ works. After all, how much generation of knowledge, shared discovery, or intellectual exchange are we going to see in writings that do not practice any genuine attentiveness to others—other writers, other ideas, etc.?

The Process of Unification

It’s important to remember, though, that in self writing, the writing practices are not simply all about others. They are as much about the subject-that-is-the-writer as about any other author’s truth or insight. They are about constituting that subject-that-is-the-writer. To put this in Foucault’s terms, “the role of writing is to constitute, along with all that reading has constituted, a ‘body.’” That body is constituted because the writing “becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.” Per this principle, “the writer constitutes his own identity through this recollection of things said” (“Self Writing” 213), unifying these “things said”—the fragments found in his/her hupomnēmata— by bringing them together and meditating on them.

To put this in other terms, the writer constitutes his own identity by historicizing his self. Foucault states, “Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read” (“Self Writing” 214). To put this in very practical terms, the writer “enters into the conversation,” as so many of my colleagues call it, a conversation that may, for example, be between the works of Montaigne and Foucault. In practicing the disparate, the writer becomes a part of the ideas/beliefs s/he is engaged with/in and is remade in them. Consequently, s/he becomes a part of a lineage of ideas, of a system of beliefs, etc.

Thus, an essay is not the transparent representation of an isolated, fixed, stable, “unique” agent, nor is s/he the socially constructed representation of a pre-existing agent in a world that consists of re/oppressive practices. Rather, the self is a historical moment, an event in the movement of discourses. To relay an apt metaphor, Seneca states, “The voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together…. I would have my mind of such a quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history; but all should lend harmoniously into one” (qtd. in “Self Writing” 214).

The Subjected Subject

In reference to classical texts, Foucault states, “The care of the self is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance” (“Technologies” 25). In this statement lies the most profound distinction between the technologies of self that are articulated by Foucault and arguably by Montaigne and the writing-of-self described in other versions of subjectivity: the self is not a substance. There is no given, fixed, stable self that is then acted on and manipulated by outside forces. Rather, in the act of writing (an act of caring), selves are constituted. Admittedly, this seeming reversal, where the subject is subjected, flies in the face of most of Western philosophy. In an interview with Foucault, the interviewer states, “But what I don’t understand is the position of consciousness as object of an epistemè. The consciousness, if anything, is ‘epistemizing,’ not ‘epistemizable’” (“An Historian” 98). This confusion, perhaps, sums up the bewilderment toward Foucault’s work on subjectivity, for most of Western philosophy operates within the fundamental belief that “transcendental consciousness… conditions the formation of our knowledge” (98).

The two major theories of subjectivity (what one might call “expressivism” and “social constructionism”) in Rhetoric and Composition operate under the assumption that the writer is the agent that can exist outside of its own construction or outside of its social context, even outside of its own mind. Foucault’s theory of subjectivity refuses “an equation on the transcendental level between subject and thinking ‘I.’” He states, “I am convinced that there exist, if not exactly structures, then at least rules for the functioning of knowledge which have arisen in the course of history and within which can be located the various subjects” (“An Historian” 98). For example, within the hupomnēmata there are specific rules—like the (re)reading of other author’s texts, like the testing of truths from those texts—that serve as particular operations within which the subject-on-the-page is constituted. Obviously, the writer practices these practices, but s/he is not the transcendent origin of these practices. Rather, the point is that in these practices, the self is possible.

To quote Foucault: “[T]hese practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group” (“The Ethics” 291). Through these models, a relation of self to self is created, and through this relation, selves are constituted differently, newly, so that, for example, the constituted self on the page serves as the material for meditation and transformation of the constituted self of the writer. But, admittedly, it is this conceptual tangle that many scholars may find too alien to engage. So, in the next section, I will unravel this conceptual tangle via a discussion of the care of the self.

Caring for the Self

Foucault states, “In Greek and Roman texts, the injunction of having to know yourself was always associated with the other principle of having to take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim [Know thyself] into operation” (“Technologies” 20). In this, two ideas are most important: through the care of oneself, one knows oneself, and care is not simply a principle but involves a series of practices. Foucault argues that writing was one such practice in caring for oneself. He states, “One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed” (“Technologies” 27). Examples of these features are evident in Montaigne’s works, e.g., where he has written about his endeavors to make a study of himself, to address his dearest friends (see his letter “To the Reader”), and to study other authors’ works in order to test the opinions he formed long ago. Examples of these features are also found in the work of Marcus Aurelius. 31 Foucault argues that Marcus Aurelius writes “an example of ‘a retreat within oneself’: it is a sustained effort in which general principles are reactivated and arguments are adduced that persuade one not to let oneself become angry at others, at providence, or at things” ( Care 51). 32

In both cases (of Montaigne’s work and in Marcus Aurelius’s), the practice of writing is a disciplining of self; it is a way of composing a self that is somehow better—perhaps less angry or fearful of the future. This composing happens because one “retreats into oneself” in the act of caring for oneself, but this does not mean that the writer cares for his/her self by turning inward to examine the essence seated within flesh. Rather, the practices of caring for oneself are ways of producing a subject so that the writer participates in the engineering of the subject, engineering that is a product of knowledge of the production of the subject.

To explain further, I point to a passage from Montaigne in “Of Experience.” He states:

He who calls back to mind the excess of his past anger, and how far this fever carried him away, sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceives a more justified hatred for it. He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. (822)

In essaying (even in the explanatory excerpt above), Montaigne studies his experiences and assesses his condition; in so doing, a self-on-the-page is constituted, a self that is wiser, less prone to anger, and so on. The ancients knew this kind of writing to be one practice that lends itself to the composition of the self. They practiced this kind of writing in order to participate in the engineering of the self. In that engineering, not only is the self-on-the-page made stronger, but that self serves as material for reflection for the essayist. In meditating on that self, the essayist is transformed, potentially made wiser, etc. This is the self-to-self relation of which I spoke earlier.

That said, if self writing, in general, is done in order to make us better people, then I can foresee essay teachers’ and scholars’ concerns that I might be condoning the teaching of essay writing as a mode for moralizing students. However, that would be a gross misreading of Foucault’s work and of my work here. It would presume, for example, that the practices of self writing should govern a universal self—i.e., that they should objectivize the same type of person, perhaps the moral or civic person—in the same ways and toward the same end. However, for Foucault, self writing is a way of practicing freedom.

By “freedom,” Foucault does not necessarily mean “liberation.” Rather, he shows that for the Greeks and Romans, “Not to be a slave (of another city, of the people around you, of those governing you, of your own passions) was an absolutely fundamental theme.” In turn, “the conscious practice of freedom has revolved around this fundamental imperative: ‘Take care of yourself’” (“The Ethics” 285). In this model, where practices (not codes of conduct or morals) are emphasized, “greater attention is paid to the methods, techniques, and exercises directed at forming the self within a nexus of relationships. In such a system, authority would be self-referential and might take a therapeutic or philosophical form” (Rabinow xxvii, emphasis added). I am reminded of Socrates saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It is this examination that is crucial to the practice(s) of freedom, for in examination, a self is formed—one that does not have to be a slave to the discourses that shape it.

The So What and Where to Now

This shift in thinking about subjectivity—about how the self is constituted in practices—has implications for how we exchange ideas, how we enter into conversations and participate in them, and most importantly for this project, how we essay. If we took seriously the idea that the subject is constituted in practices, in the practices of self-writing, for example, then we would be able to get past the belief in opinion-as-identity and to actually exchange ideas, share opinions, and, even, potentially cultivate different selves. We’d be able to participate in the generation of other possibilities, in critique, and even (sometimes) in the resolution of conflict—not simply the back-and-forth articulation of what we already know/believe. In other words, we’d be cultivating more fluid, dynamic selves, not finite selves.

As such, I could have a productive conversation with the student who joked about the rape of women. I could ask him to examine where his willingness/desire to see humor in violence toward women comes from, where its roots and branches extend and where the shape of that willingness/desire is amplified or diminished. I could ask him to examine, even, why that attitude took hold in him and what it gets him in his work in the care of the self. In other words, I could help him to push his examination of the self-on-the-page further, and with any luck, he’d begin to see that self at play in a complex of discourses of which he, the writer, would also be a part … but differently.

There are at least two major possibilities for essaying and for conceiving of subjectivity in the essay that I’d like readers to take away from this chapter: 1) that essay writing can be discussed and taught according to a series of practices, particularly the practices of meditation (i.e., reading and writing), that it need not rely on a list of conventions; 2) that the relation of the writer to the page is an agonistic one, not a tyrannical or transparent one. The first possibility—that essay writing is a series of practices—stems from the fact that subjectivity does not have to be conceived in terms of an essential or socially constructed self. I have discussed here a different conception of subjectivity, one that is conceived in terms of practices of subjection, and this different conception of subjectivity has implications for how we talk about and teach essays. Instead of talking about and teaching essays as texts that allow students to discover and express their true selves, we might talk about the essay and teach it as a mode that does different kinds of work—work that is still invested in the self, but not The Self (a stable, often hidden, potentially transcendent self).

Regarding the second possibility I’d like readers to take away from this work (that the relation of the writer to the page is not a transparent or tyrannical one), I like to think of the relation, instead, as one of subject to subject— that relation writing me as much as I’m writing the page. As such, even when I receive a critique of this page, I can go into that exchange knowing that this work is not equal to me (and that it is not done). It does not equal who I am, where I come from, or my mind on the page. It’s an experiment. A long, arduous, but also in my opinion, compelling and important experiment—one that has made me as much as I have made it.

24. Here, I’m deploying a simplistic distinction between voice or the textual self and ethos: the former being the expression/construction of the writer’s self on the page (see Chapters 1 and 2) and the latter being the character of the self that is created to establish the writer’s credibility and judged according to accepted notions of “the ethical.”

25. Here, I’m referring to the concepts that Muckelbauer aligns with the concept (and celebration) of the romantic subject. Within that concept, creativity, originality, and genius all hinge on the belief that the subject is utterly originary—that from it, creation happens. The capacity to create and to exist as the source of creation is “genius.”

26. It’s important to note that one implication of this different conception of the subject (as one that is subjected) is that this version of subjectivity takes seriously the idea that the writer is one subject being subjected by a number of forces (acting on the body, for example) and that the subject-on-the-page must, therefore, be something different because it is subjected by other forces.

27. Though perhaps obvious, it’s worth pointing out that reconceptualizing essay writing as a complex of practices subverts the idea of the innately talented essayist. If we writing teachers want to take seriously the idea that essaying can be taught, then this theory of subjectivity gives us a way to teach it as a complex of practices, as something other than an expressive art that the student writer is inherently “good at” or not.

28. This is not to say that Foucault does not take seriously the question of ownership of texts. In “What is an Author?” his study of the author function does not involve any assumptions about the author-as-creator of the text, though, or about the author-manifested in the text. Rather, Foucault is most interested in the historical operations that are part of the author function, a function that does not invoke the privileging of an author’s agency over/in a text, but is an enunciation of how the author’s name provides a mode of “existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses” (211). For example, a text with the name “Montaigne” attached to it can be expected to be a prototype of the essay. It can be expected to be written in a meandering, contemplative mode; to quote many important, classical authors; to incorporate personal experiences; and to be relentlessly skeptical of its own claims.

29. The similarities here in Foucault’s articulation of self writing and Montaigne’s description of being made by his book are very likely due, at least in part, to the fact that Montaigne was such an avid reader of Seneca’s work—a writer who was very much invested in the self-disciplining practices of self writing. Montaigne goes so far as to write about the “Seneca in [him]” in his essay “Of Books” (297), and in the same essay, he states that the books from which he learned “to arrange [his] humors and [his] ways” are those of Plutarch and Seneca (it’s worth noting, too, that in the 2003 Penguin Edition of Montaigne’s essays, translator M.A. Screech uses the verb “control,” instead of “arrange” (463)).

As Foucault points out, “[…T]he theme of application of oneself to oneself is well known [in Antiquity]: it is to this activity… that a man must devote himself, to the exclusion of other occupations” ( Care 46). Montaigne, too, takes this occupation as seriously as the writers of Antiquity. He states, “For those who go over themselves in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength” (“Of Giving” 504). I should note that “essentials,” as Montaigne is using the term, refers to tendencies or habits, not to an essence of self.

30. In “On Keeping a Notebook,” Didion argues that we should use our notebooks to “keep in touch” with old selves, past experiences, seemingly fleeting ideas/images/feelings. She states, “It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about” (140).

31. Though I’ve not found any evidence of the claim in my own reading, Bensmaïa states in The Barthes Effect that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is one of the models that have been “invoked” as a “springboard” for the essay (90). In general, the essay scholarship I’ve read that reaches for roots older than Montaigne’s essays most often points to Seneca (see Lopate and Hall, for example).

32. Incidentally, this phrase “a retreat within oneself” should sound very familiar to Montaigne/essay scholars, for it is commonly used (even by him) to describe his work.

Scientific Writing: A Self-Study Guide

Summary: I summarize some useful readings in Scientific Writing and Communication that helped me when I was learning to write and that will likely help my students and others.

Creating high-impact research requires effective writing. Most researchers, however, will never take a formal course in Scientific Writing. Even if we did, a formal course would hide the fact that researchers must continually practice and refine their writing craft over their careers. Since “good writers read about writing,” this page lists a self-study course in scientific writing for the researcher who wants to become a better writer. It lists good books at the bottom of the page (all of which we have available in our lab’s reading library), and then breaks out sections of those books for you to read and progress through: from understanding what scientific writing is to how to structure your writing to writing a first draft to editing and submitting the final copy and beyond. I hope that the below progression will guide you on your path to becoming a better writer and that you will add to and revise this list as you uncover what readings helped or hindered your progression as a writer.

How to use this guide: I organized this guide as a week-by-week progression of readings for the aspiring scientific writer. You will find some weeks more time-consuming than others. To help alleviate this burden, I have bolded specific titles that provide the best coverage in the least time each week. Allotting about 30 minutes, two to three times a week, should provide you ample time to finish the bolded ones. You can read the non-bolded chapters if you have extra time or are particularly interested in the topic. I suggest having some your own writing handy so that you can practice what you learn each week; working through your own concrete example improves both your learning and your research. While I arranged the topics in a week-by-week progression, that should not stop you from jumping around if your needs require it; skipping ahead to the “Editing” sections might be more useful when a deadline approaches.

Part 1: Understanding Content

Week 1: understanding your role and purpose.

• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 1: Communicating Science
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 2: Scientific Communication
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 1: Deciding Where to Begin
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 1: Thinking in Print
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 2: Connecting with Your Reader
• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Ch. 1: Writing as Conversation

Week 2: Setting Yourself Up to Be a Productive Writer

• How to Write a Lot: Ch. 1: Introduction
• How to Write a Lot: Ch. 2: Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 17: Actually Sitting Down to Write

Part 2: Understanding Organization and Flow

Week 3: structuring scientific documents.

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 2: Organizing Your Documents
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 7: The Scientific Paper
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 12: Planning
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 10: Technical Reports
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 16: Introductions and Conclusions
• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Ch. 8: Introduction and Conclusion
• Writing for Science: Ch. 9: Scientific Journal Articles

Week 6: Abstracts and Titles

• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Ch. 6: Title and Abstract
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 2: Beginnings of Documents
• Writing for Science: Ch. 3: Research Abstracts
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Ch. 10: Titles and Abstracts
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Appendix 8: Evolution of a Title
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Appendix 9: Evolution of an Abstract

Week 7: Effective Literature Reviews

• They Say, I Say: Ch. 1: They Say
• They Say, I Say: Ch. 2: Her Point Is
• They Say, I Say: Ch. 3: As He Himself Puts It
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 5: From Problems to Sources
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Ch. 4: Searching and Reviewing Scientific Literature

Week 8: Constructing Cogent Arguments

• The Craft of Research: Ch. 7: Making Good Arguments
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 8: Making Claims
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 9: Assembling Reasons and Evidence
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 10: Acknowledgements and Reponses

Week 9: Revising a First Draft

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 17: Revising, Revising, Revising
• Scientific Papers and Presentations Ch. 9: Reviewing and Revising

Week 10: Revising for Organization and Flow

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 3: Providing Transition, Depth, Emphasis
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Lesson 7: Motivation
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 14: Revising Your Organization and Argument
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Lesson 5: Cohesion and Coherence

Part 3: Understanding Style

Week 11: revising for clarity and straightforwardness.

• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Ch. 3: Actions
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Ch. 4: Characters
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 5: Being Clear
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 6: Being Forthright
• Revising Prose: Ch. 1: Action
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 17: Revising Style: Telling Your Story Clearly

Week 12: Revising to Reduce Length and Complexity

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 4: Being Precise
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 7: Being Familiar
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 8: Being Concise
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Ch. 9: Concision

Week 13: Revising the Layout of Sentences:

• The Elements of Style: Part II: Elementary Principles of Composition
• The Elements of Style: Part V: An Approach to Style
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Lesson 1: Understanding Style
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 9: Being Fluid
• Line by Line: Ch. 3: Ill-Matched Partners
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Lesson 10: Shape

Part 4: Understanding Illustrations

Week 14: why illustrations.

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 10: Illustration: Making the Right Choices
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 9: Graphics and Their Place
• Writing for Science: Ch. 6: Scientific Visuals

Week 15: Effective Illustrations

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 11: Illustration: Creating the Best Designs
• The Craft of Research: Ch. 15: Communication Evidence Visually

Part 5: Understanding Editing

Week 16: basics of copy-editing.

• The Copyeditor’s Handbook: Ch. 1: What Copyeditors Do
• The Copyeditor’s Handbook: Ch. 2: Basic Procedures

Week 17: Correcting Basic Errors

• The Elements of Style: Part I: Elementary Rules of Usage
• The Elements of Style: Part IV: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace: Lesson 2: Correctness
• Line by Line: Ch. 1: Loose, Baggy Sentences
• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Appendix B: A Usage Guide for Scientists and Engineers

Week 18: Improving Sentence Structure

• Line by Line: Ch. 2: Faulty Connections
• Revising Prose: Ch. 2: Attention
• The Copyeditor’s Handbook: Ch. 14: Grammar: Principles and Pitfalls

Week 19: Adding Punch to Sentences

• Revising Prose: Ch. 3: Voice

Week 20: Editing Structure

• The Copyeditors Handbook: Ch. 15: Beyond Grammar

Week 21: Final Edit Checklist

• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Appendix C: Review Checklist
• The Copyeditor’s Handbook: Appendix A: Checklist of Editorial Preferences

Part 6: Life-Long Learning About Writing

Week 22: reading and reviewing.

• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 3: Reading Well
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 6: The Review Process

Week 23: Creating a Culture and Support Structure for Writing

• How to Write a Lot: Ch. 3: Motivational Tools
• How to Write a Lot: Ch. 8: Good Things Still to be Written
• Revising Prose: Ch. 8: Why Bother?
• How to Write a Lot: Ch. 4: Starting Your Own Agraphia Group
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 5: Writing Very Well
• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Ch. 5: Using Exemplars

Week 24: Proposals

• The Craft of Scientific Writing: Ch. 13: Writing Proposals
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Ch. 5: The Proposal
• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science:: Ch. 11 Proposals
• Writing for Science: Ch. 10: Scientific Grant Proposals

Week 25: Writing for Non-Native Speakers:

• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science: Ch. 12: For Researchers with English as a Foreign Language
• Scientific Papers and Presentations: Ch. 20: To the International Student
• Writing for Scholarly Publication: Appendix B

List of Writing Books

The content of scientific writing: what and why to write.

• The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003 by Montgomery, Scott L.
• The Craft of Scientific Writing, 3rd Edition 3rd Edition by Michael Alley
• The Craft of Research by Booth, Coloumb, and Williams
• How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia

Organization and Flow: Structuring Ideas

• Writing for Science by Robert Goldbort
• Writing for Scholarly Publication by Anne Sigismund Huff
• Scientific Papers and Presentations by Martha Davis
• On Writing Well. 6th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2001 by William Zinsser
• Trees, Maps, and Theorems Effective Communication for Rational Minds, 2009 by Jean-Luc Doumont

Style: Creating Effective Paragraphs and Sentences

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr and E.B. White
• Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams
• They say I say: The Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

Editing: The Mechanics of Copy-Editing and Review

• The Copyeditors Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications by Amy Einsohn
• Line by Line: How to Improve your Own Writing by Claire Cook
• Revising Prose. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000 by Richard Lanham

Amazon Self-preferencing in the Shadow of the Digital Markets Act

Regulators around the world are discussing, or taking action to limit, self-preferencing by large platforms. This paper explores Amazon's search rankings of its own products as the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) was coming into effect. Using data on over 8 million Amazon search results at 22 Amazon domains in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, I document three things. First, conditional on rudimentary product characteristics, Amazon's own products receive search ranks that are 24 positions better on average throughout the sample period. Second, the Amazon rank differential is large in comparison with the differential for 142 other popular brands. Third, shortly after the EU designated Amazon a “gatekeeper” platform in September 2023, the Amazon rank differential fell from a 30 position advantage to a 20 position advantage, while other major brands' rank positions were unaffected. The changed Amazon search rankings appear in both Europe and other jurisdictions.

I disclosed that I received funding from my school to purchase data and to pay a research assistant. I thank Honey Batra for help collecting data, and I thank the Carlson School for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Computer Science > Information Retrieval

Title: a comprehensive survey on self-supervised learning for recommendation.

Abstract: Recommender systems play a crucial role in tackling the challenge of information overload by delivering personalized recommendations based on individual user preferences. Deep learning techniques, such as RNNs, GNNs, and Transformer architectures, have significantly propelled the advancement of recommender systems by enhancing their comprehension of user behaviors and preferences. However, supervised learning methods encounter challenges in real-life scenarios due to data sparsity, resulting in limitations in their ability to learn representations effectively. To address this, self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have emerged as a solution, leveraging inherent data structures to generate supervision signals without relying solely on labeled data. By leveraging unlabeled data and extracting meaningful representations, recommender systems utilizing SSL can make accurate predictions and recommendations even when confronted with data sparsity. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of self-supervised learning frameworks designed for recommender systems, encompassing a thorough analysis of over 170 papers. We conduct an exploration of nine distinct scenarios, enabling a comprehensive understanding of SSL-enhanced recommenders in different contexts. For each domain, we elaborate on different self-supervised learning paradigms, namely contrastive learning, generative learning, and adversarial learning, so as to present technical details of how SSL enhances recommender systems in various contexts. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at this https URL .

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A Solar Eclipse Means Big Science

By Katrina Miller April 1, 2024

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On April 8, cameras all over North America will make a “megamovie” of the sun’s corona, like this one from the 2017 eclipse. The time lapse will help scientists track the behavior of jets and plumes on the sun’s surface.

There’s more science happening along the path of totality →

An app named SunSketcher will help the public take pictures of the eclipse with their phones.

Scientists will use these images to study deviations in the shape of the solar surface , which will help them understand the sun’s churning behavior below.

The sun right now is approaching peak activity. More than 40 telescope stations along the eclipse’s path will record totality.

By comparing these videos to what was captured in 2017 — when the sun was at a lull — researchers can learn how the sun’s magnetism drives the solar wind, or particles that stream through the solar system.

Students will launch giant balloons equipped with cameras and sensors along the eclipse’s path.

Their measurements may improve weather forecasting , and also produce a bird’s eye view of the moon’s shadow moving across the Earth.

Ham radio operators will send signals to each other across the path of totality to study how the density of electrons in Earth’s upper atmosphere changes .

This can help quantify how space weather produced by the sun disrupts radar communication systems.

(Animation by Dr. Joseph Huba, Syntek Technologies; HamSCI Project, Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, the University of Scranton, NSF and NASA.)

NASA is also studying Earth’s atmosphere, but far from the path of totality.

In Virginia, the agency will launch rockets during the eclipse to measure how local drops in sunlight cause ripple effects hundreds of miles away . The data will clarify how eclipses and other solar events affect satellite communications, including GPS.

Biologists in San Antonio plan to stash recording devices in beehives to study how bees orient themselves using sunlight , and how the insects respond to the sudden atmospheric changes during a total eclipse.

Two researchers in southern Illinois will analyze social media posts to understand tourism patterns in remote towns , including when visitors arrive, where they come from and what they do during their visits.

Results can help bolster infrastructure to support large events in rural areas.

Read more about the eclipse:

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