Abstract Summary
Scientific institutions have long occupied a central position in the processes of production, transfer and certification of knowledge. Since their establishment, such organized bodies developed their own identity traits, became actors with a variety of functions in world affairs, and underwent temporal transformations. Taken together, these features make institutions particularly suitable to be described in anthropomorphized terms. It comes as no surprise, then, that historians have often made use of biographical terminology to narrate the stories of these kinds of bodies. It remains an open question, however, whether there is a substantial gain in understanding the histories of scientific institutions as biographies or whether the biographical terminology is rather employed at the purely metaphorical level. In the present paper, I address from the historiographical perspective the concerns of applying a biographical approach for analyzing, understanding, and narrating the stories of particular kinds of scientific institutions: international nongovernmental bodies devoted to assessing, certifying, standardizing and diffusing scientific knowledge in physics across national borders. By discussing episodes from the ‘lives’ of the International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation (1959-1974) and of the European Physical Society (1968-present), I shall argue that, notwithstanding its various limits, the biographical approach is a useful analytical tool as it allows to address in a unified narrative the multiple functions, both scientific and political, of these sorts of organizations.
