In the rapidly growing recent historical and literary scholarship on the genre of biography, a quote from Virginia Woolf has achieved classic status: "How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailors' bills, love letters and old picture postcards?" It pointedly frames the biographer's unresolvable dilemma in terms of her sources. How to navigate between an empiricist faith in a subject speaking through these paper traces, and the constructivist awareness of the biographer's role in "making" this life? My contribution is concerned with how scientific practice changes the generic forms in which the biographical subject is traditionally taken to speak --- such as letters or diaries --- in the case of the German test pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg (1903-1945). The fragmented records of Schiller's life have left room for much biographical controversy about her work for the Luftwaffe as a woman of Jewish descent, and her potential involvement in her husband's family's resistance to Hitler. Placing her diary and other texts in the context of the recording and note-taking practices that were developed as part of the professionalization of scientific test flying, I argue that the construal of Schiller's predicament in terms of politicized ethnicity alone leaves aside her own understanding of her work in aviation research as epistemically and morally meaningful. Hers is a case where biography can serve to examine how scientific practice shapes the practitioner by reconfiguring older cultural technologies of self-articulation.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries metaphors acquired biologies, and then biographies. Emerson, in 1842, said “Language is fossil poetry”; modernist poets and critics gave criteria for what made a “healthy metaphor”; and it became possible for a metaphor to die. A dead metaphor is a once-figurative expression whose figure, vivid in the past, is no longer apparent. In contrast, the figure in a live metaphor is present and active, wrenching around the order of things. Some causes of death are ascertainable by literary scholars; others need to concern historians of science. This paper shows how historians of science are in a privileged position to observe the lives and deaths of metaphors. My main exhibit will be metaphors of perception in late-nineteenth-century psychology and physiology. These are metaphors whose differences once formed the basis of theoretical disagreements, about the contribution of the perceiver and the integrity of the perceived. Since that period of diversity and contest, these metaphors—such as the “stream of consciousness”—have incurred death by two counts: death by consolidation and death by banality. I show how science is implicated in these deaths, by the changing of scientific theories and, equally, by theories consolidating or gaining empirical verification and acceptance—thus no longer requiring the epistemic work of a live metaphor. I argue that metaphors live precariously in science, but to mark their time of life is to restore their distinctive potency and to better recognize, for a particular historical moment, the nature of its epistemic freedom.

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.

By recognizing the essential, lived dimension of the ideas people use to organize their thinking about the world, biography has the potential to restore motivating ideals to historical understanding. In this paper I will develop this thesis by considering the ways the idea and ideal of reason were supported and shaped in the lives of a family that flourished from the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. All of the members of this family were convinced that reason defined their essence as human beings, and although some of the details changed over time, all were essentially agreed on the basic parameters of the reason that defined them as human thinkers. Nonetheless, over the course of their lives, their ideas of reason were severely tested by their lived experiences. Their conviction that the ability to reason constituted the essential definition of what it was to be human was challenged by efforts to establish a constructive relationship between English gentiles and Jews, by the intense experience of raising young children, by harrowing confrontations with sudden and untimely death. Biography offers a means of restoring the negotiations between the idea of reason and these lived experiences to the historical record. By so doing it deepens our understanding of the directions in which ideas of reason developed, in response to their role as an ideal that shaped human lives.