Living the history of science

A few years back, I was travelling on a bus through the mountains of Utah with a journal editor-in-chief. An unexpected consequence of her job was the realization that each paper accepted for publication immediately became part of scientific history. This idea was a metaphorical slap for me, because it crystallized thoughts that had been burbling around in my head for awhile. For all my jokes about celebrity scientists, and attempts to maintain humility about my own discoveries and achievements, I have always been careful about what I publish. Manuscripts sometimes sit in my filing cabinet for decades, waiting for conditions to be right so they can be completed.

Obsessiveness and perfectionism aside, at some point we have to release our discoveries into the world. We don't know which will be the big ones, and realistically, none are likely to be big in a way that will impress the local newspaper, our neighbours or the dog. But they will all be part of the micro-history of some micro scientific field, and  relevant to a wider micro-world in some way.

The history of art is captured in the galleries of the world, but no one would claim that every piece in every museum is an indispensable part of history. Yet, they are all part of the grand story of art in the same way that all scientific papers are part of the narrative of scientific discoveries about our world. Dead celebrity scientists are represented in the museums of the history of science that dot the globe, but what about the rest of us? 

In London, England, the city council has placed round, blue plaques in sidewalks around the city to commemorate sites where famous people, including famous scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday, lived or performed great works. In Chicago, USA, there are larger explanatory plaques on sign posts, such as the one in front of the house where the physicist Enrico Fermi lived, shown at the top of this article. I doubt the present occupants of the house are disturbed too often by Fermi groupies ringing their doorbell and asking to see where Enrico slept, but you never know.

I live in a wood-lot outside the city, and like every field biologist am often obsessive about documenting the plants and animals and tiny things that share the property. I fantasize about creating an identification manual for whoever inherits these acres, imagining how impressed they will be by all the species living on the grounds. A few years ago, to the perplexity of the arborist we hire to clean up messes that I can't handle, I was very emphatic that a certain bunch of dead branches were not to be touched because they were part of my work. The notion that a scattering of dead maple branches on the ground could become some kind of minor scientific reserve because a new species was discovered on them, seemed too improbable to explain.

Yesterday, I was cycling along a trail near home, and stopped by a tree that I visit frequently.  I am a bit like a dog who finds something surprising in a certain place, and then checks the same spot every day for the rest of his life just in case something unexpected might occur again. So this is an interesting tree, and for the last few years I have found something rare living on it, not a new species, but a very old and obscure one. The biological community is now in the process of trying to sequence the genome of every living species under the sun. I decided to try to collect this rare species again, and put it forward for genome sequencing, yet another contribution of unknown significance to the knowledge of mankind. Then I will go to an engraving shop, after the genome is done and published, and buy a little brass label explaining that this tree was the site where the first genome of that species originated, perhaps including the URL where the sequence is stored.

Then today I thought, "Why not do this for everything?" We should all do this for everything! Our scientific institutions should display an ever expanding index documenting the connections between discovery and location. Scientists should start a respectful guerrilla movement and begin labelling, as permanently as possible, the sites where discoveries are made. Nothing is permanent, but even in our Information Age, this kind of knowledge evaporates too easily. Even if it is stored digitally, it is buried in bits and bytes of quiet databases, disconnected from the tangible world. 

If we do this, most of these little mementoes will probably be destroyed eventually, but maybe some will be preserved. Perhaps this will be one way to excite little sparks of curiosity, and inform the populace that scientists inhabit their day to day world as surely as artists do.