Scientific genius and loss of a parent (1975)

Scientific Genius and Loss of a ParentAuthor(s): William R. WoodwardSource: Science Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 265-277Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/284525 .

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Science Studies, 4 (1974), 265-277

SCIENTIFIC GENIUS AND LOSS OF A PARENT

William R. Woodward Department of History of Science and Medicine, Yale University*

Biographical statistics, like vital statistics, are only what you make of them. In the nineteenth century, the purpose of collecting statistics on scientific men was to establish that 'genius' is passed down in families. DeCandolle, Odin and Galton each counted the leading men of science and letters and computed the percentage of kinsmen of a given eminent individual who also were eminent.' Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius is the famous example, purporting to show acknowledged greatness, yet betraying twinges of an attempt to buttress the Galton/Darwin family name against the intrusion of aristocratic pretenders.2 The spread of Social Darwinism, if not Galton's example, may have suggested to James McKeen Cattell on his visit to England the possibility of studying the hereditary component of eminence.3 This slant on the heredity-environment issue went out of fashion after Dean Brimhall's follow-up work4 on Cattell's American Men of Science in the I920S.5

The past fifty years have seen a swing to the environmental side of the issue. As might be expected from the explosion in the number of scientists, other factors than family-relatedness have come under investigation. One interesting factor, suggested by Anne Roe, is the death of a parent during the childhood of a scientist.6

The author gratefully acknowledges Professor Derek Price's guiding influence and helpful criticisms. He is also grateful to David Edge for his editorial direction and suggestions during the preparation of this Note.

*New Haven, Connecticut o6520, U.S.A.

1 Alphonse de Candolle, Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siecles (Geneva: H. Georg, I873); Alfred Odin, Genese des grands hommes, I (Paris: H. Welter, i895); II (Lausanne: H. Mignot, I895); Francis Galton, English Men of Science (London: Macmillan, I 874).

2 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869, I892, repr. New York: Horizon Press, 1952).

3 Cattell visited England in I 886 en route home from Leipzig (where he took his doctorate), and he was a lecturer at Cambridge University in x888, when he met Galton. His work on eminence commenced with 'A Statistical Study of American Men of Science: The Selection of a Group of One Thousand Scientific Men', Science, 24 (23 November, 30 November, and 7 December 1906), 658-65, 669-707, 732-42.

4 Dean R. Brimhall, 'Family Resemblances Among American Men of Science', American Naturalist, 56 (November/December 1922), 504ff, 57 (January/February, May/June, Sept- ember/October 1923), 74ff, 137ff, 326ff.

5 James McKeen Cattell and Dean R. Brimhall, American Men of Science, 3rd edn. (Garrison, N.Y.: Science Press, 192I).

' Anne Roe, The Making of a Scientist (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., I952), 84-5.



266 William R. Woodward

Bernice Eiduson confirmed this statistic in a different sample of scientists, and she concluded that social isolation in childhood is a contributory factor in the 'psychological world' of the scientist.7

The present study stands in the twentieth century tradition in that it treats an environmental variable-loss of a parent before the age of fifteen. A decade ago, Derek de Solla Price remarked that the characteristics of people who became eminent in the days of 'little science' might differ from those in the era of 'big science'.8 Specifically, he observed that 'many of the great men of science lost one parent early in youth . . . and became strongly attached to the other'.9 S. M. Silverman has gone beyond this suggestion of over-identification with the surviving parent to the speculation that withdrawal from the human to the natural world is also a function of parental deprivation.10 Our purpose is to test the hypothesis- implied by Price and Silverman-that the percentage of eminent scientists who lost a parent during childhood has been higher than the percentage of children in the population at large who lost a parent during the same age span.

LISTS OF SCIENTISTS It should be clear by now that we mean the ternm 'scientific geniuses' in the Gal- tonian sense of 'eminent men of science'. How to select them is another problem. While lists can be found, they suffer from the disadvantages of (a) limitation to a single scientific discipline, such as mathematics or psychology,11 (b) all-inclusiveness, generating far too long a list, as in a biographical dictionary of scientists,12 or (c) lack of the relevant data, namely, the dates of death of parents.'3 Since any list, old or new, is based on some criterion of eminence, and setting such a criterion for this special purpose would be invidious, we adopted instead a simple random approach, taking the biographies as we found them in Bell's Men of Mathematics and on the shelves of individual and collective biography at the Yale Medical- Historical Library.14 We were able to discover the exact dates of death of parents, and the ages of the scientists-to-be at those dates, for some sixty-four scientists. This empirical list, including men who had not lost a parent before the age of

I Bernice Eiduson, Scientists: Their Psychological World (New York: Basic Books, i962), 67.

8 Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York and London: Columbia University Press, I963), I 10.

9 Ibid., IO9. 10 S. M. Silverman, 'Parental Loss and Scientists', Science Studies, 4 (I974), 259-264. 11 A rich source of dates of death, nonetheless, is E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (New

York: Simon and Schuster, I937); surprisingly lacking in such data is Carl Murchison (ed.), History of Psychology in Autobiography, 5 Vols. (Worcester: Clark University Press, I93I; New York: Russell & Russell, 196I).

12 For example, the popular reference work with over iooo entries and few parental dates of death: Trevor I. Williams (ed.), A Biographical Dictionary of Scientists (New York: Wiley-Interscience, I969).

13 Useless for our purposes were the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, I970, repr. of Ist edn. of I887); the Dictionnaire de Biographie Francaise (Paris: Libraire Letouzey et Ane, I956); and the Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, I949-50, repr. of Ist edn. of I885-1901).

14 Professor Derek Price provided the seed list for this study.



Notes and Letters 267

fifteen (an age limit to childhood chosen so as to include the orphanhood data introduced below), as well as those who had, showed a very high percentage of orphaned scientists (i.e., orphaned by the loss of either parent). Then we realized that we had eliminated those men for whom dates of death of parents were not given; when parents survived the childhood of their son, this was not, in most cases, noted-whereas the loss of a parent during childhood, apparently, was. As a partial corrective for this artifact, we included those biographies previously read but excluded because they lacked dates of parental deaths. (For example, a comment that the parents sent their son to a university, or even the lack of mention of their deaths, was taken to mean that they survived his childhood.) The new total list of ninety-six was an arbitrary stopping point in a time-consuming search; of these scientists, thirty-eight had lost a parent during childhood. This crude attempt to devize a realistic sample gave a working percentage of 39.6% for scientists who lost one or both parents before age fifteen during the period 1400-I900. These scientists are listed in Appendices i and 2.

CONTEMPORARY DATA Although our lists are clearly not comprehensive ones, they do surpass previously published data on scientific orphans.'5 Their innovation is the inclusion of scientists who were not orphaned. For purposes of comparison, we looked for similar descrip- tive statistics in various contemporary sources: the two studies of scientists by Roe and Eiduson; Terman's famous longitudinal study of over 500 gifted children; and census data in England and Wales and in the United States.

Anne Roe first called attention to the fact that twenty-five per cent of her sample of biologists had lost a parent before age ten.16 Later, in a group comprising twenty-two physical scientists and twenty-two social scientists, in addition to the original twenty biologists, she found that thirteen per cent of physical scientists and nine per cent of social scientists had lost a parent by the same age. Altogether, then, ten out of sixty-four men, or 15.6%, had lost a parent before age ten.17 The data of Bernice Eiduson are drawn from six physicists, six geologists, twelve chemists, and sixteen biologists. Although Eiduson was impressed by the fact that nineteen of her forty scientists 'did not know their fathers very well', we note that only six out of forty, or fifteen per cent, had lost a parent before the

16 M. Goran, in 'The Proxy Parents of Pioneer Physical Scientists', Isis, 6o (October/ December i969), 645-6, mentioned seventeen scientists who had lost a parent before the twentieth century: S. M. Silverman has increased this figure to twenty-three (see Silverman, op. cit. note IO, 259-264). Our list brings the number to thirty-eight; it overlaps extensively with the foregoing lists, although it neglects the following nine men: A. Leeuwenhoek, N. Steno, J. Flamsteed, J. Hutton, S. Poisson, P. DuLong, A. Quetelet, F. Haber, and A. S. Eddington. The reason for this is that neither of these articles was known to me when my data were collected, and it would have interfered with my methodology of random search to add these men to my list afterwards, without a corresponding increase in scientists who did not lose a parent.

16 Anne Roe, 'A Psychological Study of Eminent Biologists', Psychological Monographs, 64 (October/December I951), 48ff.

17 Roe, op. cit. note 6, 85.




age of ten.18 Turning to Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius for data on non-scientists, we found that of 502 children, forty-two (8.4%) had lost a father, and thirteen (2.6%) were reported to have lost a mother before age thirteen, a total of ii.o%.19 Finally, orphanhood in the United States in I940, calculated from mortality rates by a formula which Lotka constructed earlier,20 is given by Dublin et al. as I2.7% (7.68% paternal orphans and 4.98% maternal orphans under age fifteen in the white population).21

Although the orphanhood percentages for non-scientists are lower than for scientists, two considerations tend to bring them into line. First, in the Terman study, the author suggested that if the mother were a stepmother, she might fail to report the 'loss of mother' and claim the honour of having a gifted child for herself; and he thought it possible that more children of widowed mothers entered the study because more attention or affection was offered to them. Secondly, the census of 1940 came approximately fifteen to twenty years after the time when most of Roe's subjects (and some of Terman's) would have reached their fifteenth birthday; thus declining mortality rates would, by then, have lowered the percentage loss of parent.

TESTING THE HYPOTHESIS We have presented the lists of scientists and gathered data from four contemporary sources. Clearly our data on scientists is from several different centuries, while the contemporary data stems from different decades, and the data cannot be compared without respect to changes in mortality in these periods. It is common knowledge that life expectancy has doubled in the period for which we have reliable records. Thus, Edmund Halley computed the mean length of life in Breslau during i687-91 to be 33.5 years; it had risen to 40.9 in England and Wales during I838-54, as measured by William Farr; yet T. N. E. Greville determined the average length of life in the United States in 1946 as 66.7.22 If mortality rates have declined as life expectancies have increased, then it would certainly be desirable to compare our list of scientists (who lost parents during the period I400 to I900)

18 Eiduson, op. cit. note 7, x. 19 Lewis M. Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius, I (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1925-47), 125-6. 20 Alfred I. Lotka, 'Orphanhood in Relation to Demographic Factors: a study in popula-

tion analysis', Metron, 9 (January/March 193 I), 37-IIO. Lotka explains that 'orphan' denotes any person who has lost a parent, and 'orphanhood' can be estimated from the formula

- Lv+ where a=age of child, v=average age of parent when the child is born, and

a + v = age of parent when the child is a years old. L is the number of parents, which is closely related to the mortality rate and the mean age of the fertility curve. Lotka also con- structs correction formulae for posthumous orphans (children whose fathers die before they are born) and puerperal orphans (whose mothers die in childbirth).

21 Louis I. Dublin, Alfred I. Lotka and Mortimer Spiegelman, Length of Life, 2nd edn. (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1949), 264-5.

22 Ibid., 42. Cf. Chap. 25, 'The Social Sciences', in Abraham Wolf, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and New York: Macmillan, 1939).




with the mortality data of an earlier period. Fortunately, we have for this purpose Lotka's curve for orphanhood in the latter nineteenth century, computed from mortality statistics of I87I-8o.23

100

90 /

80 -

70 * Baseline,mothers lost (Table 1) , Fathers lost (Table 2)

60 AMothers lost (Table2) 60-

g50- 4Q Z

E :3 A 030 -

A/

20 - A

10

O 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Age (yrs)

FIGURE I. Parents Lost Against Age of Scientist, Lotka Baseline (I871-80) and Empirical Data (1400-I900).

Let us leave aside for the moment the data on loss of parent during the twentieth century. Our hypothesis is that the percentage of eminent scientists before I900 who lost a parent prior to age fifteen was higher than the percentage of children in England and Wales during I87I -80 who lost a parent prior to the same age. Figure i shows the percentage loss of mother (no percentages are given for fathers) cumulated as a function of age by Lotka (see Table i). This becomes the baseline. Our data (Table 2), plotted on the same graph, has been cast into similar form by computing separately the cumulative percentage of mothers and of fathers lost. The artifact mentioned above is clearly in evidence: parental deaths in our sample of ninety-six scientists appear to have been noted more often when they occurred early and neglected when they occurred later on. We obtain Figure 2 by replotting the data up to age fifteen (see Tables i and 2).

93 Lotka, op. cit. note 20, 41.




TABLE i. Parents Lost Against Age of Child Cumulative percent of maternal and paternal orphans, computed by Lotka from census data in UK (I87I-80) and US (I920)

UK Maternal US Maternal Paternal Age orphans orphans orphans

o *35 .00 .52 0-I .76 .32 .87 I-2 I.58 .95 I.59 2-3 2.44 i.6o 2.32

3-4 3.33 2.25 3.07 4-5 4.25 2.9I 3.84 5 - 6 5.2I 3.58 4.64 6-7 6.I8 4.27 5.45 7-8 7.J6 4.96 6.29 8-9 8.I7 5.65 7.6 9-I0 9.20 6.35 8.04

I-I I I0.25 7.o8 8.96 I I-I2 II.3I 7.8I 9.9I I2-I3 I2.40 8.54 io.88 I3-I4 I3.53 9.29 I I.89 I4-15 I4.67 io.o6 I2.96

20-2I 22.09 I5.26 20.22

30-3 I 37.77 27.66 37.02 40-4I 59.46 47.25 59.67 50-5 I 82.20 71.9I 82.33 6o-6i 96.og 9I.43 96.04 70-7I 99.7I 99.00 99.7I

Now we can test the hypothesis. On the baseline provided by Lotka's data, I4.67% of the children of England and Wales in the period I87I-80 have lost a mother before age fifteen. In our empirical tally, ninety-six scientists have lost forty-five parents by that age;24 the loss of parent figure is 46.88%, and the loss of mother figure is exactly twenty-one out of ninety-six, or 2I.8%-some 7.2I

percentage points higher than the baseline of I4.67%, or a loss rate I.49 times normal. We can understand this difference by taking into account the average year of birth of the scientists (1756), which is long before the advances in preventive

24 If we read Table 2, only forty-one parents (twenty-two fathers, nineteen mothers) died before their child reached age fifteen. However, Appendix I lists two paternal deaths (Aronhold, Betti) and two maternal ones (von Haller, Copernicus) which could not be tabulated because the exact year was not known to us. Thus, forty-five parents (twenty-four fathers, twenty-one mothers) were lost before age fifteen. This statistic is necessary in order to compare our data with Lotka's paternal and maternal orphahhood statistics (Table x). Parental loss (forty-five), which includes absolute orphans (seven), should be distinguished from children who lost a parent (thirty-eight), which does not include them.



Notes and Letters 27I

medicine which brought about drastic decreases in mortality rates by the I88os. For example, the widespread use of inoculation for smallpox begun by Edward Jenner in I798 and the introduction of asepsis by Joseph Lister in I867 had helped to reduce infant and parental mortality.25 It is, therefore, premature to accept our hypothesis.

TABLE 2. Parents Lost Against Age of Scientist Cumulative number (N) and percent (ioo N/96) of total parents of same sex from empirical data on scientists I400-I900.

Age Mothers lost Fathers lost Age N N/96 N N/96

0 2 2.I

0-I 3 3.2

I-2 I 1.I

2-3 3 3.2 4 4.2 3-4 4 4.2 6 6.3 4-5 8 8.2

5-6 7 7.3 6-7 II II.5 9 9.3 7-8 I3 I3.4 I2 I2.4

8-9 I5 I5.6 I4 I4.5 9-I0 I5 I5.6

io-i I i8 I8.8 I6 i6.6 II-I2 I9 I9.8 I2-I3 I9 I9.8 I3-I4 20 2o.8 I4-I5 22 22.9 20-2I 24 25.0 29 30.2

30-3I 27 28.I 40 4I.7 40-4I 3 I 32.3 53 55.2 50-5 I 38 39.6 57 59.4 6o-6i 4I 42.7 63 64.6 70-7I 42 43.8 80-8 I 43 44.8

We would like to make a similar test of the hypothesis for the period since I900, and we are able to do this by comparing our contemporary data with Lotka's curve, calculated by his formula from U.S. mortality rates in I920 (see Table I). Note that the contemporary data (as does Lotka's) derive entirely from the United

26 Logan Clendening, Sourcebook of Medical History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2942, I960), 29I-300, 603-2I.




States. Figure 3 shows that on the Lotka baseline, loss of father before age fifteen is higher (12.96%) than loss of mother (io.o6%). The four studies (Roe, Eiduson, Terman, and Dublin et at.) give us summed data-points at ages ten, thirteen and fifteen, respectively. Roe and Eiduson used the earlier cut-off, while Terman's is at thirteen and Dublin's tables can be read in consonance with our own at age fifteen. Generally speaking, the studies of scientists were on or above the baselines at age ten, while studies of gifted children and United States children were somewhat below and evenly distributed about the baselines at ages thirteen and fifteen. Taking a closer look, Roe's data are very near, with 7.8% loss of

25 V

v 20 A v

A

v Baseline,mothers lost (Table 1) v Fathers lost (Table 2)

- 15 _ A Mothers- ost(Table2) A v

A tN ^ ~~~~~~~~~v

p 10 _

E v 5

A

o L L, 1 I I I I I I I I I t I

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Age(yrs)

FIGURE 2. Parents Lost Against Age of Scientist (same data as Figure i).

father and 7.8% loss of mother. Eiduson's data are above the line for loss of father (io.o%) and below for loss of mother (5.o%). Terman's data are close to the baseline at age I3 with 8.4% loss of father, though well below it with 2.6% loss of mother. His two reasons for this discrepancy were stated above. The 1940 data in Dublin et al. reflect an extremely acute difference between white and black mortality statistics.26 Thus, for blacks, loss of father (i8.5%) and mother (13.5%) are both

26 Dublin et al., op. cit. note 2I, 265. Improvement in mortality, it seems, has been confined to certain socioeconomic strata. Bear in mind that we are comparing a curve computed for whites in I920, on the basis of fertility and mortality conditions then, with census data on whites and blacks in 1940.




far above the I920 baseline; by contrast, for whites, loss of father (7.7%) and mother (5.o%) are both well below the baseline. Since most scientists have been white, we need to consider only the white comparison statistics. Here the two decades from I920 to I940 explain the difference between baseline and white statistics, in view of mortality rate decreases coincident with life expectancy increases from 56.3 to 62.8 years (for white males at birth).27

20 v

15 0 . Baselines, mothers lost (lwer), fathers lost (upper)

v Fathers lost (Text) ? 10 l Mothe-s lost (Text) v

E

5 A A Eiduson Dublin

A

Terman 0 L I I - I I - - I I I I L I I - I

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Age (yrs)

FIGURE 3. Parents Lost Against Age of Scientist, Lotka Baseline (I920) and Empirical Data (after I900).

In summary, we can see that the dispersion of the contemporary data is around the baselines: Roe's and Terman's data are virtually on it, and Eiduson's and Dublin's data range as far above as below it. Accordingly, the hypothesis that scientists lose parents at a higher percentage than the rest of the population is rejected for the period after I900.

ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ESTIMATES Why do the data agree with theory in the post-Igoo period, but not, apparently, in the pre-igoo period? Is there a variable which we have not recognized, and might it explain the discrepancy between prediction and fact, between Lotka's data computed for i87i-80 and our empirical data for I400-I900 ?

27 Ibid., 50.




We lack data on loss of parent for the general population before i88o. We have already mentioned that preventive medicine led to a drop in mortality rate during the nineteenth century. Let us adopt the mortality rate as the probable missing variable. We can make use of it to estimate the percentage of children who lost a parent in the epochs of 1850, I900, and 1950, thereby creating order of magnitude estimates for the past century and a quarter. Given the mortality rates in fifteen European countries in I84I-45, I896-I900, and I933,28 we make two assumptions: (i) that all parents are thirty years old when they have a child, and (ii) that loss of a parent is an independent event.29 This makes it possible to consider the next fifteen years of the parent's life in the way that we have hitherto considered the first fifteen years of the child's life. In either case, the loss of a parent is the important statistic.

In I84I-45, the death rate in Europe was 22.5 per iooo (or 2.25%) per year. (We note in passing that this rate refers to the total population, undifferentiated by sex.) Multiplying by fifteen, the number of childhood years, we arrive at 33.8% as the percentage of parents of either sex who will have died before their child reached the age of fifteen. Similarly, we have a mortality rate in i896-i900 of I9.5 per Iooo (or I.95%); from this we obtain 29.3% as the percentage of parents who died during the span of their child's life, but fifty years later in time. Finally, the mortality rate in I933 was 12.5 per Iooo, and i8.8% of parents died before their child passed age fifteen.

Let us now compare these order of magnitude estimates with the data we have previously presented. In Table 3 we have order of magnitude estimates of the percentage of parents who died before their child reached age fifteen: these are for I84I-45, 33.8%; for I896-I900, 29.3%; and for I933, i8.8%. We also have Lotka's computed percentage (I4.67%) of children under fifteen who lost a mother over the time period I87I-80; since this refers to only one sex, we must double it to yield an approximate percentage (29.3%) of children who lost either parent. Again from Lotka, we have a calculated figure for I920 of 23.0% loss of parent (the sum of a io.o6% loss of mother and a I2.96% loss of father). Thus, the first two columns in Table 3 refer to the general population, and the third alone repre- sents the scientists. Our empirical data on the sample of ninety-six eminent scientists (I400-I900) yields a figure of 39.6% who lost a parent. The sixty-four scientists treated by Roe and the forty scientists by Eiduson (since I900) show, respectively,

28 Robert Kuczynski, The Measurement of Population Growth (London: Sidgewick and Jackson, Ltd., 1935), I62.

29 The mortality rates available to us for the earlier epochs are not listed by age. The age of thirty in assumption i is chosen for illustrative purposes; in fact, the mean age of the fertility curve was 32.9 for white males and 28.6 for white females in the United States in 1920. It can safely be applied to our earlier epochs, for as Lotka states: 'It lies in the nature of things that this mean age of the fertility curve is a relatively constant figure even though the fertility itself may undergo considerable changes, the reason being that these changes are largely changes in amplitude rather than changes in the position of the fertility curve along the axis of age'. Assumption 2 means that a child can lose only one parent before age fifteen; actually, absolute orphanhood runs about ten per cent of single parent orphanhood, although it is closer to nineteen per cent when allowance is made for interdependence of death of father and mother. See Lotka, op. cit. note 20, 40-I.




a I5.6% loss of parent (the sum of 7.8% losses of each parent) and a I5.0% loss (the sum of a io.o% loss of father and a 5.0% loss of mother) before age ten. Extrapolating these figures linearly by a factor of I.5, we obtain respectively a 23.4% and a 22.5% loss of parent before age fifteen, or an average for I04 contemporary scientists of 22.9% who lost a parent (since none were absolute orphans).

TABLE 3. Percentage Loss of Parent Before Age I5. Scientists versus the general population during three epochs

GENERAL POPULATION SCIENTISTS Order of magnitude Computed (Lotka) Empirical (Woodward)

I841-45 33.8% 1400-1900 39.6% I896-I900 29.3% I87I-I880 29.3% 1933 i8.8% 1920 23.0% after 1900 22.9%

CONCLUSION It is clear, from Table 3, that our hypothesis is untenable for twentieth century scientists. Roughly one child in five loses a parent by age fifteen in the twentieth century, whether or not he is destined to become a scientist. Our data on earlier scientists suggests approximately double this figure-but this is only six percentage points higher than the best mid-nineteenth century estimate for the population at large. We can easily accept this degree of underestimation in a figure encompas- sing earlier centuries. We therefore conclude that our hypothesis is, in general, untenable. There is no evidence, at any epoch, that the percentage of scientists who lose a parent before the age of fifteen is significantly higher than that for the general population. The extent of the dramatic drop in mortality rates in the past century, associated with (among other factors) modern medical practices, invalidates the claims we have been considering.

It is, however, still true that a high percentage of earlier scientists lost a parent during childhood, and further investigation of this quite common personality factor is justified. Silverman suggests the age of six as a kind of 'watershed' in parental loss, and has speculated on the differing roles of mother and father in the child's development. In any individual case, such factors may well be signifi- cant. The analysis of scientific biography could then proceed along multiple lines: the strict Freudian interpretation might stress the psychic trauma and its later 'overdetermination' of manifest behaviour; neo-Freudian views would emphasize effects of parental deprivation on psychosocial development as a function of the epigenetic stage at which loss of parent occurs; and factor analytic approaches would offer a personality profile in terms of traits and types. Such studies could well illuminate any historical changes in the 'scientific personality'-and hence in the social context in which the 'scientific role' has been practised.




APPENDIX i. Scientists Who Lost a Parent Before Age 15 (140o-I900)*

Name (Year of Birth) Age at death of Name (Year of birth) Age at death of father, mother father, mother

J. d'Alembert (1717) 9, ? A. von Humboldt (1769) 9, L S. H. Aronhold (i8ig) +, ? C. Huyghens (I629) 58, 8 I. Barrow (i677) L, 6 E. Kummer (i8io) 3, ? J. Berzelius (I779) 4, 9 R. Laennec (178i) L, 4 E. Betti (i823) +, ? A. L. Lavoisier (1743) 32, 5 H. Boerhaave (i668) i4, 4 G. Leibniz (i646) 6, i8 R. Boyle (I627) 17, 4 N. Lobachevski (1792) 7, ? G. Buffon (1707) ?, 7 J. C. Maxwell (i831) 27, 8 H. Cavendish (i73i) 51, 2 D. I. Mendeleev (i834) i3, i6 N. Copernicus (I473) I0, early age I. Newton (i642) 0, 47 M. Curie (I867) 35, II B. Pascal (I623) 0, 4 C. Darwin (I809) 39, 8 C. Polhem (i66i) 8, ? R. Descartes (1596) 44, o J. Priestley (i733) 46, 6 A. Fleming (i88i) 7, 47 B. Silliman (i779) "I, 39 J. B. Fourier (1768) 8, 8 B. Thompson (I753) I, ? A. von Haller (1708) 12, under 5 W. Thomson (I824) 25, 6 W. R. Hamilton (I705) i4, I2 A. Volta (i745) 8, ? J. B. van Helmont (I577) 3, L K. Weierstrass (I815) ?, II R. Hooke (i635) 13, ? C. T. R. Wilson (I869) 4, ?

Key L = parent living when scientist reached age If

+ = parent died before scientist reached age I5 ?= no information.

* The dates in this Appendix are on the whole consistent with those in Silverman's Table i (op. cit. note io), but there are some small differences. For Mendeleev, my source is Daniel Posin, Mendeleyev -(New York: McGraw Hill, 1948), 23; for Boyle, R. E. W. Maddison, The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle, F.R.S. (London: Taylor and Francis Ltd., I969), 292.

APPENDIX 2. Scientists Who Did Not Lose a Parent Before Age I5

Name (Year of birth) Age at death of Name (Year of birth) Age at death of father, mother father, mother

N. Abel (I802) i8, ? F. Bacon (I56i) i8, 49

L. Agassiz (1807) 30, L C. Bernard (I8I3) 33, 53 G. Airy (i8oi) L, L F. Bessel (1784) L, L A. M. Ampere (I775) i8, ? B. Bolzano (178I) L, L J. J. Audubon (1785) L, L G. Boole (i8I5) L, L A. Avogadro (1776) 36, L G. Cardano (Ioi) 22, 35 C. Babbage (1792) 35, ? A. Cauchy (1789) 58, 49

(cont'd overleaf)




APPENDIX 2 (cont'd). Scientists Who Did Not Lose a Parent Before Age I5

Name (Year of birth) Age at death of Name (Year of birth) Age at death of father, mother father, mother

A. Cayley (I821) L, L J. Kepler (I571) L, L H. Cushing (I869) 41, 34 R. Koch (I843) L, L G. Cuvier (1769) 33, 24 L. Kronecker (I823) L, L J. Dalton (1766) 21, L J. L. Lagrange (1736) L, L H. Davy (788) I5, 47 J. B. Lamarck (i744) i6, ? R. Dedekind (I831) L, L P. S. Laplace (I749) L, L B. Franklin (I706) 38, 46 Leonardo da Vinci (I452) 52, L S. Freud (I856) 40, 74 J. Liebig (I803) L, L G. Galilei (1564) 27, L C. von Linnaeus (1707) L, L E. Galois (i 8ii) i6, 6i J. Lister (I827) L, 37 F. Galton (I822) 22, 52 H. Olbers (1758) L, L C. Gauss (I777) 32, 62 L. Pasteur (I822) 43, 36 J. Gay-Lussac (1778) L, L I. Pavlov (I849) L, L J. Gibbs (I839) 22, i6 H. Poincare (I826) 38, L W. Gilbert (I544) L, L G. Riemann (I826) L, L H. von Helmholtz (I821) 38, 33 A. Schweitzer (I875) 50, 4I C. Hermite (I822) L, L H. Spencer (I820) 46,47 F. Herschel (1792) L, L J. W. Strutt (I842) 3I, L T. H. Huxley (I825) L, L J. J. Thomson (I845) i6, 45 C. G. Jacobi (I804) 28, L C. Wren (I632) 25, L J. P. Joule (i8i8) 40, i6 T. Young (1773) L, L A. Keith (i866) i8, L J. Watt (1736) 46, 17

Key As for Appendix i.

Totals and Percentages Appendix I: 38 scientists, 39.58%

(24 fathers lost, 25.00%) (2I mothers lost, 2I.88%)

Appendix 2: 58 scientists, 60.42%

Sum: 96 scientists, ioo.oo%



Scientific genius and loss of a parent (1975)

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