We need new science stories

I am midway through writing my 8th book. Please send help.

Drunkenly at a literary festival once, Alice Roberts and I dreamt up the following model for various aspects of our professional lives: festival talks are like one-night stands – fun, exciting, largely anonymous and over quite quickly. Making television programmes is like being in an abusive relationship – this needs little explanation. But books are like raising children – you pour your wisdom, experience, life and love into their birth, you nurture them, you have favourites (but never admit it), but ultimately, they escape your gravity and have lives of their own.

I’ve written seven (and a half) books. The lives these books have is fascinating. Sometimes ideas are zeitgeisty, and don’t linger. Other times they come into their own years later. The talks that literary festivals seem to ask for most nowadays are about family trees, from the tree of life to the genealogies on the royals, in which I hack down the whole metaphor of trees, and unleash the truth bombs that everyone today is descended from everyone alive at a specific point in time if you go back far enough, but far enough really only means a few centuries. I first wrote about this in A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, which will be 10 next year. I’ve recently resurrected my unobvious but effective comparison of genetic engineering and hip hop – both invented by New Yorkers in 1973, both giving birth to new previously impossible chimaeras, both commercialised into megalithic industries, and then hamstrung by copyright and/or patent restrictions. I’m turning this into something for broadcast soon.

The next book will not be called its current working title ‘The Atlas of All Creation’, but it is a new history of science, and of the universe. My contention is that scientists often make poor historians, and the version of the story of science that dominates the popular narrative is whiggish, linear, and adheres to the Great Man Theory that academic history began abandoning decades ago. We continue to draw straight lines from Aristotle to Hawking via a lot of great men doing great and often heretical things because they were lone geniuses revolting against the status quo. Often, this narrative is projected because the current crop of wannabe great men want to position themselves on this lineage. If you’re lucky you might get Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin thrown in, because women also exist. The fact that we continue to perpetuate the Great Men of Science says more about us than it does about them.

Man alive, I am tired of these fables. In the new book, I’ll be doing some debunking of the standard tropes of the history of science (Archimedes’ Eureka! moment never happened; that was debunked by Galileo; Galileo never said ‘eppur si muove’ – ‘and yet it moves’ in weltschmerz defiance of the Church’s refusal to accept heliocentrism; an apple never fell on Newton’s head – when has an apple ever fallen on anyone’s head? Instead, it took him 20 years to develop gravitational theory, and in that time spent much of it attempting alchemy (as many did at that time), slagging off his peers (as many do at this time), and calculating the age of the Earth (about 4000 years). And jamming a bodkin into his eyeball to see how visual perception works – I’ve handled a lot of human eyes in my time, and I do not recommend this. Even the revised Rosalind Franklin story is not true: Photograph 51 was not stolen, nor taken by her, and wasn’t the key piece in the puzzle that enabled Crick and Watson to solve the double helical structure of DNA. The attempted revisions to Jim Watson’s story of the double helix in his book of the same name merely play to his enjoyably breathless but ultimately fictionalised narrative. According to recent research by Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, the real story renders Franklin a more interesting and better scientist than merely the victim of institutional and Watson’s explicit sexism. He mythologised the discovery, we created a new myth to fix it.

All of these tales misrepresent the history, and misrepresent science. Science is a collegial process and a social activity. It’s always political, because science is done by people. Data is never neutral because it is always collected and curated by people. We should aim to minimise these influences, but those who deny them really haven’t been paying attention for the last several hundred years.

I wonder if you might help me. I am never not deeply in awe of the niche and peculiar expert knowledge that people harbour. I’m not going to say here what stories and which people will feature in the new book, so as not to bias you or spoilerise it. I’m attempting to sing some new songs about why we know what we know. Some of these are known but not well known, others, I hope, will be new to a mainstream audience.

But I’d really like you to send me suggestions of tales that are not well known, and people who are unsung in the story of science – heroines or heroes, or rogues, or any combination, because people are strange and complex. I want to centre the people from your hometown who deserve a statue, or a biography. The people whose work was foundational to the big discoveries that we do know. The collectors, the tinkerers, the women who did the work but whose names are eclipsed by the men who took credit. The villains. Who do you think is missing or unheard in the story of science? Tell me. We need new stories.

(And give me a title).