Biography has for long been an important medium in the transmission of images of scientists and ideas about science. Whether in the form of celebratory accounts of the heroes and heroines of science or more rounded, critical studies, the lives of such famous figures as Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Madame Curie have always been assured a ready market and an eager audience. Today, as seldom before, the general public is hungry for news about science and consumes scientific biography with relish.

Perhaps surprisingly, very little criticism or comment has accompanied the recent resurgence of interest in scientific biography; nor are there readily available any detailed or comprehensive studies of the development of the genre, its status and influence. Telling Lives in Science is in fact the first book of its kind.

Since the seventeenth century, memoirs, anecdotes and portraits of leading natural philosophers have been central in forming the way in which the scientific community is perceived by outsiders and perceives itself. Although the history of science has blossomed over the past twenty years and undertaken detailed explorations of the culture of science, biography has until recently been viewed as an old-fashioned, stale and distinctly uninteresting resource. Far more attention has been paid to scientific textbooks, novelistic tales of science and laboratory notebooks than to biographical accounts. While the former, properly interpreted, can be immensely rich and revealing, the latter have been often dismissed as simplistic and self-serving.