Frederic Lawrence Holmes

LARRY HOLMES was a historian of science of unusual rigor, range, productivity, and steadfastness. During year between diagnosis of his terminal illness and his death, he wrote one book and almost completed a second. The finished one, now published as Investigative Pathways: Patterns and Stages in Careers of Experimental Scientists (Yale, 2004), will almost certainly become his most widely read book. It a masterpiece of method. It gives illustrations from his lengthier works of his particular practice of excavating laboratory notebooks and other raw data to reconstruct course of scientific discovery. The unfinished volume, to be completed by colleagues, applies method to (as its working title has it) the pathway of Seymour Benzer into rll region. This last of a series beginning with Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (1974) and continuing through Lavoisier and Chemistry of Life (1985), Hans Krebs: Formation of a Scientific Life (1991), Hans Krebs: Architect of Intermediary Metabolism (1993), Lavoisier again (Antoine Lavoisier-The Next Crucial Year: Or, The Sources of His Quantitative Method in Chemistry, 1997), and a history of the most beautiful experiment in Meselson, Stahl, and Replication of DNA (2001). This list ignores an unpublished book-length manuscript on Justus von liebig, on which Holmes worked while engaged with Bernard and Lavoisier. Holmes's scholarly itinerary shows same sorts of twists and turns, opportunism, luck, privileged access, flashes of insight, hard work, and higher purpose that he found in his scientists' journeys. His higher purpose, bond that tied his diverse investigations together, was to understand scientific creativity. He did not care to write full biographies, even full intellectual biographies; only portions of careers leading to major discoveries commanded his sustained attention. Holmes was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended high school. He graduated from MIT in 1954 with a major in quantitative biology, then switched to Harvard and to history. After two years in Air Force, he returned to finish his M.A. (in 1958). He then switched again, to history of science (Ph.D., Harvard, 1962). In 1964, following two years of teaching in MIT's Department of Humanities, he moved to Yale as assistant professor (and was promoted to associate professor without tenure in 1968) in Department of History of Science and Medicine. In 1972, still without tenure at Yale, he accepted a professorship at University of Ontario. He returned to Yale in 1979 as professor and chair of a section in history of medicine in School of Medicine that had been founded to fill space vacated by closing of department he had joined fifteen years earlier. Recently Holmes was instrumental in creating a Program in History of Science and Medicine conducted by faculty from his section and from history department. I first met Holmes in late 1960s at an annual gathering of History of Science Society. He invited me to breakfast. That amazed me. Real academics attending professional meetings need morning to recover from hard thinking of night before. Holmes could not spare time. At breakfast I had another surprise. He talked not only about his current work, but also about his plans for his next book, and for one after through half a dozen major ones, and about effect he hoped they would have on profession. He stopped and flashed his wonderful smile. And that, he said, is all I'll have time for. His count was almost exactly right. Holmes did not have precise topics of all his books in mind at that breakfast forty years ago. He did not pick his topics on basis of his prior knowledge of science or languages he would have to master. The availability of a detailed record was cardinal requirement; rest was historian's equivalent to building experimental apparatus. …

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