Here’s an odd angle: how did scientists come to co-operate? This question and the fact that Lorraine Daston’s Rivals is in the Columbia Global Reports series, made me want to settle in to a great philosophical/historical discussion. But, for the first time since I began reviewing this normally superlative series, my curiosity was not even addressed.

The book came out of a lecture Daston gave. She spent years researching in national and company libraries. The result is a recitation of history without much attempt to evaluate, until the conclusion. Worse, for me at any rate, Daston does not address the things that make science and scientists controversial if not suspicious today. It made me question the whole concept of this book.

First of all, science is really very recent. Scientists were known as natural philosophers until just 300 years ago. Second, co-operation is a function of communication, and the farther back you look, the less communication was even possible. Galileo did not have a whole lot of peers – that he even knew of – that he could communicate with, let alone work with.

With better communications and more traveling, scientists could finally make contact with others. But would they be pigheaded rivals, or co-operative and generous co-workers? The clear answer must be both; it takes all kinds.

Daston reaches back to find international co-operation in fits and starts, as you might expect. Unfortunately, all the wealth early on was in the hands of the monarch, which meant politics and favors for supporting whatever the scientists were undertaking together. This became crystal clear when the Universal Postal Union came into being (1874). Postmasters from around the world congregated in Switzerland to hammer out a system whereby mail from other countries would be accepted and delivered locally. The key to it all was the word postmaster. No “diplomats” were involved, so the work got done, by the people who understood the mechanics of it. This is the first demonstrable example of a global working group succeeding totally. And the UPU remains precisely the system we continue to employ today, despite Donald Trump nearly pulling the USA out of it.

It was really only since World War II that scientists have been conferencing and co-operating on things like global measurements and universal standards. They are getting to network, meet face to face, and to leverage each other’s strengths. They also have all their professional journals, where peers supposedly review papers that are submitted for publication. This has devolved into a constant scandal of corruption, with articles having to be retracted by the publisher, and scams whereby literally thousands of scientists get credit as co-authors of a four page paper, just so they can say they published something. Some publishers openly sell the space. Again, it takes all kinds.

The bulk of the book is a microscopic examination of two international efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: The cloud atlas and the star/sky map. Atmospheric scientists wanted to catalog every kind of cloud around the world. They had a great deal of difficulty with co-operation, standards, and the overwhelming costs of putting together a book with so many fine graphics (for the time). Politics played a big role, as France for example, insisted it be printed in France and in French. The usual.

The astronomical map fared far better, as astronomers around the world accepted blocks of sky to photograph, played by the rules and regulations they were given, and ultimately produced a map that a hundred years later is proving valuable in comparing the size and position of various entities in the sky. It worked because of the enthusiasm of the practitioners, and of the indefatigable project leader, who traveled the world to enlist them to his cause. Meeting them in person made all difference.

Both case studies are filled with characters very few readers will recognize, and whose strategic moves and perseverance seems totally unimportant in today’s world of mass co-operation and the management of large groups of researchers. They are not household names, did not go on to win the Nobel Prize or publish deathless papers, it seems. Christopher Nolan will not be making Imax feature films about them. They have little importance.

Yet far from the handful of astronomers participating in the study, today’s estimate of co-operating researches numbers almost four million globally, Daston says. Co-operation is now endemic.

She tries to build intrigue by claiming “nothing was less inevitable” than co-operation among scientists who were members of their own countries’ elite national Societies. Science was about national pride, with credit to the king or chancellor. Opulent gatherings and endless dull speeches. And it was really thanks to the World Meteorological Organization after the Second World War that scientists suddenly discovered that systems worked globally, and that they needed each other’s data to make sense of anything, from oceans flows to weather fronts to the dispersal of volcanic ash, and everything in between.

Daston also tries to argue “that scientific internationalism of the late nineteenth century did not survive the first world war, much less the second,” largely because of nationalism and rivalries based on it. But that way of thinking clearly gave way to scientific answers that were required of ever deeper enquiries into how the world works, from the submicroscopic to the galactic. Today, it does not matter what country a scientist was trained in, science transcends borders thanks to air travel, telephones and the internet. University professors often seem to be foreign, no matter where you enroll. Crippling arguments like Egypt’s that Sudan should not have a vote because it was a colony have been relegated to the UN to sort out. In science, new facts win every time.

She insists that “’community’ seems a peculiarly ill-suited term to describe this fractious, competitive, dispersed and diverse collective.” Yet you have only to look at the great accomplishments recognized in awards every year, to see that collaboration across continents has become the rule, not the exception.

Another thing that bothered me was ignoring the constant attacks on science these days. How is it that people all over the world have come to the conclusion that science is fraudulent, and what role does their co-operation across borders and continents play in that? Is there jingoism behind it? Can only local scientists be trusted? Or is it the isolated locals who are the problem? Daston does not venture there, even though it is front and center globally: scientists can’t be trusted. Do they even trust each other?

I don’t think anyone would argue the world of science is humble or that it doesn’t operate its own governance, structures and recognition systems, peculiar to itself. But to maintain scientists remain rivals seems completely wrong. Of course, you want your team to be the one to discover the cure for cancer or reverse climate change. But tapping the resources of another team halfway round the world has been totally integrated and subsumed by the greater good of science itself. It seems to me that it is when scientists don’t collaborate and claim to make incredible discoveries on their own that the fraud occurs. That’s when you get the “discovery” of superconductors at room temperatures, studies that cannot be replicated by anyone else, the supposed cloning of humans, lab notes proving totally falsified data, and the launching of products and services that don’t perform any of the miracles claimed. Co-operative efforts act as a reality check and an honesty check, from what I’ve seen.

And to that extent, I don’t see the point of this book.

David Wineberg ( )