Acceptance Speech – Rome, 21.11.2024

Germany/Usa

Lorraine Daston

2024 Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science

For the extent, originality and variety of her work, which has drawn on a wide range of scientific fields to highlight the mental representations and values underlying research activity; for the number and quality of her articles and books, which have opened up new paths in the history and epistemology of sciences; for her contribution to the training of generations of researchers; and for her support - as head of prestigious institutions - for innovative research projects.

Mr President,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My first and last words must be ones of gratitude to the Balzan Foundation for its generosity and recognition of my scholarly work. I am honored and somewhat abashed to be judged worthy of a prize that has been awarded to so many other scholars and scientists whose work I greatly admire and have learned from. Thank you, with all my heart, not only for the recognition but also for the opportunity once again to conduct a research project with younger scholars, who are the liveliest part of the life of the mind. I think it was D’Annunzio who said he was the caffeine of Europe; young scholars are the caffeine of the Republic of Letters. It will be a great pleasure and privilege to be once again involved in a collective research project that supports their talent.

It is also an honor for the discipline of the history of science. The Balzan Prize is unusual among prizes in that it selects different fields of intellectual inquiry each year as well as individual laureates from those fields. For a discipline or a topic to be chosen for recognition by the Balzan Prize is a mark of distinction for all scholars and scientists working in that area, a sign that it is a field that has demonstrated its fruitfulness and significance beyond a small group of specialists. For a small and relatively young discipline like the history of science, this signal from the Balzan Foundation is especially meaningful. Scientists have been doing a form of their own history since Aristotle, usually in the form of criticisms of one’s predecessors. However, the first professorships in the history of science date almost entirely from the twentieth century, and the very few university departments of the history of science that now exist in the world were established only after World War II.

The reason for this timing is evident: at latest after the creation of the atomic bomb, it had become evident that we are living in a society that is saturated with science and technology and that it was urgent to understand how that had happened. All societies invest in some kind of technology, whether it is the wind technology of sailing ships or the silicon technology of microchips. But historically speaking, it is relatively rare for societies to invest heavily in science, especially in sciences that do not promise immediate practical benefits, like astronomy. One of the major challenges of the history of science, and one that has driven a great deal of my own work, is to understand the cultural preconditions for the flourishing of science as well as the evolution of science itself: its theories and concepts but also its standards of evidence and ways of knowing, from the controlled experiment of the seventeenth century to the computer simulations of the twenty-first century.

One of the many topics investigated by the history of science is the history of scientific prizes, from the prizes awarded by Enlightenment academies like the Royal Society of London to the Nobel Prizes of today and, yes, the Balzan Prizes. There’s no doubt that the drive for individual recognition, especially recognition by one’s peers, is a powerful personal motivation in science and scholarship. But perhaps the most significant invention of modern science is the scientific collective, these days called the scientific community, which has managed to organize individual researchers into a team of rivals. Every scientist, every scholar recognizes that there is too much to know for any individual: to have any chance of succeeding, the pursuit of knowledge must be a trans-cultural, trans-generational undertaking. Every one of us depends crucially on our colleagues now and in the past; we aspire to leave something of value to our successors in the future.

For that reason, every prize awarded to an individual scholar or scientist is in fact a prize awarded to the collective. I therefore accept the prize in all humility, knowing that I receive it only as a representative of that great collective that spans continents and centuries.