What is the use of writing lives of recent scientists?

Few historians of science realize that scientific biography is a very old metascientific genre-one that goes much further back than the tradition of historiography.1 While histories of science only came forth in the mid-and late eighteenth century,2 the first vitae of astronomers and natural philosophers appeared already in the seventeenth century immediately after the rise of modern science.3 Since then, about four to five thousand biographies of scientists have been published in the major European languages, not to mention obituaries, short biographical articles, and dictionary entries on individual scientists.4 Cumulatively, scientific biography has been, and may still be, the best-selling and most widely read of all genres of writing about science’s past. And, as long as the book review institution has existed, scientific lives have repeatedly matched the highest possible standards for scholarly writing.