Book Review

Müller's Lab

N Engl J Med 2007; 357:2740-2741December 27, 2007DOI: 10.1056/NEJMbkrev58761

Article

Müller's Lab
By Laura Otis. 316 pp., illustrated. New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. $55. ISBN: 978-0-19-530697-2

There are fairytales we love to hear again and again. In the history of science, the tale of the child without any academic background who is raised to the scientific Olympus by his thirst for knowledge is such a story. Johannes Müller (1801–1858), the great physiologist, was quickly built up into such a figure by his early biographers. Müller himself believed that “one needs to know nothing of a scientist except the dates of his birth and death,” as he wrote in a letter to Max Isensee in 1856, but this message went unheeded.

Müller, born the son of a shoemaker in Koblenz, Germany, received an excellent classical education at the local school, where his extraordinary abilities attracted the attention of his teachers. This opened the way into academic society for Müller, and he became one of the outstanding contributors to the development of the fields of anatomy, physiology, and biology. He shared his approach and his visions of the life sciences with his students, many of whom would become famous themselves.

The story of Müller's life has been recounted many times and illuminated from nearly every possible angle. Now Laura Otis, a professor of English literature and liberal arts at Emory University in Atlanta, has bestowed her attention on this man who grew up in the scientific and social environment of post-Napoleonic Germany. She searches in Müller's research environment for the mysterious key to how this son of a craftsman rose to become an idealized and universally admired figure in the history of science, and to how he won over students of the most diverse social backgrounds and interests to the work of scientific research. In order to understand Müller's influence on his students, Otis uses the methods of “psychohistorical analysis” to investigate the ways in which seven students — Jakob Henle, Theodor Schwann, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, Robert Remak, and Ernst Haeckel — perceived their teacher.

Otis thinks that “literary studies offer one perspective adaptation of [Sigmund] Freud's notions about fathers and sons that may help us understand the relationships among scientists,” but she also claims that “this study differs from most psychohistorical ones . . . in that it emphasizes scientific, institutional, and social factors over psychological ones in explaining why these seven relationships evolved as they did.”

Otis uses the wealth of scientific literature on Müller and his students — original publications and published correspondence — to pick up clues as to how the students who were molded by Müller's environment became outstanding scientists. She studies their social backgrounds in detail and traces from them the diverse relationships between each student and Müller and among the former students themselves. These accounts may be described as a collection of gripping biographical stories. Otis's conclusion is that “the stories of Müller and his students show the degree to which science is driven by personal passion . . . it is simply not true that work is one thing, and personal life is another. Life drives science just as — in some people — science drives life.”

It is questionable whether this generalized conclusion is justified. Certainly, the life of a scientist is driven by personal passions — and this is true of Müller and his students. But to make such a claim, one would need to look at science in a larger context. Unfortunately, Otis pays too little attention to the extraordinary situation of the life sciences in the middle of the 19th century. The controversy about the role of vitalism played a significant part in the establishment of the experimental life sciences. There was also a “gold rush” feeling at the time, with essential scientific problems lying out in the open like gold nuggets before the eyes of curious researchers. This unique environment also partly explains the different research interests of Müller and his students. The prevailing policy on science at the time may have played an important role, too. The University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, the two institutions where Müller spent his academic life, were founded as models for the realization of Wilhelm von Humboldt's celebrated vision of the university as a place where teaching and research were inseparable. It is also relevant that freedom in research at these universities was guaranteed by law.

I hope that this fascinating book will interest the English-speaking community in what was a remarkable period of German science. The main message should be that it is not, as the publisher's advertising text suggests, depression (Müller), dueling (Henle), or political activism (Virchow) that is the true ferment of science, but it is, instead, intellectual freedom in the laboratories.

Brigitte Lohff, Ph.D.
Hannover Medical School, D-30161 Hannover, Germany
lohff.brigitte@mh-hannover.de