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Interest in information science; grants and awards

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Getting your kids into science and the role of class in science
Eugene Garfield Scientist
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I wasn’t successful... at getting my kids interested in science. Maybe it’s a kind of field that, that the only interest they’ve got to discover it for themselves. I mean, the ones that need to discover it, will do it. And the others, may not. Although, there are plenty of people who are scientists who have managed to train their, bring their kids up with a similar interest in, in fact, even in the same specific field. You look at Dan Koshland who just died. He’s got a, a highly qualified son who’s a, also a biochemist Dan... Doug is his son’s name. Interesting homograph, by the way, DE Koshland; one’s Dan, one’s Douglas. But his son only uses a D to differentiate himself, whereas his father always said DE.  And that clearly had nothing to do with money or anything like that – that was just curiosity. He was basically, was a very wealthy... was born into a very wealthy family; Levi Strauss, I think was their... though, of course, science used to be the, the interest of the upper class, you know. Think of all the scientists who came from the, the upper middle class and the, even the ruling class, in England and elsewhere. It’s rather interesting that the early days of some of the, you couldn’t afford to be a scientist if you were poor. So that’s, that’s an interesting part of the history of science in the 17th, 18th Century. Although I don’t know, somebody like Benjamin Franklin wasn’t wealthy, clearly. But he managed to make that transition from being a printer’s apprentice to becoming a, you know, a founder of the American Philosophical Society.

Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.

Listeners: Henry Small

Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.

Duration: 2 minutes, 19 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2007

Date story went live: 23 June 2009