Science, then, is built up like a coral reef. Individual scientists are the polyps, secreting a shelly carapace that they bequeath to the reef upon their departure. That carapace is the sterilized public record of their research, a compilation of observation or experimentation and the explanatory derivation, where possible, of the data from known theories and auxiliary assumptions. The scientist, like a polyp, is a complete living thing, all too human in just the ways that the historians and sociologists of science have described. When the organism goes, however, its humanity goes with it.
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