Author tracks the evolution of Darwin

If you like science, you may have read a bit of Charles Darwin's writing. Janet Browne, on the other hand, has read every bit of Charles Darwin's writing: books, notes, stray jottings, and more than 14,000 letters exchanged by the principal founder of evolutionary biology.

"I spent a long time with him," says Browne, a historian of science acclaimed for her two-volume biography of Darwin, published in 1995 and 2002. "Darwin was in my computer."

That closeness has paid off. The first volume, "Charles Darwin: Voyaging," was called definitive by the late Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, while the second, "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place," won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

Now Browne is doing some voyaging of her own. After two decades at University College London , she began teaching at Harvard this spring. Why the move? Many academics have material reasons to cross the Atlantic, but Browne cites Harvard's intellectual atmosphere and strong tradition in the history of biology, and she says a postdoctoral year she spent at Harvard in the 1970s was "an eye-opener, the most exciting thing I had done in my life until then."

Browne was also free to move because she has largely finished years of archival work in England, where she helped catalog Darwin's entire correspondence.

Although he famously kept his evolutionary ideas under wraps for years, Browne's Darwin is no solitary thinker but a man in the middle of a busy network of scientists. Once Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle ended, she writes, letters became "his primary research tool" as he queried people around the globe for evidence about evolution.

This has become an influential interpretation of Darwin. So has Browne's view that Darwin's later years deserve intensive study. The second volume of her biography, running from the 1859 appearance of "The Origin of Species" until Darwin's death in 1882 , depicts the chronically ill scientist defending and expanding his understanding of evolution.

" 'The Origin of Species' took over his life, and in the end it almost destroyed him," says Browne. "The publication of the book divided his life into two halves. That's why I wrote two volumes."

Browne would know about a book developing a life of its own. Already an established historian of biology in the 1980s, she says she had no clear plans for a Darwin biography and first hesitated when a publisher proposed one: "I didn't think I could possibly do that. But then I began thinking, well, maybe I could."

Ultimately Browne wanted the chance to depict the fully complex Darwin she knew from his letters -- the brilliantly innovative scientist who still dreaded the controversy his ideas would unleash. "I think anybody doing that work would want to put it all into one picture," she says .

Browne's next book is a few branches away from Darwin on the evolutionary tree, however. Along with colleagues Jordan Goodman of University College London and Robert Peck of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, she is producing a history of human depictions of gorillas from the Victorian era through modern mass media (think "King Kong") and notable scientific studies.

"The trajectory is from a beast that's thought to be ferocious," Browne notes, "to the point where naturalists, including George Schaller and Dian Fossey , turn this imagery on its head and claim gorillas are actually very like humans, sociable and friendly and domesticated." Some humans, anyway.

Beyond that, Browne may train her sights on Darwin again. "I have been thinking of writing a third volume for my Darwin biography, which would be Darwin's legend," she says. This would chronicle the public re invention of Darwin during the century after his death as an icon for science and target for its foes.

"All the Darwins that are trundled out are slightly different than the ones we know in the historical record," Browne says. "People re-create Darwin to emphasize what is happening in the world at a particular time." Sounds like Darwin might start inhabiting Janet Browne's computer once more.

Fact sheet

Resides: Cambridge.

Education: B.A. in natural science, Trinity College, Dublin; M.S. and Ph.D. in the history of science, Imperial College, London.

Hobby: Gardening.

Favorite Darwin Book: "The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms," from 1881 -- because of Darwin's "delight in earthworms, and his appreciation of the way small things over long periods of time can make great changes."

A Darwin Failure: Skipping the funeral of his mentor, John Henslow. "That's the one place where I'm in the book, criticizing Darwin for not doing what duty and affection required."