PUBLIC LECTURE
Linnaeus as a role model for today's science
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 7 November 2007
Professor Gunnar Öquist
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå Plant Science Center, Umeå University, Sweden
Plant physiologist Professor Gunnar Öquist's field of research is stress and adaptation mechanisms in photosynthesis, with emphasis on the responses of photosynthesis to low temperature and high light. Professor Öquist is a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science and Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He visited Australia as part of celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus.
It is very nice to be back in Australia. I have many good memories from Australia, both scientific memories and also personal memories that I share with my good friends here.
My talk today is about Linnaeus as a role model for today's science. It is very much a science historian type of talk.
I will start with talking about how we have celebrated the 300th anniversary back home in Sweden. I will also talk about Linnaeus, what kind of person he was, and about the science that he did. I will also reflect on the contributions that he made to science and how this has affected the science of today. And then I will look at in what respect Linnaeus can be a good example, and maybe also how he can be a bad example for science.
So now we are celebrating the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus. His birthday was actually May 23, and his birthday party was held in Uppsala in the presence of the Swedish King and Queen, and also of the Emperor and Empress of Japan. The celebration went on for one week - it was a one-week-long celebration throughout Uppsala, with flower exhibitions, lectures, and activities for school children, just to mention a few examples.
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This is the logo and the picture of Linné that have gone with all the activities that we have arranged and are arranging.
My own Academy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, has hosted all the combination[?] and administration for this anniversary. Altogether more than 600 local events are being arranged through the country this year, and a national Linnaeus delegation has taken responsibility for five national projects.
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These are pictures from the celebration in Uppsala and also (the photograph of the stilt-walker) from the event that occurred in January when we opened the celebration for the year.
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These are the national Linnaeus projects. The Academy has taken particular responsibility for the movie Expedition Linné. That film is particularly for a young audience, young people in their teenage, and the hope is that the movie will attract interest among young people to go into science and technology.
Personally, I have been most interested by the School-project Linné. For all these national projects and for many of the regional initiatives that have been going on and are going on, the theme is to inspire young people of today to adopt natural science research as enthusiastically and as boldly as Linnaeus did.
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I mentioned the School-project. We know that Linnaeus was highly respected, enthusiastic and a curious teacher who attracted hundreds of students to his botanical excursions and lectures.
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In the spirit of Linnaeus this School-project has four aims, as listed here. The first is stimulating creativity, the joy of discovery and a thirst for learning. The second is inspiring investigation as a working method, developing material that can be used in schools. The third is taking a perspective of 'past-present-future', giving time for reflection over Linnaeus and his age, stimulating discussions about developments that have subsequently taken place and may take place in the future, and then coupling all these discussions with current research. The final one is considering environmental perspectives, with sustainable development and biological diversity as key elements of outdoor experiences.
This is all in line with the inquiry-based school developmental program of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and other academies around the world. We have heard from the President that the Australian Academy is intensely involved in a similar activity, and it has great international recognition for what it is doing in the forefront in the work of improving the quality of science teaching and engagement at the primary school level.
All the material that has been produced in this School-project is available in English, and more information can be found at the web address shown here.
You may wonder why there is such an interest in Sweden to celebrate the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus. I think we may identify many different reasons, both scientific and historic, but for people in general the most important is his travel books, which he wrote based on his journeys across the country, describing what he saw with his curious eyes - the landscape that he travelled through, the description of people he met and their daily work. He identified water wells, plants, animals and minerals that could be used, et cetera.
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Linnaeus also passed through my home town, which happened to be also the birthplace of Carl Linnaeus, namely, Piteå. On his Lappish journeys in June 1732 he stayed a couple of days in Old Piteå, and as schoolchildren I and my school friends basically walked in the footsteps of Linnaeus, using his diary book Iter Lapponicum, pictures of which you can see on this slide. Basically, we used the book to guide us, walking in the footsteps of Linnaeus. So he was really the King of Botany for us schoolchildren in those days.
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So who was Carl Linnaeus?
He was born in Råshult, in the south of Sweden. He was the oldest of five children of a typical Swedish clerical family as they lived in the early 18th century, and the destiny for Linnaeus was to follow in the footsteps of his father, Nils Linnaeus, who was a clergyman.
Linnaeus attended the grammar school in nearby Växjö, preparing himself to study theology at the university. However, his performance in school was poor, and so were his grades. Luckily, Linnaeus had a very knowledgeable and open-minded teacher, whose name was Dr Johan Rothman. Rothman spotted the genius in Linnaeus and supported his interest in the less - as it was thought in that time - utilitarian study of plant life.
Rothman introduced Linnaeus to the 17th century theories of botany, and by the time Linnaeus left grammar school he was well acquainted with the field. Through Rothman, Linnaeus became conscious of the relationship between plants in their groups and classes, so we can say that the direction of his scientific path was laid out very early in his life.
As I mentioned, Linnaeus' school results were poor, and his parents were extremely unhappy with his performance. So Rothman had to intervene and explain that although Carl might not be suited to become a priest, this did not mean that he was lacking in talent. He could become a prominent physician, for instance, making use of his good knowledge in herbs and medical plants. So Carl's parents reluctantly accepted, and after one year at Lund University he ended up at Uppsala University, studying medicine.
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Here you have some pictures of the city of Lund. The bottom left picture is of the Orangerie; Linnaeus had his house very close by.
In Uppsala he met with a two-year-older student by the name of Petrus (Peter) Artedi. Carl and Peter became very close friends and they shared an interest for biology, and as they merged their thoughts about systematics, new ideas saw daylight. The science historian Gunnar Eriksson writes that it probably was Artedi who first came up with the brave suggestion of independently constructing a new system for plants, and this gave Linnaeus the idea of embarking upon the same course.
He did this extremely successfully. Already as a student Linnaeus became an authority in botany, and he had by 1730 - only 23 years old - already worked out the sexual system for the classification of plants. I will come back to his system, but before that I want to say a few more words about Peter Artedi.
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Artedi and Linnaeus divided up the work in classification. So Artedi embarked on the systematics of fishes, while Linnaeus took responsibility for the plant kingdom, based on sexual principles. Unfortunately, Peter Artedi drowned, 30 years old, in a channel in Amsterdam on his way home after a 'wet' party.
Anyhow, Linnaeus later published Artedi's classification work on fishes in the work Ichthyologia, as shown here. It was published in 1738, and today we view Artedi as the father of fish taxonomy.
We have no picture of Artedi and he is largely forgotten, but he was most important for Linnaeus' development as a scientist. Some historians say that Artedi had the brighter intellect of the two, but he lacked the sharp elbows, the charm and the good fortune that characterise Linnaeus' career.
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In 1735 Linnaeus began a three-year-long journey in Europe, first to Hamburg and then to Holland. He was there to obtain his doctor's degree in medicine, and after only one week at Harderwijk University he published a thesis on the subject of malaria. These are some pictures of old Harderwijk and a mosquito, to remind you of malaria.
But he also travelled to London and Paris, and during this time he established a network of influential friends with a deep interest in botany.
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During the period in Holland he also published several books. I have been counting them and I think it is eight books altogether that he published. The most important one was the one that you see to the right here, Systema Naturae. That is the book where he first published his sexual classification system for plants, but he also made a classification of animals and minerals in the book. After 1735 there were regular new issues of this book. It came out in the folio format and it was only 12 pages when it was first published, but then it became a thick book and I think it was also more than one volume eventually.
He also published Hortus Cliffortianus. This is a magnificent volume presenting all the plants in the Hartecamp garden owned by his Maecenas, the wealthy Dutchman George Clifford, who was extremely pleased by the work of the young Swede. Clifford was probably his most important Maecenas during this period in Continental Europe.
So Linnaeus' time in Holland was exceptionally successful. When he arrived in Holland he was practically unknown, with a whole new system for the classification of plants and animals in his head and in the form of manuscripts. When he left, three years later, he was an acknowledged international authority in botany. But he was largely unknown in Sweden.
The year 1738, after three years in Holland, became a very decisive year for Linnaeus. He had to decide whether to remain in Holland, where Clifford and others offered him continued employment, or to return to Sweden. Biographers usually mention that it was the love for Sara Elisabeth Moraea that drew him back to Sweden. (Sara Elisabeth's family had promised to wait three years for the fiancé to return.)
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So he returned home, and he opened a doctor's practice in Stockholm. He married Sara Elisabeth Moraea in 1739, and they had six children.
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Linnaeus was one of the founding fathers of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and he was the first President of the Academy. It was founded in June 1739.
The Academy was formed in the spirit - as, I think, were most academies of that time - of the English statesman and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon, who advocated that science be organised and directed to give maximum usefulness to society. Results obtained by scientific research should be documented and disseminated so as to gradually accumulate more and more accessible knowledge for the benefit of mankind.
Linnaeus shared the same view of the role of science, and he also won the debate on which scientific language should be used by the young Academy. He argued for Swedish being used.
In 1741 he had become known for his botanical research done in Holland, and he was appointed professor in medicine at Uppsala University, with responsibility for botany.
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This is what he looked like around 1740, as a young man.
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In 1761 Linnaeus was raised to the nobility. His name was changed from Linnaeus to von Linné, and that is the name by which he is generally known today in Sweden.
As a new member of the nobility, Linnaeus had to propose a coat of arms, and his rather charming suggestion was to use a section of an egg in the centre of the coat of arms, in order to symbolise his biological message that everything comes from an egg. (He very often came back to this metaphor that everything living originates from an egg.) The state herald at that time hesitated, but he agreed at last to the egg - but whole rather than cut into two pieces. So you see here the egg in the middle of the coat of arms, and at the top Linnaeus' favourite flowers, Linnaea borealis.
Linnaeus received a large number of awards and distinctions, and his last distinction was to be buried in Uppsala Cathedral, after his death in 1778.
Linnaeus is famous today, since we have celebrated the 300th anniversary of his birth. But it should be stressed that he was famous - I would say extremely famous and well known - and highly respected as a scientist already during his lifetime.
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Linnaeus himself, I have been told, said that he had never attended a single lecture in botany during his time in Uppsala. However, it was exactly during these years that he developed his revolutionary method of systematising all plants in the world. Without a system, said Linnaeus, chaos would rule, and one admiring member of posterity said, 'God created, Linnaeus ordered.' Those sentences tell us a little bit about how Linné viewed his work and how people of his time looked upon his work.
Linnaeus was already convinced about the sexual propagation of plants at an early stage of his life. He was also, as a young man, fascinated by the sexuality of the plant world. The strength of his classification system lies in its simplicity. In contrast to pre-Linnaean systems, it operates with discrete characters and as a rule each plant can easily be placed into its appropriate class and order.
The plants were divided into 24 classes according to the number and arrangement of the stamens, and each class was then divided into subordinate orders, usually according to the number of the pistils. These 24 classes are illustrated on the famous plate that you can see here in front of you, a plate by Georg Ehret. It was first reproduced in Systema Naturae.
I will give you one example. A plant with six stamens and one pistil, like a tulip for example, according to the system belonged to the class of Decandria and the order was Monogynia.
Throughout his entire career - and this is a little bit remarkable, I think - Linnaeus spoke of the stamen as 'man' and the pistil as 'woman', and their relationship he always described in terms of a marriage. He does this also in his book Systema Naturae, and I will give you one example.
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This is the plant Fuchsia. It belongs to the class Octandria, and as you see it has eight stamens and one pistil. The way Linnaeus describes this in his scientific book Systema Naturae is, 'Eight men in the same bridal suite with one woman'. He used that kind of analogy throughout the 24 classes. For certain classes the situation becomes quite promiscuous, if you will allow me to say that.
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With the book Species Plantarum, published in 1753, Linnaeus created the foundation for all subsequent botanical nomenclature. And it was the first work in which Linnaeus consistently used the Latin names for plants. Ever since that time, every plant and every animal has a Latin name consisting of two words, where the first one indicates to which genus the plant or animal in question belongs, while the other is unique to the species.
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This name reform gave Linnaeus a position of power, which he quickly used to his advantage. He often chose to name his genera after some early botanist or collaborator whom he appreciated. To have a genus or species named after oneself in those days was - and I think it still is - the greatest honour to befall a botanist. And it was up to the King of Botany in Uppsala to bestow these tokens of favour upon those he appreciated.
Linnaeus had great ambitions, and early in his life he decided to catalogue all life on Earth. Of course, his pretension was that his own particular method would be accepted by the world's natural scientists. And it is amazing that he more or less succeeded in all these respects. He was most successful in botany, which was the field that was really the centre and the focus of his scientific interest.
So Linnaeus wanted to conquer the entire world with his systematics. This is where his students - disciples, or 'Apostles' - come in. If we use the terminology of today, we may call them his postdocs.
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Linnaeus' students were travelling around the world. Sometimes they were on Swedish trips, and sometimes, more often, on foreign ones. Here you can see Linnaeus as the leader of his disciples.
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Two of Linnaeus' disciples are shown here. You would recognise Daniel Solander, on the left, who went on shore here and in eastern Africa. The other one is Carl Peter Thunberg, who researched the flora of South Africa and Japan. These two disciples probably have been the most influential in spreading Linnaeus' classification system, and they have been really instrumental in the success of spreading the system worldwide.
So in many ways Linnaeus was a modern professor. He initiated new projects for his Apostles, he had broad contacts in the society at large, and he knew the right strings to pull when money was needed for the various projects. He was a charismatic leader for this network of around 20 Apostles.
Many of his students suffered. They perished in horrifying numbers. They had very poor food on board the ships, they were hit by exotic diseases and other hardships, and the result was that about half of his students never returned to Sweden - they died. Linnaeus looked upon them as martyrs in the service of flora, in their mission to rediscover the beauty of the Creation of God, the beauty that was lost for man to see because of the sin fall.
So Linnaeus had a great capacity to instil enthusiasm in his travelling students, but he was also a very demanding master and those who dared to go their own ways risked falling out of favour. And this happened to Daniel Solander.
Daniel Solander is probably the Apostle who is best known here in Australia, since, together with Joseph Banks, he circumnavigated the globe with James Cook.
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This is a picture of Solander and Banks, and also of the Tahitian young man Omai. (I think the original painting is held by the Royal Society, in London.) They were both on the ship Endeavour, and they landed at Botany Bay, south of Sydney, late in April 1770. They brought home to London an enormous collection of species from the Southern Hemisphere, but when Banks and Solander remained in England, Linnaeus accused Solander of being ungrateful. Linnaeus complained bitterly, writing: 'That ungrateful Solander is not sending me one single herb, or insect, of all the things he has collected.'
Linnaeus punished Banks and Solander by never honouring them by naming a genus after them. It was Linnaeus the Younger, son of Linné, who called a newly discovered genus Banksia, and Solander had to wait until later, until the Swedish professor in botany Olof Peter Swartz gave the genus name Solandra to a beautifully blooming plant.
So why was Linnaeus excluded from the Banks-Solander collection? Nobody knows for sure, but Bengt Jonsell, the botany professor in Stockholm, points out that by the time of the return of Endeavour to London in 1771, London had already become the world centre for natural history. In that time the centre for natural history had actually started to decline in Sweden, so London was the centre. But it was probably also the fact that the age of Linnaeus and his illness played a role in their not sending 'one single herb, or insect' to Linné. And of course he complained bitterly.
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But Linnaeus hardly suffered from a lack of plants, which he got from all corners of the Earth. He probably did not exaggerate when he wrote, with his usual self-esteem, that with certainty his herbarium was the largest anyone had ever seen.
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After the death of Linnaeus, in 1778, his widow needed money and she sold Linnaeus' library in London, where today it is preserved by the Linnaean Society, founded in 1788. From the Swedish point of view - and we learned this in school - the selling of the Linnaeus collection was a national scandal. We had [inaudible]; we were very upset by the fact that his widow sold this national treasure. But now, looking back, if one abandons the national perspective and considers Linnaeus' international fame instead, we can agree after all that there were advantages in having the Linnaean collection end up in London, where it became available for international research at the time when science started to decline in Sweden.
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As you would understand, in many respects Linnaeus was a child of his time. And the science historian Tore Frängsmyr points out in one of his books, Linnaeus: The Man and His Work, that that really was the case.
You see here a quite interesting picture of Linné. When he came to Holland he had this Lappish costume made, with a very funny hat - it doesn't belong to the Sami dress at all. But anyhow this probably shows a little bit about Linnaeus. He was an exhibitionist, he wanted to show off, and I think he made lots of success in Continental Europe using this dress (which also was his wedding dress, by the way).
In the beginning of the 18th century, Sweden was being ruined by all the wars that Carolus XII started, and all energy had to be put into repairing the economy of the nation. At this time the power of the monarchy had decreased, and the Riksdagen, our parliament, gained in power. It was dominated by two political parties, the Hats and the Caps. In 1739 the Hats regained power and they began immediately to preach the mercantilistic message, which prescribed that as much as possible should be exported and as little as possible imported. Even science was considered to be of potential economic importance, both in improving agriculture and also in encouraging the emergence of domestic manufacturing.
This is exactly where Linnaeus fitted in. He himself helped to spread the new economic thinking, and he argued that natural history formed the basis of any sound economy. Both agriculture and industry used nature's products, so knowledge of plants, animals and minerals was fundamentally important. In the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the economic purpose was so pronounced that it was at first planned to call it the Academy of Economics.
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Linnaeus was, as we have seen, very willing to put his branch of science at the service of the economy. The aim of his many long journeys within the country, often asked by the parliament, was to make an inventory list of the utilities - that is to say, natural resources, ores, tree species, edible plants and berries, animals that were usable as food or could be put to economic use. Linnaeus also noted other matters: people's costumes and traditions, what they ate and how they lived, how they built houses or celebrated weddings.
These travel diaries, three of which we see here, have been read through generations and they are regarded as classics in Swedish literature. They are regularly reissued.
In many respects the political ambition to use science and technology to improve the economy and living conditions of people resembles the emphasis that we, in our time, put on knowledge as we talk about 'knowledge-based economies' and 'knowledge-based societies' in order to develop prosperity and to deal with the threats related to global changes and to develop lifestyles which allow for a sustainable development. So there are similarities between the 18th century and today in respect of the confidence that we put on science and technology.
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A little bit more about the personality of Linnaeus: in his commemorative lecture on Linnaeus' birthday on May 23, science historian Tore Frängsmyr emphasised that a person of Linnaeus' calibre must be evaluated and judged by a variety of measures, and the images of Linnaeus varied from being defined as the smiling King of Flowers to being a greedy, mean and selfish scientist, to being the national saint of today depicted on Swedish banknotes and stamps, as you see here.
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Linnaeus was a short man - he was 154 cm tall, just over five feet - but his spirit and self-esteem were great. He was a brilliant observer; nothing escaped him. Linnaeus experienced the diversity of species and forms in the empirical world around him with an exceptional intensity. Linnaeus rightly said about himself, 'I am one of the best observers we ever had.' And it is Linnaeus, the brilliant observer full of curiosity, that we all have learned to love.
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Here is a collection of pictures of Linnaeus.
I need to say a few words about Linnaeus' relation to religion.
During the Age of Enlightenment, statements of the Bible became more and more questioned by the emergent empirical science. But for Linnaeus the world was created by God. He regarded every existing thing as instigated and governed by the Almighty, or the Creator, as he often said. He writes in one of his famous lines, 'I saw the eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful God from the back when he advanced, and I became greedy. I tracked his footsteps over nature's fields and found in each one, even in those I could scarcely make out, an endless wisdom and power, an unsearchable perfection.' This was what is called physical theology - to view God's wisdom in nature. Today we call it Creationism, or Intelligent Design, and he was really a priest singing the praises of nature.
However, Linnaeus' definition of God was quite broad, which also has reminiscences of pagan philosophies when he wrote, 'If you wish to call Him Fate, then you will not be in error, for everything is dependent on His finger. If you wish to call Him Nature, then you will not either be in error, for everything comes from Him. If you wish to call Him Providence, you would also be correct, for everything complies with his beck and call.'
Linnaeus also made a plea for philosophical freedom when he said, 'Wherever free religion exists, the country flourishes. Where theology rules, there is no freedom and misery prevails.' I think this is something to reflect on in our time, when fundamental religious movements seem to gain terrain in certain parts of the world. Linnaeus was a true Christian but he was not an Orthodox.
I will say a few words about Linnaeus' image of himself, both as a scientist and as a private person. From what I have already said about Linnaeus it is evident that in terms of science he had a very strong image of himself, and that image was there already when he was a young man. This was a feeling that deepened with age and international recognition.
He was very thin-skinned, and very sensitive to criticism. He wanted to be the one, and the only one. He was the King of Botany, and he needed only the slightest touch to be wounded in his self-esteem. Sten Lindroth, who has been studying Linnaeus quite a lot and was one who really started to question Linnaeus as the smiling King of Flowers, goes as far as saying that Linnaeus swung between violence and assertion and broadening despair. He had the temperament of a hysteric, and the need to dramatise himself and all that happened to him. He had a weakness for medals and distinctions from kings and gentlemen.
But that is only one side of him. As Tore Frängsmyr states, he was also a simple man from the countryside, who loved to experience God's magnificent nature. And, as Frängsmyr says, he was really a man of paradoxes.
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For Linnaeus a natural plant system was the real goal of botany, but he thought that to develop such a system he needed a knowledge of all the species of plants on Earth. It was always his view that his own sexual system was only a provisional tool, a substitute for the natural method.
In the pursuit of a natural system, taxonomists have increased the number of plant characteristics to be considered. Linnaeus' stamens and pistils no longer play the same essential role as they did for the Swedish 18th century botanist. Also, the family concept has been introduced for plant systematics, to define that plants are derived from primordial forms through evolution.
Botanists began to categorise plants in a way that reflected their evolutionary history, to develop a cladistic system - a treelike structure that you see here for some organisms. And today the use of DNA sequencing and computers have become the most important tools for plant systematics, introducing genealogical family trees based on the degree of correspondence between particular DNA segments.
So what would Linnaeus have said about the recognition of his sexual ordering of plants, which the botanists of our century have devoted themselves to? Today, of course, Linnaeus' sexual system has been revised and also questioned in many ways. Well, his self-esteem might have objected to this development, because no-one had the right to tamper with the system of the Creator, which He in His mercy had related to him and him alone. However, being a scientist of high rank, he would probably have smiled, admitting that we now have a natural system at hand and that his system became the foundation of all consecutive plant systematics. He would smile if he knew that plant systematics is as vital today as it was in the 18th century, but today taxonomists are investigating the meandering path of evolution over millions of years and not God's plan for Creation. But Linné is the starting point for modern plant taxonomy, and maybe also for what we today call ecology.
I will not discuss this, but Linnaeus in fact constructed an ecological theory, and it was astonishingly modern. He formulated the food chain circulation, he wrote on the balance between organisms and nature, and he described the modern biological concept of the so-called ecological niches in nature.
So now, besides what I have just said, what remains of Linnaeus' scientific contribution?
While we are using his binary nomenclature, that's for sure, and we will certainly continue with that, he has an emerging concept of ecology. He was not the only one to have it, of course, but he was certainly aware of relationships between organisms. He also very clearly and boldly classified Homo sapiens - man - as an animal. And today he is of great interest for science historians.
I think we can say that he was a stepping-stone towards today's science, and he was a very important stepping-stone towards today's science.
We may ask ourselves whether Linnaeus ever really made a single new, remarkable discovery. The answer of the German biologist Julius Sachs is no. And, when we think of it, he was probably right. Linnaeus didn't discover. He observed, he described and he ordered, but he did not make discoveries. He was a natural historian in an old-fashioned sense of the word. But he was number one in the field of a very long tradition.
Sten Lindroth says that with Linnaeus an era in the history of botany reached its termination and conclusion. And Linnaeus represents the end of scholastic botany, which has its roots in natural philosophy. So he gave science a new face but not a new soul - that had to wait. Lindroth says that Linnaeus was so successful that he probably delayed the development of a more question-oriented modern biology, based on answering questions and hypotheses by observation and experiment. And I think this is true. I can see, when I look at science history and the way botany and biology have developed in Sweden, that experimental plant science was very slow in taking off in Sweden in the beginning of last century.
So Linnaeus did not make experiments. He observed, described what he saw, and he ordered better than anybody else. But his explanations of various phenomena were often taken from older literature and applied to his observations.
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Being the Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, I have been looking for whether there is a link between Carl Linnaeus and Alfred Nobel. And I think there is.
They were both outstanding scientists and entrepreneurs, although they represented different time periods, different centuries. They both had a mission to use science to improve the living conditions of mankind. Linnaeus would certainly have supported Nobel when he wrote his will defining the criteria for the Nobel Prize, which is the first international scientific award established. Nobel said that it should go to individual scientists who, through discoveries, innovations or improvements, have been most beneficial to mankind. They both saw the human curiosity to search for a better understanding of nature as a unique resource, a tool for us human beings.
So we can conclude that Linnaeus was a man of his time. He was thin-skinned and selfish when it came to defending his role as a scientist in his time, but this is not unusual among scientists. He was not a modern scientist, as he was part of the scholastic tradition, but he showed many traits that characterise successful scientists of today, and in many ways he shows the development of science into the future.
I would like to mention four of the characteristics that Linnaeus showed that I think we can appreciate today.
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First of all, he was a great teacher. We know, and we have several pieces of documentation, that Linnaeus was highly respected. He was enthusiastic and curious, and he was a teacher who attracted hundreds of students to his botanical excursions and lectures. He was outstanding in inspiring his students - and this is documented in many ways, but first of all through his eminent ability to recruit some 20 extremely motivated, talented and knowledgeable postdocs, his Apostles. He was really an inspiring scientist of a calibre that we can fully appreciate today.
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Linnaeus was also a networker. His scientific international network went beyond what was normal in his time.
Nationally he worked with broad networks of local scholars, priests, doctors and governors who helped him spread knowledge about natural history, and his contacts with the political system of the parliament, the royal court and the aristocracy were very good and used extensively to raise money for expeditions and publications. He was influential as a scientist, and his influence penetrated deeply into the society.
He also had a very well-developed international network, comparable actually with the networks of today's scientists, and thousands of his letters have been preserved and can today be viewed on the net. There is a project that has been going on for many years - it is not completed yet, but if you go in on the internet at www.linnaeus.c18.net you will get to the web page where you can start to study Linnaeus' correspondence.
As I said, Linnaeus was also a brilliant observer. It is Linnaeus the observer, full of curiosity, that we really like to talk about. And he was really the best in the field. It is amazing that he was so good at looking at details, at the same time having a view for the whole, for the system. This combination does not always go together for us scientists, but he had both dimensions - both the detail and the system.
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This slide is to exemplify that he was an observer. These are sketches and drawings that he made as he travelled around in Sweden.
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But what I also would like to emphasise is what you see on this picture. This is really the leader that you have here. He had a strategic view for the organisation, for the financing and for the conduct of research, involving his whole network of contacts. He could see his science in various perspectives, applied as well as scientific, and he could work both with long-term and with short-term perspectives. And he was indeed most inspiring for his students.
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I would like to finish off by using a satellite view of the planet Earth. Today we have networks of communication that can link individuals, wherever they live or work, within fractions of seconds, and we can travel within hours to every corner of the globe. Linnaeus had a vision to classify and order everything globally, to show to mankind the beauty of Creation. He pointed towards a global understanding.
We have continued on this path, although with a gradually changed perspective, adopting the evolutionary concept both of the physical world following the Big Bang and of Darwin's formulation of the evolutionary theory of the living world.
Today the global issues are more pressing than ever in the search for rational solutions to fight poverty, ongoing climate changes, and to stop the devastating over-exploitation of the ecosystem services that the planet Earth can provide. It is the kind of vision, curiosity, ingenuity and leadership that Linnaeus showed that we need more of today, in order to come up with new ideas and new discoveries, to open up for new, unforeseen opportunities and solutions to today's and tomorrow's problems.
This was exactly Linnaeus' perspective, although applied in a different time from ours.
So let us hope that this anniversary can inspire the young generation to address the pressing global issues with a vitalised rationality based on research in the natural and social sciences, and in the technologies, and with a commitment that goes beyond what their parents and grandparents have mustered.
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I would like to thank you, and I would also like to acknowledge some science historians for teaching me so much about Linnaeus during this year and when I prepared myself for this talk.
Thank you very much for your attention.
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Discussion
Chair (Kurt Lambeck): Thank you very much, Gunnar. That has been a lovely introduction to Linnaeus. I think at the same time you have succeeded in giving us some thoughts on how to and how not to conduct science. It is quite interesting that many of the dos and don'ts that were valid 300 years ago are still valid today, and I think we do have a lot to learn from looking at history. Perhaps our Minister for Education is right that it should be taught in schools.
Question 1: In view of all the books that Linnaeus wrote in Holland, I am just wondering who funded all the books that he published. Did he publish them himself, or were they published by institutions that he worked for? How did that work?
Gunnar Öquist: I don't have the whole picture, but I know that for all these books that he published when he was in Holland, he had good contacts with those who had money. The man Clifford that I mentioned was really one of his sponsors. He was always looking for money, and he had good contact with politicians and with the aristocrats of his time, who had money. He had to fight for money all the time, that's for sure, but he was good at raising money.
Question 1 (cont.): What was the motive for publishing? Was it just to share knowledge, or were the people sponsoring him trying to make a profit?
Gunnar Öquist: No, he had two goals with this. He was very active in publishing in the local language, in Swedish, to reach out with knowledge about nature to people at large. But when he tried to reach the international community, then he used Latin. So he played and acted nationally, spreading knowledge - he was one of the first scientists that really was into popular science, trying to popularise what he had to say. But he was also the stringent scientist talking to the learned community internationally, using Latin.
When you read his diary books, it is very interesting that in Iter Lapponicum, for example, he writes in Swedish but when it comes to describing something scientifically, a plant, for example, in detail, then he switches over to Latin. So he goes back and forth, depending whether he wants to spread the information broadly or whether he wants to reach the scientific community.
