In criticizing the stereotyping of female scientists, historian Patricia Fara creates a new stereotype — for biographies of female scientists (Nature 495, 43–44; 2013). She laments that they portray their subjects as weird, and protests against catchy titles, elements of cover design and the use of first names rather than surnames. As the author of one of the five books Fara criticizes, I would have welcomed a more substantive discussion. The challenges of writing scientific biography are more complex than she implies, whether the subject is female or male.

My book is, among other things, an exploration of the intertwined roles of truth and beauty in science, and of how a mathematician (Dorothy Wrinch) and a chemist (Linus Pauling) came to see them very differently. That difference is reflected in the title I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science. I fail to see how, as Fara contends, this trivializes Wrinch's intellect.