Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello Johann Wolfgang von Goerter, the great poet and dramatist is famous for Faust,

for the sorrows of young Verter, for Storm and Drang, and for being a Colossus in German literature.

Born in the middle of the 18th century, he lived

through the first third of the 19s. He wrote lyric and epic verse, literary criticism,

prose fiction, translations from 28 languages. He was a politician as well and was hailed by Napoleon as the boundless measure of man.

But for much of his time, often to the exclusion of everything else, Gerta was a scientist.

He gave us the term morphology and

sometimes he's even credited with inventing biology itself. How important were

Goeter's discoveries and where does he really stand in the history of science?

With me to examine Goeter's scientific legacy And where does he really stand in the history of science?

With me to examine Gerta's scientific legacy is Nicholas Boyle, who's just published the

second volume of his immense and scholarly biography of Gerta, tremendously well received,

called Gerta, the poet and the age.

Also with me is Simon Schaffer, reader in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University.

What drove him, Nicholas Boyle Boyle to take up science?

Gooter turned to science in his late youth, one might say, after he'd moved to Weymah from his hometown of Frankfurt and initially his scientific interests related to

his responsibilities in the duchy of Weimar.

He took up geology because he was responsible for the local mines. He took up Botany because he had to look after the Duke's park and planted up with trees. He got interested in anatomy because he reopened the Duke of Drawing Institute and they started live drawing classes.

So the initial interest was practical, but it became an obsession with him. And I think the reason for was in something and the social and human world about him was perhaps not quite as interesting as the natural world that lay there at his fingertips.

Sir Man Schiava, can you give us some idea of the context of Gerta's involvement in science. We expect the Renaissance man to be just that, and

...