Biographies of famous scientists are meant to inspire children toward science, but a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests many of the genre’s bestsellers may do the opposite. Educational psychology professor Jessica Gladstone, working with NYU’s Andrei Cimpian and former NYU research assistant Gabrielle Applebaum, analyzed 422 of the top 500 bestselling children’s science biographies on Amazon, covering 655 individual scientists — 59% male and 41% female, and 76% white and 24% of other races or ethnicities — publishing the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers applied mindset theory, which distinguishes a fixed mindset, the belief that ability is innate and unchangeable, from a growth mindset, the belief that ability develops through mentorship, strategy, and effort. Many of the biographies did not address a protagonist’s scientific interest or ability at all — “The books often portray scientists and their paths to success in ways that risk alienating young readers,” Gladstone said. Among books that did address ability, portrayals of innate versus developed ability appeared about equally often, but scientists’ interest in science itself was overwhelmingly framed as innate or as emerging very early in life.
That innate-talent framing was especially common in biographies of scientists from fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science — the same fields where the public already tends to assume success requires inborn talent and where gender and racial or ethnic representation gaps are largest. “Biographies of scientists are an enormously popular genre,” Cimpian noted. The study also found that biographies of female scientists emphasized effort more than those of male scientists, even after accounting for scientific field, a pattern the authors argue implies that success is framed as costing women more; the gap held even after accounting for the obstacles described in each biography and the author’s own gender, though no similar link emerged for race or ethnicity.
As an illustration, one biography of Ada Lovelace described her filling journals with equations at age three — “Children are coloring and learning about numbers at age 3,” Gladstone pointed out — while a biography of Neil deGrasse Tyson traced his early interests in ballet and boxing before describing how his interest in science developed gradually over time. Gladstone suggests that framing scientific success as something built through practice, with failure presented as a normal and useful part of the process, could make these biographies feel more reachable to the young readers they are meant to inspire.
Endnotes
- Jessica R. Gladstone, Gabrielle Applebaum, and Andrei Cimpian, “Children’s books about scientists convey demotivating messages,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 21, 2026, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2612021123.
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign News Bureau, “Scientists’ biographies may demotivate, not inspire, children to study science,” news release via EurekAlert!, July 28, 2026.