TESTIFYING BEFORE CONGRESS in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: “I don’t know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain.”

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.

That’s the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin, the Franklin L. Ford professor of the history of science at Harvard. In an upcoming book, “The Scientific Life,” to be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press, Shapin argues that our notion of the noble scientist untethered by monetary obligations is bad history.

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