Albert Einstein announced his theory of general relativity 100 years ago. Celebrations to mark the event will go on throughout this year, just as there were festivities in 1979—the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s birth—and in 2005, the centennial of his “miracle year,” when he published a series of papers (on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on special relativity and on the equivalence of matter and energy) that turned the physics world upside down. In his own lifetime, Einstein’s name became a global synonym for transcendent genius. People knew that he had done astounding things in physics, but few had much of an idea just what he had done. Once Einstein was at a film premiere with Charlie Chaplin, and the crowds went wild. Chaplin explained to Einstein what was going on: “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.”

Each of the Einstein milestones was an occasion for biography, though biographers and their publishers have felt no need to await a special commemorative occasion. There are dozens of Einstein biographies, in different languages, meant for different audiences. The first of this year’s crop, Steven Gimbel’s “Einstein: His Space and Times,” is a compact, synthetic contribution to Yale’s Jewish Lives series.

The flow of new scientific biography is one of many signs of the ever-growing cultural prestige of science. Biographical celebration is standard fare for scientists of what’s usually called the “genius class.” There are more scientific biographies than ever these days; some of them sell pretty well, and it’s not hard to understand why. As we come more and more to appreciate the world-shaping significance of science and technology, why shouldn’t we want to know about the remarkable people who did this shaping?

There was a time when scientific biographers had a confident notion of what they were doing and why. They were paying tribute, celebrating, offering up scientific lives as patterns for admiration and emulation. The scientist was either an isolated and ascetic eccentric—following the hermetic pattern of a life touched by divine inspiration—or he (then, invariably, “he”) was a paragon of humility and virtue, living in accord with the personal modesty enjoined by methodological discipline and recognizing that new science is built upon past science—seeing further than others, as Newton said, by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” Both of these conceptions licensed a legitimate interest in the scientist’s personality and personal life.

But the conventions of scientific biography have changed. Beginning around the early 20th century, some authors began to write with the goal of showing that “scientists were human too,” that “science had a human face.” Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel “Arrowsmith” was an influential marker of changing sensibilities, and soon scientific biographers also took up the task of showing that great scientists might not be wholly different from you and me—even the exalted Einstein. They too loved and hated, experienced disappointment, felt lonely or unrecognized, behaved badly and put their trousers on one leg at a time. (A major, and more recent, discovery was that some scientists were women.) A 1979 collection of occasional remarks was titled “Albert Einstein: The Human Side,” and one understands what’s meant, though the literal-minded might wonder what the “non-human side” would be.