A century ago it would have been tough for anyone visiting South Georgia, a frigid British-administered island in the South Atlantic, to distinguish a whale scientist from an actual whaler.

Visiting zoologists would spend months on greasy, icy platforms wearing nail-studded hip boots as they hacked vertebrae and ovaries out of rank carcasses suspended from steel cables. Falling whale parts threatened to kill them at any time, as they did the whalemen with whom the scientists...