A Curious Boy
Page 27
When my short time in Fitzrovia came to an end I lodged with another friend whom I had first met on the geological field trip to Arran in my first year at Cambridge University. I was drawing away from Bridget’s family. Andrew Sita Lumsden’s career took a biological turn, and eventually he ran a famous Medical Research Council laboratory attached to Guy’s Hospital in London. He was elected to the Royal Society well before I was. He had a brief spell as a graduate vertebrate palaeontologist at Yale University, but that did not end happily, although he met his beautiful wife Ann while in the USA. In the early 1970s he looked like a slightly epicene rock star, with hair – a little lank – well below his shoulders and clothes that belied his handsome face and posh accent. He was a motorcycle fanatic, and also an accomplished engineer. The front room of the Victorian terrace in MacKenzie Road, Penge, housed a gigantic lathe on which metal thingumajigs could be turned with precision. Andrew’s bike, a Vincent, was set up on a kind of altar, ready for worship. I once went for a ride on the pillion that was hardly less terrifying than falling into the Arctic Ocean. Andrew acted as a kind of consultant for the South London biking community, and tough-looking types in leathers were wont to turn up at the front door, waving broken metal whatsits for repair. Andrew and Ann welcomed the man with two suitcases into their spare room – ‘damaged goods’, my mother would have said. I wondered if any woman could ever be interested in someone who owned only responsibilities and a Mini Countryman with a leaking tank.[3]
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In this book I have emphasised how twists of fate – luck if you prefer – repeatedly tweaked my story, allowing me to follow a unique route that led to an office deep within the Natural History Museum in London. My tale would have been different had a crucial toss of the die fallen any other way. If I had made another intuitive response to A. Sainsbury-Hicks my life would have been directed towards the humanities rather than science. Harry Whittington might well have stayed at Harvard University. I might have decided not to go on that first Spitsbergen adventure, and there may have been nothing special about the rocks when I got there, or Geoff Vallance might have had another fifteen marks in his final examinations. Bill Dean could have become head of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum – and there would have been no job. The list of my lucky chances is impressive, and has nothing much to do with any gift of character or intelligence on my part.
A sceptical reader might wonder with some justice whether luck alone may provide what philosophers call ‘necessary and sufficient’ conditions for prospering in science. I am sure luck plays a part, but knowing how to put good fortune to equally good use is just as important. The proverb that ‘genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains’ is all very well, but a mountain of observations is not a hypothesis. Imagination operates alongside hard work, and both can be seeded by a fortunate turn of fate. I had to make some intellectual leaps to link what I had discovered in Svalbard to advances in understanding in plate tectonics. Again, I was lucky enough to be in the right place – Cambridge – at the right time, but I could have earned a perfectly respectable doctorate without engaging my imagination in any kind of gymnastics. Luck, I believe, is a boon that must not be squandered. Luck gifts foundations but does not build a castle. If a theory can be proved by its converse, I know of examples where fortune has been generous but its magnanimity has been wasted. In the mid 1970s I spent a year in Newfoundland, off eastern Canada. I learned of some astonishing fossils that had been discovered at Mistaken Point, on the eastern side of the island. They were in what were then called Precambrian strata, and at that time the discovery of an array of large, frond-like fossils this ancient (c.565 million years old) was sensational. The original finds were made by a geology student called C. B. Misra in 1967, but the site was regarded as the ‘property’ of a local academic at Memorial University, Mike Anderson. From time to time he would show casts of the extraordinary fossils, always promising to reveal them fully to the world. He never did. He failed to do justice to an extraordinary gift, but kept other researchers away. After Anderson’s retirement, the Mistaken Point fauna was proved through publication to be seminal to our understanding of early life, and its locality is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Science is one of the few areas of human endeavour where merit is still the main criterion for success. ‘It’s who you know, not what you know’ does not apply. Science does not listen to accents; nor does science care about skin colour. Women are still outnumbered by men, but there is nothing intrinsically sexist about science, and the numbers are changing as ways of balancing work and family are developing. Very few scientists become rich through science, but then most of them are not in it just for the money. Science is not a moral system – it is a method of discovery, and has no direct part to play in organising society, although society is obliged to listen to scientific evidence to make up its mind. Too few scientists engage with politics; they tend to be suspicious of murky compromises and wary of how scientific evidence is ignored in favour of short-term gains. Those scientists that do serve government tend to leave the laboratory far behind. Twenty-first-century politicians often perceive public science as little more than a way of feeding innovation into the economy – for every dollar spent, two dollars earned. It is as if the job of the scientist were regarded as churning out profitable patents. This is not good news for those studying mimicry in butterflies or, for that matter, those fascinated by Ordovician trilobites. Sometimes I consider my luckiest break of all was to be born at exactly the right time.
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The International Geological Congress is held every four years, when all manner of scientists involved with the earth and its history gather for a series of sessions spread out over a week. Titles and abstracts are offered, and papers presented in front of leading specialists spanning the spectrum of geological subjects, palaeontology included. It is a big affair. The 1968 Prague Congress had been abruptly truncated by the Russian occupation of the city, when David Bruton and Harry Whittington had made good their escape. No such troubles threatened the 1972 Congress to be held during the summer in Montreal, the most populous city in Quebec. The British Museum (Natural History) had agreed to finance my first transatlantic trip. I was to represent the BM at the IGC! Even the initials gave the trip a kind of special imprimatur: after all, I was part of an exclusive club that actually knew what they meant. Better still, the meeting was preceded by a field trip across the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada in the western United States. The rocks there had yielded several trilobites of the same age and kind as the ones we had collected and identified from Svalbard. This was my first outing in a twenty-year mission to chase rocks of this Ordovician age around the world to test out theories about ancient continents and trilobites. So I enrolled with TIGBOE, the Third International Great Basin Ordovician Expedition: I was going to IGC via TIGBOE on behalf of the BM. It could have been a secret code.
Portrait of the artist as a young geologist. With Lehi Hintze (left) in Nevada in 1972.
The expedition started from Denver, Colorado, and moved westwards over the Rockies. The organiser was Reuben James Ross Jr of the US Geological Survey, who had mapped these rocks and collected their fossils throughout his working life. His monograph of twenty years earlier was a classic. ‘Rube’ was, in the demotic of the region, a somewhat ornery character, but he was charm itself on TIGBOE, apart from rallying everyone at 5.30 in the morning for a useful start. The party was an international crew – from France, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Australia. I came with Robin Cocks from the Natural History Museum, and struck up a friendship and collaboration that has lasted a lifetime. Our line of all-terrain vehicles moved from range to range across the west. We lodged in Nevada casinos and cheap motels. The spacious and beautiful landscape was divided into high ranges – still partly snow-clad in early summer – separated by great arid basins floored by endless, aromatic sagebrush. The flats of playa lakes occupied the lowest ground, where water gathered and evaporated to per
fectly smooth salt surfaces that glistened white in the sunlight. The only trees were pinyon pines scattered high up on the ranges. The whole landscape was fragrant from top to bottom. There was nobody out there. All roads ran straight across the basins, and then twisted and turned to cross the ranges; many of them were unmetalled, and their gravel surfaces developed corrugations known as ‘washboard’ that mercilessly rattled field vehicles. Coffee was spilled into laps.
The Ordovician rocks were exposed on the flanks of the ranges and wonderful sections through the strata lay on every side. The only problem was what to sample first. For me, it was the validation of my hard-won expertise. I was first out of the vehicle, and last back at the end of each stop. I scurried up steep slopes in a frenzied attempt to collect as much as I could in the shortest possible time. The abundant trilobites were old friends from Spitsbergen, I knew many of them better than did the older and greyer experts from around the world. I could already see that many of the ideas I had developed on the Arctic wastes could be applied here in the semi-desert – during the Ordovician period they had both been part of the same ancient continent, flooded by warm, shallow seas full of life. We were joined in Utah by Lehi Hintze, another trilobite expert – and a Mormon. He wore long woollen underwear as demanded by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, which seemed an extraordinary punishment as the heat built up; neither was he allowed to cool down with an icy beer at the end of the day. We rubbed salt around the rim of the glass to help make up for what we had sweated out during the heat. Lehi swigged a Coke, and even that was considered naughty. I rehearsed some of my ideas to him and he smiled a very sweet smile; I am still unsure whether he believed a word I said. One evening, I had the chance to present the talk I was planning for Montreal to the whole party. After sunset, a sheet was rigged up as a substitute for a white screen, and a slide projector was somehow powered from the vehicle. There was nothing but empty, open countryside for miles around, and a million stars made a distant ceiling. In the wild American west it seemed curious, but somehow wonderful to show images of David Bruton and myself with a backdrop of icebergs. I explained my ideas about the different habitats occupied by trilobites in relation to past Ordovician continents. By now, I felt I was among friends. My arguments seemed spun out of pure logic. An owl hooted approval from somewhere far away. For the first time in months I felt buoyant.
Return to civilisation was sobering. It was hard to believe that there could be so many geologists in the world as were strutting around Montreal. The 24th International Geological Congress embraced ranks of geophysicists, bearded tectonics wallahs, oil men, stratigraphers, surveyors, glaciologists, petrologists … and some palaeontologists hidden away somewhere in the melee. After a plenary session given by the grandees, the crowd would separate into their specialist disciplines for the rest of the meeting. But first, the ‘icebreaker’ was a vast congregation of chattering geologists; old friends were greeted with a vigorous pumping of hands, Russian delegates tried to evade their KGB shadows, people from Far Eastern countries tried their best with English, which did not do them much good when addressing a Québécois. It was hard to read the badges that hung around delegates’ necks (some years later I was labelled ‘Richard Farty’ thanks to a careless computer). In Nevada and Utah I had felt like one of the gang, a member of a special club. At IGC I realised that I was a small fish in a very large pond, and almost nobody knew who I was. This was the world in which I had chosen to make my mark. My new French pal Jean-Louis Henry and I wandered around with Gauloises dangling from our lips trying to look like Jean-Paul Belmondo. Robin Cocks was a few years older than I was, and introduced us to some of the friends he had made from previous meetings. Rube Ross made sure we met his colleagues from the Geological Survey. The word ‘networking’ had not been invented, but that was what I was doing. In the end, I thought the throng might be negotiable. Robin and I sloped off to the room we shared in one of the more ordinary Montreal chain hotels. I felt nervousness creeping on as I tried to get to sleep. The air conditioning hummed off and on, doubtfully.
The small, modern lecture hall was quite full the following day. The palaeontology sessions had brought together my colleagues from around the world, while the other geologists attended their own lectures in adjacent venues. I could recognise a number of friends from the Great Basin expedition, but there were many more delegates that I had never seen before. Some were quite elderly and looked a tad fierce. I guessed that I was probably the youngest person in the room. Before computers made mechanical devices redundant a slide projector clunkily projected images on to a screen behind the speaker. Slides had to be inverted to appear right way up for the audience, and I had checked mine repeatedly before inserting them into the carousel. It would have been unthinkable to show our field tents dangling from the sky! I was preceded by several other talks: the chair introduced, the paper was presented, questions were fielded, the session moved on. Abstracts were already printed in the programme. I was in a daze, twitching internally. The Russian speaker before me had brought thick glass projection slides. The lamp in the projector was too hot and the glass cracked onscreen; the poor lady had to see her images covered with a spider’s web of cracks that made them almost indecipherable. What if some disaster happened to me as well? The butterflies in my stomach rehearsed a major migration. It was my turn. The title was announced by the chair – and the slides were fine. I whizzed through my talk efficiently enough, but without the assured pizzazz I had displayed a few days earlier. There was brief applause. The person who always asks the difficult question asked the difficult question. Somebody made congratulatory noises. I thought I caught the word ‘garbage’ coming from one of the grizzled figures to my left: clearly, not everyone was impressed. I returned to my place in the auditorium, hugely relieved. The ritual moved on. Attention switched to the next topic. I had survived. I had personified my ideas, and now I could be just another delegate. The new boy from the BM had been introduced to the world. All the other boys I had once been listened to my words from very far away. I was, at last, a scientist.
Footnotes
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1 The Trout
1. Ephemeroptera are unique among insects in having an extra growth stage. After they hatch out from the subaqueous nymph stage, a brief early ‘dun’ winged stage moults once again to give rise to the reproductive ‘spinner’ stage.
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2 Eggs and After
1. Along with about 5,000 miles of track all over the British Isles. Dr Beeching remains a hate figure to this day.
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2. Ealing used to be in Middlesex, too, always abbreviated to Mddx on the post, until it became part of Greater London in 1965.
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3 The Chemi-shed
1. When this book was in press my wife discovered the likely identity of ‘Robinson’: Chemistry Experiments at Home for Boys and Girls by H. L. Heys.
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2. There are those who favour the mercaptans for the title, but they don’t have the advantage of being so volatile.
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4 The Ammonite
1. If I recall it correctly, this illustration may have been adapted from a famous nineteenth-century drawing by Henry De la Beche, and so was very antiquated indeed.
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2. Bryozoans form branching or mat-like colonies of tiny tubes, each of which holds a tiny filter-feeding animal in life; and yes, there was a specialist in bryozoans behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum.
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3. The Palaeontological Association has since produced a series of excellent photographic guides – for example, Fossils of the chalk, which would have been perfect for my young days.
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4. I would eventually try to capture what I had discovered in a book called The H
idden Landscape, which was published decades later.
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5 Fungus
1. There is no scientific difference between mushrooms and toadstools. Most people tend to use ‘toadstool’ to embrace inedible and poisonous mushrooms. In this case all toadstools are mushrooms, but not all mushrooms are toadstools.
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2. I should mention that New Naturalist 96 is a modern one on fungi by Brian Spooner and Peter Roberts. It brings the science right up to date, if lacking the incidental pleasures of the original volume.
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3. My French turned out to be useful, archaic or not. I examined two PhD theses in French many years later, though I had to prepare the questions carefully. Je n’ai pas pu m’empêcher de rire.
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6 Entr’acte
1. Thanks to the miracle of the web I discovered a recording of this song (1932), and it truly fails to live up to the promise of its title.