by Kevin Ashton
Lowell was looking at a projection from inside his head. No telescope is more powerful than the prejudice of the person looking through it. We can see what we expect when it does not exist just as well as we can ignore the unexpected when it does.
Seeing what we expect shares the same root as inattentional blindness. When we prime our eyes with preconception, we do not have beginner’s mind. Lowell could have avoided his errors. A. E. Douglass, his assistant, pointed out the risk of making the telescope’s aperture so small not long after Lowell started using it: “Perhaps the most harmful imperfection of the eye is within the lens. Under proper conditions it displays irregular circles and radial lines resembling a spider-web. These become visible when the pencil of light entering the eye is extremely minute.”
Douglass tested his hypothesis by hanging white globes a mile from the observatory. When he looked at them through the telescope, he saw the same lines Lowell was mapping onto planets. Lowell’s response was to fire Douglass—soon to become a distinguished astronomer—for disloyalty.
We can change direction when we take steps but not when we make leaps. Lowell made a leap when he said he would find life on Mars. He committed himself to canals, not truth. Robin Warren took a step when he said there were bacteria in the stomach. He made that modest note in his lab report: “I am not sure of the significance of these unusual findings, but further investigation may be worthwhile.” Then he took more steps. They led to the Nobel Prize.
Warren did not lack confidence—he was not, for example, deterred by colleagues who said the bacteria were of no significance—but he did lack something Lowell had in abundance: certainty.
Confidence is belief in yourself. Certainty is belief in your beliefs. Confidence is a bridge. Certainty is a barricade.
Certainty is even easier to create than illusion. Our brains are electrochemical. The feeling of certainty, like any other feeling, comes from the electrochemistry in our heads. Chemical and electrical stimulation can make us feel certain. Ketamine, phencyclidine, and methamphetamine create feelings of certainty, as does applying electricity to the entorhinal cortex, a part of the brain a few inches behind the nose.
False certainty is common in everyday life. In a study of memory, cognitive psychologists Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch tested false certainty by asking students how they first heard about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. One student’s answer was: “I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about it. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching which I thought was so sad.” Another response was: “I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and we were both totally shocked.”
Both answers are from the same student. Neisser and Harsch first asked her the question the day after the event, then tracked her down two years later and asked the question again. She felt “absolutely certain” about the second answer.
Of the forty people in the Challenger study, twelve were wrong about everything they recalled, and most were wrong about most things. Thirty-three were sure they had never been asked the question before. There was no relationship between the subjects’ feelings of certainty and their accuracy. Being wrong, even being shown we are wrong, does not stop us from feeling certain.
Nor does irrefutable evidence—in fact, there is no such thing. Everybody continued to believe their second, incorrect memory even when shown the answers they had handwritten the day after the explosion. One response: “I still think of it as the other way around.”
Once we become certain, we can remain certain, even when the evidence that we are mistaken should be overwhelming. This unshakable certainty was first studied in 1954, when psychic and spiritualist Dorothy Martin said aliens had warned her that the world would be destroyed on December 21. Psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, Henry Riecken, and others posed as believers, joined her group of followers, and watched what happened when her prophecy did not come true.
Martin had made specific predictions. One, delivered via trance by an alien called “the Creator,” said a “spaceman” would arrive at midnight on December 20 to rescue Martin and her followers in a “flying saucer.” The group made preparations, including learning passwords, cutting the zippers out of their pants, and removing their bras. Festinger, Shachter, and Riecken’s book about the experience, When Prophecy Fails, describes what happened when the spaceman failed to appear:
The group began reexamining the original message which had stated that at midnight they would be put into parked cars and taken to the saucer. The first attempt at reinterpretation came quickly. One member pointed out that the message must be symbolic, because it said they were to be put into parked cars but parked cars do not move and hence could not take the group anywhere. The Creator then announced that the message was indeed symbolic, but the “parked cars” referred to their own physical bodies, which had obviously been there at midnight. The flying saucer, he went on, symbolized the inner light each member of the group had. So eager was the group for an explanation of any kind that many actually began to accept this one.
The aliens’ big prediction had been the end of the world. But Martin received a new message from the aliens shortly before this was due to occur: “From the mouth of death have ye been delivered. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”
The group had saved the world! The cataclysm was canceled. Members started calling newspapers to announce the news. They did not even consider the possibility that Martin’s prophecies were false.
One of the undercover psychiatrists, Leon Festinger, named this gap between certainty and reality “dissonance.” When what we know contradicts what we believe, we can either change our beliefs to fit the facts or change the facts to fit our beliefs. People suffering from certainty are more likely to change the facts than their beliefs.
Next, Festinger studied dissonance in ordinary people. In one experiment, he gave volunteers a mundane task, then asked what they thought of it. Each one said it was boring. Despite this, he persuaded them to tell the next volunteer to arrive that it was fun. After people told someone else the task was fun, their memory of it altered. They “remembered” thinking that the task was fun. They changed what they knew to fit something they had initially only pretended to believe.
Once we become certain, we need the world to become and remain consistent with our certainty. We see things that do not exist and ignore things that do in order to keep life in line with our beliefs. Festinger writes in his 1957 book, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: “When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it, the person will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.”
Knowing that dissonance exists does not help prevent it. We can have dissonance about our dissonance. Dorothy Martin had a long career communicating with aliens after her prophecy failed and even after the study about her was published. Some of Martin’s followers interpreted the psychologists’ research as proof of her powers. For example, “Natalina,” an “explorer of the supernatural” from Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote on her website “Extreme Intelligence”: “The psychologists determined that when people have a strong enough faith in something, they will often do exactly the opposite of what we would expect when their faith is tested.”
How can we know we are seeing something real, and not being deluded by dissonance—that we are like Robin Warren and Judah Folkman, not Percival Lowell and Dorothy Martin?
That’s easy: delusion comforts when truth hurts. When you feel sure, feel wary. You may be suffering from certainty.
Delusion’s comfort comes from certainty. Certainty is the low road past questions and problems. Certainty is cowardice—the flight from the possibility that we might be wrong. If we already know we are right, why confront queries or qualms? Just climb the Eif
fel Tower and fly already.
Confidence is a cycle, not a steady state, a muscle that must be strengthened daily, a feeling we renew and increase by enduring the adversity of creation. Certainty is constant. Confidence comes and goes.
Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything.
1 | ROSALIND
Sleet like crystal tears fell on cobbles of black umbrellas at the United Jewish Cemetery in London. It was April 17, 1958. Across the sea in Brussels, the World’s Fair opened with a scale model of a virus as the main attraction. In the cemetery, a casket containing the body of the scientist who built the model was put in the ground. Her name was Rosalind Franklin. She had died of cancer the day before, aged thirty-seven. Her work was understanding the mechanics of life.
With its gas chambers, guided missiles, and fission bombs, World War II was an apex for the engineering of death. After the war, scientists sought a new summit. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger captured the spirit of the age with a series of talks in Dublin called “What Is Life?” He said the laws of physics are based on entropy: the “tendency of matter to go over into disorder.” Yet life resists entropy, “avoiding the rapid decay into the inert,” by means then enigmatic. Schrödinger set a bold goal for the science of the rest of the century: to discover how life lives.
Of all the things in the universe, only life escapes inertia and decay, however briefly. An individual organism delays destruction by consuming matter from the environment—by breathing, eating, and drinking, for example—and using it to replenish itself. A species delays destruction by transferring its blueprint from parent to child. Life itself delays destruction by adapting and diversifying these blueprints. At the start of the 1950s, life’s mechanism was a mystery; by the end of the decade, much of the mystery had been solved. Rosalind Franklin’s model of a virus at the World’s Fair was a celebration of that triumph.
The model showed the tobacco mosaic virus, known to scientists as “TMV” and studied throughout the world because it is easy to obtain, highly infectious, and relatively simple. TMV was named for the destruction it wreaks on tobacco leaves, which it stains in a brown patchwork like a mosaic. In 1898, Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck showed that the infection was not caused by bacteria, which are relatively large and cellular, but by something smaller and cell-less. He called it a “virus,” using the Latin word for “poison.”
Bacteria are cells that divide to reproduce, like the cells in other life-forms. A virus has no cells. It occupies, or infects, cells and repurposes their engines of reproduction to make copies of itself—it is a microbiological cuckoo. A virus contains the information it needs to make a copy of itself and little else. But how is the information stored? How does the virus duplicate the information in a new cell without giving away its only copy?
The questions were more important than tobacco or viruses. All reproduction is like viral reproduction. Parents do not cut themselves in half to make a child. Like viruses, fathers provide information only: a sperm is a message wrapped in matter. To understand a virus is to understand life.
Life’s information is a series of instructions that give cells particular functions. A child is not, as scientists of the nineteenth century believed, a blend of its parents; it inherits discrete instructions from each parent. These discrete instructions are called “genes.”
Genes were discovered in 1865 by Gregor Mendel, a friar at St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brünn, now part of the Czech Republic. Mendel grew, cross-fertilized, and analyzed tens of thousands of pea plants and found that traits present in one plant could be introduced into its offspring but, in most cases, could not be blended. For example, peas could either be round or wrinkled but could not be both; nor could they be of some intermediate form. When Mendel crossed round and wrinkled peas, their descendants were always round and never wrinkled. The instruction “Be round” dominated the instruction “Be wrinkled.” Mendel called these instructions “characters”; today we call them “genes.”
Mendel’s work was ignored—even Darwin was unaware of it—until 1902, when it was rediscovered and became the basis of “chromosome theory.” Chromosomes are packets of protein and acid found in the nuclei of living cells. Their name comes from one of the first things discovered about them—that they become brightly colored when stained during scientific experiments: chroma is Greek for “color,” and soma is Greek for “body.” Chromosome theory, developed in parallel by Walter Sutton and Theophilus Painter and formalized by Edmund Beecher Wilson, explained what chromosomes do: they carry the genes that enable life to reproduce.
At first, scientists assumed the chromosome’s proteins were the source of life’s information. Proteins are long, complicated molecules. Acids, the other component of chromosomes, are relatively simple.
Rosalind Franklin believed life’s messengers might be the chromosome’s acids, not its proteins. She came to the subject indirectly. During her college years, she developed an interest in crystals and learned how to study them using X-rays. She became an expert on the structure of coal—or, as she called it, “holes in coal”—which gave her a reputation as a talented X-ray crystallographer. This led her to two research positions at the University of London, where she analyzed biological samples instead of geological samples. It was during her second appointment, at Birkbeck College, that she studied the tobacco mosaic virus.
The word “crystal” evokes brittle things like snowflakes, diamonds, and salt, but in science, a crystal is any solid with atoms or molecules arranged in a three-dimensional repeating pattern. Both of the acids found in chromosomes, deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid, or DNA and RNA, are crystals.
Crystal molecules are tightly packed: the gap between them is a few ten-billionths of a meter long. Light waves are hundreds of times longer than this, so light cannot be used to analyze a crystal’s structure—it cannot pass through the crystal’s gaps. But the waves of an X-ray are the same size as the crystal’s gaps. They can pass through the crystal’s lattice, and as they do so, they are diverted (or “refracted”) every time they hit one of the crystal’s atoms. X-ray crystallographers deduce the structure of a crystal by sending X-rays through it from every possible angle, then analyzing the results. The work requires precision, attention to detail, and an ability to imagine in three dimensions. Franklin was a master crystallographer.
She needed all her skill to solve the problem of how viruses reproduce. Unlike bacteria, viruses are metabolically inert—meaning that they don’t change in any way or “do” anything—if they have not penetrated a cell. The tobacco mosaic virus, for example, is just a tube of motionless protein molecules until it infects a plant—a tube that contains deadly instructions, encoded in RNA. By the time Franklin took on the problem, it had already been determined that there was nothing but empty space in the center of the tobacco mosaic virus. So where were the deadly instructions?
The answer, she discovered, was that the virus is structured like a drill bit: its protein exterior is twisted with grooves, and its core is scored with spirals of acid. This weaponlike form also shows how viruses work. The protein punctures the cell, and then the RNA unspools and takes over the reproductive machinery in the nucleus of the cell, cloning itself and so spreading infection.
Franklin published her results at the start of 1958. She did the work despite being treated for cancer, from which she had been suffering since 1956. The tumors went away, then returned to kill her. She made the model for the World’s Fair while she was dying.
Her death was noted in the New York Times and the London Times. Both newspapers described her as a skilled crystallographer who helped discover the nature of viruses.
Then, in the years after her death, a new truth was told. Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to humanity was far greater than her work on the tobacco mosaic virus. For a long time, the only people who knew what she had really accomplished were the three men who had secretly stolen her work: James Watson,
Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins.
2 | THE WRONG CHROMOSOMES
Watson and Crick were researchers at Cambridge University. Wilkins had been Franklin’s colleague and supervisor during her first University of London appointment, at King’s College. All three men wanted to be first to answer the question of the age: what is the structure of DNA, the acid that carries the information of life, and how does it work? The men saw themselves in competition. Wilkins called the trio “rats” and wished the other two “happy racing.”
Rosalind Franklin was aware of the race but did not compete in it. She believed racing made hasty science, and she had a handicap: she was a woman.
From a genetic perspective, the difference between a man and a woman is one of forty-six chromosomes. Women have two X chromosomes. Men have an X and a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome carries 454 genes, fewer than 1 percent of the total number in a human being. Because of this tiny difference, the creative potential of women has been suppressed for most of human history.
In some ways, Rosalind Franklin was lucky. She was educated at Cambridge University’s Newnham College. Had she been born a few generations earlier, she would not have been admitted to Cambridge. Newnham was founded in 1871, the second of the university’s women-only colleges. The other, Girton, was founded in 1869. Cambridge University was founded in 1209. For its first 660 years—more than 80 percent of its existence—no women were admitted. Even when they were admitted, women were not equal to men. Despite placing first in the university’s entrance exam for chemistry, Franklin could not be a member of the university or an undergraduate. Women were “students of Girton and Newnham Colleges.” They could not earn a degree. And even this place in the university’s underbelly was a privilege. The number of women allowed to attend Cambridge was capped at five hundred, to ensure that 90 percent of students were men.