by Kevin Ashton
Physicist Max von Laue answered this question in 1912. Laue put crystals between X-rays and photographic plates and found that the X-rays left interference patterns—which are similar to sunlight reflecting off rippling water—on the plates. Particles could not fit through the densely packed molecules of a crystal—and, if they did, they were unlikely to make interference patterns. Therefore, Laue concluded, X-rays were waves.
Within months of hearing about Laue’s work, a young physicist named William Bragg showed that the interference patterns also revealed the inner structure of the crystal. In 1915, at the age of twenty-five, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery, becoming the youngest ever Nobel laureate. His father, also a physicist called William, received the award too, but this was all “Matthew effect.” Bragg the elder played almost no role in his son’s discovery.
Bragg’s work transformed the study of crystals. Before Bragg, crystallography was a branch of mineralogy, part of the science of mines and mining, and much of the work involved collecting and cataloging; after Bragg, the field became “X-ray crystallography,” a wild frontier of physics inhabited by scientists intent on penetrating the mysteries of solid matter.
The sudden shift had an important and unexpected consequence: it advanced the careers of female scientists. In the late 1800s, universities had started admitting women into science classes, albeit reluctantly. Crystallography, a relative backwater, was a field of study where women had been able to find work after graduating. One, a woman named Florence Bascom, was teaching geology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, while Bragg was accepting his Nobel Prize. Bascom was the first woman to receive a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she was forced to take classes sitting behind a screen so that she would “not distract the men”; she was also the first female geologist appointed by the United States Geological Survey, and had been an expert in crystals long before physicists became interested in them.
When the study of crystals moved from understanding their exterior—mineralogy and chemistry—to understanding their interior—solid-state physics—Bascom followed, taking her female students with her.
One of them was a woman named Polly Porter, who had been forbidden from going to school because her parents did not believe girls should be educated. When Porter was fifteen, her family moved from London to Rome. While her brothers studied, Porter wandered the city, collecting fragments of stone, cataloging the marble the ancient Romans had used to build the capital of their empire. When the family moved to Oxford, Porter found bits of Rome there, too: in Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, which had a collection of ancient Roman marble in need of cleaning and labeling. Henry Miers, Oxford’s first professor of mineralogy, noticed Porter’s regular visits to the collection and hired her to translate the catalog and reorganize the stones. She discovered crystallography through Miers. He told Porter’s parents she should apply for admission to the university, but they would not hear of it.
Porter took a job dusting instead. But not just any dust—the dust in the laboratory of Alfred Tutton, a crystallographer at London’s Royal School of Mines. Tutton taught Porter how to make and measure crystals. Then the Porters moved to the United States, so Polly cataloged more stones, first at the Smithsonian Institution, then at Bryn Mawr College, where Florence Bascom discovered her and appealed to Mary Garrett, a suffragist and railroad heiress, for funds so she could study. There she stayed until 1914, the year Bragg’s Nobel Prize was announced and crystallography moved from the margins of geology to the foundation of science. At that point, Bascom wrote to Victor Goldschmidt, a mineralogist at Heidelberg University, in Germany:
Dear Professor Goldschmidt:
I have long had the purpose of writing you to interest you in Miss Porter, who is working this year in my laboratory and whom I hope you will welcome in your laboratory next year. Her heart is set upon the study of crystallography and she should go to the fountainhead of inspiration.
Miss Porter’s life has been unusual, for she has never been to school or college. There are therefore great gaps in her education, particularly in chemistry and mathematics, but to offset this I believe you will find that she has an unusual aptitude and an intense love of your subject. I want to see her have the opportunities which have so long been denied her. I am both ambitious for her and with faith in her ultimate success.
Yours truly,
Florence Bascom
Goldschmidt welcomed Porter in June 1914.
The next month the First World War started.
Porter succeeded at her work of learning the art of crystallography despite the difficulties of the war and the depression and distraction of Goldschmidt, and three years later, she earned a science degree from Oxford. She stayed at Oxford, conducting research into, and teaching undergraduates about, the crystals that were her passion until she retired, in 1959. One of her most enduring acts was to inspire and encourage a woman who would become one of the world’s greatest crystallographers and Rosalind Franklin’s mentor: Dorothy Hodgkin.
Hodgkin was a child at the dawn of the crystal revolution. She was two years old when Bragg invented X-ray crystallography, five years old when he and his father won the Nobel Prize, and when she was fifteen, she listened as the elder Bragg gave the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures for children. In Britain, the lectures, which were started by Michael Faraday in 1825, are as much part of the season as feasting and caroling. Bragg’s topic in 1923 was “The Nature of Things”—six lectures describing the recently revealed subatomic world.
“In the last twenty-five years,” he noted, “we have been given new eyes. The discoveries of radioactivity and of X-rays have changed the whole situation: which is indeed the reason for the choice of the subject of these lectures. We can now understand so many things that were dim before; and we see a wonderful new world opening out before us, waiting to be explored.”
Three of Bragg’s lectures were about crystals. He explained their allure: “The crystal has a certain charm due partly to glitter and sparkle, partly to perfect regularity of outline. We feel that some mystery and beauty must underlie the characteristics that please us, and indeed that is the case. Through the crystal we look down into the first structures of nature.”
The lectures inspired Dorothy Hodgkin to pursue a career in crystallography, but Oxford disappointed her: crystal structures were a small part of the university’s undergraduate science syllabus. It was only in her final year that she met Polly Porter, who was teaching crystallography while also conducting research to classify every crystal in the world. Porter inspired Hodgkin anew and may have even stopped her from straying into another field. Hodgkin wrote, “There was such a mass of material clearly already available on crystal structures that I had not known about—I wondered, for a moment, whether there was anything for me to find out—and gradually realized the limitations of the present which we could pass.”
What Hodgkin saw before most other scientists was that X-ray crystallography could be applied not only to rocks but also to living molecules and that it might be able to reveal the secrets of life itself. In 1934, shortly after graduating, she set about proving her idea by analyzing a crystalline human hormone: insulin. The molecule would not yield to the technology of the 1930s. In 1945, she determined the crystal structure of a form of cholesterol, the first ever biomolecular structure to be identified, or “solved,” then determined the structure of a second biomolecule, penicillin. In 1954, she worked out the structure of vitamin B12, and for this discovery she was awarded the Nobel Prize.
That same year, Japanese physicist Ukichiro Nakaya solved the mystery of the snowflake. Snowflakes that form at temperatures higher than −40 degrees Celsius are not pure water. They form around another particle, almost always biological, and usually a bacterium. It is a beautiful coincidence that life, in the form of a bacterium, is the nucleus of an abundant crystal, snow, and that a crystal, DNA, is the nucleus of abundant life. Nakaya also showed why snowflake
s have six corners: because snowflakes grow from ice crystals, and the crystalline structure of ice is hexagonal.
When Rosalind Franklin started analyzing DNA using X-ray crystallography, she was inheriting a technique pioneered by Dorothy Hodgkin, who was inspired by Polly Porter, who was a protégée of Florence Bascom, who broke ground for all women in science, following work by William Bragg, who was inspired by Max von Laue, who followed Wilhelm Röntgen, who followed William Crookes, who followed Heinrich Geissler, who followed Robert Boyle.
Even the greatest individual contribution is a tiny step on humanity’s way. We owe nearly everything to others. Generations are also generators. The point of the fruit is the tree, and the point of the tree is the fruit.
Today, the whole world stands on Rosalind Franklin’s shoulders. Everybody benefits from her work; it is a link in the long chain that led to—among many other things—virology, stem-cell research, gene therapy, and DNA-based criminal evidence. Franklin’s impact, along with Bragg’s, Röntgen’s, and all of the others’, has even traveled beyond this planet. NASA’s robotic rover Curiosity analyzes the surface of Mars using onboard X-ray crystallography. Nucleobases, essential components of DNA, have been found in meteorites, and glycolaldehyde, a sugarlike molecule that is a part of RNA, has been discovered orbiting a star four hundred million light-years away from us. Because we have found these buildings blocks so far away, it now seems possible that life is not rare but everywhere. Life was mysterious when Franklin first photographed it; today, we understand it so well we can reasonably suspect that the universe may be full of it.
Rosalind Franklin died because of her DNA. She was an Ashkenazi Jew, descended in part from people who migrated from the Middle East to the shores of Europe’s Rhine River during the Middle Ages. Her family name was once Fraenkel; her ancestors were from Wroclaw, now in Poland, then the capital of Silesia. Much of her genetic inheritance was European, not Asian: the Ashkenazim began when Jewish men converted European women and survived by prohibiting marriage outside their group. Three of these people had genetic flaws: two of them had mutated breast cancer type 1 tumor suppressor genes, called BRCA1 genes; another had a mutation called 6174delT in his or her breast cancer type 2 tumor suppressor, or BRCA2, gene. Franklin likely inherited one of these mutated genes. The BRCA2 mutation makes a woman fifteen times more likely to get ovarian cancer; the BRCA1 mutation increases her odds by a factor of thirty. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer.
None of this could have been imagined before she photographed DNA. Today, Ashkenazi Jewish women, all literal cousins of Rosalind Franklin, can get a test to see if they have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations and take preventative measures if they do. These measures are crude: they include surgical removal of both breasts, to reduce the risk of breast cancer, and surgical removal of the ovaries and fallopian tubes, to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer. But in the near future there will likely be a targeted therapy that prevents the mutation from causing cancer, without the need for surgery. This will also be true of other genetic mutations, other cancers, and other diseases. Franklin could not save her own life, but she could and did help save the lives of tens of thousands of other women who were born after her death, many of whom will never know her name.
None of this would have happened, or it would have happened later, if women were still barred from science—not because they are women but because they are human and, thus, as likely to create, invent, or discover as anybody else. The same is true of people who are black, brown, or gay. A species that survives by creating must not limit who can create. More creators means more creations. Equality brings justice to some and wealth to all.
1 | WILLIAM
William Cartwright’s dog started barking soon after midnight on Sunday, April 12, 1812. There was a single gunshot from the north, one from the south, then one each from the east and the west. Cartwright’s watchers awoke at the sounds. Men, unseen and uncounted, came through the night and beat the watchers to the ground in the lee of Cartwright’s mill.
Other men broke the mill’s windows and pounded on its door with great sledgehammers called “Enochs.” Yet more fired pistols through the broken windows, and muskets at the higher floors.
Cartwright, accompanied by five employees and five soldiers, counterattacked, firing muskets from behind raised flagstones and ringing a bell to alert the cavalry stationed one mile away.
The mill door, which Cartwright had reinforced and studded with iron, would not yield to the Enochs. Musket balls smoked up and down. Soon, two men lay dying in the yard. After twenty minutes and 140 shots, the attackers retreated, carrying the wounded, unable to retrieve the dying.
Once the shadows of the mob had disappeared, Cartwright looked out. Hammers and pistols had destroyed his first-floor windows, pane and frame; musket balls had shattered fifty more panes upstairs. His door had been sledged beyond repair. Beyond, two mortally wounded men furled and unfurled among discarded hammers and hatchets, axes, puddles of blood, strips of flesh, and a severed finger.
The object of the attack was Cartwright’s automatic loom. The attackers were weavers, trying to destroy the new machine before it destroyed their jobs. They called themselves “Luddites” and had launched similar attacks throughout the north of England. William Cartwright was the first man to ever defeat them.
The Luddites—their name came from the then-famous, possibly fictional machine breaker Ned Ludd—have become icons of both restraint in the face of new technology and entrenched fear of change. They were driven by neither: they were just men desperate to keep their jobs. Their battle was against capital, not technology. The new and improved Enoch sledgehammers they used to wreck looms were named after their inventor, Enoch Taylor, who had also invented the looms that were being wrecked—an irony that was not lost on the Luddites, who chanted, “Enoch did make them, Enoch shall break them.”
The Luddites’ story is a tale not about right and wrong but about the nuance of new. As our creations advance from generation to generation, they have consequences that, good or bad, are nearly always unforeseen and unintended.
New technology is often called “revolutionary.” This is not always hyperbole. The context of that bloody night in England was a collision between two revolutions, one technological and one social.
In the decades before, Europe’s monarchs and aristocrats had been besieged. In 1776, thirteen North American colonies had declared independence from King George III of England. The French Revolution started in 1789, and the French king Louis XVI was dead within four years. Thomas Paine summarized the spirit of revolution, and the age, in 1791, when he wrote in The Rights of Man, “Governments must have arisen either out of the people or over the people.”
At the time of the Luddites, the British government, like the French government that had just been deposed, was one that had arisen over the people. The head of state, King George III, was one strand in a cobweb of intermarried, interrelated monarchs covering Europe. George ruled Britain through a tier of intermediaries: hereditary aristocrats who in turn ruled the general population. Recently, a new layer in the social hierarchy had endangered this arrangement: capitalists—men who became wealthy through working and creating work for others, not by accidents of birth. People claiming to be “royal” did not impress the capitalists, who expected political power along with their profits. Their rise was in part a result of inventions like the printing press, which freed information, and labor-saving machines, which freed time. The middle class is a consequence of the creations of the Middle Ages.
The battle at William Cartwright’s mill exemplified the new tensions. Cartwright, given but a few of the monarch’s soldiers, rang his bell for more, and they never came. The aristocracy was ambivalent about this new industrial class. Many of them recognized the same risk the Luddites saw—that mechanization could concentrate power and wealth in new hands. Technology like Taylor’s automatic loom did not threaten one social class. It threatened two.
T
he Luddites, monarchs, and aristocrats did not fear technology in general so much as the possible consequences of particular technologies for them personally. New tools make new societies.
While the aristocrats were unsure of the threat, the Luddites were certain—so convinced that automatic looms would do them harm that they were willing to risk death, either in their raids or from execution after capture, to stop the rise of the machines. But the longer-term consequences of the looms, a precursor to both computers and robots, were unforeseen, especially by the Luddites. They could never have predicted that their descendants—today’s workers—would use information technology and automation to make their living, just as William Cartwright did. In the end, we’ll see, it was the working class that gained the most from the new technology. The aristocrats, the only ones who perhaps had the power to keep automation away, did nothing and lost everything.
2 | HUMANITY’S CHOIR
The consequences of technology are mostly unforeseeable, in part because technology is so complex. To understand that complexity, let’s step back from Cartwright’s mill to consider something apparently all-American and seemingly mundane: a can of Coca-Cola.
The H-E-B grocery store a mile from my home in Austin, Texas, sells twelve cans of Coca-Cola for $4.49.
Each one of those cans originated in a small town of four thousand people on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra—the site of the world’s largest bauxite mine. Bauxite is surface-mined—basically scraped and dug from the top of the ground—and then crushed and washed with hot sodium hydroxide until it separates into aluminum hydroxide and a waste material called “red mud.” The aluminum hydroxide is first cooled and then heated to over a thousand degrees Celsius in a kiln, where it becomes aluminum oxide, or alumina. The alumina is dissolved in a molten substance called cryolite, a rare mineral first discovered in Greenland, and turned into pure aluminum using electricity in a process called electrolysis. The pure aluminum sinks to the bottom of the molten cryolite, is drained off, and is placed in a mold. The result is a long, cylindrical bar of aluminum. Australia’s role in the process ends here. The bar is transported west to the port of Bunbury and loaded onto a container ship to begin a month-long journey to—in the case of Coke for sale in Austin—the port of Corpus Christi, on the Texan coast.