by Bill Bryson
The triumphant successes of Cambridge molecular biology had been carried out largely in a ‘temporary’ shed outside the Cavendish Laboratory, known as The Hut. In 1962 they moved to the purpose-built Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which has continued to expand ever since. Max Perutz chose to be chairman of the lab, not director as was usual in MRC units. He pursued a policy of attracting good people, giving them a share in the resources of the lab, and letting them get on with their research with a minimum of interference while he got on with his. The model also included more or less compulsory tea and coffee breaks in the communal canteen, where even the starriest prima donna would sit down next to the most junior graduate student and discuss science.
It paid off. The tally of Nobel Prize-winners steadily rose, with Fred Sanger (his second), Cesar Milstein, Georges Köhler, Aaron Klug, John Walker, Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz, John Sulston and Venkatramen Ramakrishnan joining the list. In 1993 Sulston (FRS 1986) moved to become founding director of the nearby Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Its major role in the international Human Genome Project, which published the complete human sequence in 2003, grew directly from Sulston’s work at the LMB on sequencing the genome of the nematode worm, work supported by Jim Watson in his role as head of the US Office of Genome Research. Both the LMB and the Sanger Institute continue as international centres of molecular biology, while labs throughout the world are peopled with those who imbibed the LMB philosophy as young researchers. Sulston, supported by the Wellcome Trust, has continued to champion the free availability of biological information and oppose ‘land grabs’ in the genome for private gain.20
Perutz retired as chairman of the LMB in 1979, but never gave up research. In his latter years he became a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, writing witty and lucid essay-reviews on science and scientists. Though he abhorred political extremes of both right and left, he shared Bernal’s view of science as a force for good and set out to counter the anti-science movement with his 1989 collection of essays Is Science Necessary?21 His main concern was to promote health and well-being in developing countries, and to that end he advocated birth control, intensive agriculture and nuclear power (later with reservations). Like his more politically motivated colleagues, he argued passionately for an end to nuclear weapons and indeed all forms of warfare:
A nuclear war would destroy everything that has been built up over centuries without giving us any control over what, if anything, will rise from the ashes. We must work for the application of science to peace and a more just distribution of its benefits to mankind.
As for John Kendrew, after his solution of myoglobin he turned to government advice and scientific organisation. He had a close exposure to nuclear matters during two years’ tenure as deputy to the chief scientific adviser of the Ministry of Defence at the time of the Polaris Sales Agreement between Britain and the US. He subsequently became a member of the Council for Scientific Policy, created under the Labour government in 1964, and was knighted. A committed internationalist, he chaired the International Council of Scientific Unions and in 1978 became the founding director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, now a flourishing centre for research and training in the subject with a membership of twenty European countries.
On Sir Lawrence Bragg’s retirement from the RI, David Phillips moved his group to Oxford. His successors there, Louise Johnson and Dave Stuart (FRS 1996), have in turn headed the life sciences division at the Diamond Light Source, the synchrotron near Didcot in Oxfordshire that since 2007 has provided a national source of high-energy X-rays to probe ever more complex biological molecules and their interactions. Phillips himself spent his last two decades in scientific administration. As Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils from 1983–93, he shouldered the difficult and thankless task of sharing out an essentially static science budget among a growing and increasingly high-tech scientific community, while constantly fighting for better settlements from the government. After being raised to the peerage, he chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.
Dorothy Hodgkin remained a practising scientist well into her eighties, by which time she was chronically disabled with arthritis. In 1969 her dedicated team of assistants and students finally completed the task she set herself in 1934, of revealing the structure of insulin. It was a result that depended on huge advances in technology, including the development of high-speed computers and innovative ways of programming them. No single individual could have done all this. Protein crystallography offers a prime example of a style of science that is the antithesis of the ‘lone genius’ model. It is often said to be a science in which women excel, though most are wary of any suggestion that it is ‘women’s work’. It is the case, however, that Hodgkin took on many female graduate students who went on to make careers in the field.
Hodgkin was another political idealist and admirer of Communist systems. Like Bernal she had found that her political sympathies made her persona non grata in the US during the McCarthy era (and like Bernal she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize); but unlike him she conducted her politics on a personal level and avoided strident sloganising. She maintained contacts with colleagues in China throughout the Cultural Revolution, and worked indefatigably behind the scenes to bring about their readmission into international scientific organisations. She was a vocal opponent of war and nuclear weapons, a stance that led to her appointment in 1975 as President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.22 She was not afraid to use her status as a Nobel Prize-winner in the service of causes she believed in. She personally lobbied education minister Sir Keith Joseph over cuts in the higher education budget, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (who was her former student) on East-West relations; and she insisted on speaking out about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a conference of Nobel Prize-winners organised by the French President François Mitterrand in 1988. She is commemorated in the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowships, launched by the Royal Society to help young scientists, especially women, to get on to the academic career ladder.
Bernal never gave up science, taking on the presidency of the International Union of Crystallography in 1963. In the post-war years science policy in both Europe and the US moved a considerable distance in the direction he had mapped out in his 1939 book. The establishment of ‘big science’ projects such as the Apollo programme, CERN,23 and the Human Genome Project all required central government planning and support. The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat [of the scientific revolution]’ speech in 1963, and the UK’s science policy White Papers A Framework for Government Research and Development (1971), Realising Our Potential (1993) and Excellence and Opportunity (2000), all stressed wealth creation and the quality of life, though the debate has swung back and forth over whether scientists themselves or their government paymasters should set the agenda. Once again, though, Bernal’s take on the interdependence of science and socialism has proved laughably wide of the mark. When he wrote, in 1964, that ‘the scientific and computer age is necessarily a socialist one’,24 he could not have envisaged the commercial free-for-all made possible by the World Wide Web.
ENVOI
Like all branches of science, X-ray analysis calls for a combination of imagination and rigorous data collection. Unlike some, it gives hard-earned results that no paradigm shift or new experimental approach can undermine. As Perutz wrote, ‘Bragg’s structures were not preliminary approximations subject to revision: any student setting out to redetermine the structures of calcite, quartz or beryl will be disappointed.’ 25 The knowledge that an exact solution existed gave crystallographers an optimism that kept them going in their darkest hours (insulin took thirty-five years to solve, haemoglobin twenty-two). It is perhaps no coincidence that the scientists in this account were prepared to tackle society’s problems in the same hopeful spirit.
1 Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of
the Sciences (Cambridge, Polity, 1994), p. 117.
2 For more on the Braggs, see Graeme Hunter, Light is a Messenger: The Life and Science of William Lawrence Bragg (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004).
3 Letter from Max Perutz to Gerald Holton, 9 July 1966, private papers, quoted in Georgina Ferry, Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (London, Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 28.
4 W.H. Bragg, Concerning the Nature of Things (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1925).
5 Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge, pp. 115–35.
6 Kathleen Lonsdale, Is Peace Possible? (London, Penguin, 1957).
7 For more on Bernal, see Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (Oxford, OUP, 2005).
8 See Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London, Allen Lane, 1978).
9 For more on Hodgkin, see Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (London, Granta, 1998).
10 Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, A Passion for Science (Oxford, OUP, 1988).
11 J.D. Bernal and D. Crowfoot, ‘X-ray Photographs of Crystalline Pepsin’, Nature, 133 (1934), 794–5.
12 Insulin controls levels of glucose in the bloodstream, and has to be given artificially to those with some forms of diabetes.
13 Kathleen Lonsdale to Dorothy, 15 May 1945, Bodleian Library, Hodgkin papers, H.138. In fact the work was published not in the Royal Society journal but as part of a book edited by Hans Clarke and others, The Chemistry of Penicillin, published by Princeton University Press in 1949.
14 For more on Perutz, see Ferry, Max Perutz and the Secret of Life.
15 It was conceived by Geoffrey Pyke, a maverick inventor whom Bernal regarded as a genius and persuaded Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, to take seriously.
16 J.D. Watson, The Double Helix (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); Robert Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (London, Macmillan, 1974).
17 J.D. Watson and F.H.C Crick, ‘A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid’, Nature, 171 (1953), 737–8.
18 Quoted in Hunter (2004), pp. 232.
19 Found in tears and other secretions, lysozyme provides some protection against bacterial infection.
20 John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (London, Bantam, 2002).
21 Max Perutz, Is Science Necessary? (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1989).
22 Pugwash is an international organisation of scientists and others dedicated to research into the dangers of nuclear weapons. It was inspired by the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955.
23 The European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva.
24 J.D. Bernal, ‘After Twenty-Five Years’ in M. Goldsmith and A. McKay (eds), The Science of Science (London, Souvenir Press, 1964).
25 Max Perutz, ‘How W.L. Bragg Invented X-ray Analysis’ in Max Perutz, I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier (expanded edition) (New York, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003).
12 STEVE JONES
TEN THOUSAND WEDGES: BIODIVERSITY, NATURALSELECTION AND RANDOM CHANGE
Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London. His popular books include The Language of the Genes, In the Blood (based on the BBC TV series), Almost like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, Y: The Descent of Men, Coral and, most recently, Darwin’s Island. He writes the ‘View from the Lab’ column in the Daily Telegraph.
HOW MUCH DO WE KNOW ABOUT BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY? TO UNDERSTAND WHAT MAINTAINS IT MIGHT HELP IN THE BATTLE TO PRESERVE WHAT REMAINS. STEVE JONES ARGUES THAT ALTHOUGH WE HAVE MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE GEOGRAPHY OF LIFE THAN IN DARWIN’S TIME, WE LACK A THEORY OF WHY SOME PLACES HAVE LOTS OF CREATURES, WHILE OTHERS HAVE FEW.
In 1859, London – with its two million inhabitants – was the largest city on Earth. It was in addition (and in large part through the activities of the Royal Society) the world centre of geological and biological research, its lasting memorial the publication in that year of The Origin of Species. the book that gave birth to modern biology. The capital’s people were well aware of its fame, and flocked to public displays in the Zoo, the British Museum and Kew Gardens and – as a more select group (Charles Darwin among them) – to the Linnean, Geological, Royal and Royal Geographic Societies.
In 2009 Britain’s first city has slipped to a global number seventeen in size, but its status as an international centre of gravity of the intertwined sciences of ecology and evolution has not changed. London still represents, by a considerable margin, the world’s largest conglomeration of researchers in this field and remains, as it was in Darwin’s time, a global hub for the study of biological diversity. The Natural History Museum (in which the great man’s statue, once hidden in the tea room, has been promoted to pride of place) has over twenty million specimens of plant and animal, and Kew plans to store tens of thousands of species of plant as seeds. How many kinds of creature there might be altogether is a matter of guesswork; almost two million have been described, but the total may be – some say – twenty times as great (although that figure depends on just how a ‘species’ is defined).
Charles Darwin founded the modern sciences of evolution and ecology (although neither word appears in The Origin). His book was wrong about plenty of things but impressively right about others. He had an uncanny ability to foresee the difficulties that his new science was likely to face. To him, the nature and origin of species was ‘the mystery of mysteries’ – as it still is. In a prescient hint of disagreements to come, his writings introduce the tension between the power of directed change (natural selection included) and the importance of accident. That argument pervades the history of evolutionary biology and remains unresolved.
Palaeontology, development, genetics, ecology, demography, species diversity and other parts of evolutionary theory share a history of dissent about the role of chance as opposed to directed forces. Since 1859 there have been many reversals of attitude within each of those fields with – no doubt – more to come. Now, the study of biodiversity is revisiting the controversy, with mixed results.
FROM DELIGHT TO DOUBT
In Darwin’s early years, Nature seemed bounteous, complicated, and more or less permanent. For the young naturalist on the Beagle the main task was to describe, rather than to explain, the world’s variety. His joy in life’s abundance is clear: as he wrote on his first steps ashore in South America:
The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this, brings with it a deeper pleasure than he ever can hope again to experience … The day has passed delightfully. Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.
To the delighted Darwin, the tropics – unspoiled by man, filled with sunlight and blessed with sufficient products of the bounteous to allow chains of hungry creatures that prey upon each other – were the centre of the world’s diversity. Twenty years later The Origin, as it transformed a static view of life into a dynamic one, began to ask why. The book begins with chapters on variation and on the struggle for existence and makes the case that an all-pervasive interaction of the two generates new kinds of creature as the result of an ordered process called natural selection: inherited differences in the chances of reproduction. The Origin ends in a hymn to its power with the famous tangled bank: ‘clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth’. It was a vision of what today we refer to as biodiversity.
The original of the paradisiacal bank is only a few hundred yards from Down House, Darwin’s home in Kent for the last forty years of his life. To the patriarch of Downe its inhabitants – like those of the Brazilian forest – made up a crowded system of competitors, each s
queezed into its own way of life, any vacancy at once filled by a hungry challenger. So finely tuned were their interactions that natural selection was inevitable. Ancestors were replaced by better-adapted descendants and the world was full with no room for passengers. The directive forces of competition, extinction and replacement were essential parts of his theory. ‘The face of Nature’, he wrote, ‘may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.’ Inevitably, the less successful wedges were squeezed out. That vivid image gave rise in time to the well-known ‘Red Queen’ model of ecology in which competition is the engine of evolutionary change and in which different creatures must run just to stay in the same place.
That view of Nature is still, as in Victorian times, accompanied by the perception that evolution emerges from a series of rules: ‘Throw up a handful of feathers, and all must fall to the ground according to definite laws; but how simple is this problem compared to the action and reaction of the innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the proportional numbers and kinds …’ Since then, a great variety of laws – definite and less so – has been proposed by ecologists. Many are both linear and prescriptive. Some may have some validity; but most ecologists accept that accident also moulds the diversity of life. As The Origin points out, on oceanic islands the number of kinds of inhabitants is scanty and particular groups such as frogs and toads are absent – a result of the hazards of colonisation, denied to creatures that cannot cross the sea and open by chance to only a sample of others. Unpredictable events such as ice ages also helped to shape the distribution of plants and animals. Its author was happy to incorporate such random agents into the evolutionary argument.