The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  Scientists themselves may have moral or immoral reasons for pursuing their research. But these leave no mark on their findings, which are right or wrong, to whatever degree, irrespective of their discoverer’s motives. David Bodanis may be right to trace a link between Pasteur’s loathing of mass humanity and his connection of disease with bacteria. The scientific credentials of the connection are, however, neither strengthened nor weakened by Pasteur’s misanthropy.

  The last few paragraphs may prompt readers to ask why they should bother to know about science if it cannot help to resolve moral or religious questions. The best answer is that science is, simply, what is known, and the only alternative to it is ignorance. Coleridge (whatever his opinion of Sir Isaac Newton’s soul) saw this clearly:

  The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or play-withs, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.

  As science has grown, so, inevitably, has the ignorance of those who do not know about it. Within the mind of anyone educated exclusively in artistic and literary disciplines, the area of darkness has spread enormously during the later twentieth century, blotting out most of modern knowledge. A new species of educated but benighted being has come into existence – a creature unprecedented in the history of learning, where education has usually aimed to eradicate ignorance. The most highly gifted members of this new species have generally been the most forthright in regretting their deprivation. ‘Exclusion from the mode of thought which is habitually said to be the characteristic achievement of the modern age’ is, lamented the distinguished American literary critic Lionel Trilling, ‘bound to be experienced as a wound to our intellectual self-esteem.’

  More recently, however, ignorance of science has acquired a degree of political correctness. The Green movement, blaming science for global pollution, has contributed to this. So has feminism, which has demonized science as the embodiment of the male will-to-power. Even supposing these attacks were justified, however, they would not constitute reasons for relinquishing science, rather the reverse. Countering the pollution that political misdirection of science has caused can only be achieved by scientific means. Even at its most basic level, the monitoring, protection and conservation of endangered plant and animal species is inevitably a scientific endeavour. Nor does the feminist complaint that science is dominated by male aims and attitudes justify the neglect or rejection of science by women. On the contrary, it makes urgently desirable the increased involvement of women in scientific education and research. This is the view put forward by one of the most cogent of the feminist critics, Evelyn Fox Keller, in her book Reflections on Gender and Science (1984). Herself a mathematical biophysicist, and a biographer of the Nobel prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock, Keller sees scientific knowledge as ideally ‘a universal goal’, rather than the expression of destructively masculine drives.

  A text that has been utilized to reinforce feminist and other disparagements of science is Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). This popularized the idea that scientists are not really as rational as they suppose, but follow cultural trends, shifting from one paradigm to another for reasons that have nothing to do with objective truth. A criticism of Kuhn’s book often voiced by scientists is that in describing how beliefs came to be held it leaves out of account the question of their truth or falsehood.

  The effect of these various devices for discrediting science has been to allow ignorance to appear not merely excusable but righteous. Teachers at British universities will know that most arts students happily forget what little science they learnt in their schooldays. Even if you are prepared for this, however, the extent of their ignorance can come as a shock. Recently, in an Oxford literature seminar, I cited John Donne’s lines, where Donne observes that no one at the time he was writing (1612) knew how blood gets from one ventricle of the heart to the other. I asked the class how, in fact, it does. There were about thirty students present, all in their last year of study, all outstandingly intelligent, and none of them knew. One young man ventured haltingly that it might be ‘by osmosis’. That the blood circulated round their bodies, they seemed unaware.

  The annual hordes competing for places on arts courses in British universities, and the trickle of science applicants, testify to the abandonment of science among the young. Though most academics are wary of saying it straight out, the general consensus seems to be that arts courses are popular because they are easier, and that most arts students would simply not be up to the intellectual demands of a science course. On this issue, Sir Peter Medawar is worth quoting, since he is well qualified to judge, and he disagrees. Commenting on the career of James Watson, the young American who became world famous in 1953 when, with Crick, Wilkins and Franklin, he discovered the molecular structure of DNA, Medawar says:

  In England a schoolboy of Watson’s precocity and style of genius would probably have been steered towards literary studies. It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability – much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one’s abilities.

  Medawar’s remarks caused a considerable rumpus, especially his claim that scientists had something to be clever about whereas arts students had not. Surely, he was asked, he did not intend to imply that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, etc. were not proper subjects for cleverness? Less attention was paid to his claim that science could bring happiness, and not just to geniuses but to people of ordinary ability. Yet that was surely the vital part of his message. If young people are to be wooed back to science, it will not be done by telling them that if they continue to spurn it, Britain will face economic decline (true as that may be). But if scientists demonstrate by their writing that Medawar’s promises of pleasure and self-fulfilment are true, they will not lack recruits.

  The new generation of popular science-writers, whose work I have drawn on in this anthology, are the advance guard of that campaign. If readers ask, as they well might, what I, a professor of literature, think I am up to editing a science anthology, my answer is that I have done it for pleasure, self-fulfilment and (in Coleridge’s words) ‘the gratification of knowing’.

  Prelude: The Misfit from Vinci

  A left-handed, vegetarian, homosexual bastard, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) contravened most of the accepted norms of his day. Reared by his peasant grandparents in a remote Tuscan village, he had minimal schooling. He was apprenticed as a painter because his illegitimacy debarred him from respectable professions. (Painting in fifteenth-century Tuscany was regarded not as ‘creative art’ but as a lowly trade, fit for the sons of peasants and artisans.) Lacking literary culture he was scorned in the highbrow Florence of the Medicis. This turned him towards science and observation. ‘Anyone who invokes authors in discussion is not using his intelligence but his memory,’ he contended.

  He was insatiable for newness, both in art and science. His first known drawing was also the first true landscape drawing in western art. He was the first painter to omit haloes from the heads of figures from scripture and show
them in ordinary domestic settings, and he was the first to paint portraits that showed the hands as well as the faces of sitters. His Leda (which does not survive) was the first modern painting inspired by pagan myth. His notebooks, of which over 5,000 pages survive, are all written backwards in mirror writing, and are dense with intricate drawings. They record his observations on geology, optics, acoustics, music, botany, mathematics, anatomy, engineering and hydraulics, together with plans for many inventions, including a bicycle, a tank, a machine gun, a folding bed, a diving suit, a parachute, contact lenses, a water-powered alarm clock, and plastics (made of eggs, glue and vegetable dyes).

  It is true that Leonardo was not strictly a scientist, nor always as original as he seems. His war-machines had already been designed by a German engineer, Konrad Keyser; his ‘automobile’ by an Italian, Martini. Though he came close to formulating some scientific laws, his insights were sporadic and untested by experiment. He thought of looking at the moon through a telescope a century before Galileo (see p. 8), but he did not construct one. He knew no algebra, and made mistakes in simple arithmetic. His man-powered flying machine, designed to flap its wings like a bird, could never have flown. Apart from anything else, it must have weighed about 650 lbs (as against 72 lbs for Daedalus 88, the man-powered aircraft which flew 74 miles over the Aegean in 1988).

  Despite these reservations his notebooks give an astonishing preview of the new world science was to open. The first of the following extracts, recording two autopsies he carried out in Florence on a very old man and a young child, has been called the first description of arteriosclerosis in the history of medicine. The second anticipates nineteenth-century geology (see p. 71) in deducing from fossil remains that the earth’s present land-masses were once covered by sea. (The ‘great horse’ Leonardo refers to in this extract was his 7-metre-high bronze equestrian statue, planned for Lodovico Sforza in 1493, but never completed.) The third and fourth extracts show the sympathetic observation of birds, which inspired his interest in manned flight. The fifth illustrates Leonardo’s irreverent humour and anatomical accuracy.

  Autopsies

  A few hours before his death, this old man told me that he had lived a hundred years and that he felt no physical pain, only weakness; and thus, seated on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Novella [in Florence], without any movement or symptom of distress, he gently passed from life into death. I carried out the autopsy to determine the cause of such a calm death and discovered that it was the result of weakness produced by insufficiency of blood and of the artery supplying the heart and other lower members, which I found to be all withered, shrunken and desiccated. The other postmortem was on a child of two years, and here I discovered the case to be exactly opposite to that of the old man.

  Submarine Traces

  Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea? In the mountains of Parma and Piacenza, multitudes of shells and corals filled with worm-holes may be seen still adhering to the rocks, and when I was making the great horse at Milan a large sack of those which had been found in these parts was brought to my workshop by some peasants. The red stone of the mountains of Verona is found with shells all intermingled, which have become part of this stone. And if you should say that these shells have been and still constantly are being created in such places as these by the nature of the locality or by potency of the heavens in these spots, such an opinion cannot exist in brains possessed of any extensive powers of reasoning. Because the years of their growth are numbered upon the outer coverings of their shells; and both small and large ones may be seen; and these would not have grown without feeding, or fed without movement, and here [embedded in rock] they would not have been able to move… The peaks of the Apennines once stood up in a sea, in the form of islands surrounded by salt water, and above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once moving in large shoals.

  Birds’ Eyes

  The eyes of all animals have pupils which have power to increase or diminish of their own accord, according to the greater or lesser light of the sun or other luminary. In birds, however, the difference is greater, and especially with nocturnal birds of the owl species, such as the long-eared, the white and the brown owls; for with these the pupil increases until it almost covers the whole eye, or diminishes to the size of a grain of millet, preserving all the time its round shape. In the horned owl, which is the largest nocturnal bird, the power of vision is so much increased that even in the faintest glimmer of night, which we call darkness, it can see more distinctly than we in the radiance of noon.

  Flight

  A bird is an instrument working according to a mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce, with all its movements. A bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags. It does this by means of the curves of the winds, which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus, bend their straight course towards the sky, with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop, with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.

  The Penis

  It has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. Whether one is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature often has a life and intelligence separate from that of the man, and it seems that man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it; that which he seeks to cover and hide he ought to expose solemnly like a priest at mass.

  Sources: ‘Submarine Traces’, ‘Birds’ Eyes’ and ‘Flight’ are from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Arranged, Rendered into English, and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy‚ 2 vols, London, Jonathan Cape, 1938. ‘Autopsies’ and ‘The Penis’ are from Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, translated by Sian Reynolds, London, Edward Burlingame Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 1991.

  Going inside the Body

  1543 has a good claim to be the year when modern science began. It saw the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (see below p. 8) and of Andreas Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body (generally known by its Latin title, the Fabrica). The text of this book – the foundation of modern anatomy – was accompanied by magnificent illustrations, designed by artists of the school of Titian, and cut on fine pearwood by Venetian block-cutters, which show the arteries, veins, muscles and nerves of the human body.

  A well-off Belgian doctor’s son, Vesalius (1514–64) had been given the best medical education available, studying at Louvain, Paris and Padua, where he became Professor of Anatomy at the age of 23. His mission was to rescue anatomy from the errors of the ancient Greek physician Galen, who still dominated medicine in the sixteenth century. Galen had had to depend on animal corpses for his knowledge of anatomy, and the prejudice against cutting up human bodies was still strong at the start of Vesalius’ career. At Louvain, wishing to construct a human skeleton, he stole the remains of a malefactor from a gibbet outside the city. In order to satisfy his curiosity about the fluid in the pericardium, he contrived to be present when a criminal was quartered alive and (he recalls) carried off for study ‘the still-pulsating heart with the lung and the rest of the viscera’. Once he was established in Padua, the magistrates supplied him with corpses fresh from the gallows, and executions were timed to coincide with his anatomy lessons.

  Unlike previous professo
rs he did not sit aloof on his throne while a barber surgeon cut up the cadaver, but carried out the dissection himself. The title page of the Fabrica – as if to emphasize masculine conquest of ‘Mother Nature’ – shows him handling the abdominal organs of a naked, cut-open woman, surrounded by tiers of eager male spectators. The woman, Vesalius records, had tried to cheat the gallows by declaring herself pregnant.

  By chance an eyewitness account of Vesalius’ first public anatomy classes survives, written by a German student, Baldasar Heseler. Held in Bologna in 1540, the classes covered the dissection of three human corpses, but the last class was on a living dog. The question which puzzles the students in this extract had already been answered by Vesalius at the end of his previous lecture, where he pointed out that it was when the heart contracted that it pumped blood into the pulmonary artery – so evidently the students had not been listening.

  Finally, he took a dog (which was now the fifth or perhaps the sixth killed in our anatomy). He bound it with ropes to a small beam so that it could not move, similarly he tied his jaws so that it could not bite. Here, Domini, he said, you will see in this living dog the function of the nervi reversivi, and you will hear how the dog will bark as long as these nerves are not injured. I shall cut off one nerve, and half of the voice will disappear, then I shall cut the other nerve, and the voice will no longer be heard. When he had opened the dog, he quickly found the nervi reversivi around the arteries, and all happened as he said. The bark of the dog disappeared when he had by turn cut off the nervi reversivi, and only the breathing remained. But, he said, it can still quite well bite, do not let its jaws free, hold it strongly. Finally, he said, I shall proceed to the heart, so that you shall see its movement, and feel its warmth, and so that you shall here around the ilium feel the pulse with one hand, and with the other the movement of the heart. And please, tell me, what its movement is, whether the arteries are compressed when the heart is dilated, or whether they in the same time also have the same movement as the heart. I saw how the heart of the dog bounded upwards, and when it no longer moved, the dog instantly died. Those mad Italians pulled the dog at all sides so that nobody could really feel these two movements. But some students asked Vesalius what the true fact about these movements was, what he himself thought, whether the arteries followed the movement of the heart, or whether they had a movement different from that of the heart. Vesalius answered: I do not want to give my opinion, please do feel yourselves with your own hands and trust them. He was said always to be so little communicative.