The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  I had to think, to see him again – and to see him in his own familiar habitat, at home.

  A few days later I called on Dr P. and his wife at home, with the score of the Dichterliebe in my briefcase (I knew he liked Schumann), and a variety of odd objects for the testing of perception. Mrs P. showed me into a lofty apartment, which recalled fin-de-siècle Berlin. A magnificent old Bösendorfer stood in state in the centre of the room, and all round it were music-stands, instruments, scores … There were books, there were paintings, but the music was central. Dr P. came in and, distracted, advanced with outstretched hand to the grandfather clock, but, hearing my voice, corrected himself, and shook hands with me. We exchanged greetings, and chatted a little of current concerts and performances. Diffidently, I asked him if he would sing.

  ‘The Dichterliebe!’ he exlaimed. ‘But I can no longer read music. You will play them, yes?’

  I said I would try. On that wonderful old piano even my playing sounded right, and Dr P. was an aged, but infinitely mellow Fischer-Dieskau, combining a perfect ear and voice with the most incisive musical intelligence. It was clear that the Music School was not keeping him on out of charity …

  I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower.

  ‘About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said encouragingly, ‘and what do you think it is, Dr P.?’

  ‘Not easy to say.’ He seemed perplexed. ‘It lacks the simple symmetery of the Platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own … I think this could be an inflorescence or flower.’

  ‘Could be?’ I queried.

  ‘Could be,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Smell it,’ I suggested, and he again looked somewhat puzzled, as if I had asked him to smell a higher symmetry. But he complied courteously, and took it to his nose. Now, suddenly, he came to life.

  ‘Beautiful!’ he exlaimed. ‘An early rose. What a heavenly smell!’ He started to hum ‘Die Rose, die Lilie …’ Reality, it seemed, might be conveyed by smell, not by sight.

  I tried one final test. It was still a cold day, in early spring, and I had thrown my coat and gloves on the sofa.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked, holding up a glove.

  ‘May I examine it?’ he asked, and, taking it from me, he proceeded to examine it as he had examined the geometrical shapes.

  ‘A continuous surface,’ he announced at last, ‘infolded on itself. It appears to have’ – he hesitated – ‘five outpouchings, if this is the word.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. ‘You have given me a description. Now tell me what it is.’

  ‘A container of some sort?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and what would it contain?’

  ‘It would contain its contents!’ said Dr P., with a laugh. ‘There are many possibilities. It could be a change-purse, for example, for coins of five sizes. It could…’

  I interrupted the barmy flow. ‘Does it not look familiar? Do you think it might contain, might fit, a part of your body?’

  No light of recognition dawned on his face.*

  No child would have the power to see and speak of ‘a continuous surface … infolded on itself’, but any child, any infant, would immediately know a glove as a glove, see it as familiar, as going with a hand. Dr P. didn’t. He saw nothing as familiar. Visually, he was lost in a world of lifeless abstractions. Indeed he did not have a real visual world, as he did not have a real visual self. He could speak about things, but did not see them face-to-face. Hughlings Jackson, discussing patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost ‘abstract’ and ‘propositional’ thought – and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia). Dr P., on the other hand, functioned precisely as a machine functions. It wasn’t merely that he displayed the same indifference to the visual world as a computer but – even more strikingly – he construed the world as a computer construes it, by means of key features and schematic relationships. The scheme might be identified – in an ‘identiti-kit’ way – without the reality being grasped at all …

  When the examination was over, Mrs P. called us to the table, where there was coffee and a delicious spread of little cakes. Hungrily, hummingly, Dr P. started on the cakes. Swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, he pulled the plates towards him, and took this and that, in a great gurgling stream, an edible song of food, until, suddenly, there came an interruption: a loud, peremptory rat-tat-tat at the door. Startled, taken aback, arrested, by the interruption, Dr P. stopped eating, and sat frozen, motionless, at the table, with an indifferent, blind, bewilderment on his face. He saw, but no longer saw, the table; no longer perceived it as a table laden with cakes. His wife poured him some coffee: the smell titillated his nose, and brought him back to reality. The melody of eating resumed.

  How does he do anything, I wondered to myself? What happens when he’s dressing, goes to the lavatory, has a bath? I followed his wife into the kitchen and asked her how, for instance, he managed to dress himself. ‘It’s just like the eating,’ she explained. ‘I put his usual clothes out, in all the usual places, and he dresses without difficulty, singing to himself. He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses the thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes – or his own body. He sings all the time – eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.’

  While we were talking my attention was caught by the pictures on the walls.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs P. said, ‘he was a gifted painter as well as a singer. The School exhibited his pictures every year.’

  I strolled past them curiously – they were in chronological order. All his earlier work was naturalistic and realistic, with vivid mood and atmosphere, but finely detailed and concrete. Then, years later, they became less vivid, less concrete, less realistic and naturalistic; but far more abstract, even geometrical and cubist. Finally, in the last paintings, the canvases became nonsense, or nonsense to me – mere chaotic lines and blotches of paint. I commented on this to Mrs P.

  ‘Ach, you doctors, you’re such philistines!’ she exclaimed, ‘Can you not see artistic development – how he renounced the realism of his earlier years, and advanced into abstract, non-representational art?’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ I said to myself (but forbore to say it to poor Mrs P.). He had indeed moved from realism to non-representation to the abstract, but this was not the artist, but the pathology, advancing – advancing towards a profound visual agnosia, in which all powers of representation and imagery, all sense of the concrete, all sense of reality, were being destroyed. This wall of paintings was a tragic pathological exhibit, which belonged to neurology, not art.

  Source: Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, London, Picador, Pan Book, 1986.

  *Later, by accident, he got it on, and exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s a glove!’ This was reminiscent of Kurt Goldstein’s patient ‘Lanuti’, who could only recognize objects by trying to use them in action.

  Seeing the Atoms in Crystals

  This is part of an interview from A Passion for Science (1988), a book based on a BBC Radio 3 series produced by Alison Richards. The interviewer is Lewis Wolpert, the interviewee Dorothy Hodgkin.

  In 1964 the Daily Mail carried a headline, ‘Nobel Prize for British Wife’. The prize was for chemistry, and had been awarded to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin for research on the structure of biologically important molecules including penicillin and vitamin B12. Using the technique of X-ray crystallography she had coaxed from these molecules the minute details of their three-dimensional structure, to the extent that the exact position of each atom was known. In 1969, she went on to solve the structure of ins
ulin.

  Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Laureate, Fellow of the Royal Society, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford and the first woman since Florence Nightingale to have the Order of Merit conferred upon her, was born in 1910, in Cairo, where her father, Dr J. W. Crowfoot, was in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. Both her own family and that of her husband, Thomas Hodgkin, had a long tradition of intellectual achievement and social responsibility, and she has combined her distinguished scientific career with an active commitment to the cause of world peace. She has now officially retired and I went to talk to her at her home in a small rural village about 30 miles from Oxford. She looks just like the famous portrait by Brian Organ which hangs in the Royal Society, and her hands, crippled by arthritis since she was a child, are familiar too, from the drawings by Henry Moore. We sat by the fire in the cluttered sitting room, with its faded rugs on the floor and books and pictures everywhere. She is still very active, and divides her time between writing up research papers and Pugwash, an international movement of scientists working for peace. The delight she takes in her chosen field is infectious.

  X-ray crystallography is a way of studying the structure of molecules by shining X-rays through them. The beam is scattered, or diffracted, by the atoms in the molecule and registers on a photographic plate as a pattern of spots of varying intensities. That this pattern of spots could be used to determine how the atoms were arranged in the molecule was the brilliant insight of a 22-year-old Cambridge student, Lawrence Bragg, who three years later, in 1915, became the youngest person ever to receive a Nobel prize. The technique brought about a revolution in physics and chemistry, and also, more dramatically, in biology. Not only did it make Dorothy Hodgkin’s achievement possible, but it also led directly to the solution of the structure of the genetic material, DNA.

  Bragg worked with relatively simple, inorganic crystals such as salt. When the technique was applied to biological molecules, which are larger and more complicated, the diffraction patterns were, not surprisingly, also more complicated. Their interpretation became a highly skilled and immensely time-consuming occupation involving painstaking measurement, complex and lengthy calculations, and no small measure of intuition. When Dorothy Hodgkin began her research career, the ground rules for interpreting the X-ray data had still to be worked out.

  Among the leaders in the field was Desmond Bernal, later to become Professor of Physics in the University of London. He was pioneering the application of X-ray crystallography to proteins, the most diverse and important chemical components of cells, at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In 1932, after graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, Dorothy Hodgkin went to work under him. Together they obtained the first successful X-ray photograph of a protein single crystal. This was a major achievement, for not only does the skill lie in taking the actual photographs, but also in growing the crystals in the first place. It’s not a matter of following rules, but of almost alchemical skill. Dorothy Hodgkin’s future achievements were to depend both on her talent for growing suitable crystals, and on the intuitive and dogged brilliance she brought to the study of the impenetrable spots.

  Two years later, she returned to Oxford. Here, just before the Second World War, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain began trying to isolate the actual antibacterial agent from the mould studied by Fleming. This fortunate set of circumstances gave her the opportunity to start work on penicillin as soon as sufficiently pure samples were available. It was a major undertaking, but by 1945 the structure was solved. Soon afterwards, in 1948, vitamin B12, the factor which prevents pernicious anaemia, was isolated, almost simultaneously, by two British and American groups. This was a more complex molecule than penicillin, and even with the aid of one of the first electronic computers, its structure was to occupy her for the next six years. Then came insulin, a still more complicated compound, which had preoccupied her since the beginning of her career. Its chemical structure – the number and order of the chemical units from which it is composed – had been worked out by Fred Sanger, in Cambridge, in the early 1950s, and won him the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1958. But the monumental task of determining the exact configuration of the constituent atoms still lay ahead. Dorothy Hodgkin took it on.

  DH: I’m really an experimentalist. I used to say, I think with my hands. I just like manipulation. I began to like it as a child and it’s continued to be a pleasure. I don’t do very much experimental work now, but I get something of the same pleasure from going through the maps indicating the position of the atoms that result from the calculations that are carried out.

  LW: I hadn’t thought of crystallography as being an experimental subject.

  DH: Well, it does involve experiments, usually, because you often have to modify the crystal in order to get understandable results from the intensities of the reflection of the X-rays.

  LW: Now, to a non-X-ray crystallographer the reflections that you get from the X-rays look a little ordered, but it’s very hard to see any structure in them. Is it just a logical process to interpret them or is there a great deal of intuitive skill?

  DH: Of course now you can just interpret them by putting the photographs through a machine, and letting the machine place the reflections and measure their intensities and pass them into a tape full of numbers which you can put into your computer. It wasn’t like that when I was young and it isn’t what I think about. I’d start off any crystal structure operation by taking the photograph myself and looking at it and seeing straight away what there is about the structure that I can tell immediately from the distribution of the reflections on the photograph. I admit that I don’t like some modern improvements which cut out photographs almost altogether and put everything through a counter. I got a lot of pleasure myself out of just looking at the photographs and guessing the answers even if one guessed imperfectly and wrong. Also some photographs are really very beautiful you know.

  LW: So you had a great skill in being able to go from those two-dimensional, ghost-like pictures to a three-dimensional object. Why were you so successful?

  DH: Well I don’t know that it requires all that skill if you know the lines on which these things work. It was a great advantage to start early. I mean one gets a certain amount of notoriety from being the first person to do things which anybody else really could have done. What I find difficult to know is why more people didn’t take up this particular method of attacking problems at the same stage as we did. It seems to me that once W. L. Bragg had taken the first step, the chemists and physicists should have realized much more than they did that this was a tremendous opportunity. But for those who came in at the early stages there was so much gold lying about that we couldn’t help finding some of it.

  LW: Your pleasure, you said, comes partly from handling crystals. Is this something that developed very early?

  DH: When I was quite young, I think I was ten at the time, I went to a small PNEU class in Beccles. PNEU stands for Parents National Educational Union, and it was founded by a Miss Mason of Ambleside to improve the education given by governesses, in a private way, all over the country. They produced small books that would enable the governesses to introduce their pupils to the different sciences in turn. So the small book on chemistry began with growing crystals, which I think is quite a common way to begin chemistry, growing crystals of copper sulphate and alum. I found this fascinating and repeated the experiments at home, when we had a home, which was the following year. My father and mother had been abroad most of the war and came home to look for a house for us to live in so that we could settle down near the local secondary school for our further education.

  LW: So you made a little laboratory at home?

  DH: Yes. I did go on crystal growing, and then, when I knew about the elements of analytical chemistry, I also used to carry out analyses on a collection of minerals. Now how I came by this is quite a nice story which perhaps illustrates the situation. My father and mother, as I said, worked abroad in the Sudan, and when I was thirte
en they were just about to retire. They thought it would be interesting for us children to see how they lived out there and so they took the two eldest of us away from school for a term to stay in Khartoum with them. We didn’t do very much in the way of lessons but my mother took us about with her to see the different things she was interested in. One of the visits that we paid was to the Wellcome Laboratories and we first of all went to the medical one. Then, next door, was geology. The geologists there had just brought some little tiny pellets of gold back, and to amuse us children, they showed us how they got these by panning the sand from the bottom of streams. Of course this started me off thinking why shouldn’t we find gold. So we went and panned the sand at the bottom of the little water channel running through our garden, and found a black shiny mineral. Now, I had already made friends with the chemical section of the Wellcome Laboratories. Its head was a particular friend of my father, Dr A. F. Joseph, whom we called Uncle Joseph. I went across to him and said ‘Please can I analyse this mineral and find out what it is?’ I guessed and told him I thought it might be manganese dioxide because it was black and shiny like manganese dioxide. So he helped me try the tests and, of course, it wasn’t manganese dioxide. It was ilmenite, which is a mixed ore of iron and titanium. After that, he gave me the proper sort of surveyor’s box with little bottles of reagents. One could carry it about the country and test for different elements in the minerals one found. It had a sample set of minerals in little tubes, so when I got home I used quite often to try out experiments and see whether I found the things in these little tubes that were supposed to be in them, according to the books. Then on his advice I bought a very large and serious text book of analytical chemistry, and continued this interest all through the years that I was at school.