My work for JPL required me to commute by air once a month from Houston to Los Angeles, a journey of about 1,700 miles, but taking only a few hours. A few times the whole family took the journey and we then travelled by car. Driving in Texas was easy after densely crowded England; we would travel for hundreds of miles along straight, wide roads that seemed to vanish thirty or more miles ahead. When crossing the wide flat plains of the desert landscape the distant mountain ranges had a beckoning beauty that enthralled me. Only occasionally did another car or truck appear in the far distance, and in these conditions it was no more arduous to travel 700 miles a day than it is in Europe to travel 200 miles. The journey from Houston to Los Angeles by car took two and a half days and we usually stayed at motels just before El Paso and at Yuma in Arizona. Sometimes we would take a holiday and stop for a day at one of the National Parks along the Mexican border—the Grand Canyon, the Meteor Crater, and the Petrified Forest.
At JPL the first year and a half was not as exciting as I had expected. Most of my time there was spent in technical discussion on the design of the chromatograph to be used for analysing the lunar surface. It was good to know that the purpose behind our work was to ensure that the moon was safe for astronauts to walk on, but after a while the discussions themselves became repetitive and to me boring. Towards the end of our stay in Houston, JPL became more interested in Mars than the Moon, and discussions on the JPL space instruments now had Mars as the target. I felt that I had made all the contribution I could to the chemical side of the design and gravitated towards the space engineers who translated our ideas for instruments into space-worthy hardware. They found me useful as an interpreter who could translate their thoughts and ideas into the language of the biologists and planetary scientists. For those of you who can remember the 1960s, scientific electronic equipment, and indeed domestic electronics like televisions and tape recorders, were fallible. We almost expected our televisions to break down once or more times in a year. The hardware that was to make its long journey to Mars had not only to endure the shocks of being lifted by rocket—a shattering and vibrating experience—but also had to endure exposure to the hard vacuum of space for a period approaching a year, and then survive atmospheric re-entry and the stress of landing on that inhospitable planet, Mars. And even when there, the stress was not over, for on Mars the temperature cycles daily between near 20° C in equatorial sunshine to night-time temperatures cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide from the air, and if this were not enough, the surface of Mars is acid and oxidizing and everywhere there is abrasive, windblown dust. For these reasons, the engineering required to build instruments for space vehicles and landers was of an order quite different to that used to make the 1960s car or television. It was as different indeed as was 1960s engineering from that of Roman times. I consider that the opportunity I had to mix freely, talk, and discuss problems with these competent engineers at JPL was the greatest of my rewards for working there.
I often felt like young apprenticed artists must have felt to be welcomed into the studios of a Leonardo or a Holbein. On one occasion, a scientist I worked with was demonstrating his version of a gas chromatograph for Mars. From the point of view of Earth engineering, it was a well-made portable instrument suitable to take into the field, as they call it, to analyse the soil at any place on the Earth. The space engineers then told us what they would do to such an instrument to make it space-worthy. First, we would need to think about the power needed to run the apparatus. The total power available on Mars would be about 100 watts and this would be shared amongst all of the experiments and all of the necessary housekeeping of the spacecraft itself. The energy-hungry part of our Earth-type gas chromatograph was the oven used to keep the chromatograph column and the detector at its operating temperature, usually in the region of 200° C. We were using about ten to twenty watts to heat the oven and this was too large a drain on the spacecraft power supply. The space engineers told us to aim instead at a power consumption of not more than two watts for the entire operation of the chromatograph. It seemed at first impossible to design a chromatograph that would run on as little power as that required to light a flashlight bulb. But it was done.
One of the most difficult problems faced by the spacecraft engineers was how to transmit back to Earth the data gathered by our instruments. A distinguished electronic physicist wrote an article during the 1960s on the impossibility of making radio or television transmissions from a place as far away as Mars. He calculated that the power required to transmit useful information over such vast distances would be in the region of hundreds of kilowatts and he doubted if we could ever send a transmitter this powerful to Mars. Yet, here I was a few years later, sitting in a room with sensible engineers who were talking confidently about how and when we would be sending messages from Mars. They would broadcast from Mars not only the data from the instruments, but also colour pictures of the Martian surface. They would do it with 100 watts of power, using a transmitter no more powerful than a ham radio transceiver—more than one thousand times less than the distinguished physicist calculated that we would need.
Being given the challenge to invent was what spurred these engineers to find a way to avoid the apparently unbreakable rules of science. If anyone ever asks what was the use of the space programme technologically, forget about the non-stick frying pan and other trivia hyped by NASA’s publicists. Think instead of the technology that we take for granted. The users of today’s ubiquitous mobile phones and personal computers are the beneficiaries of those pioneering space engineers and these are the true harvests of space technology. Another harvest that may turn out to be of greater importance was the discovery of Gaia.
Conrad Josias, a dark young man from New York, and Howard Marshall, a youthful patrician and graduate of CalTech, were two of the electronics engineers I talked with. They later left JPL to found their own firm, Analogue Technology, carrying on as private enterprise the same kind of work that they had been doing at JPL. One morning I was discussing with them the transmission of a gas chromatograph signal from Mars to the Earth. The chemists and biologists were insistent that we needed the whole chromatogram to characterize any of the chemicals of life present in the Martian soil. The output of a gas chromatograph is a long, wide strip of paper bearing a single inked line. This line moves from its normal position called the base line and rises to a peak and then falls back again. It does this every time a substance emerges from the column. The complete chromatogram is a set of tent-shaped peaks, each by its height showing the amount of each individual chemical. Howard Marshall looked at one of these chromatograph charts, which showed thirty compounds from a sample of soil, and said, ‘This will take at least 100,000 bits of information; we can do it but there will be a lot of arguments from the other experimenters on whether or not that much channel space can be spared.’ I then asked, ‘Why do you need so many bits to transmit this simple analysis? All we need to know is that there are thirty compounds, how much of each, and when they appeared. Surely, the information content is a lot less than that.’ Howard then went into an explanation of how many samples per second he would need to accurately describe the chromatogram. I realized that we were in one of those so typical confusions between the disciplines of science. The engineers did not know that a chromatogram has very low information content. Instead of 2,000 samples per second to describe it, two per second would be quite generous. So, by combining our expertise, we were able to send the data at a thousandth the information cost. JPL reminded me of my days in making instruments in the Second World War. Contraptions conceived in the lab were no use aboard aircraft that had to fly missions during wartime. The sheer vibration would shake almost any laboratory equipment to pieces in a matter of seconds and we needed something much tougher and better engineered. It was all very familiar. It made me wonder how much we need the urgency and sense of purpose that comes with war or a sense of mission to do our best.
An important step towards my practice of independent sc
ience took place in Houston, and that was the forming with Al Zlatkis of a small company called Ionics Research. By operating as a company we were able to offer advice and supply prototype detectors to any of the firms in the instrument industry who needed them. As ordinary consultants, we would have found it hard to act for more than one firm at a time. Soon after returning to England I formed my own company—Brazzos Limited—and resigned from Ionics Research.
6
The Independent Practice of Science
The start of an independent practice is more than a single step. Let me tell you how it happened for me. In the spring of 1963 we felt that we had had enough of living in North America. This is no criticism of the American way of life as it was then. From the viewpoint of suburban Europeans, we lived in a paradise. Houston was a pleasant, medium-sized city far more cultured than our New England friends ever realized and our gross income was approaching $40,000 a year—sufficient in those days to count us rich. We could, for example, as a whole family—two adults and four children—cross the Atlantic for a holiday in England by ship or by plane without thought of the cost. So why were we all restless for England? At that time, although less so now, England had an ethos so strong that no amount of riches could compensate for the lack of it. There were three parts to it: first, a benign authority and a people who were law-abiding and non-violent, second, a homogeneous society with few tribal divisions and where racial problems were as yet unnoticed; and third, it was still easy to live in a village, and that included the city villages of London where each adjacent built-up area still had some of the quality of the village it used to be.
What distinguishes village from suburban life is the random juxtaposition of rich and poor, clever and stupid, wise and wooden, kind and cruel. A village is a self-contained microcosm of human life, with its pub, school, and shop, its village hall and cricket team in the country, and, of course, football team for the cities. Because we were homogeneous, the village could cope with the odd criminal family. We knew each other in the village by our Christian names, yet the villagers respected our privacy. Children could play safely and a woman could walk without fear along the unlit village road at night. There was too much hard work to do and too much happening ever to be bored in a village. All this and around the village we loved, Bowerchalke, was the glorious countryside of the small and medium-sized farms run by villagers, verging onto the unspoilt downs and wild woods of Wiltshire and Dorset. Southern England, up until agribusiness destroyed the countryside and the car-led battalions of suburban-minded people invaded it, was the most civilized and beautiful place I have ever known. In those halcyon days I guess the same must have been true of much of Europe; the hilltop towns of Tuscany and Umbria had a similar seemliness and so did those of the French and German countryside. England of the early 1960s had other plus values; there was the BBC—admittedly there were only three radio and two television channels, but after Houston they seemed to possess such quality that we needed nothing more. I wish that it were so still. Then there was the climate: gentle enough to enjoy walking at almost any time of year. The health service was then in its prime and it took away the fear of ruin from prolonged illness, something that hovered over life in the USA. Therefore, in early June 1963 I responded to an advertisement in Nature for the post of Director of the Medical Research Council’s Radiation Laboratory, then based at Harwell, near Oxford. To my surprise, I promptly received a reply telling me that I was shortlisted for the post, and asking me to come for an interview when back in England in July.
We left Houston in early June, travelled by car north through Huntsville and Palestine, and stayed the night at a motel in the pleasant town of Sulphur Springs. The countryside of east Texas is flat but made beautiful by the green verges of its roads that are rich with wild flowers, and free of the billboards which spoil so much of the rural roads of other states. We went on through Arkansas and into the woody country of Missouri and crossed the Mississippi at St Louis and then on past Chicago to Lansing, Michigan, a huge university town where I was to give a paper at a meeting on radiation biology. We moved from there into Canada staying, out of curiosity, at a motel in London, Ontario. The next day we were in Montreal and ready to join the Carmania, the ship on which we were to travel the Atlantic to Britain. This ship had brought us back from England the previous September and we were delighted as we joined it to be recognized and welcomed by our names. We went to our spacious rooms on the upper deck and settled in. To travel by ocean liner to England from Montreal was one of those great journeys of the world. The ship sailed nearly a thousand miles down the St Lawrence River, passing Quebec with its unusual gothic city and the many smaller communities of that French-speaking province.
On the way to Quebec, I could not help wondering about a strange tale told me by Mel Schachter, a Canadian scientist who had worked at Mill Hill. He and his wife had escaped from Lithuania just before the Second World War by crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. From there, they took a ship to Vancouver and intended to take the same route from Canada that we were taking. On the way from Montreal Mrs Schachter said to her husband, ‘Mel, the ship will collide with that island ahead in the river if the Captain does not change course.’ Mel replied, ‘Don’t be silly, they know what they are doing, leave it to them to sail the ship.’ Like most men, Mel was reluctant to face the polite derision of the ship’s officers so he did nothing. Minutes later, and with no change of course, Mrs Schachter pleaded with her husband, ‘Mel, please go and tell them or we will crash.’ By now, it was too late for Mel to alert the officers on the bridge, and moments later the crash came. No one was badly hurt but the ship was holed and their luggage was lost. We all watched as the island came in view and were relieved to see it pass. Family discussions dominated the return journey and they were about our decision to return to live in England. I already had made the first move by applying for a job. Now we had to decide where to live in Bowerchalke. There was a farm up for sale in the hamlet of Woodminton just south of the village; the Barter family who we knew well owned it. We would have bought it, although it was large—about 600 acres—but a couple that we had befriended overheard our conversation and they earnestly warned us about the harsh and hard life of a farmer and how unwise it would be for us to have anything to do with it. Their words fell on receptive ears, for already I knew enough about farms from my experiences as a student in Manchester. I knew just how tough it could be. Our shipboard friends had owned a farm near Bristol and had hoped for years to make enough money to relieve them from their drudgery so that they could retire. Quite unexpectedly, the local council had declared their farmland a building site. The value of their land increased tenfold and they became millionaires at the stroke of a pen. They were a likeable and intelligent couple and genuinely concerned that we did not make the mistake of taking on farming as a living, especially as we had not grown up with it. It was a fortunate encounter for us and one made possible by the eight days’ travel and the leisured comfort of the ship.
We disembarked at Southampton and then drove through the bright resplendent countryside we had so much missed. Great full-bosomed trees overhung the road as we drove on through Cadnam and across the New Forest to Salisbury and from there to Harvard Hospital where the director, the distinguished virologist, David Ty rell, made us welcome. He had kindly arranged for us to stay in an unoccupied flat during the period that we were back in England. I went to the job interview at Harwell, still curious to see how they would receive me but sure that I would not get the job. I was more concerned, in fact, that they might offer it to me and I would have to refuse. My application for the job was a cry for help, dictated by the unconscious part of my mind. We all wanted to return home but this way I could let my past employers know without losing face. The interview was wonderfully friendly and courteous, and the interviewers sensed my hidden agenda and let me down as gently as a perfectly managed hot air balloon.
My stratagem worked. Within a week, there was
a letter from my old boss, Sir Charles Harington, of Mill Hill, asking if I would call to see him at the Medical Research Council’s headquarters in London. Sir Charles had retired from directing the National Institute but still worked as an administrator at the Medical Research Council’s headquarters near Regent’s Park. He was as direct as ever and said, ‘I am so glad to hear that you are coming back from the USA. We would be very pleased if you would take the job at Mill Hill as head of the Biophysics Division. MacFarlane, the present head, will be retiring this year. What do you think?’ It was quite an enticement but I knew that I was unsuited to administrative jobs of any kind. I had decided that I would never have anyone work for me. If I did, I would become so concerned for their welfare that concentration, which I need for creative work, would no longer be possible; being a boss is fine for some, but I was not one of them. I explained this to Sir Charles, and I think he understood, although he did not approve. I offered to come to work as a single scientist at Harvard Hospital just as I had done during the time I had worked at the Common Cold Unit. He grew enthusiastic about that and said he would speak to Sir Harold Himsworth who was then the Secretary of the MRC. Himsworth rejected my proposal immediately. He was one of those administrators who cannot understand that some individual scientists do best when working alone. He subscribed to that common belief that groups, or teams, of talented people spark ideas off each other. Reasonable as this seems, I doubt if it works for pioneering research. One strong and not always intelligent person among the team usually dominates. This is fine and is necessary with the team work needed to take a laboratory breakthrough and turn it into a public benefit. On the other hand, significant scientific advances come mostly from individuals, not from teams. Of course, the individuals who make the advances are sometimes team members, but when they make breakthroughs they are thinking for themselves and not according to the team agenda. The administrator who ignores this and tries to use talent manipulatively will find his teams left recycling old ideas. Sir Charles told me, with obvious regret, of Himsworth’s decision but said, ‘I hope that you will find what you want.’ That he was concerned for me was confirmed the following week when I received a letter from Lord Rothschild. He just wrote, ‘Will you come to see me on Thursday at 11 o’clock at Shell Centre on the South Bank to discuss something to your interest?’ I had met Rothschild before when I visited him at his home in Cambridge. At the time, he, Chris Polge, and I were amongst the very few scientists in the United Kingdom who used spermatozoa as their experimental animals, so to speak. My interest was in their membranes and their resistance to freezing; his was in the mechanism they used for swimming. I liked his direct manner and we got on well, so his invitation intrigued me. Victor, the Lord Rothschild, was then the senior member of the English branch of that famous Jewish family and, unusually for aristocrats, both he and his sister Miriam were distinguished biologists and Fellows of the Royal Society.
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