by Andrew Brown
You can make a heap out of anything, no matter what it is, but you cannot make a pile of things that are not more or less the same – you see every day piles of oranges, piles of apples. Another word that comes in all languages… is the article ‘an’: an apple, an orange. It is not always true, but by and large everything for which you could use that article is a quasi-identical object: it can be made into a pile. I can even apply this to an amino acid, or a nucleotide. These quasi-identities have most surprising results. They enable you to build structures, and they also enable the structures to build themselves. That cannot be done unless there is quasi-identity. I cannot go into the details of how much ‘quasi’ is allowed; it is something I do not know. Two per cent is allowed, 10 per cent is just off, but somewhere in between those you can build piles.34
Although liquids were heaps of atoms, they displayed repeated signs of five-fold symmetry in isolated regions. Mackay listened to Bernal’s strictures about five-fold symmetry being a violation of classical crystallography rather than being incompatible with the laws of nature. Just as there was good evidence that irregular five-fold structures were common to the structure of viruses and liquids, Mackay postulated that they might occur in inorganic solids. His prediction was born out in the early 1980s with the discovery of quasi-crystals in aluminium–iron alloy.35 Forty years after Sage sensed the arrival of generalized crystallography, a professor of chemistry wrote about the concept of ‘crystal’ in Nature, saying that the key issue ‘is not how one defines crystal but how one should define order’.36 He built his case on the divergences from classical X-ray crystallography made necessary by the discoveries of quasicrystals, biological and liquid structures. All these phenomena can be traced back to Sage’s Birkbeck department. As Sage’s friend Nikolai Belov wrote, ‘His last enthusiasm was for the laws of lawlessness.’37
Although Bernal received the Proceedings of the Soviet Academy of Sciences as a foreign member, he did not read (or speak) Russian, and was probably unaware of a series of ten papers from the Institute of Surface Chemistry that appeared there between 1962 and 1966. The lead author on these publications was Boris Deryagin, a surface chemist who was well respected in the West. The subject of the reports was an anomalous form of water that his group claimed to have produced in quartz capillary tubes. They thought that in this form of water, the H2O molecules were connected together in some novel way that accounted for physical properties such as boiling and freezing points, very different from those of ordinary water. Deryagin was invited to a meeting of the Faraday Society, held in Nottingham in September 1966, giving him the opportunity to present anomalous water to an international audience of chemists.
In his talk, Deryagin made some revolutionary claims that occasioned surprisingly little comment at Nottingham, where the audience may have had difficulty understanding him, or was perhaps reluctant to criticize one of the few Soviet scientists to attend a meeting in the West, or was merely dozing. While it was known that the solid wall of a container forces liquid molecules coating the surface to line up in layers, Deryagin proposed much more than a surface effect, and one that the molecules remember even in the vapour phase. What was more, the denser anomalous water was the stable form of water – ‘The usual state of water and certain other liquids is thermodynamically metastable’, he said.38 The implications of this remark are staggering. Deryagin seemed to be suggesting that, over a long period of time, all the water on the planet would revert from its common but metastable state of H2O into the lowest energy state of anomalous water (which he claimed was 15 times more viscous than ordinary water and had a boiling point approaching 200°C). If Deryagin were correct, it was a reasonable assumption that anomalous water would occur naturally, perhaps in conjunction with silicates such as quartz.
Over the next two years, a few British laboratories set out to see if they could replicate the Russian experiments. One of these was the crystallography department at Birkbeck, where Bernal selected his PhD student, John Finney, to undertake the exacting task. Finney was a Cambridge physics graduate, who had learnt the principles of classical X-ray crystallography from Helen Megaw. He was to be Bernal’s last PhD student, in a distinguished line going back to Helen Megaw, and the first male one whose hair-length matched the professor’s. When he came for interview, he was shown the liquid ball-and-spoke model in 20 Torrington Square and asked to find the order in it. After studying the ping-pong balls and coloured spokes for some minutes, he turned to Bernal and said softly ‘I can’t see any order in it.’39 Sage congratulated him and said he was hired. Finney’s main work would be to produce a satisfactory 3-D model of a real liquid, but divining for anomalous water would become a major diversion.
Deryagin was invited back to Britain in 1968 and visited Birkbeck on 2nd May, when he took part in a discussion that was tape-recorded. Bernal asked the Russian how he thought anomalous water formed, and Deryagin admitted:
This is the most unclear point of the work. We have only two points clear, that this water may appear on the condensation of vapour but not as the result of direct contact of liquid water from quartz. Liquid water does not transform in some of our kind of water even after prolonged contact even at raised temperature; but in the form of vapour it can be modified.40
After some practical questions from Finney, Sage asked, ‘Have you any idea what the structure is of this new kind [of water]?’ Deryagin replied, ‘No, we do not know. But it may be a ring [of H2O molecules] or a square or it may be tetrahedral.’ Deryagin was convinced that the phenomenon was real and depended on changes at the molecular level. When Sage somewhat rashly stated, ‘In my opinion, this is the most important physico-chemical discovery of this century.’ Deryagin jumped in. ‘I am very glad to hear you say this. I would like to ask you something. Would it be possible for you to write something later about your opinion on the significance of this work, as you are the principal specialist on the physics and chemistry of water? It would be very important for me to get such an estimate.’41 One of Deryagin’s reasons for wanting Bernal’s support was that he was having difficulty in persuading any Western scientific journal to publish his results, and praise from Sage would no doubt enhance his reputation at home as well.
After more speculation from Deryagin on the possible biological effects of anomalous water and its possible presence in high atmospheric clouds, he was brought back to earth by a sceptical Finney.
Finney: Are you talking in terms of water which is partially modified and water which is fully modified, and so presumably most of the time you are dealing with a mixture of water.
Deryagin: Yes. We always prepare a mixture of water, partially modified, but after we continue the evaporation it would become strongly modified water. We can also do the inverse. We can take strongly modified water and mix, not very quickly; sometimes it lasts one week, because the coefficient of the diffusion of the molecules of this modified water in ordinary water. It is about five or ten times lower than the coefficient of self-diffusion in ordinary water. So the diffusion is a slow process.
Finney: Can you actually say you can prepare water which is 100 per cent modified or do you not know this? Can you say: This water is 100 per cent modified. Have you any way of telling, any way of measuring the degree of modification?
Deryagin: Well, the degree of modification is not so precisely measured…42
The Soviet Embassy in London put out a press release about Deryagin’s visit to Birkbeck and included some mention of anomalous water. Paul Barnes, who was just completing a PhD at Cambridge on the properties of ice surfaces, read the newspaper story. He had heard Deryagin lecture at the Cavendish Laboratory and decided to apply for a job at Birkbeck so that he could join Bernal’s team working on anomalous water. The Americans, ever watchful of Soviet science, became interested too, and Finney was given a ‘rather splendid lunch at the US Embassy’43 by a liaison scientist for the US Office of Naval Research (ONR). In February 1969, the ONR held a symposium in Washington to discuss an
omalies in the properties of liquid water. The promise of government research dollars was enough to overcome previous scepticism, and several American laboratories started work on the subject. A report appeared in Nature from a group of chemists at the Unilever Research Laboratories at Port Sunlight, who thought that they might have evidence for a trace of anomalous water in ordinary water treated according to Deryagin’s method. Finney and the Birkbeck group were having no success at all; in an article ‘Polymerized water – is it or isn’t it’ in May 1969, Finney wrote ‘By not fitting in with existing ideas, anomalous water could trigger off an important advance… If only we could make a thimbleful, the problem would very quickly be resolved.’44
The same month that Finney’s article appeared, there seemed to be a definite breakthrough as a result of collaboration between the British Ministry of Technology and an American spectroscopist, Ellis R. Lippincott, who served as a senior consultant to many US government departments. They found that the spectroscopic fingerprint of anomalous water was quite different from that of ordinary water and stated that anomalous water ‘must consist of polymer units’ that they thought would be four water molecules linked in a square pattern.45 Over the next few months, the popular press in Europe and the USA would be full of stories about this weird ‘polywater’ (as it was now termed). The polywater fever was stoked by a letter to Nature from a scientist at Wilkes College, Pennsylvania, who, having been convinced of the existence of polywater, regarded it as potentially ‘the most dangerous material on earth’.46 This ‘unduly alarmist and misleading letter’ earned him an immediate rebuke from the Birkbeck group, who were ‘currently trying to sort out the chaos surrounding the phenomenon’.47
Contrary to the data which Dr Donahoe quotes as fact, remarkably little is still known about the precise properties of the substance, and it is still not certain that it even exists… There is still no adequate explanation of the phenomenon, and no coherent picture of its properties. One of the greatest difficulties in even accepting the existence of a more stable phase is its apparent absence in nature. Indeed, this is the most persuasive evidence of its inability to grow at ordinary water’s expense, for it has stood the test of billions of years. The classic conditions for its formation – a quartz surface and greater than 95 per cent humidity – are very widespread in nature, yet no anomalous water has been detected. If it can grow at the expense of ordinary water, we should already be a completely dead planet… By all means draw attention of scientists to thedangers of their work, but make sure it is a real danger before alarming everybody else.
The debate over polywater continued with considerable publicity for the next year or so. At Birkbeck, it remained elusive unless the strict conditions of the experiment were relaxed. In Finney’s words, they became convinced polywater was ‘a load of junk’ and in 1971 published an article ‘Polywater and polypollutants’48 in which they attributed the phenomenon to gross impurities, introduced as a result of ignorance or carelessness. The accompanying Nature editorial, ‘Polywater drains away’ provided the epitaph, although Deryagin continued to believe in his discovery and wrote to Bernal suggesting his team was incompetent and should be fired. While Sage had shown initial enthusiasm for anomalous water, and his words about it being ‘the most important physico-chemical discovery of this century’ have been quoted against him,49 he never repeated the remark in public and took the responsible course of seeing whether Deryagin’s work could be replicated. His own major contribution to the structure of liquids resulted from throwing off orthodoxy, and such startling new observations about anomalous water, from a credible source, were bound to intrigue him. His attitude was infinitely less reprehensible than it had been over Lysenko’s sham genetics.
By the time the controversy over polywater was settled, Sage was no longer an active participant. His last public appearance on the stage of science, which he had graced over five decades, came at a Ciba symposium on ‘Principles of biomolecular organization’ in London in June 1965. He was invited to open the meeting, which brought together not only the cream of molecular biologists from Cambridge (Crick, Finch, Holmes, Huxley, Kendrew, Klug, and Wilkins) but a contingent from Harvard, led by Watson and Caspar. In his opening remarks, Sage dwelt on the development of generalized crystallography and raised the flag of Bernalism for the last time – recommending that thought should be given to the future arrangement of molecular biology, which was ‘in some need of the application of a science of science’.50
Over the next three days, he listened to fifteen lengthy papers on the structural organization of cells and their components. Each talk was followed by rapier-like exchanges between the young giants of the field, who would often ask Sage for his opinion or refer to his work. At the end of the meeting, Crick asked him to give his impressions, and lawlessness was much in evidence in Sage’s unscripted remarks.51
A meeting like this gives me great encouragement because it is an example of absolutely random processes which seem to yield results. I may have come here with some ideas of organizing this work in order to improve its yield, but these ideas have been amply dissipated in the course of the discussion. We have had here a highly sophisticated participation from what have been called by D.J. de Solla Price the ‘high-level scientific commuters’ or the ‘scientific jet set’. I have spent a long time trying to get these things organized only to conclude, first of all that no one wants to organize them, and, secondly that there is no proof that if one did organize them they would be any better.
He could not quite abandon his need to plan, and questioned whether molecular biology was being studied in enough centres (with enough resources), whether it was attracting enough young scientists and if it was reporting results in an accessible fashion.
One element involved in this is free energy, which in this case can be equated with money. Presumably we all know how to spend the money when we have it, and the point is to extract it. One of the great problems in the whole of science is to what degree is science to be considered as a criminal activity? There is big criminal activity and small criminal activity, and through the whole history of science – it does not matter on what scale – the scientist is forced to do something. He has two problems: how to do it, and how to raise the money for it, which consists – and this is why I call it criminal – in finding some way of dressing the thing up so as to extract money from the people who have it, by persuading them that it is going to do something quite different from what it is really going to do…
I have come to this conference from another conference which was concerned entirely with the moon. It was very interesting because, of course, no one knew what it [the moon] was like; they all disagreed but they all agreed that within three years they would know what it was like and, therefore, this was their last chance of blowing off their ideas on the subject. Quite seriously, the moon is a very good money-raiser. I think the ratio in the US is 7:3 for money spent going to the moon and money spent on all the rest of science put together.
Seriously though, the problem is, is there a money problem? Is there a communication problem? There is an enormous increase in publication each year, and although you may be able to produce 50 per cent more papers per annum, it is doubtful whether you could read them. It is also doubtful whether there is any use reading them. The whole object of a meeting like this is to avoid having to read papers; it is really a sorting process. If you read one in a hundred or one in a thousand of the papers you will find out the state of the field – you will get a good random sample… It was pointed out, for example, that the one-to-one combination of Watson and Crick did not need anyone else at that stage… there are certain strategies, and the thing about strategies in science is that you engage in them first, and you find out about their existence afterwards… A cook does not know how he produces his results, but you know whether he has produced them…
The advance of science is really a nucleation phenomenon. Someone gets an idea that something would be worth doing, and he does
it; if he fails nothing more is heard about it, but if he succeeds, then hundreds of people do it, and that may be the way science advances. I am interested in these methods, but from a specialist point of view, to find out how science works.
Sage returned to some of these ideas in a conversation with Aaron Klug. He told Klug that he had begun to realize that there were two ways of organizing science: one was planning it strategically and getting all the right elements in, the other was the Rockefeller Principle. Klug asked him what the Rockefeller Principle was, and he replied ‘Oh, the Rockefeller just gives money to people who look good and have interesting ideas, irrespective of the nature of the project as long as it’s something that appears to be important and generally in the right field.’52 After the war, Sage had planned the Birkbeck department and succeeded in establishing the prototype for future molecular biology departments by including computing, X-ray crystallography, protein chemistry and other elements. He was less concerned about the staff appointments. It was Klug’s impression the success of the Cambridge MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, so evident at the Ciba conference, persuaded Sage that a better method might be to recruit the brightest young people and let them follow their own interests. It was, after all, the way Sage moved science forward.
22
Years of Struggle
Bernal and Margot Heinemann were well matched: both shared a passion for literature and politics. The 1950s was probably Bernal’s most stable decade domestically, although he was far from settled into a conventional style of life. Soon after Jane was born, they moved to a house in Highgate (a move probably financed from the Stalin Peace Prize). The house was not lavish and the family’s material needs were met by Sage’s professorial salary of over £2,000 per annum. In the 1950s, it was quite shocking for an unmarried couple to be living together and raising a child, let alone when the man was still married to another woman. There were also the added complexities that attached to being a communist household – although such a distinction mattered less in London than it did in communist states.