Seeing Further (30 page)

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.

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.

H
OW 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.

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:

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 squeezed 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.