杏吧原创

Passionate Minds by Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, Oxford, 拢19.99,
ISBN 0198549040

THE public was right after all. 杏吧原创s are mad鈥攋ust as nutty as the
wild-eyed, white-coated caricatures of popular fiction. They are driven,
obsessive, other-worldly and almost lustfully fixated on the beauty of their
subject. At least the best ones are. Such is the inescapable conclusion to be
drawn from Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards鈥檚 Passionate Minds, their
latest collection of interviews with icons of modern research.

As with their previous volume, A Passion for Science published in
1988, the interviews were first conducted by Wolpert and produced for BBC Radio
3 by Alison Richards, who provides a sparkling introduction to the book. I shall
now apologise to my children for scoffing at their stereotypical views of
white-coated boffindom.

The interviews are a joy. Question and answer interchanges are usually hard
going, whether in a reporter鈥檚 notebook or on the printed page. But not here.
Wolpert鈥檚 interviewing technique is forensic and to the point. He homes in
unerringly on the declared purpose of the series, to reveal 鈥渉ow scientists
迟颈肠办鈥�.

Richards sums up the common characteristics of most of the 23 scientists
interviewed as 鈥渋nnocents and outsiders鈥�. It is gratifying to find that, even
today, the best boffins are the gifted amateurs and 鈥渋ntellectual buccaneers鈥�.
However dense the undergrowth of existing knowledge, it still seems that
burrowers lose out to the high-steppers who achieve an Olympian view. Narrow
specialism remains strictly for the drones. The best still roam free.

This book is full of people who jumped subjects, even dropped science for
sabbaticals in other careers, and found that a clean canvas and the freedom of
the outsider cleared their minds and cut through the received wisdom of existing
disciplines.

James Lovelock, the independent scientist and inventor of numerous gadgets as
well as the Gaia hypothesis, rails against the science establishment from his
one-man experimental station deep in Cornwall. He tells Wolpert that science
disciplines 鈥渁re purely feudal, set up by professors to retain territories over
which they have control鈥�. His independence is notorious. But Carlo Rubbia, the
godfather of European particle physics, one of the ultimates in organised 鈥渂ig
science鈥�, is among many here who offer a similar view. 鈥淎 scientist is a
freelance personality,鈥� he says.

The common trait of innocence is equally interesting. Some say the best
politicians (Thatcher, say, or Blair) bring an innocence to their task that
allows them to override existing institutions and orthodoxies. To think afresh.
Many artists have the same naivety.

James Black, Nobel prizewinning inventor of beta-blockers, says he did it by
entering a field about which he knew little and 鈥渁sking questions which were
really quite preposterous鈥�. Immunologist Gerald Edelman says only innocence gave
him the gall to investigate the structure of the antibody molecule.

Richards concludes that innocents and outsiders follow in the footsteps of
Freud, Einstein and Darwin in daring to divide up the world into categories that
are radically different from those used by everyone else.

As cell biologist Michael Berridge puts it, the task of good science is 鈥渢o
make connections between different ideas, different disciplines鈥�. That, of
course, is what the mad do鈥攁nd conspiracy theorists. They find links
between things other people believe utterly unconnected. And many scientists
admit to being thought deranged by their fellows. 鈥淧eople thought I was crazy,鈥�
says Edelman.

It is generally supposed that the boundary between the madman and the genius
is, well, small鈥攖he scientists are just those who are eventually proved
right. The man who first proposed the existence of quarks, Sheldon Glashow, told
Wolpert: 鈥淚f you would simply take all the kookiest ideas of the early 1970s and
put them together, you would have made for yourself the theory which is, in
fact, the correct theory of nature. So it was like madness, everybody鈥檚 weirdest
fancy was right.鈥�

But scientists often get it wrong too, says Richards. In fact, failure 鈥渟eems
to be the rule rather than the exception鈥�, and the catalogue of mistakes
revealed here by the scientific elite is salutary. Biochemist Peter Mitchell,
for instance, owns up to spending eight years on the wrong track before later
picking up a Nobel prize. Carl Djerassi, who invented the contraceptive pill,
says 鈥渟cientific research most of the time is just a series of failures鈥�.

Gloomy? Not at all. The best scientists just keep on keeping on. They are
stubborn and driven by an inner certainty. But they are also childlike. For
Rubbia, the man who ran science鈥檚 biggest ever adventure playground at CERN,
says disarmingly that science 鈥渋s a sort of game鈥�. So you were wrong? So what?
Wasn鈥檛 it fun!

For many this may seem the ultimate heresy. Science is fun because it is
about imagination, dreaming and creativity and all those things that are
supposed to be the province of artists. For instance, the double helix was
鈥渄iscovered鈥� in a dream. As developmental biologist Antonio Garcia Bellido puts
it: 鈥淭he pleasure of finding something that explains the phenomena . . . is
similar in many respects to the feeling of a creative artist who has finished a
painting or a musical composition. It鈥檚 a feeling of having been in agreement
with somebody, with nature.鈥� Rubbia concurs: 鈥淪cience for me is very close to
art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It鈥檚 an intuition which turns
out to be reality at the end of it鈥攁nd I see no difference between a
scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a
辫补颈苍迟颈苍驳.鈥�

Chemist Roald Hoffman, who describes himself as an antireductionist, says
theory-building in science is 鈥渁n act of creation鈥濃�攍ike writing poetry,
his other love.

There is more. The passion aroused by discovery has another side. Edelman has
鈥渓ustful feelings of excitement when a secret of nature is revealed鈥�. And with
love comes hate. Underneath every report in a science journal 鈥渋ntended
supposedly to present the facts dispassionately without emotional involvement,
without history, without motivation . . . there鈥檚 a human being screaming that
I鈥檓 right and you鈥檙e wrong,鈥� says Hoffman. There is high politics, too, hidden
from all but a few cognoscenti. 鈥淪ometimes it鈥檚 more important to know who has
been omitted among the first ten footnotes rather than who is
included鈥攙ery much like in Russian communist days taking stock of the
line-up of people on top of Lenin鈥檚 tomb,鈥� adds Hoffman.

And what of the moment of inspiration? We are told that scientists rarely
leap from the bath shouting 鈥淓ureka!鈥�. Hard grind is what matters. Well phooey
to that. The 鈥渞eally sensational advances鈥� happen exactly like the romantic
myth, says Djerassi. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann agrees. 鈥淯seful original ideas
usually follow a certain set of general principles in most fields, including
arts [in which] outside of conscious thought the mind seemed somehow to go on
working on the problem, because at some point later on鈥攕ay while running
or cycling or shaving or cooking鈥攖he useful idea would come.鈥�

So we should pity those government administrators determined to 鈥渄irect鈥�
science towards particular ends. You will work hard to find on these pages any
successful exercise of this sort. Black, the man who made two of the most
lucrative pharmacological breakthroughs of the age by inventing beta-blockers
and cimetidine, a drug that fights ulcers, says that such ends were never in his
head.

Nurse! The syringe, the straitjacket; these people are crazy. Thank goodness!