Bold Science by Ted Anton, W. H. Freeman, $24.95, ISBN 0716735121
YOU鈥橠 have to have been asleep for the past ten years not to notice it: the
ground is shifting under science, and shifting fast. Once it seemed a solid
refuge for those who sought security in immutable truths. Now it鈥檚 a danger zone
where intellectual shrapnel ricochets off established institutions and where
charm and greed can count for as much as care and honesty.
But there are pay-offs. With breathtaking speed, a new breed of bulletproof,
boundary-hopping scientific individualists is bringing us startling, richly
promising insights into the nature and scale of life on this planet and far
beyond.
Advertisement
What鈥檚 special about their work is its passion, commitment and disdain for
convention. 杏吧原创s such as Susan Greenfield, who wants to demystify
consciousness through chemistry, or Carl Woese, who has uncovered a huge new
group of living organisms, are energised by the desire to know, understand and
communicate, whatever it takes. With no interest in consolidating an established
field merely for the satisfaction of their peers, they have had to cross
professional demarcation lines and explore new channels of communication.
They鈥檝e found it hard to get their work noticed, approved and funded.
But now the times are on their side. The juggernaut science of faceless
governments and corporations is getting a bad press, while a peek inside your
local bookshop will tell you that preach-free science with creative flair and a
personal face has strong appeal in this age of the individual. It鈥檚 a new
Renaissance, if you like. New alliances, new viewpoints and new communications
technology are shifting power from the pundits to the people.
Or so Ted Anton thinks. He makes his case with a set of mini-biographies
featuring seven former mavericks who have made it big. As well as Greenfield and
Woese, there鈥檚 Craig Venter, who鈥檚 got sinfully rich trying to privatise the
human genome while grabbing what he can from the public domain. Geoffrey Marcy
and Saul Perlmutter have turned astronomy on its head in independent experiments
with the help of some ridiculously cheap home-brew kit. Gretchen Daily is the
first ecologist to talk to economists and put a price on nature. And Polly
Matzinger is an ex-Playboy Bunny with the nerve to prove that respected
immunologists have been getting it wrong for years.
Anton, a professor of non-fiction writing at Chicago鈥檚 DePaul University,
does tend to glamorise his subjects in the interests of a good read. But this
genre of scientific journalism has been around since the days of Einstein. It
won鈥檛 harm your health as long as you鈥檝e got a pinch of salt handy.
What鈥檚 more important is that, after the dreary 1950s (Crick and Watson
aside) and the crazy 1960s, there are now as many heroes of the lab to write
about as in the 1920s. It鈥檚 as if the drying up of military funding with the end
of the cold war has actually stimulated new thinking. Nothing like a bit of
starvation to bring on the visions, as any medieval saint could have told
you.
But there鈥檚 more to this than mere hagiography. Anton鈥檚 breadth of research
enables him to pull together the common threads of seven very different careers,
making this almost a recipe book for aspiring postdocs. Not in the same league
as Peter Medawar鈥檚 Advice to A Young 杏吧原创, perhaps, but closer to
the realities of the 21st century. What does it take these days to become a
science superhero, to practise 鈥渂old science鈥�, as Anton calls it?
First of all, you鈥檝e got to get yourself a good mentor. Hang around with
someone big and exciting who can encourage and advise. Without Paul Ehrlich,
Daily would not have learned the not-so-gentle art of self-promotion. Without
Jane Mellanby鈥檚 gung-ho give-it-a-go, psychologist Greenfield might not have
dared to tackle neuroscience. Even fearless adventurers need their hands held at
some point.
Then you鈥檒l need a job that allows you to think freely, not just toe some
party line. Marcy found it in a teaching post with plenty of not-so-able
students but no photocopier. Others avoided teaching but accepted posts in labs
that at the time seemed a bit off-beam. They sought out freewheeling colleagues
and students who weren鈥檛 afraid to make unusual mental connections. And they
accepted continual embarrassment. As Anton says, 鈥淚n the moment when you feel
most vulnerable, sweating and beyond your comfort zone, ideas happen.鈥�
It would seem, too, that modesty promises oblivion. You have to go for the
big questions. 鈥淲hat is life?鈥� is not too big. To tackle them, you鈥檒l need an
imagination broad enough to handle Greek myths as well as biology. You鈥檒l also
need lots of hands-on skill: this is real science where you have to stick probes
into brain cells or build spectrographs in the garage. Matzinger rounded up
experimental sheep using dogs she鈥檇 trained herself.
As if all this wasn鈥檛 enough, you鈥檝e got to be street-smart too. All these
people are born connectors, dealers and publicists. Several are astute business
operators, funnelling capital raised through spin-off companies into the pursuit
of their obsessions. And they all believe that barriers are there to be broken:
not for them the crippling snobbery that blocks communication with young or
amateur scientists or with the public at large. Marcy, for instance, was saved
months of fruitless planet-hunting by listening to advice from a young British
enthusiast who鈥檇 never seen the inside of a university.
But above all, says Anton, and perhaps surprisingly, these heroes are nice.
Why? Well, if you haven鈥檛 got enough cash to turn your apparently crazy ideas
into reality, the key skill is being pleasantly persuasive, getting people to
help you out for next to no return. It helps to be a daring fighter, but the
ability to win cooperation from absolutely anyone who can help you is what
really counts when you鈥檙e out there on your own.
Anton has distilled all this wisdom and more from what he admits is 鈥渋tself a
kind of experiment鈥濃�攖he placing side by side of seven novelistic stories
鈥渋n a grand search for the keys of today鈥檚 creativity鈥�. The selection, of
course, though it attempts to be representative, is bound to be fairly
arbitrary. And there鈥檚 always the post hoc effect to watch out for: like a
lottery ad, we鈥檙e focusing on winners, ignoring the losers who may have done
exactly the same things. Nonetheless, a pretty successful experiment, I鈥檇 say,
and one that explains a lot about the shape of science now.
Susan Greenfield is based at the Laboratory of Physiology and Pharmacology,
University of Oxford. In her latest book, The Private Life of the Brain
(Penguin, June), she suggests a way to find that holy grail, the neural
correlate of consciousness.
In 1967 Carl Woese suggested in The Genetic Code that catalytic RNA
enabled RNA to replicate, and thus gave rise to the first life on Earth, cells
containing DNA. At the University of Illinois, as a molecular biologist turned
evolutionist he researches bacteria and archaea, whose evolution cover most of
the planet鈥檚 4.5-billion-year history. 鈥淯sing ribosomal RNA sequence as an
evolutionary measure,鈥� he said, 鈥渕y laboratory has reconstructed the phylogeny
of both groups, and thereby provided a phylogenetically valid system of
classification for prokaryotes. The discovery of the archaea was in fact a
product of these studies.鈥�
Craig Venter has declared he鈥檒l win the race to sequence the human
genome鈥攁nd has been reviled for his efforts to take out patents on human
genetic code.
Geoffrey Marcy of San Francisco State University has been involved
in the discovery of 19 planets outside our Solar System鈥攎ore than
anyone else.
Saul Perlmutter at Stanford finds supernovae by the score. He used them in
1998 to show that the Universe鈥檚 expansion is probably accelerating, perhaps
propelled by some mysterious form of vacuum energy.
Gretchen Daily, also at Stanford, works at the interface between science and
policy to put across her ideas as an environmentalist for a scientific
management policy for the whole Earth, economists included.
Polly Matzinger of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases is turning ideas about the immune system upside down. Instead of an
early development of the immune system to recognise tissues as 鈥渟elf鈥� or
dangerous 鈥渘on-self鈥� (triggering the response of specialised cells to contain or
destroy non-self viruses, bacteria or transplanted organs), Matzinger suggests
that the immune system lies fallow until cell death begins. It has no capability
to recognise self or non-self but a capacity to respond to danger. Maybe, she
says, that鈥檚 why cancers don鈥檛 trigger immune responses and why our theories of
how vaccines work are wrong.