HOW many 10-year-old girls have a lab of their own? Admittedly, this was only
a converted bit of an attic, but it did the trick: four decades later, in 1964,
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin picked up a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her
lifetime’s work on the structures of penicillin and vitamin B₁₂.
Georgina Ferry’s splendid biography of Hodgkin is the first to tell her
story.

Hodgkin’s life was unusual from the start. She was born in 1910 in Cairo,
where her archaeologist father worked for the colonial education service; her
mother’s political interests extended to taking young Dorothy to the 1925
congress of the League of Nations. Living in Britain with her sisters, she
inevitably saw little of her parents, but they did find ways to encourage her
interest in science, while family friends helped to boost her education to the
standard required for Oxford. Her mother’s suffragette friend Margery Fry,
principal of Somerville College, took Dorothy under her wing, and she emerged
with both a first class degree and a scholarship for a few years of postgraduate
research.

A chemist friend in Egypt introduced her to J. D. Bernal’s crystallography
lab in Cambridge, and Bernal hired her in 1932. Dorothy fell in love with him,
and their correspondence reveals a professional and personal intimacy that
lasted a lifetime. Bernal, a Communist, created in his lab a mix of politics,
science and personal relationships—an atmosphere in which Hodgkin thrived.
It became the model for the lab she would later create in Oxford. When she
returned to Somerville in 1934 as a fellow, research remained her forte: both
she and her students found her tutorials dreary (Ferry writes that the students
were often “utterly lost” as she talked on, completely over their heads, and
uncomfortable when she lapsed into long silences).

It was in Oxford that she met and married Fry’s cousin, Thomas Hodgkin. He
had a talent for absence, and jobs far afield meant that his wife and children
saw little of him. He spent a few years in Oxford, working in adult education,
but he would appoint only tutors who were members of the Communist Party. When
the university disapproved, he took a job in Ghana (then the Gold Coast) away
from his family once again.

Hodgkin consolidated her position in Oxford, and spent half a century there
in dogged pursuit of her molecules. She was fascinated by those vital to the
ordinary physiological processes of everyday life; many of these molecules are
defiantly complex in composition and structure. And she was among the first wave
of scientists to use physical methods to investigate them: in particular, the
new technology of X-ray crystallography enabled her to peer among the atoms. She
was a pioneer in the interpretation of the slender evidence in the scatter
patterns the X-rays left behind. As the structures began to emerge, she felt
sure she was due a Nobel prize, and became disgruntled when it went elsewhere
year after year. When the accolade finally came, she was in Ghana with Thomas.
The young country’s post-colonial successes, and the financial freedom offered
by the prize, inspired her to think again about politics.

While a welcome recruit to many causes, Hodgkin was admired more for her
scientific eminence than her political sense: her reactions to conflicts were
personal reactions to individuals, be they promising students facing poverty or
Vietnamese villagers enduring American aggression. But empathy does not, on its
own, constitute politics, and Hodgkin now appears naive within her universities
and on the world stage. It was perhaps an indication of her personal approach to
institutional politics that her Oxford lab disintegrated when she retired.

Aside from her intellectual brilliance and her empathetic nature, however,
Hodgkin’s personality is something of an enigma. In fact, during her time in
Bernal’s lab, a colleague had remarked that her most prominent characteristic
was her unobtrusiveness. The clearest insights into her personality come from
her correspondence with family and friends (her own memoirs were incomplete at
her death). And her world was populated by characters much more famous than she:
perhaps this is why she remains difficult to see. Between her family and
Thomas’s, they seemed to know everyone who was anyone for most of the century.
She dined with Kitchener, Kruschev and Thatcher; she could have mustered an
international party of scientific Nobel laureates at the drop of a hat.

While her contacts sometimes put Hodgkin in the shade, her world was a vivid
one. Ferry’s account of the social and political context of the day not only
fleshes out Hodgkin’s portrait, but is also useful as a picture of an era in
which science and politics struggled to come to terms with each other. Ferry’s
story of life in the lab under Bernal is magical, an echo of what it must have
been for the young Dorothy. In the lab, X-ray crystallography can be a slow and
tedious business, but Ferry gives us years of painstakingly acquired findings at
a cracking pace by teasing out the strands of Hodgkin’s later life—a
particular molecule, the path to the Nobel prize—and presenting them in
separate chapters. Be thankful: it took 40 years for a particular favourite of
Hodgkin’s, insulin, to crack under her team’s determined gaze. Despite the
narrative oddities produced by these parallel stories (people die in one
chapter, but live in the next), this fast-forwarding results in a compelling
read.

Ferry’s laudable attention to the historical context of her subject also
reveals how many women worked alongside Hodgkin, making useful contributions in
uncelebrated roles, like most scientists. It’s a shame, though, that these women
appear in the index under their husbands’ names: in many cases the husbands came
along much later. And delicious moments, such as when colleague and Communist
activist Nora Wooster leavens the long hours in the Cambridge lab by having her
au pair pop in with a picnic, are better than fiction.

Hodgkin hated being held up as a role model for women in science. Her
distinguished connections, the flexible boundaries of a new interdisciplinary
field brimming with important problems, an influential Communist lover and
mentor, family money—this biography reveals why her experience would be
difficult to repeat, even if one did have the mind for the job. Professional
women everywhere would envy a household that boasted a domestic staff of cook,
cleaner and nanny even in lean times. Without that support and Thomas’s
absences, her long hours of work and travel would surely have been
impossible.

Those who believe that women necessarily do science differently, or do a
different kind of science, will be disappointed when reading this biography.
Despite the relative freedom offered by her reputation and status, and the
funding that came to her personally rather than via a university post, her
science was of a rather ordinary kind. She worked long and hard to hone the mind
that looked at arrays of X-ray spots and saw molecules. The insight that
admirers demean as “feminine intuition” came not from the chromosomes she was
born with, but from years of slogging through patterns, numbers and charts. Like
a lot of men, she let others keep her household together, and in the lab she
displayed many of the characteristics of the stereotypical scientist, from a
lifelong obsession with particular problems to a distaste for paperwork, an
uninspiring wardrobe and a fiendishly untidy desk.

Hodgkin’s quietly successful life deserves this fine biography: Ferry has
brilliantly captured the flavour of a century of science, a century in which her
subject’s sometimes dim outline moved slowly but surely through an extraordinary
life, towards goals we can all be glad she reached.

Wizardby Mark Seifer, Carol Publishing, ÂŁ27, ISBN 1 55972 329 7

Einsteinby Albert FĂśsling, Viking, $37.95, ISBN 0 670 85545 6

Feynman by John and Mary Gribbin, Viking, ÂŁ18, ISBN 0 670 87245 8

THE hero of Mark Seifer’s Wizard is a scientist who thinks eating
and sleeping are a waste of time, and instead hops naked onto a vibrating
electrified plate for his daily vivification. He is more intimate with city
pigeons than people, believes he can talk to Martians, has restaurant tables
cleared if a fly so much as touches the cloth, harbours a phobia about ladies’
earrings and develops fever if he merely looks at a peach.

But this mad scientist is not the malicious creation of the antiscience
mafia: Seifer’s wizard is the real-life Nikola Tesla of AC transmission fame,
inventor of fluorescent lighting and the induction motor. It was Tesla who
turned Niagara Falls into a generator, and designed electrical systems that now
power the world.

Tesla fitted well into fin de siècle America. This remarkable
era saw dreams swiftly become reality as electric light, the telephone and the
phonograph tumbled out of the workshops of Boston and New Jersey, and fortunes,
nations and people were tossed back and forth with the changing tides. In
Tesla’s world, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt really did greet her guests in a
twinkling frock lit up by little light bulbs.

A Serbian by birth, Tesla arrived in New York in 1884, hoping to persuade
Thomas Edison of the advantages of AC over DC current. Tesla was classified as
an alien in the US, and his European roots served, in the popular media, as a
sign of his other-worldliness. Eventually he would become the model for the
extraterrestrial inventor in Nic Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth,
while New Agers now claim he was from Venus.

Like the raptures of a medieval monk in his cell, Tesla’s creative trances
originated in higher powers—in his case, electricity and magnetism. He was
a showman who electrified himself with his precious AC, and managed to glow in
the dark. Luminaries from Lord Kelvin to Sarah Bernhardt visited him, and he
sent Mark Twain scurrying to the lavatory when he demonstrated his vibratory
cure for constipation. In London, Tesla captivated J. J. Thomson, and discussed
psychic phenomena with William Crookes. His ideas about interplanetary
communication were not so strange then, for Martians were all the rage in
scientific literature as well as the yellow press of the day. Sadly, the
repeated three beeps Tesla claimed to have received from Mars at last may well
have been the “dot dot dot” of the Morse “S” test signal that Guglielmo Marconi,
Tesla’s new rival, was transmitting within Europe that same day.

Tesla’s sparkling demonstrations hid secrets he would not reveal publicly,
for he was forever in patent disputes and royalty battles with George
Westinghouse and Edison. He courted millionaires endlessly to keep his
enterprise afloat. Tesla’s vision was big: he wanted to unite the Universe with
wireless power, end wars with weapons so terrifying that no one would dare to
fight and save the environment with his clean, boundless electrical energy.

Wizard is a compelling tale presenting a teeming, vivid world of
science, technology, culture and human lives. Yet in spite of Tesla’s luminous
genius it is a dark book: it happens in hotel rooms and crowded labs, in tangles
of wires and emotions, and inside Tesla’s mind, where many of his ideas had
their only realisation.

Tesla died of anorexia in 1943. Marconi was the new wizard of the wireless,
and Tesla was broke, redundant and a long way from the scientific mainstream.
Physics, for him, had been about machinery, not mathematics. He had no truck
with upstart theoreticians such as Albert Einstein. Tesla’s disapproval of
relativity theory had briefly been grounds for others also to dismiss it, but
Einstein won through to become a new kind of wizard. Where Tesla’s tricks had
revealed wonders of the visible world, Einstein’s techniques—and
results—were invisible.

Einstein was famous as a scientist in Europe long before he became an
over-night success in the English-speaking world. As Albert FĂśsling
explains in his measured and detailed biography—a very readable
translation of the well-received German edition—the Royal Society’s expeditions
to photograph the solar eclipse off the coast of western Africa corroborated
Einstein’s general theory of relativity and brought him to prominence in the US
and Britain in 1919. At a time of political upheaval and disputed boundaries,
Einstein turned public attention to the free and boundless heavens, and, as
Fösling says, “proclaimed new and scarcely believable news from the seat of
the gods—news that, to the war-weary, must have sounded like a secularized
Christmas message”.

The new mass media took to Einstein the man (after all, no one understood his
science, or knew what it was for), and by 1920 had apparently made him feel
“like a graven image”. But Einstein also quickly realised that however
discomfiting his reputation for “superhuman powers of intellect and character”,
he could use the influence it gave him “in the spiritual and moral domain”. He
had plenty of opportunities to do this later, which makes his popular standing
easier to understand.

But in the early days, Einstein did not enjoy the “relativity circus”, and
was puzzled by his popularity with people who hadn’t a clue about his life’s
work. Charlie Chaplin explained it as they walked through enthusiastic crowds at
a Hollywood premiere: “They cheer me,” said Chaplin, “because they all
understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.”

By that estimation, Richard Feynman is a mix of Einstein and Chaplin.
Feynman’s original physics presents the Einsteinian intellectual challenge,
while his personal life and popular writings offer an accessible, Chaplinesque
mix of slapstick and pathos. John and Mary Gribbin’s biography, Feynman,
shows a man absorbed by science from an early age.

As an undergraduate he avoided nonscience courses, and his second wife
complained in her divorce testimony that he did calculus while driving—and
lying in bed. Against this obsessive stereotype is juxtaposed Feynman the
womaniser, joker and bongo-player. The result is two Feynmans, the genius and
the “lad”, who run parallel courses. The two are not always in step, and the
life of one is rather more readable than the other.

Einstein claimed that, had he not lived, someone else would have thought of
special relativity, but without Beethoven we would not have the Eroica
symphony. Feynman gave us quantum electrodymanics, but his unique personal
contribution was perhaps his teaching, and the textbooks he wrote as a result.
The Gribbins congratulate Feynman for the days of work that went into each
class, yet they also describe time spent on the lectures as a “fallow period of
his life in physics”.

Feynman came to wide public notice during the enquiry into the Challenger
disaster in 1986. His televised demonstration of the effect of cold on the
shuttle’s rubber sealing rings was, according to Freeman Dyson, Feynman’s
“finest hour” as a communicator. Tesla, in his role as showman, would have
approved.

Yet the outside world is mostly absent from this life in science: even the
Second World War barely figures, despite its impact on Feynman’s life and work.
A scientific biography set apart from its context raises artificial barriers.
While bongo-playing may be startlingly unusual among physicists, it was probably
a rather mild diversion in the context of a successful Californian life in the
1970s.

The Gribbins want to show that Feynman was loved, and their own affection for
him is clear. Yet neither this, nor their apologetic accounts of his
eccentricities—”Feynman lacked respect (in the best possible way) for
authority”—nor their sideswipes at Murray Gell-Mann (a mere “ordinary
genius”) make his light shine any brighter.

Of this trio, Tesla is the least celebrated. He is also the nuttiest, and the
one today’s scientists might most readily leave in obscurity. Yet his years of
struggling for money, of courting favour in unpleasant places, of seeking fickle
public approval and harbouring unrealised dreams give Tesla’s story the most
contemporary resonance.

“Annie vomited slightly a second time and took less of the gruel. As Brodie
sponged her face and hands, she put her arms round the nurse’s neck and kissed
her. Then she slept peacefully. In the small hours, Charles sat circled in
candlelight and poured out his heart to Emma. `Whilst writing to you, I can cry,
tranquilly,’ he confessed. `Otherwise I am constantly up & down: I cannot
sit still.’ “

Annie’s death left Darwin with a profound sense of the unjustness of nature,
and a recognition at last that there could be no God. He had, according to
Desmond and Moore, “a fresh vision of the tragic contingency of nature”.

That such a particular, unrepeatable and intensely personal event could
influence the course of science was for a long time unacceptable to historians
of science. A “Eureka” moment was assumed to occur only to solitary scientists
alone with their data.

Later, even the concept of “great men of science” was temporarily displaced
by the notion of the “history of scientific ideas”. And sociologists located the
agency of scientific change in society, culture and context: sociology, after
all, is not about individuals.

Yet even science-as-social-construct needs constructors. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s work
within a culture and in a context that consists not only of their society and
their times, but also of their lives, their families and themselves. Prefacing
the Cambridge Science Biographies series reissued this year (most cost about
£14), editor David Knight proclaims: “Science is a human activity; the
personalities of those who practise it are important.”

Overall, however, the series is more factual than personal. For instance, in
Darwin’s biography, Peter Bowler presents Annie’s awful death in a few lines.
And in Michael Sharratt’s Galileo, all we learn about Galileo is that
he was conceited and “not cold”. Perhaps the historical sources allow us no
more. In his Isaac Newton, Rupert Hall implies that the apparent
scarcity of Newton’s personal relationships may be an artefact of the record,
not a fact of the life.

Rather different is the life drawn in exquisite and revolting detail in John
Banville’s 1981 novel Kepler. Unconstrained by the record, but richly
informed by the period, Banville tells of a stinking, dark, precarious world
where dukes in cloth-of-gold mete out their spiteful patronage. Here, Kepler
discards the principle of uniform velocity of the planets while puking
absentmindedly during a prostitutes’ brawl.

The personal can inform even when it repels. In Ray Monk’s discomfortingly
compelling biography, Bertrand Russell (Jonathan Cape, ÂŁ25, ISBN
0 224 03026 4), we learn that the philosopher tried to alleviate the pain of his
wife’s unrequited love for him by being cruel to her: if she had reason to love
him less, her pain would decrease accordingly. Full marks for logic, Bertie, but
zero for human understanding.

Denis Brian’s Einstein (Wiley, £18.99/$30, ISBN 0 471
11459 6) also deals with his relationships with women, previously considered
inappropriate for a scientist’s biography. Brian brings us Einstein’s assertion
that while special relativity would eventually have been discovered without him,
the Eroica symphony could never have existed without Beethoven.
Individual artists matter, but individual scientists don’t.

Certainly, bookshops teem with biographies of the interpreters and
manipulators of the human sphere— actors, politicians and soldiers. These
people live their professional lives in public: we buy the books to see what
they do in private. But the scientists, whose profession is private and who are
presumed to “reflect”, rather than “refract”, the cosmos, have become like a
mirror—invisible. We have tended to look at them to see not what they are,
but only what they do.

Those most likely to benefit from the books’ dogged factuality and measured
speculation are surely students working on essays. Why else would anyone read
Bowler on Darwin, when they could enjoy Desmond and Moore, or Janet Browne’s
widely acclaimed Charles Darwin: Voyaging, now in paperback?

Perhaps this would not matter too much if physical science students
were destined only for the backrooms of scientific laboratories. But recent
trends indicate that many science graduates end up in careers far from their
initial training. Many a physics graduate is to be found predicting the
futures market in the Square Mile; many a chemist is hyping it up in public
relations.

One of the main complaints of those graduates who leave science is that
their course concentrated on producing students equipped to follow a research
career, and that the underlying assumption was that such research would
be carried out in an academic environment.

Those who eventually find themselves elsewhere, whether as scientific
researchers or in another capacity, often feel ill equipped for the environment
of commerce and industry. These young people have often to write off their
last three years’ training. At most, all they got from their BSc was a grounding
in scientific logic and numeracy. The factual content of their subject was
just so much excess baggage.

The academic scientific community which supplied the excess baggage
can be heard loudly bemoaning the ‘loss’ of talented young scientists. Yet
academic scientists also complain about scientific illiteracy in exactly
those nonscience professions which are now welcoming science students.

Perhaps if there were less moaning and greater acceptance of this intellectual
osmosis, the exodus could be turned to everyone’s advantage.

The refugee graduates ought to be able to think of their scientific
knowledge and training as a bonus. It ought to make a positive, constructive
contribution to their working lives, and be a source of insight for their
colleagues. At the same time, the scientific community should be reaping
the benefit of this broad and influential distribution of people who are
sympathetic to science.

The reason why this is not the case is that science graduates are often
unable to share their science with their nonscientific colleagues. They
are unable to communicate. Instead of building Bragg’s ‘flying bridge’ they
find themselves erecting barriers whenever called upon to explain scientific
concepts in everyday terms.

Attitudes in the scientific community are changing, albeit slowly. In
1985, the Royal Society published a report on the public understanding of
science in Britain. Its conclusions took many members of the scientific
community by surprise.

The report advocated increased cooperation with the media, more training
in communication skills for scientists and wider science education. It also
recommended that communication skills be an integral part of every undergraduate
science course.

The response in British universities has been patchy, to say the least.
The reasons are not clear. It may be that nothing more than straightforward
inertia is responsible. Being more charitable, academic scientists may simply
feel their job is to teach science and that any attempts to delve into the
art of communication will be ill received by both students and the outside
world. However, there is evidence to suggest these fears are ill founded.

For example, the departments of chemical and electrical engineering
at Imperial College, London, have for many years offered their students
tuition in giving talks. The motivation was partly to save examiners from
hordes of trembling undergraduates mumbling their way through their oral
exams. But mostly, it was the recognition that engineers have to deal with
‘the public’ – bankers, designers, construction workers – all the time.

Although these classes are crammed into odd spaces in overcrowded timetables,
the students take the idea seriously and work hard on their talks. Through
a process of practice, group discussion and criticism, all the students
show a clear improvement in their communication skills. The best students
give talks that are positively entertaining, as well as informative.

Over the past 12 months, University College London has been preparing
a new course on the communication of scientific ideas. This will start in
January as part of the science faculty’s new physical sciences degree. Part
of the course will involve the oral communication skills now being taught
to engineers at Imperial. The rest is designed to bring students’ writing
skills to a level where they could, perhaps, submit an article to New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´
without it needing major surgery at the hands of a subeditor.

Preparations for this element of the course have involved contacts with
working journalists and bodies whose aims include making science more accessible
to the general public, such as the British Association for the Advancement
of Science and CIBA’s Media Resource Service. Here, too, initial approaches
have produced an enthusiastic response.

The conclusion from these ventures is that students want to know how
to present the information they are learning in a coherent and attractive
manner, and that initiatives by science departments which try to give their
graduates such skills will be well received in the outside world.

It is not necessary to pay a fortune for a ‘win-friends-and-influence-people’
sales guru. There are many people in universities who are interested in
communication. In many science faculties, staff are now taking upon themselves
the responsibility for ‘chairing’ classes for their students in communications
skills. Given half a chance, most students would happily criticise their
lecturers: in a class where they do the talking or writing, students learn
by criticising each other.

For academic scientists, the challenge of producing students with the
communications skills demanded by society may be daunting. One thing, however,
is certain. If we do not even try, we can never succeed.

Jane Gregory researches the communication of scientific ideas at Imperial
College, London. Dr Steve Miller is the press officer for the Department
of Physics and Astronomy at University College London.