The Periodic Table, Passion and Progress
Reflections on scientific elites and their institutions
I recently came across one of Prof Brian Cox’s TV mini-series programmes on the solar system in which he was discussing the subject of Ice Worlds and the various materials (obviously water, but also molecules such as methane and carbon dioxide etc), found on planets that can freeze and produce various wonderful landscapes. His enthusiasm was infectious, and this combined with the help of computerised graphics drew me in and started me thinking. It took me back to the 1970s and another engaging presenter of science, Jacob Bronowski, talked about the Periodic Table and the work of Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) in his epic TV series The Ascent of Man. As I remembered it in programme 10 World within World, Bronowski explained how Mendeleev was passionate about elemental structure and wrote the atomic weights and numbers of each element on separate playing cards, and then played a type of patience, in which he rearranged the playing cards into groups according to their material characteristics. By doing this not only was Mendeleev able to produce what has become known as the Periodic Table, but he was able to predict where elements were missing, and what properties these elements would have when they were discovered. A truly remarkable piece of scientific thinking.
However, another thought that seemed to have stuck in my mind was that Bronowski also made the comment that Mendeleev had a position at one of the less prestigious universities in Russia and therefore was on the fringe of the intellectual debates going on at the time about the structure of matter. In my memory, Bronowski makes the point that the fact that Mendeleev was not central to these discussions at, let’s call them the more prestigious institutions, gave him greater freedom of thought in which to develop his ideas. For whatever reason this thought, rightly or wrongly, has been buzzing round my mind ever since, but it was also accompanied by another thought put into my mind by an editorial comment some years later that I read in either Nature or Science, I cannot remember which, that stated the next set of big scientific ideas would come from the top 200 universities in the world and that they could be named and identified. Clearly, the editor was suggesting that funding bodies should only focus on prestigious elite institutions, a sentiment also attributable to James Watson, the co-author of the paper on the structure of DNA, when he said, “Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.” Now, there is clearly a tension here between “elites” and “pedantic hacks”, be they individuals or institutions. This polarising notion I think is totally misguided and needs to be unpacked and examined.
But first let’s check some of the facts. So, I first consulted Bronowski’s statement in the book version of the Ascent of Man and reread Chapter 10, entitled World Within World. Here I learnt that “These forecasts made Mendeleev famous everywhere – except in Russia: he was not a prophet there, because the Tsar did not like his liberal politics… He was not elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences, but in the rest of the world his name was magic.” This begs the question, was I dreaming all this about elite institutions vs non-elite ones, or did it contain a grain of truth? Now the version of the Ascent of Man broadcast in America was subtly different from the one broadcast to the British due to the religious sensibilities of the American audience. In the American series it was promoted as “a personal view” by Jacob Bronowski and it was therefore not accepted as a standard scientific world view to the extent it was in Britain. To pursue this even further I wrote to David Attenborough who was involved in commissioning Bronowski’s Ascent of Man to see if he could throw some light on my problem. He kindly replied to my letter suggesting I look on the BBC I-Player where the series was still available. Again, there was no explicit articulation other than the one I quoted above saying he was not elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. We are on the horns of a political dilemma. So, where to now?
The University of Cambridge cannot be classified as anything other than an elite institution, it is regularly placed in the top six of global rankings and it is where James Watson and Francis Crick were based in the early 1950s. They worked in the Molecular Biology Unit of the Cavendish Laboratory under the leadership of Max Perutz who was a protein chemist and who was instrumental of determining the structure of haemoglobin for which he was awarded the Noble Prize for chemistry with John Kendrew. Following Watson and Crick’s famous Nature publication on the structure of DNA (April 1953), Watson was keen to document his account of the backstory to this paper in his book The Double Helix. On publication in 1968 he ignited a controversy between the various scientists involved. Officially, both Watson and Crick were being paid to work on protein structure, and not the structure of DNA. Here, I am not going to go into the details of this controversy suffice it to say that the book produced a certain amount of acrimony especially between the principle players, Watson and Crick and fellow scientists at King’s College London, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins who were also interested in the structure of DNA. In his book The Eighth Day of Creation Horace Judson recounts an interview he has with Max Perutz in a taxi going across London discussing the inception of molecular biology and comparing the problems associated with obtaining protein structures and contrasting them with obtaining DNA structures. According to Perutz, the structure of DNA was the far easier to solve because it only has a dual function, to replicate itself and to produce proteins. Proteins by contrast play many more functional roles in cells and are much more functionally diverse and correspondingly, therefore, more difficult to resolve.
Horace Judson (author of the Eighth Day of Creation) and Max Perutz (Protein biochemist based in Cambridge) who conversed about James Watson during a Taxi ride across London (Acknowledgements The Guardian and Wikipedia).
However, during this taxi journey across London, Perutz also recalled a now famous statement by James Watson that, “It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant”, followed by the revelation that while working under Perutz with Crick he had said, “…But I [Watson] was very underemployed when we solved the structure of DNA.” Perutz goes on talking of his interaction with Watson, “People sneer at Jim’s book [The Double Helix], because they say that all he did in Cambridge was to play tennis and chase girls. But there was a serious point to that. I sometimes envied Jim. My own problem took thousands of hours of hard work, measurements, calculations.” There was no short cut, “For Jim there was an elegant solution, which is what I admired. He found it partly because he never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking; he always refused to substitute the one for the other.” I too remember a time of increasingly hard laboratory work, and nothing was happening, the results were dreadful. I thought I must work harder, put in more hours or work faster, but all that happened was my variation around my measurements increased; in technical jargon my standard errors went up! Either the hypothesis to be addressed needed more careful thought, or the methods needed thinking through more carefully. Either way, I needed more, “hard thinking”. Now, this I think deals with a problem that faces many a budding student in the transition from being an undergraduate to being a postgraduate researcher; a first degree is in the main an intellectual degree, whilst a research degree is more of an emotional degree.
What do I mean by an intellectual degree vs an emotional degree? Are not all university degrees intellectual? Well, yes of course they are, but not all people are temperamentally suited to scientific research. The confusion of hard work and hard thinking is more complicated because it involves not only intellectual work but emotional work. The ability to be passionate and emotionally engaged with the work in hand when it’s not going well and to continue in the face of adversity takes more than intellect. It is easy to sail before a gentle wind, but when the winds blowing a gale and you’ve run out of intellectual ballast that’s when the emotional ballast is required, and you have to dig deep. The fact that you’ve been an elite student and attended an elite institution does not cut the mustard to make progress; it also requires emotional ballast, it takes more than being intellectually clever, and this comes from temperament. The same type of thing can also often be seen in sport, it’s not enough to be an excellent athlete, you need a highly developed athleticism of course, but you also require the correct frame of mind. Watch a tennis match at the top level, say the men’s or woman’s final at Wimbledon, and you can watch the mental balance shift even between one game and the next! It’s even the same with team sports like football or rugby. But in all these sports to perform at the top level it’s readily admitted that you need a whole cadre of enthusiasts that are passionate about what they are doing, and this is true from the small local village school all the way up to the participants in the premier league at the top. Here, I want claim that progress in science, in art, in music, in fact in any human endeavour, you need more than just focusing your funds on the elite and the elite institutions. As Jacob Bronowski eloquently articulates at the end of the Ascent of Man:
We are all afraid – for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual and emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man [my italics].
