Mountains, Microscopes and Mavericks
Matterhorn, Dent Blanche and Grand Cornier as seen from the Klein Matterhorn
In my last blog I focused on the expansion of suburbia and its encroachment into environments that hitherto had remained hostile to human domesticity. The first ascent of the Matterhorn was on 14th July 1865 and ended with four members of the team falling to their deaths on their descent. Edward Whymper, the leader of the team, had previously had several attempts during which he had studied in detail the various faces of the mountain but all these ascents had ended in failure. According to Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind), “What makes mountain going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands among some of its participants that they die.” As Macfarlane points out, in “Some winters more people perish in the mountains of Scotland than on the roads surrounding them.” Another ascent in the chronicles of mountaineering is the North Face of the Eiger (3967 meters) the first ascent of which was by a group in July 1938 lead by Heinrich Harrer.
The Second World War was building in Europe and in 1938 Harrer had enrolled in the German Army and was a member of the Nazi Party. Therefore, on reaching the summit he flew the Nazi flag an achievement for which he was later photographed with Adolf Hitler. A year later, this feat of climbing the North Face of the Eiger and having studied geography at university won him a place on an expedition to the Himalaya to find the easiest route up the Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat (8126 meters). It was during his return from the Nanga Parbat expedition that he was arrested by the British colonial authorities as an enemy alien. He had several attempts to escape the British and when he eventually succeeded he made his way to Tibet. On returning to Europe, he recorded his experiences in his book, Seven Years in Tibet which has since been made into several films, one in 1956 and the most recent 1997 starring Brad Pitt. There was however another book by Harrer that has been described to me as the best mountaineering book ever written. It is called The White Spider. In this book he recalls the history of climbing the North Face of the Eiger in which he states:
What I propose to do here is to draw a true picture of it; one which will be hardly less exciting, but whose drama will be based on truth and fact, not on uninformed imaginings of some pen pusher. For the true story of the Eiger’s North Face is even more terrible and more glorious than men have yet been able to discover.
North Face of the Eiger (Wikipedia)
It is a story in the growth of knowledge of a mountain face and how each attempt builds on the previous attempts; each is a scientific experiment guided by the vision of reaching the summit built on past experience. As Harrer states, “Its history is more than a record of mountaineering disasters and successes. It is a history of human development and human tragedies.” Many mountaineers died in attempting to scale this face and indeed the Swiss authorities even banned people from climbing the Face as it was regarded as too dangerous.
Harrer’s book The White Spider finishes with a list of the attempts, both the successes and failures, and maps out the Face with a set of locations where various incidents occurred amongst them, “Death Bivouac”, “Difficult Crack”, “Ramp” and of course the “White Spider.” Every climber must cross the “White Spider”, as there is no alternative route. As Harrer says, “Someone once compared the whole Face to a gigantic spider’s web catching the spider’s victims and feeding them to her.” But at every attempt the geographical and geological knowledge of the Face grows and like the growth of all scientific knowledge the task in hand becomes increasingly easier. Failure was as important as success and becomes especially poignant if it ended in a death; it was all a part of a learning process and represented progress.
Seen from afar, an individual climber in the context of the whole North Face is a mere speck, but in 1957 that did not stop the onlookers to come in their hundreds to Grindelwald, Alpiglen and Kleine Scheidegg to besiege the telescopes that were trained on the climbers as they made their way up the Face and to report the spectacle to the world at large. Death has an attraction all of its own, and the world’s press knew it. But none of this would have been possible without the invention of the telescope which magnified each climber and made visible to the onlookers their every move. Telescopes, along with microscopes, are a technological development of the scientific revolution and both reply on the development of the lens. Both telescopes and microscopes make a change in the perspectives of their objects in relationship to the observer; telescopes bring very distant objects nearer and microscopes make very small objects larger.
The crest at the top of the Matterhorn (top left) is approximately 100 meters, the diameter of the Pasteuria endospore (bottom left) is approximately 3 microns (1 meter = 1,000,000 microns). The distance between the Matterhorn summit and Dent Blanche summit (middle peak) is about 10 Km as the crow flies. The distance between the top of the endospore on the left and the one on the far right is less than 10 microns.
I want to draw a similarity here between the microscopist and the mountaineer. Although the microscopist may not be in danger of losing their life, both of them are exploring a physical reality, one a large mountain Face the other the small spore of a bacterium. But both are in the pursuit of a personal individual vision and simultaneously both engaged in a communal activity. In his book The White Spider Harrer makes explicit the learning process by which every attempt revealed something new about the mountain. For example, he talks about the fact that falling rocks loosened by sunshine prohibited and even proved fatal to several attempts to climb the Face. Therefore, it was key to climb beyond this particular section of the Face before the sun got to melt the snow and ice that cause the rocks and boulders to fall. Learning that you had to start your climb early enough before the sun got too high was one of the keys to his success. But this is hard won knowledge but not always consciously obtained, the subconscious can work in mysterious ways.
The growth of our knowledge rarely goes forward without hitches. Let’s now turn from the mountaineer to the microscopist and the Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock. In Evelyn Keller’s biography of McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism, there is a section dealing with her cytological work on the fungus Neurospora in which she recounts that:
…I got very discouraged, and realized that something was wrong – something quite seriously wrong. I wasn’t seeing things, I wasn’t integrating, I wasn’t getting things right at all. I was lost.
Keller recounts that she went off and sat down on a bench under some trees and recalled:
…she “let the tears roll a little,” but mainly, “I must have done this very intense, subconscious thinking. And suddenly I knew everything was going to be just fine.” It was. In five days, she had everything solved.
Heinrick Harrer (1912-2006) and Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)
Similarly, I can remember a related situation. I was trying to work out the life-cycle of an endospore forming bacterium of a strain of Pasteuria that infects plant-parasitic nematodes or eelworms. In essence the literature at that time suggested that the endospores bound to the cuticle of the nematode as it migrated through the soil to the plant root and only germinated when the nematode had invaded the plant root and had started feeding by setting up a specialised feeding site. The literature suggested that as the nematode starts to feed the adhering endospore receives a signal and germinates thereby infecting the developing nematode. In the absence of Pasteuria infection, the nematode would normally develop into a saccate female full of nematode eggs. However, if infected by Pasteuria the female nematode is stopped from producing eggs and instead becomes a cadaver full of the next generation of bacterial endospores. On this occasion, I had been sampling a field of cereal cyst nematode throughout the growing season. I could see endospores adhering to the migrating infective nematode, but I could never find any infected females, they just did not seem to exist. Using McClintock’s phrase, “I was lost.”
I was also frustrated! I had been doing the sampling week after week for several months and had spent day after day looking down the microscope, but every saccate nematode I extracted from the plant root showed no sign of Pasteuria infection. However, on one particular day I was looking at some infective nematodes I had extracted from the soil, and the majority had endospores adhering to their cuticles. In my frustration I picked up my pencil and brought it down heavily on the glass coverslip that was covering my nematode samples and broke the coverslip. Why I did not remove the slide with the broken coverslip and throw the sample away I will never know (perhaps some subconscious intuition?), but instead I looked down the microscope and was able to avoid the cracks of the coverslip, and there beneath the broken coverslip I could see that some of the nematodes with endospores attached had broken open. But not only that! To my surprise I saw some of the developmental stages of Pasteuria that hitherto had only been reported in the female nematodes feeding and developing on the root.
Revue de Nematol. Vol 13. pages 303-309
The life-cycle as reported in the literature was wrong! For the next ten days I concentrated my studies on the infective nematodes migrating through the soil to the root, and each time I looked down the microscope I saw more and more of the other developmental stages of the bacterium until I had its complete life-cycle. I was bearing witness to a part of the world that nobody else had previously seen, and a report was written and published. However, that is not all. I can add that bearing witness to something for the first time is addictive! That is certainly true, but it’s more than just the culminating observation. It’s also about the process and it’s the same as climbing a mountain, the journey is as important as the destination.
At the end of Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock she writes:
Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist. It is an emotional investment that provides the motivating force for the endless hours of intense, often grueling, labor. …But McClintock’s feeling for the organism is not simply a longing to behold the “reason revealed in this world.” It is a longing to embrace the world in its very being, through reason and beyond. …reason – at least in the conventional sense of the word – is not by itself adequate to describe the vast complexity – even mystery – of living forms.
Although mountains by most people are not normally regarded as living forms, the process by which our human knowledge grows clearly rests on a of deep emotional investment; here both mountaineers and microscopists as mavericks would surely concur.
