Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [109]
I shudder when I think about the implications of stripping scientists – those who might know more about some given topic than anyone else – of their citizenship. I do not think people know what they are saying or implying when they say scientists should not be advocates, or when scientists justify their lack of advocacy or criticize their peers on this basis.
Scientists, as highly informed citizens, have their own peculiar set of responsibilities, especially because their colleagues and professional forebears have, with the post-war rebranding of science, helped to create the problems that good science alone can solve. Carl Sagan put it thus: ‘It is the particular task of scientists, I believe, to alert the public to possible dangers, especially those emanating from science or foreseeable through the use of science.’ The quote comes from a book, The Demon-Haunted World, that Sagan dedicated to his grandson Tonio with these words: ‘I wish you a world free of demons and full of light.’
EPILOGUE
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early seven years have passed since that enlightening episode with Stephen Hawking’s soup. Now I’m watching another scientist eat – and again, it’s rather distracting. This time I am in the cafeteria of the Medical Research Centre at Cambridge University, and newly crowned Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has just sat down at the next table. He is tucking heartily into a banana, and I’m wondering whether I should grab the opportunity to interview him before he wanders back to his lab.
With a little effort, I pull my focus back to Michael Fuller, the man sitting at the table with me. Fuller is the technician who built Crick and Watson’s famous model of DNA. He is telling me about the years he spent working with Francis Crick, but he can see that I’m not quite giving him my full attention. Fuller, a warm, generous, walking smile of a man, sees my predicament. ‘Do you want to go and talk to Venki?’ he asks.
I think about it, then dismiss the idea. ‘I might catch him later,’ I say. But I know that I probably won’t bother. Ramakrishnan won’t be able to tell me the secret of how to win a Nobel Prize. The scientists themselves rarely can. Anyway, it’s not that secret that I am really here to uncover. Ten days after Crick’s death in 2004, a British journalist called Alun Rees published a ‘scoop’ that he had been sitting on for years. Crick, Rees reported, had been high on LSD at the moment when he and James Watson had discovered the structure of DNA.
It is certainly not impossible: Crick was not shy of drugs. In 1967 he signed a letter to the London Times – other signatories included Paul McCartney and Graham Greene – that called for a reform of the drug laws. Around the same time he helped found a pressure group seeking to get cannabis legalised. The group was called Soma, after the socially acceptable mind-altering drug that featured in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley was a great advocate of the use of LSD and mescaline, among other pharmaceuticals.
Rees said in his article that it was while moving in this circle that Crick met Richard Kemp, a young biochemist who went on to develop a new and extremely efficient way to manufacture LSD. According to Rees, Crick had been Kemp’s inspiration: Crick had told Kemp that LSD had enabled him to see the structure of DNA, and that all the academics in Cambridge were using it to free their minds. Unfortunately, Rees got this story from a ‘friend’ of Kemp’s. When he asked Crick directly about his LSD use, Rees reported, Crick ‘listened with