Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [111]
It is not as if this would have made Crick a one-off. As we have seen, LSD seeded Kary Mullis’s Nobel Prize. Another Nobel laureate, the physicist Richard Feynman, enjoyed marijuana and LSD (but had already done his best work before he tried them). The cosmologist Carl Sagan was also a regular user of cannabis, and describes many experiences of seeing things in a new way when stoned. His insights were so profound to him that he made tape recordings to try to persuade his ‘down’ self to take them seriously the next day:
If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’
Sagan was open to the idea that drug-induced experiences would help his research. His best friend was Lester Grinspoon, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. They used to get high together, and Grinspoon remembers Sagan asking him for his last ‘bud’ to help him with the following day’s research. ‘Lester, I know you’ve only got one left, but could I have it?’ Sagan said. ‘I’ve got serious work to do tomorrow and I could really use it.’
It has to be admitted, though, that while Sagan said that pot improved his appreciation of many things – including, oddly enough, potatoes – there is little evidence that his cannabis use had any impact on his scientific work. He describes one occasion when he was able to recall seemingly irreconcilable experimental facts when stoned, and coming up with something that might pull them together, but admitted that it was ‘a very bizarre possibility’. He wrote a paper that mentioned the idea. ‘I think it’s very unlikely to be true,’ he later wrote, ‘but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.’
Hardly a moment of blinding revelation, then. But neither do we have any blinding revelation when it comes to Francis Crick’s use of LSD in the 1950s. There is no solid evidence, just conflicting testimony and the presence of a personality that would almost certainly have used anything he could to steal a march on his competitors. We are back to that mantra again: anything goes. When I started this project, Feyerabend’s idea that ‘anything goes’ in science seemed like a glimpse of its dark side. Now, having explored the lengths to which scientists will go in the pursuit of discovery, it has become apparent that ‘anything goes’ is a virtue – the secret of science’s success.
Some of the stories about science in this book might be shocking, but hopefully it is now clear that science often progresses in ways that defy our usual notions of what scientists get up to. And the anarchists have made important discoveries. Einstein might never have proved without doubt that E = mc2, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. What’s more, our understanding of the interplay between mass and energy helped to bring about the end of the Second World War. Even more important were fortuitous discoveries that led to the Allies’ ability to engineer the atomic bomb ahead of the Nazis. The scientists involved can’t exactly take credit for those discoveries – they don’t know quite how some of them happened – but they grabbed them with both hands and used them to make the world a better place.
Anything goes; science does