Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [117]
Is such overspecialisation avoidable? Yes, but it demands effort and courage – exactly the kinds of qualities not possessed by those who went into science because it offered an unchallenging route to a secure existence. Andre Geim, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, has advice for those wanting to do truly groundbreaking research: don’t work where others are working – go off the beaten track. ‘If you follow the herd, all the grass is gone,’ he says. For a truly significant breakthrough, you ‘have to do things no one else is doing. Unless you happen to be in the right place at the right time, or you have facilities that no one else has, the only way is to be more adventurous.’
It seems that, here again, the cover-up may have hurt the progress of science. In the first few decades after the Second World War, scientists opened their field to cohorts of researchers who didn’t share their anarchic curiosity. The result was a grudging acceptance of mediocre, tedious advances as equally valid contributions to the scientific endeavour, and a consequent public blindness to science as a vital and fascinating facet of human culture.
Finding a way to keep science outward-looking, relevant, energetic and accessible is vital, Schrödinger said. With uncanny prescience, he pointed out that the ‘masses’ outside science decide issues such as what gets included in school curricula. According to Ortega and Schrödinger, public disengagement from science through tedium is the first step in a journey that includes, for example, allowing Creationism into the science classroom, and ends with the disappearance of science from popular culture.
The scientists’ pose as grey, faceless, unthreatening ushers of a brighter future has had a significant impact. The world is a worse place because of it, and unless something changes, it could get much worse still. That is why we need to set the secret anarchists free.
Here at the Medical Research Centre, I have resigned myself to the fact that I am not going to discover the truth about Francis Crick and his use of LSD. His secret – if there is one – is safe. But Crick and Watson are not the only Nobel laureates Michael Fuller has worked with. He arrived at the MRC, aged sixteen, in January 1952 to work as a technician. In the fifty-eight years he has spent here, the centre has won twenty-six Nobel Prizes (it had won three, including Alexander Fleming’s, before Fuller arrived). In all his time at the MRC, Fuller has been charged with going out and getting the champagne for each Nobel celebration. Sometimes, he says, Cambridge has almost run dry of bubbly.
I have to ask: what is their secret? Fuller pauses for a long time before he responds. ‘Single-mindedness,’ he says. ‘They can’t be deterred by anything or anyone.’ There is another pause; he seems unsure whether to make his next remark. ‘And big egos,’ he adds eventually. ‘Incredible egos. They just know, somehow, despite what anyone says, that they are right.’
I am reminded of Albert Szent-Györgyi’s comment that scientists are egotists, selfish beings who get their kicks solving the puzzles of nature. It occurs to me, as Venki Ramakrishnan throws his banana peel into the bin and heads back to his lab, that he doesn’t look like much of an egotist. But then, as I have said many times, these are secret anarchists.
Now that their secret is out, they are not diminished. Having discovered the true depth of their resourcefulness, I am filled with a renewed admiration for the anarchists of science. They make discoveries not despite their humanity, but precisely because of it. If we want more scientific progress, we need to release more rebels, more outlaws, more anarchists. The time has come to celebrate the anarchy, not conceal it.
Science is something we should hold in the highest regard. In the words of Bronowski, ‘These are the marks of science: that it is open