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for all to hear, and all are free to speak their minds in it. They are marks of the world at its best, and the human spirit at its most challenging.’ It is challenging because, as he also noted, this reckless, relentless pursuit is made at great personal cost. Claude Bernard once said that the joy of discovery is available only to those who have felt the ‘torment of the unknown’. This is science: torment, dreams, visions, restlessness, lying, cheating, despair, brawling, bullying, desperation and – in the end, when everything works out – a moment of euphoria that makes it all worthwhile. Typically, Bronowski found a way to put it more simply. ‘Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not,’ he said. ‘That needs more courage than we might think.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone at Profile Books, in particular Andrew Franklin for his enthusiastic support for this project, for excellent editing, and for pushing me until I stuck my head ‘way, way above the parapet’. Thanks also to my agent, Caroline Dawnay, for her assurance that Andrew was not going to be the ruin of me, for directing me to invaluable sources, and for her eagle-eyed suggestions regarding the text.

I am also grateful to the numerous scientists who sent me their papers when I could find no other way to access them, in particular Carol Reeves of Butler University and Laura Manuelidis of Yale University. Thanks are also due to the many scientists who answered my queries, among them David Pritchard, Barry Marshall, Robin Warren, Hans Ohanian and Cristof Koch, and also Stanley Prusiner (who answered my main question by declining my request for an interview). I enjoyed a warm welcome when exploring Cambridge University’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, with Michael Fuller deserving special mention for his radiant honesty and enthusiasm. For pointing me to valuable source materials, I would like to thank Ann Brooks and Adrian Hill.

I had enlightening conversations and encounters with many people during the writing of this book. I can only apologise that of the many I can name only a few here: Alun Rees, Roger Highfield, Jeremy Webb, John Horgan, Cathy Lynn Grossman, Mark Stevenson, Kevin Dutton, Elaine Fox and Charles Ross. Two people deserve special mention: George Lamb and Marc Hughes, who showed me just how engaging and enlightening the humanity of science and scientists can be.

As always, I must acknowledge a debt to the staff of New Scientist magazine, who together constitute a fearsome hive mind. And speaking of hive minds, I gained numerous sources and insights through the people I follow on Twitter. They are too numerous for a complete rundown, but a few come to mind and are worth following if you want to continue the explorations begun in these pages. It seems somehow wrong to reduce these hi-tech monikers to old-fashioned patterns of ink on paper, but I am particularly grateful for unwitting help from @AliceBell, @AtheneDonald, @cgseife, @KieronFlanagan, @sciencebase, @sciencecampaign, @sciencegoddess, @tomstandage, @WilliamCB, @xmalik and @ZoeCorbyn.

My immediate family have put up with a catastrophically distracted husband and father over the past year or so; it is only right that I thank them for their patience and support. But I can’t promise that it won’t happen again.

Michael Brooks

March 2011

NOTES AND SOURCES

PROLOGUE

p. 3 ‘the Merlins of the Cold War’: M. Schrage, ‘Physicists’ Reign Is Likely to End’, Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1991.

p. 3 What followed, according to historian Steven Shapin: S. Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Shapin points to Robert Merton, who has analysed this further. ‘A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, an altruistic concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of other special motives have been attributed to the scientist,’ he says in The Sociology