Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [40]
Stanley did not have to return his Nobel Prize. Evidently, though, he did reflect on the long fight for his credibility and the legacy of his stubbornness. In 1970, he published a paper in which he apologised to some of his colleagues. The paper is called ‘The “Undiscovered” Discovery’, and it makes electrifying reading – especially when seen in the context of what Stanley Prusiner’s efforts have achieved.
In 1944, Wendell Stanley’s team at the Rockefeller Institute included two very talented microbiologists. Thomas Francis and Oswald Avery were experimenting on the pneumococcus bacterium, trying to establish how bacteria take up genetic material. Almost a decade before Crick and Watson worked out the structure of DNA, Francis and Avery discovered that nucleic acids could encode and transmit genetic information.
And yet no one – including Stanley – did anything about it. In the last section of Stanley’s 1970 paper, the section entitled ‘An apology’, he admits to having no clue why he didn’t see what was before his eyes. ‘It is obvious that … I was not impressed with the significance of the 1944 discovery,’ he says. ‘I have searched my memory and have failed to find any really extenuating circumstances for my failure to recognize the full significance of the discovery …’
To anyone working there at the time, the extenuating circumstances would have been obvious. Wendell Stanley was too busy fighting Bawden and Pirie, trying to safeguard his reputation and legacy in the face of vanishing supportive evidence. Stanley’s public apology does not stretch to an admission of scientific anarchy, but ‘The “Undiscovered” Discovery’ does provide a glimpse of the insights Stanley gained into the way to find success in science. Here is what he had to say about Francis and Avery’s discovery:
Clearly the evidence presented was substantial and the investigators recognized that they had made a significant discovery. Why, therefore, was this great discovery not immediately recognized by the scientific world and why did it not influence the direction of biomedical research? Why did not the discovery that nucleic acid could carry and transmit genetic information receive the recognition that it so richly deserved, for this was a major discovery, one contrary to general thought, and hence one that should have immediately affected scientific thinking in several fields. I am convinced that an unfortunate combination of circumstances was responsible.
One of those circumstances, as we have seen, is that Stanley was locked in a battle with Bawden and Pirie. The other circumstances take us straight to the heart of the matter and encapsulate a philosophy that is central to the strategies Prusiner would later employ. If it is important, new science will overturn the old – but not without a forceful promotional campaign. Stanley continued:
Perhaps of major importance was the fact that the discovery was quite contrary to the dominant thinking of many years and, hence, required not only a vigorous presentation but also a vigorous and continuing promotion for acceptance. This was not forthcoming. In fact, although the authors made the correct conclusion based on the scientific evidence, they were modest and somewhat cautious in their presentation … no one undertook the task of describing the discovery and arguing its merits and significance before scientific audiences across the nation; hence, several years passed before there was general acceptance.
In other words, Francis and Avery didn’t have the required combative tendencies. If you want a Nobel Prize, good science is not enough. You need ‘a vigorous and continuing promotion’.
Wendell Stanley died a year after he published ‘The “Undiscovered” Discovery’. He was buried in California, where he had been a local hero. He had set up the biochemistry programme at the University of California at Berkeley in 1948. If, following the death of his CJD patient in 1972, Prusiner’s reading about viruses