Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [80]
The first drafts of her acceptance speech, jotted down on the hotel’s headed notepaper, certainly give that impression. The notepaper is a simple design, with just a crown – the hotel’s logo – and a few addresses and telephone numbers. The twenty pages of notes that McClintock made while preparing her speech are more complicated, however. There are crossings-out, and meandering amendments that curve and swoop around the pages. Her handwriting, like her science, is not easy to decipher. Nevertheless, it is worth decoding because it provides a rare insight into the mind of a scientist who has climbed the biggest peak, yet become an object of ridicule, scorn and callous snubs.
‘For many years,’ she began, ‘I worked on a genetic phenomenon that was most unacceptable to all but a few persons.’ Then she crossed this out as a false start. Below it, she wrote that she was ‘truly amused’ by some of her critics. A maize geneticist came to see her once, and said he had heard that she held some strange views, and that he did not want to hear a word about them. ‘I could not refrain from laughing’ she said.
That story is outlined in almost every draft of the speech, but it didn’t make the final cut. At the ceremony, McClintock contented herself with expressing pleasure at her ‘radical’ status. Because her peers and colleagues ignored and even rejected her, she had been left alone to get on with the work she loved:
I was not invited to give lectures or seminars, except on rare occasions, or to serve on committees or panels, or to perform other scientists’ duties. Instead of causing personal difficulties, this long interval proved to be a delight. It allowed complete freedom to continue investigations without interruption.
The period in which she was isolated ‘surprised and then puzzled’ her, she said, but she didn’t mention how her colleagues’ blindness amused her, and how she laughed out loud at their more ridiculous reactions to her work. Instead, she reiterated her anarchic selfishness. For her, the work was always about the puzzles of genetics and the ‘pure joy’ they provided:
When you suddenly see the problem, something happens – you have the answer before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened too many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I’m so absolutely sure. I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to tell anybody about it, I’m just sure this is it.
It seems that McClintock shared the sentiment expressed by the French physiologist Claude Bernard: ‘The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.’
Not all scientists can rise above the pain of rejection, though. Svante Arrhenius, the first Swedish recipient of the Nobel Prize, moved heaven and earth to make sure that his genius was recognised. As a graduate of the Cathedral School in Uppsala, he was no doubt aware of the biblical principle that ‘a prophet hath no honour in his own country’. He had carried out a groundbreaking analysis of chemical reactions while still a postgraduate student, but his superiors considered the work unremarkable, and he was given the lowest possible pass. That would have scuppered his chances of a career, but Arrhenius won himself scientific salvation by sending his thesis to prominent scientists outside Sweden. The foreign physicists and chemists recognised its quality – it was, after all, the same work that would later bring him his Nobel Prize – and showered him with offers of research positions. Keen to stay in Sweden to care for his dying father, Arrhenius used the offers as leverage to broker himself a job in Uppsala.
It was an early indication of Arrhenius’s taste for the Machiavellian. In a delicious piece of anarchic