The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [202]
Undaunted by this criticism East and West - indeed, not even slowed down - he went on to do monumental work on how anaesthetics work, identified the cause of sickle cell anaemia (a single nucleotide substitution in DNA), and showed how the evolutionary history of life might be read by comparing the DNAs of various organisms. He was hot on the trail of the structure of DNA; Watson and Crick were consciously rushing to get there before Pauling. The verdict on his assessment of Vitamin C is apparently still out. ‘That man is a real genius’ was Albert Einstein’s assessment.
In all this time he continued to work for peace and amity. When Ann and I once asked Pauling about the roots of his dedication to social issues, he gave a memorable reply: ‘I did it to be worthy of the respect of my wife,’ Helen Ava Pauling. He won a second Nobel Prize, this one in peace, for his work on the nuclear test ban, becoming the only person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.
There were some who saw Pauling as a troublemaker. Those unhappy about social change may be tempted to view science itself with suspicion. Technology is safe, they tend to think, readily guided and controlled by industry and government. But pure science, science for its own sake, science as curiosity, science that might lead anywhere and challenge anything, that’s another story. Certain areas of pure science are the unique pathway to future technologies - true enough - but the attitudes of science, if applied broadly, can be perceived as dangerous. Through salaries, social pressures, and the distribution of prestige and awards, societies try to herd scientists into some reasonably safe middle ground - between too little long-term technological progress and too much short-term social criticism.
Unlike Pauling, many scientists consider their job to be science, narrowly defined, and believe that engaging in politics or social criticism is not just a distraction from but antithetical to the scientific life. As mentioned earlier, during the Manhattan Project, the successful World War Two US effort to build nuclear weapons before the Nazis did, certain participating scientists began to have reservations, the more so when it became clear how immensely powerful these weapons were. Some, such as Leo Szilard, James Franck, Harold Urey and Robert R. Wilson, tried to call the attention of political leaders and the public (especially after the Nazis were defeated) to the dangers of the forthcoming arms race, which they foresaw very well, with the Soviet Union. Others argued that policy matters were outside their jurisdiction. ‘I was put on Earth to make certain discoveries,’ said Enrico Fermi, ‘and what the political leaders do with them is not my business.’ But even so, Fermi was so appalled by the dangers of the thermonuclear weapon Edward Teller was advocating that he co-authored a famous document urging the United States not to build it, calling it ‘evil’.
Jeremy Stone, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, has described Teller - whose efforts to justify thermonuclear weapons I described in a previous chapter - in these words:
Edward Teller... insisted, at first for personal intellectual reasons and later for geopolitical reasons, that a hydrogen bomb be built. Using tactics of exaggeration and even smear, he successfully manipulated the policy-making process for five decades, denouncing all manner of arms control measures and promoting arms-race-escalating programs of many kinds.
The Soviet Union, hearing of his H-bomb project, built its own H-bomb. As a direct consequence of the unusual personality of this particular individual and of the power of the H-bomb, the world may have risked a level of annihilation that might not otherwise have