My degree could not have been less relevant to my employment at the Chivers jam factory. As well as sugar beet, the fens were famous for fruit and vegetables grown on the peaty soils that had been established by draining the waterlogged ground three centuries earlier. Chivers was a centre for canning and jam-making housed in a large site on the edge of Cambridge. I soon discovered that a number of familiar brands emerged from the same plant – Hartley’s and Rose’s as well as Chivers all spewed out from production lines cranking away inside ranks of anonymous sheds. They needed labour, not degrees, but they did pay a wage. Employees had to clock in and out on a contraption that may have begun life when Charles Dickens was working at the blacking factory. I found myself on the new potatoes. My job was to pick off rotten or misshapen spuds from a never-ending conveyor belt before they went off to be peeled and cooked (‘Hartley’s New Potatoes with a hint of mint’). It was tedious work, and a challenge to believe that so many potatoes could exist in the known universe. At the end of the day I earned extra overtime by sweeping up the rotten potatoes and hurling them into containers for pigswill. Nothing was wasted, even if the smell was appalling. Near the end of the process mint flavouring was added to a huge vat of cooking potatoes from a flask of super-concentrated liquor. I never owned up to once accidentally dropping the whole bottle into the vat. My clumsiness would have had housewives opening tins of explosively minty spuds all across Britain. Perhaps they liked them that way. One day the potatoes changed to strawberries bound for Chivers’ (or was it Hartley’s? Or more likely both) strawberry jam. The conveyor belt was just as endless, although bad strawberries did not smell as nasty as rotten spuds. I also had the job of strawberry tipper at the front of the line, which was only slightly less relentless than that of sorter: pick up full tray – tip into the washer – dispose of the empty tray – pick up next tray … I understood now how working on a production line could so diminish the versatile organism that is a human being.
The women who worked in the factory wore unflattering floral over-garments that buttoned down the front. Hair of both sexes was enclosed in nets, but the managerial class wore white trilby hats and walked around with a superior air. One of the women on my line pointed out her colleague who was leering through an open doorway that gave into the next production line. That was Lil, she informed me, and Lil fancied me. ‘She calls you Toffee Crisp,’ she explained, ‘because you look like the man in the Toffee Crisp advertisement.’ I was uncertain what to do with this information. Fortunately, I was soon moved to the far end of the potato tinning process, where the tins rolled down from the canning machine still warm to have labels slapped on them, then to be packed into cardboard boxes by the dozen. The packing was probably more tedious than any of the other jobs on the production line. The tins, like the Mississippi River, kept on rollin’, kept on rollin’ along. They rolled on their sides into the labelling machine that slapped ‘Hartley’s New Potatoes’ on to each tin before rolling off to the packer. To relieve the tedium loud music was provided, one hour on, one hour off. I never thought I would long for Engelbert Humperdinck to sing ‘The Last Waltz’ but I found myself desperately looking forward to the end of the silent hour to relish the rich tones of Engelbert to get me through the next sixty minutes. I did not dare look up towards the adjacent shed lest I caught Lil’s eye. I could sense her gaze in the back of my neck. I had never even eaten a Toffee Crisp. Somebody thought of a method of sabotage to introduce an extra break in the implacable tin rolling. The tins had to meet the labelling machine with their long sides transverse to the conveyor belt. If a tin was quickly turned lengthwise it jammed the labeller, which then endlessly slapped more and more labels on to the same lucky tin. The belt stopped, the alarm rang, and the whole system had to be reset. Five extra glorious minutes of repose, our own last waltz, stopping the Mississippi.
9
Getting Serious
The life of a British[1] doctoral student is almost ideal. For three years the lucky candidate can immerse themself completely into the object of study with no examinations to pass, no administrative responsibilities, no distractions, except for chosen ones. The grant money is just about enough to live on with nothing left over for luxuries, but then three years of time is almost the ultimate luxury. This is the period when the importance of the college decreases as the importance of the department grows. This is when the significance of past research is appraised, criticised, and superseded. If being an undergraduate is often about summarising what is already known, then the research student pushes out into new territory, building upon, and sometimes upsetting the past.
I was allocated a research room on the top floor of the Sedgwick Museum in Downing Street. It was reached by a lift of astonishing antiquity in which a stool was stored like a holy relic; it had been used by the famous graptolite expert (and pioneer female scientist) Gertrude Elles in her old age. Nobody dared to move it in case she came back from the dead. My attic room was shared with a fellow student, John Bursnall, who was working on the Ordovician geology of Newfoundland. Our room was lined with cabinets in which to house our collections and field specimens, so free space was very limited, and our desks were crammed into the interstices. The first job for me was to unpack the specimens that Geoff Vallance and I had collected on Hinlopen Strait. More than a year had passed since our adventures. The newspaper headlines on the wrapping paper already seemed historical: ‘“All You Need is Love” – New Beatles Single’. Occasionally, an outstanding specimen would be unwrapped, bringing back the moment of its discovery on a remote Arctic shore while we sheltered from the merciless wind.
Harry Whittington was my supervisor for my thesis on the Ordovician trilobites of Spitsbergen. I prefer the American term ‘adviser’ for this role because that was exactly what Harry did over the next three years – he offered advice, but left me largely alone to follow my own path. Bridget and I were immediately invited to his home to meet his wife Dorothy, an ebullient American whom Harry addressed as ‘dearie’. She was as loud as Harry was quiet, and bubbled over with goodwill towards his students. They lived in a good if undistinguished modern house in a respectable suburb of Cambridge, where it could be imagined that his neighbours were solicitors or bank managers. Their drawing room displayed surviving knick-knacks from their early years in Burma, where Harry had begun his teaching career under the most challenging of wartime circumstances, eventually fleeing the invading Japanese army and escaping with little more than a few precious mementos. He subsequently arrived at Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.) where he established a distinguished research career by publishing relentlessly on palaeontology (and especially trilobites) through the 1950s and early 1960s. After he arrived at the other Cambridge he established a research programme on one of the most famous fossil deposits in the world – the Burgess Shale – where are preserved an array of soft-bodied fossils which would overturn our understanding of early animal evolution. Twenty years later the Burgess Shale animals were made world famous by Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life. Although Whittington would have welcomed me on board the Burgess Shale project, my heart was with the trilobites, and the gift that had fallen into my lap under the shadow of the Valhallfonna glacier.
In Spitsbergen.
After unwrapping hundreds of specimens I had to arrange them in the order of the strata we had collected in the field; this would be the basis of my catalogue of geological time. I separated the trilobites from the graptolites. When I was sure of my ground I would show the latter to Professor Bulman. Drawers were labelled so that I could find what I wanted speedily in future: so far, so routine – and not so different from arranging my boyhood collections. The real work began with extracting buried trilobites from their rocky hideouts. Most of them had to be freed from the limestone that embraced them by manual preparation, painstakingly chipping away the enclosing rock with a mechanical tool employed under a low-power binocular microscope. The extraction instrument works by vibrating a needle of strengthened st
eel that is harder than the rock, which then tends to flake away from the surface of the fossil. It is slow and laborious work, and easy for a beginner to make a mistake – one slip and the surface of a precious specimen can be horribly gouged. I started on a trilobite that was well known from several localities around the world. From the illustrations of other species I knew what I should find beneath the surface of my new specimens – I had a pattern to follow. I spent many weeks refining my skill in preparation. There was something therapeutic about it, because absolute concentration was required – if the mind wandered the specimen was likely ruined. This was my new Zen. I became skilled in extracting delicate spines without damaging them. I delighted in the subtle patterns that some trilobites showed on their surfaces: arrays of lines like fingerprints, terraces, tubercles, pits – it was a measure of my improvement that I could extract such fine features without damaging the rest of the specimen. John Bursnall called it ‘sculpting my animals’ but the poor man was driven half crazy by the perpetual buzzing of my modified engraving tool. I was having fun, and he was having to hide.
This was only the beginning. I still had to piece many of the trilobites together. Complete specimens were rare, but they were invaluable when they were found. Trilobites moulted as they grew, like most arthropods, and the majority of fossils were just their shed parts: heads came into four main pieces, the thorax fell into individual segments, leaving the tails behind. To get an idea of the whole animal the fragments had to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. There were clues – for example, certain kinds of head came with a distinctive type of tail – but there were many puzzles that could be solved only by careful detective work. A special type of surface decoration might link two separate parts, or two pieces might articulate in only one unique fashion. Hundreds of specimens took months to work on. I mention these details to show that effort and subtle observations went into piecing together the different species of trilobites from the Ordovician rocks of Spitsbergen. Eventually, well over a hundred different kinds of trilobites were discovered from those remote cliffs and streams. Many of them were new species. Only when they were identified could I think of giving them names.
Naming fossils is one of the minor pleasures of palaeontology. All animals have a binomial scientific name, often Latin or Greek in origin, and they have to have an ‘official’ name before they are accepted as genuine species. Names in theses are not formally published and remain provisional until they are. It is not permitted to use the same name twice, so ingenuity is sometimes required to ensure originality. Nearly all my PhD thesis names were eventually published. What we called ‘Fred’ in the field became two genera. ‘Broad-brimmed Fred’ became Balnibarbi, named for one of Lemuel Gulliver’s travels to a land peopled by eccentric natural philosophers – this was Jonathan Swift’s satirical take on the Royal Society (my favourite Balnibarbi mad experiment was an attempt to distil sunbeams from cucumbers). ‘Narrow-brimmed Fred’ became Cloacaspis from the Latin for sewer (cloaca) because its fossils were found in black limestone stinking of sulphur. The broad ‘Freds’ included one species with an exceptionally wide brim, which was called Balnibarbi sombrero, which requires no further explanation. Oopsites was derived from the Greek for ‘egg eyes’ for a big-eyed trilobite, but also reminded me of an occasion when I accidentally destroyed a good specimen and ‘Oops!’ seemed appropriate. Gog was a giant trilobite named after a giant. There is a lot of fun with names, but a serious purpose, too; once they are given to well-defined species they become ‘data’. Changes in the number and distribution of species can be plotted. Counts of individuals can be made to discover if a few species are dominant. The main point is that these analyses are only as good as the data (names) that go into them. The months of hard graft going into digging out specimens is just as ‘scientific’ as computer programming or setting up experiments in a chemistry laboratory. It is the dogged work that validates or disproves any theories that grow out of the results.
Once I had made decisions about species and named them, I began to plot out the trilobites against the rock strata we had measured, and patterns began to emerge. There were synchronised changes in the trilobites through time – not all of them were found together in one place in the rock section. Instead certain trilobites were found associated in sets of particular rock beds, while other species chummed up in different parts of the section. ‘Freds’ (all of them) were found with other members of the same trilobite family (Olenidae) in two thicknesses of strata separated by a very different assemblage of a dozen or so trilobite species that dominated through at least thirty metres of strata, representing a few million years of geological time. There had to be an ancient environmental control over their preferences. Trilobites came in ‘packages’. Some species preferred to live together, and avoided another marine environment that well suited ‘Fred’ and the associated Olenidae. What kind of habitat control could this be? It was obvious too that the ‘Fred’ strata were also those that yielded the most abundant graptolite fossils. These rocks were all very dark – even black when fresh – and many samples emitted a sulphurous smell when they were split. It left me wondering what strange sort of world these ancient animals inhabited.
* * *
A revolution in scientific understanding was happening in Cambridge during my undergraduate years that would ultimately help to explain many details of my own research: the belated acceptance that the continents had once been joined together in the ‘supercontinent’ – Pangaea – that then split up as its components ‘drifted’ apart to reach their present geographic configuration. Although Alfred Wegener promulgated this idea in the 1920s it had not achieved wide acceptance until the ten years before my arrival in Cambridge. Edward Bullard had prepared remarkable ‘best fit’ maps showing how closely the profiles of the edges of the continental shelves on either side of the Atlantic Ocean fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This result was achieved with the help of computers, which seems routine now but was then at the cutting edge. Bullard worked at the geophysics laboratories up the Madingley Road, quite removed from the quiet world of the Sedgwick Museum. When the mid-ocean ridges were mapped, it was realised that this was where new oceanic crust appeared as the continents moved apart (‘filling the gap’). The analogy that this happens at the same rate as fingernails grow has been repeated so often that it is becoming a cliché, but it does carry the right note of inevitability. What had originally looked like speculation began to look like an undeniable fact. The earth’s surface could be regarded as an assembly of plates that moved relative to one another, drawing apart in some areas of the world, while colliding in others to throw up mountain ranges as high as the Himalayas; an inexorable earth motor. This view of global geological creation and destruction became dubbed ‘plate tectonics’ and soon entered the language. It has been adopted as a metaphor by opinion formers in newspapers who wish to convey something that moves with inevitable consequences, albeit very slowly, but in the 1960s it still had the lustre of a freshly minted idea. Plate tectonics seemed to explain so many things at a stroke: why volcanoes were where they were; how and where linear mountain chains formed and why they spawned granites; why similar fossils were found in Africa and South America, so far apart today. It was a theory of almost everything.
Dan McKenzie was one of the crucial scientists in generating our understanding of the geometry and movement of tectonic plates. Dan was a geophysicist a few years ahead of me in King’s College. During my final undergraduate year I was always vaguely aware that this bright star glowed sufficiently to put others in the shade, and that he was the first to apply Euler geometry to describe the movement of the plates. He was already becoming famous when his PhD thesis was hot off the typewriter. Extra copies had to be made to accommodate the demand. Nowadays, Pangaea and its break-up is just an interesting fact accepted almost without question. I was at Cambridge at exactly the time when the complexities of plate tectonics and the fate of continents was still hot stuff. As for
Dan McKenzie, he has been there all my life, a tall and diffident figure out in front, always getting there first. One of the early lessons of the scientific life is that there will inevitably be somebody cleverer than you receiving invitations to speak at Harvard University while you are struggling with the final chapter of your thesis. It hurts a little at first, until you realise that science needs officers as well as generals. If it is not stretching the metaphor too far, science is a war on ignorance and a campaign requires all ranks for a successful outcome. The legions follow the generals with their own discoveries, each small victory confirming the justice of the cause. When the war is won, the general gets the laurel crown and the troops share the buzz to know that they were on the right side. Science moves forwards, not caring one jot about the warriors, whether generals or foot soldiers.
A Curious Boy Page 22
