by Ramona Koval
‘Have you,’ my professor asked me, ‘considered journalism as a career?’
Which I took as an insult because I was going to be Marie Curie. It was quite a long time before I came to see his point.
I spent a few years studying genetics and microbiology, and clearly my reading of The Double Helix had inspired me greatly. I was impressed with what we could find out about the world beyond our senses—what was too small or too far away to see. But I could never become Madame Curie with my baby in a bassinet under the bench, as my thesis supervisor told me one Sunday afternoon. I took my baby home and cried.
But I got over the grief because I realised that, with or without a baby, I didn’t have the temperament to be really good at science. I was not graced with the kind of mind that revelled in working out the next step in a research project. I did not have the patience to stay with an idea, repeating and refining experiments. Many of the best researchers have an obsessive streak, a love of completeness, which drives them to do exactly that to push their knowledge further.
I was still impatient, and most of all I loved the poetry in these great stories of science. The miniature battles within our bloodstreams between invading antigens and our home armies of specialised defender cells were as exciting as any war story, full of strategy and risk. Imagining the tiniest dance of DNA strands as they were read by enzymes for translation was as mysterious and thrilling as the cosmic sweep in the movement of galaxies. And I loved the human drama at the centre of it all, of our ancestors looking up into the night sky and telling themselves stories of how the world came into being, reading the patterns of the stars and the visits of comets.
Poetry and science would not seem at first glance to have too much in common, not even the same language. Science stood accused of destroying whatever it was investigating in order to analyse it. As Wordsworth famously put it, ‘We murder to dissect.’ But the great poet Goethe was also a scientist. He is best remembered for his literary works like The Sorrows of Young Werther and Faust, but with his scientific imagination he made a significant contribution to biology.
He was an accomplished botanist and helped found the field of comparative anatomy, he invented the term morphology, and he even anticipated the theory of evolution. In 1784 he discovered the intermaxillary bone in the human jaw, thus supplying a link to primate anatomy that proved crucial to later evolutionary theories.
The English Romantic poets grappled with science in its fully modern sense. With the Industrial Revolution well underway, the Romantic generation experienced the chief distinguishing characteristic of modern science: its link to technology and its effort to transform the world in material terms.
We think of them as nature poets, and remember how appalled they were by how the beautiful landscape of England was made ugly by the scars of industrialisation. But Wordsworth also speculated that science might open up imaginative possibilities for poetry. And both Shelley and Byron were fascinated by what was happening in astronomy and cosmology. They took a special interest in the emerging fields of geology and palaeontology, and kept up with the latest theories about the prehistoric creatures that came to be known as dinosaurs.
One writer who brings the excitement of this time to life is the marvellous English biographer Richard Holmes. I was instantly a fan from his first book, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, in which he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1878 journey through the Cévennes in southern France, goes to revolutionary Paris in pursuit of Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft, and follows Shelley and his friends to Casa Magni, Shelley’s house on the North Italian bay of Lerici. Footsteps was hailed as a milestone in biography for Holmes’ insistence on locating long-forgotten stops on ancient journeys, and for the way he tells us what his subjects might have thought and felt in those places.
A more recent book of his is The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, referring to the period between 1770 and 1830, commonly called the Romantic Age. It was a time of grand explorations and discoveries: a new planet, a new way of travelling and seeing the world by air, and a new way of looking at the make-up of matter itself. It was indeed an age of wonder not only to those who worked in science but to its great writers.
Holmes starts with the botanist Joseph Banks who sailed with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour in the 1768 expedition to the South Pacific, and uses him as a trope of the romantic figure throughout his story. Holmes draws a portrait of Banks as a young man of twenty-five, who had an expensive education at Oxford and inherited a lot of money. His peers would have embarked on the Grand Tour of Europe with their servants. ‘Any blockhead can do that,‘ Banks said. ’I’m going to go round the world.’
Judging from the portrait of Banks, which we saw at school, painted when he was much older, the man who collected plants had seemed to me a deeply boring character. I was never fascinated by plants, even as a science student. But reading Holmes made me want very badly to meet Banks, especially on that trip with Cook to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, which would help astronomers work out the distance between the Earth and the sun.
He is one of the first Europeans to land on the beach in Tahiti (twenty years before William Bligh and the Bounty mutineers and sixty-six years before Charles Darwin and the Beagle), and from this moment on he’s open to everything. And he can do everything. Some days he does a bit of astronomy, a bit of exercise, a bit of botany, and then he thinks about the structure of the whole world.
They’re in Tahiti for three months. The idea of the superior enlightenment of European civilisation begins to melt down for Banks as he discovers elements of this new civilisation that are immensely attractive. He has a wonderful expedition up country with one of the Tahitian queens who is smitten with him, and they share a canoe one night. But when Banks wakes up in the morning the locals have stolen almost everything—his brass-buttoned jacket, breeches and pistols have humiliatingly gone.
Banks is thrilled with the sexual opportunities in Tahiti and he considers the women there perfect in body and temperament for such delightful pastimes. Unlike his fellow travellers he tries to learn Tahitian, and Holmes suggests his lexicon reflects his passions: plants and animals, astronomical terms, the names for intimate parts of the body. He learns the words for stealing, understanding, eating and being angry or tired.
Banks became president of the Royal Society in 1778, an office he held for forty-two years, enough time to be painted with an Order of Bath across his chest, and looking most unlike the man who had danced naked with Tahitian girls on that long-ago beach in paradise. But Banks became a wonderful patron, sending young explorers in all the different areas of science around the world. One of these was the German astronomer William Herschel, who went on to discover Uranus.
Lord Byron had looked through Herschel’s telescope. The young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who from the time he was a young student had microscopes and telescopes, read the Herschel papers. He noted the discovery of Uranus and the size of the universe, and was excited because, if there were many galaxies and solar systems, there must be many other planets. And other civilisations.
So Shelley asked himself about the role of God in all this. ‘His works,’ he said, ‘have borne witness against him.’
Since I loved stories like those that Holmes tells I realised that it might suit me better to be a translator from the laboratories of scientists to the general public. To convey my excitement and to use language simply to interpret the jargon that many scientists were trained to use.
Scientists often complain that they are misquoted by journalists when they are interviewed. Journalists complain that they can’t get a straight answer from scientists—that they are always qualifying themselves, making it difficult to work out what the story actually is. After my hopes to do scientific research were truncated by my circumstances and my personality, and my subsequent exposure to a few months working in medical microbiology (where people expected
you to analyse rather disgusting bodily fluids and worse), I found a job teaching medical laboratory technicians at RMIT. From here I could put myself between scientists and journalists, as the campus has a close relationship with the community radio station 3RRR. In 1979 I started a weekly science program with a colleague. We called it The Marie Curiosity Show.
It gave me an excuse to read more books about science.
I read Stephen Jay Gould’s books on natural history, physicist Paul Davies’ many books on cosmology and the nature of the universe, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking, and James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science. Dava Sobel’s book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, on the eighteenth-century invention of a clock that could tell the time at sea, was a landmark book in popular science.
Later, working for the ABC, I set myself challenges on radio. Could I explain complex ideas to lay audiences? None was as great as my interview with Roger Penrose, emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford, who shared the Wolf Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking, for their joint contribution to our understanding of the universe.
The occasion was his appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with his book The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a great tome that included many mathematical formulae and illustrations, penned by the author, of different possible universe evolutions, or ‘quantum superpositions of alternative classical paths in configuration space’. Or the Newton/Carson spacetime. And they are the easy ones.
But for the interested general reader there were chapters and paragraphs of descriptive prose that gave a sense of what the shining mathematical formulae point to. The Road to Reality was described by Wired magazine as ‘a mathematical Finnegans Wake’.
I tried to understand the book without understanding the mathematics, and indeed Penrose had given permission for just such a reading in his introduction. He used terms such as music, beauty, intuition, miracle and simplicity, which you don’t always associate with complex mathematics and physics. It seemed that there was a fundamental yearning in mathematics for the beauty of simplicity and the aesthetic attraction of coherence. I understood that. I was looking for it myself.
Penrose told me there was a very close relationship between beauty and truth. If there was a choice between two possibilities, one that would be a neat solution and another that might be messy, the likelihood is that the neater possibility is the true one, that beauty is the guide to what is true. It was, of course, the Romantic poet John Keats who said, in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
It’s clear that human beings find certain things beautiful. Symmetry, for example—the faces that we find beautiful are the more symmetrical ones. And we are fond of order. It’s the way we learn to navigate the world. Our brain labels things that are like each other and stores them together.
I was glad to find that my search for order and coherence was fundamental to my human mind, and not just a symptom of neurosis. Along the way I’d made another discovery too—how much I enjoyed making radio programs.
I had heard my own recorded voice as a child, on a reel-to-reel recorder owned by the father of a friend I’d made at Hebrew School. I thought they were a rich family, as they had a double-storey house, and the tape recorder confirmed this. We played with the machine, and I wondered how the tape captured the sounds. I’d forgotten how much fun I’d had making strange noises and hearing them back again.
Encouraged by my amateur beginnings at 3RRR where I learned to edit magnetic tape with a razor blade and a white chinagraph pencil, and to record interviews on temperamental cassette players, I finally left laboratories and students behind and embarked on a full-time career in radio journalism.
The studio control panels were filled with all kinds of mysterious buttons and switches and volume slides like those I imagined in extraterrestrial spaceships. I liked learning to operate the equipment but most of all I loved the intimacy of the conversations that you could have with strangers in the studio or at the end of telephone line or a satellite link. And these conversations could be heard across the country and across the planet.
I could ask the best minds in any field any questions that I liked. And if I had diligently read everything I could to understand the work they were doing they always gave me the best of answers. I began the kind of reading that immerses you in a subject, and I supplemented this with reading everything that had been written about the person I was going to interview. They became my quarry, and I tried to anticipate as much as I could about the exchange before we met. I was happily immersed in reading both the work and the mind that had made it.
CHAPTER 9
Mortal men
I had lived without a mother for nearly twenty years, and should have been able to look after myself, but just before I turned forty I slipped on a step and broke my ankle badly. The break had a name, a Pott’s fracture, and it led to a series of medical problems that landed me in an intensive care unit. I was one of the only conscious patients, and I had little to do but lie down and breathe oxygen from a tank. I had trouble concentrating, but I asked my friend to bring me a book I’d bought years before and hadn’t yet read.
Reading Oliver Sacks in a hospital seems only right. The book was A Leg to Stand On, his 1984 account of breaking his leg after an encounter with a Norwegian bull, and subsequently finding that his leg had suffered some neurological damage. This was especially distressing when he discovered his leg in his hospital bed with him and his damaged nerve told him it belonged to someone else. I was completely engrossed in the book; it was all about me.
When I left the hospital I noticed everyone in plaster or a wheelchair or with crutches or a walking stick. I loved watching the film The Accidental Tourist, the story of a man whose son is killed in an accident and whose marriage disintegrates. All I really remember of the film, though, was that he has a fall and is encased in plaster. I felt at one with William Hurt, the lead actor in the movie.
My fracture renewed my admiration for Sacks, the neurologist and writer whose work takes us into hospitals and consulting rooms, where his patients not only disclose a remarkable array of symptoms but reveal stories of their illnesses that give us an understanding of what it might be like to be them. And what it is like to be us.
I first met Oliver Sacks when he came to Melbourne on a book tour in the early 1990s. He was a bear of a man, with a great bushy beard and a wrestler’s build. He was engaging but a little remote. When he arrived in my studio for a live-to-air interview he sat opposite me and took out of his bag what I thought was a large poultry thermometer and placed it in front of him.
Just before we went on air, I asked what the thermometer was for, and he explained that he is sensitive to heat. He told me he might have a strange response—difficulty in speaking, for example—if the temperature went over 65 °F. I suggested he put it away until after the interview, since he might not be affected if he didn’t know the exact temperature. He assured me the thermometer was not for him—he knew exactly when the temperature climbed to 65—it was for other people who might try to tell him the temperature was fine.
On another occasion I was interviewing him at a public event. He had asked for two huge fans to be placed in the wings of the stage. The fans were going full blast. The day was very warm and I was alarmed to see several trickles of sweat begin to make their way down Sacks’s face. Could we reach the end of the interview before his distress became too great? When we got to audience question time, I breathed a sigh of relief. Sacks was on his own.
His best-known book is The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. It came out in 1985 and was the first of his books I read. It is written in the ‘casestudy’ approach made popular by Sacks’s medico-literary antecedents Sigmund Freud and Russian neuropsychologist A. R.
Luria. Sacks says that reading Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory altered the focus and direction of his life. The book, translated into English in 1968, is an extended case study of a man with an extraordinary facility for remembering things, or perhaps a terrible affliction in not being able to forget anything.
Another of Luria’s books, The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound, published in 1973, followed the case of a World War Two veteran, Sublieutenant Zasetsky, who sustained a bullet wound in 1943 that damaged the left side of his brain and caused memory, perception and language problems. Zasetsky was encouraged to write about his injury and its effects for twenty-five years, even though he could not read what he had written. These books, which attempt to tell the reader what it was like from the inside of the affliction, were described by Luria as ‘romantic science’.
Sacks’s writing brings us right into his medical rooms, and allows us to meet the patients as he did. We see through his eyes and make the connections he does as he observes various behaviours and reports on his tests. His work homes in on the stories of individual patients and expands to tell us not only what their experiences of illness reveal about how the human brain works, but how humans perceive the world we inhabit. Sacks follows in the footsteps of his patients as Richard Holmes follows in the footsteps of his writers.
His telling of the story of Dr P, a singer and music teacher, is part thriller, part achingly sad. Dr P’s wife and friends had suggested he go to see a neurologist to have his strange mistakes investigated. At first Sacks is impressed by his patient’s charming and intelligent personality, and can’t see what the matter might be. After a physical examination he notices the man has not yet replaced his shoe.
He asks Dr P if he needs help putting on his shoes and sees that he is baffled by the question. Dr P looks down at his own foot and finally asks Sacks if his foot is his shoe. Sacks, in turn, is baffled:
