Richard Leakey is a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, ‘a big man in every sense of the word’. Like other big men, he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any. He lost both legs in a near-fatal air crash in 1994, at the end of his rampantly successful years crusading against poachers. As director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, he transformed the previously demoralised rangers into a crack fighting army with modern weapons to match those of the poachers and, more importantly, with an esprit de corps and a will to hit back at them. In 1989 he persuaded President Moi to light a bonfire of more than 2,000 seized tusks, a uniquely Leakeyan masterstroke of public relations that did much to destroy the ivory trade and save the elephant. But jealousies were aroused by his international prestige, which helped raise funds for his department, money that other officials coveted. Hardest to forgive, he conspicuously proved it possible to run a big department in Kenya efficiently and without corruption. Leakey had to go, and he did. Coincidentally, his plane had unexplained engine failure and now he swings along on two artificial legs (with a spare pair with flippers specially made for swimming). He again races his sailing boat with his wife and daughters for crew, he lost no time in regaining his pilot’s licence, and his spirit will not be crushed.
Should that ‘coincidentally’ have been in quotation marks? I suppose we shall never know, but it seems odd that the near-fatal engine failure happened soon after take-off on the very first flight after his plane had been serviced.
Richard tells a lovely, if slightly macabre, story about his legs. After they were amputated in Cambridge he wanted, for sentimental reasons, to bury them in his beloved Kenya. He had to get permission to transport them, and bureaucracy insisted that this was possible only if he could produce a death certificate. He very reasonably argued that he wasn’t dead, and eventually the dundridges saw the justice of this and agreed. They stipulated, however, that he must take them in his hand luggage. Legs may not be checked in. Richard hilariously describes the double-take of the previously bored official watching the X-ray screen as the bag containing the legs went through, and his facial expression as he frantically beckoned his colleagues to come over and have a look.
Richard was a natural choice for Simonyi Lecturer, and he gave a stellar performance. As usual it was spontaneous and without notes. In Hitchensian vein, his fluent performance was the more impressive because he arrived at the theatre directly from yet another large lunch – at the very same restaurant as the Philosopher King’s (and accompanied, for all I know, by equally good wine) – with another potential benefactor, this time from Holland.
I first met Carolyn Porco in 1998 in Los Angeles, when we were both invited by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to a meeting of scientists and film-makers, to try to persuade Hollywood to frame science in a more sympathetic light. We were reminded that scientists in fiction, from Dr Frankenstein to Dr Strangelove, were typically portrayed as heartless eccentrics, gradgrinds, psychopaths or worse. A 1943 film about Marie Curie represented her as indifferent to her husband’s death, whereas in fact, as one delegate said, ‘We know from a letter that when they brought her husband’s corpse in she hurled herself at it and kissed it and cried.’ The film directors at our Hollywood conference included one infuriating contrarian who seemed hell-bent on wrecking the whole meeting and all it stood for. This was unfortunate as he was powerful and influential, a well-known name in the world of television. Jim Watson lost patience and hissed a wonderfully Watsonian put-down: ‘Are you for real? You sound like an escapee from the Yale English Department.’ But I was equally impressed by the insouciant disdain shown towards him by the bright, articulate, courageous and beautiful astronomer sitting next to him on the same panel: Carolyn Porco. At one point she quietly whispered something to him, which prompted him to bellow to the whole audience, ‘Oh, so now she’s calling me an asshole.’
There was a lot of talk about trying to initiate a science soap opera, with sympathetically portrayed scientists supplying the human interest. Carolyn would have made an ideal role model for the heroine of such a drama. Indeed, one of two rumours holds that Carolyn was the model for Ellie, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s science fiction book Contact (the other candidate being Jill Tarter, the admirable Director of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). My contribution to the discussion was the somewhat heretical suggestion that science is so interesting in its own right, it doesn’t need the sort of human interest that a soap would provide. The New York Times report of the meeting quoted me as wondering why Jurassic Park had to have any people in it at all, when it had dinosaurs. I have just watched that film again and, even on a small airliner screen, was as enthralled as ever by the dinosaurs. But I had forgotten quite how anti-scientific its ‘human interest’ message was. The concluding negativity of even the scientist characters was so untrue to life. However terrifying their experience, which included watching a lawyer being swallowed whole by a tyrannosaur, how could any scientist not remain captivated by the very idea of recovering viable dinosaur DNA from the last blood meal of a mosquito embalmed in amber? Presumably the ludicrous shoehorning in of ‘chaos theory’ was in deference to the pop science flavour of the month at the time the film was being made. Nowadays the equivalent fad, enjoying its fifteen minutes of pop science voguery, would be ‘epigenetics’ (and no, there are some in-jokes that are best not spelled out).
After our panel discussion, I made a pretty shameless point of manoeuvring to sit next to Carolyn on the bus as we toured Hollywood and were shown around one of the big studios. In this legendary town of starry people, I was star-struck by a charismatic scientist – which I suppose sums up the purpose of the conference. Now that I think about it, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is a novel that exactly fits that same purpose: a beautiful story of scientists as sympathetic human beings, and how they work and think. Hollywood please take note. It would make a lovely film.
Carolyn came to visit us in Oxford (see picture section), and has been friends with Lalla and me ever since. She is a planetary scientist, in charge of NASA’s Cassini imaging team – the team that has brought us those stunning pictures sent back from Saturn and its many moons. But she is more than just a good scientist; she is inspired by the poetry of science, especially the romance of the spheres that share our sun. She is the nearest approach I know to a female Carl Sagan, a poet of the planets and singer of the stars. Whether or not the heroine of the book Contact was actually modelled on her, it is a fact that Carl Sagan invited her to be the character consultant on the film version. The scene where Ellie first hears the unmistakable communication from far space still gives me goose bumps when I think of it. The slender, clever young woman, woken up by the mind-shattering signal, bouncing back to base in her open car, exultantly yelling the celestial coordinates into the intercom for her dozing assistants: numbers, numbers, the spine-tingling poetry of those numbers and their arc-second precision. And how poetically right that the hero of the numbers should have been a woman. A role model, just like Carolyn.
An anecdote displays the poetry of Carolyn, and I related it in the Oxford Playhouse when introducing her Simonyi Lecture. A beloved professor from her days at Caltech was the geologist Eugene Shoemaker, co-discoverer, with his wife and David Levy, of the famous Shoemaker–Levy comet. A pioneer of astrogeology, Shoemaker was part of the Apollo space programme. He was in the running to be the first geologist on the moon, but to his sad regret had to drop out for health reasons, and he turned to training astronauts instead of being one. In 1997 Shoemaker was killed in a car crash in Australia. Carolyn, in her grief, raced into action. She knew that NASA was about to launch an unmanned craft, which was programmed to crash-land on the moon after its mission was accomplished. She managed to persuade the mission manager, as well as the head of the planetary exploration programme at NASA, to add her teacher’s ashes to the spacecraft’s payload. Gene Shoemaker’s ambition to be an astronaut was denied him in li
fe, but his ashes now lie on the moon’s surface where no wind stirs them (it is said that Neil Armstrong’s footprints are almost certainly still intact), and with a photographic engraving bearing these words that Carolyn chose, from Romeo and Juliet:
. . . and, when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
I have dined out on that story from time to time, but I usually cannot manage to recite the Shakespeare, and turn to Lalla to rescue me. When she speaks the lines from memory in her beautiful voice, I think I am not the only one around the table to choke up.
Carolyn’s Simonyi Lecture was, as you would expect, gorgeously illustrated, the beauty of her images matching the poetry of her words. The ovation that the Oxford audience gave her made me proud to have initiated the series, and delighted that this was one that Charles himself was able to attend. I placed Carolyn next to him at the dinner and I believe they have stayed in touch since. It is thanks to Carolyn, by the way, that Asteroid 8331, a main belt asteroid discovered on 27 May 1982 by Shoemaker and Bus, is named Dawkins.
I ended my run of Simonyi Lectures on a high, with two Nobel Prize-winners, Sir Harry Kroto in 2006 and Sir Paul Nurse in 2007. Immensely distinguished as they are – and in spite of the fact that Paul Nurse is now President of the Royal Society – neither of them fits the establishment model of ‘great and good’. Harry Kroto, especially, probably wouldn’t mind being called a maverick. He won his Nobel with two other chemists for their discovery of the remarkable molecule buckminsterfullerene (‘buckyballs’), consisting of sixty carbon atoms C60. It has long been known that you can assemble an elegant sphere-like shape from twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons (it’s the ‘truncated icosahedron’ of classical geometers; soccer balls are often constructed in this way). It is also well known that carbon atoms link up with each other in a ‘tinker-toy’-like way to form structures of indefinite size, of which the best known are graphite and diamond crystals. It was therefore a theoretical possibility that sixty carbon atoms might link arms to make a ‘soccer ball’, a truncated icosahedron. It was almost too good to be true when that possibility was realized in the lab by Harry Kroto and his colleagues. Harry named the molecule ‘buckminsterfullerene’ after the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I met in his nineties, by the way, as a fellow speaker at a strange conference in France, where he held the audience spellbound for three hours). ‘Bucky’ invented the geodesic dome, a stable structure whose resemblance to C60 was spotted by Harry Kroto. Amazingly, buckyballs have turned up in meteorites. Even more amazingly, buckyballs, though gigantic compared with quanta, behave like quanta in the famously counter-intuitive two-slit experiment. (Presumably nobody has been quixotic enough to try it with golf balls? – but that aside is surely straying absurdly too far aside.)
Harry Kroto’s Simonyi Lecture was a passionate plea to save the Enlightenment and rescue rational thinking, and he unexpectedly launched a thundering broadside against the Templeton Foundation. This was music to my ears – he went further in his denunciation than I would ever have dared. He illustrated the lecture with examples of his wonderful series of educational resources, small films that science teachers can use. I met him again at the second Starmus conference (see page 103), where he was as stimulating as ever and well deserved his standing ovation (I think he was the only lecturer at the conference to get one).
Incidentally, Harry’s Starmus lecture, like his Simonyi Lecture, was a tour de force of PowerPoint virtuosity, using a technique that anyone might do well to emulate. Like most lecturers, I find that my lectures often draw from the same modular groups of slides, but different modules in each lecture. It is wasteful to duplicate the same slides every time you put together a presentation. The sensible strategy, one that would occur to any computer programmer, is to have only one copy of each slide, or modular group of slides, and ‘call’ it each time you need it in different lectures. Harry is the only person I know who actually does this, and does it properly, so that each lecture is simply a collection of pointers to units which are stored elsewhere on his hard disk. Annoyingly, it is not possible to do this in Keynote, which is Apple’s otherwise superior rival to PowerPoint. I have repeatedly tried to persuade Apple to implement ‘sub-routine jump’ hyperlinks instead of absolute jumps. The point about sub-routine jumps is that they remember where they came from and return there. This is essential for the Kroto ploy. I cannot see that sub-routine jumps should be any more difficult to implement than the absolute jumps that are already there (and shouldn’t be: absolute jumps are notoriously bad programming practice anyway).
I met Paul Nurse a couple of times when he was still in Oxford, running in Port Meadow, for instance, but I didn’t have a long conversation with him until April 2007, when I won the Lewis Thomas Prize given by Rockefeller University in New York. Paul, as President of the University, hosted me when I travelled over to receive it. I was especially pleased to win this prize, as Lewis Thomas was a much admired lyrical stylist among biologists, a prose poet. Paul was a delightfully informal and friendly president, the sort of man you can’t help instantly liking and continuing to like. He told me the strange story of his birth, which has now become well known but which he had then only just uncovered. The woman whom he had thought to be his mother was actually his grandmother. And the woman whom he had thought to be his big sister was in fact his mother. Both had died while still maintaining the pretence. Paul seemed more amused than shocked by his recent discovery of his true origins, although he said it did take a bit of getting used to. What strange quirks of fate, I wondered, lead to the uncovering of genius from unexpected beginnings? How many geniuses remain undiscovered for lack of opportunity? How many Ramanujans have died unrecognized? How many talented women in Islamic theocracies are reduced to uneducated serfdom?
Paul Nurse, like Harry Kroto, is far from an ‘establishment’ figure, and I suggested to him that he would consequently make an ideal President of the Royal Society in succession to Martin Rees. He hinted discreetly that it might be a possibility. I am delighted that it did indeed come to pass, in 2010. Three years earlier, his Simonyi Lecture in 2007, ‘The great ideas of biology’, was already the kind of magisterial survey you would expect a President of the Royal Society to give, a little reminiscent (but of course up to date, which makes a big difference in modern biology) of Peter Medawar’s 1963 presidential address to the British Association.
At the end of Other Men’s Flowers, a charming and surprising (for a field marshal) anthology of poems, most of which he had had in memory at one time or another, Lord Wavell inserted his own ‘little wayside dandelion’, his ‘Sonnet for the Madonna of the Cherries’, whose final rhyming couplet, coming in the wake of the three sensitive quatrains, moves me deeply despite its Christian tenor:
For all that loveliness, that warmth, that light,
Blessed Madonna, I go back to fight.
I quote Field Marshal Wavell here only for the becoming modesty of his apology for including his own poem in such company. I felt the same diffidence when I decided that I myself should give the final Simonyi Lecture of my tenure. I was conscious that I had never given an inaugural lecture, as new professors are supposed to do. This was technically because, as explained above, I was initially appointed Simonyi Reader and only later became Simonyi Professor. In practice I had thought of my Dimbleby Lecture (see page 160) as filling the role of inaugural, but that was given on national television rather than in an Oxford hall. So I decided that I would make good the omission by giving a valedictory lecture in the Oxford Playhouse; and that it would be the final Simonyi Lecture of my run, my ‘wayside dandelion’ outside the garden of the distinguished nine. As part of my presentation, I showed pictures of all the Simonyi Lecturers with the titles of their lectures.
In my own lecture, called ‘T
he purpose of purpose’, I made a distinction between two meanings of purpose. I defined ‘neo-purpose’ as true, deliberate, human purpose, as in creative design: purpose as in goal and ambition. And I defined ‘archi-purpose’ as its ancient predecessor, the pseudo-purpose mocked up by Darwinian natural selection. My thesis was that neo-purpose is itself a Darwinian adaptation with its own archi-purpose. Like other Darwinian adaptations, it has its limitations – and I illustrated its dark side – but also its huge virtues and breathtaking possibilities.
I hope Charles Simonyi appreciated my instituting this series of lectures in his honour, and I’m glad that my successor, Marcus du Sautoy, is continuing the tradition. I was gratified that Charles made every effort to fly in each year, including 1999 when Dan Dennett was the first lecturer of the series.
On that occasion, at the post-lecture dinner, I proposed the health of both Dan and Charles. The full text of what I said can be found in the e-appendix, but I’d like to close this chapter as I drew to the close of my speech:
It is incredible to think that I am now in my fourth year as the Simonyi Professor. I can’t tell you how fortunate I feel in this position, and therefore how grateful to Charles for his generosity. Not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of the university for it is, I don’t need to remind you, an endowment in perpetuity to a university with which Charles had no previous connection. In perpetuity means that we only have to put up with me for another ten years before we get a new Simonyi Professor.
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 29
