The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman J. Dyson

  Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einstein and Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters who invaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the public wanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawking in his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumph over physical obstacles has earned for him. I will never forget the joyful morning in Tokyo when Hawking went on a tour of the streets in his wheelchair and the Japanese crowds streamed after him, stretching out their hands to touch his chair. Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman shared an ability to break through the barriers that separated them from ordinary people. The public responded to them because they were regular guys, jokers as well as geniuses.

  The third quality that is needed for a scientist to become a public icon is wisdom. Besides being a famous joker and a famous genius, Feynman was also a wise human being whose answers to serious questions made sense. To me and to hundreds of other students who came to him for advice, he spoke truth. Like Einstein and Hawking, he had come through times of great suffering, nursing Arline through her illness and watching her die, and emerged stronger. Behind his enormous zest and enjoyment of life was an awareness of tragedy, a knowledge that our time on earth is short and precarious. The public made him into an icon because he was not only a great scientist and a great clown but also a great human being and a guide in time of trouble. Other Feynman books have portrayed him as a scientific wizard and as a storyteller. This collection of letters shows us for the first time the son caring for his father and mother, the husband and father caring for his wife and children, the teacher caring for his students, the writer replying to people throughout the world who wrote to him about their problems and received his full and undivided attention.8

  1. Norton, 1985.

  2. Addison-Wesley, 1963–1965 (three volumes).

  3. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited and with an introduction by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books, 2005).

  4. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

  5. Physical Review, Vol. 76, No. 6 (September 15, 1949).

  6. Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Norton, 1988), p. 117.

  7. See, for example, the letter to Herbert Jehle on page 159 of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations.

  8. This review sketches only one side of Feynman’s many-sided personality. Other sides are sketched in Chapters 25 and 26.

  IV

  Personal and Philosophical Essays

  24

  THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL

  THE WORLD, THE FLESH and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul is the full title of Desmond Bernal’s first book, which he published in 1929 at the age of twenty-eight.1 Forty years later he wrote in a foreword to a reprinted edition, “This short book was the first I ever wrote. I have a great attachment to it because it contains many of the seeds of ideas which I have been elaborating throughout my scientific life. It still seems to me to have validity in its own right.” It must have been a consolation to Bernal, crippled and incapacitated in the last years of his life by a stroke, to know that this work of his springtime was again being bought and read by a new generation of young readers.

  The book begins: “There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.” I do not know of any finer opening sentence of a work of literature in English. Bernal’s modest claim that his book “still seems to have validity in its own right” holds good in 1972 as it did in 1968. Enormous changes have occurred since he wrote the book in 1929, both in science and in human affairs. It would be miraculous if nothing in it had become dated or superseded by the events of the last forty years. But astonishingly little of it has proved to be wrong or irrelevant to our present concerns.

  Bernal saw the future as a struggle of the rational side of man’s nature against three enemies. The first enemy he called the World, meaning scarcity of material goods, inadequate land, harsh climate, desert, swamp, and other physical obstacles that condemn the majority of mankind to lives of poverty. The second enemy he called the Flesh, meaning the defects in man’s physiology that expose him to disease, cloud the clarity of his mind, and finally destroy him by senile deterioration. The third enemy he called the Devil, meaning the irrational forces in man’s psychological nature that distort his perceptions and lead him astray with crazy hopes and fears, overriding the feeble voice of reason. Bernal had faith that the rational soul of man would ultimately prevail over these enemies. But he did not foresee cheap or easy victories. In each of the three struggles, he saw hope of defeating the enemy only if mankind is prepared to adopt extremely radical measures.

  Briefly summarized, the radical measures which Bernal prescribed were the following. To defeat the World, the greater part of the human species will leave this planet and go to live in innumerable freely floating colonies scattered through outer space. To defeat the Flesh, humans will learn to replace failing organs with artificial substitutes until we become an intimate symbiosis of brain and machine. To defeat the Devil, we shall first reorganize society along scientific lines, and later learn to exercise conscious intellectual control over our moods and emotional drives, intervening directly in the affective functions of our brains with technical means yet to be discovered. This summary is a crude oversimplification of Bernal’s discussion. He did not imagine that these remedies would provide a final solution to the problems of humanity. He well knew that every change in the human situation will create new problems and new enemies of the rational soul. He stopped where he stopped because he could not see any further. His chapter “The Flesh” ends with the words: “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”

  How much that was out of sight to Bernal in 1929 can we see from the vantage point of 1972? The first and most obvious difference between 1929 and 1972 is that we now have a highly vocal and well-organized opposition to the further growth of the part that technology plays in human affairs. The social prophets of today look upon technology as a destructive rather than a liberating force. In 1972 it is highly unfashionable to believe as Bernal did that the colonization of space, the perfection of artificial organs, and the mastery of brain physiology are the keys to man’s future. People in tune with the mood of the times regard space as irrelevant, and they consider ecology to be the only branch of science that is ethically respectable. However, it would be wrong to imagine that Bernal’s ideas were more in line with popular views in 1929 than they are in 1972. Bernal was never a man to swim with the tide. Technology was unpopular in 1929 because it was associated in people’s minds with the gas warfare of the First World War, just as now it is unpopular by association with Hiroshima and the defoliation of Vietnam. In 1929 the dislike of technology was less noisy than today but no less real. Bernal understood that his proposals for the remaking of man and society flew in the teeth of deeply entrenched human instincts. He did not on that account weaken or compromise his statement. He believed that a rational soul would ultimately come to accept his vision of the future as reasonable, and that for him was enough. He foresaw that mankind might split into two species, one following the technological path which he described, the other holding on as best it could to the ancient folkways of natural living. And he recognized that the dispersion of mankind into the vastness of space is precisely what is required for such a split of the species to occur without intolerable strife and social disruption. The wider perspective which we have gained between 1929 and 1972 concerning the harmful effects of technology affects only the details and not the core of Bernal’s argument.

  Another conspicuous difference between 1929 and 1972 is that men have now visited the moon. This fact makes little difference to the plausibility of Bernal’s vision. Bernal in 1929 foresaw cheap and massive emigration of human beings
from the earth. He did not know how it should be done. We still do not know how it should be done. Certainly it will not be done by using the technology that took men to the moon in 1969. We know that in principle the cost in energy of transporting people from earth into space need be no greater than the cost of transporting them from New York to London. To translate this “in principle” into reality will require two things: first a great advance in the engineering of hypersonic aircraft, and second the growth of a traffic massive enough to permit large economies of scale. It is likely that the Apollo vehicle bears the same relation to the cheap mass-transportation space vehicle of the future as the majestic airship of the 1930s bears to the Boeing 747 of today. The airship R101 was absurdly large, beautiful, expensive, and fragile, just like the Apollo Saturn 5. If this analogy is sound, we shall have transportation into space at a reasonable price within about fifty years from now. But my grounds for believing this are not essentially firmer than Bernal’s were for believing it in 1929.

  The decisive change that has enabled us to see farther in 1972 than Bernal could see in 1929 is the advent of molecular biology. Bernal was himself one of the founding fathers of molecular biology. In the 1930s he mastered the art of mapping the structure of large molecules by means of X-rays. He understood that this art would be the key to the understanding of the physical basis of life. His pioneering work led directly to the discovery of the double helix in 1953. Rosalind Franklin, who took the crucial X-ray pictures of DNA that showed the helical structure, was working in Bernal’s laboratory in London. In the 1968 foreword to his book, Bernal speaks of the double helix as “the greatest and most comprehensive idea in all science.” As a result of this discovery, we understand the basic principles by which living cells organize and reproduce themselves. Many mysteries remain, but it is inevitable that we shall understand the chemical processes of life in full detail, including the processes of development and differentiation of higher organisms, within the next century. I consider it also inevitable and desirable that we shall learn to exploit these processes for our own purposes. The next century will see a completely new technology growing out of the mastery of the principles of biology, just as our existing technology grew out of a mastery of the principles of physics.

  The new biological technology may grow in three distinct directions. Probably all three will be followed and will prove fruitful for particular purposes. The first direction is the one that has been chiefly discussed by biologists who feel responsibility for the human consequences of their work; they call it “genetic surgery.” The idea is that we shall be able to read the base sequence of the DNA in a human sperm or egg cell, run the sequence through a computer which will identify deleterious genes or mutations, and then by micromanipulation patch harmless genes into the sequence to replace the bad ones. It might also be possible to add to the DNA genes conferring various desired characteristics to the resulting individual. This technology will be difficult and dangerous, and its use will raise severe ethical problems. Jacques Monod in his 1971 book Chance and Necessity sweeps all thought of it aside with his customary dogmatic certitude. “There are,” he says, “occasional promises of remedies expected from the current advances in molecular genetics. This illusion, spread about by a few superficial minds, had better be disposed of.” Although I have a great respect for Monod, I still dare to brave his scorn by stating my belief that genetic surgery has an important part to play in man’s future. But I share the prevailing view of biologists that we must be exceedingly careful in interfering with the human genetic material. The interactions between the thousands of genes in a human cell are so exquisitely complicated that a computer program labeling genes “good” or “bad” will be adequate to deal only with the grossest sort of defect. There are strong arguments for declaring a moratorium on genetic surgery for the next hundred years, or until we understand human genetics vastly better than we do now.

  Leaving aside genetic surgery applied to humans, I foresee that the coming century will place in our hands two other forms of biological technology which are less dangerous but still revolutionary enough to transform the conditions of our existence. I count these new technologies as powerful allies in the attack on Bernal’s three enemies. I give them the names “biological engineering” and “self-reproducing machinery.” Biological engineering means the artificial synthesis of living organisms designed to fulfill human purposes. Self-reproducing machinery means the imitation of the function and reproduction of a living organism with nonliving materials, a computer program imitating the function of DNA, and a miniature factory imitating the functions of protein molecules. After we have attained a complete understanding of the principles of organization and development of a simple multicellular organism, both of these avenues of technological exploitation should be open to us.

  I would expect the earliest and least controversial triumphs of biological engineering to be extensions of the art of industrial fermentation. When we are able to produce microorganisms equipped with enzyme systems tailored to our own design, we can use such organisms to perform chemical operations with far greater delicacy and economy than present industrial practices allow. For example, oil refineries would contain a variety of bugs designed to metabolize crude petroleum into the precise hydrocarbon isomers which are needed for various purposes. One tank would contain the n-octane bug, another the benzene bug, and so on. All the bugs would contain enzymes metabolizing sulfur into elemental form, so that pollution of the atmosphere by sulfurous gases would be completely controlled. The management and operation of such fermentation tanks on a vast scale would not be easy, but the economic and social rewards are so great that I am confident we shall learn how to do it. After we have mastered the biological oil refinery, more important applications of the same principles will follow. We shall have factories producing specific foodstuffs biologically from cheap raw materials, and sewage treatment plants converting our wastes efficiently into usable solids and pure water. To perform these operations we shall need an armamentarium of many species of microorganisms trained to ingest and excrete the appropriate chemicals. And we shall design into the metabolism of these organisms the essential property of self-liquidation, so that when deprived of food they disappear by cannibalizing one another. They will not, like the bacteria that feed upon our sewage in today’s technology, leave their rotting carcasses behind to make a sludge only slightly less noxious than the mess that they have eaten.

  If these expectations are fulfilled, the advent of biological technology will help enormously in the establishment of patterns of industrial development with which human beings can live in health and comfort. Oil refineries need not stink. Rivers need not be sewers. However, there are many environmental problems which the use of artificial organisms in enclosed tanks will not touch. For example, the fouling of the environment by mining and by abandoned automobiles will not be reduced by building cleaner factories. The second step in biological engineering, after the enclosed biological factory, is to let artificial organisms loose into the environment. This is admittedly a more dangerous and problematical step than the first. The second step should be taken only when we have a deep understanding of its ecological consequences. Nevertheless the advantages which artificial organisms offer in the environmental domain are so great that we are unlikely to forgo their use forever.

  The two great functions which artificial organisms promise to perform for us when let loose upon the earth are mining and scavenging. The beauty of a natural landscape undisturbed by man is largely due to the fact that the natural organisms in a balanced ecology are excellent miners and scavengers. Mining is mostly done by plants and microorganisms extracting minerals from water, air, and soil. For example, it has been recently discovered that organisms in the ground mine ammonia and carbon monoxide from air with high efficiency. To the scavengers we owe the fact that a natural forest is not piled as high with dead birds as one of our junkyards with dead cars. Many of the worst offenses of human beings against
natural beauty are due to our incompetence in mining and scavenging. Natural organisms know how to mine and scavenge effectively in a natural environment. In a man-made environment, neither they nor we know how to do it. But there is no reason why we should not be able to design artificial organisms that are adaptable enough to collect our raw materials and to dispose of our refuse in an environment that is a careful mixture of natural and artificial.

  A simple example of a problem that an artificial organism could solve is the eutrophication of lakes. At present many lakes are being ruined by excessive growth of algae feeding on high levels of nitrogen or phosphorus in the water. The damage could be stopped by an organism that would convert nitrogen to molecular form or phosphorus to an insoluble solid. Alternatively and preferably, an organism could be designed to divert the nitrogen and phosphorus into a food chain culminating in some species of palatable fish. To control and harvest the mineral resources of the lake in this way will in the long run be more feasible than to maintain artificially a state of “natural” barrenness.

  The artificial mining organisms would not operate in the style of human miners. Many of them would be designed to mine the ocean. For example, oysters might extract gold from seawater and secrete golden pearls. A less poetic but more practical possibility is the artificial coral that builds a reef rich in copper or magnesium. Other mining organisms would burrow like earthworms into mud and clay, concentrating in their bodies the ores of aluminum or tin or iron, and excreting the ores in some manner convenient for human harvesting. Almost every raw material necessary for our existence can be mined from ocean, air, or clay, without digging deep into the earth. Where conventional mining is necessary, artificial organisms can still be useful for digesting and purifying the ore.