Other scientific figures of note: Dmitry Mendeleyev, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Gregor Mendel, Florence Nightingale, Wilhelm Roentgen
1900–1999
This century was all about biochemistry for Matthew, and it marked an exciting time for his research in genetics.
Alexander Fleming, “On the Antibacterial Action of Cultures of a Penicillium, with Special Reference to Their Use in the Isolation of B. influenzae,” British Journal of Experimental Pathology 10:226–236, 1929
The Scot Alexander Fleming graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London in 1906 at the age of twenty-five and later joined the research department there, becoming an assistant to a bacteriologist. After taking a degree in bacteriology in 1908, he remained at St. Mary’s as a lecturer until the Great War broke out in 1914.
Fleming developed his interest in finding an effective antibacterial while working in France as a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Many soldiers died of sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Fleming discovered that the antiseptics used for wounds might have done more harm than good, because they killed beneficial agents on the surface and did nothing to kill anaerobic bacteria deep inside the wound. After the war ended, he continued his search for antibacterial substances.
As most schoolchildren know, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was not only accidental but was the direct result of his reluctance to clean his laboratory. In September 1928 he returned from vacation to find dirty petri dishes stacked in a corner. One culture had been contaminated by a fungus, and the colonies of bacteria immediately surrounding the fungus were dead. Fleming immediately set about growing the mold in a pure culture and found that it killed many different disease-causing bacteria. With help from his mycologist colleague “Old Moldy,” whose lab might have been the source of the rogue fungus, he identified it as Penicillium chrysogenum. (Actually, Old Moldy initially misidentified it, but Fleming was gracious about the mistake.) After several months of calling the resulting substance mold juice, Fleming settled on the more salutary name of penicillin.
When Fleming published his discovery in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929, it aroused little interest. Fleming, unlike Darwin, was a notoriously poor communicator; he couldn’t cultivate enough penicillin for it to be useful on a larger scale; and he couldn’t persuade a chemist to help him solve the problem. We now know that penicillin is produced only by certain species of Penicillium and only when the growth of the fungus is inhibited by stress—a complicated combination of factors. Fleming had all but abandoned his efforts by 1938, when Howard Florey, a pharmacologist and pathologist at Oxford, read his 1929 paper.
Florey and a team of scientists, including biochemist Ernst Boris Chain, quickly isolated the effective penicillin compound, conducted successful trials on mice and humans, and began working on the problem of mass-producing penicillin. Their first human subject in 1941 improved dramatically but later died because there was not enough penicillin to continue the treatment. The team turned to America, where they received help from Merck & Co., various research laboratories, and most of all a moldy cantaloupe from Peoria, Illinois, whose strain of Penicillium chrysogenum produced two hundred times more penicillin than Fleming’s source. Mass production started after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and by 1944 there was enough penicillin to treat all the Allied wounded in World War II.
Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945. Fleming could never have carried his initial discovery to fruition without the team from Oxford, but then again they never would have had a substance to work on if Fleming hadn’t looked at a dirty petri dish in 1928 and said, “That’s funny.”
As for Matthew, after reading Fleming he returned to his earlier interest in understanding the properties of vampire blood (both its healing, palliative properties and pathological properties such as blood rage). When he considered it in light of Darwin’s theories about evolution and natural selection, Matthew began to reconsider whether blood rage might be a symptom of species progress or species decline.
Crick and Watson, “The Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids”; Franklin and Gosling, “Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate”; Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson, “Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids” (www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf; 1953)
On April 25, 1953, three articles appeared in the scientific journal Nature that transformed the science of genetics and shaped Matthew’s future field of study. The leading article was by Francis Crick and James D. Watson and was entitled “The Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.” The second article that appeared alongside Crick and Watson’s was by Rosalind Franklin and Randall Gosling, with the third by another King’s College researcher, Maurice Wilkins and his two colleagues. These two articles supported Watson and Crick’s findings with their own data.
Crick and Watson’s article put forward their theory of the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the molecule that holds the genetic code of living organisms. Prior to this, scientists had conjectured about the role DNA played in holding and passing on genetic information. They knew it was connected with the structure of the gene, but up until that time no one had been able to decipher how or why. The correct model was finally laid out by Crick and Watson, who noted in this famous article that “the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
DNA was originally isolated in 1869 by a Swiss scientist, Friedrich Meischer. Around the globe, researchers built on Meischer’s work, with DNA’s function in heredity confirmed by the Hershey-Chase experiment in 1952. James Watson, an American molecular biologist, met his British fellow scientist Francis Crick (who died in 2004) in England at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. Their work together drew heavily on the data of Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling, researchers from King’s College London. An X-ray diffraction image taken by Gosling, called Photo 51, is famously said to have given Crick and Watson the breakthrough they needed.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” This recognition came after the death of Franklin in 1958, and there is still some controversy over whether due credit has been given to Franklin for the discovery.
When Matthew read these three articles, more than fourteen hundred years of reading, practice, and experiment came together. Finally he felt he might have the key that would unlock the doors of his understanding on the essential differences among daemons, humans, vampires, and witches. By looking deep within the human body—deeper than anatomy, or Vesalian dissection, or microscopy allowed—Matthew might be able to understand once and for all who he was and why he was put on earth. After centuries of wondering if God was an architect, a painter, a sculptor, or a mechanic, Matthew began to think that He was all of them—and a chemist as well. Genetics enabled Matthew to see beyond the superficial differences between species to consider the commonalities that proved Hunter and Darwin right: All four hominid species were merely branches on one complicated family tree.
What Matthew never anticipated was how complicated DNA research would be. From the study of the chemistry of the DNA molecule to the mapping of the genome and the role that mtDNA plays in inheritance, Matthew’s journey toward understanding has been long and twisting. Instead of finding a key to the mystery of his existence in DNA, he discovered another set of barriers to overcome.
Other scientific figures of note: Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Ivan Pavlov, Jocelyn Bell
Alchemy
The ancient art of alchemy is where magic and science intersect, and it provides the core framework running through the heart of the All Souls world. Today the secrets of alchemy are a never-ending source o
f debate for historians and academics, including Dr. Diana Bishop. Who was the first alchemist? No one knows as the origins of alchemy are shrouded in mystery. Scholars believe that some form of alchemy was practiced in ancient cultures throughout the world. At the heart of alchemy is the belief that human beings can imitate the processes of creation and destruction that are so important to the earth’s history. Just as it is impossible for historians to identify the first alchemist, it is impossible to come up with a single definition of alchemy that adequately covers the many different strands of the discipline that developed over the years.
For some, alchemy was primarily concerned with the material transformation of chemicals and metals through processes such as heating, cooling, condensation, and separation. Stories of alchemists who turned lead into gold belong to this tradition, and the methods they developed can be traced forward into modern scientific laboratories and the discipline of chemistry. Their practices also contributed to medical, industrial, and technical breakthroughs such as the creation of chemical medicines, the production of new dyes for cloth, and refinements in glass making and furnace construction.
For other alchemists, material transformations were merely an earthly sign of more important philosophical and metaphysical changes. Alchemical texts are often couched in allegorical language and use symbols to show the alchemist’s journey toward wisdom and knowledge. These allegories and symbols have led modern psychologists to argue that alchemical texts contain important insights into archetypal human emotions and impulses. In the past, alchemy was linked to spiritual redemption, the coming of the apocalypse, and the search for the philosopher’s stone, which would bring eternal life to the lucky alchemist who was able to obtain it through his chemical work.
As Matthew pointed out, Darwin’s biological theory of natural selection also mirrored the alchemical theory of transmutation. Through a process of linked changes, animals and plants were continually evolving over time to create the perfect being for their environment. It was when Matthew read Darwin’s Origin of Species that he remembered reports of another work about the origin of creatures, hidden in a mysterious book of alchemy.
Opus Magnum and Symbols of Alchemy
I’d always been more interested in the symbolism of alchemy than in its practical aspects, but my afternoon with the Countess of Pembroke had shown me how intriguing the links between the two might be.
Opus magnum (or magnum opus) will be familiar to readers today as a label applied generally to epic works of creation, particularly in literature. This was the term used to describe the alchemist’s process of transmutation, with the ultimate goal of producing the sought-after philosopher’s stone. The symbolic starting point for this Great Work was known as the prima materia, or first matter, thought to be made up of opposites, in conflict with each other, that needed to be brought to a perfect state of harmony. The path to achieving this was traditionally laid out in four (or three) stages and tied to chemical color changes: nigredo (a blackening), albedo (a whitening), citrinitas (a yellowing), and rubedo (a reddening). Diana wrote an article about the color symbolism in alchemy, one that Matthew told her had fascinated him. These alchemical stages were also expanded to seven or twelve, with numerous interpretations and variations across texts, including George Ripley’s “Twelve Gates.”
Many European medieval and Renaissance theories of alchemical transmutation were based on the classical belief of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. According to the ancient Greeks (and other cultures such as those of Egypt, Babylonia, and Japan), everything on earth was composed of a combination of these four basic elements, and each represented types of matter: Water represented everything that flowed, earth was everything that was solid, and so on. Each was also made up of a balance of hotness, dryness, wetness, and coldness. Aristotle believed that an element could be transformed to another through altering the variations of these characteristics, a theory that many alchemists later applied to their experiments.
Paracelsus (the famous medieval physician who pioneered toxicology in medicine) also put forward the idea of the tria prima (three primes or three principles) of sulfur, salt, and mercury. These were the foundation for all matter, which needed to be in perfect balance. This was the alchemical theory he applied to his medicine, looking at disease on the basis that it could be an imbalance in the chemical compound of man.
At a basic level, the alchemical stages in the Great Work began with putrefaction and breaking down the putrefied material. The divided matter was then purified through various methods, including dissolution and separation. The final stage was a state of perfection, with the purified elements unified and hardened to produce the philosopher’s stone. The spiritual analogy for these stages was seen as an initial breaking down of the ego, purifying the elements of the divided self, and freeing the spirit on a path to ultimate wisdom and a refined, perfected soul.
In the chemical processes, there were also two paths open to alchemists, either a short dry one, using heat to separate the matter, or a longer wet path, which involved numerous distillations. Alcohol was often distilled in medieval and Renaissance alchemy to produce aqua vitae (water of life, or concentrated ethanol), which is why Diana asked for barrels of wine for her stillroom at sixteenth-century Sept-Tours. And the aqua fortis (strong water, or nitric acid) that Mary Sidney used in her laboratory to dissolve silver was also frequently produced through distillation.
Diana studied many texts that laid out these various stages of the alchemical work, including The Book of Alchemical Formulas, which she was consulting in the Bodleian at the beginning of A Discovery of Witches. But as in Ashmole 782, the secrets of these alchemical processes were very often buried in obscure narratives and imagery.
Alchemy may be early chemistry, but there are strong religious elements in the iconography, and the equipment was often borrowed from kitchens and stillrooms, traditional female spaces in the home. One of the reasons I became fascinated with the subject was the mix of scientific, religious, and domestic traditions.
Alchemical Symbolism
Much of alchemical literature is couched in complicated symbolism and allegory. Alchemists were known to be purposely mysterious about their work, believing it a science that should be open only to those deserving of its secrets. Diana has been studying and attempting to decipher this symbolism throughout her academic career and was working on a paper about the allegorical-image tradition in England when Matthew first met her in Oxford.
These are some of the basic symbols, which appear in various guises in the enigmatic alchemical texts.
Paracelsus’s three principles were also seen as symbols of the tripartite nature of man, with sulfur representing the soul, salt the body, and mercury the spirit.
See also: SCIENCE: Paracelsus
Alchemical Imagery
Godfrey de Clermont’s copy of the Aurora Consurgens, which Diana consulted at Sept-Tours, has the same text as others she’d seen, but the illustrations were quite different. Diana read descriptions of the first part of the alchemical process, nigredo in this copy of the Aurora Consurgens, and the various stages are represented in it through beautiful allegorical images.
This image of the dark sun representing the step in the alchemical process called nigredo is actually from the Splendor Solis, a famous illustrated alchemical manuscript, and the picture here comes from the British Library’s copy, Harley MS 3469, dated 1582. When thinking of Godrey de Clermont’s copy of the Aurora Consurgens, I imagined the main images would resemble those in Harley 3469, though the surrounds would be much earlier in style (as befits a work of Bourgot Le Noir, the illuminator who was active in the middle of the fourteenth century).
Here are some other allegorical images from copies of the Aurora Consurgens:
Representations of Wisdom and Justice, with the seven alchemical metals laid out on the table. The first image that Diana saw in Godfrey’s copy showed Wisdom
shielding under her cloak the personifications of the seven metals.
This is a representation of the initial pulverization, the breaking down of the material and philosophical renewal. The imagery also ties in to descriptions in one of the other alchemical manuscripts Diana studied at the Bodleian: “Take your pot of mercury and seethe it over a flame for three hours,” began one set of instructions, “and when it has joined with the Philosophical Child take it and let it putrefy until the Black Crow carries it away to its death.”
Here is represented the process of raising the matter, also featuring the important ouroboros.
See also: LITERATURE: Aurora Consurgens
The Ouroboros
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol in alchemy, traditionally representing the eternal cycle of nature, creation and destruction, birth and death: “The supreme serpent is the cosmic spirit which brings everything to life, which also kills everything and takes all the figures of nature. To summarize: he is everything, and also nothing.”* This image, on which All Souls’ tenth knot is based, is from an eighteenth-century alchemical text. Surrounding the ouroboros are also the symbols for the four elements, as well as those for salt, sulfur, and mercury.
The Arbor Dianae
The arbor Dianae (Latin for tree of Diana), also known as the arbor philosophorum (the philosopher’s tree), is the beautiful treelike structure produced when silver is submerged in a bath of highly corrosive, liquid aqua fortis, or nitric acid, to which mercury has been added. In the alchemists’ laboratories, the silvery tree of the arbor Dianae could take anywhere from forty days to form from a lump of solid silver to fifteen minutes if the silver was filed finely and submerged in a particularly strong nitric acid solution. The branches of the arbor Dianae are dendritic crystals that multiply and grow much like frost patterns on a window. As a crystal is created by the chemical reaction, that crystal then branches into two parts, with each then branching into two more parts, and so on until the solution in the vessel is full. This particular crystalline tree was known by alchemists as Diana’s tree because of the presence of silver and its associations with the moon and Diana, goddess of the moon. Alchemists were struck by the crystalline shapes that grew within their glass flasks and the seemingly vegetative nature of those structures; it is no wonder that early alchemists believed in the vitality of the mineral world.
The World of All Souls Page 37
