The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The conference itself was a carefully staged victory for Lysenko. Following his opening address, five days were devoted to a discussion. However, his opponents were not allowed to speak for the first half of the meeting, and overall only eight of the fifty-six speakers were allowed to criticise him.12 At the end, not only did the conference ratify Lysenko’s approach, but he revealed he had the support of the Central Committee, which meant, in effect, that he had Stalin’s full endorsement for total control, over not just genetics but all of Soviet biology. The VASKhNIL meeting was also followed by a sustained campaign in Pravda. Normally, the newspaper consisted of four pages; that summer for nine days the paper produced six-page editions with an inordinate amount of space devoted to biology.13 A colour film about Michurin was commissioned, with music by Shostakovich. It is difficult to exaggerate the intellectual importance of these events. Recent research, published by Nikolai Krementsov, has revealed that Stalin spent part of the first week of August 1948 editing Lysenko’s address; this was at exactly the time he was meeting with the ambassadors of France, Britain, and the United States for prolonged consultations on the Berlin crisis. After the conference, at the premier’s instigation, great efforts were made to export Michurinist biology to newborn socialist countries such as Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Biology, more than any other realm of science, concerns the very stuff of human nature, for which Marx had set down certain laws. Biology was therefore more of a potential threat to Marxist thought than any other science. The Lysenko version of genetics offered the Soviet leadership the best hope for producing a science that posed no threat to Marxism, and at the same time set Soviet Russia apart from the West. With the Iron Curtain firmly in place and communications between Russian scientists and their Western colleagues cut to a minimum, the path was set for what has rightly been called the death of Russian genetics. For the USSR it was a disaster.

  The personal rivalry, political manoeuvring, self-deception, and sheer cussedness that disfigured Soviet genetics for so long is of course the very antithesis of the way science prefers itself portrayed. It is true that the Lysenko affair may be the very worst example of political interference in an important scientific venture, and for that reason the lessons it offers are limited. In the West there was nothing strictly comparable but even so, in the 1950s, there were other very significant advances made in science which, on examination, were shown to be the fruits of anything but calm, reflective, disinterested reason. On the contrary, these advances also resulted from bitter rivalry, overweening ambition, luck, and in some cases downright cheating.

  Take first the jealous nature of William Shockley. That, as much as anything, was to account for his massive input into twentieth-century intellectual history. That input may be said to have begun on Tuesday, 23 December 1947, just after seven o’clock in the morning, when Shockley parked his MG convertible in the parking lot of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, about twenty miles from Manhattan.14 Shockley, a thin man without much hair, took the stairs to his office on the third floor of the lab. He was on edge. Later in the day, he and two colleagues were scheduled to reveal a new device they had invented to the head of Bell Labs, where they worked. Shockley was tense because although he was the nominal head of his little group of three, it had actually been the other two, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, who had made the breakthrough. Shockley had been leapfrogged.15 During the morning it started to snow. Ralph Bown, the research director of Bell, wasn’t deterred however, and stopped by after lunch. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain brought out their device, a small triangle of plastic with a piece of gold foil attached, fixed in place by a small spring made from a paper clip.16 Their contraption was encased in another piece of plastic, transparent this time, and shaped like a capital C. ‘Brattain fingered his moustache and looked out at the snow. The baseball diamond below the lab window was beginning to disappear. The tops of the trees on the Wachtung Mountains in the distance were also lost as the low cloud closed in. He leaned across the lab bench and switched on the equipment. It took no time at all to warm up, and the oscilloscope to which it was connected immediately showed a luminous spot that raced across the screen.17 Brattain now wired the device to a microphone and a set of headphones, which he passed to Bown. Quietly, Brattain spoke a few words into the microphone – and Bown shot him a sharp glance. Brattain had only whispered, but what Bown heard was anything but a whisper, and that was the point of the device. The input had been amplified. The device they had built, an arrangement of germanium, gold foil, and a paper clip, was able to boost an electrical signal almost a hundredfold.18

  Six months later, on 30 June 1948, Bown faced the press at the Bell Headquarters on West Street in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. He held up the small piece of new technology. ‘We have called it the Transistor,’ he explained, ‘because it is a resistor or semiconductor device which can amplify electrical signals as they are transferred through it.19 Bown had high hopes for the new device; at that time the amplifiers used in telephones were clumsy and unreliable, and the vacuum tubes that performed the same function in radios were bulky, broke easily, and were very slow in warming up.20 The press, or at least the New York Times, did not share this enthusiasm, and its report was buried in an inside section. It was at this point that Shockley’s jealousy paid off. Anxious to make his own contribution, he kept worrying about the uses to which the transistor might be put. Looking at the world around him, the mass-society world of standardisation, he grasped that if the transistor were to be manufactured in bulk, it needed to be simpler and stronger.

  The transistor was in fact a development of two inventions made much earlier in the century. In 1906 Lee de Forest had stumbled across the fact that an electrified wire mesh, placed in the path of a stream of electrons in a vacuum tube, could ‘amplify’ the flow at the outgoing end.21 This natural amplification was the most important aspect of what came to be called the electronics revolution, but de Forest’s discovery was built on by solid-state physics. This was due to a better grasp of electricity, itself the result of advances in particle physics. A solid structure will conduct electricity if the electron in its outer shed is ‘free’ – i.e., that shell isn’t ‘full’ (this goes back to Pauli’s exclusion principle and Linus Pauling’s research on the chemical bond and how it affected reactivity). Copper conducts electricity because there is only one electron in its outer shed, whereas sulphur, for example, which does not carry electricity at ad, has all its electrons tightly bound to their nuclei. Sulphur, therefore, is an insulator.22 But not all elements are this simple. ‘Semiconductors’ (silicon, say, or germanium) are forms of matter in which there are a few free electrons but not many. Whereas copper has one free electron for each atom, silicon has a free electron for every thousand atoms. It was subsequently discovered that such semiconductors have unusual and very useful properties, the most important being that they can conduct (and amplify) under certain conditions, and insulate under others. It was Shockley, smarting from being beaten to the punch by Bardeen and Brattain, who put all this together and in 1950 produced the first, simple, strong, semiconductor transistor, capable of being mass-produced.23 It consisted of a sliver of silicon and germanium with three wires attached. In conversation this device was referred to as a ‘chip.’24

  Shockley’s timing was perfect. Long-playing records and ‘singles’ had recently been introduced to the market, with great success, and the pop music business was taking off. In 1954, the very year Alan Freed started playing R & B on his shows, a Dallas company called Texas Instruments began to manufacture chip-transistors for the new portable radios that had just gone on sale, which were cheap (less than $50) and therefore ideal for playing pop all day long. For reasons that have never been adequately explained, TI gave up this market, which was instead taken over by a Japanese firm no one had ever heard of, Sony.25 By then Shockley had fallen out with first one, then the other erstwhile colleague. Bardeen had stormed out of the lab in 1
951, unable to cope with Shockley’s intense rivalry, and Brattain, likewise unable to stomach his former boss, had himself reassigned to a different section of Bed Labs. When the three of them gathered in Stockholm in 1956 to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, the atmosphere was icy, and it was the last time they would be in the same room together.26 Shockley had himself left Bed by that time, forsaking the snow of New Jersey for the sunshine of California, in particular a pleasant valley of apricot orchards south of San Francisco. There he opened the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.27 To begin with, it was a small venture, but in time the apricots would be replaced by more laboratories. In conversation the area was referred to as Silicon Valley.

  Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain fought among themselves. With the discovery of DNA, the long-chain molecule that governs reproduction, the rivalry was between three separate groups of researchers, on different continents, some of whom never met. But feelings ran just as high as between Shockley and his colleagues, and this was an important factor in what happened.

  The first the public knew about this episode came on 25 April 1953, in Nature, in a 900-word paper entitled ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids.’ The paper followed the familiar, ordered layout of Nature articles. But although it was the paper that created the science of molecular biology, and although it also helped kill off Lysenkoism, it was the culmination of an intense two-year drama in which, if science really were the careful, ordered world it is supposed to be, the wrong side won.

  Among the personalities, Francis Crick stands out. Born in Northampton in 1916, the son of a shoemaker, Crick graduated from London University and worked at the Admiralty during World War II, designing mines. It was only in 1946, when he attended a lecture by Linus Pauling, that his interest in chemical research was kindled. He was also influenced by Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? and its suggestion that quantum mechanics might be applied to genetics. In 1949 he was taken on by the Cambridge Medical Research Council Unit at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he soon became known for his loud laugh (which forced some people to leave the room) and his habit of firing off theories on this or that at the drop of a hat.28 In 1951 an American joined the lab. James Dewey Watson was a tall Chicagoan, twelve years younger than Crick but extremely self-confident, a child prodigy who had also read Schrödinger’s What Is Life? while he was a zoology student at the University of Chicago, which influenced him toward microbiology. As science historian Paul Strathern tells the story, on a visit to Europe Watson had met a New Zealander, Maurice Wilkins, at a scientific congress in Naples. Wilkins, then based at King’s College in London, had worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II but became disillusioned and turned to biology. The British Medical Research Council had a biophysics unit at King’s, which Wilkins then ran. One of his specialities was X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA, and in Naples he generously showed Watson some of the results.29 It was this coincidence that shaped Watson’s life. There and then he seems to have decided that he would devote himself to discovering the structure of DNA. He knew there was a Nobel Prize in it, that molecular biology could not move ahead without such an advance, but that once the advance was made, the way would be open for genetic engineering, a whole new era in human experience. He arranged a transfer to the Cavendish. A few days after his twenty-third birthday Watson arrived in Cambridge.30

  What Watson didn’t know was that the Cavendish had ‘a gentleman’s agreement’ with King’s. The Cambridge laboratory was studying the structure of protein, in particular haemoglobin, while London was studying DNA. That was only one of the problems. Although Watson hit it off immediately with Crick, and both shared an amazing self-confidence, that was virtually all they had in common. Crick was weak in biology, Watson in chemistry.31 Neither had any experience at all of X-ray diffraction, the technique developed by the leader of the lab, Lawrence Bragg, to determine atomic structure.32 None of this deterred them. The structure of DNA fascinated both men so much that virtually all their waking hours were spent discussing it. As well as being self-confident, Watson and Crick were highly competitive. Their main rivals came from King’s, where Maurice Wilkins had recently hired the twenty-nine-year-old Rosalind Franklin (‘Rosy,’ though never to her face).33 Described as the ‘wilful daughter’ of a cultured banking family, she had just completed four years X-ray diffraction work in Paris and was one of the world’s top experts. When Franklin was hired by Wilkins she thought she was to be his equal and that she would be in charge of the X-ray diffraction work. Wilkins, on the other hand, thought that she was coming as his assistant. The misunderstanding did not make for a happy ship.34

  Despite this, Franklin made good progress and in the autumn of 1951 decided to give a seminar at King’s to make known her findings. Remembering Watson’s interest in the subject, from their meeting in Naples, Wilkins invited the Cambridge man. At this seminar, Watson learned from Franklin that DNA almost certainly had a helical structure, each helix having a phosphate-sugar backbone, with attached bases: adenine, guanine, thymine, or cytosine. After the seminar, Watson took Franklin for a Chinese dinner in Soho. There the conversation turned away from DNA to how miserable she was at King’s. Wilkins, she said, was reserved, polite, but cold. In turn, this made Franklin on edge herself, a form of behaviour she couldn’t avoid but detested. At dinner Watson was outwardly sympathetic, but he returned to Cambridge convinced that the Wilkins-Franklin relationship would never deliver the goods.35

  The Watson-Crick relationship meanwhile flourished, and this too was not unrelated to what happened subsequently. Because they were so different, in age, cultural, and scientific background, there was precious little rivalry. And because they were so conscious of their great ignorance on so many subjects relevant to their inquiry (they kept Pauling’s Nature of the Chemical Bond by their side, as a bible), they could slap down each other’s ideas without feelings being hurt. It was light-years away from the Wilkins-Franklin ménage, and in the long run that may have been crucial.

  In the short run there was disaster. In December 1951, Watson and Crick thought they had an answer to the puzzle, and invited Wilkins and Franklin for a day in Cambridge, to show them the model they had built: a triple-helix structure with the bases on the outside. Franklin savaged them, curtly grumbling that their model didn’t fit any of her crystallography evidence, either for the helical structure or the position of the bases, which she said were on the inside. Nor did their model take any account of the fact that in nature DNA existed in association with water, which had a marked effect on its structure.36 She was genuinely appalled at their neglect of her research and complained that her day in Cambridge was a complete waste of time.37 For once, Watson and Crick’s ebullient self-confidence let them down, even more so when word of the debacle reached the ears of their boss. Bragg called Crick into his office and put him firmly in his place. Crick, and by implication Watson, was accused of breaking the gentleman’s agreement, of endangering the lab’s funding by doing so. They were expressly forbidden from continuing to work on the DNA problem.38

  So far as Bragg was concerned, that was the end of the matter. But he had misjudged his men. Crick did stop work on DNA, but as he told colleagues, no one could stop him thinking about it. Watson, for his part, continued work in secret, under cover of another project on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, which showed certain similarities with genes.39 A new factor entered the situation when, in the autumn of 1952, Peter Pauling, Linus’s son, arrived at the Cavendish to do postgraduate research. He attracted a lot of beautiful women, much to Watson’s satisfaction, but more to the point, he was constantly in touch with his father and told his new colleagues that Linus was putting together a model for DNA.40 Watson and Crick were devastated, but when an advance copy of the paper arrived, they immediately saw that it had a fatal flaw.41 It described a triple-helix structure, with the bases on the outside – much like their own model that had been savaged by Franklin – and Pauling had left out the ionisation, meaning his structu
re would not hold together but fall apart.42 Watson and Crick realised it would only be a matter of time before Pauling himself realised his error, and they estimated they had six weeks to get in first.43 They took a risk, broke cover, and told Bragg what they were doing. This time he didn’t object: there was no gentleman’s agreement so far as Linus Pauling was concerned.

  So began the most intense six weeks Watson or Crick had ever lived through. They now had permission to build more models (models were especially necessary in a three-dimensional world) and had developed their thinking about the way the four bases – adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine – were related to each other. They knew by now that adenine and guanine were attracted, as were thymine and cytosine. And, from Franklin’s latest crystallography, they also had far better pictures of DNA, giving much more accurate measures of its dimensions. This made for better model building. The final breakthrough came when Watson realised they could have been making a simple error by using the wrong isomeric form of the bases. Each base came in two forms – enol and keto – and all the evidence so far had pointed to the enol form as being the correct one to use. But what if the keto form were tried?44 As soon as he followed this hunch, Watson immediately saw that the bases fitted together on the inside, to form the perfect double-helix structure. Even more important, when the two strands separated in reproduction, the mutual attraction of adenine to guanine, and of thymine to cytosine, meant that the new double helix was identical to the old one – the biological information contained in the genes was passed on unchanged, as it had to be if the structure was to explain heredity.45 They announced the new structure to their colleagues on 7 March 1953, and six weeks later their paper appeared in Nature. Wilkins, says Strathern, was charitable toward Watson and Crick, calling them a couple of ‘old rogues.’ Franklin instantly accepted their model.46 Not everyone was as emollient. They were called ‘unscrupulous’ and told they did not deserve the sole credit for what they had discovered.47 In fact, the drama was not yet over. In 1962 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded jointly to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, and in the same year the prize for chemistry went to the head of the Cavendish X-ray diffraction unit, Max Perutz and his assistant, John Kendrew. Rosalind Franklin got nothing. She died of cancer in 1958, at the age of thirty-seven.48