Months Later...

So, I've been busy. I've been busy apprenticing. Now I can look back over the blog posts from last September and October and toss my head in a derisive way and say, "ha, what a very little did I know then! How simplistically did I view the history of science!"

In my first post, I wrote,

(For the sake of efficiency, let’s assume that ‘elegant’ ‘puzzle’ and ‘science’ are all overly simple or trite terms for what is in reality complex and difficult. Already I am making errant assumptions.)

 How right I was! Science is rarely elegant. It has a kind of difficult elegance, on occaision, when things finally seem to work-- if they ever work. The 'puzzle' of science--a thousand philosophers of science just cringed--is a collection of abstract puzzles, with overlapping pieces and miscut connections and no easy edges or corners to lay down first. And science?

Because I'm not a scientist, I find myself drawn to the human side of science--as do many historians of science. There is somewhat of a disconnect between science historians and historians of science, or the internal and external views of the history of science. Both are needed: we need the technical histories that trace what-happened-next so we can see how the bits fit together. We need the historians of increasingly broad subject area of 'science' to understand how the heck science fits into the rest of world, without the clear break--or any break-- from it technical histories can imply or even overlook. 

There is much more to be said on that topic, but you get the general idea.

I like both kinds of history. My sciencey brain longs to be able to track technical histories, but I am not a scientist or a mathematician. I fall firmly into the history side of things, walking the bounderies of natural knowledge, technical knowledge, and human society.

But that, I should point out, is absolutely fascinating. And so, we go on...

Link: LED at 50

Another day, another great History of Science BBC audio slideshow. This one's on the LED, the Light Emitting Diode, invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak. He invented the lower energy red LED 50 years ago and it's taken much of that half-century to work our way up into the other (higher energy) colours so we can have white light. Holonyak says each higher energy colour required learning from the previous colour how to do it-- a very methodical, incremental way of cracking a problem.

Are blue LEDs out of focus for you? For me they are diffuse splodges compared to the red ones. 

Nick Holonyak and his Red LED

Hamlet in the Lab: Watson v. Franklin (et al)

Previously on The Most Elegant Puzzle, I read the prologue of James Watson's The Double Helix and decided despite claims to honesty and accuracy, it was just as it also claimed to be--a retroactive diary, unreliable. While useful and interesting, it should be only be approached with the utmost skepticism. Part way through, I noted that I didn't consider Watson's attempt to backtrack a bit on his treatment of Rosalind Franklin in his personal account to be good enough. I said that would be a whole other blog post.

This is that blog post, and then some.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an x-ray crystallographer, which means her work involved firing x-rays at the atoms in crystals to create an image that enables someone to determine their structure, something Patricia Fara (in her four thousand year history of science) describes as requiring 'huge amounts of skill and patience'. In the early fifties and at the time of the events of the Double Helix, she was working at King's College London. She is best known for taking the photograph that clinched the double helical shape of DNA-- a photograph that was 'borrowed' without her knowledge by Maurice Wilkins (also working at King's) and shown to James Watson and Francis Crick.

This more tangible injustice, however, is not the end of it. In The Double Helix, Franklin gets the most unfavourable description of anyone. I stole this condensed version of Watson's description of Franklin from this excellent mini account of Franklin's life, but it's accurate to the early part of Watson's book.

By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. . . . There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. . . . Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. . . The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.

Charming, eh? Watson never criticises her abilities as a scientist and I have no reason to believe that he is not abolutely sincere when he says she was good at what she did. After all, it was her photograph that provided him with the evidence to make his famous discovery. We should remember, also that Watson claims he is writing as if he was in the early fifties. He also does comment earlier that the women at King's were required to eat separately from the men, implying he views this as injust.

However, this does not undo the sexist nature of his comments and I think this is worth a bit of attention. A blogger called Nick B., writing here, concludes:

All indications are that she [Franklin] was a very brusque and forward person. She, according to her close friends, could be bossy and impatient, not because she was mean, but because she was so serious about science. One of her friends, Anne Sayre, pointed out that she could often come off as far more stubborn or opposed to an idea than she actually was. Watson’s account of her personality was confused and incorrect; he clearly didn’t fully understand her, as he admitted in the epilogue. But I think, generally speaking, he probably accurately described their initial interactions and first impressions, which was Watson’s stated goal.  

 As I said in my previous blog post, Watson's personal truth has no bearing on the historical accuracy of his statemnt and the fact remains that this is the record that he has left behind-- and did so with full knowledge of what he was doing. If he actually started planning the book in 1953, he had over 15 years to work out the exact language of his book. He chose not (only) to focus on her stubborn, bossy, impatient personality, as Nick B. implies, but on her looks (decrying her lack of lipstick and 'unimaginative' clothing choices). To me, this is a complaint made particularly of women by people who seem to be under the impression that a woman has a duty to look a certain way in order to appear professional (when few uphold such standards for men). This is, of course, pure sexism.

The final comment, that a feminist belonged in someone else's lab, stems from tension between Franklin and Wilkins. They were both working on DNA, and both apparently under the impression that DNA was theirs to work on. Wilkins was, according to Watson, under the impression that Franklin was to take an assisting role. Franklin was under no such impression and naturally refused to be subjugated.

In 1976, Jerry Donohue (also an insider to this story with an instrumental role to play in the structure of DNA) wrote a comprehensive review following the publication of a book by the aforementioned friend of Franklin, Anne Sayre. The book was called Rosalind Franklin and DNA and posthumously told Franklin's story. Donohue's review not only covers his response to this book but also Watson's dismissive (yet cutting) so-called non-response to its publication ("It’s just too complicated. She [Sayre] might as well have her fun. No comment.") It also tackles a longer reposte from Farooq Hussain, writing (with some possible bias) from King's College itself.

Franklin's (and Ray Gosling's) X-Ray photograph of DNA

But let's put the details of Donohue's review aside because I think that there is something to be said about the furor (Donohue uses the word "brouhaha") surrounding Watson's memoir. The amount written about this period is astonishing. Dozens of people have tried to unpick this story, detail by detail, personality by personality, interaction by interaction, and tell that honest tale of the discovery of DNA. The events of 1951-53 are only the beginning. The whole backlash decades later is Act II.  It's Hamlet in the lab, heaving with characters and confusion.

Almost everyone involved has weighed in, or been required to weigh in--perhaps because of the delay of Watson's book often long after the fact. It is evident that Sayre interviewed Wilkins and Francis Crick in the seventies in order to her write her take on Franklin. Wilkins wrote an autobiography (2003), which must be an interesting read. Hussain, as he was at King's College and worked in the field clearly had a vested interest. Jerry Donohue, as I have already said, was also involved-- he shared an office with Watson and Crick. We haven't even mentioned Ray Gosling, Franklin's assistant, and of course J.T. Randall, the Director of Biophysics at King's, who fatefully muddied the waters between Wilkins and Franklin by misleading them both on their roles. Part of this has to be that Franklin died in the late fifties, long before Watson assassinated her character and her gender in his retroactive diary, so her voice--of all the clamouring voices involved in this tangled story--is crucially missing. 

Would her voice put the discussion to bed? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The drama, and the drama about the drama, goes on.

Oddly though, Watson the ultimate winner, the last voice, because of what he says at the beginning of his book. Remember? He wrote:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

And--although probably didn't intend it the way it turned out--having created with the publication of his 'honest' tale a perfect storm of conflicting reports, records and memories, wasn't he entirely right about that? 

*

In addition to the works linked in the post above, I also read this Independent article (which I remembered seeing the news about when it happened): "Fury at DNA Pioneer's theory: Africans are Less Intelligent than Westerners." It does nothing to dispell a very dim view of James Watson.

The Jerry Donohue review is called 'Honest Jim?' and can be found in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 51, No. 2, Jun., 1976  pps. 285-289.

I also read the Wikipedia entry on Rosalind Franklin, which is where I got her photograph. 

Link: Patent Trolls and US Law

With the recent Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit, a lot more attention has come down on the patent law culture in the US. I don't really know much about patents or law, but I found this arstechnica article by Timothy B. Lee quite interesting. Apparently, a new court was created in the 1980s to deal with patent law, but the result of this has been overfavourability towards upholding the patent-holder's claim. This has led to "patent trolls" who sit under bridges on bits and pieces of technology and software, popping up to file claims that are much more often upheld than not.

Within the article (second page) one concept I had never heard of before caught my eye:

What explains the Federal Circuit's relentless pro-patent bias? One obvious theory is what economists call "regulatory capture": the theory that over time, public officials will come to identify with the interest groups they are supposed to be supervising. The theory is usually applied to regulatory agencies in the executive branch (think FCC commissioners becoming Comcast lobbyists), but the theory seems to fit the Federal Circuit as well.

That is to say that the very judges who judge patent cases have become over long exposure (often as patent lawyers) to a patent-heavy culture more committed to enforcing existing patents, thus causing the massive proliferation of patents. You are much more likely, says Lee, to patent something if you think it has a good chance of being upheld down the line when you file a claim.

The concept of growing to support the thing you regulate because you come to identify with it I think is fascinating and I will be on the look out for this idea in the future. 

The Nobels and the Nazis

I've been reading Sam Kean's book The Disappearing Spoon, a very fun read that takes you through various stories surrounding elements, their discoveries and the scientists who discovered, isolated or otherwise messed with them to good effect.

A young de Hevesy

One story I just have to share, and from some quick googling I know that it is not only me who, out of all the great stories in Kean's book, has picked this one out as particularly impressive. After all, it has Nazis, tension, a healthy dash of derring-do and (drumroll) science!

It was 1940, the Nazis were marching into Copenhagen in Denmark, and Neils Bohr and Georges de Hevesy found themselves in possession of two Nobel prizes. They weren't theirs-- two physicists, fearing their medals would be seized and lost forever under the rise of the Nazis, had sent them from Germany to Copenhagen for safekeeping. Their discovery could be deadly, because exporting gold from Nazi Germany was forbidden and the names of the recipients were inscribed on the medals.

Bohr and de Hevesy had only hours and, knowing the Institute would be searched, initially thought of burying the medals-- although a freshly-covered pit would no doubt be discovered. So what did de Hevesy do? He dissolved them.

Gold in Aqua Regia

Gold, it turns out, doesn't dissolve easily. The same stability which means it sits around in Pharoah's tombs untarnished for thousands of years also means it stubbornly resists efforts that would rid a lab of, say, a silver medal. However, such a problem only needs one workable solution-- and solution it was, as, the Nazis breathing down his neck, de Hevesy slowly dissolved the medals in a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid called aqua regia.

The bright orange resultant liquid was bottled up and carefully stored on a shelf and, despite the Institute being searched and both de Hevesy and Bohr ultimately fleeing Denmark themselves, it was still there after the war, sitting on the shelf. De Hevesy simply precipitated out the gold and returned it to the Swedish Academy where it was once again turned into two, shiny gold medals inscribed with the names of their owners.

 Great story, eh? This story may be the quintessential example of this:

Probably how de Hevesy looked when dissolving the medals,

Edmund and the History of Fishes, A Tale of Science

Once upon a time, long, long ago there lived a man with Ideas. This man was brilliant, but reclusive and bad with people. Let’s call him Isaac.

Our Friend Edmund, 1687

One day, a young astronomer, much better with people, let’s call him Edmund, went to Isaac and asked him a question which would prove to be one of the most important questions every asked of anyone. Edmund asked,

what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.

Isaac replied that it would, of course, duh, be an ellipse. Now, this may be common knowledge today but Edmund found this answer very exciting and he asked to see the work Isaac had done to come up with this answer. Isaac had done a lot of thinking about this kind of question, but, turned out, he couldn’t quite track down the bit of paper on which he had come up with this response.

So he went away and wrote. And he wrote. And he wrote. And eventually he came up with a whole book packed full of his ideas not only about the shape of the orbit of planets but about how things were in the universe in general.

Meanwhile at the Royal Society, where Edmund was a clerk, the Society published what they thought was going to be an absolute blockbuster book. It was going to have stunning illustrations like never before seen in 1686. It was by eminent naturalists John Ray and Francis Willughby and was called De Historia Piscium (The History of Fishes).

It, like a fish out of water, was a flop. The Society had grossly overestimated the interest of the general and specific public in even the mostly beautiful woodcut engravings of fish and now it had an expensive loss on its hands, stacks of books about fish and certainly couldn’t go on making other commitments to other books, even ones which were going to revolutionise the understanding of the universe.

Willughby's Fishy Illustrations

Edmund, on the other hand, had been working his socks off trying to get grumpy, reclusive Isaac to finish and publish his book. But now—worse—there was no money to publish because it had all being soaked up by the History of Fishes. The Society was so skint that they were actually paying Edmund in copies instead of his £50 salary.

Thankfully, Edmund believed fiercely in Isaac’s work and managed to scrape together the cash from his own meagre funds and publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known among its best friends as the Principia.

Isaac (Newton), of course, went on to eternal fame and glory as the definer of gravity and classical mechanics as a whole and Edmund (Halley) went on to generally be a great all-around guy and use the Principia to calculate the trajectory of a famous comet that bears his name.

The Royal Society is still shuffling its feet in a somewhat embarrassed way and has this to say about The History of Fishes:

“While it may seem surprising to some people that the early Fellows of the Royal Society nearly passed up the opportunity to publish Newton’s Principia, we mustn’t forget that Halley, Newton, Ray and Willughby were all working in the very earliest days of the scientific revolution.  Although the Principia may have gone on to achieve lasting fame and glory, we hope that visitors to our new online picture resource will be able to appreciate why early Fellows of the Royal Society were so impressed by Willughby’s stunning illustrations of piscine natural history.”

Which I think reads amusingly like a sheepish grin and an unnecessary excuse over 300 years later.

One part of this story remains to be addressed: Did Isaac ever fully answer Edmund’s question? The answer appears to be ‘no’, at least not right away. I can’t follow the maths on this page, but it does explain saying that the argument Newton did give only the 'converse proposition' to the original question and that

the answer to Halley’s question “followed from” the converse proposition, which of course is not a generally valid argument. Newton later claimed that he hadn’t included the proof for the original question – the one that prompted the entire work – because he regarded it as “very obvious”.

…You can see what Halley was working with. The argument was sort of included in later editions, but only through the efforts of various other mathematicians and natural philosophers.

But Halley was nevertheless, along with everyone else who understood Newton’s work, justifiably impressed by what he had done and even wrote him a charming ode that concludes with the glowing lines:

Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare,
Come celebrate with me in song the name
Of Newton, to the Muses dear; for he
Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth:
So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast
The radiance of his own divinity.
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.

But in the light of Newton's achievement, let us spare a thought, for Halley who befriended and worked with this unusual man Newton, invested time and money in him, and put up with being paid in books about fish, out of sheer belief that his Ideas were worth something and ought to be out here not in there.

James Watson's Retroactive Diary

The James Watson of the Past

So, this isn't really a review of James Watson's famous book The Double Helix, but a response to his prologue.

James Watson is commonly known as one of the co-discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins. The Double Helix book retells the discovery, in a way deliberately not free of James Watson's personality. To explain his approach, he writes:

As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.

There are lots of ways to tell a history. Many of them are primarily factual: "this happened on this day". Lots take into account the events or the society (including cultural traditions) surrounding the key characters-- think of Einstein and Eddington's pacifism in World War One bringing them together. Some go into personal relationships and backgrounds-- the writer Dava Sobel has a tendency to try this (sometimes fictionally). But it's only since books like The Double Helix, in 1968, that we've really got much of a sense of the role of personality, particularly from the person involved.

Watson wants this book to be true and accurate. In fact, he had always wanted the book to be accurate:

The thought that I should write this book has been with me almost from the moment the double helix was found. Thus my memory of many of the significant events is much more complete than that of most other episodes in my life.  

He not only intends to be accurate concerning the events of 1951-1953 but also accurate to his own interpretation and responses to events and people. This is not "the discovery of the structure of DNA" this is Watson's version. In fact, the original title of the book was to be Honest Jim.

Importantly, he (attempts) to give himself a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything he might say that is controversial or rude, stating that he is writing as if without the benefit of hindsight, an as-it-happens account:

Thus many of the comments may seem one-sided and unfair, but this is often the case in the incomplete and hurried way in which human beings frequently decide to like or dislike a new idea or acquaintance.

This wasn't all that successful because the book, initally intended to be published through Harvard University Press but was blocked by both Watson's co-authors of the original article Wilkins and Crick (and I might speculatively add the university itself as universities are definitely in the business of deciding what is beneficial for them to be directly associated with).

There was an entire 1980 critical edition published by Norton that included some of the criticism and responses to criticism that surrounded the publication of the book.

But how accurate is such an "honest" retelling? Certainly every scientist knows that what we believe to be the case and what is the case are not the same thing. Watson partially acknowledged this in the epilogue of The Double Helix, particularly in the case of his description of the scientist Rosalind Franklin whose work was instrumental in the discovery.*

James Watson Nowadays

Is it perhaps better to regard Watson's book more of a diary after-the-fact than a historical recount? A diary is honest to the minute but usually considerably inaccurate with the benefit of hindsight. He states he was planning to write a book from the point the discovery was made. It's not such a huge leap to speculate that he was in fact writing an imaginary diary before he began working on DNA, keeping phrases in his mind or in notebooks and his letters to his parents (which he says he used for date references) that then made it into the book. I think there is a kind of prodigal, ambitious person who does this and I think Watson falls easily into both prodigal (attending university at 15) and ambitious categories.

The Double Helix is absolutely an interesting and valuable text to have in the world but I'm not sure that accurate is the right word. The book may be relatively or entirely accurate to the personal truth and that certainly has a powerful voice, but as soon as he starts writing sentences which ascribe beliefs and actions to people that aren't him we surely have to assume that (considering Crick or Wilkins' conspicuous lack of blessing for this book), Watson may as well be making stuff up. In short, it's a personal retroactive diary with all that entails when using it as a historical text.

 *I should note that Watson's misogynism, at the very least towards Franklin (and towards his sister) I don't think are undone by his epilogue explanation (although let's make some allowances for the Pleasantville attitudes that probably abounded). I found a blogger who wrote something about this that I vehemently disagree with but again, that's another blog post.