| Science and Subtext |
| Monday, 25 April 2005 | |
|
Emily Tweed talks to Hugh Alderslay-Williams about subtext in great scientific publications Journals, papers and articles are the day-to-day battleground of the sciences; places where discoveries are announced, debates rage and reputations are made. What can they reveal to us about the personal motivations and preconceptions of their scientist authors?
Also in this section, BlueSci takes a look at some of the scientific events featured in Findings, with expert opinions on each paper’s impact. Where did you get the idea for Findings , and what is your aim in analysing scientific papers in this way? It began with my previous book, The Most Beautiful Molecule, which described the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene. I found that the paper in Nature announcing this new molecule was full of unexpected treats: the scientists’ glee and good humour at their discovery, veiled references to arch-rivals, errors made in haste and so on. In Findings , I try to show that this was not a one-off and that any scientific paper is liable to contain its own subtext. By approaching the idea fairly rigorously, i.e. by performing the deconstruction many times over for key twentieth-century breakthroughs, I hope to convince scientists that the analytical techniques of literary criticism have more power than they might think. There has been much talk in the humanities about subjecting science literature to this kind of treatment, but no-one really seemed to have done it properly. So the main aim is to show that these are intrinsically human documents, not utterly dispassionate, objective accounts. Some scientists still believe the latter, but the meanings are in there and they will be there in all scientific papers, as they are in anything we write. The idea that the author can rise above personality is a myth, even in science literature. For example, the animosity that James Chadwick — whose 1932 paper established the particulate nature of the neutron — felt for his French rivals Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie is clear in his text from the way that he refers to them, even getting their names wrong. The French were convinced the neutron was a ray-like phenomenon, whereas Chadwick and his mentor Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge believed it was a particle [although nowadays it is thought that it can be both, a paradox known as wave-particle duality]. It’s clear from reading the papers by both groups that either group might have made the discovery sooner if they’d been a bit less dogmatic. How did you choose the papers featured in the book I tried to pick papers announcing major, and to some extent familiar, discoveries. Readers might have read accounts of them, but probably won’t have read the actual papers. For example, Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA has been described many times in popular books, including by the scientists themselves, but Findings deals directly with their original paper. Personally I was struck by the authors’ cleverness: in Findings I argue that they use literary artifice to disguise their debt to the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin while pretending a grand rivalry with Linus Pauling, and repeatedly switch between descriptions of DNA in nature and the molecular model they have built of it, so as to confuse (and fuse) the two in readers’ minds. What value do you think the history of science has to the student of science and to the research scientist? Scientists should definitely know the history of their field, and the broader history that gives it a cultural context. They would avoid some embarrassing pitfalls. My best example of this is the 1996 paper in Science by the Nasa team that claimed to have found evidence of fossil life on Mars. I think there was a major flaw in the scientists’ logic; they build their claim for life on the formation of certain carbonate globules, but these globules they first state as having been formed by ‘biogenic activity’ — a completely circular argument. What’s really astonishing though is that this is exactly the same false logic that was used by the American astronomer Percival Lowell in the 1890s when he used Giovanni Schiaparelli’s discovery of so-called ‘canals’ on Mars to claim them as evidence of intelligent life there. Nowadays Lowell ’s claims are a notorious example of circularity, but the 1996 paper makes exactly the same mistakes. If the Nasa team had known this story, they might have constructed their own argument more carefully. Do you have a particular favourite among the papers you discuss in the book, one whose style, content or subtext you find especially interesting I think the 1910 paper by the American zoologist Thomas Morgan, who discovered the link between sex and heredity in his experiments on fruit flies, is beautiful. Its logic is incontestable, the writing is spare but highly literate, and its pace is perfectly judged. And because of this it succeeded in a larger, rhetorical way, sending a signal that biology was coming of age, maturing from an observational pastime of gentleman naturalists to a rigorous experimental science. In the introduction to your book you mention the gulf that exists between nonscientists and the scientific literature: why do you think this exists? A lot of non-scientists are intimidated by the initial appearance of scientific literature. You certainly can’t pick up Nature and read it like The Times . And too many scientists rather enjoy the mystique. Those who speak for science in the media, for example, often say that the public isn’t qualified to comment on the latest scientific developments. But this is a dangerous and disturbing misunderstanding of the way democratic society works: the public is ‘qualified’ to comment on anything it damned well wants to. So these scientists need to change their attitude. But then, so do those nonscientists who think it a badge of honour to reveal how totally fazed they are by the slightest bit of science! What are you working on at the moment? In June I am co-curating a contemporary design exhibition about ‘Touch’. It’s at the Victoria and Albert Museum, but it is also funded by the Wellcome Trust, so it has a certain scientific underpinning. I am also writing a book about science and nationalism, a set of biographical sketches based on four scientists whose lives overlap with national interest in very different ways. The idea is to go from the beginning of modern nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century up to the present day. It begins with Alexander Borodin, a Russian composer and renowned chemist, then moves onto Fritz Haber, the German chemist responsible for Germany ’s use of poison gases in the first world war. Then I look at Chaim Weizman, a fermentation biologist who became the first president of Israel, and finally Carl Sagan, who was a spokesman for the US space race but was also very critical of other aspects of American political life and used his science to inform that criticism. For example, he was heavily involved in publicising the idea of ‘nuclear winter’. I think this is interesting as it shows science as a critical tool as well as an instrument of the state. Finally, as a former Natural Sciences student at Cambridge , is there any advice you would give to current NatScis? Get a sense of the bigger picture. Go to lectures outside the subject that fill in the context. You can luxuriate in the fact that you don’t have to take notes, and won’t be tested on it. Emily Tweed is a second year Natural Scientist
J.
Chadwick, ‘Possible existence of a neutron’, Nature 129:312 (1932). J.D.
Watson and F.H.C. Crick, ‘A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid’, Nature
171:737–738 (1953). D.S.
McKay et al., ‘Search for past life on Mars: possible relic biogenic activity
in Martian meteorite ALH84001’, Science 273:924–930 (1996). T.H. Morgan, ‘Sex limited inheritance in Drosophila’, Science 32:120–122 (1910).
In this section: Who, What, Where and When |
In his new book, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, who studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, takes a seminal paper from each decade of the twentieth century and subjects them to a scrutiny worthy of any literary critic. Beneath the precise formulae and specialist terminology he finds a world of rivalry, prejudice and political bias. | Next > |
|---|
News Archives
| News Archives |
