Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (96 page)

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 structure 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

Years later Watson wrote an entertaining and revealing book about the whole saga, on which this account is partly based. Some of his success as an author lay in his openness about the scientific process, which made him and his colleagues seem far more human than had hitherto been the case. For most people up until then, science books were textbooks, thick as bricks and just as dry. Partly this was a tradition, a convention that what counted in science was the results, not how the participants achieved them. Another reason, of course, in the case of certain sciences at least, was the Cold War, which kept many crucial advances secret, at least for a while. In fact the Cold War, which succeeded in making scientists into faceless bureaucrats, along the lines Orwell had laid into in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
also sparked a bitter rivalry between scientists on either side of the divide, very different from the cooperative international mood in physics in the early part of the century. The most secret discipline was in fact physics itself and its penumbra of activities. And it was here that the rivalry was keenest. Archival research carried out in Russia since perestroika has, for example, identified one great scientist who, owing to secrecy, was virtually unknown hitherto, not only in the West but in his own country, and who was almost entirely obsessed with rivalry. He was more or less single-handedly responsible for Soviet Russia’s greatest scientific success, but his strengths were also his weaknesses, and his competitiveness led to his crucial failures.
⁴⁹

On Friday, 4 October 1957, the world was astounded to learn that Soviet Russia had launched an orbiting satellite.
Sputnik I
measured only twenty-three inches across and didn’t
do
much as it circled the earth at three hundred miles a minute. But that wasn’t the point: its very existence up there, overflying America four times during the first day, was a symbol of the Cold War rivalry that so preoccupied the postwar world and in which, for a time at least, the Russians seemed to be ahead.
⁵⁰
Receiving the story in the late afternoon, next morning the
New York Times
took the unusual step of printing a three-decker headline, in half-inch capitals, running the whole way across the front page:

Only then did Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian leader, realise what an opportunity
Sputnik’s
launch provided for some Cold War propaganda. The next day’s
Pravda
was quite different from the day before, which had recorded the launch of
Sputnik
in just half a column. ‘World’s First Artificial Satellite of Earth Created in Soviet Nation,’ ran the headline, and it too stretched all the way across page one. The paper also published the congratulations that poured in, not only from what would soon come to be called satellite states of the USSR, but from scientists and engineers in the West.
⁵²

Sputnik
was news partly because it showed that space travel was possible, and that Russia might win the race to colonise the heavens – with all the psychological and material advantages that implied – but also because, in order to reach orbit, the satellite must have been launched at a speed of at least 8,000 metres per second and with an accuracy which meant the Russians had solved several technological problems associated with rocket technology. And it was rocket technology that lay at the heart of the Cold War arms race; both Russia and the United States were then trying their hardest to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could carry nuclear warheads vast distances between continents. The launch of
Sputnik
meant the Russians had a rocket with enough power and accuracy to deliver hydrogen bombs on to American soil.
⁵³

After dropping behind in the arms race during World War II, the Soviet Union quickly caught up between 1945 and 1949, thanks to a small coterie of ‘atomic spies,’ including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, David Greenglass, Harvey Gold, and Klaus Fuchs. But the
delivery
of atomic weapons was a different matter, and here, since the advent of perestroika, several investigations have been made of what was going on behind the scenes in the Russian scientific community. By far the most interesting is James Harford’s biography of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
⁵⁴
Korolev, who led an extraordinary life, may fairly be described as the father of both Russia’s ICBM system and its space program.
⁵⁵
Born in 1907 near Kiev, in Ukraine, into an old Cossack family, Sergei Pavlovich grew up obsessed with manmade flight. This led to an interest in rocket and jet propulsion in the 1930s. (It has also become clear since perestroika that the USSR had a spy in Wernher von Braun’s team, and that Korolev and his colleagues – not to mention Stalin, Beria, and Molotov – were kept up-to-date with German progress.) But Korolev’s smooth ride up the Soviet system came to an abrupt end in June 1937, when he was arrested in the purges and deported to the gulag, accused of ‘subversion in a new field of technology.’ He was given no trial but beaten until he ‘confessed.’
⁵⁶
He spent some of his time at the notorious camp in the Kolyma area of far-eastern Siberia, later made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in
The Gulag Archipelago.
⁵⁷
Robert Conquest, in
The Great Terror,
says that Kolyma ‘had a death rate of up to 30 per cent [per year],’ but Korolev survived, and because so many people interceded on his behalf, he was eventually moved to a
sharashka,
a penal institution not as severe as the gulag, where scientists and engineers were made to work on practical projects for the good of the state.
⁵⁸
Korolev was employed in a
sharashka
run by Andrei Tupolev, another famous aircraft designer.
⁵⁹
During the early 1940s the Tu-2 light bomber and the Ilyushin-2 attack aircraft were designed in the Tupolev
sharashka,
and had notable records later in the war. Korolev was released in the summer of 1944, but it was not until 1957 – the year
Sputnik
was launched – that he obtained complete exoneration for his alleged ‘subversion.’
⁶⁰

Photographs of Korolev show a tough, round-faced bear of a man, and do nothing to dispel the idea that he was a force of nature, with a temper that terrified even senior colleagues. After the war he adroitly picked the brains of Germany’s rocket scientists, whom Russia had captured, and it was the same story after the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and the leaking of atomic secrets to the Russians. It was Korolev who spotted that the
delivery
of weapons of mass destruction was every bit as important as the weapons themselves. Rockets were needed that could travel thousands of miles with great accuracy. Korolev also realised that this was an area where two birds could be killed with one stone. A rocket that could carry a nuclear warhead all the way from Moscow to Washington would need enough power to send a satellite into orbit.

There were sound scientific reasons for exploring space, but from the information recently published about Korolev, it is clear that a major ingredient in
his
motivation was to beat the Americans.
⁶¹
This was very popular with Stalin, who met Korolev several times, especially in 1947. Here was another field, like genetics, where Soviet science could be different from, and better than, its Western counterpart.
⁶²
It was a climate where the idea of science as a cool, rational, reflective,
disinterested
activity went out the window. By the early 1950s Korolev was the single most important driving force behind the Russian rocket/space program, and according to James Harford his moods fluctuated wildly depending on progress. He had a German trophy car commandeered after the war, which he drove at high speeds around Moscow and the surrounding countryside to get the aggression out of his system. He took all failures of the project personally and obsessively combed the open American technical literature for clues as to how the Americans might be progressing/
⁶³
In the rush to be first, mistakes were made, and the first five tests of what was called in Russia the R-7 rocket were complete failures. But at last, on 21 August 1957, an R-7 flew the 7,000 kilometres to the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia.
⁶⁴

In July 1955 the Eisenhower administration had announced that the United States intended to launch a satellite called Vanguard as part of the International Geophysical Year, which was due to run from 1957 to 1958. Following this announcement, Korolev recruited several new scientists and began to build his own satellite. Recent accounts make it clear that Korolev was intensely aware of how important the project was historically – he just
had
to be first – and once R-7 had proved itself, he turned up the heat. Within a month of the first R-7 reaching Kamchatka,
Sputnik
lifted off its launchpad in Baikonur. The launch not only made headline news in the world’s media but gave a severe jolt to aeronautical professionals in the West.
⁶⁵
The Americans responded almost immediately, bringing forward by several months the launch of their own
satellite, to December 1957. This too was scarcely the mark of cool, rational scientists – and it showed. In the full glare of the television cameras, the American satellite got only a few feet off the ground before it fell back to earth and exploded in flames.
‘OH, WHAT A FLOPNIK!’
crowed
Pravda.
‘KAPUTNIK!’
said another newspaper;
‘STAYPUTNIK,’
a third.
⁶⁶