What Mad Pursuit (3 page)

After the war I did teach myself the elements of quantum mechanics, but I have never had occasion to use it. Books on this subject were in those days often entitled
Wave Mechanics.
At that time they could be found at the Cambridge University library classified under “Hydrodynamics.” No doubt things are different now.

Having obtained my Bachelor of Science degree, I started research at University College, under Professor Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, helped financially by my uncle, Arthur Crick. Andrade put me onto the dullest problem imaginable, the determination of the viscosity of water, under pressure, between 100° and 150° C. I lived in a rented apartment near the British Museum that I shared with an ex-school friend, Raoul Colinvaux, who was studying law.

My main task was to construct a sealable, spherical copper vessel (to hold the water), with a neck that would allow for the expansion of the water. It had to be kept at a constant temperature and its decaying oscillations captured on film. I am no good at precise mechanical construction but I had the help of Leonard Walden, Andrade’s senior lab assistant, and an excellent staff in the laboratory workshop. I actually enjoyed making the apparatus, boring though it was scientifically, because it was a relief to be doing something after years of merely learning.

These experiences may have helped me during the war, when I had to devise weapons, but otherwise they were a complete waste of time. What I
had
acquired, however indirectly, was the hubris of the physicist, the feeling that physics as a discipline was highly successful, so why should not other sciences do likewise? I believe this did help me when, after the war,
I
eventually switched to biophysics. It was a healthy corrective to the rather plodding, somewhat cautious attitude I often encountered when I began to mix with biologists.

When the Second World War started in September 1939, the department was evacuated to Wales. I stayed at home, occupying my time by learning to play squash. My brother (who was then a medical student) taught me on the squash courts at Mill Hill School. The students had been evacuated to Wales, while the school buildings had become an emergency hospital. Tony and I played on a sliding handicap. Every time I lost a game I started the next game with an extra point. If I won a game my advantage was reduced by one point. By the end of the year we were about equal. I played squash occasionally, on and off, for many years, both in London and Cambridge. I always enjoyed it because I never tried to play it seriously. As it is no longer a sensible game for one of my age, I now take my exercise by walking or by swimming in a heated swimming pool in the Southern Californian sunshine.

Eventually, early in 1940, I was given a civilian job at the Admiralty. This enabled me to marry my first wife, Doreen Dodd. Our son Michael was born in London, during an air raid, on November 25, 1940.1 worked first in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, next to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, a South London suburb. Then I was transferred to the Mine Design Department near Havant, not far from Portsmouth on the south coast of England. After the war ended I was given a job in scientific intelligence at the Admiralty in London. By good fortune a land mine had blown up the apparatus I had so laboriously constructed at University College, so after the war I was not obliged to go back to measuring the viscosity of water.

D
URING MOST of the war I had worked on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines—the noncontact mines—initially under the direction of a well-known theoretical physicist, H. S. W. Massey. Such mines were dropped by our aircraft into shipping channels in the relatively shallow water of the Baltic and the North Sea. There they sat, silently and secretly, on the seabed until they were exploded by an enemy sweep or they blew up one of the enemy ships. The trick in designing their circuits was to make them distinguish in some way between the magnetic fields and sounds of a sweep and those of a ship. In this I had been relatively successful. These special mines were about five times as effective as the standard noncontact mines. After the war it was estimated that mines sank or seriously damaged as many as a thousand enemy merchant vessels.

When the war finally came to an end I was at a loss as to what to do. By that time I was working at the Admiralty Headquarters in Whitehall, in the windowless extension known as The Citadel. I did the obvious thing and applied to become a permanent scientific civil servant. At first they were not sure they wanted me, but eventually, after pressure from the Admiralty and a second interview—the committee was chaired by novelist C. P. Snow—I was offered a permanent job. By this time I was reasonably sure that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing weapons, but what did I want to do? I took stock of my qualifications. A not-very-good degree, redeemed somewhat by my achievements at the Admiralty. A knowledge of certain restricted parts of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither of them subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all. The few short Admiralty reports I had written at Teddington would count for very little. Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. I was sure in my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research rather than going into applied research, even though my Admiralty experience would have fit me for developmental work. But did I have the necessary ability?

There was some doubt about this among my friends. Some thought I might do better at scientific journalism—perhaps, one of them suggested, I should attempt to join the staff of
Nature
, the leading scientific weekly. (I don’t know what the current editor, John Maddox, would think of this idea.) I consulted mathematician Edward Collingwood, under whom I had worked during the war. As always he was reassuring and helpful. He saw no reason why I should not succeed in pure research. I also asked my close friend Georg Kreisel, now a distinguished mathematical logician. I had run across him when he came, at the age of nineteen, to work in the Admiralty under Collingwood. Kreisel’s first paper—an essay on an approach to the problem of mining the Baltic, using the methods of Wittgenstein—Collingwood had wisely locked away in his safe. By this time I knew Kreisel well, so I felt his advice would be solidly based. He thought for a moment and delivered his judgment: ‘Tve known a lot of people more stupid than you who’ve made a success of it.”

Thus encouraged, my next problem was to decide what subject to choose. Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. This, as the sixties generation discovered later, only makes the decision more difficult. I brooded over this problem for several months. It was so late in my career that I knew I had to make the right choice the first time. I could hardly try one subject for two or three years and then switch to a radically different one. Whatever choice I made would be final, at least for many years.

Working in the Admiralty, I had several friends among the naval officers. They were interested in science but knew even less about it than I did. One day I noticed that I was telling them, with some enthusiasm, about recent advances in antibiotics—penicillin and such. Only that evening did it occur to me that I myself really knew almost nothing about these topics, apart from what I had read in
Penguin Science
or some similar periodical. It came to me that I was not really telling them about science. I was
gossiping
about it.

This insight was a revelation to me. I had discovered the gossip test—what you are really interested in is what you gossip about. Without hesitation, I applied it to my recent conversations. Quickly I narrowed down my interests to two main areas: the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain. Further introspection showed me that what these two subjects had in common was that they touched on problems which, in many circles, seemed beyond the power of science to explain. Obviously a disbelief in religious dogma was a very deep part of my nature. I had always appreciated that the scientific way of life, like the religious one, needed a high degree of dedication and that one could not be dedicated to anything unless one believed in it passionately.

By now I was delighted by my progress. I seemed to have found the pass through the interminable mountains of knowledge and could glimpse where I wanted to go. But I still had to decide which of the two areas—we would now call them molecular biology and neurobiology—I should choose. This proved to be much easier. I had little difficulty in convincing myself that my existing scientific background would be more easily applied to the first problem—the borderline between the living and the nonliving—and I decided without further hesitation that that would be my choice.

It should not be imagined that I knew nothing at all of either of my subjects. After the war I had spent a lot of my spare time in background reading. The Admiralty had generously allowed me to go once or twice a week to seminars and courses in theoretical physics at University College during my working hours. Sometimes I would sit at my desk at the Admiralty and surreptitiously read a textbook on organic chemistry. I remembered from my school days a little about hydrocarbons, and even about alcohols and ketones, but what were amino acids? In
Chemical and Engineering News
I read an article by an authority who prophesied that the hydrogen bond would be very important for biology—but what was it? The author had an unusual name—Linus Pauling—but he was quite unknown to me. I read Lord Adrian’s little book on the brain and found it fascinating. Also Erwin Schroedinger’s
What Is Life?
It was only later that I came to see its limitations—like many physicists, he knew nothing of chemistry—but he certainly made it seem as if great things were just around the corner. I read Hinshelwood’s
The Bacterial Cell
but could make little of it. (Sir Cyril Hinshelwood was a distinguished physical chemist, later President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Prize winner.)

In spite of all this reading, I must emphasize that I had only a very superficial knowledge of my two chosen subjects. I certainly had no deep insight into either of them. What attracted me to them was that each contained a major mystery—the mystery of life and the mystery of consciousness. I wanted to know more exactly what, in scientific terms, those mysteries were. I felt it would be splendid if I finally made some small contribution to their solution, but that seemed too far away to worry about.

At this point a crisis suddenly arose. I was offered a job! Not a mere studentship, but an actual job. Hamilton Hartridge, a distinguished but somewhat maverick physiologist, had persuaded the Medical Research Council to set up a small unit for him, to work on the eye. He must have heard I was looking for an opening because he asked me to come to see him. I hastily read his wartime paper on color vision—as I recall, he believed, from his work on the psychology of vision, that there were probably seven types of cones in the eye, not the traditional three. The interview went well and he offered me the job. My problem was that only the week before I had decided that my new field of work was to be molecular biology, not neurobiology.

The decision was a hard one. Finally I told myself that my preference for the living-nonliving borderline had been soundly based, that I would have only one chance to embark on a new career, and that I should not be deflected by the accident of someone offering me a job. Somewhat reluctantly, I wrote to Hartridge and told him that, attractive though it was, I must refuse his offer. Perhaps it was just as well because though I found him a lively and engaging character, he seemed to me a little too bouncy and I was not completely sure we would get on. I also doubt if he would have been very understanding if my work had shown his ideas wrong, as time has proved them to be.

My next task was to find some way of entering my new subject. I went around to University College to see Massey, under whom I had worked during the war, to explain my position and to ask for his help. His first guess when I told him I intended to leave the Admiralty was that I wanted him to get me a job in atomic energy (as it was then called), on which he had worked in Berkeley during the latter stages of the war. He looked surprised when I told him of my interest in biology, but he was very helpful and gave me two valuable introductions. The first was to A. V. Hill, also at University College, a Cambridge physiologist who had made for himself a solid reputation studying the biophysics of muscle, especially the thermal aspects of muscular contraction. For this he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in 1922. He liked the idea that I also should become a biophysicist and perhaps, eventually, work on muscle. He arranged an introduction to Sir Edward Mellanby, the powerful secretary of the Medical Research Council (the MRC). He also gave me some advice. “You should go to Cambridge,” he said. “You’ll find your own level there.”

The second person Massey told me to go to see was Maurice Wilkins. Massey smiled to himself as he said this, and I sensed that Maurice was in some way unusual. They had worked together on isotope separation at Berkeley for the atomic bomb. Wilkins had taken a job under his old boss, John Randall in the physics department at King’s College, London, and I went there to see him in the basement rooms in which they all worked.

Randall had persuaded the MRC that they should support the entry of physicists into biology. During the war scientists had acquired much more influence than they had had before it. It was not difficult for Randall, one of the inventors of the magnetron (the crucial development in military applications of radar), to argue that just as physicists had had a decisive influence on the war effort, so they could now turn their hands to some of the fundamental biological problems that lay at the foundations of medical research. Thus there was money available for “biophysics,” and the MRC had set up one of its research units at King’s College, with Randall as its director.

Exactly what biophysics was, or could usefully become, was less clear. At King’s they seemed to feel that an important step would be to apply modern physical techniques to biological problems. Wilkins had been working on a new ultraviolet microscope, using mirrors rather than lenses. Lenses would have had to have been made of quartz, since ordinary glass absorbs ultraviolet light. Exactly what they hoped to discover with these new instruments was less clear, but the feeling was that any new observations made would inevitably lead to new discoveries.

Most of their work involved looking at cells rather than molecules. At this time the full power of the electron microscope had yet to be developed, so observing cells meant accepting the relatively low resolving power of the light microscope. The distance between atoms is more than a thousand times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Most viruses are far too tiny to be seen in an ordinary high-powered microscope, except perhaps as a minute spot of light against a dark background.

In spite of Maurice’s enthusiasm and his very friendly explanations, I was not entirely convinced that this was the right way to go. However, at this stage I knew so little of my new subject that I could form only very tentative opinions. I was mainly interested in the borderline between the living and the nonliving, wherever that was, and most of the work at King’s seemed rather far on the biological side of that border.

Perhaps the most useful result of this initial contact was my continued friendship with Maurice. We both had somewhat similar scientific backgrounds. We even looked somewhat alike. Many years later, upon seeing a photograph of Maurice in a textbook that was somewhat confusingly labeled (it was next to one of Jim Watson), a young woman in New York mistook it for one of me, though I was standing in front of her at the time. At one stage I even wondered if we might be distantly related, since my mother’s maiden name was Wilkins, but if we are cousins we must be very distant ones. More to the point, we were both of a similar age and traveling the same scientific path from physics to biology.

Maurice did not seem especially unusual to me. Even if I had known, say, that he had a taste for Tibetan music, I doubt if I would have considered that odd. Odile (who became my second wife) thought he was rather strange because when he first arrived for dinner at her apartment in Earl’s Court he went straight into the kitchen and lifted the lids of the saucepans to see what was cooking. She had become accustomed to dealing with naval officers, and they never did things like that. After she discovered that this was not the impertinent curiosity of a hungry man—scientists seemed to be curious about such odd things—but simply that Maurice was interested in cooking, she looked at him in a new light.

My next problem was to decide what to work on and, at least as important, where to do it. I first explored the possibility of working at Birkbeck College in London with the X-ray crystallographer J. D. Bernal. Bernal was a fascinating character. One can get a vivid idea of him by reading C. P. Snow’s early science novel
The Search
, since the character Constantine is obviously based on Bernal. It is amusing to note that, in the novel, Constantine wins fame and an F.R.S. by discovering how to synthesize proteins, though Snow wisely didn’t indicate exactly what the process was. The plot of the novel turns on the setting up of a biophysics institute, while the final incident concerns the narrator deciding not to expose a fellow scientist for falsifying results and instead to give up his own career in science and become a writer, an incident I suspect modeled on something similar in Snow’s career.