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Nicholas Wade celebrates a genuinely original scientist
July 17th, 2006Book (review) shows Crick was exemplary
What a relief to read something intelligent in the newspaper of record about a truly sharp and original mind in science, unfettered by the chains of conformity and lack of imagination. Nicholas Wade shows himself to be a crack hack well up to the task of appreciating author, subject and the free thinking spirit in science with his review of a biography of Francis Crick last Tuesday (Jul 11).
The first biography of Crick, who died in 2004 at the age of 88, has now appeared. Called “Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code,†it is by Matt Ridley, one of the few journalists Crick was in the habit of talking with. Mr. Ridley has created a vivid portrait that explains Crick’s scientific work with clarity, deftly outlines his career and provides sharp insights into the nature of Crick’s remarkable creativity.
One interesting point is that Crick never bothered to read newspapers, since he had found out during his war duties as a boffin designing sea mines that all the interesting stories never made it into their pages.
Mr. Ridley dwells only briefly on Crick’s heterodox views and experimental way of life. He seldom read newspapers, because working in intelligence had convinced him that most stories never reached the press. He experimented with marijuana and LSD, Mr. Ridley reports.
There is even a plug for Honest Jim’s “The Double Helix” as “deep but gossipy”, which Crick at first detested but later realized was clever.
Crick was slow to anger and quick to forgive. He was quite unreasonably furious at “The Double Helix,†Watson’s deep though gossipy account of their discovery.The reason, Mr. Ridley suggests, is that Crick “saw himself as a dedicated seeker of great truths who had worked very hard, with long hours of reading, calculation, and intuition, to get to the point where he could make a great discovery; yet the world would now learn about the quest as if it had been just another soap opera.â€
But the two men were soon friends again, Crick later remarking, “I now appreciate how skillful Jim was.â€
Read this little review, consider the scene today in HIV?AIDS, and weep.
Mr. Ridley’s contribution is that he has extracted from existing material a considerably more complete and colorful portrait of Crick than has existed before. And by deft narration and analysis, he has captured the wonder of an unparalleled scientific mind at work and at play.
Of course, the ultimate question is, if Wade appreciates true quality in science so well, what has prevented him from seeing that the most fashionable disease study of the last two decades is the Enron of science?
The New York Times
July 11, 2006
Books
A Peek Into the Remarkable Mind Behind the Genetic Code
By NICHOLAS WADE
Francis Crick is associated with two discoveries, probably two of the most important in the 20th century: the double helix of DNA and the genetic code. The first he discovered with James Watson; the second he worked out mostly by himself, though with contributions from many others.
Despite Crick’s extraordinary distinction as a scientist, little has been written about his life aside from his brief autobiographical essay, “What Mad Pursuit,†and his leading role in “The Eighth Day of Creation,†Horace Freeland Judson’s outstanding oral history of molecular biology.
The first biography of Crick, who died in 2004 at the age of 88, has now appeared. Called “Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code,†it is by Matt Ridley, one of the few journalists Crick was in the habit of talking with. Mr. Ridley has created a vivid portrait that explains Crick’s scientific work with clarity, deftly outlines his career and provides sharp insights into the nature of Crick’s remarkable creativity.
Crick, who set a high value on his privacy, seems not to have left biographers a great deal to work with beyond what is already on the record.
One source of new material developed by Mr. Ridley concerns Crick’s wartime career in the British Admiralty. Trained as a physicist, Crick worked on magnetic and acoustic mines and mine countermeasures. Intelligence agents learned that the German minesweepers known as Sperrbrechers carried an enormous magnet to make British magnetic mines explode harmlessly far ahead of them.
When a Royal Air Force plane photographed a Sperrbrecher with its wake cutting through the wash of a mine explosion, Crick realized he had the physical information to calculate the weight and strength of the magnet. On that basis he designed a mine so insensitive it would detonate only right under a Sperrbrecher.
He had considerable trouble persuading British admirals to invest in a mine that all other ships passed over unscathed. But that obstacle overcome, his devices worked splendidly, sinking more than 100 Sperrbrechers and stripping German waters of their defenses.
Rejecting a promising career in military physics after the war, Crick was influenced by two friends, the Austrian mathematician Georg Kreisel and the physicist Maurice Wilkins, to begin a new career in biological research.
As Mr. Ridley notes, Crick was in middle age when he embarked on his career of scientific discovery, in contrast with the many scientists who make their marks when young.
Crick forged his own path through life. Mr. Ridley dwells only briefly on Crick’s heterodox views and experimental way of life. He seldom read newspapers, because working in intelligence had convinced him that most stories never reached the press. He experimented with marijuana and LSD, Mr. Ridley reports.
Crick and his wife Odile held lively parties and enjoyed the company of their many bohemian friends, like John Gayer-Anderson, who made pornographic pottery.
“Though they did not have an explicitly ‘open marriage,’ Francis was an incorrigible flirt,†Mr. Ridley writes, “and Odile at least affected not to mind.â€
Crick refused to meet the queen when she visited Cambridge’s new Laboratory of Molecular Biology because he disapproved of royalty, and he declined a knighthood. He deeply disliked religion, saying once that Christianity was all right between consenting adults but should not be taught to children.
He refused to attend weddings or funerals, though he was always up for the party afterward. He resigned from Churchill College when it decided to build a chapel like any other Cambridge college.
Desire to undercut religious obscurantism was a cogent motive in Crick’s scientific career, shaping his choice first of the gene and later of consciousness as problems that, if cracked, would destroy the last refuges of vitalism.
“Throughout, he stayed true to himself: ebullient, loquacious, charming, skeptical, tenacious,†Mr. Ridley writes in an eloquent coda. “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.â€
Among the many virtues of this short, beautifully written book are the sharp glimpses it offers into a mind of remarkable creativity.
An unusual aspect of Crick’s work habits was that his thinking was forged in the challenge of argument. This required a constant interlocutor or intellectual sparring partner. Mr. Kreisel, the mathematician, was the first holder of this unusual position, followed by Watson for the discovery of the double helix, Sydney Brenner for the work on the genetic code, and Christof Koch for the study of the brain and consciousness.
“In the periods when he had no such sounding board he was visibly at a loss,†Mr. Ridley says.
Another feature of Crick’s mind was that he excelled in being able to visualize the physical relationship of objects. He could intuitively imagine in his mind’s eye the space-group symmetry of a crystal’s unit cell, meaning how far it must be rotated to look the same again. A glance at Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photos of DNA told him what she had not grasped, that the two parallel chains of the DNA double helix must run in opposite directions.
“Although it is necessary to be able to handle the algebraic details, I soon found I could see the answer to many of these mathematical problems by a combination of imagery and logic, without first having to slog through the mathematics,†he said.
Another special feature of his approach to science was the difficult balance he always maintained between theory and empiricism.
He tried every possible theoretical approach to the problem of how the 60 possibilities allowed by a four base triplet genetic code might yield 20 kinds of amino acid but never trusted the answers, however elegant. That essential caution left him open to the empirical approach by which the code was finally broken.
He had the gift of being able to scan vast amounts of confusing experimental data, reject parts that seemed not to fit and divine the correct answer. Before DNA, biochemists had stamp-collected a large number of amino acids. In 1953 Crick and Watson, in sessions at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, set out to select some finite number of amino acids that DNA might reasonably code for.
Ridley observes: “They came up with 20. That they got the list exactly right, despite being amateur biochemists, is a minor miracle.â€
Crick’s special ability to combine his intuitions with theoretical and empirical judgment was at its finest in his astonishingly prescient paper of 1958 on protein synthesis.
In it he laid out the field’s several fundamental axioms, including that all proteins are composed of combinations of the same 20 amino acids, and that the linear order of amino acids determines the three-dimensional structure into which the protein is shaped. “All these propositions were guesses,†Mr. Ridley writes, “and all are correct.â€
Crick was slow to anger and quick to forgive. He was quite unreasonably furious at “The Double Helix,†Watson’s deep though gossipy account of their discovery.
The reason, Mr. Ridley suggests, is that Crick “saw himself as a dedicated seeker of great truths who had worked very hard, with long hours of reading, calculation, and intuition, to get to the point where he could make a great discovery; yet the world would now learn about the quest as if it had been just another soap opera.â€
But the two men were soon friends again, Crick later remarking, “I now appreciate how skillful Jim was.â€
It would be unfair to criticize the author for making essentially the same judgments about Crick’s historical role as can be found in Mr. Judson’s book, for both are correct. And it would be quite wrong to dismiss Mr. Ridley’s biography because it does not contain much new information, although in truth it does not.
Mr. Ridley’s contribution is that he has extracted from existing material a considerably more complete and colorful portrait of Crick than has existed before. And by deft narration and analysis, he has captured the wonder of an unparalleled scientific mind at work and at play.
If there is one place on the network TV dial where science is alive on the everyday level, it’s ABC, which is promising, since it is rumored to be planning coverage of AIDS in South Africa. John Stossel at 
According to the report, studies have shown that breast feeding is beneficial in building up the immune system, the US government has accepted this, and run an ad campaign pointing out that using bottled formula risks losing this effect. Needless to say, some object to the campaign, including mothers who are stuck with bottle feeding for some reason they can’t control.
Finally, a discussion of the lobster: how fair is it that it should be rapidly boiled alive for our delectation? Here it seems that science cannot advise, except indirectly, because it cannot measure pain in a silent animal, and lobsters do not, contrary to myth, scream when thrown into the boiling pot. They do appear to hurry to get out for quite a few seconds, but according to the Harvard scientist trotted on camera briefly this is mere “reflex”.
Odd goings on at Amazon, where a new review of Harvey Bialy’s “Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg” has appeared, with all the earmarks of a John Moore colleague, or possibly even Cornell science superstar and handy HIV?AIDS front man John Moore himself under a pen-name.
However, it doesn’t matter that much. The comparison between the long string of articulate and informed positive reviews and the vulgar little hatchet jobs by Moore and his friends is clear enough. We like the little verse by Francis Bacon, who captures what should be the lay reader’s response in a nutshell:
Of course, the book review that counts more than any other is by Nobel winner Kary Mullis. It has the special poignancy of being written by one of the few scientists who is a genuine peer of Peter Duesberg’s in originality and independence of mind:
Odd goings on at Amazon, where a new review of Harvey Bialy’s “Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg” has appeared, with all the earmarks of a John Moore colleague, or possibly even Cornell science superstar and handy HIV?AIDS front man John Moore himself under a pen-name.
However, it doesn’t matter that much. The comparison between the long string of articulate and informed positive reviews and the vulgar little hatchet jobs by Moore and his friends is clear enough. We like the little verse by Francis Bacon, who captures what will be the lay reader’s response in a nutshell:
Of course, the book review that counts more than any other is by Nobel winner Kary Mullis. It has the special poignancy of being written by one of the few scientists who is a genuine peer of Peter Duesberg’s in originality and independence of mind:
The long weekend seems to have weakened the instinct for self-preservation of a well known establishment HIV?AIDS researcher, who has tried to join in ganging up on Harvey Bialy’s book on Amazon, presumably to save his buddy John Moore from further embarrassment for a similar faux pas last week.
Needless to say, this sally was received with delight in Cuernavaca where the ever vigilant author Harvey Bialy stirred his email witches brew and sent out a notice gleefully reminding insiders of the fact that in his very book on page 195 Mario Stevenson, if he had troubled to read it, would have found a salutary reminder of his own earlier admission of how the paradigm came up emptyhanded when asked to explain the core of its claim – exactly what Peter Duesberg had just pointed out a month earlier.
As things stand at present, with two unspecific damnations of Harvey’s book and two detailed appreciations recently, we now have four names leading off the line up of reviews of “Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg”: Mario Stevenson, “Dr. Chipper” (actually a university professor, Charles Geshekter, who publicly supports Peter Duesberg and who did not intend for Amazon to print his Web moniker but his own name, and is trying to correct that), John Moore, and the mathematician Darin Brown.
Of course, if either Moore or his even less articulate friend Stevenson ever want to find pointers as to how to write a truly devastating review, they might leaf through back numbers of Nature Biotechnology and read the killer demolition of “Making PCR” by Paul Rabinow (University of Chicago, 1996) that Harvey Bialy himself perpetrated in Nature Biotechnology titled “Politically Correct PCR.”
All this attention on Amazon leaves the intellectual, Mexico-based arch-conservative rebel author professor, who likes to act as the behind the scenes general of the 2,400 strong army of HIV?AIDS critics, or at least some of the more activist scientists, academics and writers among them, in such a good mood that he has provided some exclusive material to New AIDS Review, an account of why he left the position of founding science editor at Nature Biotechnology in 1996 for points south, starting with Cuba.
What happened was that Bialy found another outlet for his manipulative wizardry, a scheme he concocted in 1994 which joined Cuba, Israel and South Africa as biotechnology partners. The initiative was the CISABE, or Cuba, Israel South Africa Biotechnology Exchange, and he left in the spring of 1996 for La Habana to manage the project full time from the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering, where he had been a senior advisor for ten years.
But then he anyway landed on his feet. He was invited by Francisco Bolivar, co-inventor of the plasmid cloning vector pBR322, a founding scientist of Genentech and founding director of the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to “come here and do for us what you did for Cuba, and believe me we will not treat you that way.”
He gives the Virtual Library all the profits if any from his scientific biography of Duesberg, which was published jointly by the Institute of Biotechnology and the National University (the first book ever published by the IBT, and the first English language book ever published by the UNAM), and was recently translated into Spanish by Roberto Stock, a senior investigator at the Institute of Biotechnology, and published by the National University of Mexico Press (ISBN 9703225993).
Qualified outsiders and maverick insiders are very often right about the need to replace received wisdom in science and society. This noncommercial, disinterested, pro bono site exists to back the best of them in their uphill assault on the typically massively entrenched edifice of resistance to and prejudice against reviewing, let alone revising, ruling ideas. 
The overriding purpose is to combat group think and the political and social propaganda of government agencies and other large social systems, public and corporate, which induce conformist group think and unthinking social compliance, somewtimes with blatant error, by comparing current established beliefs and claims in science and elsewhere with the scholarly professional and research literature, and especially to defend the values of science and good scientists in the paradigm wars of HIV/AIDS, cancer, evolution, global warming, nutrition, particle physics, economics, religious belief and any other disputes over replacing doubtful ideas against conformity, prejudice, subjectivity and self-interest, standing up for free speech and publication against the tendency of the authorities to repress revolutionary ideas, and mining corrective truths buried in the professional journals and commonly overlooked by harried hacks. 
This is my battle with John Maddox [editor of Nature] and with people who are actually fabricating the data [Ascher et al in Nature, March 11, 1993]. They claim to have such a group that had not used any drugs. When I analyzed the data, it turned out that there was not a single person in their paper that was drug-free. I submitted a critique to Maddox, but his response was, I could no longer respond. I was censored. – Peter Duesberg (left), interview with Bob Guccione, Spin magazine, September, 1993.
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