Vol 455|16 October 2008
AUTUMN BOOKS
Relics of the modern mind
Our enduring search for meaning in life explains the reverence with which the bones of seventeenth-century
French philosopher René Descartes were worshipped, suggests Lisa Jardine.
In spring 1666, the body of the French
philosopher and scientist René Descartes was
removed from its resting place in the undistinguished Adolf Fredriks churchyard in the
northeast of Stockholm where it had been
buried quietly 16 years earlier, and transported
under cover of darkness to the residence of the
French ambassador to Sweden, Hugues de
Terlon. There, under de Terlon’s reverential
supervision, the coffin was opened. Its contents
were transferred to a small, specially made copper coffin to be transported to a more appropriate resting place in Paris. Thus began the
curious peregrinations of Descartes’ bones.
By the time de Terlon’s convoy set off for
home, Russell Shorto tells us in his beguiling
new book, Descartes’ Bones, fragments of the
controversial thinker’s earthly remains had
already started to be dispersed, as admirers
licitly and covertly acquired relics — souvenirs
to be treasured and revered, and handed down
through the generations.
Shorto confesses that when he began to
investigate the story of Descartes’ remains passing down through the centuries, he “fell in love
with it, the way you can only fall in love with
something truly odd that you find buried in a
very old book”. As he pursued the fortunes of
the bones — and above all the separated skull
— through the historical records, he realized
that there was more to the story than mere
curiosity. Here was “a historical detective story
about the creation of the modern mind”.
In their attitudes to the relics, Shorto argues,
successive generations of Descartes’ admirers
and detractors betrayed their own deeply held
beliefs about the limits of rationality, and the
persisting need for faith in order to make sense
of the complexity of human existence. In 1666,
de Terlon had requested the authorities that he
might himself be allowed, “religiously”, to take
possession of Descartes’ right index finger, the
bone “which had served as an instrument in
the immortal writings of the deceased”. The
Swedish family that became the proud owners of Descartes’ skull — how, it is not clear
— had it lovingly inscribed with Latin verses
celebrating its significance as a souvenir of the
beginnings of rationality. Successive owners
added their own signatures and inscriptions
testifying to their
own ‘faith’ in the relic.
According to the traditional history of philosophy, Descartes’ statement “Cogito, ergo
sum” and his committed view that the human
body is a well-ordered machine, threatened
to drive faith and human emotions out of the
discourse of humanity. The story of Descartes’
bones is, according to Shorto, the tale of each
generation’s struggle to retain its most deeply
held spiritual beliefs in the face of such mechanistic explanations, an emotional attempt to
bridge the mind–body dualism.
NEW IN PAPERBACK
The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape
of the Universe
by Donal O’Shea (Penguin, £9.99)
One of the great mathematical theories, the Poincaré
conjecture defied proof for a century until it was solved
in 2006 by an eccentric Russian mathematician. In his
enthralling book, O’Shea explains the mathematics
behind the conjecture, its proof and the curious
personalities involved.
The Essential Einstein: His Greatest Works
Edited, with commentary, by Stephen
Hawking
(Penguin, £12.99)
Collecting the highlights of his work, this book
presents Einstein’s view of physics and the world
in his own words. Hawking introduces each
section, summarizing the historical context and
impacts of Einstein’s discoveries.
863
ILLUSTRATIONS BY S. KAMBAYASHI
Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the
Conflict Between Faith and Reason
by Russell Shorto
Doubleday: 2008. 320pp. $26
OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS
Each step in the detective investigation contributes to our understanding of these same
issues today. At the height of the French Revolution, for instance, Alexandre Lenoir became
the self-appointed custodian of the human
remains and historic relics preserved across
France in churches and chapels, volunteering to rescue them from the desecration of the
marauding mobs and place them in his own
‘hall of antiquities’ for safe keeping. He went
about his task with revolutionary — or perhaps,
Shorto suggests, religious — zeal, assembling
huge quantities of stonework and statuary, and
logging its acquisition with care.
As reason replaced faith in the new French
Republic, Lenoir rescued the bones of France’s
greatest rationalist from the church of St Geneviève in Paris where they had lain since de
Terlon recovered them from Sweden. Meanwhile, on the eve of the Terror, a French revolutionary committee decreed that the bones
should be moved to the Pantheon — the new
secular cathedral of the revolution — and a
statue erected to Descartes’ memory. Not for
the first time, however, events overtook the
best of intentions. In spite of an official decree
of the ruling National Convention, the bones
stayed in Lenoir’s macabre museum, where he
laid out his tombs and funerary statuary in a
pleasure garden in which visitors could wander
at will and “ponder beauty and death”.
Once again, the whereabouts of Descartes’
bones become shrouded in mystery. It is not
even clear that Lenoir’s rescued remains were
those of the father of rationalism. Nor is it clear
what happened to them thereafter. They seem
to have gone missing among the carefully documented treasures in Lenoir’s museum.
For Shorto, his own fascination with this
curious piece of narrative history is a mirror
for the concerns of each and every one of us,
bewildered by modernity and struggling to find
meaning and belief in a confusing world. His
piecing together of the fortunes of Descartes’
bones is elegantly interwoven with the intellectual history of Cartesian philosophy and
beliefs, as well as with the history of the uncomfortable relationship between Catholicism and
Cartesianism. His suggestion is, I think, that we
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
cannot escape from our felt need for faith and
devotion, and that, deprived of religious relics
we turn to secular forms of worship.
I am not sure that our attitude to mortal
remains has not always sat apart from the rest
of our thinking and feeling — a place of talisman and taboo that brings out in us, from the
depths of our soul as it were, our most primitive, elemental feelings and attitudes, however
rational our outlook.
Between 1640 and 1660, for example, an
English gentleman named John Bargrave
embarked on a ‘grand tour’ of Europe in search
of unusual items to assemble in a fashionable
cabinet of curiosities. When he returned to
England he became a canon of Canterbury
Cathedral, to which he bequeathed his carefully catalogued collection. The Bargrave
cabinets can still be seen there today. It is, in
a way, a biography in a box, testifying in its
varied items to Bargrave’s personal passions
and interests. There is a beautifully constructed
model of an eye, which can be dismantled to
show its inner structure. There are 34 saints’
bones bought for 2 shillings and 6 pence (about
£200 or US$350 today). There are tiny antique
statues, rings, trinkets, each lodged in its own
drawer and accompanied by a description of
Lisa Jardine is director of the Centre for Editing
Lives and Letters and centenary professor of
Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University
of London, London E1 4NS, UK. Her latest book is
Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory.
Psychology’s pet subject
Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot
Discovered a Hidden World of Animal
Intelligence — and Formed a Deep Bond in
the Process
by Irene Pepperberg
HarperCollins: 2008. 240 pp. $23.95
Alex and Me is the conjoined life story of
cognitive psychologist Irene Pepperberg
and her African grey parrot, Alex. Pepperberg sketches her life from lonely girlhood
in Brooklyn, New York, through college and
graduate school — she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aged 16,
and gained a PhD in theoretical chemistry
New Theories of Everything
by John D. Barrow (Oxford Univ. Press, £8.99)
Updating his 1991 work, Theories of Everything,
Barrow looks at the latest discoveries and
theories about the Universe and explores
their philosophical and cultural implications.
He shows how the search for a Theory of
Everything leaves us more aware of the richness
and complexity of the cosmos.
864
what it is and where it was found.
Just as in the case of Descartes’ bones,
Bargrave’s cabinets reveal an intense fascination on Bargrave’s part for relics and human
remains. One of the items in it — which I have
myself, somewhat tremulously, handled — is
‘the finger of a Frenchman’. Bargrave’s catalogue tells us of the “danse macabre” put on
for him at the monastery at Toulouse where
he acquired it and where “all the dead men
and women’s corpses that are buried there are
dried into a kind of mummy”. He wrote: “They
showed us the corpse of a physician (of their
acquaintance), which, when they put a clean
piece of paper into one hand and a pen into the
other, stood in such a posture as if he had seriously been a-writing a dose or prescription.”
Bargrave’s macabre trophy is a reminder of
our enduring fascination with remnants and
reminders of our own mortality. Shorto’s beautifully written book does likewise — the reader
will find its intellectual insights entertaining,
enlightening and, perhaps, disturbing.
■
at Harvard University — to her acquisition
of Alex in 1977. Pepperberg helped Alex to
develop the use of spoken words to identify
numbers, colours, materials, shapes and categories of objects. She struggled to gain respect
and recognition from the academic community for her work, and this takes centre stage
in her account.
The book starts and ends with Alex’s death
in September 2007. The public response to his
demise underscored his celebrity status. Outpourings of grief reached Pepperberg from all
around the world — even The Economist ran
an obituary. She conveys effectively her shock
at losing not just her main research subject, but
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has
Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
by David J. Linden (Harvard Univ. Press, $17.95)
Linden’s introduction to brain science is
enjoyable and accessible. “Even readers trained in
neuroscience are likely to enjoy the many tidbits of
rarely taught information — on love, sex, gender,
sleep and dreams — that spice up Linden’s main
argument,” wrote reviewer Georg Striedter
(Nature 447, 640; 2007).
AUTUMN BOOKS OPINION
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
also a beloved friend of some 30 years.
Similarly to many scientists whose
lives revolve largely around
their work, Pepperberg is impatient
with her critics.
She bemoans the
reviewers of her
work who force
her to carry out
more experiments
when the results are
already abundantly
clear, and the funding agencies that fail
to see the importance
of her project. She
calls their criticisms
“denigrating”. Yet there are
many good reasons to be sceptical of the exceptional abilities of a
single animal.
More than 350 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes suggested
that there was a fundamental difference between “teach[ing] a magpie to say good-day to its mistress,
when it sees her approach” and the
verbal expression of ideas by human
beings. The magpie, declared Descartes,
does not form words as expressions of its
thoughts, only as responses to obtain a desirable reward, learnt through training.
Pepperberg insists that her work with Alex
puts the final nail in Descartes’ coffin, and shoos
away the criticism of the behaviourists who are
Descartes’ heirs. She quotes her last interchange
with Alex on the night before his death: ‘“You be
good,” said Alex. “I love you.”’
Although she admits that her students
would sometimes teach Alex entertaining sayings in the manner that Descartes suggested,
she insists that her relationship with Alex was
truly one of reciprocated affection. However,
before concluding that a parrot proclaiming
love knows whereof he squawks, one would
want to be certain that nobody has been
giving the bird a titbit for what he says.
A century ago in Berlin, a respected school
teacher presented to the public a horse known
as Clever Hans, who had the apparent intelligence of a 13-year-old child. A prestigious
commission of experts was convinced that
Hans could solve school-level arithmetic
problems. However, psychology student Oskar
Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not
answering the questions as posed, but instead
responding to the subtle head movements of
those who asked the questions. The movements were so slight the questioners did not
know they were making them, and there was
no suggestion that the horse’s owner had intentionally taught Hans to respond to them. Can
we be confident that Alex was not deducing the
correct response from subtle cues the experimenters were giving off?
One defence against the accusation that
Alex was just another Clever Hans is that his
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How the Body
Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost)
Everything Better
by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee
(Random House, $15.00)
This book explores the emerging science of mind–body
connections. “Ideas from sister disciplines, including
neurology, psychiatry and cultural anthropology, mix
comfortably with laboratory observations,” wrote
Edvard Moser (Nature 449, 406; 2007).
responses were much more varied than the
foot stomping that Hans used to
answer questions. Whereas
Hans only needed to be
cued to start and stop
moving his hoof, Alex
needed to say many different things to answer a
question correctly. However, the fact that Pepperberg always remained in
the room to interpret Alex’s
utterances poses problems for
this defence. We know that the
human ear is easily tricked. Led
Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven
contains satanic lyrics when
played backwards — but only
if the words are shown to the
listener. Without a script, the
reversed sounds are perceived
as nothing more than mixed-up
phonemes. The squawking of a
parrot often contains jumbled
speech sounds, so the form
these take to a listener might
well depend on what that
person expects to hear.
Alex and Me is an engaging narrative because it has the
intimate relationship between
one human and one parrot at its
centre. But as an exploration in science, it is
deeply worrying that nobody can replicate its
central findings, given the ease with which the
subjects and equipment can be acquired. Even
Pepperberg has been unable to replicate Alex’s
achievements using other parrots.
Alex may have had some sense of number,
shape, colour and material. Similar results
have been obtained with pigeons, so it is not an
absurd conjecture. For those who did not know
him personally, the tragedy of Alex’s passing is
that the records that remain are not enough to
prove the case one way or the other.
■
Clive Wynne is associate professor of psychology
at the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
32601, USA, and author of Do Animals Think?
e-mail: [email protected]
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a
Social Mind
by Dorothy L. Cheyney and Robert M. Seyfarth
(Univ. Chicago Press, $18.00)
Cheyney and Seyfarth examine the dynamics of
baboon society. “Their enthusiasm is obvious, and
their knowledge is vast and expressed with great
clarity,” wrote Asif A. Ghazanfar. “It will get you
thinking — and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to
see it all for yourself.” (Nature 448, 535–536; 2007).
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OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
How a hoax fooled the faithful
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable
True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen,
Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in
Nineteenth-Century New York
by Matthew Goodman
Basic Books: 2008. 384 pp. $26.00, £15.99
In the hot summer of 1835, Matthew Goodman
writes in his new book The Sun and the Moon,
an English-educated journalist who had moved
to New York mulled over his adopted country.
Although there was much that was admirable
about the nation, he decided, a blind obedience
to religion was keeping it from being as rational
as he wished it to be. Being a superior sort of
individual, and confident that he was better
educated than those around him, he resolved
to fix that.
The problem was most painful, he felt, in
astronomy, which was especially popular that
year. Halley’s comet was expected back in September, and already in August telescopes had
been set up in public parks to offer citizens
a first glimpse for 6 cents. Yet, instead of the
predictable nature of the comet’s return demolishing religious obedience, as popular science
writer Richard Dawkins might have wished,
public opinion was just the opposite.
Halley’s comet, it was believed, proved the
existence of a divine Creator, who was able
to propel objects at will through the heavens.
New Yorkers — educated and not — accepted
that intelligent beings existed on other planets,
providing further proof that a divine creator
beneficently ruled over us all.
That link between astronomy and religion
was what Richard Adams Locke, a descendant of the philosopher John Locke, decided
had to be changed. He knew that the founding
fathers of the United States had been critical
of revealed religion — indeed, during his own
education in Britain he had come to agree with
that criticism. Before his arrival in New York he
had looked to the United States as a beacon of
radical reform, suitable to inspire class-bound,
866
subservient Britain. Yet now
his adopted country was
in the grip of religious
fundamentalism.
After several years
of making his way in
journalism, Locke
was in a position to
act. He had recently
been promoted from
police reporter to
editor-in-chief of the
New York Sun, one of
the world’s first massmarket newspapers.
It was aimed at ordinary readers, produced
on new, steam-driven
presses, and sold not by
genteel subscription but by
hustling newspaper boys.
Late in August 1835,
a series of articles began
appearing in the newspaper.
They described the wondrous discoveries of John Herschel, the noted English
astronomer who had gone to the Cape provinces, in what is now South Africa, to chart the
southern sky. Herschel was indeed there, but
being so remote he was also many weeks away
from any direct communication with New York.
This made him an especially good subject for
an inventive journalist. The hoax that Locke
conjured up would have a long stretch to run
before it could be disproved.
The first few Sun articles were innocuous
enough, stating that a scientific journal was
reporting some astounding results before
going into technical detail about the improved
telescope that Herschel was using.
Then came the bombshell: Herschel, it was
reported, had discovered lakes of water and
herds of wild animals on the Moon. Circulation of the Sun shot up. More reports came in.
Herschel had discovered more than animals —
he had identified human-like life there as well.
The newsboys selling the Sun might not
have read the articles in detail, but they loved
the circulation they generated. Everyone
— clerics and engineers, government officials
and labourers — wanted to know what was
going to come next.
Locke didn’t disappoint them. For shortly
before the great southern African telescope
needed to be, conveniently, repositioned for
other pressing enquiries, Herschel managed
to detect clear marks of religious temples on
the Moon.
By Locke’s plan, that would end it. He had
taken the purported discoveries to ridiculous
extremes. Everyone would realize he was writing a spoof, and Americans would see how silly
it was to use astronomy as a way of justifying
their religious beliefs.
But English journalists who think they
know the United States have a habit of getting
things wrong. Even when reports came back
Bad Science
The Best American Science Writing 2008
by Ben Goldacre
(HarperCollins, £12.99)
Fast-paced and highly readable, Bad Science
dismantles the dubious claims behind scare
headlines, fad nutritionists and suspect
‘clinical trials’. Looking at specific cases,
Ben Goldacre explains how bad science is
presented to look real and why people are so
willing to believe it.
Edited by Sylvia Nasar (series edited by Jesse
Cohen) (Harper Perennial, $14.95)
The latest edition of this popular series offers
a selection of excerpts from familiar names,
including Oliver Sacks and Carl Zimmer. Some
focus on climate change or new technology. Many
deal with medicine or disease — from genetic
disorders, psychiatry and cancer, to compromised
physicians and misinterpreted research.
AUTUMN BOOKS OPINION
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
from South Africa that Herschel had made no
such discoveries as the Sun described, good
New Yorkers were only reinforced in their
religious beliefs. Surely the visions that he had
described were a sign of the religious insights
that would await us, once science moved
forward enough?
The Sun and the Moon is a wonderful cautionary tale, especially in an era like our own,
when, for example, no candidate is likely to
be elected president of the United States if
he professes disbelief in either science or
religion. The mix seems illogical, but only
if one misses how the two domains are
popularly understood. Most people do not
understand the details of how science works.
They just see the impressive results of what
it can achieve — whether it is steam engines
in Locke’s era or iPhones in ours. The more
technology advances, the more such blind
trust is encouraged. Locke and Dawkins
might well weep, but a popular life that shares
none of their ultimate views goes on.
Unfortunately, Goodman tells the story
poorly, undecided if his book is an account
of Locke’s hoax or a general social history
of the mass press and ways that cynics and
reformers dealt with popular credulity. But his
research is excellent, and if publishers fund
him to write a wider account, it would be well
worth reading.
■
David Bodanis is a writer based in London and
the author of Passionate Minds.
Tale of a clockwork computer
Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery
of the World’s First Computer
by Jo Marchant
William Heinemann/Da Capo Press:
2008/2009. 330 pp/288 pp. £12.99/$25
It is appropriate that Arthur C. Clarke recommended this book before his death in March
2008. Decoding the Heavens tells the story of
the 2,000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism
and its decipherment. The tale encompasses
diving, shipwrecked treasure, scientific
puzzles, cutting-edge technology and computing, all of which Clarke knew from the
inside. Moreover, he had a walk-on role.
The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient
Greek artefact comprising more than 30 precisely cut bronze gear wheels, dials and pointers held in a wooden case.
Clarke began to publicize the mechanism
in 1959, perhaps encouraged by his friend
Jacques Cousteau, who in 1953 had reinvestigated an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island
of Antikythera, which had been salvaged by
roving Aegean sponge divers in 1900–01. In
1965, Clarke tracked down the mechanism’s
encrusted remains languishing in a cigar box at
the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, later televising it in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World in 1980. If the ancient Greeks had
been able to build on the knowledge required
to make the mechanism, he told a Smithsonian
Institution audience in 1973, by now humans
might be exploring the nearer stars, not merely
the inner Solar System.
Yet, as Clarke admits on the book’s jacket,
the Antikythera Mechanism remains “underrated”. The instrument was known only to a
small circle of enthusiasts until a paper was
published in 2006 explaining its operation,
based on X-ray images of the interior and a
new technique for illuminating previously hidden surface inscriptions (T. Freeth et al. Nature
444, 587–559; 2006). Jo Marchant, then
a Nature staff journalist, wrote
a news feature to accompany
the paper, and the book
grew from her research.
Decoding the Heavens
is Marchant’s first book
and is aimed squarely at
the non-scientific reader,
but is serious about the
science. Her gripping and
varied account will propel
the mechanism to greater
fame, although it may never
achieve the celebrity of the
Rosetta Stone that it probably deserves.
The complexity of the
mechanism suggests that the
ancient Greeks had achieved a level
of clockwork technology not reached
again until the Industrial Revolution of the
eighteenth century. “It’s hard to overestimate
the uniqueness of the find. Before the Antikythera Mechanism, not one gearwheel had ever
been found from antiquity, nor indeed any
example of an accurate pointer or scale. Apart
from the Antikythera Mechanism, they still
haven’t,” Marchant explains.
Super Crunchers
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
by Ian Ayres
(Bantam Books, $14.00)
Ayres explains how data mining, statistics
and number crunching are used increasingly
by everyone and everything from Internet
search engines to your family physician.
Showing how this affects people directly,
he gives advice on how to defend ourselves
against the negative sides of this data blitz.
by David Montgomery
(Univ. California Press, $16.95)
Montgomery explains how the collapse of ancient
civilizations is linked to soil erosion and shows
that this can be seen today. “Societies prosper and
persist best when they figure out ways to keep
their soil where it belongs and not treat it as if it
were dirt cheap,” wrote Eric A. Davidson
(Nature 447, 777–778; 2007).
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OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS
The original 1900–01 dive was the first
archaeological exploration of a wreck, undertaken decades before Cousteau’s invention
of the scuba apparatus. After describing its
drama, Marchant turns to the scholars from
many countries who tried to date and interpret
the mechanism over the next century. In the
1960s and 1970s, the leading investigator was
the late science historian Derek de Solla Price of
Yale University, who published Gears from the
Greeks (American Philosophical Society, 1974).
Since the 1990s, two rival explanations have
emerged: one from Michael Wright, a former
curator at the Science Museum in London, who
is inspired by de Solla Price, and the other from
the multidisciplinary team that published in
Nature, led by mathematician and film-maker
Tony Freeth and Mike Edmunds, an astronomer at Cardiff University. Marchant’s handling
of the rivalry is excitingly tense.
Damaged Greek inscriptions initially dated
the mechanism to between the second century
bc and the second century ad. Radiocarbon
analysis dated the ship’s wooden hull to between
260 and 180 bc, although the ship could have
sailed later. The design of the wreck’s pottery
amphorae narrowed the date to the first half
of the first century bc. Silver and bronze coins
found by a second Cousteau expedition in 1976
showed the ship sank between 70 and 60 bc,
probably while sailing from Pergamon, on the
coast of Asia Minor, towards Rome.
The mechanism was initially thought to
be an astrolabe. But its gear wheels suggested
another use, as astrolabes do not need gears.
De Solla Price imagined it was a calendar
computer, but this did not explain the ratios
of teeth on the gears. Wright now favours a
planetarium explanation, whereas Freeth’s
team believes it is an instrument for predicting
eclipses. Freeth prefers to call it a ‘calculator’
rather than a ‘computer’, whereas Marchant,
following historian Doron Swade’s definition
that a computer can display its calculated numbers on a scale, uses the latter. In both explanations, the mechanism’s builders assumed that
Earth is at the centre of the heavens, as believed
by Greek astronomers and philosophers except
for the heliocentric Aristarchus of Samos, and
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
that the movement of the heavenly bodies is
based on epicycles.
Marchant’s fascinating final chapter asks who
made it, and why. The inventions of Archimedes
in the third century bc might have influenced it;
an epigraphic analysis published earlier this year
hints at a link with his home city of Syracuse (T.
Freeth et al. Nature 454, 614–617; 2008). The
astronomer Hipparchus may also have inspired
its design, but was probably dead before its construction. The philosopher Posidonius, who
lived at the right time, is a strong candidate; his
student Cicero mentions that Posidonius built
an instrument that reproduced the “motions of
the Sun, the Moon and the five planets”.
Andrew Robinson is a visiting fellow at Wolfson
College, Cambridge. He is the author of Lost
Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered
Scripts and The Story of Measurement.
e-mail: [email protected]
Liver satire delivers
Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface
Anatomy of Four Lobes
by Will Self
Viking: 2008. 288 pp. £18.99
We live, by and large, Panglossian lives, naively
reading purpose into the world, and into ourselves. Confronted by our bodies, we wonder
at their watch-like precision. Each part of us
does something. A heart pumps blood. A skull
shields the brain. Eyes see. Hands grip.
When we look at the liver, however, we
see not a tool for living, but a living thing
— and this is an uncomfortable proposition.
The liver has a plethora of functions: storage
of the carbohydrate glycogen, decomposition of red blood cells, production of blood
plasma proteins, detoxification, bile production — and that’s without even mentioning
its regulatory abilities. It intimidates us by its
efficient ubiquity.
Will Self ’s new book, Liver, is not body horror in the science-fiction sense. For Self, as
aficionados of the author will expect, Liver is
satire. In his vision, our livers are more valuable than we are, more able, more alive. The
liver is the only internal organ in the body that
can regenerate itself to a significant extent. Yet
Citrus: A History
by Pierre Laszlo (Univ. Chicago Press, $17.00)
Laszlo describes the chemistry of citrus fruits.
“His succinct explanations of the Maillard and
caramelization reactions when describing how to
make marmalade, and his notes on foams, phase
separation, and the volatility of aromas when
explaining how to make a sabayon, justify the cost
of the book on their own,” wrote Peter Barham
(Nature 450, 479; 2007).
868
The mechanism’s purpose may have been
for astrology, in which Hipparchus apparently
believed, but more likely it had no practical
use. Like the orreries of the Enlightenment, it
was probably one among many luxury gadgets
for the educated Greek and Roman elite —
the only example of its kind to survive. “The
Antikythera Mechanism,” Marchant concludes,
“was originally meant as a celebration of the
heavens.”
■
still we contrive, over the course of our lives, to
squander its magnificent estate.
The four ‘lobes’ of Self ’s book are individual
stories — his strongest in years. With a little
intertwining of narrative, his peculiar tales of
abuse, disease and decay largely follow their
own paths. Cirrhosis, cancer, hepatitis and,
with a nod to Greek mythology, a vulture wander among the human protagonists as equals.
Self ’s satire is classical rather than radical,
rooted more in Alexander Pope than Jonathan
Swift. Diseased flesh takes plenty of collateral
damage, but contemporary behaviour is Self ’s
real target. “Confronted with the nobility of
feeling, high culture and deep spirituality”, Self
— like the malevolent bar fly of his first story,
‘Foie Humain’ — “sees nothing but the stereotypic behaviours of anthropoid geese.”
Satire depends for its success on a pitiless accuracy. Self ’s prose veers between the
appetizing and the nauseating, yet it is almost
always on the nail: proof that the more accurately you describe a thing, the more surreal
it seems. His vivid characters include a cancer sufferer being hustled towards her elective
suicide by her daughter’s poor timekeeping,
the determined alcoholic gorging of a hapless barman, and a dangerously unmotivated
Harley Street hepatologist. These sketches
Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the
Science of Flavor
by Hervé This (Translated by Malcolm
DeBevoise) (Columbia Univ. Press, $19.95)
French experimental chef, This, opens up
the kitchen to scientific experiments. In this
enjoyable book, he debunks old rules and
superstitions about cooking, and shows how
food can be looked at, prepared, cooked and
tasted in new ways.
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
portray either
the poetry of
alienation or the
20/20 insight one
acquires in the face of
approaching death.
Self plays both sides, nowhere more affectingly than in the collection’s magnificent
centrepiece, ‘Leberknödel’ (Liver Dumplings). Joyce, a retired hospital administrator, knew that her cancers would not stop
“until they had toppled the sovereignty of
consciousness itself, and replaced it with
their own screaming masses of cancerous tissue”. Appalled at the ‘bad habit’ of terminal
decline, she arranges her own death. Seemingly reprieved, she finds, however, that her
living has become as much of a bad habit as
her dying. She looks objectively at her life
— her world, her friends, her sot of a daughter — and realizes she has lost the empathic
ability that gave her life its meaning. She has,
essentially, already killed herself.
Self is not a writer who worries about the
long-term value of his art, as that would distract him from the ephemera so essential to it.
AUTUMN BOOKS OPINION
But ‘Leberknödel’
may be an exception. There’s an eye to
posterity in his playful nod
to Gustave Flaubert’s sardonic
prose technique, gleefully italicizing every
cliché passing through Joyce’s dying mind.
Like Madame Bovary, ‘Leberknödel’ mixes
its scorn with warmth and sympathy. As a
result, one gets a sense of the author’s moral
authority. Our bodies are not ours; nor are
our feelings. We think our perceptions are
ephemeral, but they are rooted in a physics
that will outlast us. Joyce manages to argue
herself away, destroyed by her own strength
of purpose. This vision of humanity — too
strong for itself, too clever by far — is more
tragic than satirical.
For Self to kick the chair out from under
himself in this way, turning his trademark
scorn to tears of sympathy, is an achievement.
Liver’s grotesques are not meant to hold — but
Joyce endures.
■
Simon Ings is a writer based in London. His most
recent book is A Natural History of Seeing.
e-mail: [email protected]
Exploitation and Developing Countries: The Ethics
of Clinical Research
Edited by Jennifer S. Hawkins and Ezekiel J.
Emanuel
(Princeton Univ. Press, $14.95)
Scientists and philosophers delve into the moral
implications of clinical research in developing countries.
Different chapters examine case studies and look at
the benefits and costs of clinical trials, both to the
individual subjects and the different nations involved.
869
OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
Drug-fuelled counterculture
Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD
in Britain
by Andy Roberts
Marshall Cavendish: 2008. 288 pp. £18.99
LSD — lysergic acid diethylamide — is an
evocative acronym: it strikes a rational fear
into governments and an irrational one into
the media. Those who have taken the drug are
in awe of its transformative power; to those
who have not, it is a dangerous unknown.
Since LSD was invented by Swiss chemist
Albert Hofmann, who referred to it as his “problem child”, it has been a drug in search of a use.
LSD is now inching its way back onto research
agendas in the United States and Europe.
Albion Dreaming is a timely book, especially
given Hofmann’s death this year. It examines
how a compound viewed by some as having
unmatched potential for positively transforming society through individual enlightenment,
instead fuelled a decades-long counterculture,
which was eventually suppressed. With investigative zeal, Andy Roberts charts the highs
and lows of LSD’s relationship with the anarchists and intellectuals of 1950s, 1960s and
1970s Britain, and takes the reader on a magical mystery tour through the cultural changes
catalysed by the most potent chemical known
to humankind.
The British government was at first intrigued
by LSD’s potential. When the compound
reached its shores in 1952, the medical and
military establishments were keen to investigate
and exploit the drug in psychotherapy and as a
battlefield weapon, respectively, as was the Central Intelligence Agency across the Atlantic.
The United States is rightly considered to
be the cheerleader of LSD-fuelled counterculture, but the author convincingly demonstrates
that Britain had a strong supporting role. The
term ‘psychedelic’ was invented in a creative
wordplay between two Englishmen, the writer
Aldous Huxley and his doctor friend Humphrey Osmond, who first gave him mescaline.
Huxley’s “To make this trivial word sublime,
take half a gramme of phanerothyme [soulvisible]”, was topped by Osmond’s “To fathom
hell, or soar angelic, take a pinch of psychedelic
[mind-manifesting].”
It was a Briton too, Michael Hollingshead,
who turned Harvard psychologist Timothy
Leary on to LSD, after which Leary morphed
into a self-styled psychedelic guru and urged
the US youth to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”,
which they did in their millions.
Much has been written about
Leary and his compatriots,
but Albion Dreaming retains a gritty
UK perspective.
From the stills ecret exp er iments conducted
at Britain’s military
research establishment at Porton Down,
to Ronald Sandison,
a doctor who opened the
world’s first specialized LSD
psychotherapy unit at
Powick Hospital in
Worcestershire in 1952,
the author packs the pages
with a riotous selection of wellsourced anecdotes. Actor Sean
Connery sampled LSD from the psychiatrist’s couch and his therapist demanded
a fine single-malt whisky as part payment.
The BBC’s laudable — or is that laughable?
— attempts to filter out ‘drug-inspired’ lyrics on radio led to a ban on The Beatles’ song
A Day in the Life, but Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds slipped through the net. Corrupt Drug
Squad officers paid informants with LSD that
had been seized in earlier raids, until the wellorganized Operation Julie smashed a major
international manufacturing ring later in the
1970s, when up to half of the world’s illicit LSD
was made in Britain.
Although Roberts does not match the gripping narrative of Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven:
Fearless Symmetry: Exposing the Hidden
Patterns of Numbers
by Avner Ash and Robert Gross
(Princeton Univ. Press, $18.95)
This book attempts to explain complex maths in an
interesting way. Reviewing the hardback edition,
Timothy Gowers wrote: “The authors are to be
admired for taking a very difficult topic and making it,
if not fully accessible, then certainly more accessible
than it was before.” (Nature 446, 26; 2007).
870
LSD and the American Dream (Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1987), he spins a good yarn,
distancing rumours such as Francis Crick’s
links to LSD from established fact. He found no
proof to back the claim that Crick took LSD and
saw the double helix in his visions. Conspiracy
theories, namely allegations of the media’s complicity with the police or the secret intelligence
services, are also maturely circumvented.
The book could have included more about
the scientific applications of LSD. Thousands
of papers in the 1950s and 1960s suggested that
LSD could be used as a treatment for conditions
ranging from depression to alcoholism —
the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was transformed by an
LSD trip — but Roberts
writes a popular history,
not a scholarly one.
Albion Dreaming
provides the fullest account yet of
recent legal battles
in the United Kingdom
that have been resurrected
by those given LSD without
consent. Soldiers who claimed they
were used as guinea pigs were
offered £10,000 (US$18,000)
each, and nearly 50 patients
claiming to have had hallucinations, flashbacks, paranoia or chronic
anxiety from LSD-assisted psychotherapy
gained 20 times as much compensation.
The street-level perspective of the book
works, but an over-reliance on the exploits of
individuals leads to a lack of deeper insights.
The concluding pages are wasted on an intelligent but irrelevant argument for the legalization of drugs, yet I wanted to know from
the author why research on LSD has yet to
resume in the United Kingdom, or why the
psychedelic-powered revolutions did not take
off across the world. Consequently, Albion
Dreaming is an enjoyable journey but leaves
the reader with more questions than answers
— much like the LSD trip itself.
■
Arran Frood is a science writer based in the
United Kingdom.
Everything Conceivable: How Assisted
Reproduction is Changing Men, Women
and the World
by Liza Mundy (Penguin, £9.99)
Mundy looks at the consequences of the
“reproductive revolution” in science that
is changing who reproduces and how. She
covers changes in society and technology,
talking to physicians, scientists, parents and
campaigners.
AUTUMN BOOKS OPINION
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
A scientist’s life for me
Forty years after the publication of James Watson’s The Double Helix, Georgina Ferry asks why the life
stories of so few scientists make it into the bookshops.
In 1968 Peter Medawar, Nobel prizewinner
and author of many witty reflections on science and its practitioners, consented to write
a preface to Ronald Clark’s biography of the
influential British biologist J. B. S. Haldane.
Imagine Clark’s consternation when he read
its opening line: “The lives of academics,
considered as Lives, almost always make
dull reading.” Later, Medawar recycled the
opening paragraph for an essay in his collection Pluto’s Republic (1982), claiming
further that scientists’ lives, unlike those
of “artists and men of letters”, were “not a
source of cultural insight”.
James Watson’s The Double Helix, a book
that broke the mould of scientific life-writing,
also appeared in 1968. It provided abundant
‘cultural insight’ into the combination of good
contacts, brilliance, luck, hard work and ruthless competitiveness that brought to light the
DNA structure. It was panned by many of
Watson’s contemporaries — if Francis Crick
had got his way, the book would never have
been published. Yet in his own memoir What
Mad Pursuit (1988), Crick later admitted that
he was wrong: “I now appreciate how skilful
Jim was, not only in making the book read
like a detective story, but also by managing to
include a surprising amount of science.”
In A Life Decoded, published last year,
genomic entrepreneur J. Craig Venter recalls
choosing The Double Helix for a college
assignment. Intending to train as a doctor on
his return from military service in Vietnam,
he sensed from its pages the adrenaline thrill
of research. Generations of scientists have
pointed to books that opened up this new
world to them, notably the 1926 classic The
Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif.
Where should today’s bright 16-year-old,
ambitious graduate student or interested general reader look for a personal insight into
modern laboratory
life? Scientific life-writing is now
a small and shrinking enterprise. Publishers
agree that the market for scholarly biography
has suffered from the onslaught of celebrity
memoir, with ghost-written autobiographies
of models, sporting heroes and television personalities enjoying sales that a serious study
cannot hope to match.
Selling biographies of scientists is particularly difficult, thinks Jenny Uglow, author of
The Lunar Men (2002) and Nature’s Engraver
(2006), and editor at Chatto and Windus.
“People look for subjects that are close to their
interests, and they perceive scientists as just not
of their world,” she says. Booksellers face the
same problem. Their choices of books to stock,
now largely in the hands of a select few in the
head offices of the major chains, influence the
A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life
by J. Craig Venter (Penguin, £9.99)
In his review of the hardback edition, Jan Witkowski
wrote: “Four decades on, our infinitely more vulgar
media has called Venter many things: maverick,
publicity hound, risk-taker, brash, controversial,
genius, manic, rebellious, visionary, audacious,
arrogant, feisty, determined, provocative. His
autobiography shows that they are all justified.”
(Nature 449, 785–786; 2007).
publishers. Most people have
heard of very few scientists, so those that they
do recognize — Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein — seem the safest bets.
The rankings of online retailer Amazon show
that of the top 100 scientific biographies in the
United Kingdom, ten are by or about Darwin;
in Germany, the first five places are all occupied by Einstein, whereas Richard Feynman
and Benjamin Franklin feature strongly in the
United States. None comes close to making the
top 100 biographies.
Biography shelves in bookshops are well
stocked with volumes about recently deceased
or living figures in politics and the arts. A handful of scientists are represented: Venter’s memoir
joins well-received biographies of the crystallographer J. D. Bernal by Andrew Brown (2005)
Avoid Boring People: And Other Lessons
From a Life in Science
by James Watson (Oxford Univ. Press, £9.99)
Watson’s frank autobiography covers personal
areas as well as the discovery of DNA and his
later controversies. It “weaves a deliciously
detailed account of his life both in and out of
science with a series of lessons drawn from
those experiences,” wrote Huntington F. Willard
(Nature 449, 787; 2007).
871
OPINION AUTUMN BOOKS
and of Francis Crick by Matt Ridley (2006),
and Eric Kandel’s autobiography In Search of
Memory (2006) sold well in the United States.
These books are few in number, increasingly the preserve of academic rather
than trade publishers, and often relegated from the store’s biography
section to the obscure corner
labelled ‘science’.
It is regrettable that readers are not more alive to the
cultural significance of scientists. But who maintains
this gulf? Scientists publish
their work in places where
only other scientists will
read it, in language that only
other scientists understand.
Many fear that attracting public attention will lose them the
respect of their colleagues; others
dismiss tales of scientific rivalry as gossip.
Some argue that individuals are irrelevant to
the progress of science: anyone could have discovered the double helix, but only Leonardo
da Vinci could have painted the Mona Lisa.
In practice, science is done by real people, as
different from one another — except in their
devotion to their field of study — as any other
sector of humanity. Telling their stories transforms the stereotype of the scientist into vivid
individuality. Truthful biographies scotch the
myth of the solitary genius: any contemporary
scientist’s story is threaded through the network of exchanges and rivalries within and
between labs that makes it such an intensely
social activity. Parents, children, spouses and
lovers feature as prominently in the lives and
careers of scientists as in those of artists.
Little hint of personal background emerges
in the memoirs of deceased fellows written by
close colleagues and published by scientific
academies. These essays are useful research
tools for historians, but not widely read by outsiders. Occasionally a scientist, having achieved
some level of distinction, decides that it might
be worth documenting his or her experiences for the public. But most have no name
recognition and therefore no market beyond
NATURE|Vol 455|16 October 2008
their immediate academic circle. Even within
science, students learn so little of the history of
their subjects that they have no real sense of the
people behind the classic references they cite.
Biography and autobiography, it seems to
me, offer an ideal opportunity to engage people’s natural curiosity about the lives of others
and so draw them into the quest to understand the physical world. Name recognition
remains a barrier, but there are some encouraging pointers. Palaeontologist Richard Fortey
has written a succession of brilliantly accessible personal reflections on his field of study
and London’s Natural History Museum. He
admits that nobody had heard of him until he
started writing popular books. For less gifted
Suffer and Survive: Gas Attacks, Miners’
Canaries, Spacesuits and the Bends: The
Extreme Life of J. S. Haldane
by Martin Goodman (Pocket Books, £8.99)
Physiologist John Scott Haldane deliberately exposed
himself to toxic gases. His results saved many lives,
from mine-workers to deep-sea divers. Reviewer
Andy Meharg commented: “It is a fitting tribute to a
pioneer who enabled the human body to survive at the
extremes of modern life.” (Nature 449, 981; 2007).
872
communicators, success depends
on giving the job to a writer with
an already formidable reputation. Simon Winchester is doing
well with his new biography of
the biochemist and Sinophile
Joseph Needham (The Man
Who Loved China, entitled Bomb, Book and
Compass in the United
Kingdom), as will
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated
biographer Richard
Holmes, who has
chosen Joseph Banks,
Humphry Davy and
William Herschel
as subjects for his
first major work in
ten years, The Age of
Wonder. The television
tie-in works for science too,
with Simon Flynn of Icon Books
reporting that the BBC4 series that
accompanied Piers Bizony’s strongly
biographical Atom (2007) “made a
huge difference” to sales.
Alternatives to the cradle-to-grave
biography or memoir are to be welcomed.
The Internet is ripe for exploitation, and is a
much more likely port of call for the young and
impressionable. Short autobiographies of Nobel
prizewinners are available on http://nobelprize.
org. But any scientist can include on their web
page or in their blog the story of how they got
into science, who inspired them, and the joys
and frustrations of their working lives.
The medium is not the issue, however. Presenting the reality of the scientific life depends
simply on the willingness of scientists to appear
as individuals — and of their colleagues to
applaud their doing so.
■
Georgina Ferry is a writer based in Oxford, UK.
Her most recent biography is Max Perutz and the
Secret of Life.
Discuss science biography online at http://tinyurl.
com/3j6y44.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks (Random House, $14.95)
Neurologist and medical writer Sacks delves
into the world of music. Reviewing the hardback
edition, Laura Garwin wrote: “Sacks is the
consummate storyteller, and his extensive
network of patients, friends and correspondents
— supplemented by a magpie-like erudition
— keeps him well supplied with raw material.”
(Nature 449, 977–978; 2007).