Free Radicals

The Secret Anarchy of Science

Michael Brooks

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781590208540
• eBook ISBN: 9781468301717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: History

"An exuberant tour through the world of scientists behaving badly" ( The New York Times).
 
They may have a public image as cool, logical, levelheaded types. But in reality, scientists will do pretty much anything—take drugs, follow mystical visions, lie, and even cheat—to make a discovery.
 
In Free Radicals, physicist and journalist Michael Brooks seamlessly weaves together true stories of the "mad, bad and dangerous" men and women who have revolutionized the scientific world, and offers a fast-paced and thrilling exploration of the real process behind discovery ( The Times, London). Brooks also traces the cover-up back to its source: the scientific establishment's reaction to the public fear of science after World War II. He argues that it its high time for science to come clean about just how bold and daring scientists really are.
 
"Not all scientists are nerds. In Free Radicals, physicist Michael Brooks tries to dispel the notion that scientists are stuffy, pen-protector-polishing bookworms." — The  Washington Post
 
"Insightful . . . A page-turning, unvarnished look at the all-too-human side of science." — Kirkus Reviews

1

HOW IT BEGINS

Dreams, drugs and visions from God

It was humankind’s first trip away from home. On 21 December 1968 a Saturn V rocket blasted off, its crew headed for the Moon. While in lunar orbit, however, the view through the craft’s window distracted the Apollo 8 crew from their scheduled tasks. ‘Though Apollo crews were trained to observe and photograph lunar features,’ recalled astronaut William Anders, ‘our main “discovery” was the Earth.’

On Christmas Eve the astronauts saw the entirety of their planet for the first time. Grabbing cameras and jostling for position, they took three photographs, two in black and white and one in colour. These are the celebrated ‘Earthrise’ pictures, astoundingly beautiful and moving images of our home that have been credited with kick-starting the environmental movement.

Stewart Brand, then a young Californian radical, felt rather proud of this achievement. One chilly afternoon three years earlier, Brand had been sitting on a gravel-covered roof in San Francisco’s North Beach district. He was high on 100 micrograms of lysergic diethylamide: LSD. The buildings beneath him curved with the Earth’s surface, and Brand’s mind wandered back to a statement he had heard a month or so before. The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller was giving a lecture, and Brand listened with rapt attention to Fuller’s extraordinary claim. The root of all human misbehaviour, he maintained, lay in the fact that people perceive the Earth as flat. If only we carried with us the knowledge that our planet is a round ball, isolated in space, an island in an inhospitable cosmos, perspectives would change, Fuller said. On that rooftop, a question began to form in Brand’s mind. ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’

The next day, Brand printed the question onto hundreds of badges and posters and sent them to NASA officials, members of Congress, Soviet scientists, UN officials and anyone else with influence and a publicly available mailing address. Then he set up a stall at the Sather Gate, the famous entrance to the University of California at Berkeley, where he sold the badges for 25 cents each. ‘It went perfectly,’ Brand said. What he means by that is, he was noticed. The university authorities threw him off the campus, an event that was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and launched him onto the TV news bulletin that evening.

Brand took the campaign on the road, performing ‘street-clown seminars’ on space and civilisation at all America’s major universities. He made the authorities edgy – the country was immersed in the Vietnam War, and even peaceful protests and rallies were always in danger of boiling over. That was why NASA hired an investigator to find out whether Brand and his ‘Whole Earth’ campaign constituted a threat to the United States Government. Years later, the investigator made himself known to Brand. ‘I checked you out,’ he said. ‘You seemed all right, so I wrote them that this was California, where people took strange notions.’

At the bottom of his report, the investigator added a postscript. It said, ‘P.S. By the way – why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’

Brand’s campaign began in February 1966. By the end of 1967, he recalls, the photos began to appear. Eventually, the Apollo 8 Earthrise photos, with the lunar surface arcing through the foreground, fulfilled everything Brand had hoped to achieve.

The photo taken by William Anders has been called ‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’. Whether Brand’s acid trip really did kick off the environmental movement is moot. It is impossible to tell whether the Apollo 8 astronauts knew about Brand’s campaign. Though it is hard to believe they didn’t, they have never mentioned it in any of their publicised discussions of the Earthrise photographs; according to the astronauts, they took those photos as an impromptu reaction to the majestic sight of the Earth from the Moon. Brand was certainly never mentioned in any discussion, but we can assume that NASA would not look kindly on suggestions that the agency was even remotely influenced by the antics of a drug-addled hippy.

The whole episode raises an intriguing question. Can this be how science happens? The Earthrise photo spawned a movement that is now a scientific endeavour – perhaps the most important endeavour that science has ever taken on. Did it really begin in an impassioned and drug-induced moment of inspiration? If so, it would certainly provide a perfect example of how science moves forward.

Ask a scientist what the scientific method is, Medawar said, ‘and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.’ Invariably, the scientist will say something like, ‘Well, you have an idea, then you test it in an experiment.’ It sounds so straightforward. But where does the idea come from? From everywhere and nowhere. From wherever. Anything goes. Science, it turns out, is alarmingly like California: it is a place where people take strange notions.

Albert Einstein is reported to have remarked on one occasion that ‘the secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources’. Though there is no paper trail for the attribution, it makes sense. Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote that nearly all clever people are afraid of being ridiculous, and Einstein, of all the great scientists, was perhaps the most in danger of being ridiculed for his sources of inspiration. As biographer Hans Ohanian has put it, ‘he made his profound discoveries in the manner of a mystic’.

Einstein relied on inspirations that had no traceable source. Working everything out logically, by deduction, is ‘far beyond the capacity of human thinking’, he said. Looking back on his experience, and relating it to the history of science, he admitted that ‘the great steps forward in scientific knowledge originated only to a small degree in this manner’. That is something that Kary Mullis, another drug-using Californian, would agree with wholeheartedly. Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and he says he couldn’t have done it without LSD.

Late one Friday night in May 1983, Mullis was driving along a Californian highway. His girlfriend was asleep beside him in the passenger seat. As can happen when you are driving, his mind was not really on the road. ‘DNA chains coiled and floated,’ he says. ‘Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes.’

DNA has a glorious mystique these days, but really it is just a complicated molecule. You can think of it working rather like Velcro: it is composed of two strands that stick together. Unlike Velcro, DNA has four different kinds of hook, which are known as A, T, G and C – abbreviations of their chemical names. Each hook can link to only one other kind: A links to T, and G links to C. When they are strung along one strand of the molecule, the order of the hooks – A, C, C, G, T, A, and so on – dictates what the other strand must look like in order for it to stick. This order also encodes the instructions for making specific proteins, the building blocks of biology.

In a biological organism, the DNA must make copies of itself, and it does this by pulling the two strands apart and bringing in new hooks to pair with the exposed ones. In this way, each single strand generates a new partner.

Kary Mullis was a humble hook-maker: he was producing the chains of acids that constitute DNA’s A, T, G and C molecules. Despite his relatively lowly position in the Cetus Corporation, a biotechnology company based near Berkeley, he would habitually apply his mind to the bigger picture. He liked to imagine that one day we would understand the four-letter alphabet of the genetic code well enough to find where the copying had gone wrong and mistakes had crept in. If you could read the copying mistakes that lead to diseases such as Huntington’s disease or sickle-cell anaemia, for example, you could potentially correct them, or at least avert the problems they cause. That’s why Mullis would spend time throwing around ideas about how that might be done.

It’s not an easy task. A strand of human DNA contains around a billion of the A, C, G and T hooks, or ‘bases’. That’s a daunting amount of reading to be done, especially when the writing is of a size where the book fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a biological cell.

But, Mullis reasoned, you don’t have to read it all at once. He could assemble a single synthetic strand of just twenty bases, pull apart the strands of the DNA under investigation, and see if his synthetic strand fitted anywhere along it. If it did, you could encourage that little synthetic strand to reproduce itself by giving it some more bases, and the right enzymes and conditions to do the job. Do it enough times and you’d have a beakerful of copies of your strand. In a process reminiscent of what happens when Alice takes a bite of the ‘Eat me’ cake in Wonderland, that fragment of DNA would grow from the microscopic scale to the proportions of our world. Then you produce another short synthetic strand with a different sequence of bases, and do it all again. Eventually, you would be able to read the entire genome.

Now, after the fact, it sounds a fairly simple idea; indeed, Mullis says he still doesn’t understand why no one else had thought of creating the ‘polymerase chain reaction’, or PCR. But perhaps it’s because no one else had been taking the right drugs. Mullis had taught himself to think in abstract, visual ways. He knew what he was trying to achieve, but he applied himself to the problem indirectly, allowing himself simply to float around, immersed in the liquid with the very molecule he was trying to read. How had he done this? Through his use of hallucinogenics.

Here is how he describes his Eureka moment:

I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it: you know, I wasn’t stoned on LSD but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymerase go by … that’s just the way I think. I can put myself in all kinds of spots and I’ve learned that, partially I would think … through psychedelic drugs.

Mullis has always been open about his use of hallucinogens. He tried LSD for the first time in 1966, just a few months before it was made illegal in the United States. When the ban came into force, he and a few colleagues began to synthesise and use hallucinogens that were still legal. Mullis believes that drugs are an invaluable tool for opening the mind to otherwise inaccessible insights. In a BBC documentary, he makes it clear where his debt lies. ‘What if I had not taken LSD ever: would I have still invented PCR?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.’ Taking LSD was ‘a mind-opening experience … much more important than any courses I ever took.’

He is far from alone in this. If you use an Apple computer or iPod, or play computer games, or have ever had to submit DNA for forensic or medical testing, you have benefited from the drug’s unique properties. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, calls his experience with LSD ‘one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life’. The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick was ‘fascinated by its effects’ during his acid trips. And most of the pioneers of Silicon Valley were regular users.

In 1991, a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner visited Siggraph, the world’s biggest meeting of computer graphics engineers. The convention is held every year in California and draws everybody in the business. During the event, the reporter asked 180 of these top-flight professionals two questions: Do you take psychedelics? If yes, is this important in your work? Every one of them answered yes to both.

The investigation had been prompted by an article that came out in that July’s GQ magazine. It was entitled ‘Valley of the Nerds’, and described widespread drug use among the pioneers of computer graphics. The writer quoted Chip Krauskorp, then head of Intel’s Human Interface Program. Intel was happy to employ drugusers, said Krauskorp, because they were ‘very, very, very bright’ and gifted workers. The fact that they used psychedelic drugs, or cannabis, was not an issue; Intel even helped them get through the company’s drug-testing procedures.

The work of some Californian mathematicians was also druginspired. Ralph Abraham, now an emeritus professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, described himself in the GQ article as ‘a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community’. He later explained that he was a professor at Princeton in 1967 when he first tried LSD. His positive experiences prompted the move to California and eventually led him to work on the mathematics of computer graphics, then chaos theory and fractal geometry. ‘There is no doubt,’ Abraham says, ‘that the psychedelic revolution in the 1960s had a profound effect on the history of computers and computer graphics, and of mathematics.’

In April 2008, the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen announced on his blog that scientists were about to be forced to undergo antidoping blood tests. The US National Institutes of Health, he said, was seeking to curb the growing problem of ‘brain-boosting’ drugs that enabled scientists to think more clearly in the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs. Eisen quoted an NIH official as saying that the new initiatives were ‘designed to level the playing field among scientists in terms of intellectual activities’. The use of drugs ‘has been affecting the competitive balance in scientific research,’ according to the statement posted on Eisen’s website.

The post was eventually revealed as an April Fool’s joke, but not before several scientists had contacted Eisen to express their concern about when the testing would start. Scientists, you see, do take drugs.

In the world of the arts, drug use is, if not encouraged, hardly a scandal. Artists, writers and musicians have long appreciated that certain drugs can open the mind to new sources of inspiration and creativity. Jacob Bronowski believed that science is creative too – perhaps even more so than the arts. ‘If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have liberated that creative impulse, it is the ideas of science,’ he said. But to be creative, scientists need ideas. And they, like artists, will take inspiration wherever they can find it.

Eisen’s practical joke was stimulated by papers published in the journal Nature, which revealed that drug-taking is rife among scientists. In an article entitled ‘Professor’s Little Helper’, two Cambridge University researchers announced that ‘we know that a number of our scientific colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• By the Same Author
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1 How It Begins
•     Dreams, drugs and visions from God
• 2 The Delinquents
•     Rules are there to be broken
• 3 Masters of Illusion
•     Evidence isn’t everything
• 4 Playing With Fire
•     No pain, no gain
• 5 Sacrilege
•     Breaking taboos is part of the game
• 6 Fight Club
•     There’s no prize for the runner-up
• 7 Defending the Throne
•     Machiavelli would be proud
• 8 In the Line of Fire
•     Life on the barricades
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Notes and Sources
• Index