Book Review : Under the Wings of a Laureate

Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty by Robert Kanigel (Macmillan: $19.95)

In C. P. Snow’s version of reality, there are two cultures, art and science, and they rarely meet. Art, in this view, is deeply personal, while science is impersonal, objective and bloodless.

Like many important insights, this observation is both true and untrue. On one level, of course, art and science do embody different ways of looking at the world. The phrases artistic temperament and scientific temperament mean something and convey a distinction that we recognize.

Artists deal with what’s illogical in the universe, while scientists try to come to grips with what’s logical and orderly. Artists are emotional; scientists rational.

Science as an Art

But on another level of abstraction, there is no split between art and science. Creativity is as mysterious among scientists as it is among artists, and science is no less a human activity than, say, painting or dance. In short, science is an art.

That’s what this clever book is about. It tells the story of the development of pharmacology in the last 50 years, which is itself one of the greatest successes of modern science. Many “miracle” drugs now considered common were discovered in this period, along with techniques for measuring them in the blood and for assessing their effectiveness.

But if that’s all there were to this book, its audience would be limited. What makes “Apprentice to Genius” special is that in the course of discussing neuropharmacology, Kanigel draws a riveting picture of scientists at work. They argue and they criticize and they are jealous of one another. They are motivated by the desire to find things out, and they are also impelled by the quest for recognition.

Like a good novel, “Apprentice to Genius” reveals more about people and how the world works than most psychology and sociology does. It is as much about scientists as it is about their work. It shows their motivations and their styles. Robert Kanigel, a science writer, is sympathetic to scientists and properly admiring of them, but he portrays them accurately, full of human faults and failings.

Greatest Gold Star

This is a world, it seems, whose major goal is the Nobel prize--which, to scientists, is the greatest gold star of them all. (It is an interesting question to ask why people invest so much in what the Swedish Academy thinks. But leave us not digress.)

For better or worse, scientists love those Nobel Prizes, as this book makes abundantly clear. Even the Lasker Prize--sort of an American Nobel prize in medicine--is enough to start feuds. Prizes are to scientists what multimillion-dollar stock options are to business executives.

Kanigel’s book is intended to be a description of the mentor system in science, by which master scientists teach apprentices (graduate students and post doctorates), and pass on to them the wisdom and art of the scientific enterprise. Along the way, he reveals a lot more than how elders teach their juniors.

Kanigel did not discover the mentor system, and he doesn’t claim to have. He gives credit to the sociologists of science who studied the old-boy network by which the present scientific elite teaches and nurtures the future scientific elite. Half of the American scientists who have won a Nobel prize studied with or worked in the lab of a Nobel prize winner.

Kanigel uses pharmacology to illustrate this phenomenon. And what a story it is, full of discoveries, passions, arguments, rivalries and excellent science.

Enlightened Stewardship

James A. Shannon made it all possible, in Kanigel’s view, by his enlightened stewardship of the National Institutes of Health. He hired Bernard (Steve) Brodie and gave him free reign to follow his interests in the science of drugs. Brodie, in turn, discovered and nurtured Julius Axelrod, who eventually broke with his master and won a Nobel prize for his work on the neuronal synapse, a prize that many people thought that Brodie should have at least shared.

Axelrod, for his part, was the master to Solomon Snyder, who has made many discoveries in neuropharmacology, and Snyder played the same role for Candace Pert, who discovered the opiate receptor with him while still a graduate student but who then broke with him when he won the Lasker Prize for their discovery.

This last episode leads Kanigel to the conclusion that “behind its veneer of cool reason, science could be just as messy, just as ugly as any other realm of human affairs, and could whip up passions quite as hot.”

Which is not to say that the artistic side of science is negative. This book is as much about the styles of science as the stuff of science. Kanigel shows that successful scientists have a knack for picking the right kinds of questions. They are neither too hard nor too easy.

And he further shows that successful scientists rely on hunches and intuitions more often than the standard picture of science would lead one to think. Many successful scientists take a sweeping view of a problem, and they don’t get bogged down in details. This leads to the valid observation that inattention to detail sometimes results in error.

Kanigel’s breezy style sometimes masks the depths of his insights. This is a serious and illuminating book that is not ponderous. In fact, it’s possible to get halfway through it without realizing how many layers have been unpeeled. All of this is to the author’s credit. He tells the reader a lot without making him feel burdened.

Reader on His Own

Oddly, Kanigel never tells us what he thinks of all this. If it is so that master scientists tend to beget master scientists, does it mean that who you know is more important than what you know, or does it mean that great scientists are good talent scouts who can select the most promising scientists of the next generation? The reader is left to make up his own mind.

It is probably the case that both conclusions are accurate. Kanigel gives the reader a context in which to think about these questions, and it’s no criticism that he doesn’t offer even a tentative conclusion. His contribution is in posing the questions.