Book Review : Discovering the Passion of Scientists

A Passion for Science by Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards (Oxford University Press; 206 pages: $21.95)

People sometimes make great pronouncements, and sometimes they make small ones. Often as not, the small ones are as revealing as the great ones. Or, put another way, God is in the details.

“A Passion for Science” is a collection of short interviews with 13 leading scientists in which they muse about themselves and their work.

For the most part, the subjects of the interviews make small pronouncements. At first I thought they weren’t saying much. Then I realized that they were. The key word in the title of the book is “passion.”

Process of Discovery

For example, the scientists reveal that science, which many people think of as the epitome of rationality, is based at least as much on feeling as on reason.

Here is Christopher Zeeman, a mathematician at Warwick University, on the process of discovery:

“I often see that the way my wife, Rosemary, makes jewellery is very much the same as the way I make mathematics. She’s not a scientist, but she struggles to solve a problem, concentrates on it, then suddenly gets an insight into how to do something. Sees how to put things together in a way that will give harmonious balance as well as technical feasibility. It’s exactly the same as some of the techniques I use to prove theorems. And she dreams about it, and gets cross with it, in the same way that I dream about my work and get cross with it. And I’m sure that most scientists dream about their work and get cross with it and get insights.”

Here is Michael Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Sussex:

“While a physicist wants to be right, he doesn’t want to turn rigor into rigor mortis.”

Scientific Reaction

And here is John Maynard Smith, an evolution theorist at the University of Sussex, on his reaction to reading “Possible Worlds” by J. B. S. Haldane when he was a student at Eton:

“I can still remember the excitement of reading it. The mixture of intellect and blasphemy was absolutely overwhelming and I’ve been attracted to that all the rest of my life.”

I could fill this review with yet more quotes from the interviews, which would accurately portray what the book is and what the book isn’t. The interviews were originally broadcast on the BBC, and they have been edited and annotated for this book.

Lewis Wolpert, a biologist at University College London, conducted revealing interviews, and Alison Richards, a BBC producer, edited and annotated them, but the authors draw few conclusions from what the scientists have to say.

Aside from a brief introductory essay in which they explain their mission, Wolpert and Richards let the scientists speak for themselves and let the readers figure out what, if anything, it all means.

Perhaps that was their intention: a Rorschach test that readers could interpret as they wished. There is much in this book for them to find. Why limit readers’ responses by telling them in advance what is there?

On the other hand, the resulting book has an unfinished quality about it. It’s not too much to expect authors to glean something from the material they have enclosed between hard covers.

In these pages, science emerges as a process--and a haphazard process at that--more than a logical scheme. Sidney Brenner, the Cambridge molecular biologist, recalls:

“For 20 years I shared an office with Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and we had a rule that you could say anything that came into your head. Now most of these conversations were just complete nonsense. But every now and then a half-formed idea could be taken up by the other one and really refined. I think a lot of the good things that we produced came from those completely mad sessions. But at one stage or another we have convinced each other of theories which have never seen the light of day. . . . I mean completely crazy things.”

I’d give my right arm (well, perhaps my left arm) for a transcript of those 20 years of conversations.

Very few of the scientists draw ultimate conclusions about their work. They tend to speak in more measured terms, talking about their colleagues past and present and telling stories and anecdotes.

Pleasure of Their Work

None of them can say for sure why they became scientists in the first place or why they chose the field that they did in which to work. But they all speak openly about the pleasure that doing science gives them.

“Of course it’s exciting,” says Gunther Stent, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley. “But I think the final excitement, the real source of the gratification, is being able to tell it.”

And they tell it very well.