What kind of scientist fudges the truth, double-crosses colleagues or takes LSD to think better? Step forward Einstein, Galileo et al.
WHEN people tell me they find science boring, I can understand where they are coming from. But they have been taken in by one of the most successful cover-ups of all time. Science and those who practise it are careful to portray themselves as logical, responsible, objective, rational, straight â in a nutshell, unhuman. But look at the history of science, and you will find scientists often do extraordinary things to achieve their goals. They take drugs, fight with one another, steal each otherâs ideas, commit fraud and character assassination and generally behave all too humanly. Here are some of scienceâs most unconventional moments, in no particular order.
KARY MULLIS TRAINS HIS BRAIN WITH LSD
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In the early 1980s, was mulling over an interesting but hardly mind-bending idea â could he eliminate the genetic abnormalities that lay behind many diseases? The first step, he realised, would be the ability to copy DNA so any defects could be repaired.
Mullis was an employee of the biotech company Cetus Corporation, based in Emeryville, California. Though not taken terribly seriously on this particular topic and known as a somewhat garrulous enthusiast with wild ideas, Mullis had an advantage over his colleagues: he had trained his brain to think differently by using hallucinogenic drugs.
In 1966, Mullis tried LSD for the first time. After it was made illegal two years later, he and some student colleagues learned how to synthesise hallucinogens that were still legal. These drugs, he later said, were essential in allowing his mind to process ideas visually, enabling him to imagine himself âdown there with the moleculesâ, looking at what would need to happen for the DNA strands to separate and be copied.
The breakthrough moment came in May 1983 when he was driving along a Californian highway. âMy mind drifted back into the lab. DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes,â as he puts it in his 1998 autobiography Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. It was on this journey that he came up with the polymerase chain reaction, the first method used for copying DNA.
The idea won him a Nobel prize. The Nobel Foundation described it as âof very great significance for biochemical and genetic researchâ, but made no mention of hallucinogens.
WERNER FORSSMANN ROMANCES HIS WAY TO A NOBEL PRIZE
Inserting a tube into the heart via a vein in the arm is now a routine procedure. Millions of people around the world undergo cardiac catheterisation every year. But in 1929, the heart was strictly off limits; no doctor would touch it for fear of killing the patient. Which is why Werner Forssmann, a trainee surgeon at a hospital near Berlin, Germany, was refused permission to try it on himself.
Forssmann wouldnât take no for an answer. All he needed was access to the operating theatre where the sterilised equipment was kept, and he knew that chief nurse Gerda Ditzen had a key. Forssmann prowled around Ditzen âlike a sweet-toothed cat around the cream jugâ, he later said. He took her out to dinner, lent her textbooks and they talked for hours about their mutual love of medicine. Eventually, he broached the subject of cardiac catheterisation, and she offered herself as the first subject.
In the end, Forssmann took only slight advantage of her. Once in the theatre, he tied her to the operating couch and then â much to Ditzenâs irritation â inserted a catheter into his own antecubital vein, pushed it into his heart and walked to the X-ray department to take a photograph.
Forssman won a share of the 1956 Nobel prize in medicine.
EINSTEIN FUDGES PROOF OF E = MC2 (AGAIN)
Thousands had applied for tickets to the lecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1935, but only a select few were admitted. One was a reporter for The New York Times, who waxed lyrical over the âhumble man of science⌠[who] gave to 400 American scientists today the treat of watching him remodel his universe. A piece of chalk was his only tool.â That man was Albert Einstein.
Itâs a shame Einstein hadnât also used his eyes or ears: it was his seventh attempt to prove E = mc2, and it contained the same flaw as all the others.
The first came in September 1905, in his celebrated paper expanding on the implications of special relativity. His mistake was to apply the rules that govern slow-moving bodies to fast-moving emitters of light. Max Planck, the journalâs editor, spotted the mistake after publication and pointed it out in one of his own papers. But Einstein took no notice, and went on to repeat the mistake over and over again. Occasionally he would slip in a self-justifying footnote, such as: âTo be sure, this is not rigorousâ.
By the time of his final attempt, in 1946, other mathematicians had created cast-iron proofs that E = mc2. Einstein railed at any suggestion the equation wasnât his, though: he had âpriorityâ, he said. In the end, he does seem to have admitted defeat. In his 1949 autobiography, E = mc2 is conspicuous by its absence.
ARTHUR EDDINGTON DESTROYS A COLLEAGUEâS WORK, LIFE AND REPUTATION
When Isaac Newton said he had seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants, he forgot to mention that he had also stamped on a few as well. Newton is far from alone. Scientific grandees often crush young upstarts who threaten to undermine their cherished theories. One of the worst offenders was peace-loving Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington.
In 1930, physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar arrived in England from India with a brilliant proof that dying stars of a certain size would collapse and form what we now know as a black hole. Eddington asked him to present his idea at a 1935 meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Eddington spent months ensuring Chandra, as he was known, had all he needed to prepare his talk, including some rather expensive calculating equipment. He quizzed Chandra endlessly on how his argument would be constructed. Only on the day before the presentation did Chandra learn that Eddington was to speak after him â and that his curiosity was not as benign as it might have seemed.
Immediately after Chandraâs talk, Eddington stood up and said, âThe paper which has just been presented is all wrong.â It was, he said, âstellar buffooneryâ. It wasnât, of course: the work won Chandra a Nobel prize in 1983. But the humiliation caused him to leave England for America in 1937, where he switched disciplines and settled for life as a second tier scientist.
CARL SAGAN GETS ARRESTED
You might think that a paper entitled âNuclear Winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosionsâ would get someoneâs attention â especially when its author is Carl Sagan and it is published in the journal Science (). But Sagan couldnât get anyone to react. So he decided to stop writing and start protesting.
Saganâs 1983 paper predicted that a nuclear war would kill half the people on the planet and that the rest would spend months in near-darkness, almost all starving to death. Mikhail Gorbachev had already initiated a unilateral halt on nuclear tests but Ronald Reagan refused to follow suit. So Sagan, by now world-famous as a populariser of science, went to the Nevada test site and, watched by thousands of other protesters, scaled the fence. He and 437 others were arrested.
It is rare for scientists to push their discoveries so hard they come up against the law. One of the few who has is climate scientist James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has twice been arrested at climate change protests. As Sherwood Rowland, who fought for the ban on CFCs that halted the destruction of the ozone layer, said: âWhatâs the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all weâre willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?â
GALILEO SCAMS THE POPEĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý
When Einstein calls you âroguishâ, you can be pretty sure you are. So convinced was Galileo Galilei that the Earth moved round the sun he wasnât prepared to let the difficulties of making a watertight argument get in the way.
âWhen Albert Einstein calls you âroguishâ you can be pretty sure that you areâ
Galileoâs argument, made explicitly for Pope Urban VIII, was that the tides were a sloshing effect produced by a combination of Earthâs movement around the sun and its daily rotation. Unfortunately, Johannes Kepler had pointed out three decades earlier that the tides are linked to the moon. Galileo was having none of that, and berated those who âresort to useless chimeras such as motions of the moon and other fictionsâ.
What really was hard to argue against was that Galileoâs calculations led to just one tide per day, and everyone knew that there were two. Nonetheless, he stuck to his guns and published the âproofâ in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World in 1632.
When Einstein was asked to write a foreword to a 1953 edition of the book, he called Galileo a rogue but exonerated him too: the howler was forgivable because it arose in the âpassionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authorityâ.
Galileo blazed a trail. Newton invented explanations, so did Einstein, and a significant proportion of todayâs scientists find ways to do it too. In a 2005 survey published in Nature under the title âScientists Behaving Badlyâ, a third of respondents admitted having committed scientific misconduct in the previous three years ().
CRICK AND WATSON STEAL THEIR COLLEAGUESâ DATA
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The American chemist Linus Pauling was close to working out the structure of DNA. Francis Crick and James Watson were desperate to beat him to it, but their colleagues Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins had fallen out and were being excruciatingly slow at releasing the crystallographic data.
What else could Crick do, but steal the data from under their noses? When Wilkins expressed outrage, Crick told him to âcheer up and take it from us that even if we kicked you in the pants it was between friends. We hope our burglary will at least produce a united front in your group.â
That quote comes from recently rediscovered letters by Crick, and it isnât the only time he made plain his disregard for his colleagues ().
Franklin comes in for a particularly vicious kicking. In 1979, amid many accusations that she wasnât given enough credit, Crick declared that Franklin was âtoo determined to be scientifically sound and to avoid shortcutsâ. In the same month he wrote: âFirst-class scientists take risks⌠Rosalind, it seems to me, was too cautious.â If you want a Nobel prize, it seems, sometimes you have to fight dirty.
ETTORE MAJORANA STAGES HIS OWN SUICIDE
There have been plenty of suicides in the history of science. Some, like meteorologist Robert FitzRoy, were a consequence of rejection by colleagues. Some, like Ludwig Boltzmann, can be put down to clinical depression. No one, though, has turned their suicide into a talking point in the way that Ettore Majorana managed.
A brilliant Sicilian physicist, Majorana would have been a strong contender for a Nobel prize. In 1938, though, he wrote a string of suicide notes then disappeared. Though it looks like an open-and-shut case, there are reasons to think the suicide notes were a decoy.
Shortly before his disappearance, Majorana made a large withdrawal from his bank account. He was also carrying his passport. So alternative explanations abound: some say Majorana was kidnapped by spies seeking nuclear secrets, others that he was abducted by the mafia. There are rumours â still current â that he fled to South America, or reinvented himself as a tramp known as âThe Dog-Manâ who lived in a cave and could work out the cube root of any number in his head.
Some have suggested that Majoranaâs aim was almost artistic: he wanted to create an enigma worthy of his beloved quantum theory. In the quantum world, things can be in two different states at once. Majoranaâs strange demise echoes this: he has become the embodiment of Schrodingerâs Cat, alive and dead at the same time.