Homage to Gaia (16 page)

Living at Harvard Hospital gave me a chance to return to
Bowerchalke
, the village that had so entranced me as a schoolboy. I went there again on a bicycle, this time with Helen, and in the spring of 1947. The hospital was on Coombe Road, which ran southwest from Salisbury and in the direction of Bowerchalke, some ten miles away. In 1947, the United Kingdom was as poor as an underdeveloped
country
is now. Food and fuel were rationed and there were few cars on the roads. It was a cyclist’s delight. The journeys up the Chalke Valley to Broadchalke and Bowerchalke were wholly unimpeded by traffic and the air was fresh and free of exhaust fumes. More than this, in spite of an easterly air stream from Europe, the sky was a clear and sharp blue,
free of the obstructing haze that spoils fine weather in Europe now—a haze that represents the exhaust fumes of the tens of millions of vehicles in that densely populated continent. Bowerchalke was just as it had been, except that no teas were on offer anywhere. We went through the village and up the hill to Wood Yates on the main road, and turned left back on the main road to Harvard Hospital and Salisbury. I took comfort in the thought that Bowerchalke was now only twelve miles away. Maybe one day we could move there.

There was a prevalent notion among common cold virologists that immunity to the disease was short-lived and this was why we catch colds so often. One evening in a discussion on this topic, Christopher Andrewes suggested that we do an experiment with volunteers on a desert island. We could isolate them for three months and then test their immunity. It so happened that there was a small deserted island off the north coast of Scotland near the small town of Tongue. In the summer of 1949 we rented the island and refurbished the cottages still standing to make them suitable temporary homes for the student volunteers and MRC staff. It was hard work and involved frequent trips by boat carrying the three months’ supplies of food and equipment.

We had just moored the village boat at the decrepit stone quay of Eilean Nan Ron when Mr Anderson, the boatman, took me by the arm and asked quietly, ‘Tell me, Doctor, what is it that you are all doing here on this island?’ He spoke that clear precise English that is a joy to listen to, the tongue common on the northern and western fringes of these islands. Mr Anderson was no Celt; his tall lean figure, blue eyes, and light complexion spoke of Scandinavia. We often forget that Scotland was once a Norwegian colony. He was also the headman of the village of Skerray and looked the part. His question, what were we doing, had been simmering a long time. Here we were spending what was, to the villagers in the austerities of 1949, a fortune
refurbishing
the houses on the island that had been deserted for decades, and just for a few months’ use. We were there to do an experiment on the common cold and we needed temporary accommodation for the student volunteers who would spend their summer in total isolation on the island. When we told Mr Anderson our true intentions, he did not believe us. The idea that we civil servants were spending
taxpayers
’ money investigating the common cold was too absurd, an insult to his intelligence. ‘So come clean, Doctor, what are you doing here?’ There was no use in my saying, ‘But we really are studying the
common cold here on this remote place. We expect to find a decline of the immunity to common colds of our volunteers as time goes by and we will test it at the end of the season by exposing them to a cold virus.’ Nothing I said like this, however true it was, would be believed; truth is so much less credible than fiction. Without
conscious
intention, I turned to Mr Anderson, after I’d stepped onto the quay, and said, ‘We are searching for uranium in the rocks here.’ His eyes lit up and a smile came across his face. ‘Of course, Doctor, I understand your reluctance to speak of it, but do not be concerned, I will tell no one what you’ve told me.’ As I looked down at the clear sea sparkling in the sunlight with the rich growth of
Fucus
and
Lami
naria
, an anemone opened its swaying fronds and seemed to wink at me. I wondered how long it would be before my fable reached Inverness.

I would like to think that my small fiction so impregnated the culture of northern Scotland that before long it gave birth to the fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay. One could have said that my words were a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do not mean by this that there was any link connecting my careless remark and the decision of government ministries in London, nearly a thousand miles away to the south, to build a fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay. No link was needed; in the minds of the locals the connection was readily made. There is no better fertilizer for a newly planted myth than secrecy, real or
imagined
. In those days, anything atomic was secret.

In a like manner, the 20
^th
century legend of flying saucers received sustenance from inappropriately applied secrecy. The more the truth is guarded, the more the fiction grows and, as we say in England, ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied.’ Some American government agency or one of its contractors decided to do
experiments
using mannequins as surrogate victims of parachute accidents, much in the way that car manufacturers test their new models by deliberately crashing them at speed into brick walls with dummies in the driver and passenger seats. From the damage sustained by these dummies, safety features and preventative designs can evolve. A wholly reasonable and scientific operation and one whose intentions are, of course, benign. Car manufacturers publicize their experiments as part of their advertising campaign, but bureaucrats hate publicity and given half a chance will make any information secret. In July 1947 in the USA they were in the mood to classify even the directions to, and the gender of, their lavatories.

The locals of Roswell, New Mexico noticed the sudden appearance of broken mannequins on the scrubby desert landscape near their town. They were puzzled, and when they saw soldiers gathering them up and placing them in body bags, their imaginations inflamed and the great myth of a failed alien invasion was born. The unwillingness of the authorities to explain the truth sustained and fed the myth until its growth became unstoppable. A recent Gallup poll showed that forty-two per cent of American college graduates in 1997 still believe that flying saucers have visited the Earth. Seventy per cent of
Americans
believe that the US government knows more about UFOs than it lets on and, of course, they are right. Bureaucrats, once they have a secret, gnaw and growl over it like a dog with a bone, and their one wish is to bury it and keep it from everyone. Like the dog they unearth it again after burial and guard it with a solemn seriousness, even when all shape and substance of the bone has gone.

Once science fiction or highly improbable events are sanctified by official or expert denial, they become a public myth. Even trained scientists and engineers become as gullible as do the lay public. One such myth, or remote improbability, is ball lightning, described as a glowing ball the size of a football that floats in the air or darts about like an insect and is usually associated with a thunderstorm.
Sometimes
it fades quietly; other times it vanishes with a loud bang. In the spring of 1979 I was returning to London from the United States by Northwest Airlines. I was sitting in my seat in the upper cabin of a Boeing 747. My seat companion had recently left his seat to go to the loo just above the helical stairway leading to the main deck. As he returned from the loo, making his way back to the seat, there was the most vivid flash and a deafening detonation. Lightning had struck the plane, not uncommon and usually harmless to large, modern aircraft. My friend of the journey regained his seat, turned to me and said, ‘Well, at least we’re still flying straight and level.’ He was an off-duty captain of the Northwest fleet and travelling to pick up an aircraft for a return to the USA. He was a cool, competent man, as one would expect of an experienced pilot. He turned to me again and said, ‘Did you see it?’ ‘See what?’ I replied. ‘The ball lightning,’ said he. He went on, ‘I saw it coming up the stairwell and it exploded with a loud bang near the top.’ ‘No, I didn’t see it,’ I told him. ‘I thought it was just a lightning strike on the plane.’ But my pilot friend was quite sure that he had seen ball lightning and he was believable. Maybe he had seen it. In a court of law, he would have been a convincing witness. I
wondered then, and still wonder, whether he was mistaken. My memory was of a vivid flash brighter than a photographer’s flashgun straight into my eyes, followed by a lingering afterglow like a ball of light superimposed on the view of the cabin. Could my companion have mistaken this afterglow for ball lightning and confused
unconsciously
the history of the event? In his memory, the bang came after and not simultaneously with the flash. Despite anecdotal evidence from distinguished physicists, I put tales of ball lightning in the same category as those of the spontaneous development of crop circles, or the spontaneous combustion of humans. I regard them all as almost certainly untrue.

What bothers me is not that the public believes these myths as much or more than they do the facts of science, but that so many scientists believe them also. Far too many British and American scientists seem either to believe or to want to believe in life on Mars. Few are objective on this topic. At a Royal Society discussion meeting on Life on Mars in 1997, I was surprised to discover how many of the scientists gathered there were ready to accept that pieces of rock gathered from Antarctica bore evidences of life on Mars. Any sensibly objective scientist would have regarded the tenuous chain linking those pieces of rock with the possibility of ancient life on Mars as so stretched as to be worthless. But faith overcame scepticism and all too many of the participants used the fiction of
Star
Trek
as their source of metaphor. There was even a government minister, Ian Lang, attending the meeting, as if it were an important event in science. Norman Horowitz of Cal Tech said, ‘The discovery of life outside the Earth would be a momentous event and change our view of the universe and ourselves.’ No one doubts the importance of such a discovery, but let us face it: founding a science programme as large as a space mission on the chance of Martian life is about as foolish as playing the National Lottery to fund a business.

As well as experiments on remote Scottish islands I found time at Harvard Hospital to improve my skills at instrument building. Among the instruments I made were two anemometers. One was an ionization device, the other an ultrasonic anemometer. I made these instruments in response to the experimental need of my medical colleagues to measure very low air movements, or draughts as the English call them. The public firmly believed that colds were caught by getting cold, hence the name. They needed objective,
experimentally
repeatable criteria for defining the coldness of an environment
and this meant measuring the temperature and the humidity of the air, which is easy, but also measuring the speed of air movement, which was difficult. At the time, there were no instruments in
existence
capable of measuring air velocities as low as five millimetres per second. The ionization anemometer met the need. More important for me it was the inspiration behind several important ionization devices I invented ten years later.

The invention of the ion anemometer also led to an exciting voyage. I have always loved travel by ship and in 1949 my smouldering itch to go to sea ignited. I was at a committee meeting at the MRC
headquarters
in London. In those days, the council occupied an elegant old house in Old Queen Street, Westminster. We met in a gracious room with a large window looking out on to St James’s Park. It was a pleasant enough place to be in but we were discussing what, to me, was a dull and pointless experiment in air hygiene in some schools in Southwark, a London suburb. One of the committee members was also a member of the Royal Naval Personnel Research Committee. During ‘any other business’ he asked if any of us would be interested in making air hygiene measurements aboard the
HMS
Vengeance
on its cold weather winter cruise into the Arctic. I was suddenly awake. Here was my chance to satisfy my longing for a ship voyage. After the meeting I buttonholed the naval colleague and said, ‘Look, I would be glad to go. Please include me on the ship.’ Fortunately for me, ship journeys are not popular with scientists and there was no competition. I rediscovered this reluctance to leave dry land years later when I was a member of the Marine Biological Association’s Council, and later its President. Few marine scientists seem to want to go to sea. To me, this is extraordinary. My employers, the MRC, were reluctant at first but the Navy, having a willing volunteer, would not let go. Soon my naval friends and I were planning the experiments we would make on the voyage.

Preparing for a scientific expedition is not usually part of a
scientist’s
training but it is something that must be done right. Nothing, not even the small things usually taken for granted, can be forgotten if you are off on a trip to distant places. More than this, one must duplicate all essentials whenever possible. Murphy’s Law rules supreme: if anything can fail, it will. The scientist and well-known
science writer Robert Matthews recently demonstrated by good experiments that toast does indeed nearly always fall on the buttered side, and that the supermarket queue we choose is more often than not the slowest one.

For the six-week Arctic cruise of
HMS
Vengeance
, they were letting me off lightly. This was to be my expeditionary apprenticeship. Here I had the thorough and painstaking support of Frank Smith, a member of the Royal Naval Personnel Research Committee, who had served in the Navy as an engineering officer. Fortunately, the
Vengeance
carried ample stocks of most of the things that we might need and, in addition, had an engineering workshop able to make and repair
anything
we broke. We were taking to the ship our slit samplers to collect the bacteria-laden particles from the air. We intended to sample the sailors’ quarters and mess decks; we were also taking some
medium-sized
forty-cubic-foot cylinders of helium to use as a tracer gas to measure the ventilation rate of the ship’s compartments. There was as well my ionization anemometer to measure air movement and so decide whether the spaces the sailors lived in were or were not comfortable. There were also all the small things of a laboratory: Pasteur pipettes, glass-marking pencils, stopwatches, chemicals,
batteries
, electronic spare parts, and so on, to say nothing of notebooks and pens. Because of these preparations, the voyage filled my mind for weeks before the ship set sail. I was still young enough then,
twenty-seven
years old, to lose sleep with the excitement of the prospect.