Homage to Gaia (18 page)

The
Vengeance
’s own peculiarity was the longitudinal flutter of the whole ship as if it were a long and thin metal bar. This flutter was rapid and gave the feel, as the seaman said, of sliding down a flight of stairs. This uneasy motion superimposed upon the pitching and tossing made useful work all but impossible. The crack on the deck became more than just a doom story in the naval constructor’s mind. It started spreading across the deck and soon we heard that seamen were drilling holes ahead of the crack. This is sound engineering practice: a hole imposes less stress on the metal than the sharp
growing
point of the crack itself. Other seamen, we heard, were welding strips of metal behind the crack to hold it together. Everyone on deck was roped as climbers are, so great was the wind and the danger of slipping off into the icy sea.

The ship continued on its southerly course into the storm for two days. Then the north coast of Iceland came into sight and there was no choice other than to turn back north again. This meant the ship would have to turn across the wind and the bridge warned us of the dangers of the manœuvre in such seas, with the ship in the state it was. The turn was an awful minute during which our cabin cupboards crashed over, ripped from their mountings by the motion of the ship. We sailed north and the storm continued; the motion more
uncomfortable
still by the following sea. That evening in the wardroom I overheard the Captain say to the Chief Engineer, ‘Well, Chief, which end drops off first?’ It was not good bedtime news. Frank Smith was, as usual, his calm and wonderful self. When I said, ‘Shouldn’t we stay in the wardroom for the night?’, thinking that our cabins in the stern were a trap should the ship, in fact, break in half, he said, ‘Nonsense, we’ll sleep there as usual,’ and we did. Next day the storm had lessened and we were able to resume our researches.

One evening, back behind the shelter of Jan Mayen Island, the Captain invited Frank Smith and me to dinner in his spacious cabin. He made us welcome and at home so that we felt that what we were doing was important for the ship. He was keen to know what we had found out so far in our tests. Because of the ship’s size and
spaciousness
, our news was good: our measurements showed a low level of airborne bacteria, and confirmed the sailors’ opinion that their
quarters
were comfortable. The
Vengeance
seemed to be a healthy ship to be on, except of course for the crack. Here Captain Terry was
reassuring
and we left for our quarters with a sense of warmth and security. Perhaps the knowledge that they may someday be responsible for starting a major war is what gives senior diplomats and service officers that quality of calm authority.

Five weeks had passed and the weather was warmer and calmer, and the trials were completed. We set sail south for Scotland, this time heading for Rossyth, the main naval port and dockyard. As we approached the north of Scotland, most of the planes took off for airfields there. The wardroom then was half empty, with the flying crew gone, but it reminded us of the dual nature of the ship that we were sailing on. Frank Smith and I spent the last day of our sailing, as we travelled down the east coast of Scotland, preparing the draft of our report on the voyage. It was later polished on shore but it was good to have what was then for me the hardest part of the whole voyage, writing the report, done before we reached port. We arrived early next morning at the dock in Rossyth and disembarked. We carried with us a generous allowance of dutiable items like liquor and cigarettes. News of our ordeal must have gone ahead for when the customs officer asked which ship we came from, and we replied the
Vengeance,
he just smiled and waved us on our way.

Back at Harvard Hospital my own particular task in the common cold project was to try to find the paths along which colds spread between people. Together with Edward Lowbury and Keith
Dumbell
, we had made experiments to show that colds spread mainly by direct contact. Contact such as shaking hands could cause the transfer of substantial quantities—milligrams—of nasal secretion from person to person. We doubted that colds were spread, as previously thought, by the fine airborne droplets of a sneeze, and our main effort was to try to quantify the transfer of infectious secretion from one person to another. I used fluorescent substances to label the nasal secretion of volunteers with colds and followed the spread of the secretion by illuminating their surroundings with long wavelength UV. In this way we showed that airborne fine particles conveyed, to those that breathed them in, only fractions of a microgram of secretion. Direct contact from shaking hands or large droplets from a cough in the face conveyed over a thousand times as much. We also made field
observations
on the London Underground, watching how often travellers touched their mouths and noses. We concluded that most respiratory
infections occurred either by imbibing the large droplets of a close encounter with a sneeze or by touching some previously infected surface and then transferring the infection to the mouth. Infection by breathing fine airborne droplets could occur but would require a highly infectious organism. Measles or tuberculosis could spread this way, especially in the confines of a passenger aircraft, but even here, the opportunities for contact transfer are much greater.

A direct experiment supported these views. We took a small room and divided it in the middle by means of a large blanket suspended between the walls of the room. On one side of the blanket was a group of five children who had streaming colds, and on the other side of the room were ten volunteers who came to the hospital and offered their services as human guinea pigs. A large fan stirred the air of the room so that fine airborne particles sneezed, coughed, or talked out by the children would be transferred rapidly round to the side of the room where the volunteers were. We also had sampling apparatus to sample the bacteria and virus particles in the air. In this experiment, colds were not transferred from the children to the volunteers. In another experiment, we took the blanket down and let the children play card games with the volunteers. The contact of the volunteers’ hands with the nasal secretion deposited on the cards by the children effectively transferred the infection. We concluded that we catch colds from others by direct contact. Something useful, I suppose, but I do not think that in practice our discovery has helped to stop the spread of the disease to any extent.

In the last years of my time at Harvard Hospital I grew curious about the role of calcium in blood clotting. I had the idea that calcium was not so much an active essential part of clotting but acted to bring in contact negatively charged blood components that would
otherwise
be repelled by their negative polarity. I started collaboration with Betty Burch and with James Porterfield. It turned out that the idea was sound and we published our research in the
Biochemical
Journal.
James Porterfield and I went on to pioneer the production of plastic surfaces that would keep blood from coagulating almost indefinitely. This work we published in
Nature
but we were about ten years premature; the need for such an invention did not come until
DeBakey
and others first made artery replacements in the 1960s. A happy consequence of the collaboration was the romance that developed between James Porterfield and Betty Burch that led to Harvard Hospital’s first marriage.

Frank Raymond, a wartime colleague in Robert Bourdillon’s department, now worked for the Agricultural Research Council but we kept in touch. He asked me if I could help by designing an instrument that would monitor the movements of cattle as they grazed. I was ready for a break from biochemistry and willingly agreed, but it led me to participate in the removal of hedgerows—one of the most destructive changes that happened to the English countryside after the Second World War. Hedgerows are linear forests that act as fences between farmers’ fields and serve to provide a habitat for birds and for numerous species of plants and insects. They are the refuge and reservoir of bygone ecosystems, but since 1946 we have lost 150,000 miles of hedgerow, and I regret to say I played a small part in this act of national ecocide.

We had nearly starved in the Second World War and we knew that our farmland could not produce enough to feed us, so it was
inevitable
that the improvement of farming efficiency should be high on our list of national priorities. What we would lose in the way of scenic beauty and a country way of life never occurred to us. As a nation, we behaved just like those in charge of a famous national museum during a time of recession when the only way to survive is by selling its treasures. I loved the English country scene passionately, yet I was as thoughtlessly responsible for its destruction as was a greedy
shareholder
of an agribusiness firm, or a landowner out to maximize the return from his broad hectares. This is how it happened with me.

The Grassland Research Institute was at Stratford-upon-Avon, about 120 miles from Salisbury. In 1947 the Medical Research
Council
had provided Owen Lidwell and me with a car, a Morris ten, registration JMM 540, and it was for our travels to sites where we did air hygiene experiments. Owen, as the senior partner of the pair of us, had charge of it. He also needed it for travelling from Salisbury to London, where his home still was. Generously, he allowed me to use it for journeys such as this one to the Grassland Institute. The problem was that there were coupons only for two gallons of fuel and only about one gallon in the tank. At thirty miles per gallon, I was short by thirty miles of my destination, Stratford-upon-Avon. However, at twenty-seven I was still under the influence of abundant testosterone and a risk-taker and was sure that I could drive to Stratford-
upon-Avon
and back with the limited fuel available. There were
competitions
where the winner was the one who travelled furthest on a fixed quantity of fuel and they left in my mind the possibility that I could
also drive as efficiently. The journey had been planned with my friend, Tom Thompson, Harvard Hospital’s capable manager and he thought that I could do it. We agreed that the best plan would be to keep an average speed of forty miles an hour, and to do so by accelerating to fifty and then coasting back to thirty, then repeating this saw-tooth pattern of driving throughout the journey. Nowadays such a plan would be impossible to put into practice; then, even the main roads were all but empty of traffic.

I set out from Harvard Hospital on a clear, bright sunlit May morning. The blackbirds advertised the excellence of their genes to potential mates and the scent of hawthorn blossoms filled the air. I should have spent the day walking in the countryside to enjoy it while it was still there but I was in the honeymoon stages of driving. The meadows were full of wild flowers, there was even pheasant’s eye, the scarlet buttercup, in the field below the hospital and the hedgerows were full of birds’ nests. Ten years later, it would be well on its way to a desert full of weed-free grain, bounded by barbed-wire fences.

The journey took me up the Avon valley through Amesbury, just missing Stonehenge and on through the Savernake Forest, with its fresh new leaves, to Marlborough. I then drove on over the downs to Swindon and to Burford in the Cotswolds, and from there I was soon at the Grassland Research Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon. The fuel gauge registered that I had used less than half the fuel allocation, so the return journey would be less exacting. My friend, Frank
Raymond
, was then a young scientist working diligently to improve the ‘backward’ farming practices of Old England. Even bread was rationed. In theory we could grow all of the food we needed; in practice, English farming seemed to use the land inefficiently and we were able during the war and immediately afterwards, to grow no more than sixty per cent of our needs.

At the Grassland Research Institute, they pioneered the practices that now allow even a small part of England to grow all of the food needed to feed the whole country. They specialized in grass farming and were telling young farmers how much more efficient their farms would be if they took out most of their hedgerows. Hedgerows are made of woody plants entwined with brambles; they are natural fences festooned with natural barbed wire. They included all of the
woodland
trees: oaks, ash, beech as well as holly, blackthorn and hawthorn. It is said that in some places the age of a hedgerow can be guessed by counting the number of woody plants per thirty-yard run. Ten
different
species implied an age between one and two thousand years old. Hedgerows represent the most amazing symbiosis of human and woodland ecosystems, and they are places where birds can nest. They are the habitats of predatory insects—ichneumon flies, small wasps, and ladybirds—that are the natural means of keeping pests in check. Hedgerows evolved in the days when mass-produced farm machinery was non-existent. Horses were the power sources and small fields enclosed by hedgerows were the norm.

What we were doing at the Grassland Research Institute was
providing
essential information to the civil servants of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the farmers. They then used it to plan their campaign to replace the old English countryside with an efficient agribusiness operation. We took the breath-taking beauty of our land as much for granted as would a peasant farmer that of his young wife, and we expected it to work for us, not realizing that a life of drudgery is incompatible with beauty. In the pursuit of agricultural efficiency we were concerned with choosing the breeds of sheep and cattle that most efficiently converted grass to meat, and Frank Raymond had the notion that the more placid an animal was the more weight it would gain during grazing and that unnecessary movement wasted energy. He had asked me—in my role as an inventor—if I would design and make a device that cattle could wear that would continuously monitor their movements. It would have to record how much time an animal spent walking, running, sitting down, chewing the cud, and so on. To meet this need I designed a small battery-operated radio transmitter that broadcast information on the animal’s movements as notes at different audio frequencies. The senior technician at Harvard
Hospital
, Ron Canaway, converted my rough breadboard design into a neat package that fitted on the back of a young bullock. I had brought the first model of this device with me for trials at Stratford-upon-Avon.