The Scientist as Rebel (24 page)

Biology will probably be the next science to enter the third stage. New tools which might give power to amateur biologists are already visible on the horizon. The new tools will be cheaper and smaller versions of the tools now used by professional biologists to do genetic engineering. It took thirty years for the expensive and cumbersome mainframe computers of the 1950s to evolve into the cheap and convenient personal computers of the 1980s. In a similar fashion, the expensive genome-sequencing and protein-synthesizing machines of today will evolve into cheap machines that can stand on a desktop. The personal computer is not only cheaper and smaller, but also faster and more powerful than the mainframe that it replaced. The desktop sequencers and synthesizers of the future will be faster and more powerful than the machines that they will replace, and will be controlled by more sophisticated computer programs.

When these tools are available, the demand for them will be irresistible, just as the demand for laptop computers is irresistible today. Genetic engineering of roses and orchids, ornamental shrubs and vegetables, will be a new art form as well as a new science. Homeowners in well-to-do suburbs will use the new tools to embellish their gardens, while subsistence farmers in poor countries will use them to feed their families with higher-yielding or better-tasting potatoes. Amateur plant breeders and animal breeders and ecologists and nature lovers will then be enabled to make serious contributions to science, just as amateur astronomers do today.

Before the amateur use of genetic engineering becomes widespread, numerous political and legal obstacles will have to be overcome. Many people are strongly opposed to genetic engineering of any kind. Some of the opposition arises from religious or ideological principles, but much of it arises from practical concerns. Genetic engineering can undoubtedly be dangerous to public health and to ecological stability. The use of genetic engineering kits must be strictly regulated if these dangers are to be avoided. Genetic engineering of microbes is a great tool for terrorists, as Richard Preston demonstrates in his recent book
The Demon in the Freezer
.
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Any kit available to the public must be made physically incapable of handling microbes. It could well happen that political authorities will decide to prohibit such kits altogether. It will be a sad day for biology if amateurs are forbidden the use of tools available to professionals. But that is a decision which we should leave to our grandchildren.
³

When we look at the wider society outside the domain of science, we see amateurs playing essential roles in almost every field of human activity. Amateur musicians create the culture in which professional musicians can flourish. Amateur athletes, amateur actors, and amateur environmentalists improve the quality of life for themselves and others. Amateur writers such as Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys do as much as the professionals Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky to plumb the heights and depths of human experience. In the most important of all human responsibilities, the raising of children and grandchildren, amateurs do the lion’s share of the work. In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of the population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society. Ferris shows us how
amateurs are giving a new flavor to modern astronomy. We may hope that amateurs in the coming century, using the new tools that modern technology is placing in their hands, will invade and rejuvenate all of science.

IT WAS A
strange juxtaposition. A big metal box filled with the manuscripts of Isaac Newton, hidden by Newton during his lifetime and unread for two hundred years afterward, and a fat young man with red hair and khaki shorts, strutting on the stage at meetings of the British Union of Fascists. The big metal box was packed up by Newton in 1696, when he left Cambridge and moved to London. He was leaving forever the life of intense and solitary study that he had pursued in Cambridge for thirty-five years, and entering the role of public figure and patron saint of the Age of Enlightenment that he pursued in London for thirty years more. The fat young man was Lord Lymington, Earl of Portsmouth. He was a direct descendant of Catherine Barton, the niece of Newton who kept house for him in London and inherited his papers when he died. Catherine Barton’s daughter Kitty married an Earl of Portsmouth and became an ancestor of the fat young man. And so the fat young man came into possession of the big metal box. When he came into possession of the box, the papers inside were still intact.

When I was a boy in high school during World War II, I met the fat young man and disliked him intensely. I was helping England to survive by bringing in the harvest, at a time when the grownups who normally worked on the farms had been called up to serve
in the army. The high school kids worked hard in the fields and enjoyed taking a holiday from Latin and mathematics. But the fat young man owned the land where we were working, and he came and lectured us about blood and soil and the mystical virtues of the open-air life. He had visited Germany, where his friend Adolf Hitler had organized the schoolkids to work on the land in a movement that he called
Kraft durch Freude
, in English “Strength through Joy.” In Germany the kids had an accordionneuse, a woman with an accordion who played music to them all day long and kept them working in the right rhythm. The fat young man said he would find an accordionneuse for us too. Then we would have strength through joy and we would be able to work much better. Fortunately the accordionneuse never showed up, and we continued to work in our own rhythm. We knew that the fat young man was second in command to Sir Oswald Moseley in the British Union of Fascists, and if his friend Adolf had successfully invaded England he would probably have been our
Gauleiter
. Being well-brought-up English children, we listened to the fat young man politely and never showed him our contempt.

When I was bringing in the harvest and listening to the fat young man, I did not know that he had been the owner of the Newton papers. I learned this two years later from the economist John Maynard Keynes. I was then a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, while Keynes was a fellow of King’s College. Keynes was chief economic adviser to the British government and largely responsible for keeping the British economy afloat at a time when more than half of our gross national product, and all of our foreign exchange, was being spent on the war. He was wearing himself out, flying back and forth between London and Washington and dealing with one financial crisis after another. He never had time to pursue his hobby, the careful scholarly reading of the Newton papers. I was lucky to be present at one of his rare appearances in Cambridge, when he gave
a lecture at Trinity College with the title “Newton, the Man.”
¹
The audience was small, and we huddled around the exhausted figure of Keynes as he lay in a reclining chair in a cold, dark room and talked quietly about the big metal box and its contents. Four years later he died of heart failure, precipitated by overwork and the hardships of crossing the Atlantic repeatedly in slow propeller-driven airplanes under wartime conditions.

Keynes described to us how the fat young man, in need of cash to finance the British Union of Fascists in 1936, had brought the big metal box to Sotheby’s in London and sold the contents at auction in 329 separate lots. Keynes had warning of the sale only a few days before it happened. He attended the auction and bought as many of the papers as he could with money out of his own pocket. “Disturbed by this impiety,” he told us, “I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including nearly the whole of the biographical portion, in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America.” The papers that he rescued are now preserved in the King’s College library. The rest of them were sold piecemeal to various collectors and dispersed all over the world. Even as a salesman of irreplaceable antiquities, the fat young man was incompetent. As a reward for his act of gross impiety, he reaped a total of only £9,000.

In his lecture, Keynes described the contents of the box that he examined as best he could during the turmoil of the sale and afterward. Among the papers that he rescued was a firsthand description of Newton, written by Newton’s cousin Humphrey, who worked for him as a secretary for five years. Those five years included the two
that Newton spent writing his
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, in English
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
, the masterpiece that set the course of the physical sciences for the next two hundred years. The
Principia
appeared in three volumes. The first two established the laws of physics and the methods of calculating the consequences of the laws. The third volume begins with Newton’s proud statement: “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the system of the world.” The third volume analyzes the diverse phenomena of the real world, the motions of sun and moon, planets, satellites, and comets, the precession of the earth’s axis of rotation, and the rise and fall of tides, and shows how they all occur precisely as his principles predict. The manuscript of the
Principia
, which Newton’s friend Edmond Halley took with him to London in 1686 to be published, is in Humphrey Newton’s hand.

Humphrey’s description of Newton’s life in Cambridge was written many years later. Newton spent much of his time in the elaboratory, a wooden building in his garden in which he did alchemical experiments. Here is Humphrey writing about Newton as an alchemist:

In his talk at Trinity College, Keynes quoted Humphrey and then added his own interpretation:

During the sixty years since Keynes spoke in Cambridge, the papers that were hidden in the big metal box have given rise to a literature that is even more voluminous. The collected mathematical papers of Newton have been published in eight large volumes, the collected correspondence in seven. The standard biography of Newton by Richard Westfall, with the title
Never at Rest
,
²
fills more than nine hundred pages. Large numbers of more specialized books and papers have been devoted to Newton’s mathematics, optics, physics, alchemy, and theology, to his scientific quarrels, his religious beliefs, and his later official career as Master of the Mint.

Now comes a new biography by James Gleick.
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For the casual reader with a serious interest in Newton’s life and work, I recommend Gleick’s biography as an excellent place to start. It has three important virtues. It is accurate, it is readable, and it is short. It is roughly one quarter of the length of Westfall’s book, and still gives a well-rounded and fairly complete picture of Newton and his ideas. To take the subject of alchemy as an example, Newton’s alchemical activities occupy forty-six pages of Westfall (half each of Chapters 8 and 9), eight pages of Gleick (Chapter 9 with the title “All Things Are Corruptible”). Gleick’s account is more sharply focused on the essential question, how it was possible for a mind as sharp and logical as Newton’s to search for nature’s secrets in ancient alchemical manipulations as well as in physical laws. Gleick’s answer to this question:

During the years after the auction, two other scholarly collectors besides Keynes were slowly reassembling the papers that were scattered in 1936. The other two were Roger Ward Babson, an American stock market analyst, and A. S. Yahuda, an Orientalist born in the Middle East who ended up at Yale University. It was fortunate that these three collectors had interests that did not strongly overlap. Keynes
was primarily interested in papers concerned with alchemy, Babson in papers concerned with gravitation, Yahuda in papers concerned with theology. The Babson collection is now in the Babson College Library at Wellesley, Massachusetts; the Yahuda collection is in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Contrary to Keynes’s fears, the papers that went to America are in collections open to scholars, while the few papers that remain inaccessible are mostly in France and Switzerland.