Leaps in the Dark: The Making of Scientific Reputations

  • John Waller
Oxford University Press: 2004. 304 pp. £18.99, $24.95 0192804847 | ISBN: 0-192-80484-7
Unprincipled investigator? Selman Waksman took all the credit for the discovery of streptomycin. Credit: RUTGERS UNIV. ARCHIVES

“The next day Koch was bending nearsightedly over the body of this little creature on his dissecting board; giddy with hope, he was carefully flaming his knives... Not three minutes later Koch is seated before his microscope, a bit of the dead creature's spleen between two thin bits of glass. ‘I've proved it,’ he whispers, ‘here are the threads, the rods — those little bacilli from my hanging drop were just as murderous as the ones right out of the spleen of a dead sheep.’” Such was the style of popular science writing in the dawn of the genre some eighty years ago. Paul de Kruif's reams of incandescent prose, hard to stomach today, inspired two generations of schoolchildren to follow in the footsteps of Robert Koch and other heroes.

John Waller finds such romantic images of the scientific process pernicious, and he is a man with a mission: he wants to rip the laurels from the brows of the scientific conquerors, and to place their achievements in a more realistic, even at times sordid, context. Leaps in the Dark is his second foray into this territory, and follows on from Fabulous Science.

We know of course that no important discovery ever emerges from an intellectual vacuum, for it is a truism that every advance rests on what has gone before. Even Newton, Waller reminds us, admitted to having seen further than his peers because he had “stood on the shoulders of giants” — though the remark is generally interpreted as a dig at his detested rival, the diminutive Robert Hooke, rather than a mark of modesty, an attribute wholly alien to Newton's temperament.

Waller excoriates the sin of ‘presentism’ — the interpretation of historical events in terms of the social, moral and intellectual norms of our own time. So, he avers, it was the intellectual constraints of the period that drove the great biologist and polymath Lazzaro Spallanzani to reject the (to us self-evident) implication of his own remarkable experiments: that an animal's genetic composition does not derive solely from its mother.

The attempt to supplant an existing principle that has until then adequately accommodated the known facts inevitably meets resistance. But this reaction, as Waller stresses, must not be taken to imply that the opposition is foolish or bigoted. An example is the power that the germ theory of disease exercised in the late nineteenth century, which made it hard for scientists and doctors to get their minds around the idea that disease could equally be caused by the absence of something (such as trace nutrients).

But with his relentless emphasis on the influence of social and political factors in determining whether a new theory prevailed or sank, Waller erects some speculative structures of his own. He holds, for instance, that in the prolonged debate over the cause of cholera, Koch vanquished Max von Pettenkofer not because he was right and his adversary was wrong, but because the Kaiser and the Chancellor of a newly united Germany were eager to present the fiercely patriotic and gallophobic Koch as their country's rival to Louis Pasteur and the French school.

And how did Ignaz Semmelweis's insight that childbed fever was disseminated by a contagion on the hands of doctors and students coming from the autopsy room to the labour wards fail so signally to find favour with his superior, Johannes Klein? Why, because of Klein's distaste for Semmelweis's republican politics, of course, rather than for his theory. Well, maybe.

In Waller's summing-up we find the following passage: “By the end of the 1800s scientific advance remained closely linked to political and economic developments. As the efficient harnessing of power became of vital economic importance with the onset of industrialization, physicists turned from the study of matter to that of energy.” Leaving aside the implicit conflation of science with technology, is there evidence that the likes of Hermann von Helmholtz, Julius Mayer, Rudolf Clausius and Ludwig Boltzmann concerned themselves greatly with economic imperatives? And did Darwin really draw his inspiration from the struggle for existence in the mill towns of the Industrial Revolution? There must at least be scope for doubt. Waller's conjectures are certainly not without interest, and he seldom fails to make a lucid case. But he threatens, it seems to me, to replace one form of historical distortion (Thomas Carlyle's ‘great man’ view of human progress) with another.

Waller concludes with two cases of misrepresentation and injustice that are still within living memory. He does a magisterial demolition job on the egregious scientific mandarin Robert Watson-Watt, whose outrageous claims to have invented radar and directed its operation were scarcely questioned by the politicians. R. V. Jones, in his wartime memoirs, recalls his efforts to escape from Watson-Watt's capacious orbit, having found him to be devious, manipulative and, worse, a third-rate physicist. Watson-Watt's boundless self-aggrandisement bore fruit, and his is still the name most often associated with the invention that, perhaps more than any other, secured victory for the Allies in the Second World War.

Selman Waksman, by contrast, was a well respected researcher who forsook his principles for the irresistible prospect of lasting fame. The antibiotic streptomycin eventually saved the lives of innumerable consumptives, and earned Waksman a Nobel prize in 1952. His claim to have discovered the antibiotic essentially by himself was challenged by his student Albert Schatz, who went so far as to take his supervisor to court, an act that incurred the opprobrium of the scientific establishment for bringing their calling into disrepute. The affair put paid to Schatz's career, even though it was he who had on his own initiative isolated streptomycin and tested it against tubercle bacilli. As so often in such cases, the student was convinced that the credit was entirely his, while the professor believed that he had created the intellectual milieu which opened the way to the discovery. This does not exculpate Waksman, who had, as Waller shows, fallen into the grip of self-delusion. Friedrich Nietzsche explained this psychology most concisely: “‘I have done this,’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done this,’ says my pride, and remains adamant. At last memory yields.”

Let me affirm finally that Leaps in the Dark is a good read, and ought to generate much healthy debate. Waller has opened what seems to be an inexhaustible vein — one that will no doubt yield more high-quality ore.