Loose Ends

  • Sydney Brenner
Current Biology: 1997 Pp. 128 £12.50,$32.50

In 1847, the aged Dr Routh, president of Magdalen and one of the foremost scholars of his day, was asked what precept he could offer to guide and sustain a young man embarking on a life of learning. After long thought, his face brightened and he spoke thus: “I think, sir, since you care for the advice of an old man sir, you will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir.” A pragmatic suggestion for our time might be “read Molecular Biology of the Cell, but don't drop it on your foot”. This is very much the level of inspiration afforded by most scientific memoirs, often sponsored by charitable foundations, that have appeared in such numbers in recent years.

A collection of Sydney Brenner's writings arouses altogether higher expectations and I am happy to report that indeed it will disappoint no one, for here we have the authentic voice of the master himself. These pieces have appeared in the back of the monthly issues of Current Biology, which tend therefore to vanish from our library the day they arrive. The appearance of a new number is generally heralded for me by a call from a friend in a lab up the road, asking me whether I have yet read Brenner this month and regaling me with a few of the more outrageous squibs.

Loose Ends are reflections on biology and the scientific life. Uncle Syd's epistles to his nephew Willie treading the path of academic virtue from graduate student to institute director are laced with pungent anecdotes from an eventful life. Uncle Syd expatiates on the value of intellectual innocence and the treacherous nature of experimental phenomena; he informs Willy that the most abject of research students has the advantage of his professor, who has little time for such trivia as the work of his laboratory. “I have to warn you,” he concludes, “that, sadly, this may be the only time in your career when you can enjoy research as an individual scientist.”

As Willie comes to man's estate, Uncle Syd proffers solutions to the problems that now face him — how, for instance, to avoid committees and conferences: the only acceptable excuse, he asserts, is to plead a prior meeting. To add conviction, Uncle Syd once invented a highly exclusive and mysterious society, which spawned numerous subcommittees to keep its members perpetually occupied. But at a pinch, he suggests, an inscrutable reply to an unwanted invitation, on the lines of “I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation as I find I cannot attend your meeting”, will often serve, and has even been known to elicit a courteous acknowledgement. This is undoubtedly better than the telegraphic formula that Proust was said to have employed when he was being lionized by Parisian society: “Regret unable to come. Lie follows.”

Willies the world over may also profit from Uncle Syd's tips on how to manipulate the old enemy, the bureaucrat. You can avert unpleasing decisions in committee by waiting until the administrators have formulated replies to your arguments and then confess that you were wrong after all and return to the original point. “You can do this,” the wily Uncle Syd explains, “because the hallmark of a scientist is to be able to change one's views depending on the evidence; no administrator can do this.” Here he is undoubtedly right. The legendary academic casuist Maurice Bowra gave it as principle never to allow scientists on committees: they were unreliable, he found, because their opinions could be changed by arguments. (It was also Bowra who announced, when outvoted by five to one, that the committee had evidently reached an impasse.)

Uncle Syd has also worked out how to use the telephone as a weapon, merely by reversing the postures of the caller and the respondent. This is an excellent device: when you have got past three secretaries and the Olympian grandee at the head of the organization finally comes on the line, you greet him with: “Why, hello, Sir Marmaduke, and what can I do for you today?”

In dilating on the seven deadly sins and their consequences, Uncle Syd again points a moral or two with some tantalizing anecdotes. Who was that editor of “an important biological journal” who submitted his work in an unworthy PhD thesis, examined and frivolously approved by Uncle Syd? The topic gives a clue, but a tormenting doubt hangs in the air. I believe, incidentally, that the seventh sin is not sloth, as here, but rather accidie, which lies somewhere between boredom and indifference. To me this is encapsulated by the perhaps rather sensible principle that if a research project is not worth doing at all it is not worth doing properly.

“Molecular Biology by Numbers” finds Brenner in top form with reflections on the science that he and a few friends mostly created. The number 1 stands for the principle of one gene, one enzyme, 2 the diploid chromosome and the double helix, 3 the codon, 4 the canonical nucleotides and 5 the pentagonal faces in an icosahedral virus. Brenner's luminous insights repeatedly bring you up short as you read. There is also here a certain nostalgia for a glorious past, when the problems of molecular biology yielded to cogitation and to discussion in the coffee room, and not merely to a brutal experimental assault.

In those days theory was king, and Niels Bohr's principle that one should never believe an experiment that was not confirmed by theory held sway. Occam's razor was complemented by Brenner's noble conceit of Occam's broom, which was used to sweep out of sight the more inconvenient facts. Today's technology allows important facets of nature to be brought to light at such a rate that, says Brenner, “pausing to think about the results, or asking how cells really work, is likely to be seen as a source of irritating delay to the managerial classes, and could even endanger the career of the questioner”.

He deplores also the advent of research-by-kit, for we seem indeed to be heading for a future in which not only the sequencing of DNA and the production of antibodies, but also the identification of new genes and their products and in due course the very formulation of the questions themselves, will be farmed out to commercial organizations for money. And then perhaps the bureaucrats will suddenly find Utopia within their grasp, because the uncouth and refractory scientists will no longer be needed.

Brenner is dismayed by the relentless advance of bureaucracy in general. We have entered an age of strategic mission statements and management training courses. (The UK Medical Research Council actually offers courses in how to appraise and discipline technicians, though of course they are not called that now.) Security is another of his bugbears, although he does not mention safety, which is now the prime growth area in many organizations. To my mind, much the most dangerous place in most laboratories is the only one the safety officer habitually spares — the library, with its ever-present hazard that a bound volume of the J. Biol. Chem. will fall from a high shelf and make an end of you.

If, then, you are not the person who has razored out the last page of Current Biology and you want a guide to how to comport yourself in your scientific career and to survive and even thrive, then I urge you, for your pleasure and profit, to buy Uncle Syd's book. You may possibly (especially if you are one of the camp-followers of the profession) want to gratify him with the abusive letters and obscene telephone calls of which he has so far been disappointed. As the old bruiser Kingsley Amis once observed: “If you can't annoy somebody with what you write I think there is little point in writing.”