Getting Past Life -- William S. Beck's Modern Science

For a book on the history of modern biology -- as modern as it can be (William S. Beck's book Modern Science and the Nature of Life was written in 1961) -- there is one surprisingly unconventional aspect about it. The book seems to have been influenced by Charles Fort.

Charles Fort, author of the Book of the Damned, was a man against the exclusionism rampant in science. Fort believed that a number of phenomena, experiences that people all over the world, at a number of different time periods, had, were outside the bounds of recognized science. Because they were outside of these bounds, they were either explained away or ignored. Fort called these phenomena "damned," because they were excluded from the rest of the world of phenomena.

Now, Charles Fort had his own ideas on how to explain these anomalous phenomena. Most of the phenomena that he mentioned were falls from the sky of strange objects -- long rains of red material, for instance, or rains of frogs. Fort mainly attempted to explain these objects by saying that they came from another world or another dimension, or that spaceships brought them.

Fort's main idea was that he took phenomena as he saw them and then tried to tailor explanations to meet them. A new phenomenon would often get a new explanation. Often, this new explanation could be a completely new world, a completely new dimension, and so forth.

I was surprised, then, that a book by a Michigan University educated Medical Doctor who was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Tutor of Biochemistry at Harvard College, and Chief of Hematology at Massachusetts General Hospital, seemed to espouse some of the ideas that formed the philosophical foundation for Charles Fort's system of thought.

Yet these ideas seem to spring up all through the book. They begin at a "fable" that Beck gives us regarding a man named Sigmund whose one aim in life is to find, with absolute certainty, the secret of life. For everything Sigmund does to ensure that his experiments will have absolute certainty, he finds himself backed into what seems like an even tighter corner of uncertainty.

But finally, Sigmund is determined, with what he feels will be his greatest experiment of all, to finally capture data about the secret of life with complete certainty. The only problem is, as he starts the experiment, something wrong with the electrical wiring in the experiment causes a big fire. Sigmund and the entire laboratory are burnt to the ground. And a physics laboratory, with a brand new cyclotron (!), is built up in its place.

Charles Fort would call the story of Sigmund a legend of translation into the Positive Absolute. When a scientist fights, in the face of increasing odds, for absolute certainty, even though he knows it's likely a losing battle, he will, Fort says, through all his audacity, be translated into the Positive Absolute, or the place where absolute certainty does exist -- though it exists kind of clumped together with everything else.

Fort even says that this translation will occur, for many people who attempt it, in a great fire. For instance, Fort guesses that Elijah, instead of having been driven up to Heaven in a fiery chariot, like the Bible says he was, was actually translated into the Positive Absolute in a fireball that ascended into the sky.

This may be the most obvious insance in Beck's book of coming up with ideas along the lines of Fortean principles. But others follow. For instance, Beck mentions the work of Louis Pasteur to prove that spontaneous generation of living organisms wasn't necessarily the truth of the origin of life.

Beck makes a strong effort to point out that Pasteur did not actually say that spontaneous generation couldn't happen. But by Beck's time, the story of Pasteur's research against spontaneous generation was so well known that even little schoolkids thought the scientists who had believed in spontaneous generation were superstitious and a little silly. So why would Beck make such a point of defending at least the bare possibility of spontaneous generation?

I believe it's because Beck was thinking, at least a little bit, of a science that could include Fortean principles. Now -- I don't know of anything in Fort that mentions spontaneous generation.

In fact, Fort would be much happier to think, for instance, that a nail in a rock had fallen from the sky and had a rock grow around it, than he would be to think that a nail spontaneously generated itself in a rock. But I believe that Fort would rather believe that something spontaneously generated than believe that a scientist's paltry explanation solved matters.

But, later on in Modern Science, Beck mentions the argument of William of Occam, and later, through a more modern re-phrasing, of Bertrand Russell, that correct science does not tend to multiply causes -- or that the simpler an argument is, the better it is. Fort argues the opposite. He argues that the more phenomena there are, the more causes there should be. And Beck, while not disagreeing with the scientific point of view, also makes the point that just because simple looks better, it doesn't always mean that it is better.

Beck seems to have been extremely influenced by Bertrand Russell. A lot of his theoretical or philosophical arguments seem to have been lifted right out of the pages of Russell. But one argument he uses is expressly changed.

Russell has said in one of his books -- I think it might be The Problems of Philosophy, though I wouldn't stand by that for sure -- that everything a human being would do throughout his life could be predicted, step by step, if we had machines that could perform every last necessary computation regarding that person's body and environment.

Beck may have a bit afraid of edging that close to saying men are automata, because he didn't use this argument of Russell's. Now, Russell did not think men were automata, but that the non-material, non-automatic portion of the human psyche was just incredibly small. Nevertheless, Beck shifted this idea from human activity in general to the phenomena of car crashes.

Using car crashes as his subject, Beck said basically the same thing as Russell did: that if there were a machine that could monitor and perform computations about every single car on the road, as well as every single road, with all the surrounding conditions, that this machine could conceivably predict every single car crash that would occur in the United States in a single year.

Only -- Beck warns us -- this isn't the case. Because there would still be anomalous car crashes. For instance, a car crash could occur because -- a meteor fell from the sky and smashed it! Now, that's an absolutely Fortean argument. It assumes a system, with a high degree of internal predictability, interfered with by an external cause. External causes are exactly what Fort is trying to integrate into the system of science. But the fact that in Beck's illustration, the external cause falls from the sky -- well, Fort would be pleased.

And then, toward the end of his book, Beck mentions an effort he believes is worthy: trying to bring the integrative character back into science. Beck says that science has become too segregative, and now science must become more integrated. This would be the same argument Fort uses. Except Fort would say that science has become too exclusionist, rather than too segregative, and that science should become more inclusive, rather than integrated.

Perhaps Beck never read any Fort. Perhaps he only arrived at Fortean ideas after thinking reasonably about the subject of science on his own. Beck had written his Modern Science about fifteen years after becoming an M.D. He'd had plenty of time to see science -- and scientists -- in action. And he often talks, with approval and disapproval, of the religious rite of science: the scientific conference.

But Beck's train of argument regarding science isn't too far removed from his own "fable" of the scientist Sigmund, who was so baffled at every turn with new uncertainties uncovered by his attempts at certainty.

Beck seems to believe, as I understand him, that the real driving force behind science is the hypothesis. The hypothesis is a directing idea. Without the hypothesis, there is no science. Without the hypothesis, there is only observation and classification.

But the hypothesis has a double function, as far as I can tell: it's both creative and limiting. The hypothesis is creative because it takes a series of observations and thinks of a way in which those observations could be tied together. But it's limiting in that it eliminates from the picture of the observations other factors of existence that don't have anything to do with the hypothesis.

Beck goes even farther toward limiting the scope of science. He says that the realm of science is the experiment. But the experiment isolates conditions even more than the hypothesis. The experiment even separates conditions into variables and controls.

The experiment doesn't even attempt to get at the truth of nature, but at what the conditions induced in the environment of variables and controls might imply about nature. If the scientist has developed the conditions of variables and controls so that he might predict the outcome of a situation in that environment, and if the prediction is in line with his hypothesis, then he has achieved his goal. And the matching up of his goal with some natural situation is only of secondary concern.

But the world of science seems to shrink more and more for Beck. Beck, like most philosophers in the Age of Analysis, doesn't believe that definition is definite. Definition is a kind of habit. As we get used to being around certain material while we are ingrained with certain concepts, we begin to define that material in terms of those concepts. And because there is no clear-cut way of making experience universal to everybody, there's no clear-cut way of making a definition universal, absolute, or completely certain.

Beck argues, along these lines, that Einstein's big contribution to science wasn't necessarily the Theory of Relativity, but the implication it made of the importance of "operational analysis," as Beck calls it, or always thinking of scientific ideas in terms of the physical operations by which they've been carried out.

Thus it is the individual operations, the measurements, that are made, that are of the utmost importance to science. How these operations and measurements are made are also of importance. And how well measuring devices are calibrated is important. Nothing in science can be truly explained. But everything that can't be explained measurably in terms of a kind of third-party or well-calibrated frame of reference, shouldn't be thought of as having been explained.

Science has been incredibly reduced through these ideas. It is boggled-over with the need for calibration and external referencing. And this shrinks its actual material for study.

But, at the same time, it makes everything about science so law-oriented, so legalistic, that the language, the terminology, the jargon of science virtually explodes! Every different kind of scientist, it seems, needs a whole new dictionary, just to learn the terminology of his own specific field!

Beck seems to think that expanded language implies the expanded culture of humanity. I disagree. Language in many of the sciences is double-speak, mystification, rather than clarification. It's the language of exclusion and hierarchy, the codes of a corrupt priesthood, rather than the symbols of knowledge.

Nevertheless, there's an interesting parallel here. Beck's subversive line of argument, based on Fortean theories (either through Beck's own thoughts or his own actual reading of Fort), moves from uncertainty, to spontaneous generation, to the occasional need for multiplicity of causes, to external events affecting a system, to the overall goal of an integrative character of science.

At the same time, Beck's main argument runs from a hypothesis, or directing idea, to experiment and isolation, to inferred effects, to the haziness of definition, to operational analysis, to the bounding off of ideas, and finally to the explosion of language and terminology.

So Fort's ideas lead to a multiplicity of causes, while conventional science's ideas lead to a duplicity of language. I think that Beck is trying to find a way to reconcile these two systems. Science needs a creative mind that can come up with original hypotheses. The creative mind may have tendencies more like the mind of Fort, sometimes. But to focus that kind of mind, and limit the spiralling out of control brought on by a multiplicity of causes, the isolation, control, and operational analysis of conventional science are necessary.

Modern Science and the Nature of Life was written, as I said, in 1961. It was written as part of the American Museum of Natural History's Natural History Library series. And Beck himself describes the book as no more than a history of the developments leading up to and constituting modern biology as he knew it.

So the book is really a kind of compendium of ideas. It's easily digestible. It's relatively short -- about 311 pages. But it's full of information. That being said, I'm going to devote the remainder of this post to a quick summary of the contents of the book. I felt that a lot of it was useful.

In fact, I thought the most useful thing about this particular compendium of ideas is that it included Information Theory. I don't think I've read a book from this time period that included Information Theory, especially as a theory important to biology.

However, the book, interestingly, while it mentions a ton of other scientists, historical and modern, by name, does not mention Claude E. Shannon in conjunction with Information Theory. It only mentions Bell Labs. This is odd. Claude E. Shannon did his doctoral work at MIT. Beck was a Bostonian as well. You'd think Beck would have known Shannon. But he only mentions Bell Labs.

The other thing that struck me as interesting was that Beck doesn't mention D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson's idea of linking Brownian motion with the origins of life. Beck mentions so many other scientists. Thomson's Growth and Form is seminal. But Beck doesn't mention it. Why? Well... maybe it wasn't written yet. And, besides, you can't expect a guy to know everything.

I, in particular, can't expect a guy to know everything! I'm as innocent as a premature baby!

Beck begins his book by saying that some people think the world of his day is in a situation of crisis. Beck then defines crisis as a state of misery in the face of cultural potentiality. Beck says that the world could also be thought of as in a state of scientific crisis. Culture is ruled by science. But science is grotesquely ambivalent.

Beck emphasizes the idea that science and culture are not separate. Science is a product of culture, and the subjects of science are the elements of existence which influence culture. In addition, scientists are human beings -- ruled by reason, yes, but also by nature and their own emotions.

Nevertheless, citizens are estranged from science. They feel they are walled off from science because it requires too much specialization to understand. In addition, the scientific information they do get is often oversimplified. There needs to be a re-unification of culture and science.

Every age of history seems to have had a body of science that it focused on. Each age seems to determine what questions a scientist will ask of nature. But individuals themselves may also ask questions of nature, independent of the current of their times.

Individual ideas may have a harder time being accepted than ideas accepted by the whole age. But if the individual scientist's idea is forceful and correct enough, it may eventually find sympathy with the times, either the scientist's times, or a later age.

Beck says that we have achieved a great deal technologically in a short time. So, Beck believes, a question many people might ask is, "Why haven't we got it all figured out yet?" Why don't we just know everything there is to know about life? Beck doesn't give an outright answer to this question. The following arguments of the book seem to be the answer.

Beck sees the history of biology beginning with the first cultivation of land for growing food. The next stage in the development of the sciences, including biology, was the Classical Greek age, where thought was highly developed. This development was brought to a halt in the Middle Ages. Beck argues that the dogmatic influence of the priestly hierarchy stifled the intellectual freedom and growth that would have led to a further development in the sciences.

Beck steps aside from history for a moment to lay the groundwork for the age of modern science. He mainly discusses cumulative versus non-cumulative knowledge. Cumulative knowledge is the basis of science, while non-cumulative knowledge is the basis of art. This is a silly idea, in my opinion. But the idea is that cumulative knowledge is up off of previous knowledge and data -- right or wrong, or thought right and later proven wrong -- and can be tied in with a theoretical system, which may also develop.

Non-cumulative knowledge is the same through all ages. Beck give a really dull example of this, by saying that in Greek times people wrote about emotions, ethics, and the universals of life, and that today people write about emotions, ethics, and the universals of life. So nothing's changed. But -- in my opinion, you *can* make the same argument about science. It's just that our technology's developed.

Beck then begins his discussion of the birth of modern science by explaining rationalism and deduction. Deduction is, according to Beck, the process of logical proof. If all A's are B's and all B'c are C's, then all A's are C's. In this kind of argument, as long as the form is correct, the argument is correct. Deduction is the basis of rationalism.

Rationalism influenced thinkers very heavily at the beginning of the Renaissance, when people were finally breaking free of the dogmatic rule of the church. But thinkers invested the same power in rationalism that they had invested in the dogmatic rule of the church. And rationalism, unfortunately, became all-powerful.

John Locke brought in the idea of empiricism, or making rational arguments from experience. This was called arguing by analogy. Now, deduction wasn't empty and formal. It wasn't A's and B's and C's. It began with nature and experience. But as long as an idea could formally fit one end of the proposition, the other end of the proposition could be just about anything. So people came up with some pretty wild theories of the universe.

But people then tried to work from self-evident axioms, moving back toward the idea of a formal deductive principle. Spinoza and Leibniz tried to build up systems of ethics based on mathematics, for instance.

Descartes was the greatest of all these philosophers. He worked on a principle of doubt. He tried to doubt everything. But the one thing he couldn't doubt was the fact that he thought. So he came up with his axiom, "cogito ergo sum," or, "I think, therefore I am." And he built up a system of philosophy from there.

Galileo seems to have been the first thinker of these times, however, to put a system of thought together based on experience and experiment. Galileo was followed up by Francis Bacon, whose work, the Novum Organon, was a refutation of what he thought was the overly rational system of Aristotle, the Organon.

Bacon's system was really a system of classification of nature, based on "sense impressions." Bacon also used inductive logic instead of deductive logic. Inductive logic is like empiricism, in that it uses actual experience as its basis, instead of a formal argument. But it differs from the deductive empiricism that followed Locke, in that the implications made from experience only relate to those specific elements of experience.

However, this kind of logic can only point to probability of truth, never to absolute certainty. Bacon thought that his system did lead to absolute certainty. And so he stopped with inductive logic and classification of sense impressions, thinking that was all there was to science.

But science, and the scientific method, were further developed, especially with the help of some of the members of Britain's fledgling Royal Society of science. Robert Boyle is thought of as the father of chemistry, since he was the first person really to have done work on the mechanism underlying chemistry.

But the greatest contribution of this time was made by Sir Isaac Newton, who, of course, discovered the three laws of thermodynamics. Newton's discoveries were largely made from a combination of observation, hypothesis, calculation, and testing. He observed things, made generalizations about them, formed hypotheses, made deductions, and proved his ideas. He explained and predicted. These were the basic processes of science, laid out for the first time.

At this point, Beck begins to discuss the history of biology itself. Beck claims that William Harvey is the father of modern biology.

Harvey was around a little bit before Newton, in the early 1600s. He discovered the circulation of the blood, and he largely did this through his own observations. He discovered a number of hitherto unknown facts about the circulation of blood in the body. But he depended too much on Aristotilean theories such as the perfection of a circle being the reason for the seemingly circular flowing of blood through the body.

Andreas Vesalius was also a major figure in biology. He was, Beck claims, the first really detailed anatomist of the human body. He produced a work on anatomy which is still astounding in its craftsmanship, even today.

Robert Hooke, who actually worked a lot with the theory of springs and tension, also did a little work on observing things through magnifying glasses. Hooke was the first person to discover evidence of cells. He saw little dead cells in cork.

Later on, a scientist named Leeuwenhoek expanded on Hooke's observations, using a microscope. But Leeuwenhoek, like a scientist naturally would be, was interested in bodily tissues and fluids. And his experiments, for instance, with semen, were too repulsive for his age to stomach. Microscopic biology died away for a while.

From this point in the book, Beck works back to some broader philosophical issues. He states that Newton's ideas put people back on the road to thinking that everything about nature could be determined with absolute certainty.

Then, however, the philosopher David Hume came along. He said there was no necessary reason to believe in cause and effect. Events were spatially contiguous, and perhaps certain events were repetitively spatially contiguous. But that didn't necessarily mean that one of those events caused the other event.

Beck himself seems to react to this point by giving the idea that science is not about determining truths in nature. It is actually about determining the probability of something happening, and determining this probability through the use of statistical analysis.

But the probabilities determined are not about processes in nature. They are about isolated situations. Experiments are based on observations. But they isolate elements of those observations. They then vary certain other elements to try and produce different conditions in the isolated elements. They attempt to predict, or determine the probability of, those conditions, based on hypothesis, calculated in the form of statistical analysis.

After this detour, Beck skips to the year 1838. He talks about Schleiden and Schwann, who, people claim, first expressed a cell-theory. The cell theory was basically that living structures are formed entirely of cells; that cells are independent living beings, but that they live as a part of a higher organism; and that cells have some kind of mechanism for reproduction.

Beck finds cell-theory (as a hypothesis, I think) is interesting because it came before solid observations of cells. In previous cases in science, observation came before hypothesis. Hypothesis didn't come until there had been a lot of observation.

Beck moves through a discussion of histology, which, I guess, is the practice of observing cells through a process of crystallizing and then dyeing them. I didn't really understand it.

Then Beck talks a bit about the controversy of spontaneous generation. People used to believe that insects, vermin, germs, and other forms of life could come to life spontaneously under certain circumstances.

Spontaneous generation was first disproved by a man named Spallanzani. But it was then proved with much more powerful arguments and instruments by Louis Pasteur. Pasteur made water filters so effective that they filtered out bacteria. He made, basically, purified water. Nothing could grow in it. This proved that the bacteria came from somewhere else, the air, etc. It didn't generate itself spontaneously.

Beck then moves on to discuss evolution. He talks about how Linnaeus invented the first really workable system of classifiation of living organisms. His system used the ideas of genus and species. Beck then talks a bit about Buffon, who, for a few years, anyway, believed in the idea of evolution, and so became its first proponent. He also mentions Lamarck, whose system of evolution was one that almost depended on the "will" of the animal to evolve.

Beck then discusses Charles Darwin, whose theory was not actually one of evolution, but of natural selection. Darwin made a lot of observations of nature. He also observed biology in domestic settings. He noticed that people bred animals. They "selected" characteristics in animals and bred animals to retain those characteristics. Darwin inferred that nature did the same thing.

Darwin then formulated a hypothesis of natural selection. Animals reproduce more than they need to. Numbers will remain constant only if a certain amount of these animals do not survive. There is, then, a struggle for existence, between species and within a species. Animals vary, and animals inherit variations. And animals may survive, in the struggle for existence, due to the variations they've inherited.

Beck believes that Darwin's theory is a great example of stepping from observation to inductive conclusions, to logical, or deductive conclusions.

Beck records a number of resistances to Darwin's theory. But he also records a number of developments upon the theory. He mentions Haeckl's idea that common ancestry plus change equals evolution. He then discusses how the geological record was used to trace the evolution of life on earth. He also discusses the fraud of the Piltdown Man, which taught archaeologists to be more careful in their assumptions.

Beck then discusses Julian Huxley's evolution studies, which, Beck believes, are the zenith of studies on evolution. Huxley asserts the importance of adaptation in evolution. He says that adaptation is the interplay of the organism and the environment.

Huxley also gives a number of different kinds of adaptation. He talks about pre-adaptation, or the change in an organism which permits it to travel into an adjacent environment. And he talks about adaptive radiation, or the way that animals spread out across the world as they evolve. Beck believes that adaptation is the "leitmotif" of the organism.

Beck then digresses into a chapter asking what the meaning of life is. He says that "living" versus "non-living" is a really hazy subject. I agree. I also don't like any of the arguments he uses. I think that from this point, as well, until the point where Beck gets back to talking about cell biology, the book, while sometimes interesting, is generally pretty hazy.

What irks me a little about this chapter is that, while Beck seems to be pretty comfortable saying that the line between "life" and "non-life" is very hazy, he doesn't seem to be so worried about making a division between "matter" and "non-matter." But I think if he were familiar enough with Russell, as he seems to be (given his arguments on definition), he'd at least mention this argument.

Beck starts the next section of the book by talking about the Greeks' "horror infinit," or horror of the infinite, and how it stopped them from making the next step in scientific development. If it hadn't been for the "horror infiniti," Beck seems to assert, we'd have had 20th century technology in Ancient Athens.

Beck also talks about Euclid's idea of parallel lines never touching. Beck mentions that non-Euclidean geometry has disproved this idea.

From this point, Beck moves on into a discussion of Einstein and Relativity. But Beck says that Einstein's real contribution to science was the idea of "operational analysis," or only expressing scientific ideas in terms of the operations or measurements by which they are carried out.

In contrast to Einstein's contribution, Beck mentions a quote by Alfred North Whitehead, where Whitehead says that people think, with the advent of Einstein's theories, that man's imagination has expanded. Whitehead says that the changes in our society, and in our scientific theories, didn't come from an expanded imagination, but from better instrumentation.

Nevertheless, Beck doesn't seem to think much of Whitehead, and this kind of gets to me. If you consider that Whitehead and Russell made the Principia Mathematica, which, with Boole's Laws of Thought and Claude E. Shannon's Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, form the logical basis of all twentieth century thought, it's kind of disturbing that Beck seems to think of Whitehead as a crotchety, old mystic who was afraid of machines.

But Beck then dives into a series of arguments based, I believe, very much on Russell's arguments on language. He proposes that words are "defined" only by habit, and how we connect the sounds or sights of words with the physical or conceptual correlates only through a process of familiarization.

Beck then speaks about propositions and meaning. A meaningful proposition, according to Beck, is one that could potentially be proven true. All other propositions are meaningless.

Beck then discusses the expansion of language in the sciences, which Beck believes is parallel with the expansion of culture. Beck also discusses models in science -- how models serve as a means conceptually to isolate the essentials of a situation so that they can be made more workable. The pitfall to this, Beck says, is that if a model becomes stale, overused, it can become circular, kind of revolve on itself.

Beck then talks about description and definition. Things can only be described, or defined, Beck says, in terms of something external, a kind of third-party. For instance, if one were to define "east," Beck says, one couldn't say, "the place from which the sun rises." Because "the place from which the sun rises" is "east." The definition is circular.

There needs to be a third-party, an outside element, for the two terms of the definition to relate to. Thus Beck says that if one were to say that "east" is the point on the horizon which is 90 degrees to our right as we face toward the north, that would be a correct definition.

This, of course, is baloney.

This baloney is followed up by further baloney, such as how people settled on the word "dog," and a description of "how" polar bears became white which Beck somehow thinks is an explanation of "why" polar bears became white.

Beck is more reasonable when he discusses the laws of science, and remembers the statement of J.B.S. Haldane, that when a law of science doesn't work, the scientists don't say that nature is breaking the law, but that the law has been incorrectly stated.

Beck then mention's Occam's Law and Russell's re-phrasing of it, that simplicity is better than multiplicity in science.

Beck discusses causal determinism, which, unlike fate, which is a kind of anthropomorphic concept implying some kind of cosmic "will," is more based on physical laws and overall probability.

But, Beck says, just because there is such a thing as causal determinism, doesn't make overall probability a matter of complete certainty. Any system we work with is, in some ways, and internal system. And there will always be external influences on the internal system. We probably won't be able to predidt those things.

Beck then gives us another serving of baloney sandwiches when he talks about "universal design" not implying a "universal designer." Of course, I agree that "design" doesn't imply a "designer." But nobody ever seems to give good arguments regarding that point.

Beck then moves on to a discussion of order, which he illustrates by using the information theory. In Information Theory, Beck says, there is a signal of information which is trying to reach us. But it comes through random "noise." The signal-to-noise ratio determines how likely we are to receive the information.

Energy is needed to maintain the integrity of information, because it is constantly fighting against the background randomness, or "noise" of the universe. However, signals often develop energy-saving tricks, such as packing very constant bits of information together. These constant bits of information have low value. Energy is saved for higher-value information, which uses more energy, but provides rare and more important information.

One way this theory manifests itself, Beck seems to believe, is in instruments of measurement. Instruments of measurement are usually calibrated, so that their accuracy is assured. However, as instruments deteriorate, they become less accurate. The best instrument is the one that stays accurate for the longest time.

The best way to calibrate an instrument is by using some "first" unit of measurement that cannot deteriorate under almost any circumstance -- such as the "meter," which is now determined by measuring the emission of a mercury-198 wavelength, as the mercury-198 isotope escapes from gold which has been subjected to neutron bombardment.

Beck gives a short discussion of genius, discovery, and the mind of the scientist. He reiterates the fact that a scientist is a human being, subject to all the same emotional factors as any other human being.

Beck now returns to a discussion of cells. He begins by quickly discussing the gene. He says that all organisms have two processes: reproduction and regulation. In reproduction, an organism creates. In regulation, an organism limits itself.

Organisms also, Beck says, have certain traits, or characteristics. Different species may have certain pronounced characteristics. But within species, these characteristics may vary. Variations can be carried through from the organism's parents. These variations are called genotypes. Or variations can occur through the effects of the environment. These variations are called phenotypes.

Gregor Mendel was the first person to conduct research on heredity and variation. In the 1850s, Mendel investigated how traits carry through from generation to generation. Mendel's research led Mendel to believe that the traits are passed on from one generation to the next by something physical. This physical thing, though it was unknown, was, in 1902, named a "gene" by Wilhelm Johannsen.

Scientists then discovered chromosomes. The idea mutation was also proposed: the factor that could alter the "permanence" of the traits passed on in genes.

A better understanding of genes, Beck claims, was achieved through the study of viruses. In 1876, the scientist named Robert Koch, developed four postulates on viruses. These were postulates for working with viruses in experiments. Koch's postulates were that the virus had to be always associated with a disease; that it had to be kept in a pure culture; that it had to be injected into a healthy creature susceptible to the disease; and that it had to be taken back out of the creature and isolated in a pure culture again.

Louis Pasteur tried to find the cause of rabies by working along Koch's guidelines. But he couldn't. He was trying to see the cause of rabies inside the pure culture dish. It wasn't going to happen. Rabies needed to act on living tissue. In this way it was discovered that one could only see viruses' cause by seeing them acting on living tissue.

As microscopic biology became a part of science again, and as the technology of microscopy developed, scientists could see viruses at work. Scientists watched as viruses entered the nuclei of healthy cells. Twenty-four minutes would elapse. The cell-nuclei would suddenly explode, and huge amounts of new viruses would burst out from the nuclei, moving on and attacking other cells.

Scientists did more work on this, especially with work on viruses that attacked bacteria -- bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages.

From this work, scientists determined that during the twenty-four-minute "eclipse" period, when the bacteria were inside the cell-nuclei, the viruses were actually re-combining with something inside the nuclei. Through this combination, the viruses were reproducing. Once they hit a certain number, they'd explode from the nuclei. Thus the scientists determined that viruses were discrete recombinable genetic units.

Beck moves to a discussion of enzymes, which are chemicals which control the production of chemicals in the body, and basically determine all of the body's structure. Scientists discovered that radiation can affect genes. Genes affect enzymes. Certain radiation effects on single genes affect only certain single enzymes. So scientists developed the "one-gene one-enzyme" theory.

But the new question was, what is the chemical of a gene? Scientists had known about the chemical inside a nucleus, DNA, for a while. But they hadn't thought it was important. However, now that they saw the effects the nucleic chemicals had on viruses, they thought DNA might be of some importance.

It was eventually postulated that DNA is the chemical that provides traits, as well as the transformative principle of the traits, to an organism. Watson and Crick developed their double-helix theory of DNA.

DNA was then also assumed to be a major part in protein production. DNA, residing in the nucleus, was like a master copy of the body's information. DNA would unzip, RNA would attach to one side of DNA, then leave the nucleus. RNA would find protein and enzymes, which it would imprint with its information. The protein and enzymes would then go off and create more building blocks -- cells or cell parts or cell nutrients, I guess -- for the body.

From here Beck moves on to discussions of the origin of life. Most of this is Beck trying to imagine the creation of life in the primordial earth of billions of years ago. Beck starts with the simple chemical elements of earth. He says that somehow the simple chemical elements must have combined to create more complex chemical elements.

The development of complex chemical elements, along with some sort of extremely improbable, but probably unknowable, events, such as some sort of radiation, led to some sort of organization that was like a living organism. This continued to develop and form a living organism.

How did the improbabilities beat out the massive probabilities that, it would seem to Beck, would dictate that life couldn't be created? Well, Beck says, there were one billion years for it to happen. So maybe that was enough time for one improbability to beat all the improbabilities.

Beck then discusses the ideas of complex forms of life. How do complex organisms come to exist? How do smaller forms of life relinquish, it would seem, their control to the larger, singular form of life of which they are a part? How do all these life-forms function together? How do they maintain their homeostasis? How do they remain stable? And how does it come about that one part of the body (the brain, perhaps) seems to control all the other parts of the body?

Beck thankfully doesn't delve too deeply into answering these questions. I'm pretty sure he feels like these are the questions future generations of biologists will either answer or, like him, puzzle over.

However, Beck does give indications of future areas of interest. For interest, the cell-fusion, which seems to complement cell-fission. Cell-fission is the reproductive process of cells. Cells reproduce by splitting. But what makes cells come together? What makes them fuse into a more complex organism?

Beck also seems to be very interested in embryology. Embryology seems to indicate the different phases of evolution which have led up to man in the present. But at certain moments in its development, the embryo is made up of very basic cells, "precursor" cells, which don't seem to be divided into, say, bone cells, blood cells, etc.

These cells could say a lot about how these various types of cells come into being. A cause should come before an effect. And, Beck seems to say, if you study a bone cell once it's a bone cell, you really won't see what caused it to become a bone cell.

Beck discusses a few other areas of possible interest for biology, such as cell duplication, differentiation, and regeneration, as well as a seeming geometrical orientation of the cell. He also seems to think that the purposiveness, or goal-oriented behavior, of simple and complex organisms is of interest.

Beck spends about twelve pages discussing the problems behind the search of modern science for a cure to cancer. He then spends about seven pages discussing the reasons that "mind" as a concept is still an interesting question for the biologist.

Beck ends his book with a discussion of the future of science. He describes how science is looked to nowadays as a performer of all kinds of miracles. People seem to believe science can do anything, Beck says, from making fertilizer or televisions, to ensuring the nation's military security. Beck talks about how various military and government agencies, as well as industrial and corporate entities, have enormous resources devoted to scientific research.

Beck speaks for a while about the possibility of extending human life infinitely. He says it seems like it is possible. If you take all the destructive elements out of life, especially the bacteria, Beck says, you can probably remove a lot of what ages people. Then you would need to find the genes that age people and get rid of those. Then people could probably live a long time, if not forever.

Beck then spends a few pages discussing what the new frontiers for biology are. He finally winds up the book by saying that science is not a parent, and that men are not infants. Man is still a man, and science is still man's creation. Men cannot act like infants in need of care. They will have to care for themselves.

As an adult baby, of course, I find this to be a hell of a note to end a book on.

Blacklisted Heroes -- Asimov's Ranger; Del Rey's Badge; Watson's Helix

I think everybody is pretty familiar with the part in cop movies where the police chief tells the investigators, "You're off the case!"

James D. Watson has a similar kind of story in his book The Double Helix, the account of Watson's work with his colleague, Francis Crick, to discern the structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid, or DNA.

Nowadays DNA is just as familiar to everybody as cop movies are. DNA, like the Theory of Relativity, has become one of those ubiquitous scientific ideas. Everybody knows the double helix. Everybody knows that our genes make up who we are -- to some degree, at least. And everybody knows that our genes are made up of DNA.

But when Watson and Crick were working to discern what the structure of DNA was, many, if not most, scientists didn't even think DNA was very fundamental at all. Instead, scientists were trying to work out some kind of theory of protein as a basic molecule, in and of itself, instead of as something which DNA creates.

James Watson was a rather level-headed guy. But, according to Watson, Crick was a bit over the top on occasion. He had a wild, loud laugh, and his voice could be heard all over the Cavendish Laboratory of King's College, Cambridge, where he and Watson worked. The head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, himself noted for work in the revolutionary field of x-ray crystallography, often dreaded the appearance of Francis Crick, as it generally meant an environment so packed with speech that nobody else could hear themselves think.

Watson and Crick, about halfway along the path of their researches into the structure of DNA, went a bit over the top, trying to convince a couple scientists, whom I'll talk about in just a moment, that Watson and Crick finally had the right idea regarding the structure of DNA. They were proven embarrassingly wrong.

Bragg cut both Watson and Crick out of DNA research. The two scientists already had research projects they were supposed to be working on, anyway. The DNA research had simply snowballed into something much larger. And Bragg figured it was time to melt that snowball. But Watson continued to work, a bit covertly, on the structure of DNA.

Watson's book The Double Helix was a best seller. I feel like it was a best seller simply because of the subject. DNA is one of the hottest topics in science. But Watson also wrote the book with a lot of feeling and style. The way he describes the interactions he has with scientists, artists, and aristocrats in Europe and America is really filled with conflict, intense personalities, and lively situations.

But at the bottom of the story is, really, the mystery of DNA. This mystery could, I feel, be presented as a detective story. I'm sure others have said that before about this book. But I found the story interesting because it actually related to two other mystery stories I've read over the past few months.

One of those stories is Badge of Infamy, by Lester Del Rey. I read this story in September. I don't remember all the details of the story. And I'll talk about it in a moment. But the story of The Double Helix, written in 1968, though it was about the events of 1951 to 1953, has a lot in common with Lester Del Rey's novel, which was written in 1957 -- and is about events taking place 200 or so years in the future.

But the other story The Double Helix seems to relate pretty darn well to, and which I read only a few days ago, is David Starr, Space Ranger, by Isaac Asimov. Again, this story was written in the year 1952 -- so, right about at the midway point of Watson and Crick's efforts.

David Starr, Space Ranger purports to be a mystery. There is some kind of mystery, even though I don't think it's very well executed. For Asimov, this is kind of a surprise, considering that he writes mystery stories quite well. But I don't think this is one of his more popular books. In fact, he wrote it under the name Paul French. Anyhow, the fact that the mystery doesn't work very well doesn't really wreck the parts of the story that are good.

However, there is another strange element to this story. I noticed this before I'd read The Double Helix, actually. It was like Asimov, in David Starr, wasn't just trying to write a mystery story. It was like he was trying to write a hard-boiled pulp novel. As I read the beginning of the story, I had a strange feeling that I was reading something that was actually trying to sound like Lester Del Rey. Though -- I've only read Badge of Infamy. So I really can't make a solid judgment on what Del Rey's style really is.

Asimov's story doesn't stick to the pulp element, though. It wavers in and out. There are other themes which I don't think I'm very accustomed to seeing in Asimov. At one point, David Starr receives the name "Space Ranger" from a group of aliens. The scene is so comic-booky that one can almost imagine everything happening in frames, with dialogue bubbles. And later on, there are scenes where David Starr place a phantom-like alien character with a spookiness one might expect from Tales from the Crypt.

All these elements together make for a kind of uneven narrative, in my opinion. But taken as separate elements, they are enjoyable.

David Starr, Space Ranger is the story of a young investigator for the Council of Science, a kind of agency that supervises the affairs of the entire universe. David Starr is the son of Lawrence Starr, a scientists who was killed by space pirates while David was only a little boy.

Starr has just graduated from the Academy of the Council of Science. He is going to celebrate at a new restaurant in International City with one of his mentors, Dr. Augustus Henree. But while Starr is waiting for Dr. Henree, he sees one of the other patrons of the restaurant up and die from poisoned food.

Eventually Dr. Henree arrives and helps Starr see to the dead man. Starr and Henree go back to the Council of Science headquarters and talk about matters. Earth can no longer grow enough food to support the five billion (!) people who now live on the planet. So Mars is the main source for Earth's food.

But somebody on Mars is tampering with the food supply going to Earth. Nobody can figure out who's doing it, or why. The poisonings are all small and they all appear to be random.

Starr goes to Mars to do some undercover investigation. He goes to the Farm Employment office to get a job as a farmhand. While he's there he meets a guy named Bigman. Bigman is a human who's lived all his life on Mars. He used to work on a farm for a guy named Makian, one of the biggest farm owners, and hence one of the richest men, on Mars.

But Bigman caught Makian and his stooges sneaking out to do some shady business one night. He didn't keep his mouth shut about what he saw. So he was kicked off the farm. He was also blacklisted from working at any farm on Mars.

Starr's chances don't look much better for getting a job. Earth men don't have an easy time finding approval in any aspect of Mars life. And as Starr is preparing to leave the employment office, Makian and his goons head into the office. They see Bigman and try to start up some trouble with him. But Starr gets in the way.

Starr has, it seems, a kind of super-human strength and reflex power. It doesn't seem to be well-explained in the book. But it does seem to be part of some overall mystery regarding Starr's childhood. It seems like, in the pirate invasion that killed Starr's father, Starr himself may have been exposed to some kind of radiation that made him super-strong.

This is yet another comic book or super-hero motif in the book that I don't think I've found in anything else Asimov has done.

Starr, knocking down a guy named Griswold, one of Makian's best men, gets accepted to work on Makian's farm. He says he'll go if he can bring Bigman along. So they all head out to Makian's car -- where Starr and Bigman are promptly clubbed on the heads.

Starr wakes up a while later in a room that serves as a prison on Makian's farm. Starr makes up some story about wanting to work on a farm because he wants to investigate the poisoning of the food from Mars. He says that he had a sister who was killed by poisoned food. Makian and his henchmen seem to be okay with this explanation. So they let him work with Bigman -- in the kitchen, serving the "real" farmers their meals every day.

In the meantime, Starr makes friends with an agronomist on the farm. The agronomist, or farming scientist, is named Benson. Benson is pretty powerful on the farm, since food has to be well cared for to grow at all on Mars. Benson even confides in Starr that he believes there are actual aliens, non-human Martians, living underground. He says that perhaps the underground Martians are poisoning the food as it grows.

One day, Starr is serving Makian and his henchmen their dinner. Griswold tries again to start up a fight. Starr handily beats Griswold. Makian and his second in command, Hennes, seem to approve of Starr's ability to handle himself in dangerous situations. They recommend that Starr go out with some of the farmers the next day for a "checkup" run The "checkup" runs are trips out to the farms of Mars.

The humans on Mars all live inside of gigantic bubbles. But -- I think -- the actual farms are outside, in the fields of Mars. The farms are all encased in small, glass boxes. But Mars is so constantly subject to windstorms that the glass boxes constantly stand a chance of breaking or cracking. So the farmers often have to go out and check on these boxes and fix them.

Starr agrees to go out on a "checkup" run. Bigman finds a way to sneak onto Starr's crew. Griswold is still playing tricks on Starr. He gives Starr a car without any extra ballast. This is the other thing about Mars. Inside the bubbles, the gravity is made to match the gravity of earth. But outside the bubbles, the gravity is Mars gravity. So things are much lighter. And since Starr's vehicle doesn't have any ballast, it is extra light, and it reacts violently to any bumps or swerves in the road.

Starr almost dies. When Starr manages to get his car stopped, Griswold blames Starr for bad driving. But Bigman sees what Griswold has done. He calls Griswold on it. Griswold says that if Starr has a problem with it, he can fight. But everybody, in the atmosphere of Mars, is wearing oxygen masks. So Griswold and Starr take off their oxygen masks and have a breathless fight.

Starr and Griswold are fighting near a gigantic gorge. Griswold tries to maneuver Starr near the gorge, so he can throw Starr down to his death. But instead, disoriented by his own lack of oxygen, he falls off into the gorge himself.

The farmers all approve of Starr now. But now Benson asks Starr to work for him. Starr starts doing chemical analysis of vegetation to see if he can find any poison. The work is getting nowhere. He never finds anything.

Bigman has finally gotten his working papers back. He is no longer blacklisted, and he has no desire to work for Makian's farm any more. So he's leaving. He comes to tell Starr goodbye. But while he's there he finds out that Starr is working undercover for the Council of Science. Bigman is pretty impressed. Starr gives Bigman a task -- to retrieve some documents for Starr, some maps of Mars, from the Library of the Council of Science in a nearby Martian town.

Bigman does this. Starr and Bigman meet later on, outside the dome. Starr reveals that he's going down the gorge. Starr tells Bigman about Benson's statement that there could be non-human Martians living underground. Starr's going to check it out. To repel down the gorge, he uses a repelling cable that hooks into rock walls using an invisible force-field kind of grappling hook.

Bigman leaves. Starr heads down into the gorge. But he only gets a certain way down into the gorge before the top closes over him. Not only does the top close over him, but some invisible force presses down on his body, kind of crumpling Starr up into a fetal position. In this position, Starr passes out.

When Starr wakes up, he finds himself in a small room. There are two aliens in the room with him. But he can't see them. They speak with him telepathically and tell him that they are non-material. They are thought-forms. They have no desire to interfere with humanity. But, when they saw Starr coming down into the gorge, they thought it might be interesting to run a few tests on him.

The aliens see that Starr has journeyed a bit through space, and that he works as some kind of law enforcement official. So they, not really understanding proper names very well, call him "Space Ranger." Starr likes the name. He thinks he'll keep it.

The aliens believe that Starr's race can develop itself into highly evolved thought-beings eventually. And so they will let the humans alone to develop in peace.

However, the thought-form aliens also have the ability to transmute matter into anything, at will. The thought-form aliens give Starr a gift, a strip of gauze which can be worn over the eyes, but then spreads a kind of cloaking device all over the body. The cloaking device scrambles some kind of electromagnetic waves around the person. This not only creates a minor kind of force field shield around the person, but also conceals the person's identity in a kind of jumbly haze.

Starr is floated back up to ground level and allowed to go back to the dome. But as he's headed back to the dome, he's caught in one of Mars' sinister, murderous sandstorms. Starr almost dies in the storm before he recalls the gauze shield the thought-form aliens have given him. Starr puts the gauze shield over his eyes. Soon the force field is protecting his whole body.

Starr arrives back at the dome, a bit worse for the wear, and finds out he's been gone for two whole days. Makian and Hennes suspect that Starr's been plotting something against them. So they imprison Starr in his room. Starr, in bad shape from the storm, needs a bit of medical help. So he's given that, as well as a bath.

Later on, Benson comes in and shows Starr a gun he's been using, ostensibly to collect samples from shipments of Mars food. Benson seems terribly worried, and he tips Starr off that there's probably going to be a much bigger attack on earth's food supply within thirty-six hours.

Starr is again attacked by one of Makian's henchmen. This time, however, Makian gets a number of men on Starr, and Starr is subdued -- in fact, he's almost strangled to death! But now another member of the Council of Science arrives on the scene, led to Starr's prison by Bigman. This member of the Council grants Starr his freedom.

The member of the Council is something like a judge. He is going to preside over something like a meeting with Makian to figure out how to stop all this poisoning. Nobody yet knows what's causing it.

But Starr is now pretty assured that Makian's second-in-command, Hennes, is involved somehow with the poisonings. I think Hennes motivation, described earlier in the book, is that, as the poisonings, which were never very large scale, get more and more notoriety in the press, Martian farms get sold off by people who don't think they'll be able to make money off them anymore.

In this way, I think, Hennes reasons, Makian will get all these lands at a very cheap price. Then he can stop the poisonings. Martian food can resume being sold. And Makian -- and Hennes with him -- can become richer than ever.

So Starr appears before Hennes under the guise the aliens have given him: "Space Ranger." He plays some kind of haunted house ghost kind of game against Hennes. Hennes really does end up being kind of freaked out. Starr manages to get a set of keys to the safe from Hennes' room. Starr then goes to the safe, which is -- I don't know -- somewhere else. He finds -- don't ask me why or how -- Benson's sample-gun inside.

The next day there's a big trial, at which Starr doesn't show up, but which the "Space Ranger" attends. Starr has already figured out that Benson, at Hennes' request, has been spreading the poison into selected batches of food by the use of the sampling gun. He gives all the details of how this was done. Hennes eventually confesses to the whole thing.

Later on Bigman, who was also at the trial, says that he knew the whole time that Starr was the "Space Ranger." It had to do with Starr's space boots. On Mars, space boots are very individual things. Most people choose bright colors and odd patterns. But Starrs have always just been white and black. And so were the "Space Ranger's" boots, even thought Bigman could barely see them behind the cloud.

Starr says he is getting ready to head out on more adventures. Bigman would like to go with him. So Starr and Bigman decide to head out on more adventures together. And the book ends with a silly kind of "Three Musketeers" catch-line.

Now, I can't remember the names or plots from Del Rey's novel Badge of Infamy, but I just wanted to get some of the details down here, so it could be compared with Asimov's book.

In Badge of Infamy, the main character is a doctor who's been blacklisted. This is the future, about 200 years from now. Labor unions basically control the world. If you belong to a labor union, you cannot practice the labor if you are not in a union-sanctioned area for practice. And if you do practice, you are blacklisted from your profession for the rest of your life. I think you may even be subject to corporal punishment.

So the story begins with a doctor who's been blacklisted for saving somebody's life by performing on the spot surgery outside of a union-sanctioned hospital. The doctor not only can't get a job as a doctor: he can't get a job at all. When you're blacklisted, your eventual fate is to starve to death.

But the doctor is "lucky" enough to have one of the people in the flophouse he's in die in the bed next to his. The doctor has tried to help him medically in small ways, I think. So the man gives the doctor his ticket to Mars. The man was thinking he'd be able to work on the farms of Mars. He'd come from there before, and he was just getting ready to go back. But he'd suddenly been stricken with the illness that then killed him.

So the doctor goes to Mars. But he goes on a flight on which is also his ex-wife or ex-fiancee. The ex-wife now hates the doctor. She looks at him as a traitor, since he practiced medicine to save a man's life in a non-sanctioned area.

On Mars, someone lets some thugs know who the doctor really is. They all beat him up. He passes out, but is picked up by a farmer who takes the doctor out to his farming village. The farmer says that he hates the blacklisting rules of earth's union-driven society. He does whatever he can to help people who have fallen victim to it.

But the farmer has another motive for helping the doctor. The people of the farmer's community all seem to be dying of the same disease. It's a virus or a bacteria or something. But people can't figure out what's causing it or how to stop it. The farmer is hoping that the doctor, who was, before he'd been blacklisted, one of the greatest doctors on Earth, can stop the community from dying out. The farmer also suspects the illness is a Mars-wide epidemic. So if the doctor can help, he'll probably be helping everybody on Mars.

There are a number of dangerous scenes that follow. The doctor gets caught, kind of reconciles with the ex-wife, goes up into space for punishment, and is helped, by his ex-wife, to escape the punishment and return secretly to Mars.

The doctor and the ex-wife now both start working on a solution to the problem of the Mars virus. They don't know exactly what will stop it. The doctor and ex-wife are somewhat reconciled. But they still aren't on very good terms with each other. Eventually they seem to figure out the solution to the problem. But while they are figuring out a solution to the problem, a big revolution is starting on Mars, which is revolting against being ruled by Earth.

The big Martian revolt is stopped, and the cure for the virus is presented to people. The cure for the virus is a Martian-native weed called Bracky-weed. You have to smoke it. So anybody who has this virus just has to smoke Bracky-weed for the rest of their lives, and they'll be fine.

Regardless of the fact that the ending to this story seems to be prescient of the uses of medicinal marijuana, it also has some linguistic commonality with James D. Watson's story of The Double Helix. In Watson's story, Watson was, as I said above, told that he could no longer work on discerning the structure of DNA with Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were "off the case," as a police chief might say. And they had to go back to more normal researches.

But Watson's more normal research was studying RNA patterns in Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV). And, it appears to me, if Watson hadn't been made to step away from being so focused on DNA -- if he hadn't had to look at TMV, he wouldn't have been able to look at the DNA problem from a distance, with the perspective he needed actually to be able to solve the problem.

The basic story of The Double Helix involves five people: James D. Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick did their research at King's College, Cambridge. Wilkins and Franklin did theirs at King's College, London. And Pauling did his at Cal Tech, in the United States.

Pauling was already famous for his theories. He was about fifty years old, and he had even worked, I believe, on the Los Alamos project for constructing the atomic bomb. As the book opens, Pauling announces his discovery, which he came upon by the use of atomic models he'd built, of the a-helix of DNA. This was a pretty big discovery.

Watson himself hadn't been too interested in DNA to begin with. He was a biologist from Chicago, and he even classifies himself as a "birdwatcher." He then went to Copenhagen to study the process of multiplication in bacterial viruses. The professor under whom he studied was Herman Kalckar.

Watson needed more training in chemistry to really understand the proceses. And, as part of his training, he was sent by Kalckar's friend Luria to a conference in Naples. At this conference, Watson heard a lecture by Maurice Wilkins on x-ray crystallography. X-ray crystallography, practiced on crystallized portions of DNA, were helping to indicate the shape of DNA.

Pauling had determined the shaped of DNA by working with physical models. But Wilkins could do it with precise machinery. This seemed to be quite exciting to Watson. Watson tried to talk with Wilkins about it. But Wilkins didn't seem to interested.

Watson, at the time, had his sister, Elizabeth, with him. Wilkins seemed to be attracted to Elizabeth. Watson thought he could use Elizabeth to get Wilkins more interested in DNA. But Wilkins was still rather glum and ineffectual.

It turns out that Wilkins was glum and ineffectual because of the person he was working with at King's College, London: Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was most likely the best x-ray crystallographer in the world. And she was only getting better. She had the best techniques for taking x-ray diffraction photographs.

But Franklin seemed to be a bitterly misguided feminist, in Watson's opinion. She was so determined to have an equal place with the men around her, that she fought violently against everything the men said to her.

It was really hard for Wilkins to get any work done with Franklin. Franklin was almost abusive toward Wilkins, who was a rather meek man. But Wilkins also couldn't fire Franklin. She was the best x-ray diffraction photographer in the world. So he was terribly glum, not really motivated to do any work at all.

Watson gave up on Wilkins. But he wondered if he could go somewhere else to work on figuring out the structure of DNA by using x-ray diffraction photography. He found another laboratory, the Cavendish Laboratory, in King's College, Cambridge.

But Watson was still doing research up in Copenhagen. He couldn't just up and leave from there. But suddenly Watson's professor, Kalckar, ended up plunging into a marriage situation that was likely to end up in a divorce. Kalckar basically told Watson there wouldn't be much research over the next year. Watson was free to do what he wanted.

So Watson wrote to Sir Lawrence Bragg, who ran the Cavendish Laboratory, as well as Max Perutz and John Kendrew, who were working more closely with the x-ray photography machine. The men welcomed Watson down to Cambridge. And Watson left. Watson had a hard time finding a place. But he ended up being invited to live in an apartment in the basement of John and Elizabeth Kendrew's residence. Watson stayed there for a year.

At King's College, Watson met Francis Crick. Crick was by this time known as a kind of genius who could help everybody else see their own ideas through, and could always produce brilliant help, even solutions, for other people's problems, but had yet to make a brilliant breakthrough of his own.

Crick was thirty-five. He'd served as a scientist in London during the war. But after the war, he was kind of left out in the cold. He'd tried in a few different places to get his bearings, so that he could finally make a career for himself out of science. But he was never able to do it.

Finally, thanks to the goodness of his friends, Crick ended up at King's College, studying the effects of salt-water solutions on the compression of hemoglobin proteins. This, at the time, was an extremely important question in pre-DNA biology.

Crick was hardened by his life. But he didn't let it show, in general. He had a loud, boisterous laugh, and he could talk a mile a minute, for miles and miles and minutes and minutes. He also loved girls. Girls, in these days, in Cambridge, were called "popsies." And Crick's wife Odile would (surpisingly) find Crick's discussion of the beauties of these "popsies" quite amusing.

So would Watson. In fact, Watson really loved Crick's personality. And he'd have dinner with Crick and Odile at their house, known as the "Green Door" (from a Strindberg play, I guess), all the time. Watson said that he wouldn't ever want to leave Cambridge, simply based on the entertainment provided there by Crick's personality.

But a lot of other people, including the administrator of the laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, had a really hard time dealing with Crick's personality, especially his loudness and boisterousness.

Crick and Watson shared an interest in DNA. They began discussing the difficulties of the problem, and the promises of its solution. They both felt that simplicity was key. Scientists knew at this point in time that DNA was composed of a sugar, a phosphate, and a base. The base was either purine (adenine or guanine) or pyrimidine (cytosine or thymine) -- the A, G, C, and T now familiar to us all.

It also seemed pretty likely that the sugar and phosphate together formed a kind of backbone for the DNA. This backbone probably had a regular pattern.

Linus Pauling, as I said above, had recently made another great contribution to science by modeling the a-helix of DNA. This showed that DNA coiled about. It didn't solve all the difficulties of the structure of DNA. There had to be more to DNA than just the first coil -- I think because the problem of replication wasn't solved with just one coil. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Anyhow, Crick and Watson knew that the really important discovery would be the one that could take Pauling's a-helix discovery and add the missing pieces -- whether they be additional helices or something else.

Crick and Watson felt like the best way to do this would be a double-attack. First, Crick and Watson would try to beat Pauling at his own game: they'd build three-dimensional models, like Pauling had. Second, they'd use x-ray diffraction photography, which Pauling didn't use.

But it turned out, after all, that nobody would really work on x-ray photography for Crick and Watson at Cavendish. So Crick and Watson went back to Maurice Wilkins, who was already, through Rosy Franklin, working on x-ray diffraction photography of DNA. Crick already had the advantage of having worked with Wilkins in the past.

But when Crick and Watson got to Wilkins, he was in a bad mental state. Franklin was trying to convince Wilkins not to do any more DNA photography. Franklin had her own researches, now, and she wasn't even talking to Wilkins about them. Franklin was completely impossible to work with, it seemed. And Wilkins was just trying to find some way to get rid of her. In the meantime, Wilkins wasn't getting anything done at all, and he didn't seem interested in getting anything done.

To make matters worse, Crick suddenly became distracted by a terrible argument, which almost became a scandal, between himself and Sir Lawrence Bragg. Crick accused Bragg of stealing an idea that Crick had recently been talking about. Bragg insisted that he would never have done such a thing. And he would not have done such a thing. The senior scientists helped patch up matters for Crick. But Crick was definitely seeming to wear out his welcome with Bragg.

A while later, Watson went to a lecture by Franklin. Franklin's lecture, though cautious and tentative -- while also intending to take the significance out of the recent discoveries of men like Pauling -- did give Watson a bit more insight into the chemical context (if I can use such a term) of DNA. However, Watson still hadn't done much work to improve his knowledge of micro-biological chemistry, so that even the stuff he did understood kind of drifted away from him before he could completely grasp it.

Watson tried to speak with Franklin after the lecture, but she was completely unapproachable.

Watson went back to Crick with the information he'd gotten from Franklin's lecture. The only problem was, Watson, in his usual easy-going style, didn't take any manual notes on the lecture. He just listened and soaked in what he could. As a result of this, he got the water component of the DNA's environment (context, atmosphere, whatever) wrong by a factor of ten.

With this really skewed water component as a part of their calculations, and with only a basic knowledge of the chemistry they were working with, Crick and Watson excitedly began building their models for DNA.

Crick and Watson were now convinced that DNA was a double-helix. They figured that the sugar-phosphate "backbones" of these helices actually stood at the center of the DNA, so that the bases kind of spiked outwards. The sugar-phosphate backbones were linked together with some kind of ion, either a Magnesium cation (Mg++), or a sodium ion (Na+).

Everything seemed to fit together so well that Crick and Watson brought in Wilkins and Franklin to look at the results. Wilkins, though he seemed to be under the cloud of Franklin's abuse (in Watson's opinion), so that he was completely irresolute about everything else, was still passionate enough about DNA research to feel like it was his baby. He was protective enough about it to be pretty angry if someone acted confident about solving its problems, but was really just blundering and bumbling around with it.

And that's just what Crick and Watson appeared to be doing. Wilkins didn't point this out. Franklin pointed this out. Franklin was actually angry enough at Crick and Watson's antics to become quite aggressive toward them. She pointed out that Crick and Watson were working under a majorly incorrect assumption, and that, because of this assumption, nothing else they said could be listened to.

The assumption? They had the water content in the DNA environment incorrect by a factor of ten. Compared to the amount of water Watson and Crick's DNA had, the real DNA was basically swimming in water. Watson and Crick's DNA model couldn't possibly work. Wilkins and Franklin left as soon as they could.

And this was the point at which Sir Lawrence Bragg, chief of police (in a melodramatic sense) for the Cavendish Laboratory, told Watson and Crick, "you're off the case!" Crick was sent back to researching the compression of hemoglobin proteins in saltwater solutions. And Watson chose the topic of x-ray diffraction photography on the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV).

I believe Watson's main goal was to understand the characteristics of RNA in TMV. This would separate Watson's work from Wilkins' work enough so that Wilkins, feeling bruised by the perceived insult of Crick and Watson's perceived DNA tomfoolery, wouldn't fear he was about to be assaulted by Crick and Watson's hijinks all over again.

In the meantime, Crick found a new source of influence in the scientists Erwin Chargaff and John Griffith. Griffith began discussing the ideal of a "perfect biological principle" with Crick. As Crick became more and more excited about the potential DNA had for fulfilling his friend Griffith's idea of a "perfect biological principle," Watson was already starting to show Crick the x-ray photos of the TMV RNA, which was also giving a decidedly helical pattern.

Crick was suddenly excited. He figured the best way to make a new start on the DNA research was by discussing it with these two great scientists, Chargaff and Griffith. Now, Chargaff knew a lot about DNA as it presently stood. And he'd be hard-pressed to believe anything new that someone tried to tell him about it. Chargaff himself had actually discovered the equivalence between adenine and thymine and between guanine and cytosine.

But Crick, in the state Crick and Watson were commonly guilty of -- i.e. vague knowledge of important chemical principles -- had dinner with Chargaff to propose his ideas. He was arguing decently. But he suddenly got to the main point in his argument, when he'd forgotten formulas he didn't know very well to begin with. The problem was -- these were formulas that Chargaff himself had invented. Crick had to sit there, asking Chargaff about his own formulas.

I'm not sure how long it took, after that night, for Chargaff not to think Crick was a clown.

So Crick and Watson were on their own again. In the meantime Wilkins and Franklin didn't seem to be making any progress. Franklin, who was finally planning on leaving Wilkins' lab, anyway, was even asserting that DNA wasn't helical at all! Nevertheless, her x-ray diffraction photographs were more and more virtuosic. She was the best photographer in the world, and her tremendous photographs always seemed to indicate to Watson the double-helix formation of DNA!

Watson, in the meantime, seemed to be separated, in the normal course of his life, from DNA. He'd been dropped from the Copenhagen project, when it became evident he now had no plans of returning there. And he'd been picked up at King's College, working full-time on the TMV RNA project. He'd moved out of John and Elizabeth Kendrew's house and into some residences at Clare College.

Watson was very close with his sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth even lived at Cambridge while Watson lived there. But Watson was very protective of his sister. So during this time, he talks about protecting his sister from men he doesn't think are good enough for her. Eventually Elizabeth has a bit of a flirting relationship with a high-class Frenchman who's come to Cambridge to "perfect his English." Watson remarks about "au pair" nannies from France who do the same thing.

Finally Linus Pauling came out with a paper where he claimed to have determined the double-helix structure of DNA. The only problem was that his solution implied a type of hydrogen bond that was completely inadmissible, even according to the very basic ideas of chemistry. But Watson and Crick were inspired by Pauling's attempts to continue along their own lines.

But before Watson and Crick went full-steam ahead on their ideas, they had to get Wilkins and Franklin's approval. Watson went to London to talk to the two. Wilkins was busy. So Watson spoke with Franklin first. Franklin was tremendously aggressive toward Watson. By the end of their conversation, Franklin even seemed on the verge of attacking Watson physically!

This is a picture I kind of love. If you see any pictures of Watson at this age -- he was twenty-four years old at the time -- he's skinny, with a fog of shaggy, disordered hair drifting over his head. To see skinny, brainy guy being threatened with attack from this strong woman is kind of a wild scene!

Watson was about to beat a hasty retreat, but he bumped up against Wilkins in the doorway. Watson told Wilkins that Franklin almost beat him up. Then he ran down the hallway. Franklin slammed the door in Wilkins' face. Wilkins then later told Watson he'd had a very similar experience with Franklin. He really though Franklin was going to beat him up.

Suddenly, through this shared experience of Franklin's violence toward them, Watson and Wilkins found themselves on some kind of same level. There'd always been a feeling of superiority in Wilkins, even if it was just something Watson had imagined. But now Watson and Wilkins were like equals -- all because Rosy Franklin had almost beat the both of them up.

Wilkins again showed Watson how Franklin's photographs just kept getting better and better, and more indicative of a double helix, but how Franklin just kept insisting that DNA wasn't a helix at all. This all provided plenty of encouragement for Watson, who figured he and Crick were going to use models, not x-ray photographs, so that they didn't have to worry about Franklin.

The only criticism Wilkins gave Watson was that there was no way at all, given the data from Franklin's photographs, that the sugar-phosphate backbone was in the center of the DNA. It had to be on the outside. This meant that DNA did not look like two poles twisting around each other with spikes coming off of them. Instead it looked like the twisty ladder that we're all familiar with.

So Watson went back home to Crick. The two of them had the metal-shop at King's College construct pieces for the models they intended to make. The sugar-phosphate pieces came first. So Watson had plenty of practice building backbones that would go along the outside of the DNA, rather than up the center. The A, G, C, and T pieces, as well as the hydrogen bonds, and so forth, all seemed to be taking a long time to have ready.

So Watson spent some time theorizing about the bonds. For some reason I don't understand (Crick seemed familiar enough with Chargaff's Laws of A to T and G to C -- I don't know why Watson didn't), Watson decided that he had to pair all A's to each other, all T's to each other, etc. He did this based on some set of hydrogen bonding theories he'd found in a textbook. But an American chemist friend of his, who was also doing research at Cavendish, told him that those theories were all, if not outmoded, then at least known, by people who know, to be fibs or fudges.

Watson went back to the drawing board. At the same time, he finally received the models of A, G, C, and T, and all the hydrogen bonds and the other pieces that could be fit into the backbones. He tried working with them along his previous line of thought, A to A, T to T, etc. But his American friend walked in the door. So Watson spontaneously decided to match some A's to T's and G's to C's, based on what his American friend had said. It worked!

This -- basically -- this point right here, was the end of the discovery of the structure of DNA. All that remained was for Watson and Crick to put together their puzzle and write up a report on it. They did this.

But as they were putting this information together and -- at the insistence of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was tired of being embarrassed by Watson's and Crick's hasty mistakes -- having the chemistry of their ideas checked and double-checked by people at Cavendish who really knew their chemistry backwards and forwards, Watson and Crick were also slowly letting their colleagues know that the DNA structure had finally been determined.

Linus Pauling, who had generally been friendly personally toward Watson and Crick, but kind of removed from them when it came to discussing anything regarding DNA, was actually thrilled that the discovery had been made.

Wilkins and Franklin were also thrilled. Something in Franklin's personality changed altogether. She became an incredibly nice person. It was decided that Wilkins and Franklin would write a paper on the x-ray diffraction photography aspect of the discovery, since basically all the photography that had influenced Watson's and Cricks thoughts had been the result of Franklin's virtuosity.

Watson's sister Elizabeth actually typed up the report, after Watson and Crick were finished making their manuscript. Not long after this, Elizabeth went back to America, where she married a man of whom, I'm guessing, Watson approved.

Franklin, though she didn't seem to keep much in contact with Watson, actually became good friends with Crick. She sought Crick's advice on things, and Crick often looked to Franklin for insight as well. However, Franklin ended up dying from a terminal disease at the age of thirty-seven. Nevertheless, she was brave in the face of her own mortality, and worked up until the final few weeks of her life.

Now -- ugh! I've done it again! I've written these long, long summaries of works. And I only meant to make short summaries. I have to get better at this. Well, I think the patterns of the Asimov story are easily compared to the patterns of the Del Rey story. And the patterns of the Del Rey story are easily compared to the patterns of the Watson and Crick story.

Hopefully my skill will be good enough in the future that I can actually summarize the stories succinctly and comment on them as well.