The other week on radio, a historian said that the purpose of history
is to show us how in other times things were done differently. I guess that
is true, if only as part of a larger truth – that the purpose of history
is any purpose to which you care to put it. I am rather of the view that,
apart from its entertainment value, history is most useful if it throws
some new light on how we live now.

With this in mind, one of the most striking features of British science
is that it has always been in decline. In whatever age, science’s great
days always seem to be just over. This dirge for the dissolution of science
has, for example, often been heard during the past 13 (unlucky for some)
years of Tory government – or rule as some people like to call it. As in
the past, when science’s decline has been bewailed, science has found reasons
outside itself for something to be done about it – British science falling
behind that of the other developed countries, the likely disastrous consequences
for industry and so on. Given that the relationship between a country’s
science and the health of its industry is a fairly tortuous one and its
precise nature becomes extremely difficult to establish convincingly, an
interesting question is exactly what is going on? Is there a hidden agenda?
This question might conceivably be answered by an appeal to history.

In what I take to be a striking historical parallel, John Harley Warren
gives us an essay ‘Science in Medicine, the Decline of Science and the Rhetoric
of Reform’, which describes a similar situation in the 1830s. French medicine
seemed to have forged ahead of British medicine, bringing in its wake loud
and prolonged calls for something to be done. Those who have read Middlemarch,
set at this time, will know something about this through one of the central
characters, Dr Lydgate, who was educated in Paris.

Warren suggests that the debate was not really about the value of particular
bodies of scientific knowledge and expertise to medicine but about the relationship
of doctors to society, how they were valued and rewarded. The idea was clearly
abroad that doctors seen as ‘men of science’ might be valued more than doctors
seen simply as practitioners of medicine. It was seen as professionally
useful, perhaps particularly by younger doctors who felt impeded in their
own ambitions by a medical establishment that admitted it saw no value in
science. This seems to me to be remarkably plausible. But what I then desperately
wanted to know was whether a similar motive has driven the rhetoric about
the decline of British science over the past ten years. Is it about the
place of scientists in society; that they similarly feel undervalued and
want more esteem and material rewards? Perhaps the argument has not been
about the lack of resources for scientists to carry out their research,
as it is usually presented. I wished heartily that Warren had drawn the
parallel himself and used his analysis to comment on the present day.

For me, Warren’s was the most interesting essay in the collection but
there are plenty of others. I liked the piece about the 1932 Anatomy Act
by Ruth Richardson. Medicine needed an ever growing supply of corpses for
dissection. The only bodies that could be used were those of executed murders
– part of the punishment for murder was that your body could be dismembered
after death. The murdering classes were, however, too few to meet medicine’s
voracious needs. Enter private enterprise, first with body snatching, then
with the realisation that bodies were more easily come by as those of the
victims of murder rather than of its perpetrators – everyone knows the story
of Burke and Hare. The government acted. Poverty was clearly a crime just
as heinous as murder and conveniently much more common. In future, the ‘unclaimed’
bodies of those dying in the poor houses would furnish medicine with its
opportunities for dissection.

One of the problems with science and medicine is still the extent to
which they have a mythology instead of a history. It is full of stereotyped
pioneers breaking new ground and noble images of heroes, even heroines.
The purpose of this mythology is not hard to find. It clearly attempts to
buttress the picture that emerging professions like to have of themselves.
In an excellent essay, Perry Williams looks at the mythology of nursing
and promptly demolishes it in favour of a straightforward account of how
modern nursing developed. Most telling is his entirely convincing account
of how the Florence Nightingale myth has worked against the interests of
nurses. He replaces the image of the selfless, caring woman on the Crimean
wards with that of the ruthless, determined reformer of hospital building,
administration and standards of hygiene. The ‘lady with the lamp’ becomes
the woman holding the new broom and bucket of disinfectant.

Finally I should mention Mary Fissell’s essay on the changing relationships
between patients and doctors. She describes how the doctor’s reliance on
patients telling them what was wrong with them for their description of
ill health was gradually replaced by attempts to become what I suppose were
the medical equivalents of prospectors, trying to get insights into the
nature of their patients’ illnesses by (if you like) measuring their surfaces.
In their use of language, doctors also retreated from the vernacular into
an increasingly private professional language of bastardised Greek and Latin.
Again, this presumably had the aim of boosting their professional status
and exclusivity. You know the old joke: Doctor: What seems to be the trouble?
Patient: I’ve got earache. Doctor: Ah yes, that will be otalgia. Patient:
What’s that exactly? Doctor: Earache. The profession would be judged not
so much by who it let in but who it could keep out. The barriers remain.

John Galloway is a science writer at the Nuffield Foundation.

Before reading Jean Sapp’s book, I had come across its central character,
Franz Moewus, only once. Vilma Fritsch’s ‘Left and Right’ in Science and
Life describes (among much else) Moewus’s discovery in the green algae Chlamydomonas
that sexual differentiation depends on the right and left-handed isomers
of an optically active molecule. Could he really have found an instance
of the tie-up, common in mythology, between maleness or femaleness with
right-or left-handedness?

As it turns out, Sapp’s book is about mythology supporting science
rather than science supporting mythology. Robert Graves pointed out that
the function of mythology is to just-ify an existing social system and account
for traditional rites and customs. Sapp uses the example of Moewus to explore
science as a social system and reveal the extent to which it depends on
mythologised accounts of history.

Moewus, working in the decades around the Second World War, seems to
have – at least on the face of it – a respectable claim to having introduced
the microorganism into genetics. As a result, he played a large part in
the development of biochemical genetics. Yet he does not appear, even in
a walk-on role, in textbooks that purport to give some history of the subject.
Why not? The reason seems to be that his work on sexual differentiation
was judged to have been fraudulent. Others could not reproduce his findings,
under scrutiny he could not always reproduce them himself. Whether he made
up his results is still controversial.

In any case, as Sapp argues very compellingly, helping your data out
in its support for your theoretical ideas is not exactly uncommon in science.
Indeed, it appears to be one of its essential features. Isaac Newton was
the master fudger, while Gregor Mendel and Robert Millikan used the process
to good effect – three examples that have received a good deal of attention
in recent years. A vivid contrast might be made with Cyril Burt. Vilified
for apparently fabricating his data on separated pairs of twins, he seems
well on the way to rehabilitation. One reason is that his work on the degree
to which intelligence is inherited seems to give the right answer. Sapp
suggests that in the struggle for priority in his pioneering work on Chlamydomonas
Moewus’s problem is that he lost.

This is a brilliant book. Its use of the scientific community’s changing
attitudes to Moewus to give insights into science as a social system and
description of the way scientists misinterpret the past – consciously or
unconsciously – to promote the ‘right’ view of science and the place of
scientists in it is a veritable tour de force.

John Galloway is with the Cancer Research Fund

It is commonly said that cancer is largely a preventable disease. And
it is not uncommon for people to use this notion as a stick with which to
beat cancer researchers – if cancers are preventable why don’t they prevent
them? Cancer: Causes, Occurrence and Control throws some light on the meaning
of ‘preventable’ and explains why it does not mean that most cancers can
actually be prevented, at least not now and perhaps not for some considerable
time.

The incidence of the 200 or so different cancers, known collectively
as ‘cancer’, varies enormously from country to country and between regions
within countries. This suggests to epidemiologists that cancers are caused
by features of the environment and people’s lifestyles, and that some environments
and lifestyles are very much safer than others in respect of particular
cancers. If we could identify what makes some relatively safe and others
less so, then in principle all could be made equally safe. At least that’s
the theory.

By comparing the incidence of a particular cancer in a particular place
with the lowest known incidence of that cancer, a rough measure of potential
preventability can be worked out.

Stomach cancer is 20 times more common in Japan than in Kuwait, which
seems to have the lowest known incidence of this disease. So, in Japan there
is a potential preventability of about 95 per cent for this disease. The
lowest breast cancer incidence is found in parts of Poland, where it is
five times less common than in San Francisco. San Francisco, therefore,
has a potential preventability of 80 per cent for breast cancer. And so
on.

It is figures like these, across the whole cancer spectrum and across
the world, that seem to suggest that cancer is indeed pretty much preventable.
The trick of course, which no one has yet mastered or at least has mastered
only in fragments, is how to jump from potential preventability to actual
prevention.

As is clear from the book, few causes of particular cancers are much
more than suspected. Yet without knowing the causes it is impossible to
see what preventive strategies might be adopted. Even when causes are known
it may be difficult to do much about them. The largest single cause of cancer
is tobacco. Yet smoking worldwide is on the increase. And although men in
Britain, for instance, are smoking less, women are smoking more.

What strategies could be adopted to prevent particular cancers? Legislation
to protect particular industrial workforces is one, and it has been used
to some effect in parts of the chemicals industry to keep carcinogens away
from people.

What about the reverse – keeping people away from carcinogens by persuading
them to alter their lifestyle? When the data showing a convincing link between
cigarettes and lung cancer were first published, there seemed to be some
immediate effect on doctors. It is often said that this was because doctors
understood the significance of the findings.

A more likely reason is that the data were actually collected on doctors,
which gave them more significance for other doctors. It appears that men
in general did not take the link seriously until journalists and their newspapers
took an interest. Women have yet to take it seriously apparently.

Some, perhaps many, cancers have a number of contributory causes, all
necessary though not individually sufficient. A clear example is Burkitt’s
lymphoma, a common B-cell cancer which affects children in the tropics.
A necessary cause of this disease is Epstein-Barr virus – a common virus
that may well infect 90 per cent of the world’s population.

Burkitt’s lymphoma appears, however, to be confined to those areas of
the world where virtually everyone is infected with malaria. During the
1970s, when successful measures reduced the incidence of malaria in parts
of Uganda and Tanzania, the incidence of Burkitt’s lymphoma fell in those
same districts by an order of magnitude. In the 1980s as malaria increased
again so did the incidence of the cancer.

One strategy for the eradication of Burkitt’s lymphoma, therefore, might
be vaccination against the Epstein-Barr virus. And indeed vaccines are being
developed in Britain and Germany against the virus.

Vaccinations might provide the best strategy against any cancer with
a virus as a necessary cause. Vaccination programmes are already being carried
out in parts of Africa against hepatitis B virus, a major cause of primary
liver cancer.

A cancer nearer to home against which a vaccine might conceivably work
is cervical cancer. A link in the causal chain leading to a proportion of
cervical cancers is probably one of the human papilloma viruses. Again,
some progress has been made towards a vaccine.

Of course vaccination is not without problems. Very young children would
have to be vaccinated to prevent either Burkitt’s lymphoma or liver cancer.
But who would be vaccinated to prevent cervical cancer? All girls before
they become active sexually – the virus is transmitted sexually – or, perhaps,
the boys?

A very different preventive strategy would be to screen an apparently
healthy population for signs of early disease or precancerous damage. Some
cancers, though by no means all, are more successfully treated if caught
early. Ovarian cancer is an example of one that is.

Of course, there is little point screening unless the results can be
successfully acted upon. And successful screening also depends on people
being prepared to change their behaviour fairly drastically and to accept
the idea of being screened while healthy.

There is a similar problem with ‘chemoprevention’ – the long-term taking
of a ‘drug’ in the hope of preventing a disease. Again those taking it are
apparently healthy.

Cancer: Causes, Occurrence and Control has a fairly clear message for
anyone prepared to get to it. The problem of preventing cancer is a remarkably
complicated one and the possibility seems remote that much could be achieved
by any simple means – or any other means in the short term. Those attempting
to radically improve cancer treatments shouldn’t slacken their efforts.

John Galloway works for the Cancer Research Campaign.

The geometer, H. S. M. Coxeter, with his tongue only slightly in his cheek, attributed M. C. Escher’s success as an illustrator and graphic artist to the fact that he was not constrained by the religious observances that forced the Moors to limit their decorative arts strictly to abstract forms. The Moors understood the symmetries that accompany the limited number of ways in which a plane can be divided or tessellated. Escher brought his more profane imagination to bear on the problem, and used not merely simple geometrical figures but the shapes of living things.

The decorative idea that attracted Escher – and, which because of its attraction for him, has held our attention ever since – is that of counterchange. Counterchange is the regular swapping of colours or shapes. It can be simple: for example, a chequered design alternates squares ofM1 M0colours. In Moorish tiles and M1 M0New England quilt patterns,M1 M0foreground and background colours in elaborate pieced stars change places regularly thoughout the design.

Escher’s work, to quote Sir Ernst Gombrich, ‘illustrates both the technical roots of a (decorative) device and its triumphant emancipation as a piece of virtuosity’, requiring as he says, a two-track mind: one track for each of the two forms that cover the plane regularly and completely.

That Escher leaned on the formal theory of isometric groups is not in doubt. But he transformed the spare skeletal beauty of mathematical theory into ornament of the highest order.

And he did more. The counterchange pattern could be given a dynamic quality – the forms evolving or metamorphosing continuously throughout the pattern, fish into birds and vice versa, for example. Or again the pattern could be elaborated in other ways. His Symmetry Work 67 using horsemen as the repeating motif is turned into a Mobius strip. Incidentally, this pattern was used as the cover of C. N. Yang’s Elementary Particles. He felt it encapsulated the idea of ‘antisymmetry’. One of Escher’s evolutionary patterns, Encounter, was later used as the cover design of Jacque Monod’s Chance and Necessity.

Escher’s interests ranged from the possible to the impossible or paradoxical. Again he found his inspiration in the ideas of mathematicians – the continuous closed staircase of L. S. Penrose and the self-supporting waterfall based on the impossible triangle thought up by Penrose’s son, Roger.

Many books have been written about Escher’s art. None has approached Visions of Symmetry for its scope, scale and sump tuousness. The sheer beauty and ingenuity of the pictures keep you turning the pages as though the book were a collection of detective stories whose plots are brilliantly organised patterns.

John Galloway is head of public relations at the Cancer Research Campaign in London.

Science is knowledge; and knowledge is power. Ergo, science is power.
It isn’t of course. No one talks about scientific power as they do about
economic, military and political power. But science at some time ends up
in the beds of them all, an intimacy that provides the title of Jerry Ravetz’s
book. It is the fruits of those beddings, which science is repeatedly horrified
to discover are not the blessings naively romantically expected, but destructive,
dangerous and downright antisocial, that underlie his subtitle. Critical
science – if I understand Ravetz correctly – is a science that looks hard
at the potential downsides of its discoveries.

Ravetz is a mathematician turned historian of science. He is known in
the medical research world for his membership in the late 1970s of the Genetic
Manipulation Advisory Group as its statutory lay member. What we have here
are a collection of his essays, and some fragments of essays, written over
a fairly long period; some illustrating these themes, others only loosely
associated with them, and others not really related. He ranges over fairly
wide territory: the problem of waste, the assessment of appreciation of
risk, essays on Francis Bacon and J D Bernal and on the scientific revolution
of the 17th century, objections to science and criticism of it; and the
philosophy of science as ideology. He has grouped the essays into: the problems
science faces including those it has itself created; historical essays;
philosophy; and finally a section called constructive approaches that discusses
how science can address complicated issues, such as social or environmental
problems.

I am sorry to have to say that I have problems with the collection.
Ravetz has interesting things to say, but I could not work out at whom the
essays are, or were aimed. He has obviously read widely and he is thoroughly
acquainted with the writings of many who have had things to say about science
and its relationship with society at large.

He presumed on my close acquaintaceship with these people, but although
I know of some of them and I have read some of what they have written, I
have not read much of what most of them have written. A single 15-line paragraph
referred to Alfred Whitehead, Jean-Louis Bergson, Tielhard de Chardin, Bertrand
Russell, Dante, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington,
Plato and A E Burtt. I learned nothing from the passage except that Ravetz
knew about them all.

It is fair to say that his style of writing is forthright, rhetorical
and assertive, rather than overly analytical. I longed to see him include
the working that led to some of his conclusions, which are often pretty
sweeping and not always wholly convincing. In contrast to his assertion,
the objectivity of science is not necessarily compromised by the fact that
industry plays a part in setting the scientific agenda. In important ways,
theoretical science has always followed technology around, so in a real
sense technology and industry have often set the research agenda.

It cannot be said too often that science is not so much about method
as methods. Methods produce new information about the world, not method
in the abstract. It is the myth of method that leads to so much misunderstanding
of science and scientists – by government, for instance. Method costs nothing,
methods cost hard cash.

The distinction comes across clearly in what I felt was the most interesting
and provocative essay – that on the relationships between the philosophy
of science, and moral (and political) ideology. Ravetz uses this theme to
explore the work of four men – Karl Popper, John Lakatos (Popper’s student),
Thomas Kuhn and Richard Feyerabend.

Popper failed in his attempt to distinguish science from what he saw
as the pseudo sciences of psychology (the work of Sigmund Freud and Mortimer
Adler), astrology and Marxism, using as a criterion whether what each says
is true. He realised that what science is revealing is not necessarily true,
and decided instead therefore that science must have a quality of moral
courage that the others lacked. Scientists are brave enough to put up their
theories as ‘Aunt Sallys’ to be knocked down by other scientists. There
is something in this, but not everything by any means. And one of the problems
of science affecting to adopt the moral high ground is that the sins of
scientists – rather like those of vicars – assume in the public eye a great
deal more prominence than they deserve. Scientists are not divided into
the virtuous and the sinful. Most scientists probably practice in small
ways what some scientists seem to have practised in large ways.

Morality for the individual scientist of private means, or who is otherwise
privately supported, is transmuted into accountability once the giver of
support becomes the state. And here we have the source of much that troubles
modern science, today the province of governments. One of the things I do
thank Ravetz for is drawing to my attention a rather apt comment on the
problem. Who said this? ‘It is impossible to obtain wages from a republic
however splendid and generous it may be without having duties attached.
For to have anything from the public one must satisfy the public and not
any one individual: and so as long as I am capable of lecturing and serving
no one in the republic can exempt me from duty while I receive pay. In brief,
I can hope to enjoy these benefits only from an absolute ruler.’ It was
Galileo.

Let me finish with a neat irony. Popper was antipathetic to Marx for
his pseudo scientific claims as Ravetz brings out in his essay. Yet in another
essay Ravetz points up how Marx seemed to have science bang to rights. In
his Critique of Political Economy in 1869 Marx said: ‘Mankind only sets
those problems it can solve.’ Where have we heard that since? Peter Medawar,
the arch-Popperist wasn’t it, who defined science as the art of the soluble.

John Galloway is head of public relations at the Cancer Reserach Campaign.

David Phillips and his colleagues at London’s Institute of Cancer Research
have been developing the technique, called ‘postlabelling’. It uses radioactive
phosphorus to identify chemicals which attach themselves to a cell’s DNA,
causing cancer.

The DNA in each human cell is the long-chain molecule which contains
the body’s genes: the human genome. It consists of about 3 billion pairs
of chemical building blocks, or bases.

Postlabelling exploits the fact that naturally occurring phosphorus
in the nucleotides, that make up DNA, can be replaced, or ‘postlabelled’,
by radioactive phosphorus. Phillips and his colleagues break down the DNA
into its individual nucleotides, and then run them on an electrophoresis
gel.

Nucleotides that have carcinogens attached have physical properties
which are different from those of nucleotides by themselves, and which characteristic
of that carcinogen. They, therefore, appear as separate spots on the gel.
Each spot’s position indicates the nature of the carcinogen, and this is
revealed when the radioactive phosphorus acts on a photographic film.

Postlabelling is so sensitive that it can identify just one molecule
of a carcinogen in the genome. And it can achieve this feat with a microscopic
quantity of DNA, obtained from only a few cells.

Until now, it has not been possible to attack the question of environmental
causes for cancer. It has tended to be researched using animal experiments
or epidemiology – the science of looking for correlations between a population’s
habits and lifestyles and the cancers its members suffer from. But researchers
realised as long as the 1960s that chemical carcinogens cause cancer by
sticking onto the cell’s DNA, largely as a result of work by Peter Brookes
and Phil Lawley at the Institute of Cancer Research. Now, using postlabelling,
it is possible to discover which chemicals have become attached to the DNA,
and so which ones could cause cancer.

Leo Kinlen, Director of the Cancer Research Campaign Epidemiology Unit
in Edinburgh believes that his explanation accounts for some of the observed
epidemiology of childhood leukaemia; in particular, the outbreaks in some
new towns, followed by depressed levels of the disease in later years.

Childhood leukaemia is relatively rare, affecting about one child in
2000 under the age of 15. But despite this, it has aroused strong public
feeling because of its increased incidence in areas close to some nuclear
installations. However, it is far from proven that the source of the disease
is nuclear radiation.

Kinlen believes that the incidence of childhood leukaemia can be explained
if a few children are heavily infected and the rest are lightly infected
by an as yet unknown agent. Those children who do not develop the disease
following infection are protected against developing it later. Kinlen predicts,
therefore, that an ‘epidemic’ of leukaemia should be followed by low levels
of disease.

The idea that leukaemia and its close relations, the lymphomas, might
have their origin in infection is not new. Herpes viruses are implicated
in Burkitt’s lymphoma and retroviruses in adult T-cell leukaemia.

To test his hypothesis, Kinlen examined the deaths from the disease
in 14 British new towns. He used statistics gathered over a 40-year period
starting when the building of new towns began in 1946. Nine of the new towns
were overspill towns, which were designed to provide homes and jobs for
people from London and Glasgow, while the other five were rural new towns,
built to increase the workforce in areas pinpointed for industrial development.

The populations of the rural group were drawn from a much wider variety
of places than those of the overspill towns. According to Kinlen, this partly
explains differences in the pattern of childhood leukaemia between overspill
and rural towns.

In the early years of the existence of rural towns, when the populations
were growing quickly, the number of children with leukaemia was significantly
greater than the national average, particularly, in very young children
under the age of four. For instance, in Glenrothes in Fife, a rural new
town, says Kinlen, the number of cases was about 11 times the national average.
In older groups, he says, there were actually fewer cases of leukaemia than
would be expected, confirming Kinlen’s hypothesis.

It looks as though infection of young children was made possible because
the newcomers came from a great diversity of places, and there were more
children in the rural new towns. In the overspill towns, however, there
were less children than in the urban areas from which the new populations
came. As a result, says Kinlen, there was no epidemic of leukaemia in the
youngest children. Also, the number of cases in older children fell short
of what would have been expected, again consistent with an immunising effect.

Kinlen points out that the picture that emerges was rather like that
seen in cats infected with feline leukaemia virus. Leukaemia is much more
common among cats which live in households where there are lots of them
than among those of single cat households.

THE PHILOSOPHER, Gilbert Ryle is reported (or reputed) when asked whether
he believed in free will, to have replied: ‘Tell me what it is and I’ll
tell you whether I believe in it’. This little anecdote kept coming into
my mind as I read Dr Ochse’s book. The problem with setting out to explore
the roots of human creativity, which is what the book attempts, is that
the author does not have any clear idea of precisely what it is that grows
from these roots.

Of course you can fritter away much time worrying about the definition
of a concept, rather than just trying to apply it. But, on the other hand,
if we are being asked to consider seriously why some people are creative
and others apparently not, and why some people are very creative indeed,
we do need striking examples of the results of such creativity and an indication
of the value society places on them and why. How does a shower specially
designed for the elderly rate against the Mona Lisa? The lack of plenty
of concrete illustrations is the book’s cardinal, perhaps fatal, weakness.

Ochse has produced a review of (some of) the literature about the sources.
He divides the material up pretty conventionally into a historical perspective,
to which he adds some methodology. A section on the creative person is subdivided
to examine possible influences on creativity: social background, education
and so on; he then attempts to analyse the creative process itself – problem
solving, for instance. He includes ideas from many of the sort of people
you would hope and expect to find: Francis Galton, Sigmund Freud, William
James all had interesting things to say on the subject in their own way.
But he has also missed much writing about the nature of creativity, perhaps
because it is not the result of formal research. There is virtually endless
literary biography, some of which must surely give some insights into the
creative process, especially since it ranges from Enid Blyton to Leo Tolstoy.
The same must apply to the innumerable biographies that have been written
of scientists, inventors, artists – and everyone else with the remotest
claim to our applause for doing something new.

Science, however, does seem to me to be an arena in which Ochse did
find some telling work. In the 19th century Galton, interested in the genetics
of ability, studied eminence as a potentially heritable trait. He looked
at judges, politicians, ‘noblemen’, athletes, authors, poets, scientists,
musicians, painters and clergymen. His most striking finding, at least to
me, is that eminent scientists do not tend to have eminent fathers, although
they tend to have eminent sons. This is consistent with the thesis, that
generally speaking, scientists come from the lower end of the social spectrum.
This particular finding was confirmed by the much later work of Zuckerman.
He discovered that very few eminent American scientists had backgrounds
that could be described as well off and that the families of a signi ficant
proportion – more than a third – were decidedly poor. Other sociologists
have also reported the same thing: there is a striking contrast between
the backgrounds of scientists and those of other prominent members of society.

At the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of investigating what makes
for outstanding mental powers, Ochse mentions the fate that befell some
great men’s brains. Both Charles Babbage’s and Einstein’s brains were kept
after their deaths and closely examined. Nothing of the remotest interest
was discovered.

Ochse could have enlivened this part of his review by adding the brain
of Lenin, who was to politics arguably what Einstein was to physics and
Babbage to calculation. In 1924, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain
Research helped to create an institute in Moscow to study the brain of Lenin
(he had died that year). He was thought to possess ‘unique associative powers’.
The finding in Lenin’s cerebal cortex of unusually large and numerous pyramidal
cells elicited among other things an enthusiastic article by Arthur Koestler
in one of the Berlin popular papers.

An aspect of cognitive psychology that I felt was prominent by its absence
was the phenomenon of idiots savants, people of very low intelligence (measured
by the norms of society) who nevertheless possess, from their earliest days,
an outstanding unique technical skill: an ability to draw, play the piano
or perform rapid calculations. Many of these children display their particular
skill at the highest level measured by any standards. This strange phenomenon
must throw light on the nature and roots of creativity because it provides
such obvious extremes against which theories can be tested.

Idiots savants display single mindedness almost literally. Metaphorical
single mindedness, an ‘addiction’ for particular subjects or problems is
a quality often possessed by achievers. Ochse quotes William James making
this point. The obsessive specialism of scientists is a long standing joke.
It is their vice but it is, by and large, what brings home the bacon.

I am sorry not to appear more enthusiastic about Ochse’s book. But the
question of creativity has been addressed often, and very well. George Polya’s
Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning is an excellent working account of mathematics
as a creative art. Livingston-Lowe’s The Road to Xanadu is unsurpassed as
an analysis of poetic creativity. Neither book is mentioned as far as I
could tell.

I suspect the problem is this. Creativity is not one large thing but
compounded of many small things. Rather than seek the roots; look at the
elements. In a final analysis all creativity will be found to be compounded
of technical aptitude, bias, opportunity, judgement, energy, and persistence
to turn a talent into a skill. And finally, there is a killer instinct,
an real willingness to run the intellectual quarry down. This seems very
obviously true of James Watson and Francis Crick in the search for the structure
of DNA, for instance. It was this quality that set them aside from their
British competitors. It was obviously true of James Joyce, setting out to
write the best possible novel. I bet it is true of all creative people.
With it you are not guaranteed success; without it you are guaranteed failure.

John Galloway works for the Cancer Research Fund, London.