THE border separating microbiology from larger-scale biology is fuzzy, but
most biologists draw the line at the microfungi, unicellular algae and protozoa.
David Dusenbery does not accept this consensus. For him, a microbe is an
organism so small that it lacks a circulatory system, and takes in nutrients and
excretes waste by diffusion, or sometimes by ingestion and ejection. He calls
toadstools, nematodes, planarians and even copepods microbes, and they occupy as
much of Life at Small Scale as conventional microbes.

Setting terminology aside, Dusenbery does present a fascinating view of life
on a small scale. Physical laws, such as those of gravity and momentum, have
conditioned the anatomy and physiology of large creatures, but these play little
part in the microscopic world. Battered continuously by Brownian movement,
constrained by viscosity and surface tension, at the mercy of currents,
turbulence and drag, yet dependent on diffusion for their metabolism, their
behaviour is determined by largely unfamiliar parameters.

His refreshing outlook on small-scale biology will please and provoke
conventional microbiologists in about equal measure. Do you know why bacteria
must either swim very fast or not at all? (They have to outpace diffusion.) Why
are they the only organisms to have wheels in their locomotor systems? (Because
wheels are incompatible with a circulatory system, which would tangle up.
Disagree? Well . . . it made you think, didn’t it?) There are numerous rewarding
insights here, a few arguably off-target.

The book is lavishly illustrated with colour plates and graphics. Students of
microbiology or general biology in their second or third year would benefit from
it, while teachers and researchers in both disciplines would find it
rewarding.

Dusenbery’s aberrant definition of “microbe” is, however, unnecessary. It
could confuse microbiology students (albeit briefly). And, being in the
subtitle, it may be shelved as microbiology so general biologists who ought to
read it will not. A pity.

Those who adopt an antiscience posture constantly ignore or dismiss the fact that science itself is neutral. It is the applications of science which are as good, or as evil, as people make them. This mistake is widespread because many people confuse “science” with “scientists”. Naturally, some of the people involved in applying science are scientists, and few would dispute that scientists share responsibility with politicians, industrialists, administrators, engineers and technicians for the uses to which science is put. But the fact remains that the intellectual structures that constitute science are morally neutral.

The neutrality of science is not an especially subtle point, but it is one that needs to be stated again and again, because it is constantly obfuscated by antiscience polemicists. Curiously, where the detractors have accepted the neutrality of science, they seem to have rejuvenated that old conflict between religion and science.

A coterie of writers and academics claims that because science is neutral it must be inhuman. For science takes a reductionist, materialist view of our thinking and being. It belittles our status in the Universe, rejects any transcendental purpose to justify our existence, denies the existence of God (or gods) and dismisses the possibility of rewards and retribution in an afterlife. To this coterie, it follows that science imposes no spiritual, aesthetic or moral values, and enjoins no imperatives towards goodness, kindness, altruism or even considerate behaviour toward one’s fellows.

Well, as an atheist, I happily concede that science does those materialist, reductionist, irreligious things. But a debate on spirituality and aesthetics in science and religion is not my objective. Here I am concerned with the assertion that science does not impose moral values.

The assertion is false. Science imposes a stern, austere morality upon its adherents, one which pervades their lives and outlooks. This is a fundamental and admirable feature of science which its detractors rarely acknowledge and which its defenders have signally failed to communicate.

Consider the way in which science works. Before an observation or concept becomes part of the logical structures of science it must be seen to be rational when dove-tailed into the existing corpus of knowledge. At the same time, the logical structures are constantly open to challenge and modification. There are no dogmas, no absolute certainties. Science approaches truth asymptotically. But it never gets there: for a scientist there is no absolute truth.

It is this groping towards the scientific approximation of truth that imposes honesty, cooperation and sharing among scientists. Not because some priest, mullah or mystical ideologue prescribes these virtues, but for utterly practical and logical reasons.

You advance neither knowledge nor your own reputation if you are guilty of deception, including self-deception; nor if you disregard unwelcome or inconsistent evidence; nor if you conceal rather than share data. Why? Because deception, plagiarism and falsification of evidence will be found out, usually very soon. Self-deception engenders contempt. Concealment, such as failure to publish, is self-defeating through loss of scientific credit. But, above all, such behaviour will delay scientific progress.

This is not to say that transgressions of scientific morality never happen. Information may be concealed, for reasons ranging from industrial or military secrecy to gaining time in the publication rat race. Results may be fudged (that is, selected) to support a point of view. Plagiarism is not unknown. As with any moral code, it is human to slip up, even to try to cheat for short-term personal advantage. But cheats frauds and inadequates are remarkably rare among the scientific community, because all know that in the end such transgressions against scientific standards are pointless.

Opinions and convictions may be held as strongly as in any walk of life, but a window of open-mindedness and objectivity is essential. These outlooks form the basis of scientific morality. They become automatic, extending into everyday life and thought; they can make scientists exasperating to live with. And they also give science the moral high ground in its renewed conflict with religion. Indeed, I suspect that the bizarre quality of some of today’s attacks on science stem from a subconscious recognition of this truth.

The world’s religions have undeniably given purpose, moral codes and social coherence to people’s lives, but they have also brought the horrors of human sacrifice, crusades, pogroms and inquisitions. For unlike science, religion is not neutral: it tells people what to do. And one of its instructions is: “Kill the infidel!”

Take a detached look at newspapers and television and consider for example, Ulster, Yugoslavia, Israel, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Kashmir, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Observe Protestant, Catholic, Serbian and Russian Orthodox Christians, Jews, Shiah and Sunni Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs and minor sects, in their hundreds of thousands, murdering each other. All in the name of their God or gods.

Occasionally, an apologist might pretend that these are not religious conflicts, but ethnic, tribal, nationalist or political clashes. A tiny minority of the forty or so current conflicts might be, but the majority are an overtly religious basis.

More serious apologists might assert that these fundamentalist killers are deviants, distorting the true teachings of their religion, perverting its morality. A negative fallout of religion is analogous to the pollution, environmental damage and unethical experimentation which are the downside of the applications of science.

This analogy does not stand up to examination. True, most of the world’s religions do indeed include a precept comparable to “Thou shalt not kill”. But religion is dogmatic and the belligerents are ordinary religious people, so they follow another religious imperative: they are agents of God’s retribution, who find support in their myths and texts, among their priests, their mullahs and their more passive coreligionists. They are convinced that they are carrying out their God’s will.

This is where the moral high ground of science lies: its morality is wholly incompatible with such murderous imperatives. No scientific principle, and nothing in scientific logic, could be construed as an incitement to mass killing, or even individual murder.

True, science has had its backsliders. In very rare instances, a few scientists have shown themselves capable of deliberate mutilation or murder in the name of research, as happened in Nazi and Japanese prison camps during the Second World War. Doubtless, too, there are participants in the current spate of religious conflicts who, in another compartment of their minds, are moral and dedicated scientists.

Every walk of life has its aberrant members, but can you imagine scientists, in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands even, arming themselves and murdering, torturing and maiming other human beings for some scientific principle or “truth”?

Science is very young in terms of human history, and the morality it imposes is still inaccessible to many people, most of whom cannot live a civilised life without dogma. Sadly, many people will need religion for decades to come, probably for centuries. But scientists must try to save the world from religion’s worst excesses, and one way to do this is to emphasise the stern morality of science, and contrast it with religious dogma and precept.

The matter is urgent, because religion today, with its backbone of retribution and holy war, is a threat to the quality of our lives quite as serious as any of the environmental and social perils attributed to science, and is much more immediate.

Scientists such as these are content to coast along as before, painting
the odd lily, often quite effectively, and not getting in anyone’s way.
These characteristics tend to appear early on if the science has a substantial
mathematical or physical component. Sadly, scientists whose output has become
lower than it ought to be in quality (not necessarily in quantity) are,
on the whole, more prevalent among older age groups.

Before I am accused of rampant ageism (by the way, I am immensely old
myself), let me amplify that ‘on the whole’ proviso. Of course there is
that invaluable minority of scientists who do not run out of steam with
age; those who, appropriately talented and dedicated, sustain momentum and
remain acknowledged leaders in their fields to a ripe old age, setting an
example to everyone and achieving well-deserved rewards and honours. There
are also a few young scientists who lack steam from the outset; equally
there are a few late developers. But in all, the exceptions represent a
very small percentage of our scientific workforce.

In the expansive years of the third quarter of the century, institutes
or departments could carry coasters along by group momentum, but those days
are over for good. Even if science funding in Britain were to rise to match
the norm among other developed countries, the heady days of 1950s-type expansion
will not return. Today such people are a source of anxiety to scientific
directors and departmental heads, because they are numerous in both the
R and D sides of R&D. They unwittingly deny opportunities to young and
innovative scientists, to the detriment both of their establishments’ programmes
and of the country’s scientific and technical progress.

Yet as our society becomes ever more science-based, we need an expanding
scientific workforce, and it must be one capable of seeing, exploiting and
developing innovations almost as soon as they appear. And we need to retain
all the innovators we can get, be they old or young.

How to do this? For reasons which stem as much from specialisation as
from age, retraining and redeployment are not the answer: they rarely work
among scientists, as Britain’s research councils have so painfully learnt.

The military solved an analogous problem well over a century ago. Soldiers
are recruited to fight and, above a certain mean age, they cease to be useful
for that purpose. Therefore they are recruited for a fixed term only and
then retired, usually with promotion and a reasonable, if modest, pension.
A few who show special talents in appropriate directions are retained for
non-combatant duties, but most professional military personnel return to
civilian life in early middle age, to make second careers or to relax, as
the case may be.

The careers of scientists ought to follow a similar course. It would
be greatly to the advantage of all concerned if they, like the military,
were normally taken on for a career-length term, say 25 years, with something
like the present civil service pay and promotion prospects. At age 45 they
would, subject to performance, normally be promoted by one grade and retired
immediately on half pay.

A minority who retained their usefulness might or might not be promoted,
but they would be invited to continue in their posts and pursue their careers
normally for another decade. Then another screening would take place. A
few outstanding scientists would come through the second screening and work
for yet another decade; quite exceptional ones would come through again
and again, and carry on well past our present cut-off age of 60 to 65.

Professional scientists’ contracts would have to be long-term. A succession
of short-term contracts would be a disaster – as today’s postdoc trap has
shown. The cost of pensions for scientists leaving ought to be balanced
out by lower salaries for the young scientists who fill their posts. In
effect, however, a career prospect based on single long-term contracts,
exceptionally renewable, would render the whole scientific work-force more
alert and productive, would ease promotion of young high-fliers, and would
avoid the premature rejection of outstanding achievers.

Being the rule, early retirement would be no stigma, and it would provide
society with a reserve of talent, intellectually disciplined and far from
elderly, for all sorts of useful purposes – in new employment (helping with
the shortage of science teachers, for example), self-employment or, if wealthy
enough, in voluntary work.

After all, the microchip revolution is on the way to making lifelong
employment the exception rather than the rule in most walks of life, if
only because the alternative is lifelong unemployment for too many of us.
Career scientists would, as usual, simply be pointing the way ahead.

John Postgate FRS is emeritus professor of microbiology at the University
of Sussex.

MAHLON HOAGLAND, now in his seventh decade, has spent his professional
life close to the cutting edge of research in molecular biology. In this
autobiography he gives an account of the way in which his research and career
developed, with reflections on the nature, organisation and philosophy of
scientific research.

He comes of a scientific family. His father, Hudson Hoagland, was a
distinguished Massachusetts scientist who, disenchanted with the chores
of academic life in the 1930s, decided to found, with his friend and collaborator
Gregory Pincus, an institution dedicated to full-time biomedical research.

The institute had a long gestation period, but in 1944 it came into
being as the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Worcester,
Massachusetts – somewhat to the relief, it seems, of nearby Clark University,
which had hitherto employed many of its active, but not always biddable,
biologists. Its specialisms were neurophysiology and reproductive biology
– Pincus’s development of ‘the pill’ is its most widely remembered achievement.

The formation of the Worcester Foundation, the underlying politics and
his father’s troubles with Clark University, loomed large during Hoagland’s
adolescence. He seems to have felt himself well out of the affair, although
he never doubted that he wished to be a scientist. As the Second World War
began, he entered Harvard and later, influenced by wartime exigencies, he
transferred to its medical school. He obtained a medical degree and planned
to specialise in surgery, but, because his course had been interrupted by
illness, his efforts in that direction failed. Instead he became side-tracked
into pure research as part of Paul Zamecnik’s group studying protein synthesis,
a change of direction that he never regretted.

His earliest research was on the toxicity of beryllium – he tells of
how a small boy playing with an old fluorescent light tube in 1947 led to
the discovery of how intensely poisonous beryllium compounds can be. But
beryllium did not have the grand perspective of Zamecnik’s main thrust;
how does a living cell assemble a relatively small choice of aminoacids
into the right protein in the right place at the right time? Protein synthesis
was a burning question in the late 1940s, because experimental approaches
to its hiterto intractable problems were becoming available, through mutant
microbes, isotopically-labelled biochemicals and refined ana lytical procedures.
Hoagland junior, it seems, could hardly wait to drop beryllium and join
in.

The 1950s were heady years for biologists. The role of DNA in programming
cell growth and metabolism became clearer, pathways of biosynthesis were
resolved, ways became available for disrupting cells gently to release subcellular
organelles, the first aminoacid sequences of proteins became available;
genetics and biochemistry converged and, not always willingly co-mingled
into what we now call molecular biology. The bacterium Escheria coli was
the principal work-horse of this massive advance, but classical materials
from the higher organisms – tissue slices, liver homogenates and so on –
played their part. Although not a microbiologist, Hoagland was in the thick
of it and his book conveys the excitement of that period effectively.

He visited European centres in the early 1950s before rejoining Zamecnik
in the research for which he is best known; the elucidation of the molecular
species, now called transfer RNA, which conveys suitably activated aminoacids
to the cell’s protein-synthesising organelles, the ribosomes. With the almost
contemporary discovery of messenger RNA, today’s understanding of DNA-directed
protein synthesis began to take shape.

Hoagland’s account of the crucial experiments is positively gripping.
He also adumbrates the competitiveness of the scene, telling of his realisation
that he did not have the temperament to remain in such a hot-house atmosphere.
He continued research in the general area for over a decade, but the opportunity
arose to replace his father as director of the Worcester Foundation and,
after some heart-searching, he accepted.

The foundation had survived and prospered almost entirely on ‘soft’
money; funds raised locally, from benefactors or industry, or raised by
its staff from National grant-giving agencies. One wonders if its younger
scientists were quite as happy about their impermanent appointments as were
the Hoaglands – I’ll bet a lot of time which could have gone into research
was spent in writing, and revising, grant applications and reports. But
that is the way things are in the US, and it worked. Later, as he tells,
his directoral responsibilities led him to become involved in that very
American practice of lobbying Congress over science funding.

Hoagland has a clear, conversational style and he does not over-burden
the reader with ponderous philosophical pronouncements, though the pragmatic
outlook of the title informs the whole book. As well as writing of himself,
he provides brief sketches of some major figures on his molecular biological
scene, such as Francis Crick, Herman Kalckar, Kaj Linderstrom-Lang, Fritz
Lipman, Jacques Monod, James Watson and Paul Zamecnik.

I sense that he is not sure what audience he is addressing, for he explains
certain matters as if for the nonscientist, yet with other topics he uses
formulae and technical terms as if writing for a trained readership. However,
this is a common problem in scientific biography – 91av readers
will have no difficulties and will enjoy his book’s narrative flow. Only
gradually might they come to wonder why almost everyone he mentions is ‘brilliant’,
‘talented’, ‘generous’ or otherwise splendidly meritorious.

How did Hoagland avoid all those awkward, self-absorbed, secretive and/or
absent-minded prima donnas who can so easily disrupt collaborative research
and drive directors mad?

Emeritus Professor John Postgate FRS was assistant director, then director,
of the AFRC Unit of Nitrogen Fixation, University of Sussex, from 1963 to
1987.