Vol 448|26 July 2007 BOOKS & ARTS A man of peace One scientist’s journey from the Manhattan Project to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Joseph Rotblat: Visionary for Peace edited by Reiner Braun, Robert Hinde, David Krieger, Harold Kroto & Sally Milne Wiley: 2007. 371 pp. $45, £27.50 War and Peace: The Life and Work of Sir Joseph Rotblat edited by Peter Rowlands & Vincent SYGMA M. PELLETIER/CORBIS Attwood University of Liverpool: 2006. 338 pp. £15

Malcolm Dando Joseph Rotblat, when receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Bradford University in 1973, described the ongoing build-up of nuclear arms and the underly- ing doctrine of deterrence: “This doctrine of deterrence is known under the name of mutual assured destruction: M.A.D. It is indeed a mad system in which survival depends on the threat of total annihilation.” Such a system, he believed, was bound to fail Joseph Rotblat campaigned sooner or later and so he advocated an alterna- for nuclear disarmament and tive: “One in which our survival is based on positive uses of science. mutual incentives, on the recognition of the ever-growing interdependence of all members becoming ever clearer that the vast new capa- blat moved, from Poland, just before the start of society all over the world, on the utilization bilities being generated by the biotechnology of the Second World War, tragically having to of the vast potential of technology to build and revolution for beneficial reasons could also leave his sick wife behind. The book contains sustain a clean and healthy world.” be used for extremely destructive, hostile essays from numerous people who knew him The two books reviewed here, Joseph Rot- purposes. As Sir Joseph indicated in his well and casts many different lights on his life: blat: Visionary for Peace and War and Peace: lecture ‘Citizenship and the Challenge of his early career in Poland; his work in Liverpool The Life and Work of Sir Joseph Rotblat, cel- Science’ in March 2002: “We already know and then in medical physics at St Bartholom- ebrate the achievements of the nuclear physi- about advances in biological warfare whereby ew’s Hospital, London; and his decades of cist, who died in 2005 aged 96 (Nature 437, gene manipulation could change some work as a campaigner for peace and coopera- 634; 2005). For much of his long life, Joseph pathogens into terrifyingly virulent agents. tion. I particularly liked the archivist’s story of Rotblat advanced the argument that nuclear But entirely different mechanisms might be carrying away some three tonnes of papers from deterrence was extremely dangerous, but that developed. We cannot predict the destructive Rotblat’s home to the University of Bath, UK, there were positive alternative uses of our potential of military applications. All we can for cataloguing. Rotblat’s few ‘faults’ included science and technology. Yet rejection of the say is that the danger is real.” an inability to throw away any records. doctrine of deterrence had not always been Despite the growing attention directed at There is some overlap between this book Rotblat’s position. As one of the first scien- the potential misuse of benignly intended life- and Visionary for Peace, but the latter deals tists to realize that atomic bombs of incred- science research by states parties to the Biologi- to a greater extent with Rotblat’s interna- ible destructiveness were possible because of cal and Toxin Weapons Convention and the tional activities for nuclear disarmament and advances in our understanding of physics, he Chemical Weapons Convention, few practis- peaceful cooperation, for which he and his felt it was necessary to develop such bombs in ing life scientists have grasped the nature of the creation, the Pugwash Conferences on Science order to deter Hitlerite Germany from using problem, let alone considered what might be and World Affairs, jointly received the Nobel them, should it develop that capability. Thus, done to prevent the large-scale hostile use of Peace Prize in 1995. Mikhail Gorbachev, for he became a member of the Manhattan Project their technology in future decades. example, recalls how he came to know Rotblat in the United States and went to work at Los These two fascinating sets of essays would be personally in the 1990s and how, at meetings of Alamos. However, when he realized that Ger- a good place for life scientists to begin consid- Nobel Peace Prize-winners, Rotblat’s contribu- many could not develop the bomb, he left and ering their dual-use problem and what might tion to discussions of nuclear disarmament was returned to the United Kingdom. best be done about it. War and Peace is based invaluable because he was “the best qualified Today, life scientists increasingly face the on a conference held at Liverpool University, and perhaps the most passionate participant”. dual-use dilemma that physicists had to con- UK, in October 2006. It was to the Physics Gorbachev also noted that as the 1990s pro- front in the middle of the last century. It is Department of Liverpool University that Rot- gressed, “concern and alarm in our discussions

411 BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 448|26 July 2007 became more and more prominent”. He con- Few of us are able to achieve a mature bal- The book’s central chapters follow a more cluded: “We should not delude ourselves: in the ance between our many activities and diverse conventional selection of examples spanning final analysis, the problem can only be solved relationships. Yet, despite his hectic work the development of Western civilization: from through the abolition of nuclear weapons. So schedule, Joseph Rotblat was universally the origins of writing in Mesopotamia for keep- long as they continue to exist, the danger will regarded as an exceptionally kind and generous ing commerce and administration records, to be with us.” person. His wife and her mother died in the the accumulation of books and bibliographic Rotblat would certainly have agreed, and Holocaust but members of the family joined records (at Alexandria, for example), through Visionary for Peace has a useful appendix of him in England after the war. An essay by his the Dark Ages in which Irish scribes worked a set of his writings, which include his 2003 niece, Halina Sand, demonstrates his human- alone outside traditional hierarchies (like paper, ‘The Nuclear Issue: Pugwash and the ity so well: “His warmth and kindness to me today’s bloggers, Wright suggests), and into Bush Policies’. This contains a typically inci- continued throughout his life, descending the age of print in the Renaissance. sive condemnation of the recent lurch to yet through the generations to my two daughters The author discusses some high points of more reliance on nuclear weapons in the West- and their children. In his mid-nineties, and early modern information management. For ern world: “The use of nuclear weapons is seen in poor health, he was still able to charm his example, Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre by the great majority of people in the world small great-great-niece and twin great-great- (around 1550) promised access to all knowl- as immoral, due to their indiscriminate nature nephews, just as he had once enthralled their edge through a system of visual mnemonic and unprecedented power. Their possession mother and their grandmother.” Joseph Rotblat cues; in 1751, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and — and therefore likely use — is thus equally was indeed a man of peace. ■ d’Alembert established the modern norm for unacceptable, whether by ‘rogue’ or benevolent Malcolm Dando is professor of international the encyclopaedia as an alphabetized, multi- regimes.” Little wonder then that Pugwash sci- security at the Department of Peace Studies, author, multivolume and illustrated reference entists have argued against the replacement of University of Bradford, Bradford, West Yorkshire, work; and at about the same time, Carl Lin- Trident by the United Kingdom. BD7 1DP, UK. naeus devised a precise set of rules for classifi- cation in nature. Wright pays special attention to the methods for classifying books between the late seventeenth and early twentieth cen- turies, which culminated in the development Too much information of multi-tiered, expandable hierarchies of standardized headings, such as Melvil Dewey’s Glut: Mastering Information Through the debate, but offers a well-informed account of decimal classification in the late nineteenth Ages information management across a surprising century. He points out that libraries and by Alex Wright range of examples. librarians have long been at the forefront of Joseph Henry Press: 2007. 296 pp. £16.99, Information management systems, which information management techniques. $27.95 typically rely on a combination of self-organ- Finally, Wright considers twentieth-cen- izing networks and hierarchical relationships, tury attempts to form a universal collection of Ann Blair are central to biological phenomena — from retrievable information, many of which are now ‘Information overload’ is a phenomenon we the evolution of multicellular organisms to the forgotten, although their original ambitions are know well — a Google search on the term dynamics of social insects. Wright draws from partially realized in the World Wide Web. Paul retrieves close to 2 million hits. But is it really sociobiology the suggestion that evolution has Otlet, for example, was a Belgian bibliographer as new as we think? “We are not the first favoured the development of particular human who dreamed of guiding users not just to the generation — nor even the first species — to cognitive behaviours in managing information, right books, but to their contents. His Mun- wrestle with the problem of information over- such as the drive to classify and the emotional daneum (1910) eventually consisted of more load,” Alex Wright reminds us in his ambitious attachment to symbols. He turns for confirma- than 12 million facts kept on index cards to new book, Glut. He seeks a balanced and his- tion to anthropologist Donald Brown’s notion which users could submit queries for a fee. The torically informed assessment of the digital of human universals and notes the particular American engineer Vannevar Bush envisioned revolution’s impact. As a former librarian now importance of the ice age that began some a machine called the ‘memex’, which would working as an information architect, Wright 40,000 years ago in forcing humans to interact retrieve information to match a query from combines insights from his areas of expertise more closely, thus stimulating the develop- texts stored on microfilm. Although Bush’s with a wide range of historical and scientific ment of drawing and symbolic objects. Wright article ‘As we may think’ (Atlantic Monthly, literature aimed at non-specialist audiences. argues that this “ice age information explosion 1945) is considered seminal today, Wright He does not attempt a synthesis of specialist brought humanity to the brink of literacy”. notes how little current information science N. STRAUSS/AKG IMAGES N. STRAUSS/AKG

Many information management techniques were first developed in libraries, where hierarchical classification methods have existed for centuries.

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