Winding Road to DNA Jan Witkowski Lauds an Account of the Half-Obscured Scientists Whose Work Helped to Reveal the Double Helix

Home , Edward Witten, Graham Farmelo, Jared Diamond, John Randall (physicist)

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GENETICS Winding road to DNA Jan Witkowski lauds an account of the half-obscured scientists whose work helped to reveal the double helix.

ong before the double helix was by botanists Hugo de discovered in 1953, biochemists vied Vries, Carl Correns to determine the enigmatic nature of and Erich Tschermak. LDNA. As early as 1914, chemist Walter Jones Williams adds imme- wrote (in his monograph Nucleic Acids) that diacy to the tale of pea the macromolecules “constitute what is possi- plants and heredity bly the best understood field of Physiological by starting with an Chemistry”. Cytologists, geneticists and even encounter between physicists, however, also co-authored the Mendel and C. W. Eich- story of DNA. ling, whose story was Unravelling the In Unravelling the Double Helix, medical Double Helix: The new to me. A German historian Gareth Williams illuminates key Lost Heroes of DNA seller of exotic flow- research in the 85 years between the dis- GARETH WILLIAMS ers, he visited Mendel coveries of nuclein, as it was first known, Weidenfeld & Nicolson in Brünn, Austria, in and the double helix. He refreshes a familiar (2019) 1878, looking for new chronicle by ending there, rather than using varieties. He later pub- it as a stepping stone to the Human Genome lished a verbatim account of his conversa- Project, epigenetics or gene editing. More tion with Mendel — the only one in existence over, he eschews the ‘mountain top’ approach (C. W. Eichling J. Hered. 33, 243–246; 1942). — featuring individuals synonymous with The contributions of cytology contin- major advances. Instead, he shines a light ued in the early twentieth century with the on lesser-known scientists struggling, as work of Walter Sutton. (Williams could also philosopher Bertrand Russell put it, to bring have mentioned Nettie Stevens and William into the world “some little bit of new wisdom”. Cannon.) They recognized that the distribu- Williams starts in 1868, the beginning of a tion of chromosomes during mitosis and mei- biochemistry golden age. Biologist Friedrich osis mirrored what was expected of Mendel’s Miescher, working with physiologist Felix hereditary ‘factors’, and showed that specific Hoppe-Seyler in Tübingen, Germany, was chromosomes were associated with sex. The then developing a technique for isolating cell fusion of genetics and cytology came in the nuclei from the white blood cells in pus. He 1910s, when Thomas Hunt Morgan and his extracted a strange, fluffy substance from the colleagues mapped the chromosomal loca- nuclei, dubbing it nuclein. Moving to Basel tions of fruit-fly mutations. in his native Switzerland, he determined its Physicists’ work in the field was at first chemical formula using nuclei from salmon theoretical. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger sperm. A decade later, cytologist Walther published What Is Life?, which built on work Flemming was studying division in sala- by biophysicist Max Delbrück to suggest that mander cells by staining them with dyes; he genes were “aperiodic crystals”. This influ- revealed coloured threads that he called chro- enced physicists including Francis Crick and matin (chromosomes). In 1882, he showed Maurice Wilkins (see P. Ball Nature 560, 548– with great clarity their behaviour in the repli- 550; 2018 ). But physics really entered the fray cation processes of mitosis and meiosis. when X-ray crystallography was harnessed to Genetics enters the picture in 1900, when study biological macromolecules. abbot-scientist Gregor Mendel’s research on That field was tiny in the 1920s. William principles of inheritance was rediscovered Astbury, J. D. Bernal and Kathleen Lonsdale worked at the Royal Institution in London NEW IN Relativity: The Special and the General Theory — 100th Anniversary Edition PAPERBACK Albert Einstein, Hanoch Gutfreund & Jürgen Renn Princeton Univ. Press (2019) First published in English in 1920, Albert Einstein’s popular introduction to his Highlights of this world-shaking theories reveals what he dubbed his “step-motherly” approach. season’s releases. This authoritative centenary edition is a fitting tribute to Einstein’s efforts to make his concepts accessible — in turn, helping to raise the profile of basic science and modern physics on a global scale. Insightful commentaries and excerpts from Einstein’s original manuscript of the book provide context.

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under physicist and Nobel laureate William to the intensely scrutinized narrative on the discovery “may turn out to be the greatest Henry Bragg, studying small molecules such double helix itself, he clarifies key issues. He development in the field of molecular genet- as tartaric acid. Moving to the University points out that the infamous conflict between ics in recent years”. And, on occasion, the of Leeds, UK, in 1928, Astbury probed the Wilkins and chemist Rosalind Franklin arose scope is too broad. The tragic figure of Nikolai structure of biological fibres such as hair. His from actions of John Randall, head of the Vavilov, the great Soviet plant geneticist of the colleague Florence Bell took the first X-ray biophysics unit at King’s College London. He early twentieth century who perished in the diffraction photographs of DNA, leading to implied to Franklin that she would take over Gulag, features prominently, but I am not sure the “pile of pennies” model (W. T. Astbury Wilkins’ work on DNA, yet gave Wilkins the how relevant his research is here. Yet pulling and F. O. Bell Nature 141, 747–748; 1938). impression she would be his assistant. Wilkins such figures into the limelight is partly what Her photos, plagued by technical limitations, conceded the DNA work to Franklin, and distinguishes Williams’s book from others. were fuzzy. But in 1951, Astbury’s lab pro- PhD student Raymond Gosling became her What of those others? Franklin Portugal duced a gem, by the rarely mentioned Elwyn assistant. It was Gosling who, under Franklin’s and Jack Cohen covered much the same Beighton. Using wet DNA fibres, he took supervision, took the iconic X-ray diffraction ground in the 1977 A Century of DNA, but images revealing the black-cross diffraction ‘Photograph 51’. Williams debunks the myth that now seems dated. James Schwartz’s In pattern characteristic of helical molecules. that Wilkins “stole” it; he clarifies how, before Pursuit of the Gene (2008) hardly touches They were never published, and Astbury did moving on to Birkbeck, University of London, on biochemistry, whereas Siddhartha not follow up on them; if he had, the story of Franklin gave her materials and data on DNA Mukherjee’s 2016 The Gene devotes little DNA might have been very different. to Gosling, to pass on to Wilkins to use as he space to the backstory of the double helix. Many other “lost heroes” emerge in Wil- wished. It was after this that Wilkins showed Isaac Newton wrote to natural philosopher liams’s telling. Martin Henry Dawson and Photograph 51 to James Watson, who, with Robert Hooke that he had seen further than James Lionel Alloway made important con- Crick, used it to uncover the double helix. others only by standing on the shoulders of tributions to Oswald Avery’s demonstration There are a few errors — inevitable in giants. Unravelling the Double Helix looks that DNA probably made up genes. H. F. W. a book of such scope. Williams writes, for beyond giants to the many researchers, now Taylor, C. J. Threlfall and Michael Creeth cru- instance, that biochemist Linus Pauling took half-forgotten, whose contributions paved the cially participated in J. Masson Gulland’s work a “surprisingly long time” to recognize that way for an icon of science. ■ showing that DNA solutions changed viscos- his proposed three-strand structure of DNA ity owing to the rupture of hydrogen bonds was wrong. In fact, at a meeting before the Jan Witkowski is the former director of between nucleotides. All is scrupulously publication of the true, two-strand structure the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor documented in more than 50 pages of notes. (J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick Nature 171, Laboratory, New York. Although there is little Williams can add 737–738; 1953), Pauling remarked that the e-mail: [email protected]

PARTICLE PHYSICS A singing, dancing Universe Jon Butterworth enjoys a celebration of mathematics-led theoretical physics.

athematics is an immensely The Universe discoveries, over-reliance on mathematical powerful tool for understanding Speaks in elegance as a guide and a general drift into the laws of the Universe. That was Numbers: How what physicist and writer Jim Baggott, in Mdemonstrated dramatically, for instance, Modern Maths Farewell to Reality (2013), called “fairy Reveals Nature’s by the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, Deepest Secrets tale physics”, divorced from its empirical predicted in the 1960s. Yet an ongoing, GRAHAM FARMELO base. Notable critiques have come from often fervid debate over the direction of Faber & Faber (2019) theoretical physicists including Peter Woit, theoretical physics pivots on the relationship Lee Smolin and, more recently, Sabine between physics and maths — specifically, Hossenfelder (see A. Ananthaswamy Nature whether maths has become too dominant. 558, 186–187; 2018). Science writer Graham The worry — expressed by a number of monoculture too focused on a small clutch Farmelo clearly intends The Universe Speaks theorists and writers over several decades of concepts and approaches. Those include in Numbers as a riposte. — is that theoretical physics has become a string theory, overstated predictions of new Farmelo takes us on a tour through the

Climate Change and the Health of Nations Economics for the Common Good Anthony J. McMichael Oxford Univ. Press (2019) Jean Tirole Princeton Univ. Press (2019) In this posthumously published volume, French economist Jean Tirole’s deft study epidemiologist Anthony McMichael journeys (translated by Steven Rendell) questions his through the deep history of Earth’s changing discipline’s role in society. Researchers, he climate and its human implications — such argues, should become socially responsible, as agricultural collapse resulting from shifts in probing issues beyond the euro’s stability, such temperature. A book with echoes for today. as climate change and resource distribution.

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history of the field. His main protagonists are James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac (subject of Farmelo’s out- standing 2009 biography, The Strangest Man). The unification of electricity, magnetism and light in Maxwell’s equations is a highlight of any good physics degree. I suspect most physicists can remember the moment when, after a few algebraic tricks with currents and voltages, the speed of light appeared, as if by magic. The Universe isn’t just speaking in numbers: it’s singing and dancing. That constant value of the speed of light led to Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905. From this, in an amazing concep- tual (and mathematically abetted) leap, Einstein conjured up general relativity in 1915 (see page 306), then the curvature of space-time, and eventually the gravitational waves discovered by the Laser Interferome- ter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) 100 years later. And in 1928, Dirac, demanding mathematical consistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, gave us both an understanding of the spin of developing the standard model of particle mathematical physicists engaged in the field, the electron — without which the periodic physics. During what Farmelo calls “the long notably Freeman Dyson, made important table of the elements makes no sense — divorce” between mathematics and theoreti- contributions, most physicists didn’t need and predicted the existence of antimatter, cal physics from the 1930s to the 1970s, our to go beyond well-established mathematical discovered experimentally a few years later. current understanding techniques to progress. These are brilliant successes of the math- of fundamental phys- Dyson himself (quoted ematical approach, and Farmelo leads ics was assembled. by Farmelo) says that us through them adeptly, with a mixture Dirac and Einstein MATHEMATICS AND “we needed no help of contemporary accounts and scientific were hardly involved from mathematicians. insight. He also casts a sceptical eye on the in those developments. PHYSICS WORK We thought we were stories the players tell about themselves — That the most very smart and could and here the tensions start to be felt. Take fruitful period in the EFFECTIVELY do better on our own.” Einstein’s warning to those who want to development of parti- TOGETHER, TO THE And, as Farmelo puts it, learn about theoretical physicists’ methods: cle physics coincided the feeling was mutual: “Don’t listen to their words, fix your atten- with its estrangement physicists “rarely gen- tion on their deeds.” As Farmelo recounts, from pure mathemat- BENEFIT OF erated ideas that were this is given interesting context by studies of ics could be seen as of the slightest inter- Einstein’s notebooks, showing how he later undermining Farmelo’s BOTH. est to mathematical overstated the role of mathematics, and case. However, the researchers”. Many underplayed that of physical insight, in his pace of progress prob- on both sides of the own breakthrough. ably had more to do with the rapid experi- divorce were content with the situation. mental advances of the time than with any There has been a re-engagement since A PRODUCTIVE UNION intrinsic issue in the relationship between the 1980s. In the mainstream of particle Farmelo’s argument is that mathematics the two subjects. physics, theorists and experimentalists and physics work effectively together, to This was a fertile patch for experimen- were calculating and confirming multi- the benefit of both. Dirac and Einstein were tation, and theorists were continually ple results that established the standard evangelists for mathematically led physics, buffeted by new and startling results, from model as, at the very least, a remark- but their pleas were more or less ignored by the appearance of the muon to the obser- ably precise ‘effective theory’. But oth- their younger colleagues, such as Richard vation of structure inside the proton; these ers, led by luminaries such as Michael Feynman and Steven Weinberg, who were demanded explanation. Although the few Atiyah, Edward Witten and pioneers of

How Dogs Work Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age Raymond Coppinger & Mark Feinstein Susan Landau Yale Univ. Press (2019) Univ. Chicago Press (2019) Digitization, notes mathematician Susan Cognitive scientists Raymond Coppinger and Landau, offers amazing potential and Mark Feinstein explore the biological basis of convenience — at the cost of privacy and a need canine behaviour and its interplay with the to ramp up security. She issues both a warning environment, examining everything from dogs’ to protect data, and a call to modify how much wildly varying morphologies to why they bark. control we relinquish in our cyber-reliance.

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string theory including Michael Green HISTORY and John Schwarz, were probing its mathematical boundaries. Whether the mathematical approach eventually became too dominant, taking England’s Galileo over in terms of academic recognition and funding, is the crux of much of Georgina Ferry relishes a biography of the formidable today’s debate. Farmelo gives a lively Moon-mapping Tudor scientist Thomas Harriot. description of the back-and-forth of contributions typical of any thriving inter- disciplinary area, with physical problems he phrase ‘publish or perish’ came into Thomas Harriot: A of the Algonquian peo- stimulating mathematical breakthroughs use in the twentieth century to encap- Life in Science ple, and of the region’s and mathematics throwing up new sulate academic pressures. It is also a ROBYN ARIANRHOD natural resources and Oxford University Press insights and techniques in physics. He Tlesson from the life of Thomas Harriot, who climate. Arianrhod (2019) steers clear of discussing the infeasibly lived when there were no academic journals, shows that his interest large ‘string landscape’ of possible physi- and who never taught at a university. in local people was far from typical: he learnt cal theories to which the mathematical A contemporary of William Shakespeare, their language, admired how they inter- approach seems to have led — contrary Harriot was an English mathematician, planted beans, squashes and maize (corn), to hopes of a unique ‘theory of eve- astronomer and natural philosopher whose and respected their religion. Meanwhile, the rything’. Instead, he concentrates on original work bears comparison with that military expedition leaders fatally soured developments more directly useful and of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Yet, relations by overreacting to perceived wrong testable in physics, where some of this outside the enthusiastic circle of historians doing and making unreasonable demands. mathematical sophistication begins to of early modern science who call themselves Previous biographers — the US authors feed back into an understanding of the Harrioteers, his name is almost unknown: he Henry Stevens in 1900 and John Shirley in standard model. never published his mathematical work. In 1983 — were prompted by the Brief and True The standard model is a complex, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science, mathemati- Report. Neither fully addressed Harriot’s subtle and immensely successful theo- cian Robyn Arianrhod sets out to explain how scientific contributions, as Arianrhod tries retical structure that leaves significant historians have nevertheless been able to place to do. Harriot’s will mentioned a trunk full questions unanswered. Farmelo makes him, almost four centuries after his death in of mathematical papers. A few were circu- a convincing case that, in attempting to 1621, among the founders of modern science. lated and partly published by friends such as answer those questions, mathematics Harriot is elusive. The earliest known docu- the mathematician Walter Warner after his has a crucial role. Yet whether theoreti- ment concerning him lists him as a “plebeian” death, but what became of the collection was cal physics has become too enamoured scholar registering to study at the University unknown until 1784, when it turned up in of beautiful mathematics will, I suspect, of Oxford in 1577. He never married and left some disorder at Petworth House, home to remain a topic of hot debate. no children. By 1583, he was employed by heirs of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, The long experimental search for the Walter Raleigh, naval commander, explorer Harriot’s patron after Raleigh. Only since the Higgs was motivated by the fact that, and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, to teach mid-twentieth century have scholars made before we accepted the existence of a astronomy and navigation — a field he sense of the thousands of manuscript sheets. quantum energy field that fills the whole greatly improved — to sea captains. He was What they reveal is astonishing. To men- Universe — part of the theory that pre- celebrated in his lifetime by the writer Gabriel tion only a portion of Harriot’s work, he dis- dicted the particle — we demanded more Harvey as among the “profound mathema- covered Snell’s law of refraction two decades evidence than ‘it makes the maths come ticians”, alongside Thomas Digges and John before mathematician Willebrord Snell; for- out right’. The need for evidence is even Dee. Afterwards, he was largely forgotten. mulated laws of motion and falling bodies stronger if the argument is ‘it makes the He has a higher profile in the United States, independently of Galileo and decades before maths look beautiful’. The Universe might thanks to the one work he did publish. A Brief Isaac Newton; produced the first drawing speak in numbers, but it uses empirical and True Report of the New Found Land of Vir- of the Moon through a telescope and made data to do so. ■ ginia is a first-person account of a 1585–86 important observations of sunspots, again voyage sent by Raleigh to survey what is now independently of Galileo; played with binary Jon Butterworth is professor of physics part of North Carolina. The party landed arithmetic nearly a century before Gottfried in the Department of Physics and on Roanoke Island and surveyed it and the Wilhelm Leibniz; and was the first to develop Astronomy, University College London, nearby mainland; almost all its members fully symbolic algebra. There are well- and the author of Smashing Physics returned to England in June 1586. Harriot was grounded suspicions that René Descartes and A Map of the Invisible. He blogs at “employed in discovering”. His report, pub- saw some of Harriot’s papers before publish- lifeandphysics.com lished in 1588, includes the first detailed Eng- ing The Geometry in 1637. e-mail: [email protected] lish description of the language and customs Where Harriot falls down, say some

Magnificent Principia Mrs Moreau’s Warbler Colin Pask Prometheus (2019) Stephen Moss Faber (2019) Isaac Newton remains a giant of physics, as his Names make sense of the world; they also reveal 1687 Principia confirms. Maths historian Colin something about us. Stephen Moss unveils the Pask presents an easily digestible guide to the often surprising roots of avian etymology and work, enlivened with passages from Newton’s offers insight into fierce, long-standing debates life. An invitation to wonder at what some see as such as that over Prunella modularis, variously the greatest single scientific book ever published. known as the dunnock and hedge sparrow.

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scholars, is that he did not draw his observations into coherent theory. It’s possible he just never got round to it. Har- riot spent his adult life in the households of Raleigh and Northumberland. They paid him generously, and all appearances suggest that he was a friend rather than a servant. However, both were players on the volatile political scene, and malicious rumours of atheism and necromancy did the rounds. Soon after James I succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603, Raleigh was convicted of treason, and Northumberland of lesser charges when a cousin was involved in the Gunpowder Plot to murder the king. Both were imprisoned in the Tower of London; Raleigh was executed in 1618. Harriot spent an anxious few weeks in prison because of his association with Northumberland; he might have felt the need to keep his head down over the years. He died aged about 60 from cancer of the nose, possibly caused by his enthusiasm for tobacco after his American adventure. The lack of finished work makes evaluating his contribution complex. Arianrhod does not hesitate to call him a genius, and the evidence she presents is impressive. Yet she fully explores his rightful position in the pantheon only in a page-long endnote; I think this short changes the “general reader” she seeks to enlighten. Some might find her technical SOCIETY passages challenging, although they are necessary to her argument. And it is irk- some to see diagrams relating to Harriot’s navigational work in an appendix, rather than with the text they illustrate. How to survive Has Arianrhod, as she intended, “put a human face to scientific inquiry in the Elizabethan and Jacobean worlds”? She has revealed a scientific mind, but the face an apocalypse is more elusive: the one supposed portrait of Harriot is of unknown provenance and, Richard Rhodes weighs up Jared Diamond’s study of because of a discrepancy in dates, some national resilience in the face of catastrophe. historians doubt it is him. This black-clad, driven, sceptical man, “contented with a private life for the love he geographer Jared Diamond is the development and challenges of nations and of learning” as he wrote to his captors, still bestselling author of a number of civilizations. “History,” he argued in the 1997 declines wholly to step into the light. ■ books on the vicissitudes of civiliza- Guns, Germs, and Steel, “followed differ- Ttions. His anchoring perspective, argued ent courses for different peoples because of Georgina Ferry’s biography of Dorothy across such works as Collapse (2005) and The differences among peoples’ environments, Crowfoot Hodgkin will be published in a World Until Yesterday (2012), is geographic not because of biological differences among revised edition this year. determinism. He sees the environment peoples themselves.” His perspective has e-mail: [email protected] as fundamentally shaping the founding, been both celebrated for clarifying historical

Natural Causes Shapeshifters Barbara Ehrenreich Granta (2019) Gavin Francis Wellcome Collection (2019) Our bodies, notes writer Barbara Ehrenreich, “To be alive is to be in perpetual are a cellular battleground, where our immune metamorphosis.” Physician Gavin Francis systems can aid the growth of tumours. tackles bodily transformations that can aid or Attacking the rose-tinted ‘wellness industry’ constrain us — from pregnancy to amputations. and advocating a realistic view of death, she will With real insight, he intertwines case studies with change how you view your own mortality. his amazement at how our bodies surprise us.

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hewing close to its economic and foreign policies, despite the resulting dissonance. Finland is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example; nor was it part of the European Union until 1995, after the Soviet Union was dissolved. In looking at Japan, Diamond harks back to 1853, when US Navy commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed his warships into Edo Bay, demanding that the country open itself to Western trade. Japan maintained independ- ence, in part, Diamond argues, by acquiring a Westernized facade, while maintaining its traditional values. (In one respect, this may have backfired: Japan’s severe restrictions on immigration have left it struggling to sustain a labour force while the population ages and birth rates stay well below replacement levels.) Comparisons with psychology soon fall by the wayside as Diamond explores crises in Indonesia, Chile, Germany and Australia. The model is, in any case, a poor fit. My country, the United States, is also Diamond’s. I find his assessment of its challenges partly acute and partly eccentric. Diamond acknowledges the country’s great natural advantages in climate, geography, population and form of government. He judges its current troubles to be conse- quences, predominantly, of the venality of US politicians and of a “politically uncom- promising” population. He attributes this complexities and criticized as oversimplified informed but specu- polarization mostly to the rise in digital com- and dated, but he has defended it vigorously. lative discussion of munications. A persistent focus on screens, he Upheaval, then, is something of a curiosity. how his seven nations argues, is producing people who “no longer Diamond says that his wife, psychologist struggle, or struggled, experience one another as live humans”. Marie Cohen, suggested the idea: compare with crises profound or Attributing social change one dislikes to nations in upheaval with individuals in wide-ranging enough new technology is a familiar moral panic. In crisis. Do nations go through similar stages of to potentially destroy my house, we call it hell-in-a-handbasket syn- challenge, disturbance and even breakdown them. These range drome. Certainly, smartphones and their ilk to emerge, if successful, selectively changed? from climate-change expose their users to an artificial environment What factors influence that failure or success? impacts and advanced much more pervasively than older communi- Normally confident of his methodology, Upheaval: Turning technology to geo cation technologies did. But whether this dis- Points for Nations Diamond proposes this comparison with in Crisis political pressures and tributed consciousness is good, bad or simply caution. He writes that he set out to inves- JARED DIAMOND nuclear weaponry. different remains to be seen, in my view. tigate seven modern nations — Finland, Little, Brown (2019) Thus, Finland More to the point is Diamond’s identifi- Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia fought the Soviet cation of inequality as a serious problem in and the United States — because he happens Union in 1939–40 the United States. Emmanuel Todd — the to have “much personal experience” of them. and aligned with Germany against the French demographer who was almost alone He acknowledges, however, that a sample of common foe in 1941–44, sacrificing some in predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union seven is inadequate for drawing statistically 100,000 soldiers, rather than allow itself to on the basis of an unprecedented rise in significant conclusions, and so proposes a be absorbed into the Soviet Union as Lat- infant mortality — commented more than “narrative exploration” that he hopes will via, Lithuania and Estonia had been. It then a decade ago that he saw “the possibility in “stimulate quantitative testing”. found accommodation with its Eastern the medium term of a real Soviet-style crisis Diamond’s caveats limit him to an neighbour by treating it with respect and in the United States”. Increasing financial

The Metabolic Ghetto The Order of Time Jonathan C. K. Wells Cambridge Univ. Press (2019) Carlo Rovelli Penguin (2019) Power relations in society affect human health. Physicist Carlo Rovelli elegantly dismantles Here, child-nutrition specialist Jonathan Wells our understanding of time as a flow from past draws on fields such as biomedicine, evolutionary to future. He argues that there is a multitude biology and epidemiology to illuminate the of times, and that the present is only localized. socio‑economic and historical factors behind Ultimately, he says, our concept of time is as chronic conditions such as obesity. much about us as about the cosmos.

COMMENT SPRING BOOKS inequality, and the despair of unmet MEDICINE expectations that it has induced in many white Americans, is almost certainly behind the opioid crisis in small towns and rural areas. There, life expectancy is Sorrows of psychiatry declining much as it did in the final years of the Soviet Union, where rising alcohol Alison Abbott probes a history on the fraught nexus of addiction took a grim toll. mental illness and biology. Inequality is even more serious for African Americans, for whom neglect and mistreatment in medical care, educa- n January 1973, Science published an restraint, rather than tion, housing and criminal remand have article called ‘On being sane in insane the standard brutal- resulted in an average lifespan half a dec- places’. The author, psychologist David ity and neglect of the ade shorter than that of white people in the IRosenhan, described how he and seven other conventional ‘lunatic United States, although the gap is closing. healthy people had reported themselves to a asylum’. It visibly failed. Among the biggest global problems dozen psychiatric hospitals, claiming to hear By the 1870s, Diamond mentions are the risk of nuclear voices uttering odd words such as ‘thud’ or asylums had become war and the fact of climate change. Here, ‘hollow’ — a symptom never reported in overpopulated, and his answers are conventional. No one the clinical literature. Each person was diag- gave up all pretence knows what to do about nuclear weapons, nosed with either schizophrenia or manic- Mind Fixers: of being therapeutic. maintained as they are under the pretence depressive psychosis, and admitted; once Psychiatry’s They began to supply that they deter the very disaster they are inside, they stopped the performance. They Troubled Search post-mortem brains to designed to produce. On climate change, were released after an average of 19 days with for the Biology of any scientist wishing Diamond recognizes the double challenge diagnoses of ‘schizophrenia in remission’ Mental Illness to investigate a pos- ANNE HARRINGTON of reducing greenhouse-gas production (D. L. Rosenhan Science 179, 250–258; 1973). W. W. Norton (2019) sible anatomical basis while meeting the rising expectations of One research and teaching hospital, hear- for mental disorders. the developing world. But he fails to rec- ing about the study, declared that its own staff These turned out to ognize that substituting renewable energy could never be so deceived. It challenged be unrevealing. Harrington describes how for fossil fuels without a major expansion Rosenhan to send it pseudopatients. He the failure encouraged Sigmund Freud to of nuclear power will merely decarbonize agreed, but never did. Nonetheless, the hos- turn away from neuroanatomy in the 1890s the existing supply. Without nuclear power, pital claimed to have identified 41 of them. to develop his theory that mental disorder the doubling of demand projected for the Psychiatric hospitals, it seemed, could is rooted in biography — specifically, early- developing world in the next 30 years will recognize neither healthy people nor those childhood sexual fantasies. These, Freud be met mainly through coal — or, at best, with mental illnesses. Rosenhan’s study thought, needed only to be drawn out by natural gas, which produces fully half as exemplifies much of what went wrong in intense psychoanalysis to achieve a cure. much carbon dioxide as coal when it burns. twentieth-century psychiatry, as biologists, At the same time, Harrington shows, the Diamond’s historical analyses hold up psychoanalysts and sociologists struggled German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin began better than do his contemporary assess- for supremacy. Science historian Anne a large-scale, systematic survey to categorize ments. Energy from fossil fuels supported Harrington takes us through the painful symptoms such as hallucinations or extreme the West’s transformation from subsistence history of that struggle in the enthralling moods. Without proper diagnostic criteria, to long-term prosperity; today, it threatens Mind Fixers, which focuses particularly on he reasoned, clinical science would never to cook our goose. The nation-state system, the United States. make progress. In 1899, he published the embedded in international anarchy, has She reveals the shameless hubris of many sixth edition of his influential textbook Com- never dealt well with global threats. So far, of the prominent battlers. She fails, however, pendium of Psychiatry, which distinguishes the response has mostly been denial and to acknowledge promising approaches in disorders — particularly, psychoses such as timidity: tragedy of the commons indeed. biological psychiatry, particularly very new schizophrenia and affective disorders includ- I read Upheaval with appreciation insights about brain circuitry as a potential ing manic depression, now known as bipolar for its historical sweep and its generally target for treatment. Many neuroscientists disorder. (Kraepelin was also interested in informed speculation. If the world is going today are very aware of past mistakes in over- eugenics, like many intellectuals of the time.) to hell in a handbasket, Diamond has not claiming the power of theories and drugs. In In the following decades, biologists and given up hope that we can change course. ■ my opinion, Harrington’s omission weakens Freudians cut separate paths, for good or ill. the case for her pessimistic conclusion. Certain discoveries, such as the findings in Richard Rhodes’s latest book is Energy: She begins in mid-nineteenth-century 1897 and 1913 confirming that syphilis causes A Human History. Europe, with a new experiment to give peo- late-onset psychosis, bolstered biologists’ view e-mail: [email protected] ple with psychosis rest and care, with no that mental disorders were brain-based. Some

The Value of Everything Water Mariana Mazzucato Penguin (2019) Jeremy J. Schmidt New York Univ. Press (2019) A crisis faces capitalism, argues economist Humans both consume too much water and Mariana Mazzucato. She reveals that we value fail to benefit from it equitably. Geographer those who extract wealth over those who create Jeremy Schmidt’s multidisciplinary study it. Noting that the debate is economic, social and shows how historical US approaches to water political, she pinpoints the urgent need to reform management have gained global reach, leading how we define value in a fast-changing world. to problematic biases. Mary Craig