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Hidden Depths His Income NATURE|Vol 435|19 May 2005 BOOKS & ARTS the paintings were linked to patterns found Grant’s detailed and well orga- on Turkish kilims today, but the Çatalhöyük nized biography is a treasure. From patterns cannot be made into rugs using the the waters of Bermuda to the weaving technology preserved at the site. jungles of Venezuela, Beebe was The book details much debate but few tireless in his enthusiasm for conclusions. The result is a good read that understanding the living world, bespeaks the importance of this enigmatic and and he provided the inspiration iconic site and highlights Balter’s considerable for many scientific careers. journalistic skills. The book is both accessible Brad Matsen’s Descent focuses SOCIETY WILDLIFE CONSERVATION and fascinating. Balter tries, with moderate on Beebe’s collaboration with Otis success, to show us how personality, national- Barton and their bathysphere ity and the training of the scientists involved dives. In the 1930s, they plunged influences their scientific ideas. six times deeper than anyone Yet the book left me distinctly dissatisfied: before and became the first people I learned more about the childhoods of the to see deep-sea life in situ. “No excavation team members than about ancient human eye had glimpsed this part Çatalhöyük. This is an intelligent, provocative of the planet before us,” wrote Bar- book by a distinguished science writer who ton, often considered the more visited the site every field season for six years, prosaic of the pair, “this pitch- interviewed the excavators, and read their The descent of man: William Beebe (left) and Otis Barton black country lighted only by the publications, which are referenced in extensive used their bathysphere to explore the ocean depths. pale gleam of an occasional spiral- notes and a lengthy bibliography. The scholars ling shrimp.” Matsen offers a wor- who have worked at Çatalhöyük are impres- But as these three books charting the history thy tribute to their remarkable achievement, sive, the duration of excavations far in excess of deep-sea science reveal, that golden age and explores the tensions between them. His of normal expectations. Why then is so much never existed. account is captivating, although not as lavishly about Çatalhöyük so unclear? Fathoming the Ocean by Helen Rozwadowski referenced as Gould’s biography. Perhaps the reason is Balter’s adherence to a chronicles the birth of deep-sea oceanography, In the days before research councils and Hodder-like reluctance to settle on a single from early observations by Benjamin Franklin national science foundations, Beebe was using interpretation for a site that means so much to to the voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s. publicity and popular accounts of his work so many. What are we to think, then, of Çatal- She weaves a rich narrative from the work of to charm funds from philanthropists. Like höyük and its evidence, excavators, myths? renowned as well as lesser-known oceanogra- some who popularize their research today, he That remains the post-processual question. ■ phers. While unearthing the foundations of sometimes encountered snobbery from his Pat Shipman is in the Department of the subject, she reveals some striking parallels academic peers. But deep-sea research has Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, with modern research careers. always been newsworthy and captured the 315 Carpenter Building, University Park, Like today, there was plenty of job-hopping, public imagination. On 26 April 1857, the Pennsylvania 16802, USA. with worries about money and research out- front page of The New York Herald hailed put. When Edward Forbes accepted a chair the laying of the first transatlantic cable as in botany at King’s College, London, in 1843, the “great work of the age”, and illustrated the he also became curator of the museum at story with microscope drawings of seafloor the Geological Society of London to boost sediments. Seventy-eight years later, radio Hidden depths his income. But he was concerned that he no listeners right across the United States and longer had any time for research, and jumped Western Europe tuned in to hear Beebe’s Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and ship just a year later for a job with the Geo- voice live from the bathysphere at a depth of Exploration of the Deep Sea logical Survey. This strategic jockeying paid by Helen M. Rozwadowski off, and he was later appointed regius chair in NATURE EDITOR WINS Belknap: 2005. 304 pp. $25.95, £16.95, natural history at the University of Edinburgh. €24 Then there is the tale of George Wallich, who AVENTIS BOOK PRIZE The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: sailed as a naturalist on the cable-surveying Philip Ball, a science writer and consultant editor Explorer and Naturalist voyage of HMS Bulldog. Wallich hoped the of Nature, has won this year's Aventis Prizes for by Carol Grant Gould expedition would make his name in scientific Science Books General Prize. Critical Mass: How Shearwater: 2004. 416 pp. $30 circles, as other voyages of discovery had done One Thing Leads to Another (William Heinemann) Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the for T. H. Huxley and Darwin. But it was not to takes a look at the application of physics to the Abyss be. Despite initial enthusiasm about his results, collective behaviour of society. Bill Bryson, who by Brad Matsen Wallich failed to secure election to the Royal chaired this year's judging panel and won the Pantheon: 2005. 286 pp. $25 Society. Under the financial pressures of sup- prize in 2004, says: "This is a wide-ranging and porting his wife and children, he became a dazzlingly informed book about the science of Jon Copley photographer instead. He described the interactions. I can promise you'll be amazed.” Deep-sea science is big science. Ocean covers prospects of his new career as “more than I (For a review of this book see Nature 428, 365 million square kilometres, and most of it is could venture to hope for in that muddy sea of 367–368; 2004.) more than two kilometres deep. To under- science”. His story may sound familiar to Robert Winston takes the junior Aventis Prize stand what goes on down there, you need a today’s postdocs-turned-plumbers. for his children's book What Makes Me, Me? ship to brave the high seas and equipment that Worrying about funding also occupied the (Dorling Kindersley). The judging panel for this can reach into the abyss. As today’s researchers mind of deep-sea pioneer William Beebe. To prize included schoolchildren as well as adult agonize over grant proposals and publication write The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, writers and scientists. records, some may yearn for the time when Carol Gould was granted unprecedented The winners received their awards at a ceremony they could chart the depths without worrying access to Beebe’s personal papers that he had on 12 May 2005 at the Royal Society in London. about tenure or research assessment exercises. bequeathed to his colleague Jocelyn Crane. 279 © 2005 Nature Publishing Group BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 435|19 May 2005 670 metres. Beebe vividly described his visit to better optical fibres based on the glass skele- knowledge itself. At the age of 16, he wrote another world, three decades before the tele- tons of deep-sea sponges. Rozwadowski that “to be a Naturalist is better than to be a vised Moon landings. describes how early workers highlighted the King”. Taken together, these books reveal Most modern grant proposals require appli- benefits of seafloor dredging for cable surveys how far we have come in understanding the cants to describe the wider benefits of their when lobbying for the use of HMS Lightning, largest habitat on our planet — and how much work to society. Those studying the deep sea HMS Porcupine and HMS Challenger. But further we have to go. ■ can point to examples of medical treatments, Gould and Matsen show that Beebe got fund- Jon Copley is at the National Oceanography industrial enzymes and even tips for making ing by promising a payback in the joy of Centre, Southampton SO14 3ZH, UK. The music of life Composer Thilo Krigar seeks to represent the flow of genetic information. translation of a nucleic-acid message into a protein sequence. Interjections of percussion, for example, represent amino THILO KRIGAR THILO acids as a building material. Live electronic sound embodies the energy consumed during protein assembly. In Metabolism, the chemical signals that connect the activities of the cellular proteins are transformed into musical signals that are passed on from one musician to another. Different groups of instruments compete with one another through intensifying motifs to illustrate the polymerization of the two Juliane Mössinger oxygen and phosphorus into an equivalent DNA daughter strands during replication. Music and science seem irreconcilable to number of semitone steps. These then form Newly developed harmonies then portray many, but there is a close and long-standing five different musical intervals, which, in the processes involved in cell division in the relationship between them. Since antiquity, turn, are the basis for the melodic and concluding passage, Proliferation, before the music has been categorized as scientia harmonic structure of the composition. music retreats back to the structure of DNA. mathematica, together with arithmetic, Krigar then uses other musical tools to The music is modern but not atonal. It is geometry and astronomy. In the eighteenth represent the biochemistry of the cell. reminiscent of minimalism but has elements century, Johann Sebastian Bach composed Stability in the harmonic architecture of the that resemble the dramatic romanticism of a some almost mathematically constructed music, expressed by a double octave, for Mahler symphony.
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