Symmetry and Hubris

NATURE|Vol 463|25 February 2010 OPINION

practices that avoid the label of piracy and its dynamics that scientists, lawyers, policy- of the central dogma — that information flows legal consequences, which has helped them to makers, business people and consumers in one direction, from DNA to RNA to pro- become accepted in parts of the commercial should understand. When pirates gain the teins — also dates from this period, along with and technological establishment. upper hand, innovators suffer and quality the gradual realization that the structures and Today’s intellectual-property system is built declines. But when exclusivity becomes too functions of molecules in cells are more com- on decisions made in the past. In revealing how strong, society loses the benefits of access. plicated than he had earlier assumed. piracy affected those decisions, Johns’s history A constant effort is required to balance the Olby brilliantly follows Crick through these provides a valuable addition to the literature. interests of innovators and copiers, and to creative years. By highlighting the scientist’s However, the book does not deal with the nurture a healthy creative environment. ■ interactions with a growing group of others future implications of piracy. Lacking a prac- Michael Gollin is a law partner at Venable LLP in devoted to developing the field, he captures the tical understanding of current intellectual- Washington DC and author of Driving Innovation. excitement, false dawns and triumphs that fol- property law and practice, Johns is unable to He chairs the group Public Interest Intellectual lowed the Watson–Crick model of DNA. Olby is draw lessons or make predictions or recom- Property Advisors, whose forthcoming book is fair to all of the early participants in DNA work: mendations. Intellectual Property and Human Development. Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins and, above Piracy is an aspect of intellectual-property e-mail: [email protected] all, Rosalind Franklin and her collaborators at King’s College London. Watson and Crick used Franklin’s data, and benefited from a breakdown in relations between Franklin and Wilkins that interrupted Wilkins’s work on the molecule. The Symmetry and hubris full story emerged only after the Nobel prize was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets which he worked on mine Crick and Wilkins; by then, by Robert Olby research for the Admi- Franklin had died, tragically Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: 2009. ralty. After the war, Crick young, of ovarian cancer. In 450 pp. $45, £30 convinced the Medical 1952, both Franklin and Research Council (MRC) Pauling were close to com- to give him a studentship ing up with the structure Francis Crick was not your run-of-the-mill to apply physics to biology. themselves. scientist, as Robert Olby makes clear in his He went to Cambridge, Issues of priority generate

superb biography. A tall man given to verbal first to the Strangeways passion, but Olby’s account & CALLAWAY M. LIEBERMAN/SIEGEL diarrhoea and infectious laughter, Crick did Research Laboratory, and can be recommended for its his Nobel-prizewinning work before he fin- then to what is now known dispassionate analysis and ished his PhD. His thesis, on the X-ray analysis as the MRC Laboratory of Francis Crick: no ordinary scientist. mastery of archival sources. of protein structure, provided him with skills Molecular Biology (LMB). Crick’s long-time collabo- to appreciate the molecular arrangement of Discovering the structure of DNA saved his ration with Sydney Brenner, another scientific DNA, but his work with James Watson was career. Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cav- giant, is given its due. So, too, are Crick’s later done in his spare time. Crick included an off- endish Laboratories where the LMB was then decades spent at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, print of their 25 April 1953 Nature paper, the housed, had grown tired of Crick’s boisterous California, where he became a neuroscientist. most fundamental in twentieth-century life behaviour. After the DNA paper, Bragg held Crick led a privileged existence there, able to sciences, in the back of his thesis as proof that a different view and Crick stayed at the LMB invite scientists whose work he admired to he was a published researcher. until 1976. His contributions to the develop- spend months with him. The Cambridge thesis was his second ment of molecular biology and genetics, and Brash young physicist turned molecular attempt at a doctorate. His first, in physics at to our understanding of the genetic code and biologist; successful molecular biologist turned University College London, was interrupted by of transfer RNA, ribosomes and messenger neuroscientist: there is symmetry to Crick’s dis- the outbreak of the Second World War, during RNA, are without parallel. His formulation cipline changes, but hubris as well. For Crick Stamps celebrate Royal Society scientists To mark the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary, the UK Royal Mail has issued a set of postage stamps featuring ten prominent fellows, each representing a 35-year period. Five are shown below (left to right): Alfred Russel Wallace, Joseph Lister, Ernest Rutherford, Dorothy Hodgkin and Nicholas Shackleton. ROYAL MAIL GROUP MAIL GROUP ROYAL

wanted to solve the ultimate problem, that of and the number of workers in the field. He stops air could be evacuated by two vacuum-cleaner the physical basis of consciousness. The man short of suggesting that Crick was yet another power units. It made a spectacularly successful who, in 1953, supposedly announced to drink- great scientist who did not know when to retire debut on 12 October 1928 at Boston Children’s ers in The Eagle pub in Cambridge that he had and let younger people take over. Nevertheless, Hospital in Massachusetts, where it resusci- discovered the secret of life, was working in that conclusion could be drawn. ■ tated a child who had faced what seemed an 2004, on his deathbed, on a paper proposing W. F. Bynum is emeritus professor of the history inevitable death. that the claustrum might be the key brain struc- of medicine at University College London and The iron lung, in its sleeker version as a ture in producing consciousness. Olby works author of The History of Medicine: A Very Short polished or enamelled metal cylinder punctu- hard to put a positive spin on Crick’s influence Introduction. ated by windows and equipped with an angled on consciousness research, in terms of support e-mail: [email protected] mirror that allowed patients to see their sur- roundings, came into its own during the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s. The respi- rators enabled those whose chest muscles had been paralysed by the disease to breathe, and How lateral thinking saved lives stood in diagonally serried rows in large wards Martin Kemp is struck by the surreal quality of a home-made iron lung. while solicitous nurses filed by. Anyone acquainted with such high-tech versions would barely recognize the wooden There is no more-telling formula associ- air could be removed by combustion, died in cabinet with bellows as an iron lung. Indeed, ated with surrealism than the words of the 1679 aged 36, and is less well-known than he iron is not the most evident material used nineteenth-century French poet Comte de should be. in the device. But it is indeed a respirator, Lautréamont, who aspired to create some- Given his early discovery of what came to and one that performed sterling service for thing “as beautiful as the chance encounter be ponderously called external negative pres- a dozen or more years at the Lansdowne of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an sure ventilation, it is perhaps surprising that it Hospital in Cardiff, UK, before being retired operating table”. was not until 1927 that a machine using this in the late 1950s. It seems that the bellows Currently on show at the Mori Art Museum principle was invented to aid those whose res- lung was put together by resourceful hos- in Tokyo is the perfect surrealist object. piratory systems were failing. The invention, pital engineers, presumably to save money. A giant pair of bellows, of exactly the type used which became known as the iron lung, is cred- Only immediately available materials were to resuscitate a domestic fire, is operated by a ited to the Harvard University physician Louis used, such as wood, leather and tacks, and a rude wooden lever that is pivoted on an arch Agassiz Shaw and his colleague, the pioneer of hospital bed was commandeered. The whole of jointed pipes. It is tethered to a coffin-like industrial medicine, Philip Drinker. They had ensemble declares the potency of artisanal wooden box, which is in turn anchored to a been sponsored in their research by the Con- resourcefulness. rickety iron bed. Patches on the leather lung of solidated Gas Company of New York. Their The utilitarianism of the bellows lung the bellows testify to its sustained use. On the device consisted of an iron cabinet from which chimes with surrealism in two respects. The wooden lid a series of stained rings speak of its first is that the leaps of occasional use as a table for hot beverages. It is a lateral imagination truly extraordinary object. To understand what that lay behind the it is really is — or was — we must return to incongruous juxta- the seventeenth century. position of objects in surrealism find a clear John Mayow, a physician at All Souls parallel in the Welsh engineers’ brilliant insight College at the University of Oxford, UK, that a giant pair of traditional bellows could was a member of the illustrious circle be combined with a wooden box SCIENCE MUSEUM LONDON that included Christopher Wren, Rob- and bed to do the same job as the ert Hooke and Thomas Willis, founder manufactured item. The second members of the Royal Society. is that how we look at an object Mayow’s 1688 treatise On Res- varies over time and in settings piration established the first other than those for which it was mechanical basis for how conceived. Now that the bellows humans breathe. lung features in historical dis- Mayow wrote that “if a plays, we cannot help but see it bladder with most of the air as a strange and wondrous thing pressed out of it, and tied by alongside the other technologi- a tight ligature around the cal dinosaurs that fascinate us in sphincter, be placed in a glass museums of science. ■ from which the air is afterwards Martin Kemp is emeritus professor exhausted, we shall at once see the in history of art at the University of bladder swell and become greatly distended,” Oxford, Oxford, UK. adding that it is “a rather pretty sight”. The plate accompanying the treatise shows a pair of bel- The iron lung is on display at the Mori Art Museum lows to support his argument. Mayow, who This makeshift respirator was used in Tokyo until 28 February, and is part of the also showed that the life-giving properties of in a UK hospital until the late 1950s. Science Museum’s permanent collection in London.