NATURE|Vol 454|31 July 2008 SUMMER BOOKS OPINION edge and extension at the trailing edge. as T. rex’s crater of doom by proving it was with others, including my late professor, Derek Alvarez leads us to this hypothesis along a 300,000 years too old. Alvarez’s frequent refer- Ager, he has helped geologists to understand personal and scientific journey through many ences to the crater as the uncontested ‘smoking that uniformitarianism and gradualism are not scientific, historical and cultural byways. gun’ would otherwise, presumably, have been the same thing. On the timescale of a planet, The book reads like an extended field guide phrased more circumspectly. uniformity must also embrace rare, catastrophic and notebook — Alvarez mingles the story of Like Alvarez’s previous book, The Mountains events that may recur on timescales far beyond his involvement with Italian geologists with of St Francis is a first-person participant history. the duration of civilizations and even species. accounts of his travels, discoveries and what This genre carries dangers, not least the pitfall Whatever the truth behind his sometimes might be called an Italian history of the world, of overplaying the author’s centrality. Alvarez is overconfident side-statements about the end- in which various historical figures receive given to grand gesture, and sometimes allows Cretaceous extinction, meteorite impacts, the proper credit for thinking of things first. himself to come too close to writing what iridium anomaly, Chicxulub crater and science Many of them, such as the seventeenth-cen- Stephen Jay Gould dubbed “cardboard history”. history, the tectonic story running through this tury Danish geologist Nicolaus Steno, need no For example, he avers that, by the 1930s, Alfred book is compelling and engagingly told. It also introduction to geological readers. But some Wegener’s ideas on continental drift had been holds appeal for lay readers, perhaps less so Italian figures will be unfamiliar, such as the “mostly rejected”. True, Wegener’s fellow geo- than his previous book, but those who venture ‘father of Italian geology’ Giovanni Arduino, physicists rejected his hypothesis because they into the mountains of St Francis with Alvarez who gave us the now obsolete term ‘tertiary’ thought it was physically impossible. But, as sci- will not regret it. I would make it required back- in the eighteenth century. ence historian Naomi Oreskes has shown, it was ground reading for students of Earth science. It Alvarez obsesses a little about issues of pri- only in the United States — for a long time a bas- would certainly help counteract the occasional ority, recalling my feeling that his other book tion of old-fashioned continental fixism — that philistinism of those leading their field trips. ■ was uncomfortably full of praise for those col- geologists rejected drift en masse. Elsewhere Ted Nield is editor of Geoscientist magazine and laborators who had set their competing claims they remained more open-minded. author of Supercontinent. aside. Here, too, using many historical exam- Alvarez deserves his place in posterity. Along e-mail: [email protected] ples, Alvarez shows the reader how well scien- tists behave when science works. I particularly relished the moral he draws from how alpine thrust faults were correctly explained. These faults are flat planes along Stalin’s war on genetic science which huge masses of rock have travelled hori- zontally, often for hundreds of kilometres. After The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story the Lysenko affair with verve and pace. Prin- years of doubt, geologists finally accepted that of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great gle makes it clear how Vavilov’s patriotism, rocks could be pushed such large distances Scientists of the Twentieth Century dedication to science and determination to be — their acceptance of plate tectonics sapped all by Peter Pringle open-minded led to his downfall and death. controversy from the issue. Alvarez uses this to Simon and Schuster: 2008. 384 pp. $26 Vavilov was born in 1887 in Moscow into remind us of a phenomenon first identified by a comfortable, bourgeois family. In 1906 he astronomers Alan Lightman and Owen Gin- It is not surprising, given the parlous state entered the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, gerich in 1992, whereby well-established ruling of Russia in the years following the Revolu- or Petrovska, one of many institutes established theories “develop a life of their own” and seem tion, that its political system put ideology and after the devastating famine of 1892. Russian to take forever to collapse under the weight of practical outcomes above all else, including agricultural practices lagged behind those conflicting evidence. scientific fact. This was most evident in agri- of other European countries and the United There is an irony here because the connec- culture, where it was imperative to produce States, and efforts to reform them were unsuc- tion that Alvarez and others made between the more food by whatever means. The conse- cessful. Vavilov undertook “to work for the iridium anomaly and the Chicxulub crater has quences were tragic for the Russian people and benefit of the poor, the enslaved class of my become just such a ruling theory in recent years, for Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, Russia’s greatest country, to raise their level of knowledge”. one that sceptical scientists have challenged at geneticist. Vavilov fell foul of Trofim Deniso- This pledge, Pringle explains, drove Vavilov their peril. One must conclude that the book was vich Lysenko who, through political manipu- throughout his life. already with the publishers last year when Gerta lation and intrigue, came to dominate Soviet After graduating, Vavilov spent a year Keller, a professor at Princeton University in genetics.Peter Pringle’s compelling book, The researching wheat with Robert Regel at the New Jersey, persuasively debunked Chicxulub Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, tells the story of Bureau of Applied Botany in St Petersburg, To Follow the Water: Exploring the Ocean to Brussels Versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the Discover Climate United States and the European Union by Dallas Murphy (Basic Books, $15.95, £9.99) by Christine Mahoney As well as covering the history of human (Georgetown Univ. Press, $29.95) expansion across the globe and the science of Political decisions made in Washington DC and oceanography, Murphy also gives first-hand Brussels have global effects, but US and European accounts of life on a research vessel. “Meticulously advocacy styles are often assumed to be culturally following the waters of the Gulf Stream into the different. This book challenges stereotypes, arguing blue beyond, Murphy’s book gets it right,” wrote that the context of issues and institutions is more Arnold Gordon (Nature 449, 407–408; 2007). important than differences between cultures. 577 OPINION SUMMER BOOKS NATURE|Vol 454|31 July 2008 before embarking on a two-year tour of somatic cells, and second by Mendel’s work. European laboratories. His stay with William Scientists rejected Lysenko’s claims, but by Bateson in Cambridge, UK, was the highlight. skilful manipulation of the political situa- Bateson was the leading proponent of Gregor tion throughout his career, Lysenko scaled Mendel’s work on inherited traits, rediscov- the Soviet scientific hierarchy. He was twice ered 10 years earlier, and wrote the first genet- awarded the Order of Lenin, and became ics textbook, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity, president of the Lenin Academy of Agricul- published in 1909. Bateson’s enthusiasm for tural Sciences of the USSR, a full member Mendelian genetics seems to have rubbed off: of the country’s Academy of Sciences and a Vavilov based his life’s work on Mendelian member of the Supreme Soviet. principles and their elaboration by, among The conflict between Lysenko and the others, fly geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. ‘Mendelian–Morganists’ came to a head in 1936 Bateson had led an expedition to the Russian at a conference at the Lenin Academy. Despite Steppes in 1886 to examine the interactions of geneticists’ devastating scientific critique of environment and species variability. Pringle Lysenko’s claims, the government-controlled suggests that this may have inspired Vavilov press declared Lysenko the winner. Attacks to undertake similar expeditions to search for on Vavilov’s position increased and Lysenko crop varieties whose traits made them suit- collection of 250,000 seeds of cultivated plants consolidated his position. Senior scientists in able for particular environments, such as dry and their varieties was the most extensive in the the Soviet administration were among the vic- or cold regions. world. In 1930, he was appointed director of the tims of Stalin’s Great Purge, when perhaps as On Vavilov’s return to Russia and the Petro- Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of many as one million anti-revolutionaries and vska, he was sent to investigate why soldiers Sciences in recognition of his position as the enemies of the people were executed over two on the Persian front were falling ill after eating country’s leading plant geneticist and his inter- years, including Muralov, president of the Lenin bread. Vavilov used the assignment to collect national reputation. Just six years later, Vavilov Academy. Lysenko took his place to become varieties of plants growing in the harsh climate was in disgrace. Vavilov’s boss. In October 1939, the Central of the Pamir mountains, in the hope that these His nemesis Lysenko was born in 1898 into Committee of the Communist Party of the hardy plants might be cultivated in northern a peasant family. Unusually for the time, he Soviet Union held another genetics conference. Russia to provide more food for the Soviet peo- attended a school of agriculture and horticul- This again ended in triumph for Lysenko. ple. Vavilov endured great hardship in travel- ture; clever and ambitious, he aspired to make Why were the reins of Soviet agriculture held ling to such remote regions, trips that would great contributions to Soviet science.