Inventing science

When I was young, we seemed to have plenty of free time available for activities that the more serious generation of today would regard as puerile, if not infantile. Thus I spent endless hours writing scripts for imaginary series such as the ‘Lives of Great Composers’ or ‘Great Moments in Science’. I remember a scene written for one of the former which depicted Berlioz in a morgue, fondling the hand of a departed lady (as he once really did, by the way), and singing to himself, “Your tiny hand is frozen. Ah! I must tell this to my friend Puccini.” One of my Great Moments in Science was to enact the ‘rediscovery’ of Mendel’s laws in 1900 by Correns, Tschermak and de Vries. The setting is a pub, in which the three inebriated principals are simultaneously trying to explain to each other, in heavy German accents, the 3:1 segregation of tall and dwarf plants. In true Stanislavsky style, the performers have themselves indulged heavily before the play and give performances that somehow also include the cell theory and the structure of chromosomes. I also spent months writing a whole book and giving lectures on ‘The Chemistry of the Neuranes and Their Derivatives’. These included the neurotic acids, which could not decide whether they were liquids, gases or solids, and schizophrenic anhydride — a remarkable compound with a negative time of reaction. And so on. With this valuable training, it was quite easy for me to meet the challenge posed by a friend, Sidney Bernhard, in the late 1950s, that we should write a paper that was clearly nonsense but which could conceivably fool an editor who was not really knowledgeable into accepting it. At that time there had appeared one of the first journals to make rapid communication its speciality and the editor we had singled out as our target was Jacques Monod. Because Sidney, who was a very talented pianist, and I, with a number of different voices, became more interested in performing ‘Excerpts from the Great Operas’, the paper was never submitted, but the text survives. Here it is. Alas, the figures and tables that accompanied the manuscript have been lost, but, as they say, their reconstruction is left to the imagination of the reader. R361