COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: FRANCIS BACON AND SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY

 

My first reading with Mr. Cohen of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was his essays (lots of two word titles beginning with “Of,” like “Of Friendship.”  I thought his essays were dry and not as illuminating as Montaigne’s.  I then read his “Novum Organon” a fragment from an incomplete book on the acquisition of knowledge.  In it Bacon rejects the logical method of making deductions, which are almost like syllogisms.  He felt not much science came from that.  Instead he argued, the scientist depends on the “slow and faithful toil gathering information and brings it into understanding.”  This process he called induction.  He felt the ideas from such an approach could be put to test and he is credited with defining and introducing the scientific method. I also read excerpts of his New Atlantis, a Utopian novel in which he describes the formation of a scientific society with funding for research and research is applied for human use, especially to provide inventions, solving social problems, extending life, and making humanity unlimited benefits limited only by our capacity for  imagination.  The problem with induction is we are not told how it works in our minds.  We are instead assured by Bacon that “faithful toil” of gathering information will bring it about.

At first I was skeptical that this was how science works. Later, when I did science with Muller, I realized he was right.  I still remember the night in Muller’s laboratory about 1957 when I was trying to add a gene mutation to the left and to the right of a stock that I wanted to use in an experiment on gene structure for the dumpy family of alleles.  I was looking for the recombined fly I desired and suddenly saw a fly that was unexpected.  It was almost like a flash of recognition that I realized it was not a contaminant and had to be recombination of a different sort.  It had occurred within the gene and not between the gene and the marker I was looking for.  I then realized with a second flash, that if this was indeed a recombinant within the gene there was no limit to recombining all the member mutations of that gene I had in my stock collection. I was jumping with excitement and wanted to tell everyone I could find but at 2 AM there was no one else in the laboratory I could share my delight that evening.  Every since, I put the emphasis on that phrase “faithful toil” as the basis for gaining insights into knowledge.  I applied it to my books.  I don’t write an outline for a book.  I submerge myself in the topic I want to write and let the connections emerge.  The more my heap of 5 x 8 cards mounts up the more likely they will reveal a number of themes which become the chapters in my book. That is how I wrote The Gene: A Critical History, or The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea, or The 7 Sexes.  Why extend what is already known when the past is waiting there for the scholar to exert “faithful toil” and make it come alive?  Is this not true for the germination of a poem, a musical composition, or a painting?  We can’t poke our minds and make them construct the pieces from some picture of the entirety we eventually produce.  It emerges in pieces and in connections. The best we can do is tell ourselves, that’s right, or that doesn’t work.  Unlike art, however, science has reality as a backup and experimentation is relentless in confirming or shattering our initial insights.  For this I give thanks and it is to Francis Bacon that I say, “Thank you”.

Life lines 10

WHY I LOVE THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: THE STORY OF THE FIRST HUMAN BLOOD TRANSFUSION

I like to go back to original sources when I write my books on the history of science. It’s not just a matter of getting the names and dates right. When you go back the past leaps out of a page or document and surprises you with novelty. While working on the history of blood groups for a book on the history of human genetics, I came across a reference that the first blood transfusion in a human was carried out in 1667 and the donor was a sheep. My first thought was that this was a long time ago and the patient must have died from the transfusion. My second thought (on the use of the sheep) was that the sheep was docile and convenient. I looked up the cited entry in Samuel Pepys’s diary and learned that the patient was a 32 year old Cambridge graduate, Arthur Coga, who was a Latin scholar and whose minister thought him on the verge of lunacy. He consulted a physician who recommended cooling his brain with a blood transfusion. In those days the brain was believed to be the place where the blood was cooled, a logical inference for fevered brains causing delirium and for violent tempered people who are still called hot blooded.

Coga was asked what type of blood he wanted as a coolant and he said he wanted a lamb’s blood because Jesus is the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) and if he couldn’t have the Savior’s blood, the closest thing in purity must be that of a lamb. He was given about 12 ounces of blood by canula and survived. Pepys recounted Coga’s conversation at the Royal Society a week after his transfusion and reported Coga as lucid in his conversation. Coga also told his questioners that he was looking forward to a second transfusion of sheep blood.

Transfusions of animal blood to humans that same year in France led to several deaths and there was a ban on human blood transfusions in most countries until Karl Landsteiner in 1900 identified specific blood types in humans (initially he called them I, II, and III). They were renamed A, B, and O a few years later and the rarer AB group was found by two of Landsteiner’s students. Surprisingly it took almost 20 years to do effective transfusions because blood tends to clot and anti-clotting chemicals were not found until 1914. Blood banks did not come into existence until the early 1930s. I do not know if Coga had that second transfusion. It is likely, if he did, that it would have killed him from the shock reaction of his immune system. I also do not know how long the placebo effect lasted from his first transfusion.

But as a contemporary scientist I would never have imagined that a sheep’s blood was the source for a first human blood transfusion. Nor would I have imagined that the transfusion was made for religious reasons. Nor would I have imagined that the transfusion was given to treat a mental illness rather than to replace a loss of blood. The pleasure of doing history of science is that it reveals how different were the assumptions about life, science, and values when we go back in time. It also serves as a reinforcement of healthy skepticism so that we resist the temptation to interpret the past through the expectations of the present.