science – Page 4 – Memoranda

Science Reads: ‘Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates’ by Franz H. Messerli

To end Science Reads Week on a lighter note, I’d like to draw your attention to an article¹ published in The New England Journal of Medicine last year, which investigates whether eating chocolate makes you smarter. Dr Messerli notes that dietary flavanols, found in dark chocolate, green tea and red wine, have been shown to improve the blood supply to the brain and cause rats to perform better on cognitive tests. He also notes that countries with a high consumption of chocolate, particularly Switzerland, tend to produce a lot of Nobel laureates. When he analyses the data, he finds “a surprisingly strong correlation” between chocolate intake and the number of Nobel Prizes won in a given country. Unfortunately, Sweden messes up his results. But don’t worry, Dr Messerli has an explanation:

“Given its per capita chocolate consumption of 6.4 kg per year, we would predict that Sweden should have produced a total of about 14 Nobel laureates, yet we observe 32. Considering that in this instance the observed number exceeds the expected number by a factor of more than 2, one cannot quite escape the notion that either the Nobel Committee in Stockholm has some inherent patriotic bias when assessing the candidates for these awards or, perhaps, that the Swedes are particularly sensitive to chocolate, and even minuscule amounts greatly enhance their cognition.”

Yes, the article is completely tongue-in-cheek. However, I feel this issue needs further investigation, so I’m off to eat some Lindt 70% Dark Chocolate. Purely in the interests of scientific investigation, you understand. Happy ‘Science Reads Week’ to you all, and may your own scientific investigations be similarly delicious!

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Sorry, this article is now only available to NEJM subscribers. ↩

Science Reads: ‘Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision inspired Francis Bacon to create Modern Science’ by John Henry

Today’s Science Read is an odd but fascinating book about Francis Bacon, who is often credited with being the founder of ‘Modern Science’, although the truth is far more complex. Now, I have to admit that my knowledge of Francis Bacon was fairly patchy before I picked up this book. My mental card file on him looked something like this:

FRANCIS BACON
– Lived in 1500s? 1600s?
– Wrote some books about philosophy
– Jumped out of his carriage to grab a chicken, kill it and stuff it with snow, in order to see if ice could preserve flesh; consequently died of pneumonia due to exposure
– Not to be confused with the Francis Bacon who painted all those grotesque portraits

In other words, I knew almost nothing about him. However, I can now reliably inform you that Francis Bacon (no relation to the artist) was born in 1561; became Lord Chancellor to King James I; wrote a LOT of books, including one of the first Utopian novels; influenced a range of scientists, from Newton to Darwin, and inspired the establishment of the Royal Society, the oldest and most prestigious scientific institution in Britain; and died in 1626, although his death probably had nothing to do with iced-chicken experiments.

'Knowledge is Power' by John Henry John Henry gives a clear description of Bacon’s main themes, which were that society was on the verge of a flowering of knowledge about how the universe worked; that this knowledge should be used for the benefit of humankind; and that science would be best developed within a bureaucratic structure funded by the government but free of political and religious bias, and staffed by a huge army of workers gathering, tabulating and interpreting information. Even Henry acknowledges that important scientific advances have never happened within this type of bureaucratic structure, but he argues convincingly that Bacon’s ideas were very influential, if sometimes misinterpreted, by philosophers and scientists during the Enlightenment and afterwards.

Henry also does an excellent job of describing Bacon’s world, one quite alien to those of us living in twenty-first century secular democracies. For example, in Bacon’s time, it was completely rational to believe in God and whatever the Church currently decreed was a ‘fact’ (regardless of whether it really was true), because otherwise, you’d find yourself convicted of heresy and burnt at the stake. Words such as ‘magic’, ‘science’ and ‘atheist’ had completely different meanings then. ‘Magic’, for example, was not about supernatural powers, but about discovering the ‘correspondences’ between natural substances (for example, between magnets and iron) and ‘natural magic’ was what we might think of as primitive science. While a magician might (unwisely) choose to summon a demon, this would only be to help the magician learn about these natural correspondences more quickly. A demon had knowledge but no supernatural powers and could not do anything miraculous, and the Church frowned upon demonology only because demons were known to exploit humans and could endanger a magician’s immortal soul. Henry also explains how Bacon’s devout Calvinist upbringing and conviction that the End of Days was nigh¹ had a significant influence upon his philosophy.

The design of this book was a bit odd, and at first I wondered if it was self-published, but no, it seems it’s part of a series of science-themed books published by Icon Books in the UK and Totem Books in the US. There was a glossary, but no index; there were a few footnotes, but they referred to only four texts; there was some very dense and academic information, but it was presented in a conversational style with lots of droll asides from the author. It’s as though the publishers weren’t exactly sure who the audience for this book would be, but I found it very interesting and readable. Those who know a lot about Francis Bacon probably won’t find much new in this book, but I’d recommend this for those who don’t know much about him but are interested in the history of science.

Tomorrow in Science Reads: Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates by Franz H. Messerli

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While ‘apocalypse’ implies destruction and chaos to us, to Bacon it meant a time when the old, flawed world would be replaced with a glorious new world, full of knowledge and contentment. While it was true that this would mean the destruction of unworthy humans (Catholics, Jews, Muslims, heathens, etc), Bacon knew that he, as an Englishman and the ‘right’ sort of Protestant Christian, would be one of the saved, so he eagerly awaited Judgement Day. ↩

Science Reads: ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ by Richard Dawkins

Today in Science Reads, I’d like to talk about a book that argues that scientific knowledge enhances, rather than destroys, our sense of wonder about the universe. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins has written a rebuttal to John Keats’s idea that Isaac Newton “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours”. For the most part, Dawkins does this clearly, effectively and with a sense of humour. There are fascinating discussions about astronomy, sound perception, forensic DNA testing and how genetics can reveal information about the ancestral environment of a particular species. My favourite chapter was about how Uncanny Coincidences (for instance, your horoscope correctly predicting your future, or a TV magician making wristwatches stop or start with the power of his mind) are usually not very uncanny at all, once you use probability mathematics and scientific logic to work out how likely it is that these events will occur.

Dawkins also discusses how scientists can sometimes get a bit carried away with using ‘poetical writing’ to convey their ideas, at the expense of clarity and accuracy. This was the part of the book where I felt Dawkins forgot his central thesis and got a bit carried away himself, on tangents that were not very interesting. Unfortunately, he also devotes a few pages of this book to one of his pet peeves – “feminist bullies” who apparently try to prevent young women from studying science because it’s the “brainchild of white Victorian males”. Now, as a woman who has studied science and worked in a couple of science-related fields, I feel I have a bit more personal experience in this area than Richard Dawkins, and I have to say that all the people who tried to discourage me from science were not feminists, but sexist men, starting with my Year Eleven Physics teacher, who informed us that girls didn’t have the right sort of brains to understand Maths and Physics¹. This attitude was shared by male staff teaching Pure Mathematics at the university I subsequently attended.² In fairness to Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow was first published in 1998, and his more recent books, such as The God Delusion, seem far less anti-feminist. Perhaps his views have matured, or perhaps his publishers pointed out to him that women read books about science, too, and that annoying the people who have bought his book is a bad business strategy.³ Anyway, this is a small part of an interesting, entertaining and often inspirational book, which I recommend with some reservations.

Tomorrow in Science Reads: Knowledge is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision inspired Francis Bacon to create Modern Science by John Henry.

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I would have made a rude gesture at this Physics teacher from the stage of our school assembly hall the following year, when I was awarded the school prizes for Physics and Chemistry, but fortunately for everyone, he’d retired by then. ↩
Although I should point out that the (male) Applied Maths lecturers were so enthusiastic and fun that I briefly considered becoming a statistician. And my (male) Chemistry professor was similarly encouraging. ↩
I don’t think his views have matured very much, given some of the things Dawkins has said in response to women being sexually harassed and assaulted at atheist conferences. ↩

Science Reads: ‘I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists and Humanity’ by Max Perutz

Our new Prime Minister has just announced his Cabinet, and for the first time since 1931, the Australian government does not have a Minister for Science. (After all, who needs scientists when we have the Pope to decide how the universe works? Just ask Galileo how well that went.) But here at Memoranda, we love science, so we’ve unilaterally declared this week ‘Science Reads Week’. It’s already Tuesday, so it’ll be a fairly short week, but each day for the rest of the week, I’ll be posting about some interesting science reads.

Today, I’d like to recommend I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists and Humanity by Max Perutz, who won the Nobel Prize for figuring out the structure of haemoglobin (which is the molecule in our red blood cells that transports oxygen around our bodies) and myoglobin (which does a similar thing inside muscles). Max Perutz also helped found the European Organisation for Molecular Biology, was an excellent science communicator, and seems to have been a genuinely nice person. John Meurig Thomas, for example, wrote:

“Perutz was a gentle, kindly and tolerant lover of people (particularly the young), passionately committed to social justice and intellectual honesty; and the warmth of his personality radiated a sense of human goodness and decency which induced others to behave sanely, especially because he exuded an inner excitement that stems from a love of knowledge for its own sake.”

In this collection of science-themed essays and book reviews, Perutz writes eloquently about the development of chemical weapons during WWI, atomic weapons during WWII, and biological weapons during the Cold War. He also discusses a number of important twentieth-century scientists, most of whom he knew personally, including Peter Medawar (whose work on immunology led to successful organ transplants), Albert Szent-Györgyi (who isolated Vitamin C), Linus Pauling (who, among other achievements, worked out how molecules were held together by chemical bonds, and identified that amino acids had alpha-helix structures, which helped Watson and Crick figure out that DNA had a double-helix structure), Dorothy Hodgkin (who figured out the structure of cholesterol, insulin and penicillin, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964) and Lise Meitner (who identified the splitting of the uranium atom and named it ‘fission’, although it was her male colleague who was awarded the Nobel Prize for their work). There are also powerful arguments for human rights, for freedom of expression, and for women to have the right to control their own fertility with contraceptive drugs and safe abortions, as well as a thoughtful exploration of whether an accident at a UK nuclear energy station led to long-term environmental damage and health problems in the local population.

However, my favourite piece was about Perutz’s experiences during WWII. He was born and raised in Vienna, but moved to England to study chemistry at Cambridge in the 1930s. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, he was unable to return home due to his Jewish ancestry. His parents managed to escape Austria and join him, but after war was declared, Perutz and his father were both interned by the British as ‘enemy aliens’. Even though Perutz was passionately anti-Nazi and had just been awarded a PhD from Cambridge (which you’d think would be pretty useful for the war effort), the British government decided to send him to a prison camp in the wastelands of Canada. After further adventures and with the help of his British scientist friends, he made it back to England, where he spent the war working for a very eccentric civilian named Geoffrey Pyke. Among Pyke’s pet projects was the development of bullet-proof ice, reinforced with wood pulp, called pykrete, although the plan to use it to make sea-borne aircraft carriers sank (literally). Pyke also came up with the bright idea of “the construction of a giant tube from Burma into China – much easier than building a road . . . Through this tube, Allied men, tanks and guns were to be propelled by compressed air.” Not even Churchill supported this ridiculous scheme, and Perutz eventually “returned to Cambridge, sad at first that my eagerness to help in the war against Hitler had not found a more effective outlet, but later relieved to have worked on a project that at least never killed anyone – not even the Chief of the Imperial General Staff [who had been injured when a bullet rebounded off a block of pykrete during one of Pyke’s ill-conceived demonstrations].”

Of the thirty-seven essays in the book, I think only two require readers to have some specific scientific knowledge (one is about haemoglobin’s structure, the other about how X-Ray crystallography developed into a useful tool for analysing biological molecules). For the most part, this is an accessible, engaging and fascinating book about science and its effects, good and bad, on humankind in the twentieth century.

Tomorrow in Science Reads: Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Five Books, Five Songs: Through The Large Four-Chambered Heart

I had difficulties coming up with a song for my work-in-progress, so I asked the two main characters, Rosy and Jaz, for their opinions. Rosy immediately nominated Vincent by Don McLean, because Vincent van Gogh is her favourite artist and he makes an appearance in the book.

“It’s a very brief appearance, though, isn’t it?” I said. “I was hoping for a song that’s about the entire book.”

“Oh, right,” Rosy said. “You want something science-y, then. Never fear, I will use my amazing research skills to find a song for you.” She flipped open her laptop. “What about Weird Science by Oingo Boingo? Or She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby? Or Science Friction by XTC? Ooh, here’s a good one – Science Genius Girl by Freezepop! Or how about Biology by Girls Aloud? If only that song was a lot smaller. They could have called it Microbiology …”

I went off to find Jaz, who said she didn’t know anything about music but wanted to see what Rosy had discovered. When we returned, Rosy was still at it.

“Did you know that there’s a band called Placebo? And there’s a song called Bad Medicine. But I think you should go with a song from They Might Be Giants – they have loads of science songs. This one’s my favourite.”

“Is this song funny?” I asked. “Because the last song I chose for Five Books, Five Songs was really sad, so I need something cheerful.”

“It’s funny,” Rosy assured me. “Also, there’s a giant squid on the album cover.”

“But the lyrics say ‘koala bear’,” said Jaz, peering over my shoulder at the computer screen. “Koalas aren’t bears, they’re marsupials.”

“Well, They Might Be Giants aren’t Australian,” said Rosy. “Or scientists. You can’t expect them to know very much. They were probably getting koalas confused with drop bears.”

“At least they understand how the blood circulation system works,” said Jaz.

“William Harvey would love this song,” said Rosy, nodding.

“Right, then,” I said. “It’s decided. Mammal by They Might Be Giants. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Rosy.

“Okay,” said Jaz. “But, Michelle?”

“What?”

“You should stop messing about on the internet and get back to writing our book now.”

So I did.

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