CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080054-5

in Scientific Discovery
A molecular geneticist reflects on two general historical questions:
(1) What does it mean to say a discovery is "ahead of its time"?
(2) Are scientific creations any less unique than artistic creations?
by Gunther S. Stent
T
The fantastically rapid progress of
molecular genetics in the past 25
years now obliges merely middle-
aged participants in its early develop-
ment to look back on their early work
from a depth of historical perspective
that for scientific specialties flowering in
earlier times came only after all the wit-
nesses of the first blossoming were long
dead. It is as if the late-18th-century
colleagues of Joseph Priestley and An-
toine Lavoisier had still been active in
chemical research and teaching in the
1930's, after atomic structure and the
nature of the chemical bond had been
revealed. This somewhat depressing
personal vantage provides a singular op-
portunity to assay the evolution of a
scientific field. In reflecting on the his-
tory of molecular genetics from the
viewpoint of my own experience I have
found that two of its most famous inci-
dents-Oswald Avery's identification of
DNA as the active principle in bacterial
transformation and hence as genetic ma-
terial, and James Watson and Francis
Crick's discovery of the DNA double he-
lix-illuminate two general problems of
cultural history. The case of Avery
throws light on the question of whether
it is meaningful or merely tautologous
to say that a discovery is "ahead of its
time," or premature. And the case of
Watson and Crick can be used, and in
fact has been used, to discuss the ques-
tion of whether there is anything unique
in a scientific discovery, in view of the
likelihood that if Dr. A had not discov-
ered Fact X today, Dr. B would have
discovered it tomorrow.
Five years ago I published a brief ret-
rospective essay on molecular go-
netics, with paApproved For Release
origins. In that historical account I men-
tioned neither Avery's name nor DNA-
mediated bacterial transformation. My
essay elicited a letter to the editor by a
microbiologist, who complained: "It is
a sad and surprising omission that ...
Stent makes no mention of the definitive
proof of DNA as the basic hereditary
substance by O. T. Avery, C. M. Mac-
Leod and Maclyn McCarty. The growth
of [molecular genetics] rests upon this
experimental proof .... I am old enough
to remember the excitement and en-
thusiasm induced by the publication of
the paper by Avery, Macleod and Mc-
Carty. Avery, an effective bacteriologist,
was a quiet, self-effacing, non-disputa-
tious gentleman. These characteristics of
personality should not [cause] the gen-
eral scientific public ... to let his name
go unrecognized."
I was taken aback by this letter and
replied that I should indeed have men-
tioned Avery's 1944 proof that DNA is
the hereditary substance. I went on to
say, however, that in my opinion it is
not true that the growth of molecular
genetics rests on Avery's proof. For
many years that proof actually had little
impact on geneticists. The reason for the
delay was not that Avery's work was un-
known to or mistrusted by geneticists
but that it was "premature."
My prima facie reason for saying
Avery's discovery was premature is that
it was not appreciated in its day. By
lack of appreciation I do not mean that
Avery's discovery went unnoticed, or
even that it was not considered impor-
tant. What I do mean is that geneticists
did not seem to be able to do much
with it or build on it. That is, in its day
Avery's dis
general discourse of genetics.
This statement can be readily sup-
ported by an examination of the scien-
tific literature. For example, a convinc-
ing demonstration of the lack of appre-
ciation of Avery's discovery is provided
by the'1950 golden jubilee of genetics
symposium "Genetics in the 20th Cen-
tury." In the proceedings of that sym-
posium some of the most eminent ge-
neticists published essays that surveyed
the progress of the first 50 years of ge-
netics and assessed its status at that
time. Only one of the 26 essayists saw
fit to make more than a passing refer-
ence to Avery's discovery, then six years
old. He was a colleague of Avery's at
the Rockefeller Institute, and he ex-
pressed some doubt that the active
transforming principle was really pure
DNA. The then leading philosopher of
the gene, H. J. Muller of Indiana Uni-
versity, contributed an essay on the na-
ture of the gene that mentions neither
Avery nor DNA.
So why was Avery's discovery not ap-
preciated in its day? Because it was
"premature." But is this really an ex-
planation or is it merely an empty tau-
tology? In other words, is there a way
of providing a criterion of the prema-
turity of a discovery other than its fail-
ure to make an impact? Yes, there is
such a criterion: A discovery is prema-
ture if its implications cannot be con-
nected by a series of simple logical steps
to canonical, or generally accepted,
knowledge.
Why could Avery's discovery not be
connected with canonical knowledge?
Ever since DNA had been discovered in
the cell nucleus by Friedrich Miescher
in 1869 it had been suspected of exert-
2001/03/26 CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080054-5 proc-
esses. This suspicion became stronger
84
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in the 1920's, when it was found that
DNA is a major component of the chro-
. mosom Approved For Release
molecular nature of DNA, however,
made it well-nigh inconceivable that
DNA could be the carrier of hereditary
information. First, until well into the
1930's DNA was generally thought to
be merely a tetranucleotide composed
of one unit each of adenylic, guanylic,
thymidylic and cytidylic acids. Second,
even when it was finally realized by the
carly 1940's that the molecular weight
10 1/03/2 6ctus Ashul TigRer than
.
the tetranucleotide hypothesis required,
it was still widely believed the tetranu-
cleotide was the basic repeating unit of
the large DNA polymer in which the
four units mentioned recur in regular
sequence. DNA was therefore viewed
as a uniform macromolecule that, like
other monotonous polymers such as
starch or cellulose, is always the same,
-00787R000200080054 5logical source.
The ubiquitous presence of DNA in the
chromosomes was therefore generally
explained in purely physiological or
structural terms. It was usually to the
chromosomal protein that the informa-
tional role of the genes had been as-
signed, since the great differences in
the specificity of structure that exist be-
tween various proteins in the same or-
·-
7
-
--
PICASSO'S "LES DESMOISELLES D'AVIGNON," painted in Par-
is in 1907, is often cited by art historians as the first major Cubist
painting and a milestone in the development of modern art. It is
reproduced here as an archetype of the proposition that works of
artistic creation are unique fin the sense
isted, it would never have been painted), whereas works of srien-
tific creation are inevitable (in the sense that if Dr. A had not dis-
covered Fact X today, Dr. B would discover it tomorrow). The va-
lidity of the proposition is disputed by the author, The painting
Approved For Release 2001/03726": CIA RDP96-0078TR000200080054.5. New York.
85

ganism, or between similar
proteins in
Approved For Release,
different organisms,
been
appre
ciated since the beginning of the cen-
tury. The conceptual difficulty of as-
signing the genetic role to DNA had not
escaped Avery. In the conclusion of his
paper he stated: "If the results of the
present study of the transforming prin-
ciple are confirmed, then nucleic acids
must be regarded as possessing biologi-
cal specificity the chemical basis of
which is as yet undetermined."
By 1950, however, the tetranucleo-
tide hypothesis had been overthrown,
thanks largely to the work of Erwin
Chargaff of the Columbia University
College of Physicians and Surgeons. He
showed that, contrary to the demands
of that hypothesis, the four nucleotides
are not necessarily present in DNA in
equal proportions. He found, further-
more, that the exact nucleotide compo-
sition of DNA differs according to its
biological source, suggesting that DNA
might not be a monotonous polymer
after all. And so when two years later,
in 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha
Chase of the Carnegie Institution's lab-
oratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.,
showed that on infection of the host bac-
terium by a bacterial virus at least 80
percent of the viral DNA enters the cell
and at least 80 percent of the viral pro-
tein remains outside, it was possible to
connect their conclusion that DNA is
the genetic material with canonical
knowledge. Avery's "as yet undeter-
mined chemical basis of the biological
specificity of nucleic acids" could now
be seen as the precise sequence of the
four nucleotides along the polynucleo-
tide chain. The general impact of the
Hershey-Chase experiment was imme-
diate and dramatic. DNA was suddenly
in and protein was out, as far as think-
ing about the nature of the gene was
concerned. Within a few months there
arose the first speculations about the ge-
netic code, and Watson and Crick were
inspired to set out to discover the struc-
ture of DNA.
Of course, Avery's discovery is only
one of many premature discoveries in
the history of science. I have presented
it here for consideration mainly because
of my own failure to appreciate it when
I joined Max Delbrück's bacterial virus
group at the California Institute of
Technology in 1948. Since then I have
often wondered what my later career
would have been like if I had only been
astute enough to appreciate Avery's dis-
covery and infer from it four years be-
fore Hershey and Chase that DNA must
experimental organism.
sociated with the name of Gregor Men-
del, whose discovery of the gene in 1865
had to wait 35 years before it was "redis-
covered" at the turn of the century.
Mendel's discovery made no immediate.
impact, it can be argued, because the
concept of discrete hereditary units
could not be connected with canonical
knowledge of anatomy and physiology
in the middle of the 19th century. Fur-
thermore, the statistical methodology
by means of which Mendel interpreted
the results of his pea-breeding experi-
ments was entirely foreign to the way
of thinking of contemporary biologists.
By the end of the 19th century, how-
ever, chromosomes and the chromo-
some-dividing processes of mitosis and
meiosis had been discovered and Men-
del's results could now be accounted for
in terms of structures visible in the mi-
croscope. Moreover, by then the appli-
cation of statistics to biology had be-
come commonplace. Nonetheless, in
some respects Avery's discovery is a
more dramatic example of prematurity
than Mendel's. Whereas Mendel's dis-
covery seems hardly to have been men-
tioned by anyone until its rediscovery,
Avery's discovery was widely discussed
and yet it could not be appreciated for
eight years.
Cases of delayed appreciation of a
discovery exist also in the physical sci-
ences. One example (as well as an ex-
planation of its circumstances in terms
of the concept to which I refer here as
prematurity) has been provided by
Michael Polanyi on the basis of his own
experience. In the years 1914-1916
Polanyi published a theory of the ad-
sorption of gases on solids which as-
sumed that the force attracting a gas
molecule to a solid surface depends only
on the position of the molecule, and not
on the presence of other molecules, in
the force field. In spite of the fact that
Polanyi was able to provide strong ex-
perimental evidence in favor of his the-
ory, it was generally rejected. Not only
was the theory rejected, it was also con-
sidered so ridiculous by the leading au-
thorities of the time that Polanyi be-
lieves continued defense of his theory
would have ended his professional ca-
reer if he had not managed to publish
work on more palatable ideas. The rea-
son for the general rejection of Polanyi's
adsorption theory was that at the very
time he put it forward the role of elec-
trical forces in the architecture of matter
had just been discovered. Hence there
mat
the history
face. That point
of view, however, was irreconcilable
with Polanyi's basic assumption of the
mutual independence of individual gas
molecules in the adsorption process. It
was only in the 1930's, after a new the-
ory of cohesive molecular forces based
on quantum-mechanical resonance rath-
er than on electrostatic attraction had
been developed, that it became con-
ceivable gas molecules could behave in
the way Polanyi's experiments indicated
they were actually behaving. Meanwhile
Polanyi's theory had been consigned so
authoritatively to the ashcan of crackpot
ideas that it was rediscovered only in the
1950's.
Still, can the notion of prematurity be
said to be a useful historical concept?
First of all, is prematurity the only pos-
sible explanation for the lack of con-
temporary appreciation of a discovery?
Evidently not. For example, my micro-
biologist critic suggested that it was the
"quiet, self-effacing, non-disputatious"
personality of Avery that was the cause
of the failure of his contribution to be
recognized. Furthermore, in an essay
on the history of DNA research Chargaff
supports the idea that personal modesty
and aversion to self-advertisement ac-
count for the lack of contemporary sci-
entific appreciation. He attributes the
75-year lag between Miescher's discov-
ery of DNA and the general apprecia-
tion of its importance to Miescher's be-
ing "one of the quiet in the land," who
lived when "the giant publicity ma-
chines, which today accompany even
the smallest move on the chess-board of
nature with enormous fanfares, were not
yet in place." Indeed, the 35-year hiatus
POLYSACCHARIDE
CAPSULE
PNEUMOCOCCUS
BACTERIA
LYSIS
(
S STRAIN
EXPERIMENT OF 1944 with which Oswald
Avery correctly identified the chemical na-
ture of the genetic material is regarded
by the author as a classic example of a pre-
also be theApproved For Release 2001/00/26 DIA-RDP06-00787R000200080054-5he virulent
tion of gases must also involve an elec-
normal, or S-type, pneumococcus, a bacteri-
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in the appreciation of Mendel's discov- these experiments, even though it is
ery is often attributed to erde's Release-0901103/6hCIA-RDP98-00787R00020008005415was un-
ing been a modest monk living in an
out-of-the-way Moravian monastery.
--
Hence the notion of prematurity pro-
vides an alternative to the invocation-
in my opinion an inappropriate one for
the instances mentioned here-of the
lack of publicity as an explanation for
delayed appreciation.
More important, does the prematurity
concept pertain only to retrospective
judgments made with the wisdom of
hindsight? No, I think it can be used also
to judge the present, Some recent dis-
coveries are still premature at this very
time. One example of here-and-now pre-
maturity is the alleged finding that ex-
periential information received by an
animal can be stored in nucleic acids or
other macromolecules.
Some 10 years ago there began to ap-
pear reports by experimental psycholo-
gists purporting to have shown that the
engram, or memory trace, of a task
learned by a trained animal can be
transferred to a naïve animal by inject-
ing or feeding the recipient with an ex-
tract made from the tissues of the donor.
At that time the central lesson of mo-
lecular genetics-that nucleic acids and
proteins are informational macromole-
cules-had just gained wide currency,
and the facile equation of nervous in-
formation with genetic information soon
led to the proposal that macromole-
cules-DNA, RNA or . protein-store
memory. As it happens, the experiments
on which the macromolecular theory of
memory is based have been difficult to
repeat, and the results claimed for them
may indeed not be true at all. It is none-
theless significant that few neurophysi-
ologists have even bothered to check
of chemical memory transfer would
constitute a fact of capital importance.
The lack of interest of neurophysiolo-
gists in the macromolecular theory of
memory can be accounted for by recog-
nizing that the theory, whether true or
false, is clearly premature. There is no
chain of reasonable inferences by means
of which our present, albeit highly im-
perfect, view of the functional organiza-
tion of the brain can be reconciled with
the possibility of its acquiring, storing
and retrieving nervous information by
encoding such information in molecules
of nucleic acid or protein. Accordingly
for the community of neurophysiologists
there is no point in devoting time to
checking on experiments whose results,
even if they were true as alleged, could
not be connected with canonical knowl-
edge.
The concept of here-and-now prema-
turity can be applied also to the trouble-
some subject of ESP, or extrasensory
perception. In the summer of 1948 I
happened to hear a heated argument at
Cold Spring Harbor between two future
mandarins of molecular biology, Salva-
dor Luria of Indiana University and
R. E. Roberts of the Carnegie Institu-
tion's laboratory in Washington. Roberts
was then interested in ESP, and he felt
it had not been given fair consideration
by the scientific community. As I re-
call, he thought that one might be able
to set up experiments with molecular
beams that could provide more defini-
tive data on the possibility of mind-
induced departures from random dis-
tributions than J. B. Rhine's then much
discussed card-guessing procedures.
Luria declared that not only was he not
interested in Roberts' proposed experi-
worthy of anyone claiming to be a scien-
tist even to discuss such rubbish. How
could an intelligent fellow such as Rob-
erts entertain the possibility of phenom-
cna totally irreconcilable with the most
elementary physical laws? Moreover, a
phenomenon that is manifest only to
specially endowed subjects, as claimed
by "parapsychologists" to be the case
for ESP, is outside the proper realm of
science, which must deal with phenom-
ena accessible to every observer. Rob-
· erts replied that far from him being un-
scientific, it was Luria whose bigoted
attitude toward the unknown was un-
worthy of a true scientist. The fact that
not everyone has ESP only means that
it is an elusive phenomenon, similar to
musical genius. And just because a phe-
nomenon cannot be reconciled with
what we now know, we need not shut
our eyes to it. On the contrary, it is the
duty of the scientist to try to devise ex-
periments designed to probe its truth
or falsity.
It seemed to me then that both Luria
and Roberts were right, and in the in-
tervening years I often thought about
this puzzling disagreement, unable to
resolve it in my own mind. Finally six
years ago I read a review of a book on
ESP by my Berkeley colleague C. West
Churchman, and I began to see my way
toward a resolution. Churchman stated
that there are three different possible
scientific approaches to ESP. The first of
these is that the truth or falsity of ESP,
like the truth or falsity of the existence
of God or of the immortality of the soul,
is totally independent of either the
methods or the findings of empirical sci-
ence: Thus the problem of ESP is de-
S
CELL-FREE EXTRACT
(TRANSFORMING
PRINCIPLE)
0
PRECIPITATION
CELL DEBRIS
SERUM FACTORS
TRANS-
FORMATION
0
0
0
0
0
6
R STRAIN
... um that causes pneumonia in mammals, is enclosed in a smooth
(hence S) polysaccharide capsule that protects the bacterium from
: the ordinary defense mechanisms of the infected animal. The avir-
.: ulent mutant, or R-type (R for rough), strain has lost the genetic
... capacity to form this protective capsule and hence is comparatively
harmless. When Approved ForiReleased2001/03/26 :01A-RDP96-00787R000200080054-5til 1952.
S donor bacteria was added to mutant R recipient bacteria, some
of the mutants were found to regain the genetic capacity to form
the capsule and thus were transformed back into the normal, vir-
ulent S type. Avery purified the transforming principle and suc-
ceeded in showing that it is DNA. The significance of Avery's dis-
87

fined out of existence. I imagine that t"
was Approved For Release 2009763/26 CIA-RDP9606787R0902000800545, as Luria h
Churchman's second approach is to
reformulate the ESP phenomenon in
terms of currently acceptable scientific
notions, such as unconscious perception
or conscious fraud. Hence, rather than
defining ESP out of existence, it is triv-
ialized. The second approach probably
would have been acceptable to Luria
too, but not to Roberts.
The third approach is to take the
proposition of ESP literally and to at-
tempt to examine in all seriousness the'
evidence for its validity. That was more
or less Roberts' position. As Churchman
points out, however, this approach is not
likely to lead to satisfactory results.
Parapsychologists can maintain with
salready been proved to the hilt, since
no other set of hypotheses in psychology
has received the degree of critical scru-
tiny that has been given to ESP experi-
ments. Moreover, many other phenom-
ena have been accepted on much less
statistical evidence than what is offered
for ESP. The reason Churchman ad-
vances for the futility of a strictly evi-
dential approach to ESP is that in the
absence of a hypothesis of how ESP
could work it is not possible to decide
whether any set of relevant observations
can be accounted for only by ESP to the
exclusion of alternative explanations.
After reading Churchman's review I
realized that Roberts would have been
ill-advised to proceed with his ESP ex-
GUANINE
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Five years ago Chargaff wrote one of
the many reviews of The Double
Helix, Watson's autobiographical ac-
count of his and Crick's discovery of the
structure of DNA. In his review Char-
gaff observes that scientific autobiogra-
phy is "a most awkward literary genre .?
Most such works, he says, "give the im-
pression of having been written for the
remainder tables of bookstores, reaching
THYMINE
ADENINE
them almost before they are published.".
OLD VIEW of the chemical structure of DNA, widely held until well into the 1930's, saw
the molecule as being merely a tetranucleotide composed of one unit each of adenylic, gua-
nylie, thymidylic and cytidylic acids. This hypothesis demanded that the molecular weight
of DNA be little more than 1,000 and that the four nucleotide bases (adenine, guanine,
thymine and cytosine) occur in exactly equal proportions. Even when it was finally realized
in the 1940's that the molecular weight of DNA is much higher (in the millions or bil-
lions), it was still widely believed that the tetranucleotide was the basic repeating unit of
large DNAAmbroved For Release 2001/03/26 .CIA-RDP96,00787R00020008
The reasons for this, according to Char-
gaff, are not far to seek: scientists "lead.
monotonous and uneventful lives and ...
besides often do not know how to write.".
Moreover, "there may also be profound;
er reasons for the general triteness of
scientific
autobiographies. Timon of
Rot have been writtens.
to be an obstacle to the eventual acceptance of the idea that DNA is the genetic material. . 'Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon' not have;
claimed, they would not be "science
but because any positive evidence ]
might have found in favor of ESP woud
have been, and would still be, prem
ture. That is, until it is possible to co
nect ESP with canonical knowledge c
say, electromagnetic radiation and net
rophysiology no demonstration of i
occurrence could be appreciated.
Is the lack of appreciation of prema
ture discoveries merely attributable t-
the intellectual shortcoming or innal
conservatism of scientists who, if thePRESE
were only more perceptive or morale as
open-minded, would give immediataanged
recognition to any well-documented scmine is
entific proposition? Polanyi is not of thenine is
opinion. Reflecting on the cruel fate
his theory half a century after first ad
vancing it, he declared: "This miscar been 1
riage of the scientific method could no casso
have been avoided. ... There must be a scient
all times a predominantly accepted sci claime
entific view of the nature of things, Every i
the light of which research is jointh that 1
conducted by members of the commu makes
nity of scientists. A strong presumptionfor C o
that any evidence which contradicty
On
this view is invalid must prevail. Such self in
evidence has to be disregarded, even isof lite
it cannot be accounted for, in the hope I was
that it will eventually turn out to be emine
(thet
false or irrelevant."
That is a view of the operation of sci Marx
ence rather different from the one come by in
monly held, under which acceptance of
man
authority is seen as something to be evolu
avoided at all costs. The good scientist
time
"grea
lutio
to m
is seen as an unprejudiced man with an.
open mind who is ready to embrace any
new idea supported by the facts. The
history of science shows, however, thate tradi
its practitioners do not appear to act
according to that popular view.
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it
PRESENT VIEW of the chemical structure of DNA sees the mole.
cule as a long chain in which the four nucleotide bases can be ar-
ranged in any arbitrary order. Although the proportion of ade-
nine is always equal to that of thymine and the proportion of gua-
mine is always equal to that of cytosine, the ratio of adenine-thy-
mine to guanine-cytosine can vary over a large range, depending
on the biological source of the DNA. With the elaboration of this
single-strand structure it became possible to envision that genetic
information is encoded in the DNA molecule as a specific se-
quence of the four nucleotide bases (see illustration on next page).
been painted, had Shakespeare and Pi-
casso not existed. But of how many uniqueness of their creations,
scientific achievements can this be
claimed? One could almost say that, with
very few exceptions, it is not the men
that make science, it is science that
makes the men. What A does today, B
or C or D could surely do tomorrow."
ra-
n-
he
ag
1."
ad
d-
DE
of
n,
! On reading this passage, I found my-
'self in full agreement on the general lack
of literary skills among men of science.
I was surprised, however, to find an
eminent scientist embracing historicism
(the theory championed by Hegel and
Marx holding that history is determined.
-by immutable forces rather than by hu-
man agency) as an explanation for the
evolution of science while at the same
time professing belief in the libertarian
"great man" view of history for the evo-
lution of art. Since it had not occurred
to me that anyone could hold such con-
tradictory, and to me obviously false,
views concerning these two most im-
portant domains of human creation, I
began to ask scientific friends and col-
leagues whether they too, by any
chance, thought there was an impor-
tant qualitative difference between the
achievements of art and of science,
namely that the former are unique and
the latter inevitable. To my even greater
surprise, I found that most of them
seemed to agree with Chargaff. Yes, they
-said, it is quite true that we would not
have had Timon of Athens or "Les Des-
moiselles d'Avignon" if Shakespeare
and Picasso had not existed, but if Wat-
son and Crick had not existed, we would
have had the DNA double helix any-
way. Therefore, contrary to my first im-
pression, it does not seem to be all that
obvious that this proposition has little
philosophical or historical merit. Hence
I shall now attempt to show that there
is no such profound difference between
the arts and sciences in regard to the
Before discussing the proposition of
differential uniqueness of creation it is
necessary to make an explicit statement
of the meaning of "art" and of "science."
My understanding of these terms is
based on the view that both the arts
and the sciences are activities that en-
deavor to discover and communicate
truths about the world. The domain to
which the artist addresses himself is the
inner, subjective world of the emotions.
Artistic statements therefore pertain
mainly to relations between private
events of affective significance. The do-
main of the scientist, in contrast, is the
outer, objective world of physical phe-
nomena. Scientific statements therefore
pertain mainly to relations between or
among public events, Thus the transmis-
sion of information and the perception
of meaning in that information consti-
tute the central content of both the arts
and the sciences. A creative act on the
part of either an artist or a scientist
would mean his formulation of a new
meaningful statement about the world,
an addition to the accumulated capital
of what is sometimes called "our cul-
tural heritage." Let us therefore examine
the proposition that only Shakespeare
could have formulated the semantic
structures represented by Timon, where-
as people other than Watson and Crick
might have made the communication
represented by their paper, "A Structure
for Deoxyribonucleic Acid," published
in Nature in the spring of 1953.
fabulous monkey typists complete their
random work at the British Museum ..
And so both creations are from that
point of view unique. We are not really
concerned, however, with the exact
word sequence. We are concerned with
the content. Thus we admit that people
other than Watson and Crick would
eventually have described a satisfactory
molecular structure for DNA, But then
the character of Timon and the story of
his trials and tribulations not only might
have been written without Shakespeare
but also were written without him.
Shakespeare merely reworked the story
of Timon he had read in William Paint-
er's collection of classic tales, The Palace
of Pleasure, published 40 years earlier,
and Painter in turn had used as his
sources Plutarch and Lucian. But then
we do not really care about Timon's
story; what counts are the deep insights
into human emotions that Shakespeare
provides in his play. He shows us here
how a man may make his response to
the injuries of life, how he may turn
from lighthearted benevolence to pas-
sionate hatred toward his fellow men.
Can one be sure, however, that Timon
is unique from this bare-bones stand-
point of the work's artistic essence? No,
because who is to say that if Shake-
speare had not existed no other drama-
tist would have provided for us the
same insights? Another dramatist would
surely have used an entirely different
story (as Shakespeare himself did in his
much more successful King Lear) to
treat the same theme and he might have
succeeded in pulling it off. The reason
no one seems to have done it since is
that Shakespeare had already done it
in 1607, just as no one discovered the
structure of DNA after Watson and
Crick had already discovered it in 1953.
First, it is evident that the exact word
sequence that Watson and Crick pub-
lished in Nature would not have been
written if the authors had not existed,
any more than the exact word sequence
of Timon would have been written with-
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Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080054-5
HYDROGEN BONDS
serting that Timon is uniquely Shaker
speare's, because no other dramatist, al-
though he might have brought us more
or less the same insights, would have
done it in quite the same exquisite way
as Shakespeare. But here we must not
shortchange Watson and Crick and take
for granted that those other people who
eventually would have found the struc-
ture of DNA would have found it in just
the same way and produced the same
revolutionary effect on contemporary bi-
ology. On the basis of my acquaintance
with the personalities then engaged in
trying to uncover the structure of DNA,
I believe that if Watson and Crick had
not existed, the insights they provided
in one single package would have come
out much more gradually over a period
of many months or years. Dr. B might
have seen that DNA is a double-strand
helix, and Dr. C might later have reck
ognized the hydrogen bonding between
the strands. Dr. D later yet might have
proposed a complementary purine-py-
rimidine bonding, with Dr. E in a sub-
sequent paper proposing the specific
adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine
nucleotide pairs. Finally, we might have
had to wait for Dr. G to propose the
replication mechanism of DNA based on
the complementary nature of the two
strands. All the while Drs. H, I, J, K and
L would have been confusing the issue
by publishing incorrect structures and
proposals. Thus I fully agree with the
judgment offered by Sir Peter Medawar
in his review of The Double Helix: "The
great thing about [ Watson and Crick's]
discovery was its completeness, its air
of finality. If Watson and Crick had
been seen groping toward an answer, if
they had published a partly right solu-
tion and had been obliged to follow it
up with corrections and glosses, some
of them made by other people; if the
solution had come out piecemeal instead
of in a blaze of understanding; then it
would still have been a great episode in.
biological history; but something more
in the common run of things; something
splendidly well done, but not in the
grand romantic manner."
Why is it that so many scientists ap-
parently fail to see that it can be
said of both art and science that where-
as "what A does today, B or C or D
could surely do tomorrow," B or C or
D might nevertheless not do it as well as,
A, in the same "grand romantic man-
ner." I think a variety of reasons can ber
myopia. The first of them is simply that
most scientists are not familiar with the:
ca
Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080064-5or this strange:
WATSON-CRICK MODEL of the structure of DNA, the discovery of which was announced
to
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&to picture the artist's act of creation in
A: the terms of Hollywood: Cornel Wilde
.Chopin gazing fondly at Merle Oberon
as his muse and mistress George Sand
and then sitting down at the Pleyel pi-
anoforte to compose his "Preludes." As
scientists know full well, science is done
quite differently: Dozens of stereotyped
and ambitious researchers are slaving
away in as many identical laboratories,
all trying to make similar discoveries,
all using more or less the same knowl-
edge and techniques, some of them suc-
ceeding and some not. Artists, on the
other hand, tend to conceive of the sci-
entific act of creation in equally un-
realistic terms: Paul Muni in the role of
the one and only Louis Pasteur, who
while burning the midnight oil in his
laboratory has the inspiration to take
some bottles from the shelf, mix their
contents and thus discover the vaccine
for rabies. Artists, in turn, know that art
is done quite differently: Dozens of
stereotyped and ambitious writers,
# painters and composers are slaving away
in as many identical garrets, all trying
to produce similar works, all using more
or less the same knowledge and tech-
niques, some succeeding and some not.
A second reason is that the belief in
the inevitability of scientific discoveries
appears to derive support from the
+ often-told tales of famous cases in the
# history of science where the same dis-
covery was made independently two or
's more times by different people. For in-
stance, the independent invention of
the calculus by Leibniz and Newton or
the independent recognition of the role
of natural selection in evolution by Wal-
lace and Darwin. As the study of such
"multiple discoveries" by Robert Merton
of Columbia University has shown, how- .
ever, on detailed examination they are
rarely, if ever, identical. The reason
they are said to be multiple is simply
that in spite of their differences one can
recognize a semantic overlap between
them that is transformable into a con-
gruent set of ideas.
The third, and somewhat more pro-
found, reason is that whereas the cumu-
lative character of scientific creation is
. at once apparent to every scientist, the
similarly cumulative character of artis-
tic creation is not. For instance, it is ob-
vious that no present-day working ge-
neticist has any need to read the origi-
nal papers of Mendel, because they have
been completely superseded by the
# work of the past century. Mendel's pa-
pers contain no useful information that
cannot be better obtained from any
cal literature. In contrast, the modern
writ -- , composer or painter still needs
in the role of ApprovedhiFor Release 2001/03/26 ; CIARDR96-00787R005:00180DV5
works of Shakespeare, Bach or Leonar-
do, which, so it is thought, have not been
superseded at all. In spite of the seeming
truth of this proposition, it must be said
that art is no less cumulative than sci-
ence, in that artists no more work in a
traditionless vacuum than scientists do.
Artists also build on the work of their
predecessors; they start with and later
improve on the styles and insights that
have been handed down to them from
their teachers, just as scientists do. To
stay with our main example, Shake-
speare's Timon has its roots in the works
of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
It was those authors of Greek antiquity
who discovered tragedy as a vehicle for
communicating deep insights into af-
fects, and Shakespeare, drawing on
many earlier sources, finally developed
that Greek discovery to its ultimate
height. To some limited extent, there-
fore, the plays of the Greek dramatists
have been superseded by Shakespeare's.
Why, then, have Shakespeare's plays not
been superseded by the work of later,
lesser dramatists?
Here we finally do encounter an im-
portant difference between the creations
of art and of science, namely the feasi-
bility of paraphrase. The semantic con-
tent of an artistic work-a play, a cantata
or a painting-is critically dependent on
the exact manner of its realization; that
is, the greater an artistic work is, the
more likely it is that any omissions or
changes from the original detract from
its content. 'In other words, to para-
phrase a great work of art-for instance
to rewrite Timon-without loss of artis-
tic quality requires a genius equal to
the genius of the original creator. Such
a successful paraphrase would, in fact,
constitute a great work of art in its own
right. The semantic content of a great
scientific paper, on the other hand, al-
though its impact at the time of publi-
cation may also be critically dependent
on the exact manner in which it is pre-
sented, can later be paraphrased with-
out serious loss of semantic content by
lesser scientists. Thus the simple state-
ment "DNA is a double-strand, self-
complementary helix" now suffices to
communicate the essence of Watson and
Crick's great discovery, whereas "A man
responds to the injuries of life by turn-
ing from lighthearted benevolence to
passionate hatred toward his fellow
men" is merely a platitude and not a
paraphrase of Timon. It took the writing
of King Lear to paraphrase (and im-
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. mer has superseded the latter
Shakespearean dramatic repertoire.
* The fourth, and probably deepest,
reason for the apparent prevalence
among scientists of the proposition that
artistic creations are unique and scien-
tific creations are not can be attributed
to a contradictory epistemological at-
titude toward the events in the outer
and the inner world. The outer world,
which science tries to fathom, is often
viewed from the standpoint of material-
ism, according to which events and the
relations between them have an exis-
tence independent of the human mind.
Hence the outer world and its scientific
laws are simply there, and it is the job of
the scientist to find them. Thus going
after scientific discoveries is like pick-
ing wild strawberries in a public park:
the berries A does not find today B or C
or D will surely find tomorrow. At the
same time, many scientists view the in-
ner world, which art tries to fathom,
from the standpoint of idealism, ac-
cording to which events and relations
their reflection in human thought. Hence
there is nothing to be found in the inner
world, and artistic creations are cut sim-
ply from whole cloth. Here B or C or D
could not possibly find tomorrow what
A found today, because what A found
had never been there. It is not altogether
surprising, of course, to find this split
epistemological attitude toward the two
worlds, since of these two antithetical
traditions in Western philosophical
thought, materialism is obviously an un-
satisfactory approach to art and idealism
an unsatisfactory approach to science.
Tt is only in the past 20 years or so,
more or less contemporaneously with
the growth of molecular biology, that a
resolution of the age-old epistemologi-
cal conflict of materialism v. idealism
was found in the form of what has come
to be known as structuralism. Structur-
alism emerged simultaneously, inde-
pendently and in different guises in sev-
eral diverse fields of study, for example
197872000200080054-5
linguistics, anthropology"
Both materialism and idealism take it
for granted that all the information gath-
ered by our senses actually reaches our?s.
mind; materialism envisions that thanks **
to this information reality is mirrored in d.
the mind, whereas idealism envisions
that thanks to this information reality is&
constructed by the mind. Structuralism,
on the other hand, has provided the in-
sight that knowledge about the world-
enters the mind not as raw data but in
already highly abstracted form, namely -;
as structures. In the preconscious proc-
ess of converting the primary data of
our experience step by step into struc-
tures, information is necessarily lost, be --
cause the creation of structures, or the
recognition of patterns, is nothing else
than the selective destruction of infor-
mation. Thus since the mind does not
gain access to the full set of data about.
the world, it can neither mirror nor con-
struct reality. Instead for the mind real-
ity is a set of structural transforms of
Wilde), after gazing fondly at his muse George Sand (Merle Ober-
6: CIA-RDR96-00787R0002000grupases his "Prel.
udes." Science, as any scientist knows, is done quhe differently.
primary
transfor
in that
from "w
tive des
of prim
only aft
so trans
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existing
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process
mamma
that the
ing to t
offer an
those te
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vance
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under
maturi
structu
standir
apprec
logical
1
ists is idealized in this scene from the 1945 Columbia Pictures
duction A Song to Remember. Frederic Chopin (played by Cornel
A
e

er
-el.
ly.
> primary data taken from the world. This
knowledge. In the parlance of struc-
transformation Approved For Release 2001/09/20CARDP06-00787R000200080056alt, or
in that "stronger" structures are formed
the set of preexisting "strong" structures
with which primary scientific data are
. made congruent in the mental-abstrac-
tion process. Hence data that cannot be
transformed into a structure congruent
with canonical knowledge are a dead
end; in the last analysis they remain
meaningless. That is, they remain mean-
ingless until a way has been shown to
transform them into a structure that is
congruent with the canon.
„from "weaker" structures through selec-
tive destruction of information. Any set
of primary data becomes meaningful
only after a series of such operations has
so transformed-it that it has become con-
gruent with a stronger structure pre-
existing in the mind. Neurophysiological
studies carried out in recent years on the
process of visual perception in higher
mammals have not only shown directly
that the brain actually operates accord-
ing to the tenets of structuralism but also
offer an easily understood illustration of
those tenets. )
111
3
1
t
_t
Finally, we may consider the rele-
vance of structuralist philosophy for the
two problems in the history of science
under discussion here. As far as pre-
" maturity of discovery is concerned,
je structuralism provides us with an under -.
standing of why a discovery cannot be
appreciated until it can be connected
logically to contemporary canonical
As far as uniqueness of discovery is
concerned, structuralism leads to the
recognition that every creative act in
the arts and sciences is both common-
place and unique. On the one hand, it
is commonplace in the sense that there
is an innate, or genetically determined,
correspondence in the transformational
operations that different individuals per-
form on the same primary data. With
reference to science, cognitive psychol-
ogy has taught that different individuals
recognize the same "chairness" of a chair
because they all make a given set of
sions from the outer world
mental structure. With reference to art,
analytic psychology has taught that
there is a sameness in the subconscious
life of different individuals because an
innate human archetype causes them to
make the same structural transforma-
tions of the events of the inner world.
And with reference to both art and sci-
ence structural linguistics has taught
that communication between different
individuals is possible only because an
innate human grammar causes them to
transform a given set of semantic sym-
bols into the same syntactic structure.
On the other hand, every creative act is
unique in the sense that no two individ-
uals are quite the same and hence never
perform exactly the same transforma-
tional operations on a given set of pri-
mary data. Although all creative acts in
both art and science are therefore both
commonplace and unique, some may
nonetheless be more unique than others.
H :
" ARTISTS' MISCONCEPTION of the scientific act of creation is
& equally unsealisis, louise
film The Stoly B
P Bf Louis Pasteur the gren
js scene from the 1935 Warner Brothers
Muni) has the sudden inspiration to discover the vaccine for rabies.
Art, as any artist knows, is done quite differently. Both photo-
Please.2001/03/26 1 CIA-RDR96-00787-R000200080054-5tills Archive.
93
1