Nanowrimo Winner

10. Science

Although he absorbed history books avidly, and re-read certain political texts over and over again, my father was not an intellectual, and while advances in medicine and practical technology quickly kindled his enthusiasm, high theoretical science tended to leave him cold or even sceptical. This was sometimes a source of slight embarrassment when he was called on to hand out prizes or make speeches at some University. I particularly remember one visit to the People’s Observatory high in the Graupin mountains where he asked to be shown the eyepiece on the giant radio telescope, and accused the astronomers of looking into the bedroom windows of Sescastri in their spare time. The Head of the Observatory was a dignified old man in a grey three-piece suit; the smile on his face got more and more fixed as the visit proceeded. Of course my father was unabashed.

“Comrades,” he said, “No less a figure than V.I.Lenin himself was a keen amateur astronomer. On one occasion, while he was visiting the fields to examine the splendid surpluses which were being produced by the latest five-year plan, he came upon a worker leaning on a gate and staring into the evening sky. On being questioned, the worker explained that he was puzzled by the appearance of a bright star while the sun was still up – indeed, quite close to the sun. Lenin smiled, and explained that this was no star but the planet Venus. He discovered to his horror that the worker had no idea of astronomy and in fact had never heard that the Earth went round the Sun. Lenin was mortified to think that the Soviet education system had somehow left this man with an understanding little better than that of a peasant, and immediately gave him a quick extemporised description of the Solar System. The man seemed appreciative, so warming to his challenge, Lenin settled down and gave the lucky worker a splendidly concise and clear summary of modern cosmology, technically accurate throughout, but couched in simple everyday language which even an ordinary worker could easily follow. He mentioned a number of constellations and some of the main stars that made them up, giving details of their characteristics and the stages in their normal life-cycle. Was the worker not amazed, he asked finally, by the achievements of modern science in measuring the unfathomable depths of space and working out the composition of the stars themselves? The worker agreed, but said that the thing that surprised him most was not that anyone should have measured the stars from a distance, but that anyone should have been able to find out what their names were. Comrades, I beg you: consider yourselves today so many Lenins.”

However, my father rightly considered himself a good judge of people, and when he first came across Raphaele Blumen he decided that this scientist, at least, was worth listening to. Blumen was a young man from Servinia province, the son of farm labourers. At the time of their first meeting he was more or less desperate. His seminal paper, On Cryptomorphosis, written at the age of 25, had been rejected out of hand everywhere and he was in trouble with the Professor of his Department for his continued attempts to have it discussed. Blumen was convinced that his rustic Latio-tinged accent and unpolished manners were making him the object of snobbery. It so happened that my father was due to make one of his rare visits to the Scholastic University of Lexandrin that month to open a new laboratory: Blumen decided on desperate measures. By begging the Professor’s secretary for her help, he managed to get himself added to the guest list for the reception which had been organised. At the door, however, he was turned back for being improperly dressed, having turned up unthinkingly in his stained old lab coat and clogs. Rousing himself with an effort from the depths of despair, he went back to his lodgings, managed somehow to borrow a half-decent suit, hurried back and was admitted. Without further ado, he charged forward through the startled guests and thrust a slightly dog-eared copy of his paper into my father’s hands.

My father, naturally, was startled: there he was, sinking gradually into torpor as Professor Vitalin plied him with Puttonyin wine and talked interminably about cyclotrons – he had a quite unrealistic hope that my father would agree to fund the construction of one at the University – when suddenly a skinny young man with a shock of curly hair thrust the Professor’s wife aside with an atrocious lack of manners, and pushed a sheaf of papers into my father’s hand. Blumen was pale and undernourished; his cheekbones stood out while his chin receded, and his red-rimmed eyes blazed with passion.

“Blumen!” Vitalin exclaimed, “Really, this is too much!”

“Will you, will you…?” said Blumen incoherently, never taking his eyes off my father. “It’s… it’s extremely important.”

“You want me to read this? I’m sorry young man, don’t think I don’t appreciate the compliment, but really I am no scientist. If this is a learned paper, you might as well give it to a bear in the forest as to me.” My father looked curiously at Blumen; the young man himself at least was legible and interesting, but even a quick glance showed that the paper was incomprehensible. My father held it out to Vitalin.

“I’m very sorry, Comrade President,” said Vitalin, “Please, you understand that in every institution there are disorderly elements who will not accept the judgement of their peers. Blumen here is a clever young man, and we value his enthusiasm, but he must learn to accept that his work is completely at odds with the established consensus of the scientific community. The occurrence of a few unusual correlations does not provide a reason to cut through the foundations of modern cellular biology.”

Dr Niardin, a balding man standing to Vitalin’s right, had been turning gradually red in the face as he listened to this.

“Vitalin, you are altogether too soft,” he exclaimed, “This young man has shown all too clearly that he has no place in any respectable place of learning. Originality and intelligence are worthless unless controlled by a proper respect for the orthodox consensus of the scientific community and the guidance of senior members of the field. Science is a discipline, not the free expression of an individual’s wilful curiosity. This intrusion is intolerable, and as for that – ” he gestured at the paper, which my father was still holding in mid-air “- that is a prime example of how the individualistic pursuit of strange and exotic data and the egotistical display of mere cleverness would overturn science as we know it if they were allowed to do so.”

My father blinked once, and said:

“Perhaps it is my duty to read the paper after all.” and he lowered his arm again.

Of course, my father had been right in the first place – there was absolutely no point in his reading the paper. He solemnly worked his way through it the following morning, but was entirely unable to make out even approximately what it was about, beyond gleaning the wholly false impression that it was something to do with the functioning of radio waves of some kind. Bearing in mind the reaction of the academic staff at Lexandrin, my father didn’t think it was worth referring the thing to another professor, but instead he sent it to Sergi Scalapin the surgeon and asked him to read it. Over the course of time, Scalapin and my father had developed a kind of respect for each other; in my father’s case he trusted Scalapin all the more because the old man made no secret of the fact that he continued to detest my father’s socialism. On this occasion, typically enough, Scalapin refused to come to my father’s office, saying he couldn’t spare the time, so my father went to the trouble of travelling to Oni-Litani to see him.

“I don’t know why you gave this to me, Larvartin,” said the old surgeon irritably, once they were settled in the room he used for his consultations. It was a well-proportioned room; rather sparsely furnished, but there was a splendid view of the lake and the celebrated pier of Oni-Litani. Scalapin, a stoutish old man with a severe expression, sat in a comfortable leather armchair, the only thing in the room which was not strictly utilitarian.

“I’m not a theoretical scientist,” he continued, “Oh I try to keep up, you know, but basically I’m a simple butcher. However, I know enough to be able to say that the young man who wrote this needs his arse kicked.”

“Really?” said my father, disappointedly.

“Yes. I’ve never read such a silly, pretentious paper. Look at this nonsensical passage about extra-sensory perception. I think it’s meant to be a joke, but I can tell you that any serious academic would drop the damned thing there without reading another word, and if this were submitted to a proper journal – well, if the academic staff at Lexandrin are any good it would never come near that. Frankly I think your boy is lucky he hasn’t been thrown out on his ear.”

“My boy?”

“Blumen, for heaven’s sake,” said Scalapin irritably, waving one hand, “I assume he’s one of your damned Communist Party blue-eyed boys, isn’t he? You see, Larvartin, you’ve got to learn to separate science from politics. If you start promoting the crackpot theories of young physicists simply because they’re good members of some Party committee, you’re going to do irreparable damage to the scientific reputation this damned country has somehow hung on to.”

“So the theory is worthless?”

“I expect you were hoping it was going to be some kind of brilliant breakthrough. Well, I’ll tell you about that,” said Scalapin, with a sly grin, “One point I keep in mind when reading papers like this is that the best scientists are not always the best at expressing themselves. Some people build a career on a facility with words while being mediocre researchers, while some good scientists never get the attention they deserve because they can’t write appealing prose.”

“So I decided to meet this Blumen myself. I got him over here. I couldn’t make out what his bloody paper was about – a lot of arrogant nonsense, mostly, but there was no denying that if you could penetrate the dreadful language, there were some sharp, elegant formulations in there, and some surprising connections. Well, he sat where you’re sitting and talked to me for half an hour, and it was no better than reading his paper. A fellow as young as that can’t afford to put on airs, he needs to express himself in simple, terms, with a proper degree of humility. After all, he’s out of his field altogether.”

“Is he?”

“Of course he is. Even you must have realised that. Blumen is a physicist, but he’s writing about biology – and on top of that most of what he says is pretty severely mathematical. I like to think I’m capable of a few advanced bits of maths, if it comes to it, but really this is a bit outside my range. At any rate, that’s half the problem with Blumen; he uses the wrong biological terms, he introduces new concepts of his own where they’re not needed, and he mixes in all sorts of stuff from physics and maths into some horrible kind of pudding.”

“Anyway, in the end I shut him up, told him he wasn’t dealing with his Lefty friends now, and made him work through the whole thing with me, step by step. He was pretty angry about it, I can tell you – quite red in the face with rage – but I’m quite used to keeping a firm rein on conceited young doctors. Now at first it was as bad as ever, but then all of a sudden when he was talking dismissively about Turing waves, I suddenly began to see what the hell he was getting at.”

“The point about it all is, Larvartin, that autopoietic morphogenesis is virtually a new field, and a pretty strange one. It’s almost as if someone wrote about the topological invariance of lyrical poetry. It’s such a different angle, I imagine it would have been impossible for his professor to take it in properly even if your boy had set it out clearly.”

He smiled.

“So, you think there’s something it in after all?” asked my father, “What… excuse me, but what actually is Blumen’s theory about?”

Scalapin opened his mouth and then looked keenly at my father and sighed.

“Let me offer you an analogy, Larvartin,” he said, “Now you know that our bodies, like all living things, are made up of cells? Yes alright, I’m just trying to keep it simple for you. Now in a human body, the different cells have to be controlled, so that they grow into the right kind of cells, muscle cells, say, or skin cells. They also have to have their growth controlled and so on, do I make myself clear? Well, the systems by which this control is exercised are quite complex. In fact, it might be better to speak of a principle rather than a system.”

He paused and sat staring at my father as if that was the end of the explanation.

“But what…” began my father and was immediately interrupted.

“Suppose we had the traffic in a big city to control?” said Scalapin, “Now there are various ways we can control it. We can change the road signs. We can put policemen in, yes? We can make gates restricting what kind of vehicles are allowed into our city. All these things, these are the kind of things that researchers have studied, hoping to be able to control the traffic. Now you see, it’s as if Blumen comes along and offers them a radio. They don’t understand how a little black box is going to control the cars and trucks in their city. But Scalapin knows that all the vehicles in town have radios and they are talking to each other all the time, you see? And now we can talk to them too, we can make them do what we want.”

I don’t know what impelled Scalapin to adopt this extremely imprecise analogy – in fact Blumen’s theory centres on a set of algorithms which allow growing cells to organise themselves in exquisite detail without central guidance. But the choice of radio-controlled cars as a metaphor was unfortunate because it cemented in my father’s mind the impression that the whole thing was to do with radio waves, a view which could never afterwards be wholly eradicated, much to Blumen’s own frustration.

“This is an important discovery, then?” demanded my father.

“Does it matter? You’ll tell everybody it’s important anyway, won’t you? Can’t have the blue-eyed Party member a failure, can we? Yes, alright Larvartin, luckily it turns out that somehow or other your boy has come up with something of real substance – if it’s true. In fact, if it’s true, it might eventually turn out to be quite important. ”

“Scalapin, Blumen is not my boy and he’s not a Party member. So the theory does need to be followed up?”

“What you need to do now is get someone who is competent to rewrite this paper so people can understand it and it can be published. Then other people must replicate and extend the results. Much bigger tests, much, much bigger. Then if it’s all confirmed, there will be dozens of useful new avenues. But first, proper scientific peer review.”

“Would you be able to rewrite the paper?”

“Absolutely not. I’m a surgeon, not an editor. You’ve got a whole government department full of advisors and doctors, surely to God you can find someone to do it without dragging an old surgeon away from his work. But get it done properly.”

He stared balefully at my father in silence.

“Thank you, Scalapin,” said my father, “Excuse my ignorance, but I think it would help if you could give me a few further clues about the theory. What practical benefits we might get from all this, for example.”

“Ha! You mean what diseases will it cure. All that’s a long way off, Larvartin, this is theoretical stuff. Well, speculatively, off the top of my head, I’d think the main potential avenues would have to do with healing processes, the management of abnormal development, perhaps age-related problems. Oncology, very likely. Really at this high theoretical level there could be the widest imaginable implications, or virtually none. To be honest my guess is that the theory will ultimately produce a richer understanding but not many actual therapies. Perhaps that’s pessimistic, but I’ve seen a lot of good theoretical work which in the end merely helped us understand more clearly what we couldn’t do and why we couldn’t do it.” said Scalapin.

“Of course,” replied my father. “Look, Scalapin, there’s another side to all this. How was it that the significance of Blumen’s stuff was missed? Alright, he may not express himself well, but someone should have done what you did – taken him in hand. I wonder whether we’ve allowed the old structures to persist in our Universities? Should we be bringing the revolution into our laboratories?”

“I want nothing to do with that.” Said Scalapin shortly and emphatically. “Look, I accept that you mean well. I grant that some of the things you’ve done in Lavordin and elsewhere have worked better than I expected. But please God, if I have any influence with you at all, keep your damned revolution out of science.”

There was an awkward pause.

“You see,” said my father gently, “I don’t want to do anything to the professors. I’m not going to shoot them. I just want them to set themselves free from their own fears and prejudices; I want people to take control of their own work. That’s all it’s about. We’ve talked about this so many times.”

They sat in silence for a few moments and then my father rose to go.

“I’m very grateful for your help with this,” he said, “Please remember that if you ever need any help here…”

He turned to go.

“Oh, Larvartin,” exclaimed Scalapin, “Try plants.”

“Plants?” asked my father, turning back again.

“Yes. Plant growth. This morphogenesis – it might be possible to do something about plant growth with it. Worth asking somebody to look at it, once you’ve got the paper rewritten.”

“Thanks.” said my father, and so the seed of the Second Agrarian Revolution was planted.

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