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SCIENCE ADVANCES
by J. B. S. Haldane
MARXIST PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES
HEREDITY AND POLITICS
SCIENCE ADVANCES
by
J. B. S. HALDANE
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
40 Museum Street
London
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 194?
SECOND IMPRESSION 1948
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
in l2~Point Fournier Type
BY UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED
WOKING
PREFACE
THE majority of these essays have appeared in the Daily Worker,
one in the New Statesman and Nation, one in Science and Society,
while the final article was published in Nature. In so far as one
theme runs through them, it is the growth of pure and applied
science. I have described some old and new discoveries and
inventions, and the way in which they are being, or could be,
used for the benefit of humanity or otherwise.
I anticipate two criticisms. I have sometimes repeated the
same statement in several articles. This was inevitable, since they
were written over a period of over four years, and also because
the same facts are of importance in different contexts. And I shall
be told that I have dragged in Marxism like King Charles's head.
This is again inevitable if the writer thinks, as I do, that Marxism
is the application of scientific method to the widest field so far
achieved by man. If Marxism were taken for granted, or even if
its general principles were widely understood in this country,
such emphasis would be unnecessary. But the facts which I
describe fit into a general framework, and Marxism is the best
account of this framework which I know. If other writers on
science can fit them into a better framework, by all means let
them do so. But they are not isolated from one another, or from
ordinary life, and it is a mistake to present them as if they were so.
I must thank colleagues who have helped me with facts, and
readers of the Daily Worker who have criticized the articles and
suggested topics. For this book is definitely a social product
rather than the efflorescence of my own mind.
October 1944
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 5
Some Great Men
Newton 1 1
Marx 14
Archimedes 1 7
Copernicus 19
Landsteiner 22
de Geer 25
Eddington 28
Wilson and Bragg 31
Boys 35
Milne 37
Animals and Plants
Newts 41
Cats 44
Flying ants 47
Bird migration 50
The starling on trial 52
Instinct 55
The origin of species 57
Species in the making 60
Back to the water 62
No caterpillars by request 65
Domestic animals 68
What to do with the Zoo 7 1
Spring 74
Potatoes 76
Britain's trees 78
3
Human Physiology and Evolution
Temperature 82
Quantity and quality 85
Blood 88
SCIENCE ADVANCES
j. Human Physiology and Evolution contd.
PAGE
Blood analysis 91
Blood and individuality 93
How muscles work 96
Sense organs 98
Brain waves 101
Learning 104
Fatigue during skilled work 107
Hygiene or sales talk? 109
Measuring human needs 112
Beyond the microscope 115
Evolution, and our weak points 118
Man's ancestors 120
There were giants 123
4
Medicine
The common cold 126
Moulds versus bacteria 128
Venereal diseases 13 1
Causes of cancer 134
A new attack on cancer 137
Nature cures 139
Inoculation 142
Immunization to diphtheria 145
-jgtene
Overcrowding and heart disease 149
Overcrowding and children's diseases 151
Overcrowding and tuberculosis 154
Dangerous trades 157
The drink trade 160
Factory ventilation, heating, and lighting 163
Badly housed occupations 165
When air burns 168
X-rays and their dangers 170
Colliery explosions 173
Euthanasia 176
CONTENTS
6
Inventions
PAGE
Inventions that made men free 179
Polarized light and its uses 182
The spectroscope 185
The electron microscope 188
The reading machine 190
Listening to doodlebugs 192
Farming the sea 195
A substitute for morphine ? 198
7
Soviet Science and Na^i Science
The cruise of the Sedov 201
How two thousand geologists saved the world 205
Colder than the pole 207
Vavilov 210
Soviet scientists and blood transfusion 213
Marxism and prehistory 214
A banned film 217
Genetics in the Soviet Union 220
Soviet children as scientists 226
Blubo 227
Nazi lessons in British schools 233
Race theory and Vansittartism 236
What to do with German science 238
8
Human Life and Death at High Pressures 2.42
1
SOME GREAT MEN
Newton
ISAAC NEWTON was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in the first
year of the Great Rebellion. Many people regard him as the
greatest man whom England has produced. But we mostly know
very little about him. This is largely due to ridiculous propaganda
about his life.
We think of Wordsworth's lines
a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone
or the story that a falling apple set him thinking about gravitation.
He is made out to be a thinker divorced from ordinary life. As
a matter of fact he was a very skilled craftsman.
As a boy we know that he interested himself in conjuring
tricks. As a man he made the first reflecting telescope, whose
most important part is a concave mirror, not a lens. For this
purpose he had to experiment with various alloys, and to grind
his own mirrors. To-day all large astronomical telescopes rely
on mirrors rather than lenses to concentrate the light from
distant stars.
As an experimenter he showed that white light could be split
up into colours in two different ways. A glass prism refracts blue
light, that is to say bends it out of its original path, more strongly
than red light. And a thin film of air between two layers of glass
reflects light of a colour whose wave-length is just equal to twice
the thickness of the gap, or some multiple of this length. He also
worked on static electrification.
If Newton had never done a sum in his life he would be
remembered as a great technician and a very great experimental
physicist. In addition he was one of the greatest mathematicians,
12 SCIENCE ADVANCES
perhaps the greatest, who ever lived. At the age of twenty-two
he invented what is now called the differential calculus, and at the
age of twenty-three the integral calculus. These were inde-
pendently invented by Leibniz in Germany within a few years.
Both these branches of mathematics were essentially tools for
his great project of producing a mechanical account of natural
events which would allow of their exact prediction.
The principles governing the flight of cannon balls were being
worked out at this time. Newton showed that the moon in its
course round the earth, and the earth and other planets in their
courses round the sun, obeyed the same laws. This was a very
great mathematical achievement. He also discovered the laws
governing the flow of heat and of some fluids.
He believed that he was describing the properties of real
matter in real space and real time. Some modern physicists say
that this is impossible, and that we cannot know the real nature
of things, but only devise theories which fit our experience more
or less exactly.
They point out that the work of the last forty years proves
that matter, space, and time are not what Newton thought them,
and that newer theories enable us to predict what will happen
more accurately than do Newton's theories. This is true. They go
on to say that this shows that one can never know what matter,
space, and time really are.
Certainly we can never know all about them. Lenin thought
that the properties of even a single electron, the smallest bit of
matter that we know, are inexhaustible. But most scientists think
it nonsense to say that because we cannot know all about matter,
we do not know anything about it.
How deeply Newton penetrated into the nature of matter is
shown by a simple fact. The moving stars do not obey Newton's
laws exactly. But their largest deviations from these laws are
about one three hundredth part of the errors of measurement
made by astronomers in Newton's day. If he had merely been
making theories to fit the available observations, the theories
would have been disproved as soon as more accurate measure-
ments were made. He went far beyond the observations, a long
way to the truth about matter.
SOME GREAT MEN 13
Newton's world picture fitted in extraordinarily well with the
ideology of the rising bourgeoisie. The need for it arose out of
practical problems of his day, especially those of navigation and
artillery. He pictured a world consisting of particles, each moving
in a way which could be predicted accurately once the forces on
it were calculated. In the same way society has been supposed to
consist of isolated individuals, each behaving according to
economic and psychological laws which governed their conduct.
As a result of the operation of these laws the universe was
thought to behave in an orderly way. And if economic laws were
allowed free play, with everyone acting according to his or her
self-interest, bourgeois economists thought that society would
function as perfectly as the stars in their courses.
History has disproved this latter theory, and about the
beginning of this century it was shown that in some important
respects matter did not behave in a Newtonian manner. If it did
so, to take only one example, solid bodies would collapse. But
modern physicists build on Newton's foundations, as Marx built on
those laid down by such economists as Petty, Smith, and Ricardo.
Newton was not only a scientist. Like most other Englishmen
of his time he believed that the Bible was inspired. He tried to
interpret the prophecies in the book of Daniel. His attempt is
interesting because, unlike most writers on such topics, he was
very cautious in his deductions.
He was also a politician. In 1687 King James II threatened the
liberties of Cambridge University, as those of Imperial College,
London, are now being threatened. Newton argued the case for
the University, and was elected by it to Parliament in 1689, as
a supporter of the Revolution by which Dutch William replaced
James II. He later became Warden and then Master of the Mint.
These were key posts, as there was no paper money in those
days, so the Mint was as important as the great banks to-day.
His knowledge of metallurgy was put in the service of the state.
In fact Newton took part in the progressive political move-
ments of his day. Like most great men, he was an all-round man.
The idea that scientists should shut themselves away from every-
day life did not appeal to him. He saw that science arises from,
and ministers to, social needs, and he acted accordingly.
i4 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Marx
Sixty years ago Karl Marx died in London. Every year since
his death he has had a greater influence on world history above
all since Lenin put his theories into practice in 1917. To-day
even those who most abhor Marxism have to admit that he was
a much more important historical force than such contemporary
political figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, or Queen Victoria, or
philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, Cardinal Newman, or
August Comte, who seemed to be great in their own time.
He can justly be compared with contemporaries like Faraday,
Darwin, and Pasteur, who are still influencing our lives and
thoughts, because their ideas were important not only for their
own time, but for many generations to come. These men applied
scientific method to new fields. So did Marx.
The two volumes of his Selected Works , just published by
Lawrence & Wishart, give some idea of the ground which he
covered, and form an excellent introduction to his thought.
There were great socialists before Marx. They saw what sort
of organization of society was needed. But they had not studied
history deeply enough to analyse the process of historical change,
and state the conditions by which socialism could come into
being, as Marx and Engels first stated them in the Communist
Manifesto.
There were great economists before Marx. But they were mostly
content with describing the economic structure of society as they
found it. Marx did not merely do this. He traced its origin and
showed how it was decaying before his eyes, while the embryo
of a new society was growing up within it in the form of the
workers' organizations.
Marx was also a great historian and philosopher. Of philoso-
phers he wrote, "Other philosophers have interpreted the world.
The point is to change it." And here he was in agreement with
the method of science. Hundreds of philosophers had interpreted
the motions of the stars and other moving bodies. Galileo started
experimenting, that is to say changing the motion or rest of
material objects,
SOME GREAT MEN 15
He found that Aristotle's and St. Thomas Aquinas's theories
did not work. Ever since then experiment has been the method
which scientists applied wherever it was possible, the method
which gives the most certain results.
Academic philosophers had tried to explain the world starting
from our sensations, and some of them concluded that the world
consisted of nothing but sensations. Marx saw that we are just
as closely related to the world by labour which changes it, as by
sensation, which only copies it, and that a philosophy in which
labour is not as important as sensation is of little value.
In the same way we can only get to understand the nature of
society by trying to change it. No living man has a clearer grasp
of the nature of society than Stalin, who has played a leading part
in two great changes, the overthrow of capitalism, and the building
up of socialism. Marx learned the true nature of class society from
his early revolutionary work.
Just as Darwin applied scientific method to the problem of
man's ancestry, and Pasteur to that of his diseases, Marx applied
it to history, politics, and economics. In each case the result of
the analysis was at first sight humiliating.
It was pleasanter to believe that we were made in God's image
than that we were descended from monkeys, to regard an epidemic
as a punishment from God rather than a result of a faulty water
supply. So it hurt human pride to be told that history was deter-
mined by economic causes rather than by the ideas of great men,
the judgments of God, or the racial soul rooted in blood and soil.
But humility is a condition for progress. If we believe that
our ancestors were monkeys we can hope that our descendants
will surpass us beyond our wildest imagination; if we know the
material causes of disease we can hope to abolish all diseases as
we have abolished many. If our history, laws, and morality rest
on an economic basis, we can see the way to a progress which
still seems impossible to many people.
By studying the laws of change in their most general form,
Marx and his friend and colleague Engels not only illuminated
history, but science. They did this in two ways. In the first place
scientific discoveries are part of the historical process, and depend
on productive forces and relations.
1 6 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Newton's work was possible because people needed exact
knowledge of the movements of the stars for navigation, and of
cannon balls for war. He showed that they obeyed the same laws.
Darwin could make his great generalizations because the exploita-
tion of colonies had disclosed the distribution of living animals
and plants through the world, and the development of mining
had disclosed the order in which fossil animals and plants had
appeared and died out in the past.
In the second place, material systems develop and perish
according to dialectical principles like those which hold for
human institutions. Engels was almost alone in his time in
thinking that chemical atoms were not indestructible. Rutherford
showed that they are born; and that they are destroyed, not
usually by external forces, but by their own internal stresses.
Marx did not live to see his theories applied by Lenin. Maxwell
did not live to see Hertz, Lodge, Marconi, and others apply his
theory of electromagnetic waves to radio-communication.
Leninism is Marxism developed by the experience of socialism
in action. But it is still Marxism.
Outside the Soviet Union there is a wide and growing distrust
of science. The intellectual leaders of the capitalist world, both
within the churches and outside them, tell us that science is
leading to increasing unhappiness, of which wars are the worst
but not the only symptom, because it is applied to machines and
not to the regulation of human conduct.
They are right up to a point. Marx said much the same a century
ago. But he took the decisive step of showing how scientific
method could be applied to human affairs on the broadest scale.
So far it has only been so applied in the Soviet Union.
We celebrate the anniversary of the great teacher who has
shown us the way out of our present distresses, who has demon-
strated that there are no limits to the application of science. We
can best honour his memory by doing all that we can to hasten
the day when Marxism will be the guiding principle in the govern-
ment of the country in which Marx spent most of his immensely
fruitful life.
SOME GREAT MEN IJ
Archimedes
The Eighth Army has taken Syracuse, a city which, when
it was free, broke the imperialism of Athens, and held up that
of Rome for many years. It is therefore fitting to commemorate
the greatest citizen of Syracuse, and probably the greatest
Sicilian.
Archimedes was killed in 212 B.C., at the age of seventy or over.
He was not only a first-rate mathematician, but a first-rate
scientist. As a mathematician, he broke away from the formal and
rather narrow methods of Greek geometry, and invented some-
thing very like the integral calculus.
Among the propositions which he proved was that the area
of a sphere is the same as that of the curved part of a cylinder
which just fits round it. The design of a sphere in a cylinder was
engraved on his tomb. He also showed that TT, the ratio of the
circumference of a circle to its diameter, is between 3^ and 3^y.
But his most important work was the founding of the science
of hydrostatics. According to the story usually told, King Hieron
of Syracuse had bought a crown which was alleged to be of pure
gold. The king suspected that it had a core of mere silver, but did
not want to cut it open, so he asked Archimedes how to decide
the question.
Archimedes hit on the answer in the public bath, and was so
excited that he rushed through the streets to the palace without
dressing. If this is true, he was the first absent-minded professor
in history, and the crown was worth more than all other crowns
put together.
He saw that a pound of silver occupies nearly twice as much
space as a pound of gold, and that the bulk can be measured by
putting each in a full vessel, and measuring how much water runs
over. So he compared the bulk of the crown with those of an
equal weight of gold and an equal weight of silver.
This led at once to the notion that every substance has a
characteristic density, or specific gravity. Thus a cubic inch of
gold weighs 19-25 times as much as a cubic inch of water, while
a cubic inch of silver weighs 10-5 times as much. So a silver
1 8 SCIENCE ADVANCES
crown displaces nearly twice as much water as a golden crown
of the same weight, and a mixed one displaces an intermediate
amount.
For thousands of years before Archimedes merchants had
been weighing and measuring. Weight and bulk are examples of
what are called extensive properties of matter. They add up.
Two pounds and three pounds make five pounds, and so on.
But density is an intensive property. It does not add up. If you
mix a metal with a density of 6 and one with a density of 10,
you do not get an alloy with a density of 16, but usually with
one somewhere between 6 and 10.
Modern physics and engineering are based on intensive
properties which can be measured. Here are a few of them.
Temperature, electrical conductivity, heat conductivity, hardness,
elasticity, refractive index, albedo (fraction of light reflected)
melting-point, boiling-point, solubility in water, magnetic
susceptibility, coefficient of thermal expansion, viscosity.
Any engineer could mention dozens more. There are other
extensive properties besides weight and bulk, such as heat con-
tent, entropy, electrostatic capacity, and so on. But physics could
not start without the measurement of the intensive properties.
Archimedes went on to found the science of hydrostatics,
and did it so well that some of his propositions are taught to-day,
almost without change. And he made a beginning with statics,
introducing such fundamental ideas as that of the centre of
gravity.
He laid the foundations of physics, but very little was built
on them until Stevin continued his work on statics, and Galileo
founded dynamics, in the sixteenth century A.D^Science died out
when the free Greek cities such as Syracuse were conquered by
the Romans, and was born again in the United Provinces of the
Netherlands, and in the free cities of Italy. w
We can see why it died out from the life of Archimedes himself.
He invented a number of machines, including a screw for raising
water, and others used in defending Syracuse against the Romans.
He is said to have set fire to their ships with a concave mirror,
but this is no more possible than the heat ray in Wells's The War
of the Worlds.
SOME GREAT MEN 19
He refused to write accounts of any of these inventions, except
a sphere for demonstrating the motions of the planets. He
regarded them as beneath the dignity of a philosopher. This
attitude to manual work was inevitable in a society based on
slavery. But the gap between thought and manual work was not
very wide in the Greek cities, where many citizens were crafts-
men, and if they owned a slave or two, worked beside them at
the bench.
As the Romans conquered the Mediterranean basin, and made
millions of slaves, the gap became so great that science died out.
Eighteen centuries later, in Holland and Italy, craftsmen once
more became leading citizens, and science started again.
There was another reason why science decayed under the
Roman Empire. Unemployment developed among the free
population of Rome and other great towns, while the slaves
were worked to death. The government paid for the build-
ing of temples, baths, circuses, and other buildings to give
work.
The historian Suetonius tells us that an inventor approached
the emperor Vespasian with a machine for moving heavy stones.
He turned it down because it would have displaced labour.
Science only flourishes in special conditions. Italian science
has been decaying for a generation or more, and Fermi, the
greatest living Italian scientist, is a refugee in America. Sicily
still produces mathematics, but little or no science.
If Archimedes's countrymen are allowed to decide their own
destinies, the liberation of Sicily may make it possible for Sicilians
once more to serve humanity as Archimedes served it.
Copernicus
The four-hundredth anniversary of the death of the great
astronomer, Nicholas Koppernik, or Copernicus, fell in May 1943.
Both the Polish and German governments are trying to claim
him as a glory of their nationality. Actually his father had a
Polish name, his mother a German. He was born in Torun or
Thorn, a city belonging to the Hansa League of towns engaged
20 SCIENCE ADVANCES
in trade, which was predominantly German. But the city govern-
ment had recently accepted the protection of the Polish king
against the Teutonic Knights. The conflict between the rising and
still progressive bourgeoisie and the feudal knights had cut clean
across national divisions.
Koppernik probably learned Polish before he learned any
other language, so the Polish claim to him is a little stronger
than the German. But he spoke seven languages, wrote in Latin,
and probably thought in Latin, if only because the Catholic
Church, of which he was a canon, had the monopoly of educa-
tion. I mention these facts because we cannot possibly understand
history if we think that the distinction between nationalities was
always as important as it is now. And we cannot talk sense about
the future if we suppose that it always will be.
Astronomy was naturally based on the idea that the sun and
stars went round the earth once a day. More accurately, if the
"fixed" stars go round once in a sidereal day, i.e. 366^ times a
year, the sun lags one round per year, so there are 365^ ordinary
or solar days per year. The moon lags still more, missing one
round each month. Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn lag less than the
sun, but Venus and Mercury never move very far from the sun,
sometimes appearing as morning, sometimes as evening stars.
On this basis you can calculate the positions of the sun and planets
pretty well, especially if you make further allowances according
to the theories of the Greek-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy, who
lived in the second century A.D.
The churches still calculate Easter according to a scheme based
on Ptolemy's theory. That is why Easter and Whitsun were so
late in 1943. The full moon on whose appearance Easter is based
turned up a few minutes earlier than it should have done according
to Ptolemy. And this happened to make a difference of a month.
Unfortunately the churches are equally out of date regarding still
more important matters.
Copernicus showed that the directions of the sun, moon, and
stars could be calculated if the distant stars were fixed, and the
earth and other planets went round the sun in circles, while the
moon went round the earth, and the earth spun on its axis once
a day. This theory has had to be improved in detail. The distant
SOME GREAT MEN 21
stars move, but they are so far off that the apparent shape of the
constellations hardly changes in a thousand years. Kepler showed
that the orbits of the earth, moon, and planets were roughly
ellipses, not circles. Newton showed that the elliptical paths were
due to gravitation. On his theory they would be exact ellipses
but for the pulls of the planets on one another. The effects of
these pulls were calculated and checked by observation. Thus
when Jupiter and Mars are in a line with the earth, Jupiter pulls
Mars further away than it should be on Kepler's theory. Finally,
Einstein has made further corrections, and doubtless there are
more to come, for the moon may be several seconds late or early
as compared with the best calculations so far made.
Copernicus, or more probably a friend who added a preface to
his book, wrote that the stars moved as if his theory were true,
but did not claim that it was true. This may have been done to
avoid being prosecuted for heresy like Galileo. Or the writer
may have been a positivist like Mach and other philosophers
attacked by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
According to positivists we have certain sensations, and it is a
matter of convenience what theory we make to explain them. If
two theories work, the simplest is the best, and it is silly to argue
which is right. If this were true, it would make no difference to us
whether the earth was really fixed or spinning on its axis, except in
so far as it simplified astronomers' sums. Actually it makes a lot.
If a north wind blows from the pole, how will it move an ice
floe? If the earth is fixed, the ice will move due south. If it is
turning, the ice will not have enough eastward velocity to keep
up with the sea as it moves south. It will be left behind, like a
man running outward from the centre of a revolving disc, and
will drift south-west, not south. This theory was verified by
Papanin's polar expedition. It had been proved long before for
air and water by a study of winds and ocean currents. But as
wind has a bigger effect on ice than water, since, in order to make
a current, the water must be set in motion down to a fair depth,
the Soviet expedition was able to make particularly accurate
observations in support of this principle.
Again, if the earth is still, a free and perfectly balanced gyro-
scope set to point upwards should still do so an hour hence.
22 SCIENCE ADVANCES
If the earth spins, it should always point in the same direction in
space, i.e. at the same "fixed" star. Actually it nearly does the
latter, but not quite exactly, as some friction is unavoidable.
But if the earth did not spin, the use of gyrostats for controlling
aeroplanes would be a good deal simpler. A whole number of
other phenomena measurable on earth show that its rotation is
a reality, not a mathematical convenience. If we lived under-
ground, and had never seen the sun or stars, but the sciences
other than astronomy had developed as they actually did, the
earth's rotation would probably have been discovered in the last
century, but it would still be regarded as probable rather than
proved.
Copernicus did not prove it. He made it so probable that he
let loose a landslide of proofs. And he played a great part in
showing man his real place in the universe, which consists of
matter such as we know on earth, behaving in ways that we can
understand and predict.
Landsteiner
Karl Landsteiner has just died in New York at the age of
seventy-five, working up to the last moment. He was one of the
very greatest scientists of our time, being a first-rate chemist as
well as a first-rate biologist.
Almost all his work was concerned, in one way or another,
with what is called humoral immunity. Every animal and every
plant makes proteins according to its own special patterns. If a
protein of a foreign pattern is injected into an animal, the receiver
usually forms what are called antibodies, which can be found in
its blood. These combine with the foreign protein if more is
injected. The results may be good or bad. For example, after
several injections of snake venom or diphtheria toxin a man
generally has enough antibodies to allow him to handle a snake
of that particular species without danger if he is bitten, or to
expose himself to infection with diphtheria without danger
of serious illness. But immunization may be dangerous. If a man
has had an injection of horse serum from an immunized horse
SOME GREAT MEN 23
as a preventive against tetanus, he develops antibodies against
the proteins of horse serum, and a second injection may make him
ill, whereas the first did not. He reacts to the injection of a
previously harmless substance with fever and other symptoms
like those which he puts up in fighting an infection.
Landsteiner brought these previously rather mysterious
phenomena into the sphere of chemistry. He altered proteins by
attaching dyes and other well-defined chemical groupings to their
molecules, and investigated how far the antibodies developed
were specific. The antibody fits the antigen, as the foreign protein
is called, much as a key fits a lock. However, some keys will fit
a number of fairly similar locks. The specificity is not absolute.
These chemical methods have been improved and extended.
We now know that the combination of antigen and antibody
follows chemical laws, and last year Pauling, a Californian
chemist, was able to make artificial antibodies in his laboratory
without using a living man or animal to make them. They were
not very efficient, but probably in another generation or so most
antibodies will be made in this way, which may remove some of
the prejudice against them.
Landsteiner was more concerned with the harmful than the
useful effects of humoral immunity. He showed that the injection
of blood from one human being into another was generally
dangerous because the blood of the recipient contained antibodies
which damaged the corpuscles of the donor. He found that
human beings belonged to different groups whose corpuscles
carry one, both, or neither, of two antigens called A and B,
and that transfusion between members of the same groups was
almost always safe, while blood from one, but only one, of the
groups could be safely injected into members of all the others.
At the same time that Landsteiner made this discovery in Vienna,
Jannsky obtained similar results in Prague. Landsteiner and his
colleagues next showed that membership of a blood group was
inherited according to simple laws. Actually he made a slight
mistake, which was corrected by Bernstein of Gottingen, who,
like Landsteiner, was of Jewish origin and escaped to America.
Landsteiner was big enough to accept Bernstein's work without
clinging to his old half-truths as lesser men have often done.
24 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Hirzfeld and his wife, Polish doctors working with the allies
in Salonika in 1917, found that members of the four groups were
found in all the peoples studied by them, but in different propor-
tions. Thus the Nazi doctrine that the blood is something peculiar
to each race was disproved while Hitler was still a corporal. You
may be a blue-eyed blond "Aryan," but a blood transfusion from
another such will kill you, while a pint from a negro will save
your life.
Landsteiner went on to study other differences of the same
kind between different human bloods. Along with Levine he
discovered two other antigens called M and N which are of no
importance in normal transfusions, though of great interest to
students of heredity. Some people thought that his work had
become of merely academic interest. But in his last years he was
one of a group in New York which made a discovery that may
save even more lives than that of the blood groups. The blood
corpuscles of the Rhesus monkey carry an antigen called Rh,
and if they are injected into guinea-pigs the latter develop anti-
bodies which destroy them.
Landsteiner found that about 84 per cent, of Europeans and
Americans of European stock have the Rh antigen in their blood
corpuscles, but 16 per cent, do not. On the other hand, all or
almost all Chinese and Red Indians possess Rh.
Now if blood is transfused from a person with Rh to one
without it, no harm is done on the first occasion, but the recipient
sometimes (fortunately not always) develops antibodies against it.
If so a second injection from a person with Rh is dangerous and
often fatal. The red corpuscles are treated as foreign bodies and
rapidly destroyed. Their debris may kill him by clogging the
kidneys, or in other ways.
This accounts for a good many of the hitherto unexplained
deaths following blood transfusions. But there is an even worse
danger. If a mother without Rh marries a man with it, most of
the children usually inherit Rh from the father. In a minority of
pregnancies Rh passes from the unborn baby into the mother,
and she develops antibodies against it.
If she loses blood during childbirth and has a transfusion from
her husband or anyone else with Rh, this may kill her. Further,
SOME GREAT MEN 25
the antibodies in her blood may get into that of the baby and
destroy its blood corpuscles. It may die before birth, or be born
with jaundice. Or it may develop jaundice within a few days of
birth; and if so it generally dies.
Such babies, if born alive, can often be saved by a transfusion
of blood from a suitable donor. There is at present no way of
saving them before birth, though an obvious method has been
suggested. But this can only be achieved after several years of hard
laboratory work and a year or so of experimental treatment.
So Landsteiner's death probably involves the death of thousands
of babies.
It has been estimated that, including still-births and abortions,
one baby in four hundred dies from this cause. Dr. Mollison, of
the Sutton Blood Storage Centre, has published a number of
pathetic cases where every child of two healthy parents died from
it before or soon after birth. But we have good hope that this
sort of thing will be prevented in future.
Landsteiner's work was recognized all over the world. I had
the honour of presenting his claims when he was elected a foreign
member of the Royal Society. He was born an Austrian and died
an American. But he was a servant of all mankind, saved the
lives of thousands who had never heard of him, and will save the
lives of thousands still unborn.
NOTE. Since this article was written, it has been shown that
there are several slightly different Rh substances, and that a
marriage between persons with different ones may lead to the
death of some or all babies. However, the above account is
correct as far as it goes, being the truth, but not the whole truth.
de Geer
Baron de Geer, one of the world's most original scientists, has
recently died in Sweden. His life work was to provide fairly
accurate dates for things that happened before men kept records.
The earliest date which we know accurately is 2283 B.C. On
March 8th of that year the sun was totally eclipsed near the city
26 SCIENCE ADVANCES
of Ur in Iraq, Abraham's home town according to the Bible;
and shortly afterwards the city was taken by the Elamites from
what is now south-western Persia. The date of the eclipse can
be calculated, for the movements of the earth round the sun and
the moon round the earth are very regular. This date agrees
fairly well with that calculated from lists of kings, and these may
be roughly correct for another thousand years or so back; but
even in Iraq and Egypt, history peters out into legend somewhere
about 4500 B.C. which is the rough date of the great flood that
certainly swamped Iraq, and equally certainly did not swamp the
whole world, as claimed in the story of Noah.
De Geer derived his dates, not from stone monuments or clay
tablets, but from the soil of his country. Much of southern
Sweden is covered with clay, and a cutting shows that this con-
sists of horizontal layers. By comparison with the Alps it is clear
that this clay was laid down in fresh water near the edge of a
melting ice sheet, and each layer was laid down in the spring of
a different year. In a warm year a lot of ice melted and a lot of
mud was deposited; in a cold year the layer of clay was thin.
At any particular place in southern Sweden there may be only a
dozen or so layers. But by comparing hundreds of soil sections
de Geer was able to get a continuous series up to Lake Ragunda
in central Scandinavia, which was drained in the eighteenth
century. There is some uncertainty about the dates of the recent
layers, and this will not be settled till another mountain lake is
drained. But there is no doubt that somewhere about 8000 B.C.
the edge of the ice was at the present site of Stockholm, and that
after this it retreated fairly quickly into the mountains. In
10000 B.C. the ice still covered the southern tip of Sweden, and
about 18000 B.C. it stretched across the Baltic to northern
Germany, where its southern edge left huge moraines.
Naturally no human remains have been found in these deposits.
But we know that in central and western Europe and Britain the
period of increasing warmth when the ice was rapidly retreating
was the mesolithic period when men were changing their tech-
nique of making stone tools from chipping to polishing. During
the last ice age the inhabitants of France hunted reindeer with
implements of chipped flint, and drew pictures of them on bones.
SOME GREAT MEN 2J
As the climate improved they began to polish their stone tools,
and to keep flocks and grow crops. In fact fifteen thousand years
ago the people of Western Europe were in the same stage of
culture as the most primitive savages alive to-day.
De Geer's pupil Antevs and others have made similar records
of the mud layers in Canada and the northern part of the United
States. The dating is not so certain, but the time scale is roughly
the same. A similar method of dating by tree rings has been
worked out by Douglass and others for Arizona and Persia. In
a fairly dry country with a variable rainfall a tree makes a great
deal of wood in a rainy year, and much less in a dry one. Where
trees live for several centuries they give a good record of climate,
and an expert can easily date a log showing a hundred or so
annual layers of hard and soft wood. This time scale so far only
goes back for about 3000 years. But it can be used to date
"Indian" houses in Arizona quite accurately, and hence tools
found in them, although their makers left no written records, and
their spoken tradition is of miracles rather than history, and has
no dates.
A knowledge of these facts is important for the following
reason. We are apt to take it for granted that the kind of society
in which we live, and which goes back for some thousands of
years beyond our historical records, is natural for man. To many
people class divisions and the ownership of property other than
clothes and tools seem normal. They are not normal, but very
recent innovations. Men, that is to say, creatures like ourselves,
using tools and fire, have existed for at least half a million years,
judging from the depths of mud laid down by water and ice, and
from other evidence. During almost all this time men have been
hunters and food gatherers living in small bands.
The great changes which began ten thousand years ago are
still gathering speed. We have no idea of what men will be like
ten thousand years hence, except that they will be unlike our-
selves, and probably just as unlike the beings prophesied by Wells,
Shaw, or Stapledon. But Marxists have solid and scientific
grounds for believing that theTiext stage of human development
will be worldwide and peaceful socialism.
28 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Eddington
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones
said Mark Antony at Caesar's funeral; and after listening to the
B.B.C. and reading several newspapers on the late Sir Arthur
Eddington, I am almost inclined to believe it. If I had not known
Eddington and followed his work, I might believe, from these
accounts, that he had done little more than comment on Einstein's
theory, and write a certain amount of idealistic philosophy. It is
not for either of these things that posterity will remember him, as
I think it will.
He was an astronomer by profession, and for thirty years
directed the Cambridge Observatory, where a large amount of
very accurate work is done. That meant that he had to be a
skilled manual worker, to be able to deal with apparatus which
is as much more delicate than an ordinary camera as a camera is
more delicate than a carving knife.
He did not merely explain and expand Einstein's theory. He
checked up on it. Einstein said that light had weight, and was
therefore bent out of its path when passing near to a heavy
object. The only object which is heavy enough to bend it to a
measurable extent is the sun, and light from a star passing near
to the sun can only be photographed during a total eclipse. In
1919 Eddington took out an expedition to the island of Principe
off the coast of West Africa, and photographed the stars which
were visible near the sun when it was eclipsed. Some months later
the same stars were photographed at night with the same camera.
In the night photograph their images were further out from the
centre of the plate, showing that the sun had bent the rays in-
wards. He found the effect predicted by Einstein, which is just
twice that which might be predicted on a basis of common sense.
The measurements were so accurate that no better ones have been
made in the ensuing twenty-five years. As a result physicists now
think that light is much more like ordinary matter more
material if you prefer that expression than they did before.
He also did a large amount of statistical work on the move-
ments of the so-called fixed stars relative to the sun, based on
SOME GREAT MEN 29
thousands of observations by himself and others. He made a
number of calculations on the internal constitution of the sun and
other stars, which later workers have modified, though they accept
most of his principles.
His greatest contribution to astronomy was probably his dis-
covery that the luminosity of a star depends mainly on its mass,
a most surprising fact which however agrees well with his
theories. One can only determine the luminosity of a star when
one knows its distance. For example Arcturus gives out four
times as much light per minute as Sirius. But it is nearly five
times as far away, so it only appears to us about a fifth as bright.
It is hard to determine the distance of a star, but still harder to
determine its mass. This can only be done accurately when a
pair of stars are revolving like a pair of dancers round their
common centre of gravity. But very careful observations are
needed to get the mass correct even within ten per cent.
Much of Eddington's writing was idealistic. He believed, with
Kant, that one can know nothing about the real nature of matter,
and that almost or quite everything which we think we know
about it is really the product of our own minds. I think he was
wrong, but to those Marxists who would condemn him root
and branch I should like to repeat Lenin's words: "Philo-
sophical idealism is nonsense only from the standpoint of a
crude, simple, and metaphysical materialism." Eddington was
so impressed by the rational character of reality that he some-
times forgot that it had any other characters. Nevertheless I think
he was far nearer the truth than a materialist who takes the
various different characters of matter for granted, and refuses to
believe that they have any rational connection. Eddington found
rational connections between the properties of stars and of atoms.
He was profoundly impressed by the fact that the real is the ,
rational, and did not realize that one can believe this without
being an idealist. Like many great scientists, he was a Quaker,
and this certainly influenced his thought in an idealistic direction.
The Daily Worker obituary notice stated that "he popularized
the idealist view that the behaviour of matter is uncertain and
unpredictable, a view which Marxists hold to be wholly unwar-
ranted and due to misinterpretation of the facts/* If that is true
30 SCIENCE ADVANCES
I am not a Marxist. Nor was Lenin when he wrote in Materialism
and Empiriocriticism that "the sole property of matter with the
recognition of which Marxism is vitally concerned is the property
of being objective reality, of existing outside our cognition."
Imagine a blindfold man who is trying to find out just where
an electric bell is. He can listen for it, but is only allowed to feel
for it with a revolving brush such as a chimney-sweep uses. He
will not be able to state exactly where it is, or of what shape. If
he makes a lot of attempts he will be able to state its probable
position, but no more. If he is an idealist he will say this proves
that there is nothing really there. We are all in a similar position.
We can locate things with light, but its wavelength limits our
accuracy. We can measure them with a gauge, but its atoms are
moving, and this again limits our accuracy. Fortunately we can
measure distances of less than a millionth of an inch, so for most
practical purposes we can reach certainty. But we cannot, for
example, examine the inside of a particular molecule in a flame,
and say that it will emit some light in the next millionth of a
second. Its behaviour is uncertain and unpredictable. However,
the behaviour of a thousand million such molecules is certain and
predictable. As Engels put it, "One knows that what is main-
tained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents/'
It seems to me that we have to steer our way between two
mistakes. Eddington's mistake was to think that because the
behaviour of matter in small samples was uncertain and unpre-
dictable, it was not real, or had free will. Our correspondent's
mistake was to think that because a thing is real we can neces-
sarily get complete information about it. I once asked Lord
Keynes what he thought of the Swedish economist Cassel. "A
very able man," he replied, "but he makes mistakes." Perhaps
Lord Keynes and the Pope are infallible, perhaps not. I certainly
make mistakes, and so I think did Eddington,
Unfortunately he was honoured for his mistakes by readers who
could not follow his real work. But he was a great astronomer and a
great physicist, and his positive achievements in these sciences will
be remembered centuries hence, when any mistakes which he may
have made are taken no more seriously than are Faraday's Sande-
manian theology or Newton's interpretation of the book of Daniel,
SOME GREAT MEN 3!
Wilson and Bragg
When microscopes were invented some people hoped that by
improving their lenses men would be able to see even the small-
est objects. We now know that we cannot do this, because light
consists of waves, and we cannot see things much smaller than
the length of these waves, even with the best microscopes.
Now atoms are very much smaller than light waves. About a
thousand atoms in a row would be needed to make up one
wavelength. So many scientists thought that atoms would never
be seen or photographed, and a few thought that they were
not real, but just convenient fictions useful to chemists.
The first man who can be said to have seen atoms is Professor
C. T. R. Wilson, of Cambridge, in England. All people who live
in mountainous regions have watched a cloud form as moist air
moves up a mountain side. This is because the air expands as it
rises, since there is less air above it to compress it. In expanding
it does work and loses heat. So the water vapour in it condenses
into drops of mist. But drops can only form on dust, or on atoms
or molecules of gas with an electric charge. Wilson made a
chamber in which dust-free air was made to expand suddenly,
and he could see through a window the drops of mist which
formed on the electrically charged particles. Now even a single
atom, if it moves fast enough, will give electric charges to some
of the molecules of the gas through which it passes, much as a
glass rod can be charged by rubbing. The moving atoms shot out
from radium leave tracks of mist which Wilson could see or
photograph, and thus measure how fast they were going. Of
course he only saw the atom in the sense that we can see a rocket
at night by the track of sparks which it leaves in the air, or as
Londoners in 1940 saw the tracks of cloud left in the sky by the
aeroplanes which were fighting so high above their heads that
they could not be seen directly.
If atoms were to be photographed when at rest, it was necessary
to use something like light, but with less than a thousandth of its
wavelength. The first man to do this was Sir William Bragg, who
has just died. This great physicist went out from England to
3 2. SCIENCE ADVANCES
Australia, where he worked for many years before coming back
to England. In 1912 a German physicist, Laue, showed that when
X-rays passed through a crystal they made a peculiar pattern on
a photographic plate, and saw that this must mean that X-rays
were trains of waves like ordinary light, but shorter. X-rays had
long been used by surgeons for seeing through the living body,
but no one knew what they were. Laue could not measure the
wavelength, and no one can get very far in physics without
measurement.
In the same year Bragg and his son showed that X-rays can be
reflected by crystals, though they are not reflected by ordinary
polished surfaces. But they are only reflected from crystals if they
strike at certain angles. The crystals consist of layers of atoms
arranged in regular patterns. If a beam of X-rays strikes the
crystal so that a wave which has penetrated to the second layer
and been partly reflected from it has travelled by a path longer
by just one wavelength than a wave which has been reflected from
the outer layer, and similarly for those which have penetrated
deeper, the waves will be reflected. Just the same principle holds
when light is reflected from a pearl, which is built in layers a
thousand times thicker than those of most crystals. The different
colours are reflected at different angles.
The arrangement of the atoms in a few simple crystals was
known already, so this discovery enabled Bragg to classify X-rays
by their wavelength, as different coloured lights are classified. This
was of great value in medicine and surgery. The X-rays with
long waves do not penetrate far into matter. So they are of little
use for making photographs of broken bones or bullets in the flesh.
They are stopped even by the skin, and their chief use is for
treating skin diseases. Those of medium wavelength are used by
surgeons. Those of very short wavelength will even pass through
the human bones, but they can be used to photograph heavy
metal objects such as the crankshafts of motor-cars or tanks, to
detect hidden flaws.
Still more important was Bragg's work on the arrangement of
the atoms in crystals. For nineteen years he was in charge of the
laboratory of the Royal Institution in London. Many great men
had held the post before him. It was there that Davy discovered
SOME GREAT MEN 33
sodium and Faraday electro-magnetic induction, on which the
whole electrical industry is based. There too Dewar liquefied air
and invented the "thermos" vacuum flask. Bragg and his pupils
photographed many thousands of crystals with X-rays, and
published diagrams and models. Thanks to them, mineralogists
can now learn a series of facts as rational and orderly as Hindustani
grammar instead of a series as irrational as the spelling of English
words or the conjugation of Spanish verbs.
A bar of metal such as iron consists of a great number of very
small crystals arranged in an irregular way, and often distorted
by working. Many properties of metals have only been under-
stood since the structure of these crystals has been determined.
New alloys have been invented as a result of the information
gained from X-ray photographs, and most great metallurgical
firms employ an X-ray crystallographer.
Matter may be less regularly arranged than in a crystal, yet
still regularly enough to reflect X-rays according to the laws dis-
covered by Bragg. Here his pupils have carried on his work.
Astbury in Leeds discovered how the atoms are arranged in wool
and such tissues as human hair and nails. Bernal in London was
able to photograph viruses, which cause some of the worst
diseases of men, animals and plants, including smallpox and
influenza, and are far smaller than bacteria, so that they cannot
be seen with the most powerful microscope.
Some of the discoveries about the structure of matter which
were made by this method merely confirmed what the chemists
had long believed. For example the photographs showed quite
clearly that the six carbon atoms in a benzene ring were arranged
at the corners of a regular hexagon, and those of paraffins in a
chain. But in a small number of cases the X-ray workers could
not agree with the chemists. In these cases the chemists have
always proved to have been wrong when they reinvestigated the
matter. X-rays are now being used to investigate the structure
of substances which have so far proved too difficult for the
chemists alone.
Naturally Bragg's work was sometimes controversial. Shortly
before his death he was in disagreement with the eminent Indian
physicist, Sir V. Raman, on the interpretation of certain re-
34 SCIENCE ADVANCES
flexions which were not predicted by his original theory. Bragg
attributed them to imperfections in crystal structure, Raman to
atomic vibrations. Posterity will decide which, if either, was
right. Science progresses by such arguments as this, which
generally suggest new experiments.
Another very important line of research is to see how the
structure of a metal crystal is deformed when the metal is sub-
jected to compression or tension. The change in shape and size
of a whole block of metal may be due to the crystals slipping
over one another, or to their changing their internal arrangement.
We now know that both can occur, and this knowledge enables
us to predict what particular composition and heat treatment will
best enable metals to stand any given kind of stress. For the first
time scientists can investigate what is going on inside an opaque
solid body. This is as important for engineering as was the
original discovery of X-rays for medicine, which allowed doctors
to see the heart, lungs, bones, and other organs in a living man.
Sir William Bragg worked on many other subjects besides
X-rays. He was an expert on sound, and in the war of 1914-18
he was one of those who designed the " Asdic" apparatus by
which ships can hear U-boats at a great distance, and which
played a great part in defeating the U-boat campaign, thus both
saving Britain from starvation and enabling British armies to be
sent overseas. He was also an extremely good popular lecturer,
and disagreed strongly with those who think that the education
of ordinary people in science is unimportant.
He was honoured both in Britain and elsewhere. He was elected
President of the Royal Society, received the British Order of
Merit, the Swedish Nobel prize, and many other foreign dis-
tinctions. His son, who helped him in his early work, and is
continuing it, succeeded Rutherford as Professor of Physics at
Cambridge. During his last year he played an important part in
a conference on the application of science during and after the
war. He was particularly fortunate in that his own work not only
gave us new knowledge about the solid state of matter, but
was immediately applicable to improving the quality of metals,
textiles, and many other manufactured articles.
SOME GREAT MEN 35
Boys
Among the British scientists who died in 1944 was C. V.
Boys. My readers may not have heard of him, but in a sense they
came in touch with him whenever thay paid a gas bill. For he
designed the apparatus which determines the price of a cubic
foot of gas.
Some scientists, including myself, are genuinely interested in
theory. We see the implications of a theory, and are able to
devise relatively simple experiments to check its results. For
example, I predicted that the volume of air which I breathed
would go down if I ate a couple of ounces of bicarbonate of soda.
The drop was so large that there was no point in measuring the
volume accurately even to i per cent. Others start out from
action, and build up their theories round it. Boys was once
asked why he did not employ a skilled mechanic to help him in
constructing apparatus. He replied that his ideas only got into
shape as the constructional work proceeded, and that this work
helped the thinking process, and he would not get on any
quicker by having it done for him. In the laboratory, at least,
he was a better Marxist than I.
His most important piece of work was to weigh the earth, or
in other words to determine the constant of gravitation. Here is
the problem. We can measure the force which the earth exerts
on a small metal ball. This force is the ball's weight. We have to
compare this with the force exerted on it by another metal ball
an inch or so away. This latter force is about a thousand-
millionth of the weight, and Boys measured it correctly to about
one part in three thousand.
To do this he designed an apparatus which was on view in the
Science Museum at South Kensington before the war. The force
is not measured directly, but two gold balls of a quarter of an
inch in diameter are attached to a metal beam about an inch
apart, and this beam is hung in a tube. Outside the tube are two
lead balls of 4^ inches diameter whose position can be altered,
and the effect on the swing of the gold balls measured. The gold
balls are suspended from a thread of quartz. Boys found that
36 SCIENCE ADVANCES
melted quartz could be drawn out into fibres, so fine that they
could only be seen with a microscope, and stronger than steel
wires of the same thickness would be if they could be made. To
draw a thread while the quartz was still molten he used a cross-
bow, also of his own design.
Incidentally he was the first to show that a quartz vessel could
be made red-hot and quenched in water without cracking it; so
a considerable industry arose directly out of his work. He finally
showed that when the gravitational pull of the lead balls was re-
versed, he got a deflection of i J degrees in the average direction
of the beam holding the two gold balls. Thus he determined the
mass of the earth, and indirectly of the sun and other heavenly
bodies. Every calculation of the mass of a star ultimately rests on
Boys's work, carried out in a cellar at night to avoid shaking by
traffic.
He also designed an apparatus to photograph lightning flashes
in such a way as to determine their speed. As a flash is over in
about one ten-thousandth of a second, a cine-camera is useless.
Boys's camera has two rapidly moving lenses which take photo-
graphs on the same plate. The images differ slightly, and enable
the speed of the flash to be determined. Using a modification of
this camera, Schonland, Malan and Collens in South Africa found
that a lightning flash is far from simple. The first process is a
"leader" flash going in steps of about fifty yards. Then follows
a much brighter flash along the same track. The process may be
repeated several times.
Boys never became a professor. He was an assistant professor
at the Imperial College till 1897, and then became a Gas Referee.
He was concerned with measuring the heating power of coal
gas, while my father, who was one of his colleagues, measured
its lighting power and the amounts of sulphur and other im-
purities in it. The laboratory was always dirty. Both he and my
father preferred to clean their own apparatus when necessary
rather than trust the best charwoman in the world to dust it
daily. The calorimeter measures the rise in temperature produced
in a steady current of water by a steady current of burning gas.
Now a cubic foot of gas contains less matter when hot than when
cold. Boys allowed for this by automatically cutting down the
SOME GREAT MEN 37
water flow when the temperature of the gas rose. The apparatus
is most ingenious and very simple. Boys always preferred
mechanical to electrical principles, and anyone can understand
his devices; but no one else had thought of them.
For over forty years Boys held this part-time job of Gas
Referee, and made a very good income as an expert witness in
cases involving patent law. His genius was very largely wasted,
both from the point of view of pure science and from that of
increasing the national wealth. His apparatus certainly secured a
fair price for gas according to capitalist economics; for the cost
per cubic foot depends on the heating power. But he would have
done far more for the public good if he had designed more
economical gas stoves, as he certainly could have done. And he
would have done far more for pure science if he had devoted his
skill to accurate measurements of the heat produced in well-
defined chemical reactions.
There can be little doubt that he would have been far better
appreciated in the Soviet Union, where the skilled workers con-
stitute the nearest equivalent to an aristocracy that exists, than he
was in Britain. For his qualities were essentially those of a crafts-
man. He would also have been better used. It makes a lot of
difference to profits, but very little to production, whether one
company or another can claim royalties for the use of a given
patent. Where science is not planned ef freedom" may mean in
practice freedom to use one's talents on disputes about patents.
Where science is planned, men of the requisite ability do work
which solves fundamental problems of science, industry, or of
both. Such men as Boys are rare. We should see that their talents
are not wasted.
Milne
The progress of physics affects us most obviously by leading
to new inventions such as electric lighting, radio, or refrigera-
tors, or to very rapid progress in technique, for example the
improvements in flying technique which render our lives rather
precarious at the present moment. However, great theoretical
38 SCIENCE ADVANCES
developments not only lead to new techniques, but alter our outlook
on the world, and thus affect history. Copernicus's new system of
astronomy, according to which the earth is only one of several
planets, and still more Newton's demonstration that the planets
moved as a result of the familiar and measurable force of gravita-
tion, certainly affected human thought. In particular they were
necessary preliminaries to any attempt to apply scientific method
to human history, as Marx did.
Very great advances in theoretical physics have been made
during this century. Unfortunately they have been expounded to
the public in this country in such a way as to make the universe
appear more mysterious, instead of more intelligible. This is a
sign of social and intellectual decadence. During periods when
conditions are improving men feel that they can control their
environments, and concentrate on expounding what is known
about the world. A class which feels power slipping from its
grasp consoles itself by thinking that the whole world is past
understanding. One form taken by this intellectual defeatism is to
say that the advance of science has proved that matter does not
exist. This is correct if matter has the properties which we were
taught at school. Its real properties turn out to be a good deal
less simple from the point of view of a mathematician, but per-
haps rather closer to those which our senses suggest.
Of course, very few working physicists are idealists. Matter
seems real enough when you are working with it, though it may
seem shadowy when you are doing sums about it. And some at
least among mathematical physicists believe that they are making
the universe easier to understand. One of these is Professor E. A.
Milne, of Oxford. Most of his colleagues do not yet accept his
views, but they are proving so fruitful that they may quite pos-
sibly be widely held, with minor modifications, a generation
hence. Perhaps Milne's most important idea is that the universe
is more rational than most scientists had thought, though not
more so than Hegel and Engels believed.
The Greeks rationalized mathematics. The Egyptians knew
that if they had a loop of rope divided into twelve equal parts by
knots, and stretched it into a triangle whose sides were 3, 4, and
5 units long, the two short sides would make a right angle.
SOME GREAT MEN 39
They took this as a fact, like many other facts which we cannot
yet explain, for instance that all feathered animals lay eggs, or
that there are higher mountains in Scotland than in England.
The Greek Pythagoras showed that such a triangle must have a
right angle because 3* + 4 2 = 5 2 , and that other right-angled
triangles can be made with sides 5, 12, and 13; or 8, 15 and
17 units long, and so on. In consequence of such discoveries as
these, mathematics has become a rational structure, not a mere
list of rules.
Newton made a great step forward when he showed that the
observed movements of the earth and planets could be explained
if they and the sun attracted one another with a force varying
inversely with the square of the distance. That is to say, the pull
is reduced to one-quarter if the distance between two stars is
doubled, to one-ninth if it is trebled, and so on. This law is not
quite exact, but it is so near the truth that predictions from it
came true until astronomers made observations with only one
three-hundredth of the errors that they made in Newton's day.
Milne believes that he has proved that the inverse square law
of gravitation must hold, except at very great distances indeed,
as Pythagoras showed that the 3, 4, 5 triangle must have a right
angle. Of course he does not start off from "pure thought," but
from certain assumptions, of which the most important is that
the universe would look much the same to an observer anywhere
in it. That is to say, there is no end to matter, in the sense that
an observer on some star would see other stars to the north of
him, but only empty space to the south. Nor does matter thin
out in any direction, though of course there are local aggregations
of it, such as stars and nebulae. This is obviously a generalization
of Copernicus's idea that our earth is not the centre of the
universe.
The proof involves some fairly stiff mathematics, but nothing
like so stiff as those of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Among the other consequences of Milne's theory are that the
properties of space merely express inter-relations of matter and
of light, and that one kind of geometry is more appropriate for
light, and another for matter. As a result of the contradiction
between these two sets of properties, the universe changes,
40 SCIENCE ADVANCES
though very slowly, so that the properties of matter are not the
same now as they were, say, when the coal measures were formed,
the rate of chemical changes having speeded up relative to that of
certain physical changes.
Milne has been violently attacked for giving up the inductive
method, going back to Aristotle, and so on. I think the history
of science shows that there is a dialectical interplay between
deduction and induction. In The Marxist Philosophy and the
Sciences I gave a brief account of his theory from the Marxist
angle, and he tells me that I have not misrepresented him. Since
then he has developed his theory to cover electric and magnetic
phenomena, and has succeeded in explaining facts which had
formerly seemed quite unconnected.
Some readers will think that a working-class newspaper is a
strange place to write about theoretical physics. If so, they
forget that Engels did so in his not very ample spare time as
secretary of the First International, and that Lenin did so after
the failure of the Russian Revolution in 1905. Marxism can be
applied to all branches of science as well as to economics and
history, and no Marxist can neglect the progress of physics.
2
ANIMALS AND PLANTS
Newts
BOYS and girls are coming home with newts in jam pots. I am
going to write about them because they are among the few
pets which can be kept without eating anything which human
beings or even pigs could have eaten. A smallish earthworm
every second day is the ration of each of my three newts, though
they sometimes get an extra.
We have three species of newt in England. The common and
palmate newts grow up to about 3 or 4 inches long, the crested
newt to about 6 inches. The two small species spend most of
the year on land, while the largest may not come out at all,
though it generally does so in youth; but all go back to the
water in spring as soon as they are old enough to breed, which
is said to be at about three years.
On land their shape is roughly that of a lizard or crocodile,
but in the water they have fins above and below their tails. The
females' tail fins are merely efficient swimming organs, but the
males* fins have a jagged edge like a cock's comb.
Even the common newt male is a gorgeous beast. Both sexes
have a brown back and a bright orange belly. The male also
has a parti-coloured tail. Its lower edge is bright scarlet with a
broad strip of Cambridge blue above it. He uses it not only to
swim but to dance in front of the female. He faces her, bends
his tail through 180 degrees, and vibrates it like a pennant
fluttering in the breeze, so as to direct a stream of water at her.
So far the courtship is not very unlike that of a peacock, a
pheasant, or many other birds where the male is particularly
bright.
But what follows is much odder. In many water animals the
male and female shed their spermatozoa and eggs into the water,
42, ^ClUJN^fc, AUVAJN^Jtii
and fertilization occurs outside the female. In some, and in
most land animals, the male embraces the female, and fertilization
occurs inside her. The newt does neither. When the male has
excited the female by his dance, he leaves a fairly solid and
elaborately patterned bundle of sperm, which she then picks up
and thus fertilizes herself.
After this she lays an egg or two a day for a month or more.
The eggs are surrounded by jelly, like those of frogs or toads.
Each one is laid on the leaf of a water plant, and the mother
then wraps the leaf round it with her mouth and back legs. The
eggs hatch into tadpoles about J inch long, with long feathery
dark pink gills. The tadpoles eat water fleas and insect larvae,
but if you want to keep them you must transfer the parents to
another tank, as they will eat their children without hesitation.
They also eat frog tadpoles.
Newts breathe through their skins under water, and must
have plenty of pond weed to make the oxygen which they need.
They also occasionally come to the surface for a breath of air,
for they have lungs, and it is desirable to give them a bit of wood
or bark to sit on.
About June the adults of the two small species lose their fins
and spend more and more time on their rafts, if you keep them
in an aquarium. When this happens they should be released in
a damp spot not too far from water. For their skins, which in
spring are thin and slippery, like human lips, become dry, and
are no longer able to take up oxygen from the water. So they
may drown in an aquarium. The young newts lose their gills in
July or August, and should also be released. It is possible to
keep them, but it is hard to obtain a supply of the small insects
which they eat.
A great deal has been found out about the process of animal
development by experiments on newt embryos. A small piece
may be cut away and grafted onto another embryo or to an
abnormal part of the same one. The earlier this is done the more
likely it is to develop like the tissues around it. But if it is done
later, the fate of the tissue is already determined, and one gets a
newt with five legs or two tails. Similarly by tying a thread
round the egg so as to dent it without cutting it in half one can
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 43
get tadpoles with two heads and four arms, or two tails and four
back legs. Such experiments have disproved two theories about
animal development. One is the crude mechanistic theory that
each part of the egg is destined to make a particular part of the
tadpole, and that development is a mere unfolding. The other is
the theory that the animal's soul, or some other such agency,
imposes form on a crude and unformed material. In fact the
different parts influence one another in an extremely complicated
manner, but each may develop in different ways according to the
influences acting on it.
However, there is an immense amount that we do not know
about newts. As the males certainly do not seize the females by
force, and do not seem to fight for them, their success or failure
as fathers must depend on their skill and persistence in dancing,
and on their bright colours. According to Darwin's theory of
sexual selection these habits and colours have developed because
those males which excited the largest number of females trans-
mitted their characters to most progeny. There is evidence for
the truth of this theory in some birds, and evidence against it in
others.
But so far as I know no one has checked it up on newts,
though they are easier to keep and watch than birds. There is
room for one or two small aquaria in many working class homes.
Accumulator jars do very well. The British species can be crossed
artificially; but no one knows whether the hybrids are fertile,
like the hybrids of the dog and wolf, or sterile, like those of the
horse and donkey.
In the Soviet Union aquaria were very well developed. The
finest exhibit of species with great differences between the sexes
that I have ever seen was in a Moscow aquarium. In 1934 it was
easier to buy small tropical fish in Moscow than in London.
A biologically minded worker cannot have his own zoo. But he
can and should have his own aquarium.
44 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Cats
We know roughly how many adult dogs there are in England,
because apart from sheep-dogs and a few others, they are taxed.
We do not know how many cats there are. Recently Mr.
Matheson, of the Natural Museum of Wales, got the help of a
number of school children to count the cats in certain areas of
Cardiff and Newport. Each child reported the number of adult
cats in its home.
He concludes, from these and other statistics, that the number
of cats in an area is roughly proportional to the number of
human beings, and not even roughly to the number of acres.
The number of cats with a fixed abode is about 10^ per cent of
the number of humans, the number of strays about 2^ per cent.
So there are probably about five million cats in Britain, apart
from young kittens. However, the number of cats per hundred
human beings is nearly three times higher in the slums round
Cardiff docks than on the housing estates. A cat on a housing
estate may be a luxury, but in some slums she is absolutely
needed to keep down the mice and rats. So if we get the houses
we want, the number of cats in England is likely to go down.
For it is now possible to build a house so as to give mice nowhere
to live, and to make cupboards mouse-proof.
I am interested in cats for a special reason. The colour and
length of their hair varies a great deal. But they are all of much
the same size and shape, apart from an occasional short-tailed
manx. There are no peculiar shapes like the greyhound and
dachshund, no giants like the carthorse, or dwarfs like the Shet-
land pony. Further, their matings are mostly governed by their
own choice, not ours. So the cat population is much more like a
human population, where a fair tall woman can marry a short
dark man if she wants to, than it is like a population of dogs,
sheep, or horses. Hence a study of inheritance in cats will be
more help than a study in dogs to understanding inheritance in
man.
At least one of the colour differences in cats seems to have
been originally a i#cial difference. The wild cats of Scotland and
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 45
Europe are generally tabbies. But the cats shown in ancient
Egyptian paintings, and those whose mummies have been
found, were almost all yellow, or as they are commonly called,
ginger cats. On the other hand I know of no evidence that there
is or ever has been a race of cats all of which are black, or blue,
though I am told that blue cats are much commoner both in
Palestine and in Brittany than in England.
Things are much the same with man. There are countries like
West Africa where all the native inhabitants have short hair and
dark skins, others like England where all have long hair (if it is
allowed to grow) and light skins. But other quite common
characters are never characteristic of a whole race. Thus no one
has ever found a race all of whom had red hair and freckled
faces, though it would be easy enough for a fiihrer who was a
"man-fancier" to breed one.
We know a lot about how characters are inherited in cats, but
not enough. There are two kinds of cat which I want badly.
One is a tortoiseshell male (uncastrated, of course). Tortoiseshell
females are common, but males are rare, and we do not know
what character their children inherit, or why, as is often the case,
they are sterile. The other kind is an albino, that is to say a white
cat with pink, not blue or yellow, eyes. I can guess how it would
breed, but I am not sure. If any readers can get me either kind, I
shall be most grateful, and quite prepared to pay. But please
write before sending any cats !
Why do we find it so much easier to make friends with cats
and dogs than with other mammals of about the same size ? The
dog has a strong inborn tendency to social behaviour, learns to
obey orders, and even develops something like a conscience.
But the cat is not very social, and has little signs of conscience.
One reason is that cats and dogs have sensations much more
like our own than those of hoofed animals such as horses, cattle,
deer, and pigs, or rodents such as rabbits and rats. There are
areas on the outside of the human brain concerned with sensa-
tions, not only from the eyes, ears, and so on, but from all parts
of the skin.
We know this in several ways. Injury to a part of such an
area does not abolish all sensation from the corresponding skin
46 SCIENCE ADVANCES
area, as when the nerves from it are cut. But it destroys its detail,
so that the patient cannot say whether he is being touched at
one point or several, or distinguish a penny from a matchbox by
touch. And if the brain is exposed during an operation, then if
the patient is conscious, stimulation of the appropriate part gives
rise to sensations felt in the corresponding skin area; while
stimulation of the skin causes electrical oscillations in the corre-
sponding part of the brain, even in an anaesthetized man. In a
cat, dog, or monkey, we can use this last method to determine
the areas in the brain concerned with skin sensation. The animal
is anaesthetized before the brain is uncovered, and killed under
the anaesthetic; so it feels no pain. The results are similar to
those in man.
But in many other animals Professor Adrian has found thatmost
of the skin is not represented by sensitive areas on the rind of the
brain. In a sheep, for example, only the mouth and feet are so repre-
sented. The pig has a large area for its sensitive snout; as a man
does for his hands, which have as big a part of the brain at their
service as the skin of the whole trunk. In consequence a sheep or
pig gets very little detailed information from most of its body,
while a cat or dog does. A cat likes being stroked. To please a
pig you have to scratch it with a hard stick. A cat or dog can be
gentle with its whole body. A horse can only be so with its
sensitive muzzle. So dogs and cats can play with us, and we with
them. In fact they play with children very much as equals, and
quite understand that they must not use their full strength.
Some relatives of the domestic cat, such as the Scottish wild
cat, certainly show no tendency to gentleness of behaviour, but
others do so. The puma "Bill" at the London Zoo before the
war, enjoyed tearing up newspapers, but would hold one's hand
in his mouth without biting it. Unfortunately he was intelligent
enough to understand that trousers do not feel, so he ruined a
pair of mine without hurting the leg under them. I have little
doubt that pumas could be made as safe domestic animals as our
large races of dog. The most hopeful of all is probably the North
American skunk. This animal defends itself when attacked by
making a smell which will paralyse a man or a dog. It only bites
in the last extremity. So if the scent glands are removed, which
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 47
is not difficult, it makes an excellent pet. There are, in fact,
probably quite a number of wild species which could become as
good friends of man as our cats. If they are not domesticated
before the spread of agriculture wipes them out, the loss will be
irreparable.
Flying Ants
A few days ago winged ants were swarming in the outskirts
of London. Now they are probably swarming in the Midlands,
and will be so in Scotland in August. I did my best to stop a
little boy from stamping on them. He said his mother had told
him they were biting flies.
Actually they are the sexual forms of ants. The ordinary ants
or ground staff, generally called workers, are females which have
never developed sexual organs or wings. The winged ants are
fully developed males and females. After mating, the females lose
their wings, often biting them off, and try to found new nests.
Naturally the vast majority fail. Those that succeed stop working
as soon as they have a brood of worker children to look after
them, and spend the rest of their lives laying eggs.
Thus an ants* nest, like a hive of bees or wasps, is normally a
single very large family with its mother, sometimes a mixture of
two or more related families. But there are larger differences
between its members than between members of any human
family. The most obvious difference between human beings of
the same family is that of sex, and this is determined long before
birth. Similarly the difference between fully male, female, and
worker ants is determined while they are still grubs.
We are apt to take the sex distinction as something funda-
mental and all-pervading among animals and plants. It is not.
Many animals, for example earthworms and most land and fresh-
water snails, are hermaphrodite, combining both sexes. Some of
them need a mate; others can mate with themselves. In many
animals one generation is hermaphrodite, the next has two
sexes. Sometimes, as in plant lice, one generation a year consists
of males and females which must be mated. The others contain
48 SCIENCE ADVANCES
only females which do not need mates. Moreover, other dif-
ferences can be just as important as sex.
In bees and wasps it is fairly sure that the workers fail to
develop sexually simply because they are undernourished. This
has been repeatedly shown by giving the special food intended
for future queens to grubs which would otherwise have grown
up to be workers. The sterility of worker bees is also probably
due to malnutrition.
These insect communities have naturally attracted students of
human society. When it appeared to be stable, as in the Middle
Ages, they were held up as models, the mother being called the
queen, or even, as in Shakespeare's Henry V^ the emperor. To-
day they are used as warnings of what will happen to men if they
adopt socialism. Both these analogies are false. An ants' nest or
a beehive is not a state, but a family. It has no government.
There is no private property, although under socialism the
average citizen will have more, not less, private property than
to-day, besides his or her share in the public property.
A society of the insect type is impossible to man for many
reasons. We do not lay eggs, nor bring forth large litters. Hence
to keep the population up, most women must have children, and
reproductive specialization is impossible. Malnutrition does not
produce a special type of human being, but merely an unhealthy
one.
Again in an insect society there is no specialization in social
functions other than sex, except where there are anatomically
different types, such as "soldiers" with large jaws. The same
individual will do nursing, food-gathering, building, and fighting,
at different periods. The only known exception is in bees, where
each individual specializes on a particular species of flower.
Hence insect communities have never developed a class society
on the one hand, or on the other a society where different
members have their own skills, but each respects the work of his
fellow, and all take part in directing the life of the community.
But the greatest difference is probably that there is no tradition
in insect societies. Language is rudimentary. Bees can communi-
cate. One type of "dance" means "I have found honey," another
"I have found pollen," a particular smell means "Come here."
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 49
But these are no more a real language than the cries of birds.
The "queen" does not educate her young even to the extent
that birds do. On the contrary, an insect society works on a
basis of inborn responses. The grubs give their nurses drops of
a sweet secretion, and are fed in return. But the worker ants
will also feed other insects which will give them sweet juices,
even if these eat the ant grubs. So innate responses are liable to
lead to antisocial conduct, as in men, and are far harder to modify
by experience.
These innate tendencies are certainly not due to the inheritance
of habit. If they were, the workers would have the "instincts" of
sexual individuals, since all their ancestors were fully developed
females or males. Lamarck thought that instinct was inherited
memory. Thus newly hatched chicks were supposed to peck at
corn because their ancestors have found seeds edible, and spiders
to make their webs because their ancestors have gradually
learned to do so. If this were true the instincts of worker insects
would gradually come to resemble those of males and females.
Social insects can only change their habit by evolutionary
change, which is a very slow process indeed. But human societies,
even the most conservative, change very quickly when judged by
the time scale of evolution.
Lamarckism is a socially harmful doctrine, though not so
harmful as the Nazi race theory. For example, the late Professor
Macbride, who also spread Nazi propaganda in Britain, wrote
that Indians could not govern themselves because it took many
generations of gradual self-government before a people could
develop the necessary inborn qualities. Similar arguments are pro-
duced to justify "aristocratic" government. They certainly could
not be used to justify either capitalist control of the State or the
present House of Lords, since few rich men of to-day had rich
grandparents, while many peerages are of recent date, and the
older creations have taken so many brides from the stage and
from newly rich families that they have not very much "noble
blood."
Human behaviour depends much more on environment than
ancestry. That is why it is possible to bring a people from
capitalism, or even feudalism or barbarism, to socialism and
50 SCIENCE ADVANCES
democracy in one generation. The ants are stuck in their state of
society, and we are not. But that is no reason for stamping on
them.
Bird Migration
As we looked up to see the Fortresses going over to bomb
airfields and factories in France, we saw another section of the
cross-channel air traffic, and our song birds and swallows going
to warmer countries for the winter.
The main routes of migration are roughly known. The long
distance record is held by some of the swallows, which winter in
south-west Africa. This is a distance of about 5,000 miles
actually more, as the birds do not fly straight. Of course they
alight on the way.
It is not only the birds which migrate. This summer 1 I have
seen a Painted Lady and several Clouded Yellow butterflies. As
they never winter over in England, though they can breed here
in summer, they or their parents must have flown over from the
Mediterranean coasts of Europe, or even from Algeria, where
they can live in winter. Only a few of the butterflies of any species
in France cross the channel. But there are some species which
migrate in masses like birds. The American Monarch or Milk-
weed butterfly regularly flies north from the southern United
States as far as Canada, in the spring, and some at any rate fly
south in the autumn. A few members of this species are caught in
England; thirty- three is the biggest number in one year, but
whether they fly the Atlantic or hitch-hike on ships is not quite
certain.
Similarly a few birds migrate in a very irregular way. For
example, every twenty-two years or so Pallas' Sandgrouse
arrives in England from Siberia in small numbers, and we occa-
sionally get birds from the Arctic or tropics.
We know something about why birds migrate, but nothing
about how they find their way. The most important work on the
causes has been done by Professor Rowan in Alberta. He showed
1 1943-
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 51
that even canaries, which are native to warmer climates than ours,
can live out of doors in many degrees of frost if they are well fed.
But they need a lot of food to keep warm. So he believes that our
migrants have to leave because of food shortage rather than cold.
What makes them leave is neither cold nor hunger, but the short-
ening of the day. He kept crows of a migratory Canadian species
in a large cage which was floodlit every evening in the autumn, so
that the effective length of night did not increase. He found that
when released, most of them flew north instead of south, like
birds which had had a normal series of nights of increasing
length. A number of plants also react to the shortening of the
day. Thus many trees only shed their leaves when the days
draw in. Walnut trees usually die in Leningrad because the frost
nips them before the leaves fall. They will live if covered with a
tarpaulin about 3 p.m. early in September, in which case the
leaves fall before the first hard frost.
The longer nights act indirectly by making the birds' ovaries
and testicles diminish in size and cease to secrete hormones. They
do not fly south if the appropriate hormone is injected. And the
urge which makes them come back to their breeding places is due
to the growth of the same organs in spring. Castrated birds do not
migrate regularly. In fact the influence which makes our birds
return in spring is the same which later on makes them desire to
mate and build nests. We must be very careful in attributing
human motives to animals. But the emotion behind migration to
breeding places is almost certainly more like human love than
hunger or curiosity. The robin is a good example of the excep-
tion which proves the rule. It does not usually leave us in winter;
and in the autumn its ovaries and testicles increase in size, and
produce enough hormones to make its breast redder in winter
than in late summer, and, what is more, to keep it at home.
We do not know the answer to the most interesting question,
namely how migrants find their way, and particularly how, in
some species at any rate, young birds migrate in the right direc-
tion without any teaching. This kind of question is commonly
called a mystery. I don't like this word. It is taken over from the
vocabulary of religion, where it means either something not to
be disclosed to the general public, or something which human
52 SCIENCE ADVANCES
reason cannot understand. This is just one of the uncounted
number of problems awaiting scientific solution. These problems
get solved in the long run; for example, we have solved the
problems of where the swallows go in winter, and how bees com-
municate information, both of which baffled our ancestors.
Very likely when we discover the answer it will help airmen to
find their way in darkness or fog. At one time it was thought that
short wave radio disturbed birds in their flight. I am not dis-
closing a military secret by remarking that if this were true few
birds would find their way to or from England during the war.
Nor do magnets put them off their course. Meanwhile we want a
lot more information. Before the war thousands of Soviet village
schools were doing a co-operative study on bird migration. They
caught migrating birds, put rings on their legs, and released them
to be caught again elsewhere. No doubt these children, if they
have not been killed or enslaved by the Nazis, are much too busy
now. But they or others will start again.
This is one of the problems which is as likely to be solved by
ordinary people in their spare time as by laboratory scientists.
With the combination of scientific education and leisure to which
we may look forward as Leninism spreads over the world, we
can look forward to a day when about one person in twenty will
be a naturalist, and many mysteries of nature will be mysteries
no more.
The Starling on Trial
A Soviet scientific film of which I recently helped to translate
the words, showed a remarkable experiment carried out by school
children. A starling had nested in a special box. Its nestlings were
removed, and a wooden model of a young bird substituted.
When the mother perched on the edge of the nest the dummy
opened its mouth and was fed. The food was collected in formalin,
and at the end of the day the children examined it. They found
that it consisted mainly of caterpillars, beetles, and other insects
harmful to crops and trees. The moral was that starlings should
be encouraged as friends of the farmer.
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 53
The film is well worth seeing, but it may not tell the whole
truth. In a paper recently read to the Royal Society, Dr. W. S.
Bullough, of Leeds University, accused the starlings of carrying
foot-and-mouth disease from Europe to Britain. This disease
affects cattle, sheep, pigs, and a number of other animals, and very
rarely, men. The animal gets fever, and blisters break out on the
thinner parts of the skin, including the udders as well as the feet
and mouth. Most animals recover, but they cease giving milk,
lose weight, and may abort or go lame; so there is considerable
loss. The disease is extremely infectious, and though in most
countries the sick animals are allowed to recover, in Britain they
are killed and burned. Most outbreaks can be traced to another in
the neighbourhood. The agent of the disease, which is a virus too
small to be seen with the ordinary microscope, can be carried not
only by infected animals, but on men's boots.
At most times there are no cases in Britain, and then a farm
will suddenly be infected, and an epidemic may start. Between
1900 and 1937 there were 349 unexplained outbreaks. It has fre-
quently been suggested that birds are the carriers, and as starlings
not merely feed in pastures, but perch on cows' backs, they come
in for special suspicion.
For many years ornithologists have studied the migration of
birds by fixing rings on their legs and then trapping the ringed
birds in other countries. Thus we know that some British swallows
go to South Africa in winter our winter, that is to say. Star-
lings don't go so far. Some stay at home. Others leave for Europe
in March, and come back about September to stay the winter.
The Scottish migratory starlings mostly go to Norway for the
summer and breed there. The English birds go to Sweden, Fin-
land, the western parts of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Ger-
many. The bird shown in the Soviet film may have wintered in
England.
There is very little foot-and-mouth disease in Norway, and
only ten unexplained outbreaks occurred in Scotland in thirty-
eight years. The peak month for them in England is October,
and they occur earlier in Eastern than Western England. On the
other hand, in Sweden most outbreaks occur in April just after the
starlings arrive, and they fall off in the autumn.
54 SCIENCE ADVANCES
A further piece of evidence comes from the habits of the star-
ling. Between June and December these birds live in huge com-
munal roosts in woods and reed beds, or on buildings such as
St. Martin's church in Trafalgar Square. In the spring they build
nests and live in pairs. But except from March to May the roosts
are fairly crowded. Less than 300 starling roosts are known in the
whole of Britain, and over 50,000 birds may crowd together in
one roost. The distribution of the roosts and of the unexplained
outbreaks of disease on the map are very similar. Dr. Bullough
thinks that the starlings, which sleep touching one another in the
crowded roosts, may pass the disease germs to one another, and
thus spread it. Except for the outbreaks when the continental
birds come back the incidence of the disease agrees very well
with the counts which have been made of the numbers of birds
in roosts.
The evidence against the starling is only circumstantial so far,
and some workers on the subject are very sceptical of Dr. Bul-
lough's theory. The answer is likely to come from a much more
detailed study of the movements of starlings, which may fly as
far as fifty miles a day to and from their roosts. In the Soviet
Union research on bird migration was done on a big scale by
school children, who caught birds, ringed them, and released
them to be caught in turn by other school children. In England
such research is left to adults with spare time. I think that at least
one child in ten has a genuine interest in animals, and could be-
come a naturalist. But a bright boy with an interest in biology is
encouraged to learn up the rabbit's anatomy with a view to a
scholarship, rather than "waste his time" watching wild rabbits.
Even in towns a good deal of natural history can be done. To
take one example, as many as fifty red underwing moths have
been seen on a single London lamp post, and such animals as the
mouse, clothes moth, and house fly are, of course, commoner in
towns than in the country. If we are to make the most of Britain
as a source of food, wool, and timber, we must study its wild
animals and plants, as well as the domesticated ones. Nature
study will come alive when our country belongs to all of us, and
every citizen feels that it is up to him or her to make it more
productive and more beautiful.
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 55
Instinct
A correspondent has sent me the following question: "What is
instinct, and how far does it differ from intelligent reasoning?
To what extent is it possessed by (a) the lower animals, () the
human race ?"
The word instinct was invented to "explain" the behaviour of
animals at a time when they were believed to be utterly different
from men, in having no reason, and no souls. It is very little used
by biologists today. It denotes an inborn tendency to do certain
actions, often quite complicated, in suitable circumstances. Now
we do a great many very complicated things without thinking
about them. For example, after swallowing our food we bathe it
in various digestive juices, churn it in our stomachs and guts,
passing it down as each stage of digestion is complete, and then
absorb some parts of it and reject others. Animals do the same.
But we do not call this instinctive behaviour. It is a series of
reflex actions, whose mechanism was studied by Pavlov among
others. We reserve the word instinct for actions of a kind which
in ourselves are conscious and willed, and may be reasoned.
Numerous animal actions often described as instinctive are
mere reflexes. Many insects fly or crawl to a light, and have been
said to desire it. If we observe one of them we note that if we
shine the light on its right eye, it pushes more vigorously with its
left legs or wings, and turns right until it is facing the light. So
would we if we wished to walk towards the light. But now take
one of the supposedly light-loving insects, and put black paint
on its left eye. It will continually move as if the light were shining
on its right eye only, that is to say it will go round and round in
a circle,, always turning right. Activities like these are properly
called reflex rather than instinctive. Our own efforts to keep our
balance are of this kind. We can easily throw them out of gear
by walking round rapidly with our foreheads on a walking stick,
and then suddenly standing up.
We use the word instinctive for behaviour which is not so
mechanical as this, without its objects being fully understood. A
female cat may have been taken from her mother at birth, and
56 SCIENCE ADVANCES
fed from a fountain pen filler, so that she can have no memory of
motherhood. But when she bears kittens she licks them, suckles
them, keeps them warm, carries them to a nest, and so on. She
probably loves the kittens and certainly enjoys touching them,
but it is idle to pretend that she knows that she can give them
food, and that otherwise they will die. You might as well suggest
that a child wants to eat sweets because it knows that it needs
chemical energy to keep it warm.
A human mother cannot do as well as a mother cat without
teaching. Her instincts are not so precise. But if properly taught,
and provided with the necessary food, clothes, housing, and so
on, she can do much better, as is shown by the fact that in pro-
gressive countries the mortality among babies is less than among
kittens.
When some precise pattern of behaviour is universal in a
species, we are apt to call it instinctive. This is sometimes, but
not always, true. We can only decide by experiment, and the
greatest number of experiments have been done on the song of
birds. This may be instinctive. For example, a male blackbird,
whether brought up alone, or where he can hear other birds, only
sings the blackbird song, which is fairly complicated. But the
chaffinch has to learn his song. If he is not taught it, his song is
described as like that of the lesser whitethroat. Other birds will
learn the song of a different species, even from a gramophone
record.
It is clear that men and women are more like chaffinches than
blackbirds, but not very like either. We learn the language of the
family or orphanage in which we are brought up, but children
brought up by animals do not develop a language of their own.
Babies have a certain urge to speak, but it is not well enough
developed to be called an instinct.
We are very apt to think that sentiments held by the vast
majority of men and women are instincts. For example, most
people object to murder within the community, even if they
commend the murder of members of another tribe. But primitive
societies have been discovered in which a murderer is not pun-
ished, but is expected to adopt the children of his victim.
Man has become the most successful of the animals because he
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 57
is the most plastic as regards behaviour. He can learn to do a vast
variety of things and, which is more remarkable, to desire a vast
variety of things. An animal species adapting itself to a new en-
vironment must change its instincts. This is a slow process, like
the change of form, occupying many thousand generations.
Human character can be changed in one generation. The
younger generation in the Soviet Union mostly take it for granted
that men and women will work together for the public good.
They regard the struggle for one's own interests which is inevit-
able under capitalism, as being not so much wicked as ridiculous
selfishness. The young Nazis and Japanese believe that they are
members of a master race, and combine cruelty to foreigners with
blind obedience to superiors. The battles which are going on
today will decide which of these ideologies will be a model for
all mankind.
We cannot draw sharp lines between reflexes, urges accom-
panied by desire, and instincts. But we can say that instincts
producing highly complicated and stereotyped behaviour are
most highly developed in insects, and that in man they are less
stereotyped than in related animals. We have to learn most of
our behaviour. And therefore we have greater possibilities for
good or evil than any other animal. The domesticable animals,
and notably the dog, have a large capacity for learning. Man
differs from them, not only in having less instinctively fixed
behaviour, but in modifying his environment by production, so
that he is always having to learn new activities. If we had com-
plicated hereditary instincts we should still be stuck in the old
stone age, if we had even got so far. If we believe that all the
customs of our own society are "human nature" we shall be
unable to adapt ourselves to the great changes which are now
upon us.
4 The Origin of Species
Men started naming different kinds of animals and plants long
before history began. This is shown by the fact that some animals
have similar names in languages such as Latin and the ancient
58 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Indian Sanskrit, whose common ancestral language must have
been spoken many thousand years ago. Primitive peoples whom
we call savages though that is probably nothing to what they
call us often have names for hundreds of kinds of wild animals.
These names are obviously useful. Clearly the differences between
two cats are less than those between any cat and a tiger. In the
middle ages the philosophers whose teaching was accepted by the
catholic church thought that the names stood for forms common
to all members of a "species," and having a real existence of their
own.
Linnaeus, the Swede who founded the modern system of
classifying animals and plants, thought each species had been
created separately. Lamarck, largely from a study of fossil
animals, thought that they had been formed from other species
in the past, but his theory of how this had happened was incor-
rect. Darwin produced much stronger evidence for the origin of
species, and his theory of how they originated is much nearer
the truth.
But it was not the whole truth. He pointed out that by selec-
tion men had produced races of dogs, pigeons, and other animals
and plants which would certainly be put in different species if
they were found wild. But his critics answered that they can still
breed together. Even a Newfoundland dog and a dachshund have
given fertile hybrids, whereas a dog and a fox do not produce
hybrids at all, even if artificially mated, and hybrids between a
horse and a donkey are sterile. It is true that some animals and
plants of obviously different species will give moderately fertile
hybrids, for example the large and small elephant hawk moths,
and the European and Chilean strawberries whose crossing gave
our cultivated varieties. But other species which resemble one
another closely will not do so.
The work of the last thirty years has completely removed this
objection to Darwin's theory, though it has shown that it has to
be modified in another respect. Clearly the conclusive experiment
is to start with a group of plants or animals which belong to the
same species and breed together, and from this to make another
group which can breed with itself, and not with the remaining
descendants of the original group.
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 59
This was first done for a plant in London by Crane and Jor-
gensen working with the tomato, and for an animal by Koshen-
nikov in Moscow with a small fly called Drosophila. If you
repeatedly cut a tomato shoot back, some of the new shoots will
have thicker leaves and other differences. If these are cut off and
planted they will set seed with their own pollen, giving more but
smaller fruits than the original. But they give very few hybrids
with the original stock, and these are highly sterile, giving one or
two seeds per plant at most. The change is due to a doubling of
the number of chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell. Micro-
scopical examination shows that a number of species have arisen
in this way. These new species are generally rather less fertile
than the parent, but stand frost better, so they are common in
the arctic and in mountains.
Another way in which new plant species arise is by a doubling
of the chromosomes in what started as a sterile hybrid. Thus
species can arise at one single leap. Perhaps Darwin's political
and philosophical outlook, which was that of the i9th century
British upper middle class, gave him a bias in favour of slow
change.
Still the differences which prevent crossing in most animal
species have almost certainly arisen slowly, and we find all sorts
of intermediates. For example, when many species are crossed,
the hybrids of one sex only are fertile. Indeed the rule which
generally enables one to predict which sex will be sterile, if only
one is so, is called Haldane's rule, as I discovered it.
Some wild species seem to be in process of splitting up. It is
not enough to form new varieties. If these mate freely, as the
different colour varieties of our mice, adders, newts, snails and
grasshoppers do, the species will merely remain variable.
But if different varieties have different habitats or breeding
seasons, or show a repugnance to crossing, a species may break
up. For example, the peppered moth and the mottled beauty
have developed black races in the "black countries" of industrial
areas, fairly sharply separated from the normal races outside.
They still interbreed with them freely, but after a few thousand
generations small alterations in the chromosomes of one or
another would probably lead to partial sterility in the hybrids..
60 SCIENCE ADVANCES
However, we are likely to follow the Soviet example and gasify
most of our coal underground within a generation or two. If so,
these black moth races will disappear again, with the black sur-
roundings which they fit, before they have had time to form
species.
Thus we see that Darwin was largely correct in his views as to
how new species arose, but that like many other thinkers of the
i9th century, he overestimated the "inevitability of gradualness."
Species in the Making
How many wild species of mammals are there in Britain ? One
would think it would be easy to answer this question, except that
there might be a doubt about some species which have recently
been introduced. The American grey squirrels, some of which
were released from the London Zoo early in this century, have
spread over most of southern England. A small Japanese deer is
wild in several southern counties. The fat dormouse from France,
and the American chipmunk, have small colonies in this country,
but it is not sure that they will establish themselves.
Apart from these there are certainly thirty-seven wild species,
and perhaps fifty-two. A hundred years ago most naturalists
believed, with Linnaeus, that species had been created once for
all, and that the number could be definitely determined. But
Darwin had already begun to doubt this. Now most biologists
think that species have arisen in the past, and are arising today.
The difficulty as to the number of English species is due to the
fact that some of our species are in the process of splitting up,
and there is doubt as to how far the process has gone.
A number of our species are variable. The variation may be
due to changes in environment. The fur of the Scottish Highland
stoats changes from brown to white every autumn, and they are
then called ermines. The stoats of southern England do not
change, even in a hard winter. Or it may be determined by
heredity. Black, yellow, piebald, white, and hairless freaks have
been found in various species, such as mice, rats, squirrels, rabbits,
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 6 1
and moles. These abnormal characters are generally inherited if
the animals are caught alive and bred in captivity.
But such freaks are not regarded as new species or subspecies,
nor even in most cases as incipient new species. They breed with
the other members of their species, and nowhere do they form a
majority. Probably natural selection prevents their spreading.
This could only be proved by counting thousands of animals.
This can be done on insects. For example, in the case of a small
British fly which my department is studying, yellow forms occur,
but never spread. This is partly because the females prefer the
normal type, and partly because the yellows dry up more easily
in a drought.
On the other hand there is sometimes good reason for splitting
what was formerly regarded as a single species. For example,
Linnaeus, the great Swedish classifier of the eighteenth century,
distinguished the wood mouse, or long-tailed field mouse, Apo-
demus sylvatkus^ from the house mouse. In case anyone thinks I
am writing of high-brow and remote problems I may add that
this is almost certainly the commonest British mammal, and that
it can be a curse to allotment holders by digging up newly-
planted peas and other seeds.
In the late nineteenth century the naturalist de Winton found
that in southern and eastern England there is also a very similar
mouse, with a yellow neck, which is slightly larger than the
long-tailed field mouse, and has three more joints in its tail. He
regarded it as a new species, and called it Apodemus flavicollis.
Most naturalists probably agree with him. But since then three
other species have been distinguished, namely, forms from St.
Kilda, the Hebrides, and Fair Island, and also a subspecies from
Bute. They differ from the ordinary wood mouse in colour and
average size, but not as sharply as the yellow-necked, and prob-
ably have less claim to be a distinct species.
On the other hand they may very well be species in the making.
The question of their specific rank can only be cleared up by
breeding experiments. Here are some questions to be answered.
Do the wood mouse and yellow-necked mouse breed together in
nature? If not, can they be got to do so in captivity? If so, do they
produce hybrids ? Are these hybrids sterile, like mules, or partly
62 SCIENCE ADVANCES
fertile, or fully fertile? If they are fertile, are the differences in-
herited as a single unit, like the difference between ordinary and
black rabbits, or in some other way?
If I had to bet on the answer, I should guess that the yellow-
necked mouse would not breed with the wood-mouse, or that if
it did the hybrids would be sterile, while the island forms would
breed with the ordinary wood mouse, and there would be some
blending in the hybrids, as is usual in crosses between species. But
I may well be wrong. On some of the Pacific islands, birds whose
ancestors migrated there from the continents or larger islands have
been isolated long enough to form distinct species which do not
interbreed with the mainland forms. Almost all our larger animals,
and probably our bats, of which there are eleven kinds, are divided
sharply into species which rarely if ever interbreed. For example,
the rabbit and hare, the weasel and stoat, the red and fallow deer,
are quite distinct. But the wood mouse, the bank vole, the field
vole, and possibly the house mouse, seem to be in the process of
forming new species, while Irish races of the stoat and alpine hare
are sometimes thought to be distinct species.
The theory of evolution was founded by such naturalists as
Darwin, Wallace, Bates, and Muller, who studied animals all over
the world, and particularly in the tropics. But they were observers
rather than experimenters. They found species which had obvi-
ously originated recently, for example wingless insects on islands;
and they produced theories, which seem to be substantially true,
about the origin of species.
But these theories can only be verified by watching species in
the act of splitting. All our three species which are engaged in
splitting are liable to such increases in numbers that they become
pests to agriculture. So active research on them will be of prac-
tical as well as theoretical value. Here is a job for British natur-
alists after the war.
Back to the Water
Much of my work during this war, some of which I have been
allowed to describe, has been in connexion with human life under
water. Naturally I had to see if I could get any hints from other
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 63
air-breathing animals which have taken to life in water, and about
whose physiology something is known.
Both the study of fossils and that of comparative anatomy
make it fairly clear that there were animals in water before they
came on land. And they leave no doubt that the four-footed land
animals are descended from fish which came out of the water
about the time when the old red sandstone was laid down, before
the coal was formed. Probably we land vertebrates are all des-
cended from a single species of adventurous fish. But very many
groups of land vertebrates have gone back to the water. Some,
like water-voles, otters, gulls, and sea snakes, show no very
obvious changes in their anatomy. But these spend a good deal
of their life ashore, and above all their young are born or hatched
in the air.
Other aquatic animals such as seals, penguins, and turtles, are
so far transformed that their limbs are greatly modified for
swimming, and neither seals nor turtles can walk far, while pen-
guins cannot fly. But they still come ashore to bear their young
or lay their eggs.
Only two groups of mammals have been fully modified for
aquatic life, and live their whole lives in the water. These are the
flesh-eating whales and dolphins, and the vegetarian sirenians,
such as the manatee. No bird has ever managed this, and the
ichthyosaurs, an extinct group of reptiles which did so, brought
forth their young alive, which is fairly unusual in reptiles, but
obviously necessary in an air-breathing marine animal.
The same kind of thing has happened in the evolution of
insects. Their remote ancestors were aquatic, and many different
groups have gone back to the water. Again this is usually only
for part of their life cycle. Thus dragonflies, mayflies, caddis flies,
and mosquitoes spend their larval stage under water, and do all
their growth there. They only come out at their last moult, mate
in the air, and lay their eggs on or near water.
In the course of evolution there are comparatively few examples
of water animals adapting themselves to land, and a great many of
land animals adapting themselves to water. And it is a striking
fact that many of the land animals which have gone back are
more efficient in the water than its original inhabitants. The
64 SCIENCE ADVANCES
largest whales are larger than any fish of the present or past. And
they almost certainly swim quicker, grow faster, and are more
intelligent. As they keep their temperatures steady, they can live
in warm or cold water, and thus have a wider range north and
south than any fish.
Clearly life on land has given them some useful characters
which they have taken back to the water. A fish coming out of
water finds itself in a more difficult environment than before.
It is not supported on every side. It must develop limbs, which
need much more complicated brain function to work them than
fins. It needs stronger bones, and must give its young a tough
egg shell or bring them forth alive. It is subject to a greater range
of temperatures, and it is an advantage to it to be able to keep
warm in cold weather and cool in hot weather. A constant tem-
perature is probably needed for the high development of brain
function found in mammals and birds. A "cold-blooded" animal,
more accurately an animal of variable temperature, probably
could not develop great mental powers. Certainly the human
brain is more upset by a rise or fall of temperature than our other
organs.
So the adaptations developed by land animals to meet the
difficulties of life on land, of which I have only mentioned a very
few, have proved useful to their descendants which went back to
water, even though they continue to be air breathers, and must
come up to the surface from time to time. Seals, porpoises, and
probably whales, manage to dive for many minutes without
suffocating, by cutting off the blood supply from most organs
except their brains, and slowing down their hearts so as to con-
serve oxygen. Human divers cannot do this, so if they are to
stay down even for five minutes they must have air pumped
down to them, or take compressed air with them in cylinders.
The facts of animal evolution have a considerable bearing on
the development of human societies, as Marx saw when he
wished to dedicate ''Capital" to Darwin. Of course, however,
one must be careful not to argue uncritically from one to another.
But the history of whales and the like may help us to understand
why scientific communism could not develop directly from
primitive communism, but a period of class society was inevi-
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 65
table. This is important if we are to see through the arguments of
some anarchists, simple-lifers, and others who want us to discard
many of the good things of capitalist civilization along with its
evils.
A member of a primitive communist society is bound by
custom, and seldom seems to think for himself, as Engels pointed
out. Worse still, he may treat the members of his own tribe like
brothers and sisters, but find his greatest pride in collecting the
heads of a tribe five miles away. Apparently class society was
necessary to develop the division of labour, to allow the forma-
tion of communities so large that each member does not know
every other, and above all to develop technology beyond that of
the stone age. In class society each man must fend for himself,
and thus develop intellect, if not morality.
We now know that it is possible to keep these gains while
abolishing the class distinctions which helped to generate them.
There is no more reason to suppose that men in a scientific com-
munist society will go back to the primitive mental and moral
processes of primitive men, than that whales will become cold-
blooded or give up suckling their young.
No Caterpillars by Request
In the Worker s Notebook for August ist Walter Holmes said
that the lobster is "a very primitive form of life/' As a biologist
and chairman of the editorial board I can't let that sort of thing
go by, especially as it may be used to justify the Ministry of
Food's permission to serve lobster, though not fish, along with
meat in restaurants.
You've only got to look at a lobster to see that it is a fairly
complicated sort of animal, and if you can afford to buy a whole
lobster to cut open, you will see that some of the gadgets inside
it are not so simple either. An ant or a fly is just as complicated
inside, but you can't see their internal organs without a micro-
scope.
By a primitive animal I suppose we mean an animal like those
which existed a long time ago. For example, there have been
c
66 SCIENCE ADVANCES
limpets very like those which live today ever since the Silurian
rocks were laid down in the sea which is now Wales, over three
hundred million years ago. In fact, compared with a limpet, Mr.
Chamberlain is quite progressive. However the limpet, though
primitive, is not very primitive. It has a mouth, eyes on stalks,
and various other organs. It has a lot of evolution behind it; but
after evolving so far, it has stayed put for a long time. A worm,
a jellyfish, or a sea anemone is much more primitive than a
limpet.
We can tell a good deal about which animals are primitive by
studying fossils. Fossils show us that fish were there before
amphibians (like the newt and frog) which developed from them;
amphibians before reptiles such as lizards, snakes, tortoises, and
crocodiles; and reptiles before birds and mammals. So we can
say without hesitation that, for example, reptiles are more primi-
tive than birds, which is fairly obvious for other reasons. But a
great deal of evolution took place before any recognizable fossils
are found, so we can't always answer on these lines.
However, we can compare the lobster with other fairly similar
animals, and ask if it is primitive. It is obviously a segrnental
animal, that is to say, built up of a number of sections one behind
the other, each with a pair of appendages. Centipedes and milli-
pedes have a great many segments, each with a pair of legs, and
one segment is very like another, except at the two ends. But in
the lobster a lot of die segments are fused together, and some of
the appendages are walking legs, others mouth parts, stalked eyes,
and feelers, whilst the biggest pair carries the claws. So it looks
as if the lobster had developed from an animal more like a centi-
pede, by specializing the appendages in different ways, and
fusing the segments in the front part of the body. The few avail-
able fossils support this view.
We are very apt to think of evolution as a process which has
culminated in ourselves, as if all the animals could be arranged in
order like boys in a class at school, with the human species as
top boy. This is quite wrong. Primitive animals such as jellyfish
and sea urchins have no head at all. Some worms have the begin-
ning of a head, and the lobster's head is not definitely separate
from its body. But three groups of animals have independently
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 67
developed a head with eyes and a brain near the mouth. Gener-
ally there is an organ of smell on the head also, for example, our
nose, and the antennae or feelers of insects. But hearing organs
may be anywhere. For example, many insects hear with their legs.
The three groups with heads are the higher molluscs, such as
snails and cuttlefish, the arthropods, including insects, spiders,
and lobsters, and the vertebrates, including ourselves. The mol-
luscs have not got very far, but the insects have done very
well.
If an intelligent visitor from another star had come to our
earth a million years ago he would probably have said that the
insects were the most advanced animals. He would have found
insect societies which were not mere herds, but engaged in
co-operative production, for example, of honeycombs. If he had
been a biologist he would have seen that insects could not grow
much larger, because their system of breathing could not work
in an animal more than a few inches long. And so they cannot
develop brains large enough for very intelligent behaviour.
The social insects have been called communists because though
they collect food and manufacture such products as the paper
nests of wasps and the honeycombs of bees, these are not the
property of any individual. But further research has shown that
they are not communistic in the human sense. For example, the
wasps within a nest have a primitive kind of private trading. A
worker catches a fly, chews it up, and gives it to one of the grubs
in the comb. The grub repays it with a drop of sugary juice. Ant
larvae do the same. And various beetles and other insects living
in ants' nests exploit the workers by secreting small drops of
sweet liquid. In return they are given much more than its equiva-
lent of other food, and are sometimes even allowed to eat the
young ants. In just the same way there are generally parasites in
primitive human communistic societies, for example wizards,
" rain-makers," and witch-finders.
Further, these insect societies are not run on the principle "to
each according to his needs." A beehive in spring contains one
fertile female, the queen, and a great many sterile female workers,
who are all her daughters. In spring most of her eggs are put in
cells with ordinary food, and develop into workers. But some are
<?8 SCIENCE ADVANCES
given a special secretion called "royal jelly" containing a hormone
which causes the grubs to develop into queens. In fact the workers
are produced as a result of under-feeding. So a certain amount of
what, in a human society, would be injustice, is inherent in these
insect communities. And the workers cannot revolt and take
control, because they cannot reproduce themselves. So the in-
sects, although very highly developed in their way, seem to be at
a dead end so far as social evolution is concerned.
May I conclude with a plea to readers ? A comrade in Devon-
shire has sent me a small caterpillar, by now very dried up, which
he hopes I will identify. I could probably do so at the Natural
History Museum in the course of an hour or so, but I perhaps
flatter myself in thinking that I have more important things to
do. I doubt if I could have identified it without help even before
it changed colour on drying up. So may I respectfully ask my
readers to remember that I am not omniscient, and am very busy ?
I wish I had time to identify caterpillars, which, by the way, are
far from primitive. In fact a caterpillar has more different muscles
than a man. And the Chinese regard it as a great delicacy. But in
spite of this, please send me no more caterpillars.
Domestic Animals
What was the most important event in man's past? I do not
say in human history, because, if I am right, it took place before
any historical records were made, and even before the origin of
the rather dubious legends with which history begins. At first
sight one would be inclined to choose some great political trans-
formation, such as the fall of the Roman Empire or the Russian
Revolution, or else the beginning of some world-shaking system
of ideas, such as the origin of Christianity or the writing of the
Communist Manifesto.
However, if the Marxist account of history is correct, these
events, or something like them, were bound to have happened.
The Roman Empire was based on slavery, and was bound to
break down or change very greatly when slavery ceased to work.
The New Testament is the only set of books surviving from the
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 69
Graeco-Roman civilization which were written by workers (ex-
cept perhaps for St. John's gospel), for workers, and about
workers. That is one reason why they have had an influence that
no other books have had. There were probably other books
written by workers at the same time, preaching more revolu-
tionary doctrines. But they have not survived. Some organized
ideology for the Roman workers was a historical necessity. The
Roman government even went so far as to invent a special
religion for freed slaves, but it did not get very far ! In the same
way, once the industrial revolution had produced a proletariat,
socialist thinkers were bound to arise, and many did. But it was
Marx and Engels who laid the theoretical foundations of the only
Socialist State.
We must look behind changes in government and ideas to
changes in productive forces and relations, and of these, the
changes in productive forces are the most fundamental. The first
and greatest of these was the origin of production. The earliest
fossils that are at all human are associated with tools, if only
with crudely chipped stones; and Engels was probably right in
saying that an ape-like creature became man when it started
making tools. If so this change was the origin of man, not
part of his history. Men continued for hundreds of thousands of
years as hunters, using fire, stone axes, and later bows and stone-
headed arrows. They developed sculpture, painting, and dancing,
made huts, and probably wore skin clothes in winter.
Towards the end of the old stone age, dogs joined human
society, probably as scavengers. From what we know of the habits
of related species, such as jackals, and of the relations of dogs to
primitive human societies, it is likely that the initiative came
from the dogs, and it is fairly sure that at first they were not
private property.
But, at least in Europe, there was a rather sudden change about
10,000 years ago. Men began to domesticate animals and probably
to practise a primitive agriculture, and changed over from the use
of chipped to polished stone. The domestication of animals or
plants as food sources brought about vast economic changes. To
take only one of them, the number of people who could live on a
square mile of fertile land was increased from ten to a hundred
70 SCIENCE ADVANCES
times. This meant that society could no longer be based on a
small tribe of twenty to a hundred people who knew one another
intimately, and settled most disputes by common sense.
Some sort of government was needed, though not necessarily
anything that could be called a state. But domestication meant the
possibility of private property not merely in tools, clothes, and
huts, but in sources of food, in fact the private ownership of land
and capital. Many primitive tribes avoid the development of a
class system based on wealth in ways which seem strange to us.
For example, in some Pacific islands the produce of the garden
worked by a man and his wife goes to his sisters and their
children.
Once a man owned sheep or other sources of food, he could
and did hire workers without property. The book of Genesis
tells the story of how Laban hired Jacob for seven years, and
swindled him at the end, while Jacob got the better of Laban at
the end of another seven, and became a large-scale sheep-owner.
In this kind of way class divisions in society arose. "The lamb
misused breeds public strife," though not exactly in the way that
Blake meant. Class society is quite a recent development, and in
no way necessary for human existence or progress.
In fact the men or women who made the great step of domesti-
cation lived in a classless society. They must have been people of
great intelligence. The idea of keeping a herd of animals with a
tribe, instead of hunting it, was a very original one. It may have
started in a people with a passion for pets, who began to eat them
when they grew too many. It is certainly striking that even in
early historical times the Greeks always sacrificed an ox or sheep
to a god before eating it themselves, as if they were ashamed of
the action, and needed a religious excuse. Even today good
Muslims will not eat an animal unless it has been killed in the
name of Allah, and many Hindus will not eat animals at all.
Gal ton believed that only a few animals had instincts which
fitted them for domestication, and that all the large domesticable
animals had already been tamed. There is much truth in this, as
can be seen from the case of the budgerigar, which was only
brought over from Australia last century, but is obviously better
adapted for human society than any of our British wild birds.
ANIMALS AND PLANTS Jl
However, animal behaviour can be altered by many generations
of domestication; and the differences are inherited, as has been
shown by crossing wild and tame mice. Today a number of fur-
bearing animals such as the silver fox, the mink, and in the Soviet
Union the sable, are being domesticated. And their descendants
will probably be tame in a few centuries if people continue to
wear furs, which is by no means certain, if only because synthetic
fibres will probably replace them, as they are replacing silk.
It is very striking that soon after the domestication of animals,
art almost disappeared. Neolithic carving is very crude compared
with that of the old stone age, and painting is unknown. This
may have been due to the origin of classes in society, and a
consequent contempt for manual work. A scientific study of
what happens when an animal is domesticated will not merely be
of interest to biologists, but will help us to understand one of the
greatest changes in the past of our own species.
What to do with the Zoo
For the first time the London Zoo has got a scientific director,
Dr. Hindle. In former times the Secretary attempted to combine
administrative with scientific work, but there is much to be said
for employing a full-time scientist. Dr. Hindle has a very wide
experience of foreign animals, for he has studied a variety of
tropical and sub-tropical diseases, including yellow fever and
kala azar, a malady which has killed millions in India, and which
spreads at least as far west as Syria.
Both are insect-borne, and the best way of controlling them is
to keep down the insects which carry them. But both of them are
also diseases of other animals besides man. Some monkeys get
yellow fever; and hamsters, which are little burrowing creatures
half-way between a rat and a guinea-pig in appearance, get kala
azar. These animals act as a reservoir of infection from which
human beings can be infected, even after all the human cases in an
area have been cured or have died. So a good deal must be
learned about these animals before the disease can be controlled,
and Dr. Hindle had to study them as well as insects.
72 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Dr. Hindle will not be able to do very much for the Zoo at
present, because of the impossibility of importing animals, and
the shortage of staff, food and fuel. But there is one thing he
could organize during the coming year, and that is an exhibition
of all our British land vertebrates except those birds which
migrate or need a lot of space to fly in.
For example, we have three native species of snake. The adder
or viper is the only poisonous one. Vipers do not do very well in
captivity, but will live several years if they are not roughly
handled while being caught. The grass snake, on the other hand,
which is also common, does quite well, and everyone should
know the difference between the two. The smooth snake is a
good deal rarer, and almost, if not quite, restricted to Hampshire
and Dorset. The slow-worm or blindworm is not a snake, but a
lizard which has lost its legs; as appears among other things, from
its having eyelids, and its habit of breaking off its tail when
alarmed. All these ought to be on show, if only to discourage
hikers from killing the harmless ones.
The hardest English land vertebrates to get would be the pine
marten, which still lives in the Lake District but is very rare, and
the polecat from the Welsh mountains. But I think Dr. Hindle
might be excused from keeping a mole. The mole is only happy
underground, needs about fifty worms a day, and is said to die of
starvation in a few hours if he runs short of them.
Even during the war we might well have a house for British
animals only. It would not require heating, as they can all stand
our winters; and the deaths of foreign animals have left the
necessary room. After the war there will be great opportunities to
make the Zoo a place of scientific teaching and research, without
lowering its entertainment value. Here a lot will depend on co-
operation with the staff. All of them are interested in their jobs,
and some are capable of real scientific research.
Last year three of the keepers made history by publishing, in
the Zoological Society's Proceedings, a detailed account of birth
and infancy of chimpanzees. One mother brought up her baby
without help; another abandoned it when it was born, and the
keepers had to look after it, though later she took some care of it.
Many of the keepers notice previously unknown facts about the
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 73
animals in their charge, and during the war most of them must
have made discoveries about what food animals will eat, for
example, turnips instead of bananas. These discoveries should be
made part of the general stock of knowledge.
In the past, the Zoo's most important contributions to re-
search have been on the anatomy of the animals which died, and
on their parasites. The anatomy could certainly be improved if it
were studied from a more physiological angle. For example, a
giraffe can stretch up to 17 feet, and its heart is about 8 feet above
its toes. This means that the pressure of the blood in its leg veins
and arteries must be far greater than in a man or horse. I am
willing to bet that a giraffe's leg veins will be found to have a
special structure if anyone examines them carefully next time one
dies.
But even more important is the teaching side. It would be
possible to state the class, order, family, and diet of every animal
on its cage or paddock, and these facts would gradually soak into
the public. We should come to take it for granted that the por-
cupine is a rodent like the rat and squirrel, while the hedgehog is
more nearly related to the mole and the shrew. Only after we
understand such classification can we really begin to examine the
evidence as to man's place among the animals, and the arguments
for and against evolution. If anyone thinks this unimportant,
please remember that Stalin was sacked from a theological
seminary for reading Darwin.
Still more valuable would be a link up with the naturalists of
London, and especially with the boys and girls who collect
caterpillars and newts, and want information about what they
have found and how to keep it. Dr. Hindle could do worse, if he
has not done so already, than spend an afternoon at the Horniman
Museum at Forest Hill, which does a great deal for the young
naturalists of South London.
London has a very big bird and insect fauna. I have seen a
kingfisher within 50 yards of the main line from Euston. In the
last two years two friends have caught a small elephant hawk
moth and a chalkhill blue butterfly in their London gardens,
though the latter is not supposed to live nearer than Berkshire.
Other insects, for example, the gray dagger, sycamore, poplar
74 SCIENCE ADVANCES
gray, buff tip, and vapourer moths, are commoner in London
than in the country. Few of us can keep a kinkajou or a badger.
Most of us can keep moths or minnows, at least in peace-time, if
we want to. By helping those who wish to devote some of their
leisure after the war to the study of our native animals, Dr.
Hindle can do a great deal to democratize British biology.
Spring
The primroses, almonds, and a few other flowers, are blooming
in Southern England. The mild winter has of course helped them
on, but why do they bloom when they do ? That is the sort of
question which scientists ask, whereas the plain man takes the
course of nature for granted. But as most children ask questions
of this kind, I don't so much think that scientists are an abnormal
set of people, as that they are people whose normal curiosity
hasn't been knocked out of them.
Of course it is not enough to ask such a question, or to think
out an answer to it. It can only be answered by experiments, that
is to say by putting the question to nature in actions, not words.
You have got to alter natural conditions, and see what happens,
One can try to imitate the various features of spring one at a time,
for example by warming up plants in December, or giving them
more light. One can't learn much about nature except by trying
to change it. The same is true of human society.
That is why numbers of people who have tried to change some
features in our existing society, whether it be the standard of
housing, the criminal law, or the prejudice against coloured
people, discover that the nature of society is what Marx and
Engels said it was, and find themselves first working with the
Communist Party and then joining it.
A great deal of our knowledge about what happens to plants
in spring comes from practical horticulture, and more recently
agriculture. If flowers are "forced," to use the horticultural term,
to bloom in winter, they sell for a great deal more than their
price in season.
The Soviet botanist Lysenko distinguishes two stages in the
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 75
development of annual plants, the first in which it is mainly con-
trolled by temperature, and the second in which its making is
controlled by light. Many perennial plants pass through similar
stages. Although most seeds require warmth to germinate, many
will not do so without preliminary exposure to cold. Thus apple
and pear seeds should be cooled down to about 40 F, and
gooseberry seeds to 20 or even 10, that is to say twenty degrees
of frost. Many varieties of wheat do not need cold to germinate,
but unless they have been exposed to cold, produce only leaves,
but no flowers or grain. Other cereals, such as millet, can be
grown in cold climates if the seeds are given a week or so at about
70 F. This process of forcing seeds by heat or cold is called
Yarovizatsia or Vernalization.
Cold and heat have similar effects on perennial plants. Nettles
start to grow very slowly in spring unless their roots have been
exposed to frost. On the other hand, if one branch of a lilac is
placed for twelve hours or so in water at 85 to 90 F., it will
produce leaves and blossoms before the buds have opened on the
other branches.
Besides these methods, which copy nature, chemical methods
are used. For example, lily of the valley or lilac can be forced to
bloom by putting it in air-tight boxes exposed to ether vapour. In
the United States seed potatoes are harvested in the north in
autumn, and sent south in railway vans sprinkled with ethylene
chlorhydrin. They are planted in the coastal states round the Gulf
of Mexico, and start to put out shoots without any rest period,
whereas untreated potatoes lie dormant for months.
In the light-sensitive period the behaviour of plants depends
on the length of the days and nights, as shown by Garner and
Allard in America. Many plants of temperate climates, such as
wheat, barley, and oats, develop quicker the longer the day. By
using powerful electric lamps at night one can get two or even
three generations in a year, provided the seeds are cooled down.
But many temperate plants will not flower at all unless the day-
light lasts for over twelve hours. So in the tropics, where all days
are about twelve hours long, they merely produce leaves, but no
seed, even in cool mountainous regions.
On the other hand, plants of tropical origin often need a long
j6 SCIENCE ADVANCES
night. They include cereals such as rice and millet, and many
varieties of cotton and beans. They will only flower in climates
with long summer days if they are covered up for some hours in
the morning or evening.
Different varieties of the same plant differ both in their tem-
perature and light requirements for early flowering. Lysenko and
his pupils have produced extremely rapidly developing wheat by
crossing two varieties, one of which responds well to cold, the
other to long days. Even though neither set seed particularly
early, some of their offspring combined the qualities of both
parents. Thus Lysenko's work is being applied, not only to
speeding up the development of existing varieties of wheat, but
to making new varieties.
This is of enormous importance for the Soviet Union, and
therefore for civilization, today. The Nazis 1 still occupy much of
the best wheat-growing areas, and it is doubtful if a full harvest
will be reaped this autumn in the reconquered regions.
But vernalization and the breeding of new early varieties have
made it possible to grow wheat in northern regions of the Union
where summer is very short. This will undoubtedly save many
lives, and also spare ships which are needed for munitions. So the
investigation of why plants bloom when they do is of immense
practical importance.
Potatoes
Lord Woolton is urging us to eat more potatoes instead of
bread. Here are what I take to be some of his reasons. In a satis-
factory diet we need food with sufficient fuel value, measured in
calories, to enable us to work and keep warm. We need enough
proteins for growth and repairs. We need lime, iron, and other
minerals. And we need small amounts of a number of very
different substances which are lumped together as vitamins.
Now if we were to try and live almost entirely on a single food,
bread would be the best available. It will give the needed calories,
and a rather poor ration of protein, though it needs some supple-
menting. Whereas potatoes are a grand source of calories, and a
* Written in Spring 1944.
ANIMALS AND PLAN'tS 77
fair source of one vitamin, but a rather worse source of protein
than wheat. A man could therefore probably live longer on bread
alone than potatoes alone. But we are a long way from having to
do either, so this does not much matter. Now a good acre of
potatoes will yield about twice as many calories per year as an
acre of wheat. So, provided we can supplement the spuds with
first-rate proteins from meat, milk, or best of all, cheese, a good
deal of land is better used for potatoes than wheat.
Of course some land is far better suited for one crop than the
other, and the potato crop is much more liable to go wrong than
the wheat crop. There are a number of reasons for this. Bread
wheats have been grown in Europe for several thousand years, so
they have had longer to adapt themselves to our climate than
potatoes, which have only been grown for about three hundred
and fifty years.
More important is the fact that potatoes are normally repro-
duced vegetatively. The so-called seed potatoes are not seeds in
the ordinary sense of the word, but tubers like those we eat.
They are not formed by sexual reproduction, like wheat grains,
or the seeds which are formed by potato flowers. Sexual repro-
duction gives much more chance for variation than sexless repro-
duction, besides allowing the combination of different qualities
by crossing. So it is favourable both to natural and artificial
selection, and plants which we propagate from seed, such as
wheat, peas, and carrots, can generally be improved more quickly
than those propagated by tubers, bulbs, cuttings, or grafts, such
as potatoes, apples, and bananas. The potato can be grown from
seeds, but none of the varieties breed true. Out of several thousand
seedlings only one or two are likely to be better from the farmer's
point of view than their parents. And one can only find out
whether they are better by testing them in different soils, and
finding whether they are immune to a variety of diseases.
Finally the potato belongs to a family, the Solanaceae, includ-
ing nightshade and tobacco, which is particularly liable to virus
diseases. These are diseases whose agents are far too small to see
with a microscope, though they can be seen with the electron
microscope. The viruses of a number of potato diseases can be
obtained fairly pure by the same chemical processes which are
78 SCIENCE ADVANCES
used for separating different proteins from any mixture of pro-
teins such as egg-white or blood serum. So long as you keep them
in a bottle they show no signs of life. But when they are injected
into a potato leaf, either artificially through a scratch or natur-
ally by a biting insect, a disease develops. Different viruses cause
a number of different diseases, some almost or quite harmless,
others fatal.
If, after several weeks, we grind up the leaves, we can extract
many thousand times as much virus as we put in, and infect
thousands more plants! Now the biologist asks an awkward
question. Are we to say that each virus particle is a living tiling
which multiplies itself? Or shall we say that the plant cells copy
it, and produce more of the same kind ? The next question is still
more awkward. Is there any possible experiment which will
decide between the two alternatives ? Or have we got to a point
where the distinction between living and dead matter breaks
down? However that may be, these viruses were worth twenty
U-boats to Hitler. Hot weather helps them to spread, so Scottish
seed potatoes are generally less infected than English. But you
cannot tell an infected potato from an uninfected one without
elaborate tests.
A lot of research is being done on potato viruses at Rothamsted
and other British stations, but much of it will not be of use for
several years. Agricultural research is not only a preparation for
peace, but for war. Had Britain devotee! as large a fraction of the
national income to such research as the Soviet Union, we should
have had a good deal less to fear from U-boats.
Britain's Trees
After the war it is proposed to spend large sums of public
money on afforestation. We are very short of timber now, and
also of soft wood for pulp. That is one reason why we can print
so few copies of the Daily Worker. As our country has a very
dense population, we cannot and should not expect to supply all
our needs of timber. But there is no reason why we should not
have enough in reserve to keep us supplied for several years if
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 79
imports are cut off. More accurately there is no scientific reason,
but plenty of political and economic ones.
A very large amount of moorland and hillside could be planted,
and our woods in the plains could be made far more productive.
I have been looking out of the train for the last ten minutes, and
though I have seen many trees, the vast majority would be of
little use for timber. They had large branches low down, or the
trunks were twisted. Often there was a fork where water could
collect so that the centre of the tree was bound to rot. They were
more picturesque than good timber trees, but much less valuable.
The copses were a delightful mixture of trees and shrubs, very
well suited to pheasants or other "game" animals, but useless for
making tables, pit props, or railway sleepers, all of which we need
at present.
The state afforestation schemes will only apply to land which
is poor from an agricultural point of view. As long as our present
agricultural system goes on, the trees on good land are likely to
be neglected. Looking after trees is a skilled job. If a collective
farm covered several square miles, one man could look after all
the trees on it, except when large planting or felling operations
were needed. As long as farms are small, and the interests of the
agricultural workers, the tenant farmers, the landlord, and the
state, are all different, nothing is likely to be done.
Unfortunately the official afforestation programme does not
provide for scientific research. But this is badly needed. No
intelligent farmer would think of planting an orchard with cherry
trees without specifying the kind of cherry. He would choose his
type of cherry, and if he knew a little more, he would choose
several different kinds in such a way as to ensure efficient cross
pollination. But there are no properly defined varieties of many of
our timber trees, and all one can do when planting a new wood is
to buy oaks, larches, or whatever one wants, from a good nursery,
and hope for the best. One is not likely to get as good trees as
one's grandfather could have got. The quality of many of our
trees is deteriorating. The reason for this is both good Marxism
and good Darwinism.
In a state forest there is a regular routine of felling, and a
landlord who spent most of his life on his estate generally knew
8O SCIENCE ADVANCES
his trees very well, and preserved the best of them. But a modern
landlord is often an absentee, and takes short views about his
estate. From time to time he sells trees to a timber merchant, who
naturally picks out the best ones. Consequently those which are
left to carry on the species are the worst from the point of view
of timber production. More and more of our beech trees are
heavily branched. On the whole the tendency to branch is
inherited, though we do not know the laws of its inheritance in
any detail. So the next generation of beech trees, grown from the
seeds of those which no timber merchant wanted, will be a good
deal worse trees than their parents.
This unconscious selection may improve plants or animals. If
one wheat plant gives twice as many seeds as another, it will, on
an average, have twice as many progeny next year, so the yield
of wheat plants is automatically improved; though because we
protect them from competition by weeds, they have become less
able to grow in competition than are wild grasses related to them.
But if the farmer picked out the best plants in a field to make
flour, and left the others to set seed, the yield of wheat would
deteriorate.
As our trees have never been selected, consciously or uncon-
sciously, for timber production, it follows that if we started
selection, we could probably produce as great improvements in
them as our ancestors did in wild wheats, pigs, poultry, and so on.
Such improvements have been made in Sweden by the Society for
Breeding Forest Trees, a company in which the state holds many
of the shares, and which conducts research as well as selling seed.
Swedish workers found that a number of valuable qualities in
trees were strongly inherited.
They also found something much more remarkable. Among a
number of aspen saplings a few grew twice as quickly as the
remainder. They were found to be triploids, containing three sets
of chromosomes in the nucleus of each cell, instead of two.
Triploid plants form very little seed, and what they form is
generally sterile. So these plants do not propagate their good
qualities by seed, though they can be multiplied by cuttings. If
the rapid growth rate were inherited, they would probably have
displaced other types of aspen by natural selection. It is, however,
ANIMALS AND PLANTS 8 1
possible by a rather roundabout process to breed triploid trees;
and Swedish workers have taken the first step in the process of
breeding triploid larches, spruces, and firs. This may mean that
towards the end of this century most of the forests of Sweden will
consist of trees which grow very much quicker than those grown
today, so that the yield per acre will be greatly increased.
In this country work on similar lines is being carried out with
apples and pears. Here the sterility does not matter; indeed it is
rather advantageous, for triploid trees form large fruits with few
pips. But nothing is being done with forest trees. It will be no use
buying seed from Sweden. For trees are adapted to the climate in
which they grow, and not only to the conditions of temperature,
but to the length of the day. The Swedish trees do best when the
summer days are very long, and though those of southern Sweden
might suit Scotland, they would not be at their best in England.
At present in peace time we import large amounts of timber
from the Soviet Union. As the U.S.S.R. is industrialized and as
its population increases, it will need its own timber. The same
will be true of Canada, though here the expansion is not likely to
be so quick. In another generation, therefore, Britain may be
faced with a shortage of wood in peace as well as in war. So it is
not only necessary to plant new forests in our country, but to see
that the new trees are properly chosen. If this is not done it will
not matter much to me., but some of my readers may live long
enough to be almost as short of furniture as they are today.
3
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Temperature
IN a recent number of the Daily Worker our Quiz expert asked
what was the normal temperature of the human body, and gave
98-6F. as the answer. A correspondent wrote that it was
98- 4 F., and the correction was meekly accepted. Both were
wrong.
Either of these figures is fairly close to the average temperature
of the mouth during the day, when at rest or doing light work.
But the temperature of the interior of the body is a good deal
higher. It is easy to measure the temperature of the rectum (the
lower bowel) or of the urine, and this is always higher than that
of the mouth, and may exceed 100 F. in health. Besides this,
some people can swallow a thermometer at the end of a rubber
tube, and pull it up again; and a thermo-electric junction be-
tween two metals, which is no thicker than a thick needle, can be
forced into the leg for some inches with little pain and no danger.
In fact the temperature of die body as a whole is generally
well over 99. Fahrenheit originally chose the human body tem-
perature to fix 100 on his temperature scale, as the measurements
of mediaeval English kings were used to define the yard and ell.
We now know that definitions of this kind are never accurate,
and that weights, measures, and so on are better defined by
physical or geographical standards. For example, the Fahrenheit
scale is now defined so that water freezes at 32 and boils at
212; the yard is not defined by the king's arm or step, but by a
metal bar, and so on. Even these are not completely accurate, but
are quite good enough for practical purposes.
So far from being the normal temperature of the body, 98- 4 or
98- 6 F. is not even the normal temperature in the mouth. A man
whose temperature remained constant would be a freak, like a
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 83
man whose height or weight stayed steady. For your height is
greatest when you wake in the morning., and during the day
your spine gradually sags. Whilst your weight goes up sud-
denly when you eat and drink, and falls suddenly when you
excrete, and gradually at other times. I own a balance which is so
sensitive that if a man sits in one pan, he rises higher at each
swing. It was nearly wrecked by a boy who was so alarmed to
see himself losing weight that he jumped out of it and spoiled
the knife-edge on which it swings.
The mouth temperature generally varies through one or two
degrees F. in the course of twenty-four hours. It is usually
highest some time between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., and lowest be-
tween midnight and 6 a.m. when it may fall below 97 F. in deep
sleep. In fact 98-4 or 98-6 is an average waking temperature.
The general average is more like 98-1. During steady work it
rises to about 99*5, and during very violent exercise, such as a
boat-race, to well over 100. In fact there is no such thing as a
normal temperature, but rather a normal range of tempera-
tures.
Mammals and birds also have fairly steady temperatures,
generally rather higher than in man. The sheep is the hottest
blooded of the mammals, so far as we know, with an average
rectal temperature of 104, whilst the tiger appears to be no
warmer than ourselves; but perhaps Dr. John Davy, who took
the temperature of a tiger in 1839, did not wa ^ t ^ the thermo-
meter had become steady. Birds are much hotter. Many of them
have temperatures of no F. or over, whereas this temperature
is generally fatal to human beings, though a few people have
recovered from so high a fever as this.
Other animals have no regular temperature, and are either
very little warmer than their surroundings, or some five to ten
degrees above it. The one exception to this rule is of great in-
terest. Outside the hive a bee cannot keep its temperature up.
But a family of bees in a hive can do so. The temperature in the
middle of a hive is usually a bit below that of the human body,
but may rise to 100 F. So temperature regulation may be a
social as well as an individual matter. In the same way men regu-
late their temperature by building houses, lighting fires, and so
84 SCIENCE ADVANCES
on, as well as by putting on or taking off clothes, and by uncon-
scious processes.
A constant, or nearly constant, temperature is one of the latest
products of evolution. The older classes of vertebrates, namely
fish, amphibians, and reptiles, do not keep their temperature
steady, whereas birds and mammals do so, and have hair or
feathers which make it possible. This gives them several advan-
tages. In the first place they can live in cold lands. Even in Eng-
land reptiles can barely live, and insects die in the autumn or stay
motionless through most of the winter. Whereas some tropical
birds can live out in a frost if they have enough food to keep
them warm.
Secondly, a standardized temperature makes for greater effi-
ciency. Life depends on chemical processes going on in the cells.
All of these are speeded up by a rise of temperature, but not all
are speeded up equally. So a sudden temperature change throws
the machinery of life out of gear, so to say. This is particularly
serious in the case of the very delicately balanced processes on
which consciousness depends. A small rise of temperature brings
on the delirium which is a symptom of high fever. A small fall
causes stupor. Other organs, such as the muscles and glands, are
much less upset than the brain. Indeed a fairly steady tempera-
ture was probably essential before anything but a very rudi-
mentary mind could evolve.
Even within the range of temperatures where thought and
skilled work are possible we can see how intimately our minds
depend on matter by a simple experiment. An expert can judge
the passage of time very accurately without any external aid
such as the sun or a clock. If his brain is warmed up by fever, by
a hot bath, or by high frequency electric currents, time will seem
to him to pass much more slowly than is actually the case. This is
so whether he estimates it by tapping (as he thinks) once a
second, or subjectively. It is quite easy to halve the rate at which
time seems to pass, or in other words to double the rate of
passage of subjective time, so that at the end of 30 seconds he
says a minute has gone by. The influence of temperature corre-
sponds exactly with that on some chemical reactions, and not, by
the way, with the effect on the heart beat, which is also speeded up.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 85
This has an interesting philosophical consequence. Some
people think that a disembodied spirit might be outside space
(whatever that means) but still aware of the passage of time. But
these experiments seem to show that we get our notion of time,
as well as space, from the material world. This is of course in
agreement with the Marxist view that change is as real and
fundamental a property of matter as extension in space, and with
the Christian view that the blessed and the damned both have
bodies.
The temperature of matter is a measure of the amount of
internal change, such as atomic vibration, going on in it. There
is always some. No-one can extract all the heat from matter, and
bring it to complete rest. And similarly the temperature of any
piece of matter is always changing, even though we can keep it
much steadier than that of the human body.
So though the notion of a normal temperature is quite useful,
any temperature within a fair range is normal. And if we take
the notion of normal temperature too seriously we are on the
path that leads us to believe in such dangerous abstractions as the
Nordic man, the unchangeable laws of human nature, and the
instincts of an English gentleman.
Quantity and Quality
Students of Marxism often find the principle of the change of
quantity into quality difficult to understand. And opponents of
socialism never seem to realize its existence. Some of them say
that under socialism no-one would own any private property,
even a pair of trousers. Others claim that the Soviet Union is not
truly socialist because workers can lend their savings to the state,
and draw interest on them.
We can understand the fallacy in such statements if we take
some examples from physiology. If these critics were consistent
they would go in mortal terror at every breath, because the
nitrogen and oxygen of which air consists are deadly poisons
if you have enough of them.
86 SCIENCE ADVANCES
About one-fifth of the air consists of oxygen. We use about
half a cubic foot of this gas per hour at rest, and four cubic feet
during very hard work. If we breathe any gas, such as nitrogen
or hydrogen, which has no oxygen mixed with it, we become
unconscious in less than a minute, and die within five minutes.
Oxygen is an absolute necessity of human life. Luckily it is so
common that nobody has been able to monopolize it.
However, as we go up the air gets thinner. At about 19,000
feet there is only half as much air in a cubic foot as at sea level.
Mountaineers can acclimatize themselves to live at this height.
But if one goes up to it quickly, as in an aeroplane, one becomes
silly at once, and quite ill after a few hours. These symptoms are
at once relieved by breathing pure oxygen, or even air to which
a fifth of its volume of oxygen has been added. So the crews of
aeroplanes need oxygen, and various firms make quite a good
thing out of their need.
Oxygen is also used for treating some lung and heart diseases
at ground level. But yet it is a poison. Pure oxygen at ground
level is not very poisonous, though if one breathes it for two or
three days it causes inflammation of the lungs. But at high pres-
sures it is a violent poison. A diver sixty-six feet below the sea is
under a pressure of three atmospheres. Before air can be pumped
down to him it must be squeezed into one-third of the volume
which it occupies at sea level. This is what we are doing, inci-
dentally, when we fill a tyre at 30 Ib. per square inch pressure in
addition to the 15 Ib. pressure of ordinary air. It would be very
convenient if we could give the diver pure oxygen to breathe. If
so he could come up without waiting, as he would be in no
danger from the formation of bubbles of nitrogen in his tissues,
which may cause severe pains, called bends, and paralysis.
Behnke and other American scientists have found that at this
pressure oxygen affects the brain, and above all, the eyes, so that
after three hours a man becomes almost blind. He can only see
things straight in front of him, and even then not very clearly.
He cannot see sideways at all. Luckily he recovers in a few
minutes. When oxygen is breathed at four atmospheres' pressure,
Behnke found that convulsions came on after about forty minutes;
and very unpleasant they are. Even before this time cramp is said
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 87
to develop in a muscle which is working hard. At higher pressures
oxygen causes convulsions still quicker.
Some organisms are killed by the oxygen of ordinary air.
Among them is the bacillus which causes lock-jaw. You will not
get lock-jaw from rubbing earth into a scratch. But you may get
it if earth containing the spores of the bacillus is carried into a
deep wound where oxygen cannot penetrate.
Nitrogen is also poisonous if you get enough of it. If you
breathe air at ten atmospheres 5 pressure, corresponding to a
depth of 300 feet, you very soon become rather silly. Divers at
this depth often cannot carry out instructions properly, or do
skilled work, and the American workers have made it almost
sure that this is due to the nitrogen in the air breathed. I have
produced further evidence myself.
Finally, water is a poison. If enough water gets into your lungs
you are, of course, drowned, but this is not what I mean. You
can be poisoned by drinking too much water as surely as by
drinking too much beer or whisky. A normal man cannot be
poisoned in this way, because he excretes unwanted water with
his kidneys. But this excretion can be temporarily prevented by
injecting one of the hormones from the pituitary gland; and if
this is done, two or three gallons of water will give you convul-
sions or cramp not unlike those of oxygen poisoning. They can
at once be relieved by injecting strong salt solution into a vein,
which brings the composition of the blood back to nearly normal.
In the same way everyone knows that you can have too much
or too little food, heat, light, and other good things. Aristotle and
other Greek philosophers applied die same principle to social
occurrences. Aristotle said, for example, that the coward took too
few risks, the rash man too many, and the brave man the right
amount. And Marx constantly used the principle in his economic
arguments. He showed, for example, that a large sum of money
could be used as capital, but a small sum could not. No doubt
when socialism has developed into communism there will be no
such thing as individual savings, for one thing because there will
be no need for them. For everyone will get not merely necessities,
but many things which we now regard as luxuries, free.
But even the Soviet Union is still a long way from communism.
88 SCIENCE ADVANCES
And under communism there will doubtless be some private
property. If we understand how quantity is transformed into
quality, we shall realize that private property, like oxygen, can be
both a necessity, as in the case of boots, and a public danger, as in
the case of armament shares. And we shall steer our way between
the extremists of the left, who think that a Soviet worker is a
capitalist because he lends a few hundred roubles to the state, and
those of the right, who think that because I can own a fountain
pen, the Duke of Westminster should be allowed to own hun-
dreds of acres of London.
Blood
As the destructive power of modern weapons increases, so do
the resources available for treating the wounded. Probably the
commonest of all results of a wound is loss of blood. This may be
fatal by itself. Or it may lower the resistance so that the wounded
man or woman succumbs to an injury which they would other-
wise survive. Fortunately loss of blood is the easiest of all major
injuries to remedy.
This is exactly contrary to the primitive ideas of physiology
which are still current, especially in advertisements and sermons.
Primitive men sometimes identified life with blood and some-
times with breath, for the reason that people die quickly if they
lose blood or stop breathing. This idea is perpetuated in the word
"spirit," which originally meant breath, and in the Nazi idea of
blood as something peculiar to a race. We are also misled by
advertisements which attribute all sorts of diseases to impurities
in the blood. Actually the blood is simply the transport system of
the body, and is full of waste products on the way to be got rid
of by the lungs or kidneys. But very few diseases are due to their
accumulation, and they may rise well above the normal level
without any serious loss of health.
The blood is perhaps the least living part of the whole body,
and once doctors began to give up these ancient ideas they
found that it was the easiest to replace. At present loss of blood is
dealt with in two distinct ways, by injecting whole blood, or
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 89
plasma. About half the blood consists of a clear slightly yellow
fluid called plasma, which contains water, salts, sugar, and pro-
teins. The other half consists of corpuscles, mainly red ones
concerned in carrying round oxygen from the lungs to the various
organs where it is used. An average man has a volume of blood
equal to about one-twentieth of his bulk, that is to say less than
a gallon in most people.
One can lose a tenth of it without noticing any difference;
after losing a quarter one feels fairly faint; and after losing half
one is likely to die. This is not due to the loss of corpuscles. An
anaemic man or woman with only half the normal number of
corpuscles can still work, though he or she is rather weak and
easily fatigued. But if the total volume is reduced, although the
blood vessels contract, the heart is unable to pump the blood up
to the head, and in consequence it is advisable to lay the patient
flat and lift up the legs to let the blood drain out of them and give
the head as good a supply as possible.
An obvious idea would be to inject pure water to restore the
volume. But this would be very rapidly fatal, as the water runs
out of the blood into the body cells which swell up and burst.
Much better results are obtained if we inject water with the same
amount of common salt as is found in blood.
But this is not enough either. The correct salts to add were
discovered by Professor Ringer at University College, London,
in a rather odd way. He was studying the effects of drugs on
frogs' hearts placed in salt solution. During one season he found
that they were beating much better than ever before. After careful
detective work he found the reason. His laboratory assistant was
no longer making up the solution with distilled water, as he was
told to, but with London tap water, which contains a fair amount
of lime from the chalk hills round London. Ringer found that
hearts would beat for a long time if perfused with water con-
taining a little calcium chloride and potassium chloride as well as
sodium chloride. Later workers found that the blood of primitive
sea animals is of nearly the composition of sea water, while fresh
water and land animals, and also most fish, have a blood plasma
like diluted sea water, and probably like that of the sea several
hundred million years ago.
90 SCIENCE ADVANCES
If Ringer's solution of salts is injected into an animal which has
lost much blood, it recovers strength for a short time, but the
added water and salts leak out in an hour or so. They will stay in
the blood vessels if the proteins of plasma are added also. So a
good deal of the blood which is taken from donors is now put in
a centrifuge and spun. The fluid part, or plasma, is then dried,
and will last for many months. It can be diluted with about 15
times its volume of water, and injected. It is far more portable
than whole blood, and lasts longer. So it is particularly useful on
ships, and in mobile dressing stations. But a wounded man whose
blood volume has been brought back to normal with plasma is
still short of red corpuscles like a sufferer from anaemia, and may
take a month or so to make all the new corpuscles that he
needs.
Whole blood contains corpuscles as well as plasma, and this
advantage brings a danger with it. Human beings fall into four
groups as regards their corpuscles, and in some cases corpuscles
from a member of a different group are destroyed when injected,
and do more harm than good. Fortunately the corpuscles from
one of the groups, called group O, can be injected into almost
anyone with safety. The only known exceptions, and they are
rare, are found among pregnant women and those who have
recently borne a child. All these facts took a long time to discover
and the discoveries were made all over the world. Thus the basic
ideas of plasma transfusion came from Ringer and Bayliss at
University College, but the modern technique was worked out
in America. The blood groups were discovered by Landsteiner in
Austria and Jannsky in Chechoslovakia. The first work on blood
storage was done by Rous in New York, and the modern methods
are largely due to Briukhonenko and others in the Soviet
Union.
Surgeons are now trying similar experiments with other tissues
besides blood. A good many blind people have had their sight
restored by grafting bits of the cornea (the transparent window in
front of the eye) from a healthy eye on to a diseased or injured
one. Here again the original technique came from Austria, but
was greatly improved when Filatov of Odessa found that a
cornea could be grafted from a dead eye. These techniques
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 9!
sound simple, but only a physiologist realizes how many years
of work, much of it apparently useless, have been needed to
perfect them, and how completely this work has depended on
international co-operation.
Blood Analysis
Any day now your ear may be pricked, and a sample of blood
taken from it to estimate the haemoglobin. An official inquiry
is being made into the nation's blood, or rather of one particular
substance in it, and samples are being investigated from a number
of different age and social groups.
The blood probably carries round thousands of different sub-
stances. It carries oxygen from the lungs to the organs which
need it, and also food and water from the intestines and from
depots such as the fat under the skin. It also carries away waste
products to be removed by the lungs, kidneys, and skin. Finally,
it carries round hormones from one organ to another. If it did not
carry the hormones from the pituitary gland children would stop
growing and adults would sink into a state of lethargy. If it did
not carry the hormones from the ovary or testicles, men and
women would lose many of the characters which distinguish
them.
These various substances have not merely to be in the blood,
but to be there in the right amounts. With too little oxygen you
become weak and silly, with too much you have a convulsion, in
each case losing consciousness. I have tried both, and prefer too
little. Too much urea is a sign of kidney disease, too much sugar
of diabetes. With too little thyroid hormone you become a fat,
sluggish imbecile; with too much a thin, jumpy neurotic with a
ravenous appetite. Some of these substances are easy to estimate
chemically, but about a teaspoon full of blood is needed in most
cases. Others, including the hormones, are much harder to
determine.
The easiest of all is haemoglobin, the red substance in the cor-
puscles which carries oxygen. More accurately it is red when
combined with oxygen, purple when uncombined. In 1900 my
92 SCIENCE ADVANCES
late father produced the first quick and accurate method for
estimating haemoglobin from a single drop of blood. He diluted
a measured amount with water, added coal gas to form the com-
pound of haemoglobin with carbon monoxide, and then added
water drop by drop till the colour matched a standard solution.
The more haemoglobin in the blood, the more water had to be
added.
He analysed the blood of a number of men, women, and
children. I was one of the children, but it was rather hard to get
all that he wanted, and my sister was heard at our door telling a
young friend "You come in here, my farver wants your blood/'
There was a good deal of difference between apparently healthy
individuals, but women and children had, on an average, a good
deal less haemoglobin than men. For over thirty years this was
accepted as a natural phenomenon, like the lesser average height
of women.
Then McCance found that, even among the well-to-do classes,
women were generally short of iron, and that if they were given
enough of the right iron salts the amount of haemoglobin in their
blood went up. They need more iron than men, as they normally
lose blood each month. So another alleged inborn inferiority of
the female sex went west. On an adequate diet women may make
as much haemoglobin as men. But in peace time most women were
not getting enough iron, even when they could afford it.
In war time it is hard to get some of the foods which are the
best sources of iron, such as liver, winkles, and chocolate, though
cocoa is not hard to come by. And a shortage of iron is not the
only food shortage which causes anaemia. The red corpuscles
only last about six weeks on an average, and new ones are con-
stantly being made. A shortage of proteins in the diet, or proteins
of the wrong sort, can slow down the production of new cor-
puscles.
The research which is now under way will show up any dietary
deficiencies which interfere with the manufacture of new blood.
If any groups of the population are getting anaemic which is
not certain the most likely are housewives, and children who
are growing very quickly. There can be no question of serious
malnutrition for those who eat at factory canteens or British
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 93
restaurants. And on the whole there is probably less malnutrition
than before the war, because the nation's food is being shared out
more fairly than ever before. However, the Government is quite
right to look for evidence for it.
If such evidence is found, and a slight redistribution of our
present supply is needed, let us hope that the cuts will be made
where they will do least harm, in the supply of food to expensive
restaurants. But meanwhile, the readier everyone is to provide a
drop of blood, the quicker the information will be available.
Blood and Individuality
Early this year a baby was lost in one English town, and a few
weeks later a baby of the same sex and roughly the same appear-
ance was found in another town. Blood tests are now being done
to help to find out whether these two are the same baby.
We know a lot more about the chemistry of the blood than
that of any other human tissue, because it is the only one which
can be taken out in quantity without harm. Muscles, brain, and
so on, can only be obtained after death when they have changed
a good deal, or in an unhealthy condition at an operation.
The chemical analysis of blood is an extremely skilled job. It
took me about three months before I could get duplicate analyses
of the amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in a cubic centi-
metre of my blood to agree within one per cent or so. Chemical
analysis is valuable in detecting some diseases, and finding out
accurately what happens in others. For example, if you find three
parts of sugar per thousand, instead of about one, it is fairly sure
that the blood comes from a severe case of diabetes. If the phos-
phate in a growing child is down to the adult level, the child
cannot make new bone, and is in danger of rickets. And so on.
Besides substances of accurately known composition, we can
detect others whose make-up is only roughly known. Thus the
blood from a patient who has, or has recently had, typhoid fever,
contains proteins which combine with typhoid bacilli, and make
them clump together. This is a useful test for typhoid. But all the
substances mentioned so far may alter in quantity in the course of
94 SCIENCE ADVANCES
a week, or even of a few minutes. They could not possibly be
used for identifying a baby, unless it were suffering from a
chronic disease which altered the blood's composition.
There are, however, some substances in the blood which differ
from one individual to another, and never appear if they were not
there at birth, or disappear if they were so. The most important
in practice are those which determine membership of a blood
group. Everyone belongs to one or another of four groups, and
everyone should know to which group they belong, for a very
simple reason. After an accident someone may need half a pint of
your blood, or you may need half a pint of someone else's. Most
doctors under 35 can probably determine blood group member-
ship as well as I, which means that they might make one mistake
in a hundred. But an expert at a blood transfusion centre makes
mistakes at the same sort of rate as a good railway signalman, less
than once in a lifetime. No doubt I could get into this class with
a few weeks' practice; but I have other things to do, and so have
most doctors. So if you have once been grouped by an expert,
you may save your own life or someone else's by protesting if a
non-expert assigns you to the wrong group.
Membership of the blood groups is hereditary, and the rules
according to which membership is determined are well known.
Exceptions to them, which occur with a frequency of about one
per thousand in some communities, and a good deal more in
others, can almost all be explained by illegitimacy. The simplest
rule is that no child can have an antigen on its red corpuscles
which is not present in one parent or the other. If, for example,
neither of a baby's parents have the A or B substance, the baby
cannot have them. In other words, if the parents both belong to
group O, and the baby does not, it is no child of theirs. Besides
the characteristics which determine blood group membership, the
blood corpuscles show a number of others which are of no
practical importance, so far as is known, but whose inheritance
is understood, and which are constant throughout life.
It will not be possible to say that this baby is certainly the
child of its alleged parents. But one of the very few men and
women in this country who combine the necessary technical skill
and knowledge of heredity should be able to say one of two
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 95
things. Either the baby is not the child of the couple who hope
they have found their lost child; or it has a combination of
characters which would be found in only one child in ten or
twenty picked at random, but could be found in one of their
children. If so the parents will probably accept the baby.
The main practical use of such tests has been in cases of dis-
puted paternity. Here too one can never prove paternity for
certain, but one can disprove it. The most important use will
probably be to work out the origins of the human peoples. So far
they have been classified on their skin colour and the shape of
their hairs and skulls. But skin colour at any rate is not only
variable in the individual, since we get browner in summer, but
is an adaptive character in a race. Many tropical peoples have
black skins. This is probably an advantage, in protecting diem
from sunburn. So it may have been developed independently in
different areas, and there is no reason to think that, for example,
Australian blacks are any more nearly related to African blacks
than to Europeans.
But the blood group characters do not alter during life, and
are of no particular use to those who bear them. They show that
there is no such thing as a pure race. Every people contains
members of groups O and A, and mostly of all four groups, even
if their skins and hair are very uniform. But the proportions
differ greatly, and often in an unexpected way. Thus the Irish
differ far more from the English than do the French or Dutch.
The case of this baby brings out one fundamental point. There
are human characters which are determined entirely by heredity
and not environment. But these are seldom of any biological or
social importance, except where there is a prejudice against a
skin colour or nose shape associated with a particular race. The
characters which matter most, whether they relate to physical
strength, or to mental or moral ability, are almost always influ-
enced by environment, and can be improved by improving
society.
9<> SCIENCE ADVANCES
How Muscles Work
Self-movement is one of the most obvious properties of
animals, including men. At first it was regarded as a property
of living things alone. Then men made machines which moved
themselves, and in the seventeeth century philosophers began to
explain animals as machines. Descartes thought that a muscle
shortened because it was blown out by "animal spirits" pumped
down the nerves from the brain.
This is wrong, for the nerves are not tubes, the muscle can be
made to work by very mild electric shocks after the nerves are
cut, and its volume slightly decreases when it shortens. In the
nineteenth century it was found that a man and a machine pro-
duced just the same amount of work plus heat when a given
amount of food was combined with oxygen, whether it was
burned in a furnace or oxidized more slowly in the body. Later it
was shown that most of this oxidation occurred in the muscles
themselves, the main substances used being sugar and oxygen
from the blood. This was very important, as it is very important
to know that a power station uses so much coal, water, arid
lubricating oil per kilowatt-hour; but it told us little of what
went on in the muscle.
The first information on this matter came from the fact that a
muscle can work for some time without oxygen, though it loses
efficiency for a while as a result. You can see at once that this
agrees with the common sense of athletics. The long-distance
runner is limited by the rate at which his lungs can supply his
muscles with oxygen. He cannot keep up a steady speed greater
than corresponds to this. The sprinter works his muscles much
faster than their oxygen supply warrants. When he stops he
absorbs extra oxygen for some time. If the long-distance runner
sprinted at the start he would have to run the rest of the race
with his muscles short of oxygen, and would lose a lot of speed.
There is only a very small store of oxygen in the muscles.
Biochemists gradually found that various substances accumulated
in muscles which worked without oxygen, the first of these being
lactic acid, isolated by Fletcher and Hopkins. During the recovery
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 97
process, when oxygen is used, these substances are put together
again. A muscle may be compared to a submarine, which uses
oxygen from the air for its motors when running on the surface,
but can run for a long time on its accumulators below water with-
out using any oxygen. On reaching the surface the accumulators
are recharged. But the muscle almost certainly differs from the
submarine in one respect. The source of energy for contraction
is always the process not needing oxygen, corresponding to
running the ship off the accumulators.
The next phase of research was to trace the various chemical
changes occurring in a muscle both during contraction and re-
covery. A large number of hitherto unknown chemical com-
pounds were isolated, and a number of enzymes were found
which cause them to change as they actually do. That is to say,
by adding a particular extract of muscle to a certain pair of sub-
stances which did not interact without it, they would form new
substances. The enzymes which make the reactions go forward
are all proteins, and probably most of the proteins in muscles
which we digest when we eat meat, are en/ymes.
Meanwhile biophysicists examined muscles, both relaxed and
contracted, with X-rays, and discovered a good deal about the
protein called myosin which forms the microscopic fibres whose
contraction shortens the muscle. The long molecules become
crinkled, as a chain of steel links might do if each were magnet-
ized so as to attract its neighbour.
In 1939 Engelhart and Lyubimova in Moscow made a very
fundamental discovery. Myosin, the protein which contracts, is
also the enzyme responsible for a particular chemical change
which gives rise to a good deal of heat in ordinary laboratory
experiments. But in the living muscle the energy is not wasted
as heat, but much of it is used as work. Bailey and Needham
confirmed their discovery in Cambridge. The biochemists had
been thinking of proteins as enzymes, the biophysicists as part of
the contractile mechanism. The Soviet workers thought of them
more dialectically. The same protein changes adenosin-triphos-
phoric acid, and, in doing so, changes itself. If it isn't alive, it is
getting near being so.
We are still a long way from making an artificial muscle, but
98 SCIENCE ADVANCES
we have at least an idea of how it would be made. It would be
more efficient than any engine of its size, that is to say it would
give more work for a given amount of fuel. But it would produce
much less power per unit weight of working parts than many
existing engines. It would probably be a bit lighter than a living
muscle of the same power, because, not being alive, it would not
have to grow or repair itself, but it would be no use for an aero-
plane, probably none for a motor vehicle. However, as a source
of power in a stationary engine it might well be really useful.
Meanwhile the main practical result of Engelhart and Lyubi-
mova's work is likely to arise when similar work is done for the
heart, which works rather differently from most muscles, and goes
seriously wrong much more often. Unfortunately work of this
kind was almost wholly stopped during the war, and is not
restarting very rapidly in England. For example, the physio-
logical laboratory at University College, London, is still occupied
by the Admiralty. The liberation of such laboratories is indis-
pensable before we can attack heart disease on these lines.
Sense Organs
In one of the air raids of this winter the Daily Worker s office
and plant was damaged. 1 It did not receive a direct hit, but a
bomb bursting near to it broke many of its windows. And a
lump of concrete from a neighbouring building set off the system
of sprinklers designed to put out fires. The water damaged a lot
of paper and some machinery, and brought down a good deal of
plaster.
This accident interested me, not merely as chairman of the
editorial board, but as a biologist. For it was an example of a
response to the wrong stimulus. The sprinklers are supposed to
act in the event of fire, but on no other occasion. In the same
way a sense organ such as the eye, if it were perfect, would give
sensations of light only when light entered it, and not when it
was struck. But a thousand million years of evolution have not
made the eye into a perfect organ. In fact m some respects, though
not all, it is less perfect than the photographic camera, which is
1 The office was burned out and much of the plant destroyed soon after its
suppression.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 99
only a century old, but has been deliberately designed, whereas
the eye seems to have evolved through unconscious struggle.
To show how sensitive the eye is to slight pressure, press your
eye gently with a finger near the bridge of the nose, through the
eyelid. You will see something, usually a bright ring with a dark
centre. If you press the inside of your right eye, it will appear
far out to the right. If you move your finger up, it will go down.
The sensitive film at the back of your eye, called the retina, is
affected by pressure as well as light, and much more so than a
photographic film. Since the images thrown on it by the cornea
or front transparent window and the lens of the eye, are upside
down, and rightside left, as in a camera, it is natural that the
bright ring appears where it does.
You can also stimulate the eye, or any other sense organ, with
an electric current, though I do not advise you to try. Still less
do I advise you to try a chemical stimulus. But you can try this
on another set of organs. Your skin and the inside of your mouth
are full of microscopic sense organs giving you feelings of warmth.
On your hand or face these are pretty close together, but else-
where, for example on the front of the thigh, they are so far
apart that they can easily be mapped by finding where a warm
piece of glass or metal is felt to be warm. These organs are easily
excited by mustard and several other substances. In fact right up
to the time when thermometers were invented, philosophers
discussed whether mustard was really hot. Nowadays it is pretty
universally admitted that the thermometer is a better indicator of
heat than the skin, and that the heat of mustard is an illusion like
the sparks which we see when the eye is hit.
For efficiency, not only must each organ respond to one par-
ticular kind of stimulus, such as light, sound, or heat, but it must
be connected up with the nervous system, and through it with
the muscles and glands, so that when it is stimulated an animal
or man responds in the right way.
Simple animals respond in very simple ways. A clam shuts its
shell if the light is suddenly diminished, or if it is touched or
shaken, and thus protects itself. Other animals move towards
light or darkness, or away from strong stimulation of any kind.
Most animals have some sense like our taste and smell, by which
IOO SCIENCE ADVANCES
they recognize food; but to recognize anything by sight, sound,
or touch, an animal must react to a pattern.
The pattern may be in space, like the shape of a man or a
bicycle, or in time, like the sound of a melody or a word. But it
must be recognized against a number of different backgrounds,
and under slightly different forms. The same object, seen in
different directions, and at different distances, makes a different
pattern on the retina. And a brain is needed before an animal can
react in the same way to these different patterns. Some bottom-
living fish will eat a crab on the bottom of the tank where they
live, but will not touch one hung by a string on a level with their
eyes. They cannot recognize "crab in the water" as the same as
"crab on the ground/' We spend much of our first year in learn-
ing to recognize simple things.
Although I am not one of those who think that the brain is a
machine, it is probably acting in a mechanical way when it recog-
nizes a simple shape or melody. For machines can be constructed
which will open a door only when a particular melody is played
or a particular word pronounced. Whether a machine could be
made which answered to the same word pronounced by Willie
Gallacher, Harry Pollitt, Isabel Brown, and myself, is more
doubtful.
Philosophers have long disputed as to what there was in
common between all squares, or all dogs. The reactionary Greek
philosopher Plato said that the squares were imperfect copies of
the eternal idea of squareness, and the dogs of dogginess. He used
this theory to attack democracy. For he thought that all states
should be as near as possible copies of an ideal city, which was
far from democratic. His disciples today oppose the notion of
indefinite progress with the notion of eternal values. I think that
we shall know a lot more about what there is in common be-
tween all squareness, or all dogs, when we understand how the
brain analyses our sensations to pick out the common factor.
To go back to the sprinklers in the Daily Worker office, their
"sense organ" is a glass bulb containing some fluid which boils
easily. When the temperature rises beyond a certain point the
bulb bursts. This releases a plug in a pipe containing water under
high pressure, and a jet of water spurts out. Obviously such a
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION IOI
device will break with a violent shock as well as with heat. The
same applies to some other heat-detecting mechanisms. In this
case the appropriate response is a spray of water at each point
which is heated up. This is a local response like the mechanism
on a sea-anemone or jelly-fish which stings its prey at any point
on the tentacles that is touched. It does not need anything like a
nervous system. In some large buildings a fire rings a bell in a
particular room, and switches on a lamp which shows where the
fire is located. For a fuller analogy to a nervous system we should
have to imagine a small fire engine which automatically ran to the
place of the fire, guided by signals from the control room.
At the present time our instruments are much more sensitive
than our sense organs. The telescope photographs stars too faint
to be seen, the balance weighs objects too small to be felt. Other
instruments can pick out patterns which we cannot detect. For
example, a tide-predicting machine picks out periods which the
unaided eye and brain miss. As machines of this kind are developed
we shall learn new facts about nature, just as we did when the
microscope was invented.
The remote control of machinery, corresponding to the motor
side of our nervous system, is being studied, particularly in the
Soviet Union. As progress is made along these various lines our
descendants will doubtless learn to know and control aspects of
nature which today we can no more imagine than our ancestors
five centuries ago could imagine electric currents. And by study-
ing these artificial senses, brains, and muscles we shall not only
increase our control and understanding of nature, but of our-
selves. Without such understanding we react as automatically and
irrationally as the sprinklers in the Daily Worker office.
Brain Waves
In a recent murder trial it was shown that the criminars brain
produced abnormal electric waves, and on the strength of this the
jury sent him to Broadmoor instead of to the gallows. This was
supposed to be an act of mercy. I am not so sure. I am going to
die anyway, but I hope I shall not be imprisoned for life. In such
a case hanging may be the more merciful treatment.
102 SCIENCE ADVANCES
*
The electrical oscillations which saved the man's life are
among the many biological facts which were discovered when
modern radio technique was applied to physiology. All the organs
of the body produce electrical changes when active, but the
potentials produced are measured in thousandths of a volt at most.
The easiest of all to detect is that produced by the heart, and
this w r as the only one which had been recorded adequately with-
out the use of an amplifier. You put your hands, or a hand and a
foot, in bowls of salt water with a wire leading from each; and
these wires are connected by a fine quartz thread, silvered to make
it conduct, and passing between the poles of a magnet. At each
heart-beat a small current passes along this thread, and its move-
ments can be photographed. The current can also be amplified
and recorded with an oscillograph using a beam of cathode rays
like that in a television set, which is deflected at each heart-beat.
The record is called an electrocardiogram in either case. Or it can
be made into sound by a loud speaker. The electrocardiograms
differ according to where the two electrodes are placed, but their
most striking differences are due to heart disease. When my
heart started occasionally missing a beat I knew that this might
mean nothing at all, or something very serious, and was greatly
relieved when the electrocardiogram unmistakably showed the
former.
If you place your electrode against a nerve, and put in a good
amplifier, you can overhear the messages going up and down it.
If a needle is placed against a motor nerve controlling a muscle in
a man's arm, and the electrical changes amplified, one normally
hears an occasional crackle, for a muscle is never absolutely
flabby. But if he contracts the muscle, say by clenching his fist,
one hears a roar like a dozen machine guns, as hundreds of
messages pass down per second to make the muscle contract.
The electrical changes in the sense organs still go on in an
anaesthetized animal, though the receiving stations in its brain
are out of action. So the messages from the eye to the brain can
be tapped and partially decoded without causing pain. In this
way the Swedish physiologist Granit has just shown that the
sensitive film at the back of the eye, the retina, behaves like
certain types of plate used in colour photography. Some of the
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 103
cells in it are highly sensitive to red light, others to green, and
others to blue, and we judge of a mixed colour on democratic
principles, according to the numbers of the different types send-
ing messages to the brain.
Finally one can take records from the brain itself. Naturally
you get the best results if you saw through the bone and put one
electrode on the brain itself. This has now been done on hundreds
of human beings during brain operations. Many of them were
fully conscious, a local anaesthetic being used where necessary.
No pain is felt when the surface of the brain itself is stimulated
electrically, or even cut; for the parts concerned with pain are
deep down in the middle. On the other hand the surface is cer-
tainly engaged in feeling, willing, and thinking. So one can
actually take records of the activity of the cells concerned in
consciousness.
The greatest electrical activity in the human brain comes from
the part at the back which is responsible for vision, to which
nerve fibres run from the eye. This produces enough effects to be
detected even through the skull, so no operation is necessary to
record them. If the eyes are shut, the main feature of the electro-
encephalogram, as the record is called, is a series of waves with a
rather irregular period of about a tenth of a second. These may
persist if the eyes are opened, especially in dim light, but if the
subject looks at anything attentively they at once break up into
an irregular disturbance. They do the same if he imagines any-
thing visually, or does mental arithmetic or other thought pro-
cesses which involve visual imagery. The large waves are caused
by millions of cells discharging nearly simultaneously. But if they
are doing different things, some being concerned in seeing white,
others black, the unison is broken up.
The technique of recording these waves was invented by
Berger in Germany, improved by Adrian in England, and applied
to medicine by Gibbs and his colleagues in America.
Epilepsy is, unfortunately, fairly common. An epileptic may
have violent convulsive fits, or he or she may merely lose con-
sciousness for a short time, without falling down or making any
violent movements. Between fits epileptics may seem quite
normal. But the rhythm of the electrical brain waves is slowed
104 SCIENCE ADVANCES
down or speeded up according to the type of epilepsy, and the
condition can thus be detected in between fits. Epileptics do not
know what they do during a fit, but they are conscious at other
times, and if an epileptic commits a crime, he may have known
quite well what he was doing.
The scientific and philosophical interest of these records of
brain activity is, of course, very great. But no-one has gone very
far with their interpretation. We can no more guess from these
records what a man is seeing or imagining than we can tell from
a rather bad gramophone record of a factory whether it was
making guns or tanks. But it took over half a century before
records from nerves were got clear enough to distinguish be-
tween impulses carrying messages of pain and of other sensations.
There can be little doubt that as technique is improved the
electro-encephalograph will help to clear up the nature of the
processes going on in the brain when we feel, think, and will.
Learning
A comrade in the Corps of Signals has sent me a question
which I cannot answer. But it is so interesting that I am going to
devote an article to it. He wants to know what happens when a
man learns Morse, finding it difficult at first, but finally sending
signals or taking them down automatically.
No doubt some change takes place in his nervous system. We
can suggest possibilities, but that is all. The human nervous
system consists of a great mass of cells in the brain and spinal
cord, numbering several thousand million, or more than the
whole human race, and of fibres which extend from these cells,
and which die and cease to conduct if their contact with the cells
is severed. Some of these fibres take messages in to the nervous
system, others take them out. The majority run from one cell to
another. The ingoing or afferent fibres include those from sense
organs such as the eye and the organs of touch in the skin, and
others whose messages do not give rise to sensation, but to reflex
actions. For example, we usually regulate our breathing and
heart-beat without knowing anything about it. The outgoing or
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 105
efferent fibres include motor fibres to muscles, which cause them
to contract, and inhibitory fibres to some muscles such as the
heart, which goes on beating when the nerves to it are cut, and
which may therefore have to be slowed down as well as speeded
up. They also include fibres whose messages increase or diminish
the secretion of glands, for example, sweating or the production
of gastric juice.
We can detect the messages going down a single nerve fibre
electrically, and amplify them so that they can be heard on a loud
speaker. We can measure their speeds, the heat which they
generate, and so on. They consist of single impulses like Morse
dots, and their effects depend merely on the connexions of the
nerve fibres, and the numbers of impulses arriving down a fibre
per second. They are simply waves of chemical change moving
along a nerve, and not particularly mysterious.
The simplest reactions involving the nervous system are called
unconditioned reflexes. Some, such as the contraction of the pupil
when a light is shone into the eye, are quite out of the control of
the will, except in a few rare individuals. Others, such as the with-
drawal of a limb when it is pricked, are reflexes, although the
same muscles can also be controlled by the will. Some of these
reflexes can still be carried out by the spinal cord after this has
been severed from the brain by a wound, though there is no con-
sciousness of pain or movement. But they can be controlled and
overridden by the will to some extent in a normal man. Even the
simplest reflex involves a number of nerve cells in series. And
most of the time between a stimulus, such as a flash of light or a
prick, and the resulting muscular contraction, is occupied, not in
passage along fibres, but in passing the message from one cell to
another.
These reflexes are inborn. Some are present at birth, and some
develop later. But they are not learnt. Besides the inborn reflexes
there are several kinds of conditioned reflexes, which depend on
experience. The most thoroughly studied are those of glands
such as the salivary glands, which are not controllable by the
will. A hungry man begins to secrete more saliva not merely
when he tastes food, or even sees or smells it, but when you talk
to him about it, or ring the dinner bell. Pavlov's work on dogs
106 SCIENCE ADVANCES
was mainly based on the conditional secretion of saliva. A dog
was fed immediately after sounding one note, but not after
sounding another, and salivated on the food signal only. Some
dogs could distinguish notes only a semitone apart. These experi-
ments were made with a great variety of stimuli. Mr. Bernard
Shaw thinks they were cruel. I wish he had seen, as I have, a dog
pulling a laboratory assistant along a corridor in a Leningrad
laboratory in his eagerness to get to the experimental room. I
confess that that if I were their subject I should regard such
experiments as rather dull. This dog apparently didn't.
Other conditioned reflexes, certainly in man, and probably in
animals, are carried out with muscles controlled by the will, and
involve will as well as consciousness in their development. Such
are those involved in any skilled activity, such as learning to
cycle or transmit and receive Morse. Consciousness is only bio-
logically useful where a choice is involved. We walk uncon-
sciously until we have to decide which side of an obstacle to take
or till something else interferes with a series of reflexes. Then
memories help us to decide what to do, and large numbers of
brain cells become active. But when the same choice has often
been made in similar circumstances, for example tapping for
D, consciousness is short-circuited, so that we can think of
something else while carrying out the reflex.
An essential feature of learning a skilled activity is that a new
pathway for nervous impulses is laid clown in the brain, involving
fewer nerve cells than before, and therefore quicker response and
less interference by other nervous activities. The new paths are
not laid down by the growth of new fibres, but probably by
increasing the sensitivity of nerve cells to particular forms of
stimulation. We know, for example, that some nerve cells will
not respond to a single impulse along a fibre. They need a series,
neither too slow nor too fast, or simultaneous impulses from
several other cells.
But the technique for studying the conditions needed to excite
a single cell is so difficult and so new that no-one has yet been
able to study changes in its sensitivity. Those who could best do
so are at present working either on such problems as the healing
of severed nerves, or on radio-location. We do at least know,
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION IO7
from a study of injuries to the human brain, whereabouts the
paths concerned in learning Morse are situated. They are largely
on the left hand side of the brain, above the ear. In so far as sight
is involved they extend backwards also. An injury to the front
part of the brain does not affect manual skill, though it may lower
initiative or affect social behaviour adversely.
If I cannot answer my correspondent, I can at least tell him
that the answer to his question will need the full use of electrical
apparatus which he probably understands better than I, such as
amplifiers and oscillographs, to record the electrical activities in
nerve cell and fibres without injuring them. If after the war even
a tenth part of the skill which is now used in the Royal Corps of
Signals is employed on the recording and decoding of nervous
impulses, and on producing them experimentally, his question
will be answered in ten years' time.
Fatigue during Skilled Work
Although this war has undoubtedly slowed down scientific
research, a great deal of interesting work which is now secret will
be published when it is over. Among this, I hope, will be much
of the work which has been done on the physiology and psycho-
logy of men in the fighting forces.
In a lecture to the Royal Society given in 1941 but only just
published, Professor Bartlett describes work done for the Flying
Personnel Research Committee on a number of highly trained
men. They sat in front of a panel containing a large number of
signals for action, including a speed indicator and a direction
indicator which had to be watched all the time, others which were
supposed to show the amount of petrol available, and so on. The
indicators were pointers on dials, or coloured lights. Sometimes
the subject's chair was also tilted as it would have been during
work. When I add that the operator had to work controls with
his hands and feet in answer to his various sensations, especially
of the movements of the dials, I think few readers will fail to
guess what the experimental set-up represented, though this is
nowhere stated.
108 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Professor Bartlett investigated the onset of fatigue in his sub-
jects. Now fatigue of a great many processes has been studied.
The earliest scientific studies were of fatigue in hard work such as
weight lifting or running. Later workers investigated fatigue of
less mechanical but still monotonous work such as copying or
adding. But very little had been done on the highest forms of
skilled work, such as are needed in industry, transport, and war.
And fatigue in skilled work is something very different from
fatigue of the muscles. To begin with, the weight lifter does less
work in his last hour than his first, apart from a possible spurt at
the end. Bartlett's subjects often did more work at the end than
the start, because they were making needless movements which
they could no longer control.
The most striking symptom of fatigue in skilled work was a
lowering of the standards of performance. Even at the end of two
hours, errors in direction increased five times, and errors in
speed were doubled. Yet most of the subjects thought they were
doing better at the end than the start. The mistakes were not due
to mistaken actions, such as pulling the wrong lever, or pulling
the right lever the wrong way. They were mainly due to wrong
timing. Another source of error was a failure to respond to all
the instruments on the control board. At first, for example, the
subject never neglected the petrol gauge. Later on, he frequently
"ran out of petrol/' and towards the end he could only attend to
one instrument at a time. If this happened he frequently "pulled
his machine to disaster," fortunately only on paper.
Early in the experiments sensations due to tilting or vibrating
the chair were a help. They allowed the operator to keep a
steadier course. Later on they could not be properly interpreted,
and merely distracted him. The same is probably true in industrial
work. Early in the day of a worker looking after a number of
machines, small changes in the sounds they make are a help.
Later on the noises are merely fatiguing.
The subjects* own account of these experiments were most
interesting. They put down their mistakes to faults in the machi-
nery, saying that the levers were becoming sticky. They not
merely failed to notice things that happened. They reported
things which never happened at all such as loud noises. They
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION IOC)
became uncomfortable. They said they were too hot or too cold,
that their equipment was too heavy or too tight. They often got
cramp. Finally they lost their tempers. At first they worked
silently, then they sighed; later a few bad words emerged. "By
the end of the experiment/* writes Professor Bartlett, "most
operators kept up a flow of the most violent language they
knew." Such observations have an obvious bearing on complaints
of rudeness or lying by fatigued factory workers.
Doubtless these experiments have been extended to deal with
the effects on fatigue of oxygen want, noise, cold, and darkness,
the proper design of instrument panels, controls, and so on, and
the need for rest periods during and after prolonged operations.
After the war it is essential that similar work should be done
with skilled industrial workers. Industrial "psychologists," at
least in capitalist countries, have been mainly concerned with
monotonous manual work, and not with the much higher form
of skill needed in looking after a complicated machine, or set of
machines. A good many of Professor Bartlett's findings are only
commonsense. The important points were to find out how soon
fatigue became dangerous, and how to combat it; in fact not
merely to describe it, but to measure and prevent its onset.
The Labour Movement should see to it that after the war the
men who have worked on fatigue in the Fighting Services are
used for the problems of peace time. A tired lorry driver can be
as dangerous as a tired pilot. This danger would be reduced by
shorter hours and greater comfort.
The study of industrial fatigue could and should benefit enor-
mously from accurate studies of this kind. But unless the Trade
Unions take a hand in the matter they will be used to boost
profits rather than to promote the safety and health of the workers.
Hygiene or Sales Talk ?
A reader has drawn my attention to an article in the current
number of verywoman, a magazine which is obviously read by
many working-class women. The article deals with cleanliness,
and if every woman followed its advice, the national consumption
110 SCIENCE ADVANCES
of soap and cosmetics would certainly go up vastly. This would
hardly help to win the war.
I am all for as much cleanliness as one can manage in peace-
time. I used to take a daily bath, and a good full one too. But I
realized that this was a luxury, and in no way necessary for
health, so I have cut it out. The traditional weekly bath night is
all you need unless you are in a dirty trade. It is desirable to have
a bath and change your underclothes about once a week. Other-
wise if you pick up a louse, as anyone may do, you give it a
chance to have a family before it is drowned.
One theme runs through the article, namely that it is better to
smell like a chemist's shop than a human being. "Haven't you
noticed the heavy odour which even the most well-bred scalps
develop a few days after a shampoo?" "Happily there are few
women today who don't use a deodorant/' "To be sure of perfect
freshness, you should wash every part of your body both night
and morning/' And so on. Human beings have a natural smell,
which a large fraction of others find attractive; and still more
would do so but for sales talk about body odour. Of course, if
you leave any part of you unwashed for too long, bacteria get to
work and produce a less pleasant smell.
Your skin contains millions of sebaceous glands, mostly near
hair roots, which secrete grease. This grease is part of your
normal equipment. It probably protects your skin from bacterial
invasion, and keeps it soft. Soap removes it, though a bath with-
out much soaping leaves a good deal. I suspect that quite a lot of
minor skin trouble comes from using too much soap. Certainly
several people who suffered from spotty skins tell me they have
had less spots since I advised them to go easy with soap.
The skin also contains sweat glands, and in accordance with
Mr. Churchill's instructions, some of us are using them a bit more
now than we used to. The article in question recommends you to
shave under your arms, and seal the sweat glands up with a deo-
dorant, while other steps are to be taken with other areas of the
body. If you seal up the pores, you won't stop the glands from
producing sweat. You will merely stop it getting out, which is
not likely to do your skin any good.
As for our necks, we are told that soap and water isn't enough,
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION III
you should mix powdered magnesia with rose water to make a
paste, and leave it on for ten minutes. Your underclothes should
be changed every day, your feet treated with talc powder and
permanganate. Apart from soap and hair wash, which are cer-
tainly needed, though not in vast quantities, I counted nineteen
articles recommended in a single page which may or may not
improve a woman's appearance (I think rouge and eyebrow
plucking very rarely do so) but are either of no use, or worse
than useless, for health. I think some of the anti-squanderbug
advertisements go rather too far, but when I read this article I
felt as if I had fallen into a nest of squanderbugs. The magazine
containing it was of course full of advertisements of cosmetics
and aids to health and beauty. If an article like the one I am
writing had appeared in it the advertisers would have objected.
In 1938, of course, they objected to any articles crabbing Mr.
Chamberlain's visits to Berchtesgaden and Munich, because the
mere thought that war was possible would have wrecked the
Christmas trade. Today they object to anti-waste propaganda
which hits their favourite form of waste.
Very likely the woman who wrote the article believed every
word of it. That is my main objection to advertisements. People
believe lies, however outrageous, if you tell them often enough,
as Hitler points out in Mein Kampf. As a physiologist I object
particularly to lies about how our bodies work. A favourite bogy
is uric acid, a non-poisonous substance which, however, accu-
mulates in the joints in gout. As gout is a fairly rare disease, and
there is no evidence that uric acid accumulates in ordinary rheu-
matism or arthritis, medicines which eliminate uric acid, or more
accurately are alleged to do so, are of very slight value at best.
At the present time the cosmetic and patent medicine industry
leads to a great waste of effort which could be used for winning
the war and keeping up the people's health. If we can't have sugar
on our cakes or cream with our pudding, it is ridiculous that we
should be able to buy substances to plug our pores or flush our
kidneys, which latter is easily done with a drink of water.
Unfortunately the interests concerned in selling such things
are well dug in, and have influential connexions in both Houses
of Parliament. Mr. Amery, for example, is, or was till recently, a
112 SCIENCE ADVANCES
large shareholder in Beecham's Trust. 1 Any attempt to clamp
them down, even at the crisis of the war, would lead to howls
about bureaucratic and medical tyranny. But at least we can show
up their propaganda when it pretends to be propaganda for
health and efficiency, and can point out that a good deal of the
grease used in cosmetics is obtained from the traps of drains.
A socialist society would supply cosmetics to those who want
them, as the Soviet Union did in peace-time. But it would not
tolerate attempts to frighten people into using them even in
peace-time, and far less so during a war when waste is criminal.
Measuring Human Needs*
The simplest formulation of socialism is "From each according
to his ability, to each according to his work/' that of com-
munism. "From each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs." Some people think it would be impossible to
determine needs, and that therefore communism is impracticable.
For example, Bernard Shaw, who on occasion describes him-
self as a communist, would like to cut the knot by giving every
man, woman, and child exactly the same income. 2 However,
Joseph Stalin, who has a somewhat better title than Shaw to be a
communist, said in his report to the seventeenth Congress of the
communist party of the Soviet Union, "Marxism starts out with
the assumption that people's tastes and requirements are not and
cannot be equal in quality or quantity, either in the period of
socialism or in the period of communism."
Any biologist must at least find the communist slogan inter-
esting, because biology is becoming more and more a matter of
ascertaining needs. Some workers are concerned with nutritional
needs. They feed rats on simplified diets and find that their
growth slows down or they develop some symptoms such as
sore skins or sterility. Then something is added to the diet, and
the rats resume normal growth or the symptoms clear up. The
rats' needs are a fairly good guide to human ones, though not a
1 See Tory M.P., by S. Maxey, 1938.
a Since this was written he has changed his view.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 113
complete one. For example, men, but not rats, get scurvy if their
diet lacks ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Rats lose weight if deprived
of a protein constituent called histidine, and men do not. Never-
theless, our present very successful rationing system is largely
based on experiments on rats.
Other biologists study the needs of animals harmful to man.
For example, the mosquitoes which carry malaria and yellow
fever pass the larval stage of their lives in water. To control them
we must know what sort of water each species needs. Can it live
in shallow water, in running water, in brackish water, in water
shaded from sunlight, and so forth ? Some insects which destroy
grain and other stored foods need a fair amount of humidity,
others can live on dry food. But all need a temperature somewhere
between freezing point and about 110 F., though many can
stand high temperatures for a few hours, if the air is dry. One
method of pest control is to see that pests do not get their needs.
Human physiological needs differ. A coalminer needs more
food than a clerk, but he does not need exercise several times a
week after work to keep fit. A sedentary factory worker has least
fatigue and fewest accidents at a temperature between 60 and
65 F. A man on hard work is better off at about 55 F.
We have a scientific basis for assessing needs as to diet and
many conditions in factories, but much less as to conditions in
the home. Let us take a simple example. No doubt living rooms
should get some sun. But is there any harm in having bedroom
windows facing north ? Or does sunshine in the day make them
healthier at night? Nobody knows. But we do know that over-
crowding to a density of more than one per room encourages a
number of diseases. We know very little about needs for physical
recreation. They may differ greatly in individuals, and I am sure
that the compulsory "games" at many schools are overdone. But
you must be careful in accepting statements from men who say
they never took systematic exercise. My father used to say he
never played games at the university, but on cross-examination
admitted that he walked home and back 45 miles each way
at most week-ends. The plain fact is that we do not know our
needs in this, and many other important matters. Only scientific
investigation on a very big scale will determine them. This is one
114 SCIENCE ADVANCES
of the very many reasons why communism is impossible without
science.
When we come to needs beyond those which a biologist can
assess, the difficulties are obviously greater. But I believe I could
persuade most readers that my needs, if I am to be as efficient as
possible, are rather greater than those of a coalminer. I do not
need so much food or so many clothes, or a daily bath, though
I give myself this modest luxury in peace-time. But I do need a
room with a large number of books, where I can work in the
evening. I have to travel to keep in touch with scientific col-
leagues both in this country and others, quite apart from speech-
making. If I am to visit my fellow academicians in Moscow in
winter, as I hope to, I shall even want a fur-lined coat. Doubtless
under communism I should not need many things which I have
had to buy in the past, for example, a stiff shirt if I am to give
an evening lecture at the Royal Institution and a top hat for
funerals. But I should legitimately get a rather larger share of the
national income than the average, whether in money or its equi-
valent, or in the shape of a free flat, books, motor car, railway
tickets, and so on.
It is worth noting, however, that a sick man, woman, or child,
suffering from a disease whose treatment is difficult, may need
more man-hours per week than a professor and would get them
under communism, just as in a well-run family a sick member
will get more than an equal share of the family budget.
Clearly there will be difficulties in assessing needs under
communism, and miners and professors may each think the
others get too much, but many of these difficulties will be solved
by the advance of science, and most of the rest on a basis of
common sense.
Science and technology have made an age of plenty for all
quite possible. This can be achieved under socialism. The Soviet
Union was so backward technically at the time of the revolution
that it was only entering the age of universal plenty in 1941.
Britain could enter it within a year of establishing socialism. The
transition to communism will probably start in the Soviet Union
in a few years from the end of the war, with the free distribution
of some necessities such as bread. It could not start so soon in
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 115
Britain even if we became a socialist country in the next ten
years. For the younger people in the Soviet Union, brought up
under socialism, mostly take it for granted that it is pleasant and
honourable to work for the community. They are therefore ripe
for communism. We shall not be so till socialism has taught us
the same moral lesson.
Beyond the Microscope
The various sciences depend very largely on technical im-
provements. Mathematics could not go very far when XLIX
multiplied by XCIV made MMMMDCVL The invention (an
Indian one, by the way) of our present numeral system made it
possible to write this as 94 X 49 = 4606. The telescope made
modern astronomy possible. Physics relies on hundreds of
machines for accurate measurement, including the balance, the
clock, the ammeter, the thermometer, the photoelectric cell, and
others, many of which are familiar in industry. Although bio-
logists may use any of the methods of physics and chemistry, the
biologists" most important instrument is the microscope.
This has not only revealed hundreds of thousands of animal
and plant species too small to be seen without it. It has shown
that the larger ones are built up of cells whose structure is not
very different in a man and a beetle, or in an oak and a moss.
The cell is not merely a unit of structure, but of function. Iso-
lated cells will live for a long time, and sometimes reproduce
while smaller parts will not.
It is lucky for biologists that few cells are smaller than a wave-
length of light, and most much bigger. For the microscope will
not disclose details finer than this length. Quite recently we have
got much greater precision with beams of electrons, but the new
technique is still more difficult than microscopy two hundred
years ago, and has not yet taught us much. So we have to rely on
indirect evidence for finer details of structure. Probably my
greatest contribution to science has been the interpretation of
some of this evidence. At first sight it would seem that a hunt in
north-east London for the relatives of a man who is both colour-
blind and haemophilic (that is to say whose blood will not clot)
Il6 SCIENCE ADVANCES
could hardly tell us about structures inside the cell too small to
be seen with the microscope. But it did.
Every cell in a human being, an animal, or a plant, contains a
nucleus. When the cell divides the nuclear material is organized
into threads called chromosomes, each of which divides in two,
half going to each daughter cell. The cell divisions connected
with reproduction are rather different from the normal. But the
net result of them, and of the fusion of a female and male cell in
fertilization, is that an individual usually gets half his or her
chromosomes from the mother, and half from the father. The
chromosomes consist, in part, of smaller structures called genes,
which are the material basis of heredity. For example, a white cat
is white (and often deaf) because it has a gene which is not there
in ordinary cats. Unless both its parents were white, it only has
one such gene, and when mated to an ordinary black or tabby, it
hands it on to half its kittens on an average.
The American biologist Bridges, who, by the way, was a keen
co-operator, and in other ways too radical for many of his con-
temporaries, first proved, from a study of flies in which the
number of chromosomes were abnormal, and well-known genes
were inherited in an abnormal way, that genes were carried by
the chromosomes. Only rarely can a gene be seen even with a
powerful microscope. But a few are visible as alterations in the
pattern of a chromosome, in insects where the chromosomes in
certain cells become very large. None have yet been seen in
vertebrates, let alone man, but we are beginning to know where
they are situated, by the study of what is called linkage.
Genes in different chromosomes are inherited independently.
For example, a man who has inherited the genes for the Rh sub-
stance in the blood 1 and for hay fever or other allergic diseases
from his father, hands them down independently to his children.
Those who inherit the Rh antigen are no more likely than the
others to develop hay fever.
But where the genes are on the same chromosome this is not
so. If a man is haemophilic and colour-blind his children are
normal, but half his daughter's sons are colour-blind, and half
haemophilic. And it is usually the colour-blind ones who are
1 See p. 24.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION II J
haemophilia. On the other hand, if a woman inherits haemophilia
from her mother and colour-blindness from her father, the sons
will almost all be either haemophilia or colour-blind. Only a very
few will have both defects or neither. The nearer two genes are
in a chromosome, the less likely they are to separate if they came
in from the same parents, or to go to the same child if they came
from separate parents.
On this principle maps of the chromosomes have been made
in a few animals and plants. These maps give us a detailed picture
of organization inside the cell, on a scale too small to be seen with
a microscope. On one small section of one human chromosome I
have located five genes, and other workers two more. It is going
to take centuries to map all the human chromosomes. When we
have the maps we shall be able to say something like this. Here
is a gene which in normal people produces a substance concerned
in blood clotting, and which is out of order in haemophilias. One
hundred-thousandth of a millimetre away is the gene whose
failure causes colour-blindness, and in between them the gene
whose failure causes a particular form of paralysis. When we can
do this, eugenics will become scientific, rather than class propa-
ganda, as it generally is at present. But we shall also have gained
what may be very much more important, a knowledge of the
internal organization of our cells as detailed as the knowledge of
anatomy which guides both the surgeon and the first-aid worker.
We may find out how to get this knowledge by less roundabout
methods. I hope we shall.
Now the war is over, I am beginning to start work again
on these problems, though I cannot do much till University
College is rebuilt. The Nazis have done such horrible things
on the basis of their false theories of heredity that all work on
this subject is inevitably suspect. But we can best counter these
falsehoods by discovering the truth, and the truth is going to
take the study of human, animal, and plant structure a whole
stage beyond that which the microscope made possible.
II 8 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Evolution, and Our Weak Points
My wife has just started a raging cold. By the time this article
is printed I shall probably have one too. Worse, we shall probably
be spreading them to others if we go into public shelters. Like
many others, I get one or two of these acute nose infections every
winter, whereas all my other organs together do not go seriously
wrong once a year. Why is the nose such a weak point ?
Part of the answer is to be found in the history of human
evolution. Compare a man's nose with that of any other mammal,
say a horse, dog, or rabbit. The air going into and out of its lungs
has a nearly straight run from the lungs in and out through the
nose. If there is a bend it is where the head joins the neck. In man
each nostril takes a hairpin bend, with very awkward results.
When a dog sneezes, the air gets a straight run, and he can clear
his nose. A human sneeze cannot get through the narrow and
twisted nostrils, so when we sneeze we have to open our mouths.
This twisting of the nostrils is a result of the great growth of the
brain, which has distorted our heads from the usual mammalian
shape. More accurately, we have kept a type of head shape which
is common in embryo mammals, but which is generally liquidated
long before birth.
Our mouth is another weak point. Our teeth suffer from gross
overcrowding, and that is one reason why they so often decay.
We are probably evolving towards a condition with fewer teeth,
for a good many people never cut their wisdom teeth, and perhaps
none of our descendants will do so. Other organs in the face
suffer from this distortion. There are a number of cavities in the
skull filled with air and communicating with the nose. These may
become inflamed, or their communications with the nose blocked.
The resulting sinus or antrum disease is almost always painful
and sometimes fatal.
Still another set of human ills come from the fact that only
in the last million years or so have our ancestors taken to standing
on their hind legs. Our feet go wrong more often than our hands.
That is why chiropody is sometimes a necessity, while manicure
is a luxury.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 119
But the effects of the erect posture are more serious elsewhere.
A dog's internal organs are suspended from above, that is to say
from his back. This form of suspension has only been partly
modified in human beings. So they are very liable to slip in a
direction which is downwards in a man, but would be backwards
in a dog. This tendency results in a variety of complaints includ-
ing rupture and prolapse of the womb, and accounts for some of
our digestive troubles. The narrowing of the orifice between the
bones of the pelvis, whilst it checks this tendency, exposes
women to more pain in childbirth than other female mammals.
The heart is much higher above the ground in man than in a
four-footed animal of the same size, and in consequence, in order
that the blood should be able to return to it, the pressure in the
leg veins must be much higher. When they cannot stand up to
this high pressure we get varicose veins.
In fact, as a result of standing up, our bodies have developed
internal contradictions, just as our society has developed them as
a result of improvements in productive forces. Unfortunately we
do not yet know how to change our bodily build as some of us
know how to change the social order. So our descendants will
probably suffer from hammer toes and varicose veins after they
have ceased to suffer from capitalism.
In just the same way our brains are so organized as to dispose
us from time to time to conduct and emotions more suited to
animals than to human beings. But here the situation is very
different to that of our anatomy. You can make a plant grow into
many different shapes, but you can't alter the human form
greatly, except by mutilation.
Some animals, particularly insects, have very stereotyped
forms of behaviour. We may say, if we like, that they have fixed
instincts. Mammals and birds, however, are much more plastic in
their conduct, and some can learn a good deal. As regards con-
duct, human beings are far more plastic than any animals. This is
one of the things which makes them human.
Some eugenists hope that by selective breeding it may be
possible to produce a human race in emotional harmony with its
environment. Trotsky adopted this view, which is certainly
un-Marxist. For a society composed of such people would not
I2O SCIENCE ADVANCES
progress. Animals which are very well adapted to some parti-
cular environment seem to be dead ends in evolution. They may
survive for millions of years without much alteration, only to be
swept away when a large change in climate or vegetation occurs.
Their place is then taken by other animals which have been less
specialized., and temporarily less successful.
In the same way if men and women were ever perfectly adapted
to a society, then that society could never undergo fruitful
change, though it would perhaps decay very slowly. Technical
improvements which might upset the social equilibrium would be
resisted, as the mediaeval guildsmen tried to prevent new pro-
cesses of manufacture. Engels pointed out that "it is precisely the
wicked passions of man, greed and lust for power, which, since
the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers for historical
development." So until society has been perfected it is futile to
wish that individuals should be so, even if this were possible.
No doubt when the classless society has been achieved our
descendants will have to tackle their physical and moral imper-
fections. But I think they will do so much more by changing the
environment than by the very slow process of eugenical selec-
tion, even if the latter is used to some extent. Man has managed
to live in cold countries by inventing clothing, fire, and houses,
not by growing thick hair like polar bears. Children are made
into social beings by education, not by breeding from those who
behave best. And as we learn about the physiology of develop-
ment we may well be able to correct the anatomical defects of
which I have spoken without surgical operations on the one
hand, or eugenics on the other.
Mans Ancestors
When Darwin wrote The Descent of Man he was mainly con-
cerned to show that men were descended from animals fairly like
modern apes, that these were descended from reptiles, reptiles
from fish, and so on. Today we have much more evidence in
favour of this theory, and also vastly more details of the pedigree.
First of all palaeontologists have now unearthed perhaps fifty
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 121
times as many fossil vertebrate species as were known when
Darwin wrote, and have studied them much more closely, for
example, by examining bone and teeth sections with the micro-
scope. Secondly, we know more about the relationships of living
animals, because we have studied their development in greater
detail. Thus it is obvious that our finger bones correspond to
those of a lizard, but only embryology showed that the small
bones which conduct sound from our car drums to our internal
ears correspond to relatively large bones in a lizard's jaws. We
can also compare animals on the basis of their chemistry as well
as their anatomy. And we can compare microscopical structures
in the cells.
Finally we know a good deal more than Darwin did about
how evolution took place. Geneticists have now produced varie-
ties of a number of animals and plants which give sterile hybrids
when crossed with the original type, as the horse does with the
donkey. The fact that all varieties of dog or rabbit can be crossed
was used as an argument against Darwin to show that species are
quite different from varieties.
The earliest ancestors of which we know anything were some-
thing between worms and fish. They lived about 500 million
years ago, arid had no jaws, but round mouths, and a number of
bony or gristly rods supporting gills round their throats. They
were probably descended from worm-like animals, of which
traces have been found in earlier rocks; but we have not enough
fossils to be sure.
The first great step in evolution was the hingeing of one gill
arch to form a lower jaw, so that the animal could snap instead
of guzzling mud or sucking motionless food on the sea bottom.
With this w r ent a development of paired fins for swimming, and
doubtless improvements in the sense organs and brain. By and
by a second gill arch was added to strengthen the lower jaw.
This step was only discovered by Watson in London just before
the war. The paired fins developed a narrow base, and became
more like flippers. A pocket off the gullet could be used for
holding air, either for buoyancy or to help breathing if the water
was foul. Our ancestors were definitely fish, but less stream-lined
than many modern forms.
122 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Then in the Devonian period, when there were many shallow
lagoons, our ancestors came out of water. Fish still do it. In the
Zoo aquarium before the war one could see the mud-skipper, a
tropical fish which can go some distance out of the water. It has
developed eyes for seeing in the air, and joints in its fins. Unfor-
tunately no one told it that it was 250 million years late in its
attempt to colonize the land. The next stages included the develop-
ment of legs and of nostrils on top of the head, and our ancestors
at the time when the coal was formed were still amphibians like
newts, almost certainly with slimy skins and probably passing
their infancy in the water.
After this they became complete land animals not very unlike
lizards, with dry skins, and laying eggs on land, so that for the
first time they were almost independent of water. One group of
reptiles, the theriomorphs, seem to have had hair instead of scales
from an early date, because we find holes on their face bones
similar to those in which the whiskers of many mammals are set.
They began to lift their bellies off the ground, and to resemble
mammals in various ways. No one yet knows when and where
they took the great steps of becoming warm-blooded, and bring-
ing forth their young alive. We shall know about the latter point
when more fossils of pregnant females are found, as fossils of the
pregnant ichthyosaurus, a whale-like reptile, have been. Nor do
we know when they began suckling their young.
Animals which suckle their young have at least the beginnings
of social life. During the last 30 million years their most striking
advance has been in brain size, though they have produced
specialized forms, runners like the horse, gnawers like the rat,
burrowers like the mole, swimmers like the whale and seal, even
the flying bats. But man is rather a primitive mammal anatomi-
cally. We have lost less than most, tails, tactile whiskers, a good
deal of hair, and a few teeth. We have kept all our fingers and
toes, and our collar-bones. Our main specializations are in our
large brains, our highly developed hands, our close-set eyes, and
our heels.
Our immediate ancestors were climbers fairly like some exist-
ing monkeys, but our structure has not changed much in the last
half million years. Since our ancestors discovered fire and began
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 123
to co-operate in production, our main evolution has been social,
and there is no need to tell readers of this book that human
society is still imperfect, and changing very rapidly.
There were Giants
We do not know where and when men originated. In one
sense we are never likely to know, for the process was probably
not quite a sudden one. If, with Engels, we make production for
future use the test of manhood, it would be hard to draw the line
between an animal which occasionally sharpened a stick or
chipped a stone, and a man who did so habitually, even if we knew
all the facts.
We shall certainly not be in a position to give a definite answer
until most of Europe, Asia, and Africa have been searched for
human remains at least as carefully as Britain and France have
been searched at present. But on the present evidence the most
likely site seems to be South-Eastern Asia or the Malay Islands,
and the time before the ice ages. Pithecanthropus, a very primitive
human type found in Java fifty years ago, and Smanthropus more
recently found near Peking, both come from this area, and the
latter was certainly a man on Engels' definition, as he used fire.
However, he had a good many ape-like features.
In May of this year Dr. Wcidenreich informed the American
Ethnological Society of discoveries made in Java in 1939 to 1941
by Dr. von Koenigswald, of the Netherlands East Indies Geo-
logical Service, who has been missing since the Japanese con-
quest of Java. A preliminary account has been published in
Science.
In the volcanic ash beds of Trinil in central Java he, or rather
his Javanese collectors, found a series of skulls and lower jaws,
which are definitely human, though primitive, and some of which
are enormously larger than those of any living or previously
described fossil men. The most complete skull, for example, had
room for a bigger brain than any ape's, though a small one by
modern human standards. But the head must have been of
human size because of the thickness of the bone, and the presence
124 SCIENCE ADVANCES
of a ridge on the top of the skull to which great jaw muscles were
probably attached as in the gorilla. The upper jaw was so big
that it allowed of a gap between the canine and incisor teeth, but
the canines were of the human type, not like the tusks of many
apes. This form has been called Pithecanthropus robustus.
A fragment of a lower jaw belonged to a much larger type,
which was probably about the size of a large male gorilla, but
yet in shape far more like a man's than a gorilla's. Its owner has
been called Meganthropus palaeojavanlcus.
Finally in Chinese apothecaries' shops in Hongkong, von
Koenigswald bought three molar teeth of human though primi-
tive pattern, and still larger size. The volume of the crowns is
about six times the volume of the crown of the corresponding
tooth of modern man, and twice that of a male gorilla. If the rest
of the body was in the same proportion, its owner may have
weighed half a ton or so. These teeth probably came from caves
in Szechuan, Yunnan, or Kwangsi. If so, excavation on scientific
lines should reveal complete skeletons of these giants, or at least
thigh-bones like that of Pithecanthropus , which made it sure that
he walked upright, and gave a rough idea of his height.
I do not think that these remains can be used to explain the
legends of giants found in so many ancient books, such as the
Bible, the Mabinogion, and the Edda. These were composed two
or three thousand years ago at most, while the human or near-
human giant fossils probably date back half a million years.
The most striking fact about these fossils is that the largest are
the most primitive, that is to say show the most ape-like features.
Dr. Weidenreich thinks that they were quite probably in the
direct line of human evolution. If so, one of the teelh which von
Koenigswald bought in Hongkong may have belonged to my
great .... grandfather (with about 20,000 "greats" in the gap).
If he or she was an ancestor of any living man he was also, of
course, the ancestor of all living men. Most palaeontologists are
inclined to think that the giants were a side line, cousins rather
than ancestors.
If these giants were our progenitors there was a long period
during which our ancestors were getting smaller. This makes a
great deal about human evolution a lot easier to understand. It
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION 125
was not clear why men had lost most of their hair, and their
canine tusks, before they began to make weapons or use fire. If
they were giants it is quite intelligible. A giant animal in a warm
country has difficulty in keeping cool, and generally loses most
of its hair, like the elephant, the hippopotamus, and the rhino-
ceros. An animal which could tear up a tiger with its hands would
not need dog-teeth. As men got smaller they would need weapons,
fire, and probably greater sociability to allow them to combine
for hunting and defence against wild animals. All this is, of
course, speculative. The great development of biology in China
under such men as Professor (now General) Lim makes it fairly
sure that many of the gaps in our knowledge will be filled in the
next dozen years.
The whole episode is typical of the progress of science. An
utterly unexpected fact has turned up, as unexpected as the
activity of radium, or the difference between the chromosomes of
the sexes. It will mean a certain alteration in current theories,
though rather a shift of emphasis than a thorough revision. In the
long run it will be fitted in, and will probably make the previously
known facts easier to understand.
4
MEDICINE
The Common Cold
THIS is the worst season of the year for common colds. From
one to three or more times a winter, most of us are inefficient for
several days as a result of this infection. In normal times the most
public-spirited thing to do if you had a cold was to knock off
work, so as not to affect your mates. At present I think we are
supposed to stay at work and trap the germs in our handker-
chiefs. The Lancet recommends us to wear a pad over our noses
and mouths for three days, but it is not so easy to get the material.
There is no doubt that a "cold" is due to infection. This has
been shown in a great many ways. Careful studies have been
made in small islands where no one has had a cold for many
months until a ship arrived, and then it has gone round the whole
population. The agent is too small to be seen even with a micro-
scope, for colds have been given, both to men and apes, by fil-
trates of nasal secretions which had passed through a filter so fine
as to stop all bacteria. Apes get our colds, and get them very
badly. The glass screens between us and them in the Zoo are to
protect them from our airborne diseases, including tuberculosis,
but particularly colds.
While a virus is one cause of colds, it is not the only cause.
The weather is somehow concerned, which is why colds almost
disappear in summer. But it is not the main cause. Arctic Explorers
never get colds, until they come back to "civilization" and get
real bad ones.
Nobody knows where the virus of the common cold spends
the summer. Even in warm weather there may be enough people
with colds to keep it going. Perhaps a few people can carry it
without showing any symptoms. Until this is known there is no
prospect of wiping out colds.
MEDICINE 127
Attempts to prevent them with vaccines, serum, and so on,
have been a failure, or at least have not been very successful. An
English professor injected half his medical students with a vaccine
which was supposed to be prophylactic. He asked them if it had
done them good, and the majority said yes. But he also made
them keep diaries of their colds, and found that they got just as
many, and as bad ones, as the untreated half. Other workers
have of course claimed better results.
Colds can probably be cured with some of the new drugs
related to sulphanilamide. But these are dangerous substances, and
can cause illness far worse than a cold. The risk is worth taking in
the case of blood poisoning, pneumonia, or gonorrhoea; it is
emphatically not worth taking for a cold.
However, a very great deal can be done for a cold with ephe-
drine. This drug is derived from a root which has been used in
China for a long time under the name of Ma Huang, Ephedra
being the scientific name for the plant. Many traditional Chinese
medicines are quite worthless, as are most of the traditional
European ones, including a good many which are still prescribed
by doctors and sold by manufacturers. Ma Huang is rather un-
certain in its action, as the amount of ephedrine in different roots
varies. This is generally so with herbal remedies.
Chinese and Japanese scientists have investigated a number of
these medicines, and the most valuable substance so far found in
them is ephedrine. Its chemical formula is similar to that of
adrenaline, the substance which the adrenal glands, lying close to
our kidneys, pour into the blood during violent emotion or
exercise. Adrenaline, among other things, contracts the small
arteries and speeds up the heart. But its effects do not last very
long, or our hearts would go on thumping for hours after we had
keyed ourselves up when we run to catch a train or hear the
sirens announce an alert. We have chemical means of destroying
it in a few minutes, and making more when it is needed.
Ephedrine has most of the effects of adrenaline, but we do not
destroy it rapidly, so they last for some hours. It can be used
locally, as surgeons use adrenaline to stop bleeding from small
blood vessels. A number of solutions of ephedrine for dropping
into the nose are on the market, and some of them are pretty
128 SCIENCE ADVANCES
effective. If you treat your nose with one of them before going to
bed the blood vessels in the inflamed membrane shut up, and I,
for one, can breathe through my nose again. This not only enables
me to go to sleep. It helps me to sleep with my mouth shut so
that I do not breathe cold air, and the infection is much less likely
to spread to my throat and lungs. It also stops me snoring.
One can also eat ephedrine. I do so when I have a cold, and it
certainly stops my nose running. But it puts my pulse rate up to
100 or so per minute, and raises my blood pressure. As my blood
pressure is normally very low, I don't mind; but no one should
eat it unless they are sure that their blood pressure is normal or
low, and I don't recommend anyone to start on more than half a
grain. Ephedrine is also liable to keep you awake if you take it by
the mouth. But I certainly recommend it. I made two speeches on
January 3Oth and 3ist, and I doubt if any of my audiences spotted
that I had a fairly bad cold or should have had but for ephedrine.
Very likely some other compound will be made which, for the
same action on the nose, has less effect on the heart than ephe-
drine, and less on the brain than benzedrine, which is also of
some value against colds. Obviously, systematic work on these
lines will not be done during the war.
And even in peace the medical profession is not much con-
cerned with colds. They are not consulted about them, and as we
only pay them when we get ill, they can hardly be expected to do
much research on the subject. Yet colds cause a vast amount of
unhappiness and inefficiency. When the economic basis of the
medical profession is changed so that their main function becomes,
not merely to cure or prevent serious disease, but to keep us in
perfect health, colds and many minor illnesses will be attacked as
vigorously as typhoid or smallpox. But this is hardly likely to
happen until medicine is socialized.
Moulds versus Bacteria
The press has recently been full of stories about a new and
wonderful cold cure, and one newspaper at least has been urging
its mass production. The substance in question is called patulin
and is made by a mould called Penicillium patulum. It is a fairly
MEDICINE 129
simple organic compound with only seven carbon atoms, and
can be purified by crystallization.
Another product of a different mould species, penicillin, has
proved extremely useful in stopping a variety of acute infections,
and is being used in a big way for the treatment of septic wounds.
Its efficiency rivals that of sulphonamide and its derivatives.
These substances are not antiseptics in the ordinary sense.
When added to a culture of bacteria they do not kill them, as
mercuric chloride or phenol do. They stop them growing, and
are called bacteriostatics. Many of them have similar effects on
other living cells. If we injected mercuric chloride into a man with
septicaemia we might kill all the bacteria in him. But if so we
should kill him too. A bacteriostatic stops the bacteria from
dividing. It may also stop human cells from dividing for a while,
but if so no great harm is usually done, though there is often a
danger of anaemia, since the cells in human blood have to be
replaced fairly quickly, and any check on cell division may lead
to a shortage of blood cells.
We know how some of the bacteriostatics act. Before any
foodstuff can be used by a living organism it must unite with a
special molecule of protein called an enzyme which causes a
chemical change in it, the first of a series of changes in which it
is either built up into living substance or used as fuel for muscular
work or heat production. For example, sugar is combined with
phosphoric acid by a special enzyme before it is used for mus-
cular work. An enzyme will not only unite with a foodstuff, but
with other substances of similar composition. If it cannot change
them, its action is more or less completely blocked, and the cell
containing it is starved of a certain product.
Much the same thing happens when human beings are given a
bogus food or drink, for example "lemonade" made from citric
acid, not lemons, or a fat which has been heated so as to destroy
the vitamins which it contains. Our appetite is satisfied, but we
do not get the benefit which we should normally get. At present
most of our foodstuffs are pretty good from this point of view.
But "decontrol" and "free competition" after the war, if they are
applied to food, will mean a shortage of essential foodstuffs once
again.
E
130 SCIENCE ADVANCES
To go back to bacteriostatics, the sulphonamide derivatives
act by jamming an enzyme which uses jp~aminobenzoic acid, one
of the substances which used to be lumped together as "vitamin
B." It acts by producing the equivalent of a vitamin deficiency,
which is much more serious for bacteria, which may divide several
times an hour, than for human cells, most of which do not divide
at all.
Penicillin was discovered from the observation by Fleming
that some moulds prevented the growth of bacteria in their
neighbourhood. This may be the function of such substances in
the mould's life, since bacteria compete with moulds for rotting
foodstuffs.
Dr. E. W. Gye, of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund's
Laboratory, wished to try the effect upon cancer of some of the
simpler substances made by moulds. It is obvious that they might
slow down the abnormally rapid growth of a cancer, without
stopping all growth in normal parts of the body. He got patulin
from its discoverer, Professor Raistrick, of the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Having a bad cold, he tried
washing his nose with it. The solution was rather too strong, and
hurt him a bit, but his cold vanished. Some colleagues had
equally good results. It was next tried by Surgeon-Commander
W. A. Hopkins, at a naval depot. He found that fifty-five out of
ninety-five men whose noses were washed with it had recovered
in twenty-four hours (besides a number who said they were
cured but were not). Only eight out of eighty-five untreated men
recovered within the same time.
So patulin certainly won't cure all colds. Moreover, some of
those whose noses had ceased running developed sinusitis, that is
to say, pains in the face, due to inflammation of hollows in the
bone connected with the nose. Even more important, two other
doctors who tried it got no good effect at all. And no one claims
that it works against influenza.
This does not prove that patulin is a fraud or a delusion. The
difficulty may be that we have lumped together a number of
different diseases under the name of "common colds," and are
then surprised that what stops one does nothing to another.
When we know more about colds this may seem as silly as to
MEDICINE 131
expect that the same treatment is best for potatoes and beans,
because they are both vegetables. Very likely the colds at the
naval depot went round the men very quickly, and half of them
were due to a single germ or group of germs which is affected by
patulin, while most of the other colds were due to a different
agent. At present patulin is being tested by a number of doctors,
and by next spring we should know whether it is worth while
distributing it widely. My own guess is that it will cure some
colds, and that other substances will cure others, so that it will
ultimately be possible to make up a mixture that will cure most.
Till then I shall go on treating my own colds with ephedrine,
which prevents my nose running, but unfortunately has other
less pleasant effects, and would certainly shorten some peoples'
lives if they took enough to deal with their colds. So I don't
recommend it for general use.
Venereal Diseases
The number of people affected with venereal diseases is in-
creasing, as it always does during war. And there is a great
diversity of opinion regarding the best means of fighting them.
This arises partly from prudery, but largely from sheer ignorance.
What are venereal diseases ? This name is given to a group of
diseases which are usually (though not always) passed from one
person to another by sexual intercourse. It is most important to
realize that they can be passed on in other ways. An infected
mother commonly gives them to her children, and a towel or
washbasin may carry the infection.
Some religious people regard them as a punishment for sin.
This is certainly not the Christian doctrine, as can be seen from
the ninth verse of chapter three of St. John's Epistle. It is also
untrue. A wedding-ring does not prevent venereal infection. It
would be truer to say that they were punishments of ignorance.
A number of diseases are passed from one animal to another in
this way. One is known in horses, another in dogs. In the human
species there are two main diseases. The worst is called syphilis,
or great pox, and is due to a microscopic corkscrew-shaped germ.
132 SCIENCE ADVANCES
This generally enters through a scratch or raw place in the skin.
After about four weeks a hard but painless sore develops. If this
is treated at once the patient need never be ill at all. If not, he or
she gets swollen glands and a variety of eruptions on the skin,
and others in internal organs which may cause all kinds of
symptoms from sore throat to madness.
These generally die down, but after several years a new set of
symptoms develop. They include "bad legs/' erosions of the
bones, and weak spots in arteries which may burst and cause
sudden death. Finally, sometimes after twenty years, the nervous
system may be affected. The first symptom is often a loss of
feeling in the feet. The patients lift them high up and stamp when
walking, and are sometimes thought to be paralysed. They often
end up as the rather cheerful kind of lunatics who sign cheques
for a million pounds, and say they are Jean Harlow or Winston
Churchill. An infected mother commonly infects her babies.
Some die before birth. Others are born with the disease, and this
congenital syphilis is one of the main causes of mental deficiency.
Gonorrhoea, or clap, is a more local infection due to a coccus
not very unlike those causing boils and blood poisoning. It starts
within a week with a discharge of pus from one or other of the
tubes opening at the place of infection. At this stage it can be
rapidly and completely cured. If not, it may spread inwards,
causing great pain, and sterility in both sexes. It sometimes
causes severe rheumatism and, if it reaches the eyes, blindness,
especially in new-born babies of infected mothers. It is not such
a great killer as syphilis, but is commoner.
Two other common diseases of this group, soft sore and
lympho-granuloma, do not spread far from the point of infec-
tion, but the latter is very serious. Venereal diseases rank fairly
high among the causes of death, but no one knows how many
they kill, as deaths are commonly registered as diseases of the
liver, blood vessels, or whatever organ first breaks down.
These diseases could and should be wiped off the face of the
earth. They would be abolished if all patients were cured, as they
could be, before infecting anyone else. But people are ashamed to
ask for treatment, or do not believe that anything is seriously
wrong until they are not only ill, but highly infectious. It will not
MEDICINE 133
be easy to educate people about these diseases. Fourteen years
ago Moscow was full of posters showing their symptoms. They
were disgusting but not so disgusting as the reality. We prefer
to hide the truth in this country.
The second line of attack is to cut down sexual promiscuity.
Prostitution will never be abolished until the men concerned are
punished as severely as the women, or as in the Soviet Union,
more severely. Young people will be promiscuous as long as low
wages, bad housing, means tests, and other economic causes
make early marriage difficult. And older people will do the same
until divorce is made a good deal easier when a marriage has
failed. History shows that "pi-jaw" has very little effect. And no
wonder, if moralists lump together as "sinners" a couple who
live together without being married, and a man who deceives a
girl and leaves her to look after the baby.
The third line is prophylaxis by antiseptics. There is very little
danger of infection if the places where infection is likely are
washed within an hour or so, first with soap and water, then with
a bright pink solution of potassium permanganate, and then
rubbed with calomel ointment. It is important to get the per-
manganate solution well into the tubular part of the organ
concerned. This can be done with a syringe. Some other anti-
septics can also be used.
When these substances are supplied and men or women
instructed in their use, venereal infection is very rare. But they
are not easy to get, and are generally sold without any instruc-
tions. Many people are violently opposed to prophylaxis, though
it is not clear to me why it is wrong to wipe out the disease after
two hours, but right to do so after two weeks.
At present a controversy is raging about Regulation 338, under
which, if two patients trace their infection to the same third
person, he or she can be forced to undergo treatment. It has been
said that this will lead to blackmail, and to further persecution of
prostitutes by the police. This may be so, but as complaints can
only come from infected people, I do not think either danger is
very great.
We shall not abolish these diseases until everyone is educated
about them, as they are about other infectious diseases, and until
134 SCIENCE ADVANCES
we have a social system which not merely discourages promis-
cuity, but encourages early marriage. Meanwhile, I believe that
one of the best ways in which promiscuity and venereal disease
could be kept down would be to allow more and longer leave to
married members of the forces, both men and women.
Causes of Cancer
In the Daily Worker of October 28th Frank Lesser wrote that
a Pensions appeal tribunal, dealing with the case of a soldier
dying of cancer, said that "as the cause of cancer was not known,
and as anybody might at any moment be found to suffer from it,
there was no evidence that death was accelerated by conditions of
service." The tribunal may have been right in their judgment in
this particular case, but if they said what is reported, they were
certainly wrong in their science. Cancer, like any other natural
event, has a great many causes, and some of them are known.
Cancer is simply a disorderly growth of the cells of some part
of the body, which invade other parts. Excessive growth in an
orderly manner may be harmless, as with warts, or very danger-
ous, as in the brain, where the skull leaves no room for expansion.
But in most parts of the body quite large tumours can be safely
removed provided they do not spread. In the case of cancer, one
may cut the original growth out or kill it with X-rays or radium,
but unless this is done very soon, some cells from it may have
been carried by the blood or lymph and settled down in some
other parts of the body, or it may have spread in another way. So
the best place to have cancer, if one must have it, is the skin or
some easily accessible organ such as the breast. Most skin and
breast cancers, if removed soon enough, do not spread.
If we are ever able to point to a single cause of cancer, it will
almost certainly be by standing the question on its head, so to
speak, and asking why every cell in the body does not occa-
sionally divide. Some cells will go on dividing every day or two
in a suitable fluid. We can only guess at what normally restrains
them. Till we know this we can only say that a lot of different
agencies favour the development of cancer, and may be regarded
as causes.
MEDICINE 135
The first, curiously enough, is hygiene. Every year of peace a
larger proportion of all deaths is due to cancer, simply because
people survive other dangers to die of it. Cancer is a disease of
old age, and kills few people under forty-five, so if die deaths
from phthisis or heart disease are reduced, more people live long
enough to die of cancer. For this reason it is rather a commoner
cause of death among the rich than the poor. Among 1,000 poor
men aged sixty-five more will die of cancer within a year than
among 1,000 rich. But so many more of the rich than of the poor
live to be sixty-five, that this gives them a higher overall cancer
death rate.
Poverty probably causes cancer by means of some form of
dirt. For the extra deaths from cancer among poor men as com-
pared to rich men of the same age are mostly from cancer of the
skin, mouth, gullet, and stomach, where dirt can reach, and not
of other internal organs where it cannot.
Motherhood lowers the chance that a woman will die of
cancer of the breast, but increases her chance of dying of cancer
of the womb. It is probably a help against breast cancer to suckle
the baby, and it is also probable that the first two or three babies
do not greatly heighten the risks of womb cancer, while large
families do so. But statistics on these points are not conclusive.
Alcoholic drinks certainly increase the chance of cancer. The
death rate from cancer among publicans, for example, is well
above that of average men of the same age. There is good evi-
dence that it is higher among habitual beer drinkers than the rest
of the population, but it is not so sure whether wine or spirits
have any such effect.
A group of chemical substances cause cancer, even in very
small quantities. These are found in some types of lubricating oil,
and were particularly common in the shale oil from which Lord
Linlithgow's fortune was largely derived. They are also common
in pitch, tar, and soot. So cancer, especially of the skin, was
found to be common in workers with shale oil, tar, and pitch,
briquette and patent fuel makers who use pitch, chimney sweeps,
and certain workers exposed to mineral oil, particularly cotton
mule spinners. The condition was found in London sweeps by
Dr. Potts in the eighteenth century, and most of the research was
SCIENCE ADVANCES
done by doctors. But it was James Wignall, an organizer of the
Dockers' Union, who discovered it in the South Wales patent
fuel workers. The cancer-producing substances act slowly. It
takes over ten years before a cancer develops in oil-soaked human
skin. But they will act within a few months on mice. And by
working on mice, Professor Kennaway, of the London cancer
hospital, was able to isolate some of them, and to show that some
lubricating oils are vastly more dangerous than others.
It is very possible that cancer spreads in man partly, at least,
because the cancer makes a substance similar to those found in
pitch and oils. For Shabad in Leningrad extracted an oily sub-
stance from the livers and lungs of men dying of cancer which
caused it in animals, and his discovery was confirmed in Britain,
America, and South Africa.
Other kinds of chronic irritation, for example, X-ray burns,
and repeated burns with hot objects, can cause cancer. Skin
cancer is common in Kashmir where the inhabitants keep warm
by carrying pots of glowing charcoal under their clothes.
Heredity also plays a part.
In fact we cannot speak of the cause of cancer. Yet we know
enough of its causes to cut down the death rate considerably.
Most of these causes take many years to act. So the tribunal was
very likely correct in its verdict according to the existing rules.
But just because the cause is often doubtful, one might hope that
a tribunal would give a soldier's dependants the benefit of the
doubt. If the tribunal is forbidden to do so, an ex-soldier like
myself may be pardoned for thinking that its rules should be
amended.
Until more is known about the causes of cancer, the best way of
fighting it is to get a medical overhaul as soon as we feel any
lump in any organ, or notice any abnormal bleeding, let alone
chronic internal pains. Cancer is not always painful, especially in
the early stages; and the fact that it can often be cut short is
shown by the fact that doctors, who naturally die more than the
average from infectious diseases, have a low death-rate from
cancer.
MEDICINE 137
A New Attack on Cancer
The most important drugs which have been brought into use
in the last few years slow down the growth of bacteria without
doing much harm to the human body. They fall into two classes.
One consists of compounds related to sulphanilamide made in
the laboratory. These act by blocking enzymes used by bacteria
for their growth. They thus prevent the bacteria from growing in
our bodies. They may also have similar effects on larger organ-
isms. For example, if you give a dose of sulphanilamide to a hen
it lays eggs with soft membranous shells for several days.
The other group consists of compounds such as penicillin
made by moulds. The composition of some of these is known,
but that of penicillin is not or if it is, it is an official secret. These
also stop bacterial growth, but we do not know how. In any case,
an explanation of how they act could only be given in terms of
organic chemistry, and would fill many pages. But another group
of substances is coming into medical use, whose action can be
explained more easily.
These are the artificial radio-active elements. Fifty years ago
almost everyone but dialectical materialists thought either that
the known chemical elements were created by God, or had existed
eternally. Even idealists who did not believe in matter said they
were "necessary forms of thought" or something equally ridi-
culous.
We now know that there are many hundreds of kinds of
atoms, but that most kinds are unstable. Naturally enough, the
stabler kinds were discovered first. Perhaps no kinds of atom are
quite stable, but many kinds seem to last for many thousands of
millions of years on an average, while the most unstable ones
may have an average life of a fraction of a second. The unstable
atoms were only discovered because they shoot out rays or
particles during their transformation. At first the only ones
known were heavy ones such as radium and uranium, which occur
naturally. It was soon found that they had a value in the treatment
of cancer.
For example, cancer of the breast is quite definitely curable if
138 SCIENCE ADVANCES
tackled soon enough. In the early stages it is often enough to
remove the swelling. Later on there is a chance that cells from it
may have spread, and needles containing radio-active elements
are pushed into the organs where it is likely that cancer cells will
be found. The particles and rays from radio-active substances
have little effect on cells except when they are dividing. The
cancer cells divide much more frequently than ordinary cells,
which is why cancer is deadly. But in consequence they are more
easily killed by radium and X-rays. So if the needles are in the
right places and left there for some days, there is a good chance
of killing all the cancer cells without killing too many others.
Recently it has been possible to make radio-active forms of the
lighter elements which are part of the normal make-up of the
body by speeding up the nuclei of the heavy kind of hydrogen in
a very powerful electric field, and shooting them into another
element. This is most efficiently done with a machine called the
cyclotron, invented by E. O. Lawrence, a Californian. For
example, by firing at a target covered with phosphorus, about
one phosphorus atom in a million can be made radio-active.
These artificial radio-active elements behave chemically like the
corresponding stable ones. In particular, radio-active phosphorus
is taken up by bones and by rapidly growing cancers, and in con-
sequence, if the patient is given a drink of radio-active phosphate,
it is automatically concentrated where it is most likely to be of
use, and it seems to have cured some cancers. Dr. Lawrence, the
brother of the inventor of the cyclotron, has used it with marked
success in the usually fatal disease of leukaemia, in which the
bone marrow or lymph glands produce too many white cor-
puscles. He has been particularly successful where the bone
marrow was responsible, as the cells which were dividing too
often were bombarded with rays from the bones surrounding
them.
Similarly, radio-active iodine has been very successful in
slowing down over-production of its hormone by the thyroid
gland, though it has not been successful, so far as I know, with
cancers of the organ. A number of other elements are being tried
out, and probably a great deal has been learned in the last year.
The ideal method would be to find some special compound
MEDICINE 139
which is taken up by cancer cells from the blood and make it up
with a radio-active element. The trouble here is that all cancers
do not behave alike, in fact it would be nearer the truth to say
that no two cancers behave in the same way.
Not only has the use of radio-active elements given us a
hopeful method of dealing with cancer, but it has made all kinds
of physiological experiments possible which were formerly quite
out of the question. For example, unless one takes a very large
dose of common salt, the amount in the blood stays so nearly
steady that no rise can be detected. But if a man drinks a solution
of common salt containing radio-active sodium, and puts his
finger on an instrument called a Geiger counter, this will begin
to register radio-activity in a very few minutes. There is enough
radio-active sodium in the blood to shoot electrons through the
skin in numbers sufficient to be counted. Such an experiment is
fairly safe, because radio-active sodium disappears pretty quickly,
whereas radium stays in the body indefinitely.
By such methods as these it has been shown that even the bones
and teeth of a living man or animal are constantly exchanging
atoms with the blood, and in a more active tissue such as muscle
or liver the exchange is extraordinarily quick. Half the nitrogen
atoms in some compounds which form part of the living structure
of liver may be exchanged in twelve hours. In fact a living man or
animal is in many ways more like a flame or a waterfall than an
ordinarily solid body. The structure remains, but is constantly
being built up from fresh atoms.
Unfortunately for Europe most of this work has been done in
the United States. But cyclotrons to produce artificially radio-
active atoms will certainly be needed on a big scale in Britain and
Europe after the war, both for the treatment of disease, and for
research which will influence both medicine and agriculture.
Nature Cures
Our medical correspondent has stirred up a hornet's nest by
attacking "nature cures." I don't feel called on to take sides in
the controversy, because I don't know of any very strong evi-
dence on one side or the other. I know people who say that their
I4O SCIENCE ADVANCES
health has been restored by these methods. I know others who
say the contrary, and I do not know of any good statistics on the
matter.
But I should like to examine one statement of Mr. E. J. Saxon,
a supporter of Nature Cures. He says of our medical correspon-
dent "As for the body poisons which he dismisses as 'sales-talk/
there is plenty of objective physico-chemical evidence available
on this point. It is largely to the inability of the kidneys and skin
to clear these out of the body that a great deal of ill-health and
disease is due, and that inability is due to a large extent to the
very thing he advocates, eating plenty of 'ordinary food.' "
Now I expect many doctors would agree with him, and so
would most of the general public, because they learn their medi-
cine from advertisements. But I don't believe it myself. When the
kidneys are diseased in certain ways, or if the excretion of urine
is mechanically blocked, as in prostate disease, various substances
which are excreted in the urine accumulate in the blood, and if
the patient is enabled to excrete them, he generally gets better.
What is more, one can judge the gravity of the disease by the
amount of these substances in the blood. Eighteen years ago I
was a hospital chemist, and used to determine the quantity of
urea in blood. Normally there is about one part in four thousand.
If it rose above one per thousand the surgeon would not operate,
as the patient would probably die if he did so.
Nevertheless urea, which is one of the main solid constituents
of urine, is a pretty harmless stuff. I have eaten four ounces of it
at a time with no ill effects. Another famous bogey is uric acid, to
eliminate which the unfortunate dupes of advertisements spend
hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. In gout it accumulates in
some of the joints, and under the skin, and causes a good deal of
pain. But in another disease, leukaemia, the blood contains plenty
of uric acid, but it does not get deposited in this way. So clearly
gout is not due to a failure to get rid of uric acid. Still less is
ordinary rheumatism.
Besides this, acid accumulates in the blood in kidney disease,
and causes panting. One can acidify one's blood enough to get
fairly severe symptoms, and I have done so. But I was certainly
not as ill as a case of kidney disease with equally acid blood. The
MEDICINE 141
plain fact is that nobody knows what are the poisons which kill
people in some types of kidney disease, though there is little
doubt that such poisons exist. But I certainly do not know of an
"objective physico-chemical evidence" about them. Plenty of
people have tried to isolate them, but without success. It is
much more doubtful whether poisons are eliminated in the sweat
to any marked extent. And it is still more improbable that poisons
accumulate in the blood where there is no definite disease of the
kidneys. Still less evidence exists that "an ordinary diet" paralyses
the kidneys, or the sweat glands. The world's sweating record, of
five pounds in an hour, was made nearly twenty years ago by an
English coal-miner, and is still, so far as I know, unbeaten. He
worked in a very hot mine, and ate a most unnatural diet con-
taining large quantities of bacon and kippers. He needed a lot of
salt to make up what he lost by sweating.
The statistics of industrial disease show that the kidneys are
badly affected in certain occupations. The Registrar-General gave
the mortality in 360 trades for 1930-32. The fifteen with the
highest death-rate from kidney disease included innkeepers, bar-
men, waiters, and bookmakers. This suggests very strongly that
alcoholic drinks are bad for the kidneys. Among these fifteen are
also cotton blowroom workers, cotton strippers and grinders,
wool weavers, wool spinners, and textile trade dyers. Clearly
there is some influence in the textile trade which causes kidney
disease, though no one knows what it is. If Mr. Saxon thinks that
textile workers eat more "ordinary food" than carpenters, loco-
motive firemen and cleaners, or furniture salesmen, who are
among the fifteen occupations with the lowest death-rate from
kidney disease, I think he should prove his case. Till he has done
so, I think he is diverting our readers from the very real dangers
of the drink and textile trades.
My main reason for raising this question is a desire to fight the
appalling ignorance on this topic. Advertisers tell the public that
back-ache is a symptom of kidney disease. It is a very rare one.
Chronic headache and puffy ankles are much commoner symp-
toms. One firm goes on to swindle the public as follows. They
sell pills containing a dye called methylene blue, which gives a
blue or green colour to the urine. They tell their clients that the
142 SCIENCE ADVANCES
drug causes the elimination of impurities from the body, and
certainly the pills do have a visible effect. This sort of thing is
legitimate capitalist enterprise, and there is big money in it.
Whatever false claims either the medical profession or "unortho-
dox" practitioners such as nature curists may make, they cer-
tainly do nothing as bad as this.
I have myself little doubt that some people benefit when they
stop eating cooked food and in particular some constituents of
our ordinary diet. But I don't think everyone would do so. On
the contrary, the evidence is very strong that about a third of the
population would benefit greatly from more of quite ordinary
foods. And I think it is our business, while not forgetting these
special cases, to concentrate on the needs of the masses.
Inoculation
The war is leading to a great deal of inoculation. Soldiers are
inoculated against typhoid, tetanus, and other diseases. The
authorities strongly recommend that children who spend long
periods in crowded shelters should be inoculated against diph-
theria, and so on. In fact, wherever hygienic conditions are bad,
inoculation is put forward to prevent the spread of disease. I am
often asked what I think of it. I cannot answer this question,
because the word inoculation covers hundreds of different
processes, and I do not think either that all are useful, or all
dangerous.
Originally it meant infection by way of the eye, and was
applied to the practice of giving smallpox in this manner, brought
over to England from Turkey some two centuries ago. This was
supposed to give a mild attack, but it certainly killed a great many
people. The word is now loosely applied to any method by
which substances supposed to protect against a disease are intro-
duced under the skin.
There are at least five distinct processes. Nowadays people are
never given a fully virulent disease, at least not intentionally.
They are given mild diseases which protect them to some extent
against severer ones. Thus cowpox, or vaccinia, which is used
MEDICINE 143
for ordinary vaccination, gives a partial protection against small-
pox. And the virus of rabies, weakened by heating or drying,
gives some protection against the spread of this disease by the
bites of mad dogs. One very real danger of such a method, where
an actual infection is transmitted, is that another may be trans-
mitted with it. A number of children have died of inflammation
of the brain after vaccination. This may be a rare effect of the
vaccinia virus, or it may be due to a separate agent.
Attempts have been made to apply this method to tuberculosis
and other diseases, with little success. A weakened form of the
tubercle bacillus, called the bacille Calmette-Guerin (B.C.G.)
after its inventors, is given by mouth to newborn children to
protect them against real tuberculosis. The mortality of children
in tuberculous families treated this way is said to have been
reduced to one-eighth in France. On the other hand, a number
of children at Lubeck, in Germany, were killed when they were
given virulent bacilli by mistake. At any rate, very few doctors in
this country will use the B.C.G.
A much safer method is to inject dead bacteria. This is done to
soldiers to protect them against typhoid fever and other similar
water-borne diseases. As the bacteria are dead, and suspended in
a mild antiseptic, there is extremely little danger of a real in-
fection developing. But the injection certainly makes one ill. I
had to do sentry duty with a fixed bayonet the night after injec-
tion in 1914, and to go up to Madrid on the outside of a very
ancient lorry the night after injection in 1936, so I know all about
it. But I think the evidence is very strong that this injection gives
a good deal of temporary protection.
Attempts have been made to apply this method to protection
against common colds, and success has been claimed. But when
a number of medical students were vaccinated against colds in
this way, and an equal number left unvaccinated, no difference
was found in the number in the two groups who developed colds.
The vaccinated ones mostly said it had benefited them; but if
there was any benefit, it was probably psychological, and injec-
tions of water and salt would have been as useful, and a lot
cheaper.
Still another method is to inject, not bacteria, but a poison
144 SCIENCE ADVANCES
produced by them, which has been treated by heat or chemicals
so as to be harmless, but still produces immunity. A toxin treated
in this way is called a toxoid. This method has been conspicuously
successful in protecting children against diphtheria. But it is not
likely to be of much immediate use at present,* as the immunity
takes about four months to develop. And if we are going to get
epidemics of diphtheria in shelters, they will probably be raging
long before April.
These three methods produce what is called active immunity.
That is to say, they cause changes in the person inoculated similar
to those which take place during recovery from an attack of the
disease. These always include changes in the living cells, and may
include the production of substances in the blood which protect
from the disease. When such substances are produced in large
amounts, an injection of blood from an immune person will give
protection. This is the case with measles. A child which has been
exposed to infection can be protected by injecting blood (or more
usually serum, the fluid which remains when the rest of the blood
has clotted) from a convalescent. This may stop the attack, but
generally merely makes it very mild. Unfortunately it is too late
to give such an injection when the spots have actually appeared.
This kind of immunity is called passive immunity, and wears
off in a few weeks or months. It is only useful in a few diseases,
such as diphtheria and tetanus or lockjaw. In these cases the
antitoxin, as the immune body in the serum is called, is made by
an animal, very often a horse. There is no moral objection to this.
The horse is not given diphtheria germs. At first quite a little of
the poison produced by these germs is injected, later on, as
immunity develops, the dose is many times what would kill a
normal horse. But it is never seriously ill, and suffers no more
than a blood donor when its blood is drawn. There is, however, a
medical objection. The first injection of horse serum is harmless.
But a later one may cause an outbreak of rash, or more serious
illness. And unfortunately the purification of antitoxins from
other substances in animal sera which have these effects is very
difficult.
Finally a mixed type of inoculation is used. A mixture of
* December, 1940.
MEDICINE 145
diphtheria toxin and antitoxin may be injected. The antitoxin
protects against the harmful effects of the toxin, but in spite of
this, immunity develops, though unfortunately only in the course
of months. Most of these treatments are pretty safe. But few are
absolutely so. Though if the chance of death is one in a million
(and it is often less) it is worth taking if we can cut down a chance
of one in a hundred of death from some disease to one in a
thousand.
Serum is unfortunately a very good medium for the growth of
several kinds of bacteria, and although many precautions are
taken, it may become infected. Thus at Bundaberg in Australia in
1928, twelve children died of blood poisoning after inoculation
against diphtheria.
The proper method of preventing disease is certainly by sani-
tation, the prevention of overcrowding, and so on. For this
reason some people attack all preventive inoculation. Their
attitude is like that of the questioners at public meetings on
A.R.P. who ask me whether I don't think it would be better to
have no wars than to make bombproof shelters. Of course it
would. But in a world of capitalist states where war is inevitable,
shelters are needed. In the same way, in a city where hundreds of
thousands spend the night in grossly overcrowded shelters,
inoculation is needed.
Immunisation to Diphtheria
We are officially urged to have our children immunized
against diphtheria, and last year a number of posters appeared
asking "Is immunization safe ?" and hinting that it is not. I am in
favour of immunization against diphtheria, but I don't pretend it
is a hundred per cent safe.
Few things are. Several thousand people are killed each year
crossing the street, but we go on taking the risk. What is more,
immunization rarely if ever gives complete protection throughout
life. Some people die of diphtheria though they have been im-
munized. Once this is admitted, the main question to be answered
is whether one can greatly cut down the risk of dying by being
I4<5 SCIENCE ADVANCES
immunized. The opponents of immunization have several other
arguments. They point out, quite correctly, that there are other
and better ways than immunization of warding off a disease.
A hundred years ago cholera and typhoid killed many people
in England. These diseases have been wiped out by the state
insisting on a clean water supply. Could not diphtheria, smallpox,
and many other infections be dealt with in the same way? The
answer is that they could, but only by a campaign covering the
whole world, and costing perhaps a tenth as much as the present
war. As long as there are areas in India or China where smallpox
is constantly present cjses will keep on occurring in this country,
and some kind of protection is needed against it. This is one of
the arguments, though not the most important one, for bringing
the standards of living of the whole human race at least up to the
not very high level reached in Western Europe before the war.
Until this has been done there is no chance of wiping out a great
many deadly diseases.
Another argument is that most antisera are made by private
firms, which not only make high profits, but often spread exag-
gerated propaganda to boost their wares. This is also quite true.
But it is likewise true of the firms which sell food, coal, clothes,
railway tickets, and other necessaries. Socialists can't go about
naked till the clothing trade is socialized, and their children
should not lack immunization because the supply of antitoxin is
largely in private hands. Finally, it is argued that immunization
involves cruelty to animals. This in not true so far as diptheria is
concerned. There are several methods of immunization against
this disease. Diphtheria is due to a local infection, usually in the
throat. The bacteria in the throat may cause such a severe swelling
that the patient has difficulty in breathing, and may die of croup.
But the main danger is from poisoning by diphtheria toxin, a
chemical substance produced by the bacteria. The poison may
stop the heart, or cause paralysis of other muscles. Thus the
disease is very different from one such as tuberculosis,where the
main damage is done in the organ infected with the bacteria, so
that the symptoms of lung, bone and skin tuberculosis are quite
distinct, and they were long thought to be separate diseases.
The germs of diphtheria can be grown in a variety of mixtures.
MEDICINE 147
They do not need a living man or animal. If their food is properly
chosen they make plenty of poison, which can be considerably
concentrated. It is then injected into a horse in gradually increas-
ing doses, none of them big enough to produce even the moderate
illness caused by antityphoid inoculation. The horse responds by
making a substance called antitoxin, which combines with the
poison to make an innocuous compound. It is then bled from
time to time, and its blood serum used as a source of antitoxin.
Except for retired race-horses at stud, these horses have an easier
life than any other horses in England.
The antitoxin can be injected into a patient suffering from
diphtheria, or one who has been exposed to infection, and greatly
reduces the risk of death. But unless one learns to make the anti-
toxin oneself the immunity only lasts for a few months. Babies of
immune mothers are born with enough antitoxin to last some
months, but they lose their immunity gradually. A human being
can be immunized by gradually increasing doses of toxin, but it
is easier and safer to inject a fairly big dose of the toxin-antitoxin
compound. This is a loose compound; and breaks up to a slight
extent, just as ammonium carbonate breaks up enough to give a
smell of ammonia. So when it is injected into a child the child
makes antitoxin; and before the injected antitoxin has disap-
peared, the child has made enough to give it considerable protec-
tion against diphtheria.
One reason why the injection of antitoxin is not a hundred per
cent safe is that animal serum is a good medium for growing some
very dangerous bacteria; and if contaminated serum is injected, a
child may be killed. This happened to a number of children at
Bundaberg in Australia. Great precautions are taken to avoid it,
and the risk is now extremely small. I have read a good many of
the arguments on both sides, and am personally convinced that
the gain in safety from immunization to diphtheria vastly out-
weighs the risk, and that adequate precautions are taken to avoid
other infections.
I wish I could say die same about vaccination against smallpox.
Here the principle is very different. The child is infected with
cowpox instead of being injected with a chemical substance. And
in practice the chance of its getting another infection as well is far
148 SCIENCE ADVANCES
greater than with diphtheria immunization. The vaccinia or cow-
pox virus is grown on calves which undergo discomfort, though
probably not severe pain. It can be grown in hens' eggs, which
certainly cannot suffer, since at the stage of development used,
the embryos have no nerves or brains. This method of growing
the virus is more expensive, but both cleaner and more humane
than the old one, and might well be used. There is another danger,
namely that vaccination sometimes, though rarely, causes a fatal
infection of the brain, though this usually occurs when it has been
put off till a child is some years old, and is extremely rare, if it
occurs at all, in young babies.
I believe that our present technique of vaccination is out of
date in several respects, and should like to see a real drive to make
it safer as soon as possible after the war. I also doubt the effi-
ciency of immunization against common colds. But I am in favour
of immunization against diphtheria, and should certainly be immu-
nized myself if a test with diphtheria toxin had not already shown
that I am immune.
5
HYGIENE
Overcrowding and Heart Disease
HEART disease is one of the commonest causes of death. But a
great many of the deaths from it occur in old age. It does not
very much matter whether one dies at 80 or 85. One's work
and pleasure are both pretty well over. Death in the early years
of life is much more serious.
One of the great causes of heart disease in children and young
people is rheumatic fever, or acute rheumatism. It has long been
known to be a disease of poverty. The fact that several cases
often occur in one family has been put down both to infection
and to heredity. But poverty is the main cause. How it acts is
another question. Some have blamed bad feeding, others bad
clothing, damp, overcrowding, vermin, and so on. As all these
are consequences of poverty, it was hard to discover which was
most to blame.
Some progress has been made by a very important research
suggested by Professor Perry, of Bristol University, and carried
out by Dr. G. H. Daniel. He investigated 341 working class
families in Bristol containing one or more children with rheu-
matic heart disease. At the same time the University of Bristol
and the Colston Research Society were making a social survey,
published in 1938, and enough families were studied to make it
possible to say what proportion of families with a particular
standard of living were affected with this form of heart disease.
The families were not classed by their total income, for
clearly a family with one child and 3 per week is better off
than a family with six children and 4 per week. They were
assessed on the relation between the family's total income and
its minimum needs according to a standard laid down by Mr.
R. F. George in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. The
150 SCIENCE ADVANCES
results were clear enough. Seventeen per cent of the families
fell below Mr. George's poverty line, and among them the
frequency of rheumatic heart disease was 39 per cent above the
average. In the 22 per cent who had double his minimum the
frequency of heart disease was 23 per cent below the average.
It is quite clear from the figures that in order to cut down the
rate of heart disease in children below the working class average,
an income 50 per cent above Mr. George's standard is necessary.
Once this is reached, further additions are not very important.
Judged by objective standards like this, a great many minima
proposed by economists would be found to be much too low.
Heart disease in children was still more strongly influenced by
overcrowding. In families with less than o- 6 rooms per person
the disease was 67 per cent above the average. In those with
i 8 rooms or more per person it was less than half. Overcrowding
is a more important factor than mere poverty. However, Dr.
Daniel showed quite clearly that poverty does not act only
through overcrowding, and that overcrowding is dangerous
apart from poverty. Children's heart disease was still above the
average in families with twice Mr. George's minimum income so
long as they had less than one room for each member of the family.
Several other characteristics of the families were recorded.
Families living in a basement have long been known to have
more rheumatic heart disease than others. This was proved to be
so, even when allowance was made for low wages and over-
crowding, though of course the effect was less. For very few
people live in a basement if they can afford to live upstairs.
There was a distinct advantage in belonging to a doctor's club,
but none in getting school meals, which suggests that malnu-
trition is not an important cause of this particular disease, though
it is already known to contribute to a great many others.
Here is Dr. Daniel's summary of some of his most important
findings in his own words: "Thus if the standards of the 30 per
cent of the Bristol working class population with the most
inadequate incomes and housing accommodation were raised to
the average level of the rest of the working class population, a
decrease of 26 per cent in the number of cases of rheumatic
heart disease could be expected. And if standards were raised to
HYGIENE 151
the level of the highest 10 per cent of all working class families,
the incidence of the disease would be roughly halved."
It is worth remembering that even if the Beveridge Report is
adopted in full, it will only bring the poorest workers up to the
average, if that. The Beveridge standard would be an immense
improvement, but it would not give all that is needed in the case
of this particular disease, or a great many others. On grounds
of national health the Communist Party is fully justified in
asking for more. And Mr. Bevin's two million builders will all
be needed to bring us up to the standard of about two rooms
per person which Dr. Daniel's work shows is needed to cope
with this particular disease.
I mention this work in such detail because we know much
less about the effects on health of overcrowding than of malnu-
trition. Naturally the two go together. Statistical work of this
kind is needed in a score of towns and rural districts, and on
many different diseases, before we have a scientific basis for a
national housing policy, as we have for our national food policy.
We do not know whether there is a gain in health from two small
rooms rather than one big one, how important sunlight is in bed-
rooms, what is the healthiest form of heating, or many other im-
portant things. Butwe do knowthatour present housing standards
condemn thousands of children to crippled lives and early deaths.
Overcrowding and Children s Diseases
IMS a scientifically proved fact that in our towns poverty is
responsible for a large proportion of the deaths. As we go down
the economic scale the death rate from almost all diseases goes
up. The exceptions to the rule, such as gastric ulcer, diabetes,
and liver cirrhosis, are favoured by overeating or overdrinking.
But it is very important to know how poverty acts. In the last
twenty years we have at last got scientific standards for diet, and
we know that malnutrition is responsible for a great many
deaths of babies and of women in childbirth, besides lowering
resistance to many diseases.
Scientific studies on the effects of bad housing are much more
difficult. Among the most striking are those of Professor PayUng
152 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Wright, of Guy's Hospital, and his wife, on the death-rates of
young London children from diphtheria, measles, tubercle, and
whooping cough in the years before the war, published in the
Journal of Hygiene for 1942. On an average 660 London children
under five were registered as having died of these diseases each
year. But another 1,100 died of bronchitis and pneumonia, and
as these deaths went up with each epidemic of measles or whoop-
ing cough, the true mortality is probably over 1,000.
The Wrights compared the death-rates in the twenty-eight
London boroughs, with East Ham and West Ham, and related
them to social conditions in 1931. The economic levels of the
boroughs were estimated from the proportion of the population
below the "poverty line" set by the New Survey of London Life
and Labour r , and from the average income left over after rent had
been paid. The overcrowding was measured by the percentage
living two or more per room. Naturally low wages and over-
crowding went together as a whole, and there were big variations
between the boroughs. Thus only 15 per cent of the adult males
of Hampstead, compared with 55 per cent in Bermondsey, were
in the worst paid occupations.
Nevertheless the differences suffice to answer the important
question, "Is poverty or .overcrowding more important in killing
children ?" If we make a graph in which the distance of a point
to the right of one line represents the percentage of overcrowding,
and the distance above another gives the death-rate from measles,
we get a point for each borough. These points lie in an irregular
cluster sloping up and to the right from Hampstead to Ber-
mondsey. We can calculate a number called the coefficient of
correlation, which would be equal to nought if overcrowding
had no effect on measles, and to one if nothing else had any
effect, and all the points lay on a straight line.
We can do the same for poverty and measles, and in each
case find a high correlation. But a competent statistician can do
more. He can calculate what is called a coefficient of partial
correlation between measles and poverty, with overcrowding
held constant. That is to say he can ask, "In boroughs with the
same standard of overcrowding, do more children die of measles
in those which also have a low average wage rate?"
HYGIENE 153
The answer is quite clear that they do not. Poverty has a
great effect on the death rate from measles, but it acts entirely
through bad housing. The same is true for whooping cough.
On the other hand poverty has a moderate effect on deaths from
diphtheria, and a very big one on deaths from tubercle, apart
from the effect due to overcrowding. Poverty probably helps
the tubercle bacillus through undernourishment and bad clothing
and heating, as well as bad housing. In other words, if the
families of the poorer boroughs were housed as well as those of
Hampstead, at their present rents, but without any rise of wages,
the death-rates of children from measles and whooping cough
would probably fall to the low level of Hampstead, deaths from
diphtheria would fall most of the way, but those from tubercle
only a little. As I hope to show in a later article, bad housing,
as well as low wages, plays a rather big part in causing adult
tuberculosis.
It is easy to see the main reason why overcrowding makes
measles and whooping cough so deadly. Most children get them
some time, and the parents are not unduly alarmed. But measles,
and particularly whooping cough, are deadly diseases in babies.
A child in its first year is about seventy times as likely to die if it
gets whooping cough as one in its fifth, and about fifteen times
as likely to die of measles. The difference is not so large for
diphtheria. The more overcrowded is a borough, the earlier the
children get infected on an average, whereas poverty by itself
has little effect on the age of infection. If any child in an over-
crowded house gets one of these diseases at school they are
almost certain to infect their baby brother or sister and may
kill them. We cannot yet lay down a standard for housing as
scientific as our standards of food. But we can say that any
family where the baby is necessarily exposed to infection by its
elder brothers or sisters is certainly overcrowded, and can at
once condemn any housing scheme which does not make the
segregation of the baby possible.
Valuable as the Wrights' work is, there is a great deal more to
do on the same lines. Is overcrowding in the schoolroom as
dangerous as in the home ? Is a damp, cold, and sunless house as
bad as an overcrowded one? Do playgrounds near the home
154 SCIENCE ADVANCES
make a difference? Such are some of the obvious questions to
be answered. Nevertheless such work is of the utmost use, both
in proving the very great importance of housing for our national
health, and in showing that while decent housing would save
many children's lives, it is not a cure-all.
Overcrowding and Tuberculosis
The fall in the death rate from some diseases is due to special
hygienic measures based on scientific knowledge. Thus cholera
has been abolished and typhoid made very rare in Britain by
giving the towns a proper water supply, filtered or chlorinated
so as to remove the causal bacteria. But in other cases the im-
provement is almost wholly due to improved economic con-
ditions. This is well brought out in Hart and Wright's recent
book on Tuberculosis and Social Conditions in England, published
by the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis.
The death-rate from respiratory tuberculosis (mainly phthisis)
has been falling for 100 years. In 1835 about 400 men in every
100,000 between 25 and 45 died of it, in 1935 about 100 did so.
The one exception to this fall was found among young women
between 15 and 35. Their death-rate fell steeply until 19005 but
the fall was then checked.
The graph shows the death-rate among girls and women
between 15 and 24. It is plotted logarithmically, which means
that a fall from 200 to 100 per 100,000 per year is represented
as large as a fall from 100 to 50. So if the graph were a straight
line, it would mean that in every 35 years, or some such period,
the death-rate was halved. The other curve shows the average
real earnings of a worker, allowing for unemployment, changes
in prices, and social services. These are based on figures of
bourgeois economists such as Bowley and Wood, and on the
figures of the Ministry of Labour, which if anything paint too
bright a picture of recent years.
A glance shows that one curve is almost identical with the
other turned upside down, except that the sharp changes in the
death-rate come a year or two after those in the standard of living.
This is natural enough. Tuberculosis kills fairly slowly, so there
HYGIENE
156 SCIENCE ADVANCES
is bound to be a lag between economic cause and hygienic
effect. But there can be no reasonable doubt that tuberculosis
in girls is far more closely dependent on economic causes than
tuberculosis in older women, or in men not liable to lung injury
from dust.
In order to get further information on how poverty acts,
the figures from 76 English county boroughs were analysed.
They were classified in several ways, and particularly by the
percentage of the population receiving poor relief in 1931-33,
which varied between 9-5 per cent in Sheffield and 8-4 per cent
in Lincoln to o- o per cent in Halifax and oy per cent in Oxford.
But this showed only a moderately close relation with tuberculosis.
The picture was very different when the boroughs were
classified by the percentage of people living at a density of more
than two per room. The five worst boroughs, Sunderland, with
29 per cent, Gateshead, South Shields, Tynemouth, and New-
castle-on-Tyne with 23 per cent, are all in the north-east coast
areas. They compare ^ith 2 per cent in Northampton, and i-J per
cent in Bournemouth. In the boroughs where over 10 per cent
had less than half a room apiece the death-rate among girls and
women between 15 and 24 was actually higher in 1932 than in
1912, and that among boys and men of the same age had barely
fallen. The differences in other age groups were not so strik-
ing. Any fall in the standard of living, such as occurred in the
1914-18 war, and in 1921, immediately started killing the girls
of the congested areas.
It is quite obvious that, whatever can be done for tuberculosis
at other ages by sanatorium treatment, improved feeding and
so on, we cannot hope to do anything serious against phthisis
in young women, or much against it in young men, except by
abolishing overcrowding. The death rate in girls began to fall
about 1933, probably as the result of the great housing schemes
started by the second Labour government.
It is important to note that overcrowding is not such an
important factor in causing the majority of diseases as it is with
phthisis in young people. It has a big effect in putting up deaths
from measles, whooping cough, and rheumatic heart disease, as
I have shown in earlier articles; but Hart and Wright point out
HYGIENE 157
that for other diseases taken as a whole, other factors in poverty
are quite as important as overcrowding. To take an example
from another lung disease, Meakins and McKenna examined 200
cases of lobar pneumonia treated with sulphonamide in the
Royal Victoria Hospital at Montreal. Twenty-one of them died,
and ii of these 21 had signs of malnutrition. The higher death-
rate from pneumonia among the poor is probably much more
due to malnutrition than to overcrowding. And McGonigle
showed that slum clearance may even raise the death-rate if it
means such a rise in rent that the tenants have to cut down their
food purchases. It is quite clear that the fight against poverty
must be fought on several fronts. The main front is the attack
on low wages, but a gigantic building programme is a second
front without which the other cannot hope for full success.
It is most encouraging for the future of medical science that a
professor of pathology in one of our great medical schools
should take up research of this kind. But a vast amount remains
to be done. We know very little about the effect of overcrowding
at work and in vehicles. You may add several years to your life
by cycling to work rather than going in a crowded tube. No
one knows. But this work brings the day nearer when we shall
have scientific standards of housing comparable with the scientific
standards of diet which are the basis of our rationing system, and
have done so much to keep us reasonably healthy during the war.
Dangerous Trades
Among many excellent proposals in the Beveridge Report
there is one which, if it is carried into effect, will lead to great
advances in industrial health. Industries which show an ab-
normally high death-rate and sickness-rate are to be specially
scheduled, and two-thirds of the extra cost of compensation of
workers in them is to come out of their profits.
Many people may think that this is already done under the
Workmen's Compensation Acts, which compel the employers
to pay the victims of accidents, and of a few industrial diseases.
But actually the large majority of the casualties of industry are
not compensated at all.
158 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Take the example of the pottery trade. Potters have a death-
rate 35 per cent above the average. Some of the excess deaths
are due to silicosis, and compensation ought to be given in such
cases. But, in addition, their death rates from phthisis and bronchitis
are more than double the average. In any particular case one
cannot be sure that the potter would not have died of the disease
if he had worked in a brick kiln and not a pottery kiln. But his
death was probably due to injury of the lungs by silica dust.
If the Beveridge Report goes through, much of the cost of
compensating these men will be thrown on the industry. This
will give the capitalists of the pottery trade a real economic
incentive to improve its health conditions. The pottery research
institute at Stoke will begin to interest itself in broken potters
as well as broken pots. And it may be that lung disease among
potters will be drastically reduced, as lead poisoning was when
its victims were compensated.
What are the industries which will probably be scheduled as
hazardous? If the Registrar-General's Report on Occupational
Mortality published in 1938 is taken as the measure of industrial
hazard, there is little doubt that one of the most dangerous of
the large trades is the drink trade, which employed about 110,000
men, whose death-rates ranged from 55 per cent above the
average in the case of innkeepers, to 16 per cent above in the
case of brewery workers. Undoubtedly the excess deaths are
largely due to drinking too much. At present if a brewery owns
a public house it pays them that the innkeeper should drink as
much as possible. If it became worth their while to lower the
publicans' death-rate this might not be so.
But the biggest blot on the industrial health map is undoubtedly
water transport. Railwaymen are conspicuously healthy, and
transport workers near the average; but merchant seamen, dock
workers, and even bargemen, have a death-rate far above the
normal. Seamen die over twice as often from violent deaths as
other men. It is often said that this is inevitable, as the sea is
more dangerous than the land. But fishermen, who are healthier
than the average, have a death-rate from accidents which is
only 6 per cent above that of the rest of us. One reason for the
difference is certainly that fishermen control their conditions of
HYGIENE 159
work to a far greater extent than seamen. Apart from accidents,
seamen have a very high death-rate from tuberculosis, and a
fairly high one from diseases associated with alcoholism. Both
these would be lowered if they had better quarters and better
ventilation on board ship, and better alternatives to the pub
when they went ashore. If the Beveridge Report goes through,
the ship owners will have an economic incentive to provide
both. Stevedores have not only a terrific accident mortality, but
die of a great many diseases probably due to bad housing
conditions. Out of two hundred occupations, only three have
higher death-rates.
The other excessively hazardous trades are mostly branches
of larger industries. Thus the death-rate among coalminers as a
whole is only 5 per cent above the average. But the anthracite
miners in South Wales have a mortality 43 per cent above the
average. This is largely from silicosis, but also from accidents.
Again, the glass trade as a whole is not very unhealthy, but
glass blowers, who form only a sixth of all glass workers, have a
death-rate of 60 per cent above the average. Similarly in the
textile industry a few dusty trades, such as those of strippers
and grinders, and blow-room workers, are far more dangerous
than the remainder.
The building trade as a whole is decidedly healthy, but masons
working in sandstone have a death-rate of 80 per cent above the
average, with silicosis 55 times the average; and the quarrymen
who produce the sandstone are also very liable to lung diseases.
If it is possible, for purposes of taxation, to separate these
particular occupations, it will certainly make for health. It will
mean, for example, that the price of sandstone will go up. And a
good thing too. As long as sandstone is dearer in human life
than limestone or brick, it should be dearer in money too. No
doubt the capitalists in these dangerous trades will raise the
same bitter cry as the insurance magnates. They will say that
they take every possible precaution, and that the high death-rate
is the workers' fault, or inevitable for some reason or other.
Doubtless the best cure for such ideas would be to make a few
shipping magnates sleep in the focYle for a year or so, and put
colliery directors to hew anthracite.
160 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Until that can be done, I hope that the whole Labour Move-
ment will see that the capitalists in those industries which suck
the life-blood of the nation are made to compensate the workers
whose healths they have ruined and the widows whose bread-
winners they have killed.
But the Beveridge Plan will be unworkable if we have un-
employment after this war on anything like the scale that we
had after the last. At Oxford on December 6, 1943, Sir William
Beveridge said of the abolition of mass unemployment, "I do
not know how it is to be done, and I do not know whether
anybody else knows." It is a pity that he has not heard of Stalin.
NOTE. This proposal for the special taxation of dangerous industries is
one of the features of the original Beveridge Report which the Government
rejects in its White Paper of 1944,
The Drink Trade
My recent article on dangerous trades has brought a reply
from a Mr. Scott London, who does not like what I wrote
about the Drink Trade. He hopes that the Daily Worker will
publish it. Unfortunately it is a little longer than my own article,
and there might be a bit of a dust-up on the Editorial Board
if I tried to substitute it for one of my own. But here is an offer
to you, Mr. London.
If you will induce those distinguished representatives of the
brewing trade, Lords Iveagh and Moyne, for whom Guinness is
good, whatever it may be for others, and Colonel Gretton, M.P.,
of Bass, Ratcliff, and Gretton, to press the Government for
those extra tons of paper for us, we will print your article when
we get them.
Till then, I can only answer some of Mr. London's points.
"The professor deduces," he writes, "without evidence, that the
excess deaths are largely due to drinking too much/' Very few
deaths are registered as due to alcoholism, but when we come
to diseases largely caused by alcoholism, the case is quite clear.
One of these diseases is cirrhosis of the liver. This is not a
very common disease. Round 1931 it only killed 1,028 men
and a good deal fewer women each year. But it killed 93 inn-
HYGIENE l6l
keepers per year, and an innkeeper was over eleven times as
likely to die of it as an ordinary man.
It is quite an interesting disease from the economic point of
view, because it is one of the small group which kill the rich
more than the poor. Among the best off 2^ per cent of men the
death-rate from cirrhosis was 84 per cent above the average.
Among the middle class it was 95 per cent up. But this, in the
words of the Registrar-General, "was due mainly to the high
rates among innkeepers and their wives, proprietors of businesses,
commercial travellers, and employers and managers in certain
industries/'
The skilled workers showed the lowest death-rate of any
classes, but the semi-skilled and unskilled workers were also
below the average. Of the deaths actually registered as due to
alcoholism more than half occurred in the rich and middle
classes, though they include only 16 per cent of the population.
That is part of the answer to those who say that drink is the
curse of the working class.
The other occupations with a specially high death-rate from
cirrhosis, though all below innkeepers, are, in order, actors,
barmen, bookmakers, lawyers, musicians, wholesale business
proprietors, retail proprietors (dairy, meat, fish and greengrocery),
bank and insurance officials and doctors. No railway signalmen
and no compositors died of it in 1930-32.
The inn- and hotel-keepers also had the highest death-rate of
198 occupations from diabetes and from diseases of the digestive
system. They come second on the list for kidney disease, and
third on that for "cerebral vascular lesions/' in ordinary language,
stroke. They had the second highest suicide rate of eighty-six
occupations. It would be interesting to know to what agency
other than drink Mr. London attributes these facts.
He goes on to write, "In the total of 110,000 men for the
drink trades, it is interesting to assess how many are innkeepers
with the high death-rate of 55 per cent above the average, and
how many brewery workers with the lower rate of 15 per cent.
At a guess about half of i per cent, which gives a proportional
figure of about 16 per cent for the trade/'
Mr. London's guess is that there is one innkeeper to 199
1 62 SCIENCE ADVANCES
brewery workers. Actually in 1931 there were 17,033 male
"makers of alcoholic drinks" in England and Wales, and 65,183
innkeepers. There were also 24,309 barmen, with a death-rate
of 49 per cent above the average. But Mr. London, who states
that he "champions the truth," prefers his guess to the census
figures.
Mr. London next tries to explain the high mortality among
innkeepers from the fact that they take up their job late in life.
This fact is of course allowed for by the Registrar-General, who
is not a complete fool. If he had not allowed for it, their death-
rate would have appeared to be 174 per cent above the average.
Mr. London goes on to air his remarkable views on statistics.
He says that, "incidence of mortality, or expectation of life is a
probability, no more subject to scientific laws than is the chance
of birth." In fact a whole branch of science, of which I am a
professor, deals with such matters.
No quantitative science reaches absolute certainty. It is fairly
easy to measure an inch accurately to one part in a thousand.
It is just possible to measure it to one part in a million. It is
impossible now, and perhaps always will be, to measure it to
one part in a thousand million.
We cannot often say that a particular man will die next year,
but, apart from war and epidemics, we can say with great certainty
that between three thousand and four thousand of a particular
group will do so.
The certainty is still greater in chemistry and physics. No one
can say that a particular molecule of water in a boiler will go
off in steam in the next minute. But we can be sure within less
than i per cent what fraction of all water molecules in a boiler
will do so. If we had not this kind of certainty, most branches
of science would be impossible.
But it is not a sheer accident that defenders of the drink trade
prefer unsupported assertions such as " is good for you"
(no prize offered for filling in the blank) rather than a study of
statistics. You do not have to be a very advanced Marxist to
explain that social phenomenon.
HYGIENE 163
Factory Ventilation, Heating, and Lighting
Joint production committees are doing a great job all over
the country, not only in increasing production, but in improving
conditions of work, so that a worker can produce more with no
greater effort, or even with lessened fatigue. To do this efficiently
they need scientific information, and particularly methods of
measuring the conditions in their factory. They will find very
useful materials in the Industrial Health Research Board's 3d.
pamphlet on Ventilation and Heating, Lighting, and Seeing,
published by the Stationery Office (postage extra). It is not
perfect, but is very good value for the money.
Ventilation should be at a minimum rate of 17 cubic feet of
fresh air per worker per minute, and a good deal more in summer,
or when the air contains harmful dust or fumes. It is rather
hard to measure this rate. But it is possible to measure the rate
of air movement with an anemometer, and every big factory
should have one. Even in winter this should not fall below 20 feet
a minute.
It is easier to measure temperature. How many shop stewards
know that under the 1937 Factories Act, the temperature in
rooms where a substantial proportion of work is done sitting,
and does not involve serious physical effort, must not be below
60 after the first hour's work? Rather lower temperatures are
desirable when work is hard.
How important this can be is shown by the record of accidents
in munition factories in 1914-18. They were at a minimum
with a temperature of 65-70 F., and went up by 20 per cent
when the temperature rose above 75, and by 30 per cent when
it fell below 55. So a thermometer in your factory is a good
investment for the insurance company as well as for the workers !
Of course it is difficult to keep temperatures down in summer,
particularly when the black-out interferes with ventilation. A
working rule suggested is 5 square feet of ventilation opening
for every 100 feet of floor space. Does your factory reach this
standard ? If it does not reach it at night, a great deal can be
done by light traps at the windows, and fans where necessary.
The incoming air can be heated in winter by passing it over a
164 SCIENCE ADVANCES
steam radiator. Such unit heaters are often used. By connecting
the intake side to the outer air by a duct which is shut in cold
weather, they can be made to cool the factory in summer as
well as heating it in winter.
Good lighting is just as important for health and efficiency as
good heating. The amount of light needed varies very much.
Fine work needs over one hundred times as much light as the
roughest work. However, a minimum is laid down by the
Factories (Standards of Lighting) Regulations (S.R. and O.
1941, No. 94). For most work this is 6 foot-candles at bench
level, or 3 feet above the floor. This is the intensity of illumination
given by six standard candles i foot away, or a 600 candle-power
lamp 10 feet away, and so on.
Illumination is quite easy to measure with a light meter, which
compares the light in a factory with a standard. "This instru-
ment," says the report, "can be obtained in a very small and
convenient size for factory use . . . and should be widely known
and used, in order to keep a check on the illumination available,
and to encourage proper maintenance of lighting installations/'
If you want to encourage your boss, and can't get hold of a
light meter, you will very likely be able to borrow one from the
local electric light company. For fine work a lot more light than
6 foot-candles is needed, and the regulations demand that it
should be supplied.
Besides lighting on the job, general lighting is very important.
If the factory consists of alternate patches of glare and gloom,
movement and cleaning become difficult, accidents are increased,
and the workers are more easily fatigued. The best effects are
obtained with very modern methods, such as fluorescent lamps.
But even where the lighting cannot be increased, one can often
get a conspicuous increase in brightness by painting the walls in
light colours, and keeping lamps and reflectors clean. If the boss
thinks you have all the light you need, and calls you a squander-
bug if you ask for more, here is what the Report says of him.
"The cost of lighting small as it is leads some people who
have to provide it to persuade themselves that poor lighting is
better than it really is. This is being penny wise and pound
foolish; for, in the long run, bad factory lighting never pays."
HYGIENE 165
The last section of the pamphlet is about spectacles. Many
people with normal vision need them for fine work. They can
do it without them. But it is an effort to focus on a near object,
and this either leads to eye strain or to pausing to rest the eyes.
Others, especially those who do not read much, may have quite
serious eye defects without knowing it. Does your factory
Medical Officer test the vision of all new workers? And can
anyone who complains of eye strain or headache have his or
her vision tested at the factory? If not, it is pretty sure that some
workers, who have no idea that spectacles would help them, are
straining their eyes, wasting their energy, and perhaps endanger-
ing their lives and those of their mates.
The biggest defect in this Report is that, except in a few cases,
it does not state what are the legal rights of the workers to air,
heat, and light. Fortunately the Labour Research Department
can generally provide this information. I suppose it is too much
to hope for it in an official publication of a capitalist government,
even though it would speed up production and help to win the
war. In spite of this serious omission, I think many shop stewards
committees would find the Report in question a good threepence
worth.
Badly Housed Occupations
As professor of biometry, I am concerned with the application
of statistical methods to biological problems, and I naturally look
at social problems from the same point of view. I am not such
a fool as to think that the study of human society is merely a
branch of biology. Man is an animal, but differs from other
animals in being able to plan his own future and that of the
community of which he is a member. If the people who regard
history and politics as merely human biology were logical, they
would also regard biology as merely the physics and chemistry
of animals, and say that there is no special science of life.
But the converse error is even worse. Man cannot act as a
social being adequately unless he is healthy, and not at all unless
he is alive. And those who dismiss the biological approach as
materialistic, and say we should keep our minds on higher
166 SCIENCE ADVANCES
things, generally turn out to be comfortably off themselves, and
preach contentment to those who are not.
What can a biologist say to the demands of the miners and
agricultural labourers for better pay and housing? First let us
see how a case could be stated against them, based on biological
facts. One would say that the agricultural labourers were already
longer lived than most people, the mortality being only 71 per
cent of the average, and actually slightly below that of farmers.
Thus it could be argued that there was no need to improve their
conditions. Similarly the coalminers have a death-rate only about
10 per cent above the average. This is partly due to accidents,
partly to the big death-rate of anthracite miners from silicosis.
As far as deaths from disease are concerned, the coalminers are
better off than the majority.
The best answer to such an argument can be got from con-
sidering the mortality of their wives and children. The Registrar-
General has only recently begun to classify deaths of married
women by their husbands' jobs, and the only available figures
refer to the years 1930, 1931, and 1932. The farm labourers*
wives had a mortality 88 per cent of the average, and their
children under one year of 96 per cent. This means that while
the men get the benefit of a healthy outdoor life, their wives and
children had to bear the brunt of bad housing conditions, and
died sooner than the wives and children of the well-to-do class
in towns, or those of men in some of the healthier urban trades
such as carpentry.
The miners' wives present a very black picture indeed. The
wives of coal hewers had 40 per cent more deaths than an average
sample of married women of the same age, and those of other
groups of coal miners were above the average. Their children
had an extra mortality of between 30 and 40 per cent. No one
who has visited a number of mining villages can have much
doubt why this is so. In spite of a number of exceptions, the
housing conditions are generally very bad, even without the
effects of subsidence. It is extraordinary to come across a typical
urban slum in the middle of a Scottish moor. And in 1930-32
the miners were suffering acutely both from unemployment
and from the wage cut which provoked the General Strike.
HYGIENE 167
The only other large trade showing as bad figures as the
miners for mortality of wives and children was that of dockers,
though horse transport ran it close. Where the good or bad
health of an occupation is due to its special conditions, the
wives may be reasonably healthy. Thus potters have a mortality
35 per cent above the average on account of the silica dust which
they inhale. But their wives are only 2 per cent above the average
and their children 2 per cent below. The one marked exception
to this rule proves it. The wives of publicans have a high
mortality, largely from diseases due to alcohol, because they
share their husbands' exposure to alcohol, while potters* wives
do not share their husbands' exposure to dust.
When the wives and children have a high mortality, this
means that the husbands share the bad home conditions, at
least during the night; and a high mortality among wives and
children generally goes with a high mortality among their
husbands, though the converse is not true. What does this mean
in practice ? It means that although a thousand miners are killed
every year in accidents, more miners' lives are likely to be saved
by better pay and housing than by increased safety measures
underground, important as these are. Much the same is true for
dockers and some other transport workers.
On the other hand, even though neither wages nor housing
are as good as they should be in Stoke and Burton, it would
probably be easier to save lives by improving the working
conditions of potters and brewers than by raising their pay or
giving them better homes.
To turn to the brighter side of the picture, teachers probably
have the best all-round record for a healthy family life, though
the wives of nonconformist clergymen are equally healthy, and
those of bank officials somewhat more so; and the children of
doctors and Anglican clergymen have a lower death rate.
These occupations show what could be done. We should aim
at a society where every baby has as good a chance of survival
as a doctor's or parson's, and every wife expects as long a life
as a teacher's or bank official's.
1 68 SCIENCE ADVANCES
When Air Burns
I was badly caught out by a questioner at a meeting of the
Socialist Medical Association which I addressed in Glasgow in
January on Industrial Health. I did not know that two electric
welders had recently been killed by nitrous fumes, though I
knew that the health of such workers was endangered.
I have two excuses. One is that I was talking about the major
causes of death. And even one or two deaths per year from this
cause are almost negligible compared with the hundreds of deaths
from silicosis, mostly registered as pulmonary tuberculosis, and
not even compensated. The other is that I cannot keep up with
medical journals if I am working in a factory.
The danger to welders is from nitrogen peroxide. This is a
brown gas, or more accurately a vapour, for it forms a liquid
which boils at about 72 F. In the gaseous state it is generally
called "nitrous fumes/* since it looks like a smoke, although it
does not consist of solid or liquid particles, as smokes do. Many
people know this gas, because it is given off when nitric acid
attacks a metal. But in electric welding it is formed from the
gases of the air. Roughly speaking, one-fifth of the air consists
of oxygen, and four-fifths of nitrogen.
For a great many purposes the nitrogen might as well not be
there. An airman at 40,000 feet is under a pressure of a fifth of
an atmosphere. But if he breathes pure oxygen, he gets nearly
as much per breath as at ground level when breathing air.
All elements but the inert gases, such as neon and argon, can
be made to combine with oxygen, and most of them can be
made to yield energy while doing so. This fact is used in ordinary
engines, and it would be theoretically possible, though expensive,
to run an engine by burning iron filings in oxygen. But nitrogen
will not burn spontaneously, mainly because the two nitrogen
atoms in a molecule are very firmly bound together. It is necessary
to add energy in order to make nitrogen combine with oxygen.
Once formed, the various oxides are fairly stable. But they all
belong to the class of bodies which chemists call metastable,
meaning that in the long run they will turn into something else,
HYGIENE 169
and that there is generally a way of making them do so quickly.
The best known metastable compounds are explosives, but the
change may be a very gentle one, such as a change of crystalline
form.
Nitrogen peroxide is nearly as poisonous as chlorine, but its
action as a poison is more like that of phosgene. A man gets a
breath or two of it, coughs violently for a few minutes, feels
better, and walks home. Within a few hours the lungs begin
oozing fluid like a bit of sore skin, and if this occurs on a large
enough scale he cannot absorb oxygen, and is suffocated within
a day or two. If smaller amounts are breathed over a long time,
nitrous fumes can cause chronic bronchitis and sore throat. They
may also rot the teeth, and have been said to affect the heart and
nervous system.
Workers with nitric acid are generally given some protection
from them, but electric welders often seem to be neglected,
though they are in real danger if working inside a compartment
of a ship. There are two forms of protection. The gas may be
removed by suction. Or if compressed air is available the workers
may wear helmets with a constant supply of compressed air.
Fortunately it is easy to test for the presence of this gas. It turns
damp blue litmus paper red, as do acid fumes of all kinds. And
if you smear a strip of paper with boiled starch and a solution
of potassium iodide, it turns blue, especially if moistened. This
is a rather more specific test, though chlorine and some other
gases have the same effect.
These chemical tests are better than detecting nitrous fumes by
their smell, since the sense of smell is very easily fatigued. One
may smell a gas on entering a room or compartment, but fail
to notice it five minutes later, though there is as much there as
before.
The history of industrial health shows quite clearly that the
workers are unlikely to be protected unless their unions take the
matter up. This is particularly the case with chronic poisoning;
for death or acute illness cannot be pooh-poohed, but mild
bronchitis or tooth trouble can be.
The nitrogen of the air becomes valuable once it has combined
with oxygen, or, in ordinary language, been burned. One way
170 SCIENCE ADVANCES
of making these gases combine is by passing air through electric
arcs, and catching the nitrous fumes in water, where they form
nitric acid. Thus the same process which kills electric welders
gives a valuable constituent of explosives and fertilizers. This
process is used where water power is plentiful but coal scarce,
for example in Norway and in the northern parts of the Soviet
Union. A little nitrogen is combined in this way during thunder-
storms, and helps to keep the soil fertile. But more nitrogen is
fixed by bacteria, especially those which live in nodules on the
roots of peas, beans, vetches, and other similar plants. Un-
fortunately no one has yet found out how the bacteria do it, or
we could imitate them, and probably fix nitrogen more cheaply
than with an electric arc.
All this is elementary chemistry, and no doubt many of my
readers know it better than I do. But chemistry will not be fully
used until the workers know the chemistry of their own jobs,
and are able to insist on the measures needed to protect their
health.
X-rays and Their Dangers
Most of the questions which readers ask me to answer in
letters are impossible, if only because they do not give me
enough information. Sometimes I can give a partial answer.
Mr. Willett asks me about the dangers to which his daughter,
and other women working in the X-ray department of a hospital,
are subjected.
X-rays are of the same general character as rays of light and
heat, or beams of radio waves. That is to say they are best
regarded as trains of waves in the "ether" moving at three
hundred thousand kilometres per second. They are started by the
blows of a stream of high-speed electrons on a metal target in a
vacuum tube. Their best-known properties are that they can go
through solids opaque to ordinary light, and can then be photo-
graphed. As bones are more opaque to them than flesh, they are
particularly useful for photographing bones which are abnormal,
but they also reveal splinters of metal or glass, tuberculous
lungs, and many other diseased organs.
HYGIENE 171
Unfortunately they have another property which is not so
advantageous, A man consists of many millions of millions of
cells, some of them drawn out into nerve and muscle fibres,
but mostly too small to be seen without a microscope. In their
ordinary state, cells are not very sensitive to X-rays. But they
are very easily damaged when dividing. Now growth occurs
largely through the division of cells. On an average, the cells in
our bodies are separated from the single cell from which we
start by about fifty divisions. The first gives two cells, the
second four, the third eight, and so on. Anyone who enjoys multi-
plication can calculate how many there are after fifty divisions.
This at once gives us a clue to the places where X-rays are
likely to hurt us. In an adult the cells in the muscles, nervous
system, and many other organs do not divide. But those in the
lower layer of the skin do so. For the skin consists of cells which
are constantly dying and being renewed from below. In the
same way there is wear and tear of the lining of our stomach
and intestines, and there, too, a layer of cells is constantly
dividing. The cells in our blood also wear out in the course of
a month or so, and new blood cells are being constantly made in
the marrows of our bones.
Besides this the cells in our gonads (ovaries or testicles) are
constantly dividing to form eggs so small as to be barely visible,
and spermatozoa much too small to be visible without a micro-
scope. These may unite to form a new individual. Finally a
cancer, which grows very rapidly, is for this reason susceptible
to X-rays, and it is sometimes, but unfortunately not always,
possible to kill a cancer with X-rays, without killing the organs
round it. So much for adults. But in a rapidly growing child
cells are occasionally dividing in most parts of the body, and in
an unborn baby they are dividing everywhere. We can now see
which are the danger points for X-ray workers.
X-rays with long waves, made by discharges at a comparatively
low voltage, have little penetrating power, and are stopped by
the skin. Many of the early X-ray workers suffered from this.
They developed "burns" on their skin, which, unlike ordinary
burns, did not heal, and sometimes became cancerous. Many of
them lost their hands.
172 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Modern X-ray apparatus produce much "harder," that is to
say more penetrating, X-rays, and serious injury to the skin is
rare. Nevertheless precautions should be taken against this risk.
Probably the most sensitive organ is the bone marrow. It is easy
to detect early stages of injury to this by examining a drop of
blood under the microscope. When Rutherford was in charge of
the Cavendish physical laboratory at Cambridge, where there
were not only X-ray apparatus, but radium, which produces
similar effects, the blood of all workers was examined several
times yearly. This ought to be done as a routine where workers
are exposed to X-rays over any long period.
If a pregnant woman is X-rayed the result may be a mis-
carriage or the birth of a severely deformed child. But this does
not happen with the relatively small dose needed for a single
photograph, which is well worth taking if twins are expected,
A heavy dose of X-rays on the gonads will produce sterility,
which usually passes off. But experiments on animals and plants
show that even a fairly light dose may produce changes in the
offspring. These may be visible or invisible in the first generation.
But even where they are invisible at first, which is often the
case, they may appear in later generations. These changes are
very rarely beneficial, but generally harmful, even if they are
useful to human breeders. For example, Soviet biologists in
many parts of the Union have to breed parasitic insects which
attack the moth Sitotroga cerealella^ whose caterpillar is a pest
of granaries. This is of course done in the case of hundreds of
insects all over the world, for example with the common white
fly which infests English tomato houses.
But the Soviet workers did not want their moths to escape
and start laying eggs in neighbouring grain stores. So Volkova
X-rayed some of the moths in question, bred their offspring
together, and produced several freak races, among others one
with very small wings, which can only crawl instead of flying.
Grain infected with the eggs of this race has been sent to Kharkov
and seven other centres to breed wingless moths on whose eggs
the parasites will live. The parasites can then be let loose into
any building where the moth has been seen or its presence is
feared. Volkova is now trying to produce a moth without
HYGIENE 173
scales, as the scales come off, and make the workers who breed
these creatures cough and sneeze.
Now we don't want this sort of thing to nappen among our
own children, and therefore X-ray workers ought to be protected
against doses of X-rays too slight to cause sterility. A sheet of
leid is the best protection, and men can be protected fairly
easily. Women are a little harder to protect, but it can and should
be done where necessary.
Of course all apparatus in the laboratory to which Mr. Willett
refers may be so well screened as to make this needless. Un-
fortunately I am not omniscient and cannot tell him whether
this is so. But in view of the number of people who have so
far been injured by X-rays, I would advise his daughter to
protect herself with a lead apron while at work.
Colliery Explosions
The report on the explosion at Murton colliery, Durham, in
June 1942 reminds us of the army which is always in danger of
death, both in peace and war, the army of coalminers on whom
our industrial life depends. The Murton explosion was not a
very big one, but thirteen men were killed.
There is nothing very new to be said about colliery explosions;
but as deaths from them are largely preventable, the whole
Labour Movement should understand about them, in order to
see that the necessary steps are taken as soon as possible.
The Murton explosion, according to the report of the In-
spector of Mines, was caused by a multi-shot exploder whose
sparks ignited firedamp. Firedamp is the name given to the gas,
mostly consisting of methane, which is given off by coal without
the application of heat. It is not the same as ordinary lighting
gas, which is made by heating coal. It burns with a very pale
blue flame, and is hardly poisonous. You can collect it by letting
a glass tumbler fill with water, holding it upside down in a
pond or ditch with a muddy bottom, poking the mud with a
stick, and catching the bubbles as they rise. You can then light
the gas; but perhaps you had better wait till there are more
matches.
174 SCIENCE ADVANCES
If a stream of pure firedamp is coming out of a pipe in a
stopping in a disused pit, one can light it without danger of an
explosion. But one must do an analysis first to be sure it is not
mixed with air. For mixtures of firedamp and air in certain
proportions are explosive. About 9 per cent of firedamp is the
minimum explosive amount. In mines where firedamp is a danger,
tests are supposed to be made for it constantly. It is fairly easy
to test for it with an ordinary safety lamp. One turns the wick
till there is only a small blue flame, and the firedamp can be seen
burning above it as a pale blue cap. This is quite safe, as the
flame is prevented from spreading out and causing an explosion
by flameproof screens of wire gauze. Electric lamps give better
light than the old oil safety lamps, but unfortunately cannot be
used for this test.
Mine inspectors have to learn, among many other things,
how to estimate the amount of firedamp in air in this way.
Most people can only see the firedamp flame in darkness. My
father was very much interested in one candidate who could
see it in full daylight. No one else could, but he got the percentage
of firedamp right every time, so he was not faking. My father
believed that a lot of so-called psychical phenomena could be
explained by abnormally acute senses. Thus a famous thought-
reader used to go out of a room while the people in it decided
on a word or a subject (say a man in a boat) of which they would
think. He was certainly out of normal earshot, but he often
guessed the thing thought of. As, however, he usually failed
when there was a tap running in the house, my father thought
that he probably had supernormal hearing, like the inspector's
supernormal vision.
The trouble about these tests is that a sudden gush of firedamp
may come out of coal, so that the air becomes explosive when it
was quite safe half an hour before.
The exploder used at Murton was of a type not approved for
use where there is a danger of firedamp. It will be interesting
to see if anyone is prosecuted for using it. The firedamp seems
only to have caused a small explosion, which by itself might
not have killed anyone. But this caused a secondary explosion
of coal dust. Air mixed with fine coal dust is very explosive.
HYGIENE 175
Since collieries have been ventilated so that most of the firedamp
is carried away, big firedamp explosions have been rare; and
most of the large ones have been due to dust.
If enough shale dust is spread along the roads, the mixture of
coal and shale dust is not explosive. By the way, the tunnels
leading from the shaft to the working face are called roads,
even though they are very narrow, and the roof is often too
low to let you stand up. But at Murton the dust explosion seems
to have occurred in disused roads, where presumably no stone
dust had been spread for some time and fine coal dust had
drifted in, so that when stirred up and mixed with air it gave an
explosive mixture.
The Inspector of Mines recommends that a safer form of
exploder should be developed for use in mines where there is
any danger of gas. But another lesson can also be drawn from
his report. The men were not killed by the force of the explosion,
or by burns, but poisoned by carbon monoxide, though some of
them may have been so badly burnt that they would have died
in any case. Carbon monoxide is always formed in colliery
explosions, and sometimes in fires, and is very poisonous.
More than forty years ago my father recommended in a report
to the Home Office that every miner in mines liable to explode
should have an oxygen breathing apparatus similar to those
used by rescue squads, but of simpler and cheaper design. This
recommendation was never carried out.
An ordinary gas mask will not stop carbon monoxide; but it
can be filtered out of air by a substance called hopcalite. Respira-
tors with a hopcalite filter have been successfully used in industries
where carbon monoxide is a danger. They would be very much
cheaper and lighter than oxygen apparatus, and could probably
be developed for the use of miners. This is one of the matters
which the Miners' Federation should take up after the war,
when the factories now making gas masks will be available for
work of this kind. The progress of science is constantly opening
new possibilities of detecting poisonous or explosive gases, and
of giving protection from them. Trade unions need a first-rate
scientific staff to keep in touch with them.
There is still another possibility. Enough firedamp goes up
176 SCIENCE ADVANCES
the upcast shafts of our collieries to light every gas lamp, and
probably every gas stove, in Britain. We do not know how to
separate it from the air. But in the Soviet Union they liquefy
the firedamp which comes up from oil wells in the Baku region,
and use it to drive buses. If serious research were done, it is
entirely possible that we might be able to use the wasted firedamp
from our coalmines, and convert one of the miner's greatest
dangers into a valuable commodity. As, however, the Soviet
Union is ahead of the rest of the world in methods of separating
gases from mixtures, it is likely that the necessary research will
be done there if anywhere.
Euthanasia
A correspondent writes to me to ask whether I approve of
killing incurable invalids, and whether this is legal in the Soviet
Union. She says that her own baby has chronic jaundice, is in
constant pain, and that the doctor says it is bound to die. If so,
would it not be right to save it unnecessary suffering?
A body called the Euthanasia Society, including a number of
well-known doctors, has been formed to urge a change of the
law to legalize killing in such cases. On the other hand the
Catholic Church, and many non-catholics, hold that it is wrong
to kill except as a punishment. To which one might answer
that the Church's record of killing for heresy is so black that
its opinion carries little weight.
There is no doubt that a vast amount of suffering would be
saved if people undergoing great pain from incurable diseases
were killed. The argument for killing an idiot child which cannot
look after itself, let alone learn to speak, is equally strong.
Nevertheless I am against legalizing such killing at present, for
three reasons.
The first is the uncertainty of medical diagnosis. Even the
best doctors make serious mistakes. They have to guess what is
wrong inside us from what we tell them, what they can see,
feel, and hear, and sometimes from X-ray photographs or
analyses of blood or urine. This is like guessing what is wrong
with a motor car engine without lifting the bonnet.
HYGIENE 177
In a medical profession organized as ours is, the ordinary
general practitioner does not have the full resources of medical
science to help in diagnosis. He has to guess more than is neces-
sary. In fact our medical profession is still largely in the feudal
stage of productive relations. We go to a single doctor for a
great variety of services, as our ancestors went to the village
cobbler for a pair of boots, or the village miller for a sack of
flour. The medical profession has not reached the development
of productive forces which is made possible by the division of
labour reached under capitalism, let alone that possible under
socialism. In the hospitals, where there is division of labour,
the patients in the wards on the whole get fairly good treatment,
but the out-patients are not only treated inefficiently, but often
with extreme discourtesy. The future of medicine lies with
health centres, run so far as possible by trade unions or other
workers* organizations, employing several doctors, and proper
equipment for the diagnosis and treatment of disease before it
gets to the hospital stage.
So to begin with I would answer that until our medicine is
better organized we should not be justified in killing a suffering
man, woman, or child because a doctor says they are incurable.
My correspondent says that her baby has no gall-bladder, and
seems to think this proves it will die. Actually the gall-bladder
happens to be one of the organs one can do without; so I wonder
if it is quite certain that the baby will not recover.
If euthanasia is ever legalized, I am sure that the killing should
not be done by doctors, though some of them seem quite willing
to oblige. I cannot think that it would increase most people's
confidence in their doctor to know that he had just bumped off
one of the neighbours, however kindly he did it.
There is another very big reason against legalizing euthanasia
at present. Suppose grannie has an incurable disease and is
suffering, her children may have economic motives as well as
humanitarian ones for putting her out of the way. Mrs. Smith is
living in an overcrowded house, and her death would mean a
lot less work for mother, and another bedroom for the children.
Mr, Brown has a larger house and a servant, but he will come in
for 10,000 under his father's will when grannie dies. It is no
178 SCIENCE ADVANCES
good pretending that these economic motives would not weigh
with people to some extent.
So I am against legalizing euthanasia until we have a society
where there are no overcrowding and no big legacies, a socialist
society in which the economic motives which make one man's
death into another man's gain are gone for ever.
In The Origin of the Family ', Engels made a very profound
remark about the future of marriage. "That will be answered/'
he wrote, "when a new generation has grown up, a generation
of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a
woman's surrender with money or any other social instrument
of power, a generation of women who have never known what
it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations
than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover for
fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in
the world they will care precious little what anybody to-day
thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and
their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each
individual, and that will be the end of it." 1
Just the same is true about euthanasia and many moral
questions on which people are divided to-day, for example
vegetarianism and the rights of animals. The people of a com-
munist world will differ from us in two ways. They will regard
affection as the normal relation between two people, and com-
passion for the weak as part of human nature. But they will
also find one of their main sources of happiness in work for
others, and will not want to live when they can no longer do
such work.
So these motives will swing them in different ways, and I do
not know which will win, though I think some form of suicide
may well be legalized. The killing of incurables is not legal in
the Soviet Union, though I am sure it would be very leniently
dealt with if there were no ulterior motive. And I, for one, am
against legalizing it in Britain at present, whatever may be the
case in future.
1 In reply to this article I got several very indignant letters, implying that I
was advocating sexual promiscuity. My correspondents apparently thought it
inconceivable that, in the absence of legal, religious, or economic pressure, people
might actually prefer monogamy. To me, as to Engels, this seems quite probable.
6
INVENTIONS
Inventions that Made Men Free
No one doubts that the great inventions of the last two centuries
have revolutionized human society, and profoundly altered the
course of history. To that extent everyone is a Marxist. However,
opponents of Marxism go on to say that these inventions de-
pended on the development of scientific theory, and that the
really revolutionary influence has been that of scientific ideas.
There is some truth in this; but only in some kinds of society
does theory lead to invention, and it is worth while for Marxists
to know something of inventions which were certainly not based
on any scientific theories, and which changed the course of history.
After the western part of the Roman Empire collapsed in the
fifth century A.D. its territories were occupied by various "bar-
barian" nations, such as the Angles and Saxons in England, the
Franks and Burgundians in France, the east Goths and Lombards
in Italy. They were uneducated, but they did not practise an
economy based on slavery, and the ordinary man in Europe was
probably a good deal freer and nearly as comfortable as his
ancestors had been under Rome.
Literature, science, architecture, and so on, were at a very low
ebb, but a number of inventions were made which had a great
effect on society. Our knowledge of them is largely due to a
French cavalry officer called Lefebre de Noettes, who studied all
the pictures and statues of horses, and remnants of harness, dating
from more than six hundred years or so ago.
If you look at a picture of a Roman chariot, you find that it
was not much bigger than a perambulator, and was pulled by at
least four horses. If you look more carefully, you can see why so
many were needed. Instead of having harness of a modern type,
they pulled it by pressing on a strap in front of their throats. If
l8o SCIENCE ADVANCES
they had exercised a force of more than a few pounds they would
have been throttled.
Further, the Romans did not use iron horse shoes. They used
leather ones, or none at all. So the hooves of their horses wore
out on paved roads, and would have done so on macadamized or
concrete roads. Horses were mainly used in open country. The
Romans did not, and could not, use horses for pulling heavy
carts. These were dragged by oxen, or by men. The huge stones
used in many ancient buildings were largely transported and
lifted by human power, often by that of slaves.
Before we start feeling superior to the Romans, we had better
remember that in India, South Africa, and other parts of the
British Empire and Commonwealth, men are still used as beasts
of burden. This may be excusable in mountains or dense forests
where horses cannot penetrate. But men pull rickshaws in many
towns where there are quite good roads, presumably because they
are cheaper than horses.
Some time in the so-called "Dark Ages/' very possibly in
France, the horse collar and iron horse shoes were invented. This
meant that when the Middle Ages began, horses were used for
transport in a way which was quite impossible in the Roman
Empire. There is one exception which proves the rule. Many of
the heavy stones in Chartres cathedral were drawn by teams of
men who undertook this hard work deliberately as a penance for
their sins. But this was unusual,- and the greater use of horses was
one reason why slavery was not revived in Europe in the Middle
Ages.
Another invention of the Dark Ages was the rudder. The
Roman ships were steered either by rowing harder on one side
than the other, or by a special pair of oars on each side near the
stem, one of which was dipped into the water as required. Even a
sailing ship had this pair of oars. This sort of steering may have
been all very well in a calm sea with a ship on an even keel. It
must have been hopeless when the ship began to roll. Some ships
with steering oars were still built at the time of the early crusades,
but about this time the rudder superseded them, which made
sailing very much easier.
However, it took a long time before wind power completely
INVENTIONS l8l
ousted man power for moving ships. The Spanish Armada which
attacked England in 1588 still included eight galleys and gal-
leasses rowed by slaves, along with one hundred and twenty-four
sailing ships; though the English had given up galleys two hun-
dred years or so earlier, for there were none in the fleet in which
Henry V sailed to the battle of Agincourt.
The first water mill recorded in Europe was built on the
Moselle under the late Roman Empire. The windmill seems to
have been another invention of the "Dark Ages/ 5 for windmills
were being used in several parts of Europe by the twelfth century.
The Roman mills had been worked by slaves or donkeys.
Here, then, were a series of most important inventions, all of
which served to free men from the most arduous and unskilled
work, namely pulling carts and oars, and turning mills. They
were made in an unscientific age, and were of great political
importance because they abolished completely unskilled occupa-
tions in which men were merely sources of power. In fact they
were much bigger steps towards human freedom than Magna
Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, or other laws of which we learn
at school. Christianity played some part in abolishing slavery,
but not a very large one, for both catholics and protestants
enslaved negroes. Technology was more important.
One other important invention was made in the "Dark Ages,"
namely the mechanical clock. This was almost certainly invented
in a monastery, while the others were made out of doors. The
clock is of great historical importance as the forerunner of every
kind of machine in which one wheel transmits power to another,
whether through gears, belts, cranks, or worms. In the long run,
therefore, it had a very great effect in liberating men from toil.
But except in so far as the principle of gearing was used in wind
and water mills, its effect as an agent of freedom did not show up
for a thousand years.
Technology is to be an important part of education under the
new Education Act. If it is properly taught, it can be made the
foundation of historical teaching. If it is badly taught, it will be
divorced from culture. Every teacher who is even slightly influ-
enced by Marxism should be able to show how human progress
has depended on technological improvements.
1 82 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Polarised Light and Its Uses
We are beginning to think seriously of post-war reconstruc-
tion. The efficiency or otherwise of this will depend to a large
extent on how far science is utilized. I am quite aware that
science cannot be fully applied to human welfare either under
competitive or monopoly capitalism. But socialists can at least
state how it should be applied.
The loss of life on our roads before the war was appalling,
About five hundred people were killed a month, which is more
than are killed in air raids at the present time, though, of course,
far less than were killed during the blitzes. It is up to us all to see
that the death-rate does not rise to the pre-war level when motor
vehicles appear on the roads again in their former numbers.
Many measures are needed, including better design of roads,
crossings, and vehicles, better tests for motorists, shorter hours
for lorry drivers, and better education of pedestrians.
I am only going to deal with one, which would save a few
hundred lives a year. This is the proper use of polarized light.
When a beam of light passes through water or glass it is bent, or
refracted, but stays single. When it goes through certain crystals
it is not merely bent, but split into two rays, which are polarized.
Light consists of electric and magnetic "waves" with a frequency
millions of times that of radio waves, but otherwise very like
them. Light is polarized when the electric force is always in the
same direction. Thus a horizontal beam such as that from a car
headlight may be polarized horizontally with the electric force
alternately right and left, or vertically, or at some intermediate
angle.
One can arrange two bits of crystal in what is called a Nicol
prism, so that they will only let through light polarized in a parti-
cular direction. If a horizontal beam has come through a Nicol
prism transmitting vertically polarized light, it will pass through
another set up in the same way. But if we turn the second one
through a right angle, no light gets through. We can understand
what is happening by analogy. If two men were signalling to one
another by sending waves along a taut rope, they could still do
INVENTIONS 183
so if the rope passed through a vertical slit. The rope would still
be able to oscillate up and down. The signals could be passed
through two vertical slits. But if the second slit was horizontal,
communication would cease.
Within the last ten years it has been possible to make large
sheets of material by arranging multitudes of very small crystals
between two sheets of glass or celluloid. These screens let through
light polarized in one direction only. They are made and sold by
the American Polaroid Corporation, and are rapidly replacing
Nicol prisms for many purposes.
This is how they can be used to make night driving safer.
Headlamps are made so as only to produce horizontally polarized
light, and wind screens so as only to let through vertically polar-
ized. A driver sitting behind such a windscreen sees the headlamp
of an approaching car or lorry as a faint glow, and is not dazzled.
But the light reflected from the road surface and banks is not all
horizontally polarized, and much of it gets through the screen.
Thus he sees the road lit up by his own or another vehicle's head-
lamps, and can avoid collisions. But he is never dazzled, and never
has to dip his own headlight. A further advantage is that as the
light reflected from a horizontal surface of water on a wet road is
mainly polarized horizontally, this source of glare is cut down
also.
Clearly this safeguard will only work if all motor vehicles have
headlamps and windscreens designed in the same way. This
change cannot be made in a moment, and certainly not in war-
time. But it could be made compulsory in all new motor vehicles
turned out after the war. So long as the old ones remained on the
road the full advantage would not be gained. Even polarized head-
lamps would have to be dipped. But after a few years the use of
polarized lamps and windscreens could be made compulsory.
As our car and lorry factories are now making military vehicles,
there will have to be a big switch in production after the war in
any case, and this offers an ideal opportunity for such a change.
But it will only be possible if the Government sees to it that
"polaroid," or whatever material is used, does not become the
monopoly of any firm or group in this country, and that excessive
prices are not charged for it. Many firms will want to get busy
1 84 SCIENCE ADVANCES
the moment the war is over, and will complain of any State
interference. Others may try to get a monopoly. Nevertheless,
the change can be made, and thousands of lives saved, provided
details are worked out beforehand by those concerned with
reconstruction.
Polarized light is already used for many purposes. When a
polarized beam passes through a sugar solution the plane of
polarization turns through an angle depending on the amount of
sugar. This is the most accurate method of measuring the amount
of sugar present, and is used by analysts for sugar and many other
substances.
Again, polarized light can be used for secret signalling. If the
observer looks through a Nicol prism, and the transmitter has a
prism on his signalling lamp which he turns through a right angle,
the light will go on and off, although an observer without a prism
sees no change in its intensity. In 1939 many people thought the
towns would be better hidden if a few lights were allowed in
country districts. One reason why this was not allowed was
probably the danger that fascists in rural districts would use
polarized light to signal to enemy planes.
I have devoted an article to a very minor point in reconstruc-
tion as an example of the need to apply recent scientific and
technical developments on the largest possible scale. This would
of course be vastly easier under socialism than capitalism. The
Soviet Union and other European States which adopt socialism
after the war will find reconstruction far simpler than the capi-
talist States. I am willing to bet that unless the election which we
are promised after the war gives us a clear majority of real social-
ists, this particular application of science will not be made in
Britain until other countries have given the example. Private
interests of one sort or another will block it, and a few hundred
lives will be lost each year in consequence.
There are, of course, vastly bigger and better reasons than this,
for desiring a socialist Britain as soon as possible. But the possi-
bility of rapid technical improvements is an argument for social-
ism, and not a negligible one.
INVENTIONS 185
The Spectroscope
Among the instruments which are now again at my disposal
since I have got back to University College, London, is my
pocket spectroscope. It consists of a set of prisms which bend the
light coming through a slit at one end through angles which are
different for the different colours, and a lens to focus them. I
carry it in my pocket in the hope of seeing the spectrum of a
flash from the explosion of a Vi. Unfortunately the Vi gives no
warning, so I have little chance of analysing the light from it.
Meanwhile I amuse myself by looking at other lights, and prob-
ably bore my colleagues by asking them to do so.
An ordinary electric lamp shows the various colours of the
rainbow, from red through orange, yellow, green, and blue, to
violet; though the violet is much fainter than in sunlight. But in
peace-time one can see a great many lights of a quite different
character in the streets of any large town. If you look at the
yellow sodium lights which are used in some streets the spectro-
scope does not show a band of all colours, but two yellow lines
close together. At present the easiest spectrum of this kind to see
is that of neon. The tube trains, besides their ordinary lamps, have
little lamps containing this gas, and giving out a pink glow. If
you look at a neon lamp through a spectroscope you see a number
of red lines, a yellow one, and two rather dim green ones. In
peace-time one can also see the characteristic bright lines of
mercury, nitrogen, and other elements used for advertisements,
and outside cinemas.
A hot solid or an ordinary flame gives out light of all the
visible wave-lengths. A gas such as neon, or the vapour of
sodium or mercury, gives out light of a few colours only, when
excited electrically or when heated very strongly. If one looks at
a strong electric lamp through the glow of a weak neon lamp, the
same lines which appeared bright before, now appear dark. That
is to say neon atoms take up from strong light the same kinds of
rays which they give out into darkness.
The spectroscope has been of great practical value. Every
element, when brought into the state of hot gas, gives out its
1 86 SCIENCE ADVANCES
own set of colours, showing as a bright line spectrum. Its quan-
tity can often be estimated with fair accuracy from the intensity
of the light, and so a photograph of the spectrum, say of an alloy
or the salts extracted from soil, enables us to state its composi-
tion.
The spectroscope is particularly useful for detecting rather
small amounts of an element, and has shown that various plants
and animals collect certain elements with extraordinary efficiency.
For example, Professor Fox, now at Bedford College, London,
and his colleague Ramage, showed that the ash of ordinary mush-
rooms contains substantial quantities of silver, though not
enough to make it worth while ashing them as a source of this
metal. The common scallop collects cadmium, a metal used in
paint manufacture, from sea water; and a sea squirt collects the
rarer metal vanadium, which is used for toughening steel. Until
these animals were analysed it was not even known that salts of
these metals existed in the sea. Vernadsky and his pupils in the
Soviet Union think that some mineral deposits containing rare
elements were formed by animals and plants which concentrated
them in this way.
The spectroscope has also given us a great deal of information
about the sun and stars. The pioneer in this research was Lockyer,
who discovered that most of the elements known on earth were
also found in the sun. And one, the rare gas helium, was detected
in the sun before it was found on the earth. The sun shows dark
lines because the gases in its atmosphere stop certain of the rays
coming from its glowing interior, like the neon lamp. During an
eclipse there is a moment when the sun's interior is covered by
the moon, but its atmosphere is visible. The light from the gases
in it then appears as a series of bright lines.
The Indian physicist Saha pushed the analysis further, and
showed how the relative intensities of different spectral lines can
be used to measure the temperature and pressure of the atmo-
spheres round stars. In consequence we know a good deal about
the physical state of stars, as well as their chemical composition.
But the most important service of spectroscopy to science has
been to show how atoms and molecules are constituted. Why
does a hot atom of neon give out light of only a few colours,
INVENTIONS 187
instead of the whole possible range of colours, like a white-hot
electric bulb filament ? Einstein showed that light of a particular
colour is given out or absorbed in packets called photons, the
amount of energy in a photon being proportional to the number
of vibrations of the light per second. And a particular atom gives
out its energy in characteristic units.
A man can only pay a bill in units which are different in dif-
ferent countries. The smallest English unit is a farthing, the
smallest American a cent, and so on. So if you know that a man
always pays his bill in cents, you know that he lives in America,
and so on. A large-sized material object, such as a fly-wheel, can
have any energy over a wide range, and can give it out in a con-
tinuous stream. But an atom or a molecule is like a fly-wheel
which can only rotate at certain definite speeds, and therefore if
it gives out energy or absorbs it, must do so in standardized
quantities. Each spectral colour represents the difference between
two of these energy levels.
When this principle was understood it became possible to make
tables of the energy levels of an atom or molecule. Some levels
are due to vibrations or rotations of a whole molecule or a part of
it, others to electrons in it moving at one or other of a standard
set of speeds. Once the spectrum of an atom or molecule is
catalogued and the energy levels calculated it becomes possible to
predict its chemical behaviour. It is of course necessary to cata-
logue the spectrum in the invisible but photographable ultra-
violet and infra-red regions, as well as the visible one.
From the spectrum of hydrogen one can calculate that two
hydrogen atoms will unite to form a molecule, and how much
energy will be given out in the process; while the spectra of
mercury and chlorine explain why two mercury atoms will not
unite with one another, though either will unite with chlorine,
and so on. Thus chemistry is becoming a rational science, not a
mere collection of rules. Unfortunately the mathematics involved
in the calculations is still so terribly complicated, that it is less
trouble to learn the rules than the general laws behind them.
However, the calculations have been justified and shown to be
this-sided by predicting a number of previously unknown
chemical facts.
1 88 SCIENCE ADVANCES
The positivistic world view is that science reveals a number of
laws connecting our sensations, and that it is no use to try and
go deeper, and explain these laws. Thus Comte thought that
chemistry could never be reduced to physics. The view of dialec-
tical materialism is that nothing is isolated or inexplicable, and
that therefore chemistry and physics can be unified; though, as
Lenin wrote, the result will be that apparently simple things, like
electrons, will turn out to be much more complicated than they
first seemed to be. There is no doubt that this second view is not
only much more stimulating to research workers, but is being
more and more confirmed by discovery. And the spectroscope
has played a major part in this unification of science.
The Electron Microscope
In 1898 J. J. Thomson published the results of some years of
work on the passage of electricity through a vacuum. By bending
the current out of its path both with an electric and with a mag-
netic field, he showed that it consisted of negatively charged
particles which were later called electrons. This discovery was of
immense importance both for the development of physics and
chemistry, and in practice. To take only one example, a radio
valve depends on the fact that a stream of electrons shot out of a
hot wire can be regulated by an electric field.
One of the most recent applications of streams of electrons is
to microscopy. A microscope using light will not magnify things
clearly more than about 3,000 times, whilst an electron micro-
scope can already magnify up to 300,000 times, and will probably
do much better in future. So the electron microscope may lead to
almost as great advances in knowledge as did the ordinary micro-
scope. It works in much the same way as an ordinary microscope.
A magnet attracts a beam of electrons as it attracts a wire carrying
a current in a dynamo. A ring-shaped magnet suitably designed
will focus a parallel beam to a point, just as a lens focusses a beam
of parallel light rays. Of course the magnet needs as careful
design as a lens.
A modern electron microscope is about seven feet high, and
INVENTIONS 189
the cheapest costs over 3,000. At the top is a cathode firing off
electrons at 60,000 volts. The beam passes through three magnetic
"lenses," corresponding to those of the condenser, the objective,
and the ocular in an ordinary microscope, and through the object
to be photographed. The whole action takes place in a very high
vacuum, for air scatters electrons as fog scatters light. Special
controls keep the electron voltage and the current through
the objective lens steady to one part in 50,000. The specimen
is mounted, not on a glass slide, but on a very thin film of
cellulose.
The technique has been used in industrial chemistry. Apply
the beam to the smallest dot on a photographic film, which looks
like a faint cloud under an ordinary microscope, and we see a
complicated tangle like a snarl of string. This result is being used
for the improvement of very fine plates such as are needed
for astronomy and aerial photography. Other industrial chemists
are studying thin films of metal, and others again the synthetic
fibres such as nylon and vinyon which are replacing silk and
rayon, and the plastics which are being used in so many branches
of industry.
This microscope has definitely proved that the molecular
theory of chemistry is true, for large protein molecules have been
photographed, and their size and shape found to be the same as
had been determined by other less direct methods.
Probably its most important applications will be in biology.
Bacteria which are so small that the ordinary microscope cannot
distinguish their parts, turn out to have quite a complicated
structure. Viruses, agents of disease far too small to be visible
with the light microscope, have been photographed, and different
kinds can be distinguished. So far as I know, no photographs
have yet been taken to show the detailed structure of human cells,
but this will doubtless be done soon if it has not been done already.
The importance of this new tool for research lies in the fact
that we still know very little about the structure of things smaller
than the smallest cells we can see which are alive, but larger than
the largest chemical compounds we can make which are not
alive. Certainly some of the larger molecules show a few pro-
perties which are generally found in living things, and the
SCIENCE ADVANCES
smallest organisms do not possess all the qualities which we
generally associate with life. But there is a considerable gap, and
there are still people who say it is unbridgeable.
The history of science, and especially our knowledge of
evolution, should make us very cautious about saying that any
distinctions such as that between living and dead matter are
absolute. The electron microscope is already helping us to bridge
this particular gap.
The Reading Machine
An invention has recently been made which may have as big
an effect on the spreading of knowledge, and for that matter of
lies, as did the invention of printing. We are apt to think of books
as part of the natural order of things, though the oldest printed
books are not five hundred years old. It is quite likely that some
of my readers will live till books are curiosities only consulted by
antiquaries.
The history of books is a remarkable illustration of human
conservatism. The Sumerians, Babylonians, and other peoples of
ancient Iraq wrote on clay tablets which they baked. These are
extremely durable, and vast numbers have been dug up. But they
are also very bulky. A learned king had to use hundreds of slaves
to make a special wing for his palace to house what one of us can
get on an ordinary bookshelf. The ancient Egyptians made a
great improvement by using papyrus. This is made from strips of
a rush gummed together, and is the origin of our word "paper."
Unfortunately they did not think of binding pages together, but
made it into continuous rolls. As one read through a book one
unrolled it from one peg and rolled it on another like a cinema
film. The Romans largely replaced papyrus by parchment, that is
to say fine leather, and books of the modern type were first made
in Europe about A.D. 100. The Chinese have certainly used paper
for 2,000 years. The Arabs learned to make paper from the
Chinese about A.D. 750, and the Europeans from the Arabs about
A.D. 1200. It was made in factories from the first, and was one of
the few commodities always made by mass production even in the
middle ages.
INVENTIONS 191
Printing, like paper, was invented in China; the oldest printed
book is dated A.D. 868. In A.D. 1041 Pi Sheng invented movable
types, but as the Chinese language needed several thousand dif-
ferent characters, they were not much used. In Europe movable
type was invented soon after the introduction of printing in the
fifteenth century. It is amazing that seals were known in Iraq as
early as 2000 B.C. and were used on clay tablets; but no one seems
to have thought of applying the same principle to paper for
thousands of years. Still more remarkably quite early seals were
cylindrical, and were rolled on the clay tablet. But the rotary press
was only invented in A.D. 1790, and first used, for printing The
Times, in 1814.
The new invention is this. An entire book is photographed on
a film. This may be an ordinary photographic or cinema film, or
a special micro-film. In either case it is about an inch across. It is
quite thin, and far too small to read directly. So its image is pro-
jected onto a screen with an electric light. The reading machine is
about two feet high, and can be stood on an ordinary table. At
present it costs about 15 and is not on sale, though a few have
been given by the Rockefeller Foundation to British libraries.
The revolutionary fact is the extreme smallness of the films. A
whole book rolls up into a case a good deal smaller than a reel of
cotton. You could carry the Encyclopedia Britannica in one
pocket, and the whole library of the British Museum could be
stored in a fair-sized house. It is curious that after nearly two
thousand years we should have gone back to rolls, though on a
much smaller scale.
Micro-films have been used for some years in America, parti-
cularly for scientific publications. But in spite of the efforts of
Mr. Watson Davis, of the American Science Service, most people
regarded them as an amusing toy rather than a serious invention.
But the war has altered this. It is impossible to get European
scientific journals in any numbers, though single sets of many
can be got through Portugal, Turkey, or Sweden. But they can
be photographed on micro-films. Reading machines are now
available in the Science Library in London, among other places;
and these journals can be read from micro-films, of which there
are a number of copies. Once the micro-film habit has caught on,
192 SCIENCE ADVANCES
some American scientists hope to publish journals on micro-film
only. It is claimed that this will be cheaper than printing. It will
certainly be cheaper for the libraries which have to store them.
On the other hand it is doubtful whether films of the present type
will last as long as paper.
As soon as paper is given up for micro-film there will be con-
siderable changes in the arrangement of books, and probably in
literary style. However, the social effects will be still more im-
portant. It will be entirely possible for a small town library to
have 100,000 films, each representing an entire book or volume
of a periodical. And reading machines will be a good deal cheaper
than radio sets. This will mean far greater opportunities of culture
for the masses.
But these opportunities may not be given. The ruling class may
try to monopolize the reading machine as it has monopolized the
radio, and very nearly monopolized the press. Unless the Labour
Movement wakes up to the situation before the capitalists it may
be as difficult to get micro-films of Lenin's works as to hear a
communist speaker on the radio. Or the reading machine may be
effectively kept for the well-to-do, while the general public is
spoon-fed with books guaranteed to raise no dangerous thoughts.
Every new invention is a chance for the workers and a chance for
the bosses. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Listening to Doodlebugs
If Londoners learned nothing else between June and Septem-
ber 1944 they learned that light travels faster than sound. The
most striking demonstration of this fact was to stand on Parlia-
ment Hill and watch the bombs bursting in London. One saw a
doodlebug burst in Wandsworth, and heard the burst half a
minute later.
Light travels at the enormous speed of nearly a hundred and
ninety thousand miles per second. If you had a system of mirrors
going round the world, a flash of light would take under a
seventh of a second to go round them and return to its starting
point. The time taken for light to cross London can be neglected
INVENTIONS 193
for all practical purposes. This does not mean that we see a thing
as soon as it happens. When the light strikes the back of our eye
it breaks down a purple substance called rhodopsin. This starts
messages along a number of nerve fibres, and these are switched
over to other fibres, finally reaching the area at the back of the
brain concerned in vision. This takes about a tenth of a second.
Sound travels at the moderate speed of 750 miles per hour, or
roughly a mile in five seconds. So with a stop-watch one could
quite easily estimate the distance of a doodlebug burst within 400
yards. The doodlebug travels at about half the speed of sound.
So its sound precedes it and gives a warning. A howitzer or
mortar shell also travels slower than sound. On the other hand a
field gun shell or bullet from a rifle or machine gun, let alone an
anti-aircraft shell, travels quicker than sound, and gives no warn-
ing. A rocket may travel either slower than sound, or faster. Vi
goes a good deal faster, and therefore gives no warning. A hooter
on a car travelling as fast as sound, or faster, would be useless.
Sound consists of series of pressure waves moving through the
air. The air consists of rapidly moving molecules. They are
travelling at many different speeds. Some are moving in the same
direction as the sound; others in the opposite direction, sideways
or obliquely. So the speed of sound is a good deal less than the
average speed of the molecules, in fact about 74 per cent of it. In
a gas the molecules are far apart, but in a liquid there is not much
space between them. So the sound travels much quicker. Roughly
speaking, the time taken is equal to the length of the gaps between
molecules, divided by their average forward speed.
In fact sound travels four and a quarter times as fast in water
as in air. This has an important bearing on the hunting of sub-
marines by the "Asdic" method which depends on sound. Sound
is not much good for locating an aeroplane. The sound from a
plane three miles away takes fifteen seconds to reach our ears.
During this time a plane moving at 300 m.p.h. has gone a mile
and a quarter. But a submarine under water moves at about 10
or 15 m.p.h., and sound travels faster in water. So sound location
is about one hundred times as efficient against submarines as
against aeroplanes. It is in fact very useful, even though a corvette
or frigate chasing a submarine aims a small distance behind it.
G
194 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Except in dealing with distant objects producing a great noise,
such as aeroplanes, the lag in transmission of light or sound
makes very little practical difference to our actions. The lag be-
tween excitation of a sense organ and muscular action is much
more serious. (One cannot determine the lag between sensation
and action exactly, because there is no way of measuring, within
a split second, when a sensation begins).
Simple reactions to simple stimuli do not take very long. If a
man is told to press the button when he sees the light, the reaction
time is about a tenth to a fifth of a second. If he is told to press the
button when he sees a red light and the pedal when he sees a
green one, about two-fifths of a second are needed; and a good
deal longer for more complicated reactions, though these times
can be reduced by training. A fighter may move over 20 yards
in a tenth of a second. So not only must a fighter's pilot's reaction
times be as short as possible, but there must be no lag in trans-
mitting them to the rudders and wing tips.
Societies react very slowly to new situations, and religious
bodies are even slower than political ones. In particular states
react very slowly to changes in productive forces. In England we
still have large vestiges of feudalism, such as the House of Lords
and hereditary ownership of land. Feudalism worked well enough
when every manor produced its own food and clothes. It was
already out of date when traders could use pack horses or ox-
carts, but it survives into the age of aeroplanes and railways.
Over most of the world capitalism survives. This again was quite
efficient in the early stages of the development of trade and manu-
facture, but was already out of date a century ago. Today it will
only work at all if its "normal" working is interfered with by an
elaborate system of controls.
Socialists are aware that capitalism is out of date, and most
socialists desire to sweep away many other out-of-date institu-
tions. But they do not always realize the full possibilities of
technical progress. For example, pre-fabricated houses far larger
and more durable than the Portal house have been made in small
numbers, and should form a part of our housing programme.
Our methods of heating houses could be overhauled, with a
great saving of coal and gain in cleanliness. Our cleaning
INVENTIONS , 195
methods, both in the house and the scullery, are still in the feudal
stage.
A socialist should make himself aware of the improvements
which technical progress has made possible, not only in society
as a whole, but in the details of life. If he does not he is in the
position of an anti-aircraft gunner who, instead of aiming ahead
of a bomber, aims in the direction from which its sound comes.
Farming the Sea
The fertility of land depends on the presence of sufficient
nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements, in the soil.
Many primitive methods of agriculture exhaust one or more of
these elements, and the farmers then abandon their fields and
move elsewhere. A society based on this kind of agriculture is not
much more developed than one based on hunting. Our ancestors
overcame soil exhaustion to some extent by rotation of crops, by
the use of manure, and so on. We have greatly increased produc-
tivity by using fertilizers such as superphosphate and sulphate of
ammonia, and lime not only to supply calcium but to overcome
acidity.
An acre of water may produce as much food as an acre of land,
or more. But it is even more easily exhausted of essential mineral
constituents. In Europe carp are frequently kept in ponds and fed
with hay which is dumped into them, but there is very little fish-
farming of this kind in England.
The sea yields far less fish per acre than a very poor pasture
will yield in meat or milk. What is more, the yield of fish is
already as high as possible in many areas, and more intensive
fishing may actually diminish the catch. This is because the sea is
very short of two essential elements, nitrogen and phosphorus.
Its yield of food per acre never rises to the level reached in a lake
where these elements are abundant. And even if the phosphates
were available, it would be impossible to keep up a high phos-
phorus level in sea water, as it is precipitated as calcium phosphate.
However, an experiment now under way, and on which a
preliminary report has been made, proves that fertilizers can be
used effectively in sea water. The site chosen was Loch Craiglin,
196 SCIENCE ADVANCES
a lake of 18 acres in Argyllshire, communicating with the sea by
a narrow channel at high tide, and somewhat brackish in its upper
layers.
The crop consisted of flatfish, namely plaice and flounders.
During the year beginning in April 1942, 600 Ib. of sodium
nitrate and 400 Ib. of superphosphate were thrown into the lake,
and during the next year rather more nitrate and the same amount
of phosphate were added. The immediate effect of a fertilization
was that within three days the numbers of small green single-
celled swimming plants had more than doubled. These plants are
the ultimate source of food for almost all the animals in the sea.
Seaweed and other plants big enough to be seen without a
microscope are almost confined to the shores, and are quite unim-
portant as a source of food. The microscopic plants are eaten by
small Crustacea, the swimming larvae of molluscs and worms, and
filter feeders such as oysters, which strain water through their
gills. The smallest of them are smaller than blood corpuscles, and
their numbers in sea water may rise to thirty million per cubic
inch of sea water, and reached four times that number in the
fertilized lake. The animals which eat them were eaten in their
turn, and there was a great increase in the animals living on the
bottom, such as cockles, worms, small crustaceans, and midge
larvae.
Twenty-five thousand flounders and six hundred plaice were
transferred into Loch Craiglin, which originally contained hardly
any. A number were weighed and measured, and all fish caught
later were also measured. It was found that the growth rate was
enormously greater in the fertilized lake than in the sea. In fact
the young flounders put on weight sixteen times as fast as those
in the sea loch from which they had been taken. The plaice also
did very well. In particular, both plaice and flounders went on
growing during the winter, which they do not normally do,
apparently owing to shortage of food.
The investigation was not without difficulties. Eels ate some of
the flatfish, and a flock of cormorants decided they were on to a
good thing, and took their share. Finally the local fishermen, who
had originally laughed at the scheme, changed their opinion, and
it is thought that some fish went into their creels.
197
The idea of this work was mainly due to Dr. Gross, a German
refugee who is an expert on growing small sea animals in labora-
tories, and thought his work could be applied on a big scale. He
was encouraged by Professor Ritchie of Edinburgh University,
and partly financed by Imperial Chemical Industries, who are
naturally looking for new markets. The work, which included
counts of animals and plants of all sizes from a ten- thousandth ot
an inch to four feet long, was carried out by Gross, Raymont,
Marshall, Orr, Nutman, and Gould working as a team, largely in
the intervals of other research. They believe that it would be well
worth while to fertilize the water in arms of the sea such as the
lochs of Argyllshire, where the fertilizer would be so rapidly
converted into plants and animals that most of it would not drift
out to sea. They look to a future, to quote their words in an
article in Nature, "when fisheries will follow the path of agricul-
ture, when development and production will take the place of
conservation and restriction/*
At present the sewage of our great towns is so treated that
much of the nitrogen is lost, while the phosphorus is in an
insoluble form. With a different treatment this need not be the
case; and the sewage of Glasgow, for example, after proper treat-
ment, might be conveyed by pipes to fertilize the waters of the
Western Scottish lochs.
Perhaps Dr. Gross and his colleagues have founded a new
industry. It will only give its best yield if fisheries are rationalized
both on a national and an international level. The sea is not
private property, and the State will have to pay for fertilizing it.
We must see to it that this results in cheaper fish and better
earnings for fishermen, not bigger profits for middlemen. And
the peace settlement should include an international control of
fisheries. It is little use trying to use the Moray Firth as a breeding
place for fish if foreign fishermen can trawl there to any extent;
and the Soviet Government has similar objections to foreign
fishing in the White Sea.
It seems likely that fish-farming can be a big new source of
cheap and good food. But this will only be so if cut-throat com-
petition is avoided, and scientific planning goes with scientific
fertilization.
198 SCIENCE ADVANCES
A Substitute for Morphine?
Research on subjects unconnected with the war has slowed down
greatly in Britain, as everywhere else except perhaps in Sweden
and Switzerland. But some very interesting work is still being
published. A particularly hopeful discovery has just been made
by Professor Dodds of the Middlesex Hospital, London, and his
colleagues Lawson and Williams.
Morphine is one of the most valuable of all drugs. It abolishes
pain completely, or reduces it to a level where it is no longer
distressing. By doing so it has saved thousands of lives, by allow-
ing people to get rest and sleep which would otherwise have been
impossible.
Some substances easily made from it are also valuable. For
example, diacetyl-morphine, or heroin, is not only a pain-killer,
but a specific against coughing. But morphine and its derivatives
have grave disadvantages too. Besides depressing the activity of
the part of the brain (probably the thalamus near its centre) con-
cerned in producing pain, they upset that of the cerebral cortex,
concerned in accurate perception, willing, and thought. And they
damp down important reflex actions such as breathing. One dare
not give morphine to a patient in great pain if there is any danger
that his breathing may stop.
Worst of all, they are drugs of addiction. If a patient is given
morphine or heroin for some weeks the dose needed to deaden
pain rises steadily, until he can take a quantity which would kill a
normal man or woman. And when the dose is stopped many
people become extremely miserable, even though the pain is
gone, and will lie, steal, and even murder to get more. It is worth
adding that not everyone would become an addict. I don't like
the way morphine upsets the working of my mind. If it must be
upset, I much prefer the effects of beer or whisky. And after a
fortnight or so on regular doses of heroin I hati no discomfort
on stopping it. I expect most people would resemble me. Still
there are enough potential addicts to make a very rigid control of
the sales of these drugs necessary.
The constitution of morphine, that is to say the way in which
INVENTIONS 199
its seventeen carbon, one nitrogen, three oxygen, and nineteen
hydrogen atoms are arranged, has been known for a good many
years. But it has not yet been possible to make it from simpler
substances, partly because the arrangement of the atoms is a
rather complicated one, which cannot be adequately represented
on paper, but needs a solid model.
When a natural drug can be made in the laboratory, one can
also make others of slightly different pattern, and hope that some
of them will have properties of the same kind, but rather more
useful. Thus the natural drug ephedrine raises the blood pressure
and keeps one awake. But the related synthetic benzedrine has far
more effect on the brain for a given effect on the blood pressure.
Dodds has started a new attack on the problem of synthetic
drugs. Forty years ago some chemists thought, with Ostwald,
that chemical formulae were mere short-hand, and not rough
pictures of molecules. The majority probably agreed with Lenin
that they were true if rough pictures. The Braggs showed by
means of X-ray photographs that this was so. But there is one
important exception. In most chemical textbooks open chains of
carbon atoms, as in the paraffins, are represented as straight.
Actually they can be stretched fairly straight, but are zigzag or
curly when relaxed. So a structure built partly of open chains of
carbon atoms may have the same shape as one built wholly of
rings.
Dodds introduced this principle into pharmacology by making
stilboestrol, a compound whose molecule has much the same
shape and size as that of the female sex hormone, oestrone,
though its formula is decidedly different. Much to most biologists'
surprise, it proved rather more effective than the natural product,
and is used instead of it in agriculture and medicine.
Now he has done the same with morphine. He tried out sixteen
compounds all much simpler than morphine, but with molecules
of much the same shape. All were less effective per unit weight.
That is to say it took a lot more to kill a rat, or to make it a little
unsteady on its legs, which is the effect of a dose which does not
endanger life. Some of these compounds were then tried on
human beings. Tests were first made on healthy people to see
what doses could safely be given. Some were turned down be-
2OO SCIENCE ADVANCES
cause they caused a good deal of mental confusion. In order to
test their properties as pain killers they were tried on patients
with inoperable cancer, who were already being given morphine,
and suffered severely if it was withheld for even four hours. One
of the compounds has so far given complete relief without any
mental confusion.
The most curious thing about it is perhaps that it was made in
1887, and in the intervening fifty-seven years no one had appa-
rently suspected that it might be a valuable drug. There was
indeed no reason to suspect it until the real shapes of molecules
were discovered.
A lot more work will have to be done before one can say that
Dodds and his colleagues have got hold of a drug as useful as
morphine, let alone a better one. But since it will be possible to
make a great many compounds fairly closely related to j8-hydroxy-
jSa-diphenylethylamine, their best pain killer, it is highly probable
that within a few years we shall have a drug which, for a given
efficiency in stopping pain, will have less effect than morphine in
upsetting thought.
It is also possible that any competent chemist may be in a
position to make half a ton of a habit-forming drug as bad as
morphine, or worse, from easily obtained raw materials, without
even breaking the law. Every advance of science opens up new
possibilities of good or evil. In this case the evil ones are quite
likely to predominate for some years unless action is taken fairly
rapidly to prevent the sale of these compounds in the sacred name
of private enterprise, until they have been conclusively shown not
to produce drug addiction.
NOTE. Since this was written, Professor Dodds has found
that /^hydroxy-ajS-diphenylethylamine is nothing like as good an
all-round suppressor of pain as morphine, but is particularly
valuable against the terrible pain which may be caused by pressure
on nerve trunks, which is unfortunately a common result of
cancer.
7
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE
The Cruise of the "Sedov"
IN 1938 three Soviet ice-breaking steamers, the Sadko, Malygin,
and Sedav, were caught in the ice to the north of Eastern Siberia.
The larger ice-breaker Yermak reached them, and the Sadko and
Malygin werfe able to get away. But the steering gear of the
Sedov was damaged, so she was left in the ice, and the crew were
told not only to preserve their ship but to make scientific observa-
tions. The ship drifted till January 1940 when she was rescued by
the ice-breaker/. Stalin. The first scientific results of the voyage
were read to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences in April 1940 by
Buynitsky and Efremov.
The crew had to face great difficulties. The work of sounding
had been done on the Sadko with an electric winch, and there was
no time to trans-ship it. The Sedov 9 3 crew had to make a winch for
themselves, and to join various lengths of cable together till they
got a cable 3! miles long. "It took our mechanics some time/*
writes Buynitsky, "before they found a method of joining the
ends of the wires so that the cable should remain strong and
flexible at the joints. All this work had to be done in the dreary
cold with no other light than the dull glimmer of a lantern." It
looks as the Sedov' *s crew had gone some way towards realizing
Lenin's ideal of "men who can do everything."
The first task was, of course, to ascertain the ship's position
by observing the sun, moon, or stars. She drifted so far north as
to go within about two hundred miles of the north pole, so that
on the whole her course lay between that of Nansen's ship, the
Fram y begun in 1894, and that of Papanin's camp which was
landed from aeroplanes at the pole in 1937. Both the recent
expeditions drifted faster than Nansen's ship. This means that the
whole polar icefield is probably moving faster, and in particular,
emptying faster into the Atlantic. This is probably due to a
202 SCIENCE ADVANCES
change in the average speed or direction of the wind. But such
changes may, in the long run, have big effects on climate.
The soundings show that the bed of the Arctic Ocean is more
irregular than was thought, and a record depth of over 17,000
feet was measured. Such observations will ultimately be needed
to understand, among other things, the currents at different
depths in this ocean. Samples of the sea bed were taken at the
same time as the depths were measured.
To find 'out what sort of rocks there are below the ocean,
measurements of the force of gravity were made with pendulums.
The stronger the earth's attractive force, the quicker a pendulum
swings. In fact a pendulum clock which is right in London loses
about 2- 3 minutes per day at the equator, and gains about 1-5
minutes near the pole. For at the equator some of the earth's pull
is balanced by the centrifugal force due to its rotation. In un-
frozen seas, pendulum observations have only been made in sub-
marines, since ordinary ships roll and pitch too much. In fact this
is the only constructive purpose which submarines have served.
Butpbservations can also be made on a ship stuck in the ice. The
observations made on the Sedov have not yet been worked out,
but they will probably show the same as the submarine observa-
tions. That is to say, the force of gravity will prove to be much the
same as on land. This is believed to be because the rocks under
the sea are denser than those of the continents, which makes up
for the fact that water is lighter than rock and exerts less pull on
the pendulum. In fact the continents stick up because they are
made of lighter material floating on the same semi-liquid material
as the heavier rocks under the oceans. Of course it is not yet
sure that the Arctic Ocean conforms to the general rule.
In order to measure the earth's magnetism ice houses were set
up a quarter of a mile away from the ship, to avoid the effect of
the metal in the vessel. The compass was found to be so unsteady
that on one day it deviated by fifty-two degrees from its usual
direction, and even on "calm" days it was often two degrees out.
One reason for this extreme variation was the intensity of the
aurora borealis, or northern lights, which were also observed
regularly. When the sky was clear during the long winter night
they were so bright as to cast shadows. As the northern lights are
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 2OJ
caused by an electrical discharge, they naturally affect the com-
pass, and the relation between them and the vagaries of the
compass was examined. The voyage took place at a time when
auroral activity was near its maximum. In ordinary years the
compass would be steadier.
The usual weather observations were made, including tempera-
ture, barometric pressure, wind direction and speed, and rainfalland
snowfall. These were telegraphed to the Bureau of the Northern
Sea Route Administration in Moscow. If these reports prove of value
to*navigators, it is possible that in future several ships or floating
camps maybe constantly kept in the Arctic Ocean at any given time.
Although the crew included no professional hydrologist,
Efremov took the temperature of the water at different levels at
forty-three points. Samples of water were also taken and sealed
up in every available glass jar and bottle on the ship. These are
now being analysed. The temperature measurements show that
the water, down to a depth which may be over six hundred feet, is
below freezing-point. I mean, of course, the freezing point of fresh
water, for salt water does not freeze till a lower temperature. Then
comes a layer of comparatively warm water which drifts in from the
Atlantic. Below 2,400 feet the water is again below freezing point.
These discoveries were made under very great difficulties. The
observations at depths down to 2,300 feet were made with a hand
windlass, and a crew of three assistants took turns in working it
which doubtless kept them warm even during the polar night.
Some zoological observations were made. Seals, narwhals, and
gulls were seen during the summer of 1938, but in that of 1939
only a few polar bears, and starving and exhausted birds which
had been driven north by gales.
Such work as this completely refutes the statement sometimes
made that Soviet science is only concerned with finding out
facts which will be immediately useful. On the contrary these
discoveries will ultimately fit into a general knowledge of our
planet which will some day benefit all men. Two hundred years
ago British explorers took the lead in exploration from the
Spanish and Portuguese. Men like Cook, Livingstone, and Scott
made Britain illustrious. Today the torch is in the hands of the
young socialist workers of the U.S.S.R.
204
SCIENCE ADVANCES
SOVIET SCIENCE AtfD NAZi SCIENCE
How Two Thousand Geologists
Saved the World
In their preparation for the assault which took Orel the Red
Army is reported to have fired ten times the weight of shells per
hour that the French fired at Verdun in 1918. And yet the main
centre of Soviet steel production before the war was in the
Ukraine, using the coal of the Donetz basin and the iron ore of
KrivoiRog. The Nazis conquered this area in 1941, and still hold it. 1
How has this extraordinary recovery been possible ? There are
three reasons. One is the extreme efficiency of the Soviet economic
system, the system of socialism which, according to anti-socialists,
" cannot possibly work." The second is the devotion of the
Soviet mine, factory, and transport workers, who are toiling
under terrible conditions to preserve their way of life.
But these would not have been enough without a third factor,
namely Soviet science. Most of the details of how science is
applied in the Soviet factories are secret, as they are in Britain.
But we do know something of the work of the geologists who
made it possible to move industry east. If the Midlands of England
were invaded, it would be no use moving steelworks to the
Scottish Highlands, for there is no coal there, and not much iron.
It would be little use moving them to Lancashire, Durham, or the
Clyde, for the output of coal could not be doubled in a year, even
if all the miners were moved also.
Lenin saw that his country could not be industrialized without
a full knowledge of its geology. The Soviet Government rapidly
built up the world's greatest geological survey. By 1940 it em-
ployed two thousand fully trained geologists, besides about eight
thousand assistants, and cost a thousand million roubles a year.
If you take the rouble's purchasing power at about sixpence, this
* s 2 5?o,ooo; and I think this is a fair estimate, based on the
price of bread, though before the war the rouble went much
further than sixpence in buying books or theatre tickets, and not
so far with clothes.
1 It was reconquered in 1943.
206 SCIENCE ADVANCES
The British geological survey, if I remember, employed ten
geologists in the field; though we still have a lot to find out, for
example, the extent of the Kent coalfield. The geology of the
British Empire is largely unknown, and much of the knowledge
is a secret of mining and oil companies. No area of comparable
size has been half as well studied as the Soviet Union.
Apart from the Lena goldfields, the only minerals in Siberia
which were being mined on any great scale before the Revolution
were the coals of the Kuznetz basin, but even this had been barely
scratched. It is now believed that this area and the Tungus basin
contain enough coal to last the whole world at its present rate of
consumption for seven centuries. The Karaganda coalfield is
smaller, but very important because it lies between two great
metalliferous areas. The Tungus and Karaganda coalfields were
only found after the Revolution. The Karaganda coal is used to
smelt the copper of Kounrad, also discovered by Soviet geolo-
gists, and the iron and other metals of the Ural region round
Magnitogorsk, which was enormously developed after the
Revolution.
The Caucasian oilfields were, of course, known before the
Revolution, but the new oilfield discovered between the Urals
and the Volga was of great importance when the Nazi thrust to
Stalingrad cut the main lines of supply from the Caucasus.
Supplies of many other metals were discovered; for example,
magnesium, which is used for aeroplane construction and for
firebombs, at Solikamsk, along with the world's biggest potash
deposit. Even tin, which is one of the few metals of which the
Union is short, has been found in Siberia.
"Move industry east" was one of the tasks of the second and
third Five Year Plans, not merely as a safeguard against invasion
but to equalize the development of different nations in the Soviet
Union. It was not merely uneconomic to take steel for thousands
of miles from Ukraine to Siberia, when it could be made on the
spot, or to take raw cotton from Tashkent to Moscow, and send
cotton goods back again. Stalin saw that the formerly subject
peoples had a right to industrial development. The war speeded
up this movement vastly. Factory equipment and workers from
Ukraine were loaded into trains and put down in Kazakhstan or
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 2O7
Siberia to start new factories. This was possible because the
newly discovered minerals were near the surface. A hundred and
fifty years ago we were still working coal outcrops in Britain.
The coal was a few feet below the surface, and no deep shafts had
to be sunk. This is the case today in the newly found Soviet coal-
fields* A factory can be built near an outcrop and get its coal in
carts. So production started very quickly. Of course, there were
other advantages, notably the absence of landlords to bargain
with. But socialism would not have been enough without science.
The two thousand Soviet field geologists played a big part in
building up the resistance of the Red Army, and thus helped to
save the world.
Colder than the Pole
In England and other capitalist countries some scientists work
in universities, generally on "pure" science, that is to say on
research which is not undertaken to solve a particular practical
problem. Others work for the Government or for different firms.
Their results are sometimes embodied in patents, which may be
used for production. But very often their only "use" is to prevent
competitors from using a process.
In the Soviet Union there is no sharp line between pure and
applied science. However, if a scientist wants to research on a
problem which interests him but has no immediate value, he or
she is often asked also to undertake some research on a current
industrial problem, just as British university professors have to
do teaching as well as research. And of course all discoveries,
even if they are kept secret from foreigners, are put at the disposal
of an entire industry.
As compared with Britain or Germany, the Soviet Union is
poor in coal resources on a basis of tons per unit area, though
richer in oil And many industrial centres are a very long way
from large coalfields. Even if there were much more coal, the
Soviets would not squander it as British capitalists have done. So
they have paid particular attention to using coal-gas as fully as
possible, and also natural gas which occurs in the oilfields.
208 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Now if several minerals occur together they can be separated
in various ways. For example, tin dioxide and gold are heavier
than the quartz where they are found, and can be separated by
crushing it, and washing the lighter quartz away, by making the
gold combine with cyanide, and so on. But it is very hard to
separate gases so long as they remain gases, thoygh fairly easy
once they are liquefied by cold. Thus neon for neon lamps boils
at a lower temperature than air, and is made by liquefying air,
collecting the fraction which boils last, liquefying again, collect-
ing the last fraction again, and so on. This is quite similar to the
method used for separating alcohol from water in making whisky.
Of course the cold is very intense. Solid carbon dioxide, or
"dry ice/' is fairly familiar. It is so cold that it injures your skin
if you hold it in your hand. But it is so hot relative to liquid air
that if you throw dry ice into liquid air it makes it boil. And even
liquid air is hot compared with liquid hydrogen.
The methods of liquefying gases were worked out largely by
Dewar in London and other British, French, Dutch, German,
and American workers. But these methods were suited for a
laboratory rather than a factory. They are now adapted to
factory conditions to some extent. But not on the vast scale
needed in the Soviet Union, where even ten years ago one plant
was liquefying a million cubic feet an hour of coke oven gas.
Twelve years ago the Soviet State Planning Commission
decided to start liquefying gases in a really big way. A laboratory
covering thirty acres was built at Kharkov, and a smaller one at
Moscow. One of the first problems dealt with was how to obtain
from coke oven gas a mixture containing exactly three volumes of
hydrogen to one of nitrogen, so that it could be made into am-
monia by passing an electric discharge through it. For ammonia
was needed for fertilizers in peace and explosives in war.
Another aim is to prepare fairly pure hydrogen, and no doubt
most of the hydrogen used for the barrage balloons round Mos-
cow and Leningrad is made in this way. But this has only been
made possible by very careful research; and if you want to know,
for example, the boiling points of mixtures of oxygen, nitrogen,
and argon, you must read Torochesnikov and Erzova's work on
the subject, published in 1940.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 2CK)
The process of liquefying gases has been considerably cheap-
ened by the work of Kapitza. In the ordinary process air is highly
compressed and cools itself by suddenly expanding. Kapitza saw
that it would lose much more heat if it was made to do work
while expanding, and designed a turbine to operate at liquid air
temperatures to turn as much heat as possible into work.
Today the Soviet Union leads the world both in the theory and
practice of gas liquefaction. The natural gas which comes from
the ground in the oilfields is liquefied; and methane, one of its
constituents, is produced in such quantities that it is used for
driving motor buses. In Britain we call methane "fire damp." It
is the main inflammable gas formed in coal mines, and we do not
use it, but blow it out into the air for fear of explosions.
Near Moscow the most remarkable of all the developments of
gas liquefaction is in progress. Some of the coal seams are near
ground level and only a foot or two thick. The Soviet people do
not want miners to work in such narrow seams. But they do not
want to waste the coal. So they put down boreholes into the coal
seams. Down one borehole is forced a mixture of steam and
oxygen separated from air by liquefaction. The seam is set alight,
and the gas which comes up the other borehole is collected and
cooled down. Not only are tar, benzene, and so on, removed, as
from our lighting gas, but carbon dioxide is condensed to "dry
ice" for refrigerators. The remaining gas is used for light, heat,
and power, and it is hoped in future to meet the entire needs of
Moscow in this way.
It is wonderful to think what this will mean from the human
angle. Instead of coalmines working under dangerous and dirty
conditions, and gas-works which belch out smoke and can be
smelt a mile away, there will be spotlessly clean factories with
machinery controlled by a few skilled men and women. Under
capitalism the worker is subordinated to the machine. Under
socialism the machine becomes the servant of man, as it should be.
In the present war, whenever the Soviet troops are forced
back, they have to destroy such enterprises as these, which are
not merely sources of wealth to the Soviet peoples, but models
for the whole human race of what can be done when the workers
take over production. The Soviet peoples want comfort, cleanli-
210 SCIENCE ADVANCES
ness, even luxury, but they are prepared to forego all these for
freedom. They realize that if they were conquered, their workers
and engineers would have to toil, not to raise the standard of
human life, but to forge new weapons for the Nazi war machine.
Rather than do this they will face cold, poverty, and death.
And those British workers who say that the Red Army is
fighting our battles today, and think that this excuses them from
working all out, should remember that every Nazi advance
means not only a prolongation of the war and a slaughter of
thousands of innocent people, but the destruction of factories
and laboratories whose achievements would have brought
wealth and health not only to the workers of the Soviet Union,
but of Britain.
Vavilov
Among the places which the Red Army has recaptured in its
offensive from Leningrad is the little town of Pushkin, formerly
called Dyetzkoye Selo, or Children's village, and before the
Revolution, Tsarkoye Selo, or Emperor's village. It was one of
the many estates with country houses belonging to members of
the imperial family.
In 1928 I spent some time in one of these houses, which had, I
was told, been given by Queen Victoria to a Grand Duke. There
were no grand dukes left there, but it was full of botanists doing
research among rather incongruous parquet floors, marble mantel-
pieces, and gilt mouldings. They would have preferred proper
sinks and laboratory benches. And if, as I suppose, the Germans
have destroyed this building, some of them will probably be
brought back to build one which is designed as a laboratory
rather than a palace. The bigger buildings at Dyetzkoye Selo
were being used for country holiday homes and sanatoria for
the Leningrad children, but much of the land and some of the
buildings were used for a great plant breeding institute which had
its headquarters in Leningrad.
As early as 1928 it had by far the largest collection of food
plants in the world. In particular, wheats and other cereals from
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 211
all over the world were being grown. The more important
varieties were sown every year, while others were only sown
often enough to keep them alive. The collection included about
100,000 varieties of cereals, as compared with 3,000 in Professor
Percival's collection of wheats at Reading, which was probably
the largest outside the Soviet Union. This collection served a
number of purposes. Some of the varieties were good, and
samples were sent to collective farms, and in the early days to
individual peasants, to try whether they suited their particular
soils and climate. In this way many farms were able to find a
better variety than they had used before.
Other varieties gave a poor yield at best, but they had some
valuable quality, such as resistance to frost, to drought, or to
some particular variety of the mould called rust. It was some-
times possible, by crossing and selective breeding, to combine
these with other desirable characters. Others were merely of
interest in showing curious characters, such as various types
of beard (which are found in some wheats as well as in
barley) or purple grains. By comparison of the variation in re-
lated species, such as wheat and barley, peas and lentils, Vavilov,
who directed the plant breeding institute for some years, formu-
lated the law of homologous variation.
Thus from a study of wheat varieties, he was able to predict
the possibility of types of barley, oats, and rye, some of which
were later found. Similarly one can predict that some day long-
haired varieties of mice and rats will turn up, and that this char-
acter will be inherited in the same way as long hair in rabbits and
guineapigs.
But from the point of view of scientific theory, at least, Vavi-
lov's most important work was on the geographical distribution
of varieties of crop plants. Wheat is much more variable in some
countries than others. Let us see what this means. Most people
know that maize originated in Central or North America, and
was grown as a crop plant by the Mayas, Aztecs, and many
"Indian" tribes. Later maize was brought to Europe, Africa, and
Asia. But only a few of the many varieties were brought. There
are far more varieties of maize in America than in the rest of the
world, and more in Mexico than in the U.S.A., apart from those
212 SCIENCE ADVANCES
recently produced experimentally. Similarly the potato came
from the Andes, and more varieties are found in Peru than any-
where else.
So a botanist, who knew no history but had collected maize
and potatoes in many lands, could infer that maize started in or
near Mexico, and potatoes in or near Peru. Vavilov applied this
principle to the most important crop plants. He found that there
were more varieties of bread wheat in Persia than the whole of
Europe, and more in Afghanistan than in Persia. So he deduced
that bread wheats had originated in the highlands of Afghanistan
or Persia, and that some varieties had been taken down to the
river valleys of India, Irak, and Uzbekistan, where they were
cultivated on a great scale, and spread over much of the world.
On the other hand, macaroni wheats, and other related types
which do not cross readily with bread wheats, originated in
Turkey or Armenia, some barleys in Abyssinia, and so on.
Agriculture did not start, as had been previously believed, in the
great river valleys with complicated class societies, but in small
communities living in mountain valleys and very probably
classless.
The work of this institute was cut down to some extent in the
years before the war, largely because the best varieties had been
selected, and partly because Lysenko's invention of vernalization
rendered many of them less valuable than they were before.
Vavilov was shot about once a year in the American press, though
he continued to communicate papers to the Academy at least up
to 1942.
After the war such scientific institutes will have to be re-
started; and we can hope that they will be on an even larger scale
than before. Vavilov's successors should be able not only to
improve the crop plants of their country, and ultimately of the
whole world, but to increase our knowledge of variation, and to
throw new light on the origin of agriculture, and therefore of
civilization.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 213
Soviet Scientists and Blood Transfusion
Thousands of British men and women are blood donors. Very
few of them know that the methods of blood storage were largely
developed in the Soviet Union. Safe blood transfusion depends
on a knowledge of blood groups, which were discovered by
Landsteiner (now a refugee in New York) in Vienna, and Jannsky
in Prague. In the 1914-18 war a lot of blood was transfused, but
always directly or after keeping for a few hours at longest. Even
in 1922 Keynes claimed to have established a world's record by
transfusing after twenty-seven hours' storage.
In 1927 Professor Shamov of Kharkov took blood from re-
cently killed dogs and injected it into live dogs without harming
them. He approached Professor Yudin of Moscow, who in March
1930 for the first time transferred blood from a dead to a living
man. The dead man had broken his skull, the living had attempted
suicide and lost much blood. He was regarded as a suitable subject
for this experiment, which actually saved his life. Soon after this
Yudin used blood from a corpse which had been stored for three
days. By 1939 this method had been fully worked out.
All cases of sudden death in the streets or public buildings
of Moscow were taken to the Sklifassovski Institute, and blood
was drawn from suitable corpses. It was stored for any time up
to ten days, and used, not only in Moscow but in country districts,
where it was sent by aeroplane. Dr. Skundina found that the
blood from people who have died a violent death does not
clot, except transitorily, and therefore nothing need be added to
prevent it clotting during storage. This is considered an advan-
tage, and Yudin claims that there are fewer cases of illness in the
recipients than when it is taken from living donors.
This work was clearly influenced by dialectical materialism.
Many years ago T. H. Huxley and others had stressed the fact
that death is not an instantaneous process, as it would be if the
soul left the body at a particular moment, and that the tissues
might remain alive after the body as a whole had died. But this
theory never became this-sided outside the Soviet Union. In the
same way Filatov of Odessa was the first to introduce grafts
214 SCIENCE ADVANCES
from the cornea, the transparent window in front of the eye,
from corpses into living people, as a cure for one type of
blindness. Outside the Soviet Union surgeons had waited till an
eye had to be removed from another patient.
Meanwhile Bagdassarov, Briukhonenko, Balakhovski, and
others worked on the storage of blood from living patients.
Bagdassarov finds no changes in the blood during the first four
days, and has carried out several thousand transfusions with
blood stored for periods up to a fortnight, though some English
doctors consider a week to be quite long enough. However, with
special precautions blood has been used even after a month in
the U.S.S.R. In the Soviet Union blood storage has been devel-
oped on a huge scale. In Leningrad there were 1,625 donors of
blood for storage as early as 1936. One thousand and ninety-four
of them were women.
The Soviet methods were used on a very large scale in the
Spanish Republic during its heroic fight against fascism, and were
adapted to war conditions by Dr. Jorda of Barcelona. Dr. Jorda
escaped to London, and has since co-operated with British
doctors. The methods now in use in Britain owe much to his
experience.
Meanwhile there can be no doubt that the Soviet blood storage
service has been greatly expanded to meet the needs of the war.
We may hope, but cannot trust, that British doctors are following
the improvements which must certainly have been made in it as
the result of war experience.
Marxism and Prehistory
Opponents of socialism object to such phrases as "socialist
science" or "Marxist anthropology." They say there is only one
science, which is based on the study of nature, and on reverence
for facts, not theories; and that if anyone's politics or philosophy
make any difference to his science, he is unworthy of the name of
scientist. They always seem to think that they themselves start
with no prejudices.
Now it is obvious that the results of scientific investigation
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 215
depend on the questions which one sets out to investigate. For
example, Charles Darwin deVoted some years to the study of
barnacles, while his eldest son George studied the sun, moon,
and stars. Naturally they got different results. But, no doubt
under his father's influence, the son applied the idea of evolution
to astronomy, and showed how tidal friction lengthened the day
and made the moon slowly move farther away from the earth.
In the same way Marxists are particularly interested in the
ordinary man and woman, and they are interested in change. If
you look at a list of Soviet works on mineralogy, you will notice
how many deal with the transformations which minerals undergo.
The most internationally famous Soviet chemist is probably
Semenov, who has worked on changes in gaseous systems, for
example, in explosion motors.
The field in which Soviet workers disagree most with those of
other countries is that of prehistory. In a sense all students of
prehistory must be Marxists to some extent, because, apart from
their bones, and bones and shells which are relics of their food,
almost all our knowledge of the early human peoples comes from
a study of their tools. Their art is striking, but there is not much
of it. A single volume will contain reproductions of all known
Western European stone age art. The peoples are classified, not
by their colour, language, or religion, of which we know nothing,
but by their implements. Almost everywhere we find that an age
of unpolished stone tools, or paleolithic age, was succeeded by a
neolithic age where stone tools were polished, and these by an age
of copper and bronze tools, followed by an iron age. The few
exceptions prove the rule. There was never a bronze age in New
Zealand, because the Maoris used stone till the nineteenth cen-
tury, when the English invaders brought iron with them.
Every serious student of the old stone age must himself learn
the art of stone chipping. Only when archaeologists had done this
did they find out that in palaeolithic times there were two distinct
methods of chipping flints; one centred in Africa where the core
of a flint was shaped into a hand axe or axe head, and one centred
in Asia where the tools were flakes struck off the central core.
These two cukures met in Europe.
The Marxist prehistorians of the Soviet Union have added
2l6 SCIENCE ADVANCES
greatly to our knowledge of undoubted facts. One single site in
the Soviet Union has yielded more scuplture of the old stone age
than all Western Europe. And they have also proved that in the
old stone age men lived in houses as well as caves. The most
remarkable of these houses, or rather its remains, was excavated
at Kostienki on the Don. It was partly underground, with stout
wooden walls, and probably roofed with skins or turfs. Its
occupants hunted mammoths at a time when the climate was a
good deal colder than now. This particular house was 113 feet
long by 1 8 feet wide, and had a row of nine fireplaces down its
centre. This is taken to mean that nine families lived in it together.
We may compare this with a typical village of the new stone age,
such as that of Skara Brae in Orkney.
Here there were a number of single-roomed houses, ranging
from about twenty feet to fourteen feet square. Clearly the
families lived separately. The primitive unity of the tribe had
been broken up. This break-up coincided with the origin of
agriculture and stock-breeding, and therefore of private property
other than tools and weapons. If Engels was right, the private
property caused the break-up.
The neolithic peoples began to make pottery. This was a slow
job before the invention of the wheel. Each pot had to be built up
by hand, dried, and then baked. Soviet workers have examined
the finger-prints on neolithic pottery, and say that they were
made by the fingers of women. If they are right, this is the first
certain evidence for division of labour. Many neolithic people
also spun and wove textiles, but no one yet knows whether this
was done by women only. Nor do we know whether, as in some
primitive societies of today, women specialized in gardening and
men in herding.
Soviet archaeologists also claim to trace the growth of social
classes from funeral customs. Many palaeolithic peoples buried the
dead under the floor of the house or cave, so that in a sense the
family was not broken up even by death. Early neolithic people
went in for great communal tombs, especially round the Mediter-
ranean. These were sometimes caves, but sometimes underground
houses with imitation door-posts, and so on, containing hundreds
of skeletons. The earliest neolithic tombs in Britain were long
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 217
barrows, which served as tombs for numbers of people. During
the neolithic age communal burial went out of fashion. In Eng-
land the long barrows were succeeded by smaller round barrows
containing one or at most a few skeletons, often of warriors with
bronze weapons. As bronze became commoner these were re-
placed by cemeteries containing numerous urns. These changes
have been put down to conquests, first by bands whose chiefs
were powerful, later by societies where the warriors were more
or less equal.
Marxist archaeologists say that they reflect changes in produc-
tive relations. Communal burial went out with communal owner-
ship. Individual burial in round barrows showed the beginning
of societies where the wealth took the form of cattle, and the
chief could afford bronze weapons. Such societies are described
in the book of Genesis. As bronze weapons got cheaper, most
men could afford them; and societies became more equalitarian,
though not communistic. Very likely the truth lies somewhere
between these views. For it is probable that the origin of class
society led to wars between tribes as well as oppression within a
tribe.
After the war I hope that a full account may be published in
English both of the facts discovered by Soviet archaeologists and
of the theories which they have based on them. But it is already
clear that Marxism has had a great and fruitful influence on the
study of primitive human ^societies.
A Banned Film
I have just watched the best scientific film that I have ever
seen. Unfortunately you are very unlikely to see it. It is a film of
wild life in the Kara-Koom desert, near the Aral Sea in Kazakh-
stan. It was shown at a recent meeting of the Zoological Society.
More accurately, only two-thirds of it were shown, as the show
started nearly an hour late. This hour had been mainly occupied
by a very acrimonious private business meeting of the society, at
which various fellows attacked the society's present administra-
tion, and accused the council of using emergency legislation to
stifle criticism of itself.
21 8 SCIENCE ADVANCES
The Kara-Koom is a sandy desert with shifting dunes, like
some parts of the Libyan desert. It is worth noting that most of
the world's desert area is not particularly sandy, but consists of
rocks or clay. However, sandy deserts are more picturesque, and
give photographers a better chance. A certain number of willows
and other shrubs grow in the Kara-Koom sandhills, and a few
animals live on them. But none of the vegetarian animals are
much larger than a rat, and the larger ones are carnivores. As
some of these were shown catching their prey, bodies such as the
L.C.C. will not license the film for public exhibition.
The first character to appear was a little burrowing rodent
something like a squirrel, which came out of its hole to nibble the
plants. The technical level of the film was amazing. Presumably it
was taken with a telephoto lens with a camouflaged camera, but
the detail was given with a softness which would have done full
justice to any actress* complexion.
An owl was seen on the look-out for its prey, but it was not
till a good deal later in the film that this ground squirrel, or
another similar one, met its death. It was killed by a snake re-
lated to the boa, which burrowed just below the surface of the
sand, so that all that could be seen of it was a ridge of sand
growing at the front. This boa rolled itself round its prey, and
squashed it to death very quickly. It then licked it, and expanded
its jaws as only a snake can, to swallow it. By comparison with
the snake's head this was about as serious a task as for a man to
swallow a football. But an animal which onlj^gets a meal a month
cannot aspire to elegant table manners. In the next shot, the snake,
or another of the same species, was attacked by a large lizard, and
defended itself by wrapping itself round its head and neck. After
several rounds both reptiles had had enough, and separated,
though I think the snake, which had several bites in its neck, had
had the worst of it.
We then went on to a scene of primary accumulation by force
which would have delighted Herr Diihring. An industrious dung
beetle had formed a ball of dry dung which she was rolling along
to a suitable place for burial. She was attacked by three other
members of her species, and there was a fine confused fight. As
beetles are heavily armoured none of them was hurt, and finally
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 219
one of them rushed off with the ball, dug a hole for it, laid an egg
in it, and covered it with sand.
The next character was an animal of a kind somewhere between
a spider and a scorpion, reputed to be poisonous to man, and not
found in England. This was seen killing a scorpion and a lizard,
and fighting with its own kind.
Finally we watched a poisonous snake. Instead of moving head
first like every other vertebrate of which I can think, it moved
sideways like a crab, with a loop of its body in front. Thus when
the loop had reached any point, it could instantly fling its head
several feet in front of it. In this way it killed a small jerboa, or
jumping rat, which died in convulsions in about half a minute,
and was eaten. As I have had several convulsions myself as the
result of poisoning, though not with snake venom, I have no
reason to think the jerboa suffered any pain.
Unfortunately, owing to the internal conflicts of the Zoo-
logical Society, we were unable to see the third reel of this film,
which I am told showed the irrigation of this desert, and ended
on a peaceful note.
Ought such a film to be shown, or is it the modern equivalent
of the fights between animals which the ancient Romans watched
in the arena? Certainly it included nothing as horrible as that
very familiar sight, a cat playing with a mangled and dying
mouse. These wild animals wasted no time in killing and eating
their prey. We are much too apt to sentimentalize about animals,
and forget that beasts are apt to be beastly. Many wild animals
live by killing others, and any account of their life which glosses
over this fact is simply false.
I believe that this film, quite apart from its great artistic merit,
is of quite sufficient value to warrant showing it to students of
zoology both at universities and schools. And I find it is a little
hard to believe that an audience, which had walked to a cinema
through bombed streets, would faint at a record of the fact that
animals, as well as men, kill one another.
22O SCIENCE ADVANCES
Genetics in the Soviet Union
It is somewhat difficult to get an objective view of the state of
science in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, along with genuine
records of fine achievements, exaggerated stories of Soviet dis-
covery and invention are put about. Typical communist success
stories, did you say? We Europeans are often amused to read
newspaper cables from the U.S.A. claiming credit for American
discoveries which had actually been made in Europe some years
earlier. And no doubt Americans have their laughs at similar
stories from capitalist Europe.
As against this, we are told that science is at a very low ebb in
the Soviet Union. No research is encouraged except what is
thought to be of immediate value to industry, agriculture, or war.
No theory may be published which does not conform with the
canons of dialectical materialism. The intellectual liberty which is
an essential condition of scientific progress is completely absent.
And so on. One of the most important and successful lines of
German propaganda in preparation for the present war was the
spreading of such views as the above, with the object of prevent-
ing any co-operation of the British and French ruling classes and
the Soviet Union which could have prevented the outbreak of
the war.
As a matter of fact some branches of science are highly devel-
oped in the U.S.S.R., and others rather poorly. Thus physical
chemistry is making great strides. Semenov's work on gas re-
actions is of the first importance. On the other hand, research
along the lines of classical organic chemistry is less important, 1 in
spite of the good work of pre-revolutionary Russian chemists
such as Reformatsky. In mathematics very little is being done on
such favourite American topics as finite group theory, but in the
study of probability the Soviet Union seems to be ahead of America.
It is easy, for propaganda purposes on either side, to pick on the
bright or dark patches. In a general way Russian science re-
1 About 10 per cent of the papers on organic chemistry cited in British Chemical
Abstracts in 1939 were from Soviet laboratories, as compared with over 20 per
cent of those on mineral and soil chemistry.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 221
sembles American science forty years ago. Many of the leaders
are training students in a number of different subjects rather than
concentrating on one line of research. So many new institutions
are being opened that a larger number of second-rate men and
women are obtaining posts than in England before the war, or
America today, where expansion is or was much less rapid. We
may look for a gigantic flowering of Soviet science in another
generation, corresponding to that of America in the last fifteen
years, but on a considerably larger scale, since the opportunities
for education are more widespread.
Nevertheless, even today the Soviet Union is leading the world
in certain branches of science. In geography the Soviet arctic
explorers have taken the lead which was held by such men as
Peary and Amundsen. In cryology (the study of cold) Soviet
scientists are ahead of the rest of the world in methods of sepa-
rating gases from mixtures by liquefaction and fractional evapora-
tion. Their work on soils and their transformation is superior to
that of other countries, though here it must be admitted that
Glinka laid the foundations before the revolution; and so in
many other branches. In the rest of this article I shall deal with
Soviet genetics, my own branch of science, of which I naturally
know most.
Let us begin with the criticisms which have been made. Two
first-rate Russian geneticists have refused to return to their
country and are occupying positions elsewhere, Dobzhansky in
Pasadena and Timofeeff-Ressovsky in Berlin. In the Soviet
Union Tsetverikov, Agol, and Levit have lost their posts. Agol
is alleged to have been imprisoned, or even executed. And
Lysenko, who is admitted to be a first-rate plant physiologist, has
attacked the basic theories of genetics.
Now let us look at the credit side. Under the guidance of
Vavilov an immense mass of data on the genetics of cultivated
plants has been accumulated. His school has also studied the
related wild plants not only in the Soviet Union, but as far away
as Abyssinia and Peru. This work has led to some very important
results. Vavilov was the first to formulate the law of homologous
variation in related species, now confirmed and extended by
Sturtevant and other workers in America. He determined the
222 SCIENCE ADVANCES
places of origin of our more important cultivated plants. This
was done under the direct stimulus of Marxist theory, according
to which the domestication of these plants was a far more impoj>
tant historical (or rather prehistorical) event than the wars and
other political happenings with which written history is mainly
concerned. Special attention was paid to the evolution of weeds.
These may evolve into cultivated plants. Thus rye is a weed in
the wheat crop in warm climates, forms a mixed crop with wheat
in primitive agriculture at intermediate temperatures, and re-
places wheat in the north or on mountains.
A vast amount of detailed observation of plant chromosomes
was done by Levitsky, Navashin, and others. This was necessary
for Vavilov's work, and has put the whole question of crop plant
hybridization on a more scientific basis. A number of very re*
markable hybrids, for example, between wheat and couch grass,
are now being tested out.
In the field of fruit genetics we may notice Rybin's synthesis of
the plum from the hybridization of the wild cherry-plum and
sloe; There can be little doubt that our cultivated plums origi-
nated in this way. On the other hand, Soviet geneticists have done
little or nothing on the genetics of ornamental plants such as the
sweet pea, the poppy, and the various Primulas, which have led
to important theoretical results elsewhere. They have concen-
trated on economically important plants, though their studies of
them have been very thorough, and have included problems of
no immediate economic importance.
In animal genetics Soviet workers on poultry such as Sere-
brovsky have covered much the same field as those of other
lands; but as regards sheep, cattle, camels, and other larger
animals, they are in a class by themselves. For example, Vassin is
now mapping the genes on sheep chromosomes. The large scale
of Soviet animal husbandry makes artificial insemination on a
vast scale possible. A single ram or bull may have several thousand
children available for study. A particularly interesting line is the
study of the biochemical differences between and within breeds.
For example, the blood chemistry of race-horses and cart-horses
is compared, and also that of efficient and inefficient members of
the two breeds. Nothing of this kind is being done elsewhere.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 223
''Formal genetics," as it is called in Russia, received a great
impetus from the visits of C. B. Bridges and H. J. Muller, two
leading American geneticists, who introduced Drosophila to the
Soviet Union. This little fly gets through thirty or more genera-
tions a year, and you can grow four hundred in a milk bottle, so
it is uniquely suited for the study of inheritance. Russian workers
took it up enthusiastically, but much of their work was inspired
by Muller, and was of the same general character as similar work
done in the U.S.A. However, one group took up the genetical
analysis of populations, which had been started by Soviet poultry
and cattle geneticists, and applied it to Drosophila populations. It
turns out that although the flies look alike, large numbers of
them carry concealed recessive genes. So when their offspring are
inbred, a great variety of abnormal insects is produced. This line
of work was started by Tsetverikov, but carried on on a vast
scale by Dubinin and others. It has been confirmed on a smaller
scale in the U.S.A. and Britain, and has led to new perspectives
both of evolution and of human congenital disease.
Let us now look at the criticisms against this background of
solid and often brilliant achievement. Dobzhansky and Timo-
feeff-Ressovsky got good jobs abroad, as dozens of British
scientists have done in the last twenty years without any sug-
gestion that British science is persecuted. Tsetverikov was a
serious loss to research. The other two dismissed workers had
not done work of great originality. But several good British
geneticists have recently lost their posts, one for marrying a
Chinese wife, another for trying to expose corruption in an
institute, and a third for disproving one of his professor's pet
theories. Similar events have occurred in America.
Lysenko's attack on genetics is much more interesting. The
public in the Soviet Union is intensely interested in biological
problems, and Lysenko's attacks were widely reported in the
daily newspapers. Now such attacks are not uncommon. Pro-
fessor Jeffrey of Harvard has attacked genetical science much less
temperately and on much flimsier evidence than Lysenko. So has
Professor MacBride in London. But such attacks are not hot news
in New York or London, because the publics of those cities are
much less interested in genetics than is that of Moscow. Some of
224 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Lysenko's points are, I think, valid against genetics as often
taught, rather than against the theories held by competent
geneticists. He was quite right in saying that so-called pure lines
of plants are generally mixtures, and that an exact three to one
ratio in accordance with Mendel's law is very rarely obtained. He
also stated that in tomatoes and related plants a number of
characters described as hereditary can be propagated by grafting.
In just the same way Little, Bittner, and other workers at Bar
Harbor, Maine, found that the tendency to breast cancer in mice,
formerly regarded as hereditary, was largely transmitted through
the mother's milk. Lysenko further pointed out that a great deal
of successful animal and plant breeding is carried out without
any reference to the results of genetical research in the last forty
years, and that geneticists have made exaggerated claims for the
economic value of their science. In both cases he was right,
though the economic value of genetics is greater than he thinks.
I am convinced that he went much too far both in his attack
on the chromosome theory, and in his claims concerning the
possibility of transferring characters by grafting. But what has
been the result of his attacks ? Vavilov was their chief target.
Vavilov still directs research on a vast scale. So far from having
been muzzled for his alleged anti-Darwinian views he com-
municated seventeen papers on genetical topics to the Moscow
Academy of Sciences between January ist and April loth of
I94O. 1 Lysenko attacked "formal genetics," that is to say genetics
which is concerned with such questions as locating genes in
chromosomes, rather than in finding out how they act in the
development of an individual, or arise and spread during the
evolution of a species. It may be that under the stimulus of so
brilliant a teacher as Muller, an unduly large fraction of the
younger Soviet geneticists had occupied themselves with formal
genetics. However that may be, formal genetics goes on in the
Soviet Union, and the output of work in this field is a good deal
larger than in England, even before the war.
In the controversy between Vavilov and Lysenko, I would
personally give Vavilov best on most points. Nevertheless, I
1 Vavilov's name is now less prominent, but up till June 1941 the output of
genetical work showed no sign of abatement.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 225
welcome the controversy, and wish that similar debates else-
where were given equal publicity. I have little doubt that when I
taught genetics (owing to the war I no longer do so) I made a
number of misleading statements. I should be a better teacher if
these were pointed out in a public debate to which I could reply.
But in England things are done differently. Five years ago there
were two professors of genetics in England. Now there is none. 1
These chairs were not suppressed as the consequence of a public
debate, but in all probability as a result of some old gentlemen
talking the matter over privately after a good dinner. If my
science must be attacked, I prefer the democratic Soviet method.
I think the position of genetics is fairly typical of that of Soviet
science in general. Large-scale work, so far as possible, is concen-
trated on organisms, substances, or processes, which may be of
economic importance, but a great deal of latitude is allowed. Any
knowledge about cows, coal, gas explosions, or arctic ice, may
be of value some day. So there is no restriction on what aspect is
investigated. If basic principles can only be worked out on eco-
nomically unimportant objects such as Drosophila, then these are
used. In all research the historical angle is stressed so far as
possible, whether it be a question of human history as in the case
of Vavilov's work on crops, or of changes in insect populations,
as in Dubinin's. This latter tendency, along with a distrust of
over-mechanical theories, is no doubt an effect of dialectical
materialism, and to my mind a desirable one.
But as dialectical materialism is a method of thought and
action, not a dogma, it is hard to see how it could influence
decisions on such controversies as this, except indeed by sug-
gesting that certain possibilities should be explored, even were
every Soviet scientist compelled to adhere to this philosophy,
which is, of course, not the case. Anyone who studies the record
of the genetical controversy recently published in Under the
banner of Marxism, and particularly of the interruptions, will
certainly realize that thought on scientific topics is pretty free in
Moscow.
I must confess that the genetical theory of racial inequality,
widely held not only in Germany but in the U.S.A. and Britain,
1 One chair has since been revived.
H
226 SCIENCE ADVANCES
which has played its part in bringing about such events, seems to
me considerably more important than those which are now being
disputed in the U.S.S.R. And I could wish that those of my
European and American colleagues who have taken up the
cudgels on behalf of Vavilov, who is not incapable of self-
defence, would transfer some of their energies to an attack on
this doctrine.
Soviet Children as Scientists
The children of the Soviet Union are fighting heroically in the
occupied regions, and elsewhere they are taking their full share
in production. I am going to write about some of the things they
did in peace time, ana will do so again when the war is over.
In Britain many school children learn science, but they have
little chance of making any discoveries for themselves. In the
Soviet Union some children make discoveries. Here are two
examples of how country boys and girls worked on birds.
As in our own country, many birds fly south in autumn to
warmer countries, and north in spring. British birds have to cross
the sea, but in the Soviet Union they fly thousands of miles over-
land. In order to discover what routes they took the children in
hundreds of country schools started trapping birds. The traps
were carefully designed so as not to hurt them.
Each bird had a numbered ring put on its leg and was then let
loose. Results began to come in when the same bird was caught
two or three times in different places. The dates and places at
which birds were caught were noted down, and the results
worked out by other school children in the big towns.
It was rather like the way in which Fighter Command Head-
quarters follows the movement of German bombers from reports
of the Observer Corps, except that of course there was no hurry
about it. The work was not finished when war broke out. But
when it is complete, a good deal more will be known about the
migration of Soviet birds than about British.
Other children, or perhaps the same ones, studied the feeding
habits of starlings and other birds which can be induced to nest
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 227
in a box. When the nestlings were fairly well grown, they were
taken out of the nest, and replaced by a wooden figure of a nest-
ling which opened its beak when the mother or father alighted on
a perch to feed it. The children made the dummy nestlings them-
selves, though I don't suppose they designed them.
The birds, or at least some of them, were completely taken in,
and kept on feeding the dummies. The food collected in a tin
below. The next job was to take it out, and count the numbers of
different kinds of insects, worms, and so on, collected each day.
In this way the children could learn for themselves which birds
were most useful to the farmers and gardeners in keeping down
pests. The same kind of work has been done in other countries,
but it generally involved killing a bird to see what food it had in
its crop. And if research of this kind is done in hundreds of schools,
it must give a mass of information which will not only help
agriculture, but tell us a lot about how birds adapt themselves to
different diets in different surroundings.
These are the children whom the Nazis regard as uncivilized
members of an inferior race, who must be massacred to protect
Europe from the menace of Bolshevism.
Slubo
If I can follow the Nazi philosophy (and I may well have
failed in this very difficult task) the characteristics of a race
depend on its blood and soil. This doctrine of "Blut und Boden,"
or "Blubo," as it is called for short by the children who have to
attend lectures on it, has a primary appeal to the emotions.
Nevertheless, it claims some sort of scientific basis, just as numer-
ous theologies, which represent illegitimate intellectualizations of
the quite genuine religious emotion, have claimed to be queens of
the sciences in the past.
I am no pedologist, as those who study soil call themselves.
But my meagre acquaintance with that science leads me to
believe that while the soils of Germany are very diverse, none of
them is peculiar to Germany. Friesland is not unlike northern
Holland, Brandenburg is like Western Poland, and so on.
228 SCIENCE ADVANCES
With haematology, on the other hand, I have more than a
bowing acquaintance. I spent three months in learning to measure
amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in a cubic centimetre of
blood. As a hospital biochemist I have performed estimations of
blood urea to decide whether or not it was safe to operate in
cases of prostate disease, and many other routine analyses. I have
certainly produced and measured greater changes in my own
blood than anyone else has ever done. And it is about eighteen
years since I first learned how to determine the group to which
the blood of an individual belongs. So perhaps my knowledge of
human blood from a scientific point of view is equal to that of
Herr Hitler from the emotional angle.
And the scientific study of the connexion between blood and
race has led to very definite results. The pioneers were two
Polish doctors, Ludwik Hirzfeld and his wife Anna. They worked
at the State Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw, so they may be dead
today. But their work is not.
In 1900 Landsteiner in Vienna discovered that transfusion of
blood from one man or woman to another caused illness or
death in certain cases, and that the bloods which he investigated
fell into three groups. He did some preliminary work on their
inheritance. In^oyjannskyin Bohemia discovered a fourth group,
and Moss in New York confirmed his discovery independently in
the next year. During the war of 1914-18 blood transfusion
became important, and it was in Salonika, where the Hirzfelds
were working with the allied armies, that they made the striking
discovery that the frequencies of the groups were very different
in different peoples. They sent a paper on their discovery to the
British Medical Journal which refused to print it. Finally it was
published in the Lancet.
In 1910 von Dungern and Hirzfeld first systematically investi-
gated the inheritance of blood group membership, but it was not
till 1924 that Bernstein of Gottingen, now, like Landsteiner, a
refugee in New York, stated the laws of this inheritance in the
form which is now almost universally accepted as correct. These
laws are used, under the Bastardy Act in Britain, and similar laws
in other countries, as tests of paternity in disputed cases.
The full significance of the HirzfelcTs discovery now began to
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 229
appear. Physical anthropologists had long been measuring
physical characters, such as skin colour and skull shape in dif-
ferent human groups. They were known to be partly determined
by heredity, but environment certainly influences them to some
extent. Our skins become browner in summer. Certain primitive
folk distort the heads of their children as civilized nations distort
their feet. On the other hand blood group membership is abso-
lutely fixed at birth (and indeed much earlier) and the laws of its
inheritance are extremely simple. For the first time anthro-
pologists could study a character in whose genesis environment
played no part. If similar psychological characteristics are ever
found, the problem of the relation between race and culture will
be soluble, at least in principle.
It would have satisfied those who stress the difference between
human races if the distinction between races had been sharp. If
you take a lock of hair from a European and a negro you can
assign it to the right race with almost complete certainty. But if
you take a drop of blood you cannot. Actually if the bloods are
taken from an Englishman and a Senegalese respectively, you will
get the right answer in 62 per cent of cases, instead of 50 per cent
by mere guessing. In the most favourable case, the distinction
between an Eskimo and a Blackfoot Indian from the Rocky
Mountains, you would only be right in 82 per cent of cases. If
you used other more delicate techniques you would increase the
certainty of your diagnosis, but you would never be right in 100
per cent of cases. In fact, if you want to be accurate it is better to
say that you are of pure European hair than of pure European
blood!
The reason for this is that every race so far studied includes
members of more than one group, and most of them include
members of all four. So the characteristic of a race is not member-
ship of a particular blood group, but the proportions in which the
various groups are found. The four groups are sometimes num-
bered, but are more usually designated as O, A, B, and AB,
according as the blood corpuscles carry neither, one, or both, of
two substances A and B. No one has been able to demonstrate
any increase or decrease of fitness due to either of these sub-
stances. Hence the frequencies remain almost constant from one
230 SCIENCE ADVANCES
generation to another. Nor do they change, at least within a few
centuries, when a people migrates to a different soil and climate.
On the other hand, when two races intermarry the proportions
in the mixed race are intermediate.
There is, of course, nothing in all this to surprise physical
anthropologists. When we say that the Swedes are long-headed
and the Swiss round-headed, we do not mean that every Swede
has a long head and every Swiss a round head. We mean that
long heads are commoner in Sweden than Switzerland. Blood
groups are a better anthropological character than head shapes in
so far as they are clear cut and their heredity is understood, but a
worse one in so far as they cannot be determined on skeletons,
though this is occasionally possible with mummies.
Germany and Japan have led the world in the determination of
blood group membership on large numbers, but good data exist
for Finland, Poland, and some parts of Italy, whilst the pre-
Columbian peoples of America have been extensively studied.
The Soviet data are rather scrappy considering the vast material
available, but are better than those for Britain, France, Spain,
Sweden, and Norway. Over a quarter of a million determinations
have been made in Japan, as compared with less than a thousand
in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. When, however, the data on those
who have volunteered as blood donors during the present war
are collected, the British figures should be fairly satisfactory, 1
though still not so good as the German or Japanese. Steffan and
Wellisch in Germany and Boyd in Boston have collected most of
the data for the whole world. The differences are obvious when
samples are large. Thus among about 5,000 Londoners, 45 per
cent belong to group O, 44 per cent to group A, 8 per cent to
group B, and 3 per cent to group AB; among 30,000 Berliners
the figures are 37, 41, 15, and 7 per cent, whilst 5,000 inhabitants
of Leningrad have 32, 37, 23, and 8 per cent. The most striking
change as we go eastwards in Europe is the increase in the num-
ber of people who have the B substance, from about 10 per cent
in Britain, Spain, and Belgium, to 37 per cent in the Perm district
of the Urals.
At the International Genetical Congress held in Edinburgh in
1 They already are so in 1944.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 231
Europe I showed maps based on counts of seventy-five European
populations. We can draw contour lines across Europe so that to
the east of a given line, all large samples have more than, say,
20 per cent of members carrying the B substance, while to the
west of it less than 20 per cent possess it. These contour lines run
roughly north and south, though of course they are not quite
straight. For example, the Czechs have more of the B substance
than the German-speaking peoples to their north and south, and
the Greeks and Turks have less of it than the peoples of the
Balkans to the north.
If we made a relief map on the basis of these contours, we
should find that the Soviet Union was represented by a large
plateau with a gentle slope, broken by a few peaks caused by
primitive folks such as the Votyaks, and depressions represented
by Jews. Curiously enough, the blood group frequencies among
the Jews of Odessa are very close to those of the Gentiles of
Konigsberg. Esthonia, Latvia, and Poland form part of the
Russian plateau, but Finland and Lithuania are well below it,
though above Germany.
The contour lines are crowded together in the Baltic, since
Scandinavia has far less of the B substance than the countries east
of that sea. There is also a sharp slope from east to west in Ger-
many. East Prussia is on the level of Bulgaria and the Swedish-
speaking Finns, whilst Munich and the Rhineland are comparable
with Scandinavia, Scotland, Paris, and Lombardy. In western
Europe the level of B is low, but less regular than that of the
Russian plain. The lowest figures for B are a rather doubtful one
for Madrid and a still more doubtful one based on a small number
of Basques.
In Eurasia as a whole we find the highest proportion of B
among the "depressed classes" in India, though even among
Brahmins it is well above the European level. It is also high
among the Buriats in southern Siberia. The frequency falls off as
we go either eastwards or westwards from central Asia into
populations where it was originally rare or absent.
Among the Atlantic peoples who have little B, there are great
differences in the amount of A. The people of Ireland (both
Dublin and Belfast) have far less of it than those of London and
232 SCIENCE ADVANCES
East Anglia; and the scanty data for Scotland, Wales, and western
England, seem to put them in an intermediate position. 1 Germany,
because its forests and mountains acted as barriers against infil-
tration from the east, shows such heterogeneity that one cannot
speak of a German race as one can of a Japanese or even a Russian
race. But the British Isles, which seem to include samples of the
neolithic peoples of western Europe little affected by later move-
ments, are even more heterogeneous than Germany.
To take a single example of the application of "Blubo," the
bloods of the peoples of Danzig arc intermediate between those
of eastern Germany and Poland. So on this criterion Danzig
should remain a "free city." To my mind such a conclusion
deserves to be ranked with the mitigation of the Sunchild's
sentence in Erewhon on account of the meritorious colour of His
hair. It seems fairly obvious that the primary criterion of the
legal nationality of any people should be their own wishes, while
the economic and strategical interests of neighbours should not
always be neglected.
The facts about human blood form a part of the science of
physical anthropology, as do those concerning skin pigmentation.
If the pigments in the skin of our Indian fellow-subjects absorbed
in the ultra-violet region only, instead of the visible region, as
they actually do, we should be unable to distinguish them except
by careful tests, and should be much more likely to treat them as
equals. We may hope that, by the time the facts concerning blood
group membership are widely known, it will also be realized that
they serve to unite the human peoples rather than to divide them.
If I want a blood transfusion, and no tests are available for the
donors, I shall do best, as a member of group O, to pick a Maya
or a Pueblo Indian. If you belong to group B you had better
choose an "untouchable" from India. Perhaps it might have been
better for the Nazi philosophy if Hitler had confined his attention
to hair and noses, and left the study of blood to those who are
more interested in saving lives than in taking them.
1 This is confirmed by figures published during the war.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 233
Lessons in British Schools
I was recently asked to address a number of London school
teachers on the teaching of biology. As a preliminary I read a
number of the publications of the School Nature Study Union.
Many of them were excellent.
The suggested lessons were often very well designed to
interest children in the animals and plants around them. But the
attempts to link this interest up with everyday life were not so
satisfactory.
The worst example occurs in a Scheme for the teaching of
biology drawn up by a small group (I am glad it is small) of
H.M. Inspectors of Schools, and published in the School Nature
Study Union's publication Sixty-seven. Lest I should seem
unfair I quote several sentences.
"If the children could really become interested in the
various ways in which living creatures show intelligence, and
in the particular habits and modes of life which are associated
with race in general, they might be in a fit state of mind to
appreciate the truth that each of the various races of man has
its own mode of life and thought."
The writers go on to ask "if knowledge of this kind is not
indispensable to the race that rules an Empire."
Hitler thought that beliefs of this kind were indispensable to
the German "race," which he believed was destined to rule an
Empire including our own country. They are meat and drink to
anti-semites. They may be useful to British imperialists, too. But
why call them "truth" ? Certainly it is a good thing for children
to realize that other peoples have very different customs from our
own, and that men and women can lead good and useful lives
even though they wear no clothes and eat raw meat.
It is true that racial differences are often associated with
different modes of life and thought. The Eskimos are racially
different from the people of Jamaica, and it would be a miracle if
a people spearing seals among the ice did not live and think
differently from one growing bananas in a hot climate. But do
234 SCIENCE ADVANCES
these differences of life depend on differences of race ? If so they
ought to remain constant unless the racial composition is altered.
And according to the Nazis they do.
Let us look at a few examples. Eleven hundred years ago the
Danes were the most warlike and bloodthirsty people in Europe,
perhaps in the world. They had conquered half England, and
part of France. They raided as far as the Mediterranean. It was a
disgrace for a male Dane to die anyhow except in battle. Since
the time of the Vikings there has been much less immigration
into Denmark than into Britain, France, or Germany. The race
is the same. But the modern Danes have offered less resistance to
the Nazis than any of the other conquered peoples. To my mind
they are as much too gentle as their ancestors were too fierce.
Which is the Danes' "own mode of life and thought/' scouring
the seas in search of plunder and a glorious death, or growing
food and making munitions for their conquerors?
Again, the "Red Indians" of North America were much alike
in their physical characters, and on any possible classification
formed one race. Most of them were hunters, and fought with
great courage and great cruelty, collecting the scalps of their
enemies and roasting prisoners alive. But in Arizona men and
women of the same race were agriculturists, living a peaceful life
in towns called Pueblos. The fierce hunters have been liquidated
and their descendants have changed their customs, but the
Pueblo "Indians" continue to live much as their ancestors did.
The difference in life and thought was not due to difference of
race, but of production.
Finally, think of the modern Americans. They have their own
modes of life and thought, but these are much the same for
Americans of English, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, or Jewish
ancestry. The coloured people, with their history of slavery and
persecution, have a rather different way of life. But even this is
essentially American. Americanism does not depend on race, but
on nationality and all that this means. There may be an American
race in the future. Today men and women of many races share a
common culture. This, by the way, is vastly superior to the
version of it with which we are familiar in this country, thanks
to the Hays film censorship.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 235
Missionaries have done a good deal of harm to some primitive
peoples. But at least they have always believed that men and
women of every race could adopt Christian "modes of life and
thought." And in consequence the best of them have done much
to protect "savages" against the worst features of imperialism.
The racial theory of the school inspectors is as flatly opposed to
Christianity as to communism.
Actually if the Inspectors knew a little more biology they
would know that differences of habit are mainly associated with
differences between species. The thrush and blackbird, with their
different songs and habits, are different species, though closely
related, and do not interbreed, as human beings of different
colours do when they inhabit die same country.
The races, or breeds, of dog, certainly differ in their behaviour,
and the differences are hereditary. But this is because they have
been selectively bred. But we do not mate human musicians to
musicians, and drown the children who are tone-deaf. So there
are no human breeds with special inborn tendencies like the
different dog breeds.
On the other hand, important differences in habit within a
species are often quite independent of differences in colour or
structure. Thus some British starlings migrate, and some stay
here all the year round. The difference seems to be inherited, but
both types look alike.
It is true that a group of insects which were originally classified
as one species is sometimes now divided into "biological races."
For example, mosquito "species" are now split up according to
what animals they bite, how they lay their eggs, and so on. But
as the different "races" do not give fertile hybrids, they are far
more different biologically than the races of mankind, and could
be described as different species.
But in spite of these facts, racial theories very like Hitler's are
doled out to children, at least by teachers who want to please
certain inspectors. They are most useful to imperialists. Kipling
was full of them. "East is east, and west is west, and never the
twain shall meet" is an excellent slogan if you don't want the
Indian people to enjoy representative government.
At the present time we are fighting Hitlerism with bombs and
236 SCIENCE ADVANCES
depth charges. We should be doing so in the realm of ideas also.
I do not mean that we should condemn every idea which the
Nazis have ever held. No human being can be 100 per cent
wrong on all questions. But there is absolutely no excuse for
teaching Nazi theories to children when these have no basis in
fact, and I hope that those who realize how much our future
depends on what is taught to children will take up the matter,
and prevent the teaching of bogus biology which can be used as
the theoretical basis of British fascism.
Race Theory and Vansittartism
The Nazis teach, and many of them believe, that the Germans
are a race different from all others, and possessing inborn qualities
which make them fit to rule other races. This is a convenient
doctrine for the German armament millionaires, the general staff,
and the Nazi bosses. It was not so good for the Germans who
died in the snow at Stalingrad.
It is now beginning to recoil on the Germans like their tech-
nique of bombing civilians. Many people believe that the Ger-
mans are a different race, and have a specially aggressive and
brutal nature, which is inborn in them. This is in fact the theory
behind Vansittartism. If it is true the only thing to do with the
Germans is to massacre them or keep them in perpetual bondage.
But is it true ? Anthropologists classify men by various physi-
cal characters, such as the colour of their skin and eyes, and the
shape of their hair and skulls. These characters are inherited,
though all except perhaps eye colour can be influenced by en-
vironment. Englishmen can get sun-tanned, and negro hair can
be straightened. On the basis of such characters one can distin-
guish the main races of mankind with certainty. One can separate
men of European, Chinese, or negro stock from one another,
even if the Europeans have lived in Africa or the negroes in
America for some generations.
Of course we must be very careful not to confuse race and
nationality. Thus Mr. Learie Constantine, the famous negro
cricketer, both of whose parents were British born, has quite as
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 237
good a claim to British nationality as Mr. Churchill, whose
mother was American born. But not all, though probably some,
of Mr. Constantine's ancestors were racially British. Unfortu-
nately we use the same word for race, language, nationality, and
sometimes religion. This confusion can be used to support all
sorts of injustice. Hitler forced German nationality on the
Austrians because they spoke German. A hotel manager denied
Mr. Constantine his rights as a British national because his skin
is dark.
The Germans have no claim at all to be a race on the basis of
inherited characters. In parts of northern Germany the com-
monest type is tall, fair, blue-eyed and long-headed, like the
typical Swede. In East Prussia a tall, fair type with high check-
bones is found, as in Russia. In the south the Germans tend to be
short, with brown hair, round heads, and a tendency to hori-
zontal rolls of fat on the neck. The same type is common in
Austria and Switzerland.
In fact if Europe were divided up on a basis of inherited
physical types, parts of Germany would be united with Scandi-
navia, other parts with Switzerland, and so on. Nevertheless, it is
true that some mental characteristics are very common in Ger-
many, some of them being very undesirable. In behaviour the
Bavarians are more like Prussians than Swiss, though physically
they are more like the latter. The reason for this is not racial but
historical. Feudalism was stronger in Germany than in any other
part of Europe. Germany was not unified till 1871, and even then
a number of subordinate kings, princes, and Grand Dukes sur-
vived until 1919. This survival of feudalism was possible because
agriculture was far more primitive than in Britain, France, or
Holland, and manufactures far less developed. In the nineteenth
century the country was very rapidly industrialized and its mines
developed. But much of the feudal structure remained.
There was never anything like the French, or even the English,
revolution to destroy it. In 1919 such a revolution began, but it
was put down with the aid of the British and French Govern-
ments, and we are now paying the price. A feudal aristocracy is
naturally aggressive, but knights in armour could seldom go very
far, as the economic structure of feudalism made standing armies
238 SCIENCE ADVANCES
impossible. Besides, they were vulnerable to bowmen. But a
knight in a tank, supported by the whole structure of modern
industry, is the very devil. The feudal landowners of Germany
provide the bulk of the higher officers. In the last generation they
have intermarried with the bourgeois capitalists, while the Nazis
gave them enough mass support for the conquest of Europe.
As long as the class structure of Germany is preserved, the
Germans will go on being aggressive, even if it is occupied by
allied forces for a generation. Germany will only cease to be
aggressive when its ruling class is wiped out. I do not mean that
they should all be massacred, though I hope that those who are
actually responsible for murders will be killed. I mean that they
should cease to exist as a class, as they will do if they are deprived
of the surplus values on which they live at the expense of other
Germans. This could be accomplished in several ways, of which
I should prefer to see the method of the Russian Revolution
adopted. But provided the landlords go, it may not very much
matter to the rest of the world whether the land is divided into
small holdings, collectivized, or nationalized. Provided monopoly
capitalism goes, the type of socialism adopted is of more impor-
tance for the Germans than for the rest of us.
The question which Marxists should ask followers of Van-
sittart is this: "Do you stand for the liquidation of the German
ruling class ?" If they do not, they are merely preparing the
ground for further German aggression, and no amount of re-
education or military occupation will prevent another war.
What to Do with German Science
The main object of the occupation of Germany will be to
prevent the Germans from preparing for another war. This will
involve a control of German industry so as to make the manu-
facture of armaments impossible. But a difficulty at once arises.
The countries which have been invaded, such as France and
Poland, will need machinery to build up their own economies.
For example, the Polish peasants will need tractors if they are to
raise their agricultural productivity to the level of the Soviet
Union*
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 239
But a factory which makes tractors can easily switch over to
making tanks. No doubt this problem has already been con-
sidered. Probably a committee at Yalta was dealing with it. But
the problem of German science has not been seriously discussed.
A number of eminent British scientists who enjoy the full con-
fidence of the Government have no knowledge of any definite
plans on this matter.
A certain number of German scientists have been guilty of
murder. They have organized the mass killing by chemical
methods of Jews and other persons judged to be of inferior race,
and are alleged to have experimented on them with various
drugs. They must be hanged like any other murderers.
I don't object to experiments on men and women, even dan-
gerous ones. I have done them. But I have always been one of
the subjects. Indeed I have never done any possibly painful
experiments on animals which I have not also done on myself, if
only because one does not know as much as possible about an
abnormal physiological condition till one knows what it feels
like.
Most German sciehtists have done nothing worse than the
majority of German civilians. But some of them are more dan-
gerous. There are those in this country who would like to stop
all German research work. I think they are wrong for three
reasons.
In the first place a great deal of German research, even in the
last twelve years, has been of benefit to the whole of humanity.
For example, the first of the series of sulphanilamide derivatives,
such as sulphapyridine and sulphathiazole, which have proved so
valuable in many diseases, was produced by a German, Domagk.
Secondly, we must hope that the Germans will ultimately take
their place among the civilized peoples. They cannot do this
without intellectual culture, which includes science. To take only
one example, unless they learn some real biology they will never
understand the utter falsity of Hitler's racial theories.
Thirdly, it is not realized how long it takes to put a new dis-
covery in fundamental science into practice. Suppose I discover
tomorrow that by injecting suitable hormones into a sheep I can
double its wool production per year, this does not mean that the
240 SCIENCE ADVANCES
wool production of England will be doubled in ten years, or
would be doubled even if there were no vested interests in the way.
Probably the hormones could only be got from some organs
in dead animals, and the process of preparing them would be
difficult even in the laboratory. To produce enough for half the
sheep in England it might be necessary to find out how to make
them from coal tar derivatives, which would be a problem for
organic chemists.
The first radio messages were sent exactly fifty years ago. I
still remember the excitement when the murderer Crippen was
arrested because the captain of the ship on which he was fleeing
had actually picked up a radio-telegram. That was in 1910, after
fifteen years of development.
No research should be allowed in Germany without a licence,
certain types of applied science being absolutely barred, and all
places of research should be open to inspection without notice, as
physiological laboratories are in England.
If the allied control is genuine, this should be quite sufficient
to prevent research directed towards a future war. If the control
is not genuine, as it was not after 1918, then more important war
preparations than research will go on.
A more difficult question is the future of the German scientific
industry, A factory which makes microscopes and telescopes can
easily turn over to making gun-sights and bomb-aimers. But the
Germans have deliberately destroyed and plundered scientific
institutions in most of Europe, and our own have been unable to
buy badly needed instruments since 1940.
American optical firms are busy on war work, and will be till
Japan is conquered; British firms and Soviet factories are still
busier. Unless such firms as Zeiss are made to start making scien-
tific equipment once more, the rebirth of science all over the
world will be held up for years, and thousands of people will die
of preventible diseases.
To take one example, malaria is a serious cause of death in
Yugoslavia and Greece. It is carried by mosquitoes. To identify
mosquito species one needs a low-powered microscope. Thou-
sands of microscopes will be needed to set up an adequate anti-
malarial service in south-eastern Europe.
SOVIET SCIENCE AND NAZI SCIENCE 24!
Of course competitors in Britain and the U.S.A. would be
very glad if the German optical factories were liquidated. The
World Trade Union Conference, I am glad to see, have come out
"for the utilization within the limits imposed, of German indus-
trial and other resources for the rehabilitation of countries which
the Germans have devastated."
The key to the whole problem is the completeness of the
control which is to be exercised. It would certainly be better to
destroy the Zeiss optical factory than to allow it to make enough
microscopes to pay its way, while building up a skeleton organiza-
tion for war work. But it would be better yet to use it to make
the microscopes which are needed even in Britain, but still more
in the formerly occupied countries.
The world needs German science and the technical skill of
German workers. They can only be directed into safe channels if
the structure of German capitalism and landlordism is destroyed,
and the military occupation lasts for at least twenty years. There
are two alternatives to this policy. One is to relax our grip and
allow a new Hitler to come into power. The other is to destroy
every factory and mine in Germany, which would starve many
Germans, and impoverish all Europe.
Fortunately the Soviet Union, which has suffered far more
from German aggression than Britain, let alone the U.S.A., will
have a large share in determining the policy adopted. And it will
not choose either of the last two alternatives. Under a sane
policy there will be a place for German science.
8
HUMAN LIFE AND DEATH AT HIGH
PRESSURES
MEN are exposed to high pressures in a number of circumstances.
They may be working in compressed air in a caisson or diving-
bell, working under water in a diving dress, or attempting to
escape from a sunken submarine. In the latter case it is obviously
necessary that the air pressure inside a part of the ship should be
equal to that of the water outside before a man emerges. This
can be achieved either by flooding a small escape chamber holding
only two men, or a whole compartment of the ship. Men have
escaped by both these methods. They can rise through the water*
either holding their breath or breathing from a Davis submarine
escape apparatus. The former method is not to be recommended,
but it is not quite so hazardous as it sounds, for a liing-full of air
at five atmospheres contains as much oxygen as a lung-full of
oxygen at atmospheric pressure, and will allow a man to hold his
breath for more than twice the normal time. The Davis sub-
marine escape apparatus consists of a rubber bag and a soda-lime
canister to absorb carbon dioxide. The bag is filled with oxygen
from a small cylinder of the compressed gas. It has the advantage
over air that it can be used almost to the last dreg. We shall come
to its disadvantages later.
In June 1939, H.M. Submarine Thetis was sunk with civilians
as well as naval officers and ratings. The Amalgamated Engineer-
ing Union and the Electrical Trades Union asked me to attend
the investigation of this disaster, as some of their members had
been killed. I was only able to carry out some very rough experi-
ments during the course of this inquiry, but they made it clear
that certain physiological factors concerned in escape from sub-
marines had not been fully considered. I was therefore asked by
Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith's physiological sub-com-
mittee on escape from submarines to undertake further research
on this question, and it has very kindly permitted me to publish
HUMAN LIFE AND DEATH AT HIGH PRESSURES 243
certain results. Messrs. Siebe Gorman and Co. put their plant and
staff at my disposal. All the experiments described here were
carried out in a small steel chamber at their works, which holds
two, or at a pinch three, people in a sitting position. The experi-
ments were conducted by Dr. E. M. Case and myself, on our-
selves and twenty volunteers, including not only physiologists
such as Dr. J. Negrin, the former Spanish Prime Minister, and
Dr. B. M. Matthews, but also a number of working men. Four of
our subjects were women. An account is in the press.
The physiological dangers fall under six different heads. The
literature concerning (A) and (F), with a full discussion, has been
given by Haldane and Priestley. 1
A. MECHANICAL EFFECTS
During rapid compression, violent ear-ache, and even rupture
of the tympanum, may occur if the pressure on the two sides of
the tympanic membrane is not equalized. Most people can easily
be taught to do this. Four working men who had never been in
compressed air before were compressed to 10 atmospheres
(corresponding to 300 feet of sea water) in 5 minutes. A trained
subject was compressed to 7 atmospheres in 90 seconds, and this
rate could certainly be exceeded. About one subject in five cannot
be taught to equalize the pressures rapidly.
During decompression there is less pain, but more danger to
life. A number of men have died from rupture of the lungs, which
forced air or oxygen into the pulmonary circulation, so that the
circulation was blocked by air embolism. This was probably
caused by a rapid rise of intra-pulmonary pressure, due to the
subjects holding their breath while rising through the water. Any
obstruction of the valve by which excess air leaves the escape
apparatus would have the same effect. We have had no cases of
embolism, but one of our subjects, Mr. J. M, Rendel, developed
a pneumothorax.
At 10 atmospheres the density of the air is very striking. The
voice becomes nasal, and the increased resistance of the air is
obvious even when the hands are moved, and still more so when
attempts are made to stir it. The resistance in breathing apparatus
* Haldane, J. B. S., and Priestley, J. G., "Respiration" (Oxford, 1935).
244 SCIENCE ADVANCES
may be greatly increased, since the volume of air breathed is
unchanged, but the mass increases tenfold, and turbulence may
develop, increasing the resistance still further.
B. NITROGEN INTOXICATION
Behnke, Thomson, and Motley (I935) 1 made the remarkable
discovery that nitrogen is a narcotic at high pressures. We con-
firm their findings. In air at 10 atmospheres all our subjects felt
very queer, and many behaved in an irresponsible manner.
Manual dexterity was little affected, but arithmetical performance
fell seriously in most cases. Some subjects became hilarious;
others were greatly alarmed, and thought they were dying. Few
could cope with several tasks at a time. There were, however,
great individual variations. One subject, H. Spurway, though
subjectively affected, was so resistant that her arithmetical per-
formance was actually slightly improved at a pressure corre-
sponding to 250 feet. The symptoms disappear when hydrogen
or helium is substituted for nitrogen.
Behnke and Yarbrough (1939)* found that argon is rather more
narcotic than nitrogen. These results are of importance for the
general theory of narcosis; and further experiments with gases
such as krypton, xenon, and methane, which are regarded as
physiologically indifferent, will be of great interest. It is also
likely that at sufficiently high pressures, say, 20 atmospheres or
more, hydrogen and helium will become narcotic. These gases
would also perhaps reach the threshold concentration for taste or
smell, as nitrogen and oxygen do for many people at a partial
pressure of about 7 atmospheres.
C. CARBON DIOXIDE INTOXICATION
If a compartment of a submarine contained i per cent of
carbon dioxide, this would not be noticed at atmospheric pressure.
If, however, the compartment were flooded at 200 feet, the
partial pressure would rise to 7 per cent of an atmosphere. This
would make many people unconscious in less than five minutes,
1 Behnke, A. R., Thomson, R. M., and Motley, E. P., "Psychologic Effects
of Breathing Air at Four Atmospheres' Pressure/' Amer.J. PhysioL, vol. 112,
554 (i935)-
2 Behnke, A. R., and Yarbrough, O. D., ''Respiratory Resistance, Oil-water
Solubility, and Mental Effects of Argon, compared with Helium and Nitrogen,"
Amer.J. Physiol.> vol. 126, p. 409 (1939).
HUMAN LIFE AND DEATH AT HIGH PRESSURES 245
although fine work, such as gas analysis, is quite practicable in air
containing 7 per cent of carbon dioxide at atmospheric pressure.
The effects of carbon dioxide and nitrogen are additive. We
investigated this question on a number of subjects. Their attitude
may be exemplified by the notes made by Dr. H. Kalmus, a
Czechoslovak refugee, just before losing consciousness at 10
atmospheres with a partial pressure of 6- 5 per cent of carbon
dioxide: "This is enough. This is enough. Not necessarily too
much." Consciousness was rapidly regained on decompression,
and there were no appreciable after-effects. *
D. OXYGEN INTOXICATION
Paul Bert (1878)* found that oxygen is a convulsant at high
pressures. At 7 atmospheres the convulsion comes on with little
warning. There is a slight feeling of anxiety, which would, how-
ever, be disregarded under Service conditions. The clonic con-
vulsions are very violent, and in my own case the injury caused
by them to my back is still painful after a year. They last for about
two minutes and are followed by flaccidity. I wake up into a state
of extreme terror in which I may make futile attempts to escape
from the steel chamber, whereas, like others, I am quite calm on
recovery from carbon-dioxide nitrogen narcosis. Behnke, John-
son, Poppen, and Motley (1935)* found that convulsions or
syncope developed in men after about forty minutes at 4 atmo-
spheres. We find that all of seven subjects could breathe oxygen
for five minutes at 6 atmospheres. At 7 atmospheres, five minutes
exposure is about the limit tolerated. It is obvious that convulsions
of this sort would be fatal if they occurred while a man was
wearing an escape apparatus under water.
E. AFTER-EFFECTS OF CARBON DIOXIDE
J. S. Haldane and J. L. Smith (1899)3 reported vomiting on
breathing ordinary air after breathing air containing a high per-
centage of carbon dioxide for some time. Alexander, Duff,
1 Bert, Paul, "La Pression Barometrique" (Paris, 1878).
* Behnke, A. R., Johnson, F. S., Poppen, J. R., and Motley, E. P., "The
Effect of Oxygen on Man at Pressures from One to Four Atmospheres," Atner.
J. PhysioL) vol. 110, p. 565 (1935).
3 Haldane, J. S., and Smith, J. L., "Physiological Effects of Air Vitiated by
Respiration,"/. Path. Bact^ vol. 1, p. 168 (1899).
246 SCIENCE ADVANCES
Haldane, Ives, and Renton (1939)* reported vomiting and severe
headache in several subjects after breathing air containing 6-7 per
cent of carbon dioxide for an hour or longer. The same symptoms
may occur if oxygen is breathed. We have not found such effects
after breathing 6-7 per cent of carbon dioxide for so short a
period as half-an-hour. Only one of the numerous subjects who
lost consciousness when breathing air containing added carbon
dioxide at 10 atmospheres even retched appreciably, and this was
before losing consciousness, not on recovery.
' It is clear that vomiting would be fatal during an attempted
escape from a submarine, and it may have accounted for some of
the deaths in the Thetis. It can be avoided by purifying the air, or
by breathing oxygen or pure air for some minutes before attempt-
ing escape; this will give time for vomiting to occur if it is going
to do so. On the other hand, this danger would not arise after a
short exposure to a high partial pressure of carbon dioxide, such
as is discussed under heading (C).
F. BUBBLE FORMATION DURING DECOMPRESSION
This has been the principal physiological danger to divers in
the past, and has been fully studied. The tissues take up nitrogen
at high pressures. On decompression they become supersaturated
and bubbles may form. With very rapid decompression, capil-
laries in the lungs and brain may be blocked with froth. This
causes asphyxia and death unless the subject is at once recom-
pressed. However, such embolism cannot occur if the blood has a
reasonable opportunity of unloading its surplus nitrogen. The
pressure should never be halved in less than a minute or so,
which gives the blood from most organs an opportunity to release
its nitrogen in the lungs. With slower rates the main symptoms
are "bends," that is to say, pain referred to the joints and bones,
and other nervous symptoms such as paralysis and paraesthesia.
These are due to the formation of bubbles in the white matter of
the central nervous system, and perhaps in the synovial fluid and
bone marrow. Nitrogen is a good deal more soluble in lipoids
than water, and this may account for the symptoms in question.
J. S. Haldane introduced stage decompression as a prophy-
1 Alexander, W., Duff, P., Haldane, J. B. S,, Ives, G., and Renton, D.,
* 'After-Effects of Exposure of Men to Carbon Dioxide," Lancet, p. 419 (Aug. 19,
HUMAN LIFE AND DEATH AT HIGH PRESSURES 247
lactic, and Sir Robert Davis (1935)* found that this could be
greatly accelerated if oxygen were breathed in the later stages.
Even when oxygen is used, decompression lasts for an hour after
15 minutes exposure to 10 atmospheres. Unfortunately, no
published figures exist on the limits of safety after very rapid
compression to high pressures, followed by rapid decompression,
such as occurs during escape from a submarine. We have obtained
some data on this important problem. As regards decompression
after longer exposures, some of our subjects have had slight
symptoms when following the official tables, but these have never
been serious. Others can be decompressed much more rapidly
without any pain. We do not know the cause of this individual
variation. Fatness may be a slight handicap, but I am fairly fat,
and have had no trouble when following Sir Robert Davis's
schedules of decompression, while thinner men have had "bends**
while doing so. Nor do we know the cause of the itching which is
almost universal during decompression from high pressures, the
rash which sometimes accompanies it, and the rarer symptom of
nose bleeding.
Helium has been recommended as a preventive of decom-
pression symptoms, and is used for this purpose in the United
States. There is no question that it is of value at high pressures, as
it completely does away with nitrogen intoxication. But I am
much more doubtful of its value against "bends." Last December
I was decompressed according to the Davis schedule after
breathing a helium-oxygen mixture at 10 atmospheres. I devel-
oped severe pain over a good deal of my body which lasted for
an hour or so, and which was followed by itching and "pins and
needles" over the area of the skin supplied by the 4th and 5th
sacral roots. This was probably due to a bubble of helium in the
conus, the tip of my spinal cord. Even after seven months I
prefer a cushion to a hard chair, and may perhaps be excused for
scepticism of the alleged prophylactic value of helium.
This failure of helium to prevent "bends" throws a good deal
of doubt on the current theories as to their causation. Helium is
less soluble in water and fat than nitrogen; and whereas nitrogen
is more soluble in fat than in water, helium is less so. For this
reason it was erroneously concluded that it would be less likely
1 Davis, R., "Deep Diving and Submarine Operations" (London, 1935).
248 SCIENCE ADVANCES
than nitrogen to produce "bends." The whole problem demands
a systematic experimental study with a number of gases. The
experiments could be made on animals, whereas experiments on
the narcotic effects of gases must be made on men. Animals give
very unclear results in this case. Thus a canary flew normally in
air at 10 atmospheres, while Drosophila refused to do so even
when stimulated.
G. COLD
Even when the surface water is fairly warm, the sea may be
below 40 F. at a depth of 200 feet. Among the questions which
we investigated in this connexion was whether cold increases the
narcotic effects of nitrogen and nitrogen -f- carbon dioxide.
Dr. Case lay in a bath of melting ice until, after 12 minutes, he
began to shiver violently. He was then compressed to 10 atmo-
spheres, but retained his faculties sufficiently to multiply 47 by 13
in his head. I propounded this question, but was unable to solve
it correctly, being more susceptible than he to nitrogen intoxica-
tion. A still more drastic experiment showed some adjuvant effect
of cold, but it does not seem that any measures need be taken to
combat it which would not be justifiable at ordinary pressures.
The main physiological problem to be tackled in planning
escape from submarines at depths of 100 feet or more is how to
steer, so to say, between the Scylla of nitrogen poisoning and
"bends," and the Charybdis of oxygen poisoning. The detailed
solution must depend on the details of construction of sub-
marines and escape apparatus, so a full discussion is impossible
at the present time. However, it also involves physiological
investigations such as those here summarized, some of which will
be published in greater detail elsewhere. I am convinced that
physiologists have been far too negligent in investigating the
limits of human existence, or at least of human consciousness.
Physicists often find that mathematicians have already provided
them with methods which they need for a theoretical account of
their findings. It would be well if physiologists were to investigate
the effect of abnormal conditions on human beings before, rather
than after, these conditions have killed numerous people, whether
in war or in industry.
INDEX
Adrenaline, 127
Adrian, 46, 103
Advertisements, 109-12
Afforestation, 78-81
Agol, 221
Agricultural Workers, Mortality, 166
Air, 85-7
Alcoholism, deaths from, 158, 161
American Indians, 234
Americans, 234
Anaemia, 92
Ancestors, man's, 120-3
Animals, British, 72
Antevs, 27
Antibodies, 223
Antigens, 23
Antitoxins, 144, 147
Ants, 47-50
Aquaria, 43
Archimedes, 1719
Argon, 244
Aristotle, 87
Asdic apparatus, 34, 193
Astbury, 33
Atoms, 16, 31, 137
Aurora borealis, 202-3
Bacteriostatics, 129-30
Bagdassarov, 214
Bailey, 97
Balakhovski, 214
Barrows, 217
Bartlett, 107-9
Bayliss, 90
B.C.G., 143
Bees, 48, 67-8, 83
Behnke, 86, 244
Bends, 246-8
Berger, 103
Bernal, 33
Bernstein, 23, 228
Bert, Paul, 245
Beveridge plan, 151, 157-61
Biology, value of, 1656
Bird song, 56
Birds, migration of, 50-2, 226-7
Bittner, 224
Blood, 88-95
Blood groups, 23-5, 90, 94-5, 213-14,
228-32
Books, 190-2
Bourgeoisie and Newtonian world, 13
Boyd, 230
Boys, 35-7
Bragg, Sir Wm., 31-4
Brain, 1014
Bridges, 116, 223
Briukhonenko, 90, 214
Bubble formation, 246-7
Budgerigar, 70
Buliough, 53, 54
Burials, stone age, 21617
Butterflies, 50
Buynitsky, 201
Calculus, 12
Cancer, 130, 135-9
Carbon dioxide, 244-6
Carbon monoxide, 175
Cats, 44-7
Cells, 115-16, 134, 171
Children, Soviet, and science, 226-7
Chimpanzees, 72
Chromosomes, 11617
Chronology, 257
Cirrhosis of the liver, 160 i
Cleanliness, no
Clock, 181
Coal, gasification of, 209
Coalfields, Soviet, 206, 207
Colds, 126-8, 143
Communism, 112, 11415
Communism, primitive, 64-5, 67
Constantine, Learic, 2367
Copernicus, 1922
Cornea grafting, 90
Corpuscles, 89-90
Cosmetics, 10912
Crops, improvement of, 21012
Crystals, arrangement of, 323
Cyclotron, 138
Danes, 234
Daniel, G. H., 149-51
Darwin, 16, 58, 59, 60, 120, 215
Davis, Sir R., 247
Davis apparatus, 242
Davy, 32, 83
Death, 213
de Geer, 25-7
2 5
Density, 17-18
Descartes, 96
Dewar, 33
Dialectical materialism, 225
Diphtheria, 144, i45~ 8 > *5 2 ~3
Divers, 64, 86, 87
Dobzhansky, 221, 223
Dodds, 198-200
Dogs, 69
Domagk, 239
Domestication of animals, 69-71
Douglass, 27
Drink trade, health in, 158, 160-2
Drosophila, 223
Dubinin, 223
Dung beetle, 219
Dyetzkoye Selo, 210
Earth, movement of, 21-2
Easter, date of, 20
Economics and science, 15
Eddington, 28-30
Efremov, 201, 203
Einstein, 21, 28, 187
Electrocardiograms, 102
Electro-encephalograph, 103-4
Electrons, 188
Energy packets, 187
Engelhart, 97
Engels, 15-16, 30, 40, 69, 120, 123,
178, 216
Enzymes, 97, 129
Ephedrine, 127-8, 131
Epilepsy, 103-4
Erect posture, 118-19
Eugenics, 119-20
Euthanasia, 1768
Evolution, 11820
Exercise, 113
Experimental method, 15
Explosions, colliery, 173-6
Eye, 98-9
Faraday, 33
Fatigue, 1089
Fermi, 19
Fertilizers, marine, 195-7
Feudalism, 194, 237-8
Filatov, 90, 213
Film, zoological, 217-19
Firedamp, 173-6, 209
Fish farming, 196-7
Flint tools, 215
Food values, 76, 92
SCIENCE ADVANCES
Foot and mouth disease, 53
Fox, 1 86
Galileo, 14, 18, 21
Galton, 70
Gas measurement, 36-7
Gases, liquefaction of, 208-9
Genes, 116-17
Genetics, 2216
Geology, Soviet, 205-7
German "race," 236-7
German science, 23841
Giants, 1245
Gibbs, 103
Giraffe, 73
Glinka, 221
Gonorrhea, 132
Gout, 140
Granit, 102
Gravitation, constant of, 35
Gravity, specific, 17-18
Gravity, submarine, 202,
Gross, 197
Gye, E. W., 130
Gyrostats, 212
Haemoglobin, 91-2
Haldane, J. S., 246
Harness, 17980
Hazardous trades, 157-60
Head, 667
Heart disease, 14951
Helium, 247
Heroin, 198
Hindle, 71
Hirzfeld, 24, 228
Hopcalite, 175
Hopkins, 130
Hormones, 51
Horseshoes, 180
Houses, primitive, 216
Humility, i 5
Huxley, T. H., 213
Hybrids, 58-9, 121, 222
Hydrostatics, 17, 1 8
Ice age, 267
Ice floes, movement of, 21
Idealism, 29-30
Immunity, 144, 145-8
Immunity, humoral, 22-3
Innate responses, 49, 55
Inoculation, 1424
Insect societies, 48, 67
Insects, 67-8
INDEX
251
Instinct, 55-7
Iraq, 26
Iron, in blood, 92
James II, 13
Jannsky, 23, 90, 213, 228
Jaundice, 25
Jeffrey, 223
Jorda, 2.4
Kala azar, 71
Kapitza, 209
Kara-Koom desert, 217-18
Kennaway, 136
Kepler, 21
Keynes, 213
Kidney disease, 140-1
Kostienki, 216
Lactic acid, 96
Lamarck, 49, 58
Landsteiner, 22-5, 90, 213, 228
Laue, 32
Lawrence, 138
Learning, 104-7
Lefebre de Noettes, 179
Leibniz, 12
Lenin, 12, 14, 21, 29-30, 40, 188
Leukaemia, 138, 140
Levine, 24
Levit, 221
Levitsky, 222
Light, 11,28
Light, polarized, 182-4
Light, speed of, 192-3
Lighting, factory, 164
Lightning, 36
Lim, 125
Limpets, 65-6
Linnaeus, 58, 6 1
Little, 224
Lobster, 65
Lockyer, 186
Luminosity of stars, 29
Lysenko, 74, 76, 221, 223-4
Lyubimova, 97
MacBride, 49, 223
McCance, 92
McGonigle, 157
Mach, 21
McKenna, 157
Ma Huang, 127
Maize, 211-12
Mammals, aquatic, 63
Man, origin of, 69, 123
Maoris, 215
Marx, 13, 14-16, 64, 87
Mathematics, 17, 39
Matter, our knowledge of, 12-13
Meakins, 157
Measles, 144, 152-3
Mesolithic period, 26
Method, scientific, and Marxism, 15
Micro-films, 190-2
Microscope, 115
Microscope, electron, 188-90
Migration, animal, 50-2
Milk, water- and wind-, 181
Milne, 37-40
Mineral wealth, Soviet, 205-7
Miners, mortality, 166
Mint, 13
Mollison, 25
Morphine, 198-200
Mortality, occupational, 165-7
Moss, 228
Mouse, species of, 61-2
Mud-skipper, 122
Mullcr, 223, 224
Muscles, 96-8
Myosin, 93
Names, specific, 57-8
Nature cures, 139-42
Navashin, 222
Necdham, 97
Needs, human, 112-15
Nerve-fibres, 104-5
Newton, 11-13, 16, 21, 39
Newts, 41-3
Nicol prism, 182-3
Nitrogen, 87, 168-70, 244
Nitrogen peroxide, 168-70
Nose, 118
Oilfields, Soviet, 206
Overcrowding, 149-57
Oxygen, 86-7, 96-7, 245, 247
Papanin, 21
Paper, 190
Papyrus, 190
Paternity tests, 94-5, 228
Patulin, 128, 130-1
Pauling, 23
Pendulums, 202
Penicillin, 129, 130, 137
Perry, 149
Pest control, 113
252
SCIENCE ADVANCES
Petty, 13
Philosophy, 14-15
Pithecanthropus, 123, 124
Planets, movements of, 20-1
Plants, growth of, 74-5
Plasma, 8990
Plato, 100
Positivists, 21
Potatoes, 768
Pottery, neolithic, 216
Pottery trades, disease in, 158, 167
Prehistory, 214-17
Pressures, effects on man, 242-8
Printing, 191
Promiscuity, 133-4
Properties of matter, 18
Proteins, 22-3
Ptolemy, 20
Pumas, 46
Quantity and quality, 85-8
Race characters, 22932, 2338
Radio-active elements, 1 379
Raistrick, 130
Ramage, 186
Raman, 33-4
Reactions to stimuli, 194
Reading machine, 190-2
Reflexes, 55, 1056
Reformatsky, 220
Retina, 102-3
Rh factor, 24
Rheumatic fever, 149
Ricardo, 13
Ringer, 87-8
Roman Empire, 689
Romans, science and, 19
Rous, 90
Rowan, 50
Rudder, 180
Rutherford, 16, 172
Rybin, 222
Saha., 1 86
Scurvy, 113
Sea, fertilizers in, 1957
SedoVy 201-3
Semenov, 215, 220
Sensation, 45-6, 98-101
Serebrovsky, 222
Sewage utilization, 197
Sex differences, 47
Shabad, 136
Shamov, 213
Shaw, G. B., 112
Silicosis, 158, 159
Sinanrhropus, 123
Sinus disease, 1 1 8
Skara Brae, 216
Skin colour, 95
Skundina, 213
Skunks, 46
Slavery, and science, 19
Smith, Adam, 13
Snakes, 72, 218-19
Sound, 1923
Species, number of, 60-2
Species, origin of, 57-9
Spectacles, for factory workers, 165
Spectroscope, 185-8
Sprinklers, 98, roo
Stalin, 15, 73, 112
Starlings, 524
Statistics, reliability of, 162
Steffan, 230
Stcvin, 18
Stilboestrol, 199
Stoats, 60
Stone age peoples, 215-17
Submarine hunting, 193
Sulphanilamide drugs, 129, 137
Swallows, 50
Sweat glands, no, 141
Sweden, 26, 80- 1
Syphilis, 1313
Teeth, 118
Telescope, 9
Temperature, 82-5
Temperature, factory, 163
Temperature, submarine, 203
Theriomorphs, 122
Thomson, J. J., 188
Timber, 78-80
Timofeeff-Ressovslsy, 221, 223
Tools, primitive, 69, 215-17
Transfusion, see Blood groups
Tree rings, 27
Trees, 78-81
Triploid trees, 80- 1
Trotsky, 119
Tsetverikov, 221, 223
Tuberculosis, 154-7
Universities, Newton and, 13
Ur, 26
Urea, 140
Uric acid, 140
Vaccination, 1478
Varicose veins, 119
Vassin, 222
Vavilov, 210-12, 221-2, 224
Venereal diseases, 1314
Ventilation, factory, 163
Vernadsky, 186
Vernalization, 75
Vespasian, 19
Viruses, 33, 77-8
Volkova, 172
Vomiting, 246
von Dungern, 228
von Koenigswalcl, 123, 124
Water, 87
Water animals, 625
INDEX 253
Water transport workers, death-rate,
158-9
Watson, 121
Weeds, 222
Weidenreich, 123
Welders, electric, 168-9
Wcllisch, 230
Whales, 64-5
Wheat, growth of, 76
Wheat varieties, 21 1
Wilson, C. T. R., 31
Wright, 152
X-Rays, 32, 170-3
Year, length of, 20
Yellow fever, 71
Yudin, 213
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