The Scientist as Rebel (6 page)

In public discussions of biotechnology today, the idea of improving the human race by artificial means is widely condemned. The idea is repugnant because it conjures up visions of Nazi doctors sterilizing Jews and killing defective children. There are many good reasons for
condemning enforced sterilization and euthanasia. But the artificial improvement of human beings will come, one way or another, whether we like it or not, as soon as the progress of biological understanding makes it possible. When people are offered technical means to improve themselves and their children, no matter what they conceive improvement to mean, the offer will be accepted. Improvement may mean better health, longer life, a more cheerful disposition, a stronger heart, a smarter brain, the ability to earn more money as a rock star or baseball player or business executive. The technology of improvement may be hindered or delayed by regulation, but it cannot be permanently suppressed. Human improvement, like abortion today, will be officially disapproved, legally discouraged, or forbidden, but widely practiced. It will be seen by millions of citizens as a liberation from past constraints and injustices. Their freedom to choose cannot be permanently denied.

Two hundred years ago, William Blake engraved
The Gates of Paradise
, a little book of drawings and verses. One of the drawings, with the title
Aged Ignorance
, shows an old man wearing professorial eyeglasses and holding a large pair of scissors. In front of him, a winged child is running naked in the light from a rising sun. The old man sits with his back to the sun. With a self-satisfied smile he opens his scissors and clips the child’s wings. With the picture goes a little poem:

This picture is an image of the human condition in the era that is now beginning. The rising sun is biological science, throwing light of
ever-increasing intensity onto the processes by which we live and feel and think. The winged child is human life, becoming for the first time aware of itself and its potentialities in the light of science. The old man is our existing human society, shaped by ages of past ignorance. Our laws, our loyalties, our fears and hatreds, our economic and social injustices, all grew slowly and are deeply rooted in the past. Inevitably the advance of biological knowledge will bring clashes between old institutions and new desires for human self-improvement. Old institutions will clip the wings of new desires. Up to a point, caution is justified and social constraints are necessary. The new technologies will be dangerous as well as liberating. But in the long run, social constraints must bend to new realities. Humanity cannot live forever with clipped wings. The vision of self-improvement, which William Blake and Samuel Gompers in their different ways proclaimed, will not vanish from the earth.

Nine years later, the gap between rich and poor has grown wider. New technologies have continued to make stockholders richer and workers poorer. The main thesis of this essay, that technological progress does more harm than good unless it is accompanied by ethical progress, is even truer today than it was in 1997.

Only a few statements need to be corrected. The cell phone is no longer a toy for the rich but is becoming ubiquitous. I sat recently in the waiting room of the Social Security Administration office in Trenton, among a crowd of the poorer citizens of New Jersey, and was happy to see that many of them are now carrying cell phones. My son George continues to operate his boat business in Bellingham, but he is now better known as a writer and historian.

THE FIRST TIME
I met Thomas Gold was in 1946, when I served as a guinea pig in an experiment that he was doing on the capabilities of the human ear. Humans have a remarkable ability to discriminate the pitch of musical sounds. We can easily tell the difference when the frequency of a pure tone wobbles by as little as one percent. How do we do it? This was the question that Gold was determined to answer. There were two possible answers. Either the inner ear contains a set of finely tuned resonators that vibrate in response to incident sounds. Or the ear does not resonate but merely translates the incident sounds directly into neural signals that are then analyzed into pure tones by some unknown neural process inside our brains. In 1946 the professional physiologists who were experts in the anatomy and physiology of the ear believed that the second answer must be correct, that the discrimination of pitch happens in our brains and not in our ears. They rejected the first answer because they knew that the inner ear is a small cavity filled with flabby flesh and water. They could not imagine the flabby little membranes in the ear resonating like the strings of a harp or a piano.

Gold designed his experiment to prove the experts wrong. The experiment was simple, elegant, and original. During World War II he had been working for the Royal Navy on radio communications and
radar. He built his apparatus out of war-surplus navy electronics and headphones. He fed into the headphones a signal consisting of short pulses of a pure tone, separated by intervals of silence. The silent intervals were at least ten times as long as the period of the pure tone. The pulses were all the same shape, but they had phases which could be reversed independently. To reverse the phase of a pulse means to reverse the movement of the speaker in the headphone. The speaker in a reversed pulse is pushing the air outward when the speaker in an unreversed pulse is pulling the air inward. Sometimes Gold gave all the pulses the same phase, and sometimes he alternated the phases so that the even pulses had one phase and the odd pulses had the opposite phase. All I had to do was to sit with the headphones on my ears and listen while Gold put in signals with either constant or alternating phases. I had to tell him from the sound whether the phase was constant or alternating.

When the silent interval between pulses was ten times the period of the pure tone, it was easy to tell the difference. I heard a noise like a mosquito, a hum and a buzz sounding together, and the quality of the hum changed noticeably when the phases were changed from constant to alternating. We repeated the trials with longer silent intervals. I could still detect the difference, when the silent interval was as long as thirty periods. I was not the only guinea pig. Several other friends of Gold listened to the signals and found similar results. The experiment showed that the human ear can remember the phase of a signal, after the signal stops, for thirty times the period of the signal. To be able to remember the phase, the ear must contain fine-tuned resonators that continue to vibrate during the intervals of silence. The result of the experiment proved that pitch discrimination is mainly done in the ear and not in the brain.

Besides having experimental proof that the ear can resonate, Gold also had a theory to explain how a fine-tuned resonator can be built out of flabby and dissipative materials. His theory was that the inner
ear contains an electrical feedback system. The mechanical resonators are coupled to electrically powered sensors and drivers, so that the combined electromechanical system works like a finely tuned amplifier. The positive feedback provided by the electrical components counteracts the damping produced by the flabbiness of the mechanical components. Gold’s experience as an electrical engineer made this theory seem plausible to him, although he could not identify the anatomical structures in the ear that functioned as sensors and drivers. In 1948 he published two papers, one reporting the results of the experiment and the other describing the theory.

Having myself participated in the experiment and listened to Gold explaining the theory, I never had any doubt that he was right. The professional auditory physiologists were equally sure that he was wrong. They found the theory implausible and the experiment unconvincing. They regarded Gold as an ignorant outsider intruding into a field where he had no training and no credentials. So for thirty years his work on hearing was ignored, and he moved on to other things.

Thirty years later, a new generation of auditory physiologists began to explore the ear with far more sophisticated tools. They discovered that everything that Gold had said in 1948 was true. The electrical sensors and drivers in the inner ear are now identified. They are two different kinds of hair cells, and they function in the way Gold said they should. The community of physiologists finally recognized the importance of his work, forty years after it was published.

Gold’s study of the mechanism of hearing is typical of the way he has worked throughout his life. About once every five years, he invades a new field of research and proposes an outrageous theory that arouses intense opposition from the professional experts in the field. He then works very hard to prove the experts wrong. He does not always succeed. Sometimes it turns out that the experts are right and he is wrong. He is not afraid of being wrong. He was famously wrong at least twice, once when he promoted the theory of a steady-state
universe in which matter is continuously created to keep the density constant as the universe expands, and once when he predicted that the moon would be covered with electrostatically supported dust into which the astronauts would sink as soon as they stepped onto the surface. When he is proved wrong, he concedes defeat with good humor. Science is no fun, he says, if you are never wrong. His wrong ideas are insignificant compared with his far more important right ideas. One of his important right ideas was the theory that pulsars, the regularly pulsing celestial radio sources discovered by radio astronomers in 1967, are rotating neutron stars. Unlike most of his right ideas, his theory of pulsars was accepted almost immediately by the experts.

Another of Gold’s right ideas was rejected by the experts for an even longer time than his theory of hearing. This was his theory of the ninety-degree flip of the axis of rotation of the earth. In 1955 he published a revolutionary paper with the title “Instability of the Earth’s Axis of Rotation.” He proposed that the earth’s axis might occasionally flip over through an angle of ninety degrees within a time of the order of a million years, so that the old north and south poles would move to the equator, and two points of the old equator would move to the poles. The flip would be triggered by movements of mass that would cause the old rotation axis to become unstable and the new rotation axis to become stable. For example, a large accumulation of ice at the old north and south poles might cause such an exchange of stability. Gold’s paper was ignored by the experts for forty years. The experts at that time were focusing their attention narrowly on the phenomena of continental drift and the theory of plate tectonics. Gold’s theory had nothing to do with continental drift or with plate tectonics, and it was therefore of no interest to them. The flip predicted by Gold would occur much more rapidly than continental drift, and would not change the positions of continents relative to one another. The flip would only change the positions of continents relative to the rotation axis.

In 1997 Joseph Kirschvink, an expert on rock magnetism at the California Institute of Technology, published a paper presenting evidence that a ninety-degree flip of the rotation axis actually occurred during a geologically short time in the Early Cambrian Era. This discovery is of great importance for the history of life, since the time of the flip appears to coincide with the time of the “Cambrian Explosion,” the brief period when all the major varieties of higher organisms suddenly appear in the fossil record. It is possible that the flip of the rotation axis caused profound environmental changes in the oceans and triggered the rapid evolution of new life-forms. Kirschvink gives Gold credit for suggesting the theory that makes sense of his observations. If the theory had not been ignored for forty years, the evidence that confirms it might have been collected sooner.

Gold’s most controversial idea is the nonbiological origin of natural gas and oil. He advocates a theory that natural gas and oil come from reservoirs deep in the earth and are relics of the material out of which the earth condensed. The biological molecules found in oil show that the oil is contaminated by living creatures, not that the oil was produced by living creatures. This theory, like his theories of hearing and of polar flip, contradicts the entrenched dogma of the experts. Once again, Gold is regarded as an intruder ignorant of the field that he is invading. In fact, Gold is an intruder but he is not ignorant. He knows the details of the geology and chemistry of natural gas and oil. His arguments supporting his theory are based on a wealth of factual information. Perhaps it will once again take us forty years to decide whether the theory is right. Whether the theory of nonbiological origin is ultimately found to be right or wrong, the collection of evidence to test it will add greatly to our knowledge of the earth and its history.

Finally, the most recent of Gold’s revolutionary proposals is the subject of his book
The Deep Hot Biosphere
.
¹
His theory says that
the entire crust of the earth, down to a depth of several miles, is populated with living creatures. The creatures that we see living on the surface are only a small part of the biosphere. The greater and more ancient part of the biosphere is deep and hot. The theory is supported by a considerable mass of evidence. I do not need to summarize the evidence here, because it is clearly presented in the book. I prefer to let Gold speak for himself. The purpose of my foreword is only to explain how the theory of the deep hot biosphere fits into the general pattern of Gold’s life and work. Gold’s theories are always original, always important, usually controversial, and usually right. It is my belief, based on fifty years of observation of Gold as a friend and colleague, that the deep hot biosphere is all of the above: original, important, controversial, and right.