#08 Unveiling genome of popular science writing
And about the book The Gene: An Intimate History
Ever since I started writing regularly, I was noticing the different writing styles, especially for non-fiction. As academicians, we are trained to write objectively. The writing is dry and does not intend to engage the reader. But I wondered how one write popular science. My early experiences with popular science literature is from a Malayalam magazine called Eureka published by Kerala Shastha Sahithya Parishad. They used stories to explain many scientific concepts.
Stories stick with us. Unlike dry scientific facts, stories relate them to our lives. Once you make it a little bit subjective, things are easier to understand and remember. However, for adults, popular science writers are yet to find a suitable format. Sometimes writing is too speculative and loses its scientific rigour. There were more articles about the "godness" of the Higgs boson than the experimental discovery. When most scientists write, the description is often monotonous though the material is sound. Make no mistakes, we had excellent writers like Carl Sagan and Stephan Hawking. But I am yet to find a perfect balance of subjective and objective writing. Siddartha Mukharjee has got the right balance in his book titled “Gene: an intimate history”. I read the book twice. First for the content and then for the craft. If you are an aspiring non-fiction writer, add this to your bookshelf (or kindle downloads).
Genetics and evolution were the only subjects in Biology I liked from high school. I barely survived the 11th and 12th studying classification, mugging up anatomy and dissecting disgusting cockroaches! The logical flow of physics or Mathematics were missing. When this connection is lost, if you cannot derive things from a basic set of laws, the field becomes overwhelming or intimidating for me. But evolution and genetics were not about byhearting the names or classification. It talked about how we came into existence.
The book starts with author's personal story. His family moved from Dhaka to Kolkatta during the partition and then moved to New Delhi. It was a family where 4-5 people were diagnosed with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression. This makes the history of genetics so intimate to him (and for us too). We are what we are due to our genes. Many of our behaviours, abilities and diseases are decided by our genes and there is no escape from that. So to know about the history of Gene, and the impact that we had and will have on society is pretty intimate. His most celebrated earlier book titled “The Emperor of All Maladies” is a biography of cancer.
As he describes the subject from a personal perspective, the book got much more engaging. The interplay between his perspectives based on his story and the scientific truths is a rare mix. Moreover, he describes the behaviour and nature of the scientists in such detail so that you can imagine how it was when they discovered something. The subjective experience, makes the understanding more profound.
The story of Gregor Mandel, father of genetics, who failed the teaching exam and joined the Agustins, is an interesting one. As a physicist, I was surprised to know that he was a student of Christian Doppler who discovered the doppler effect. The experimental rigour of Doppler’s idea has impressed Mandel. Doppler effect is the change in the frequency of moving objects relative to the observer. To prove the increase and decrease in frequency Doppler filled one train full of trumpets making one particular tone. The pitch of the sound, when listened to from the platform, varied when the train was approaching and leaving the station. Mendel wanted to bring this experimental approach to the study of hereditary information. He was a good experimentalist and an excellent gardener. He took up peas to study how hereditary information is passed from one generation to the next. Rest is, as you know, the history of genetics.
Sidhartha also describes how in the pre-Mendel era, people were theorising the hereditary. The patriarchal view of the society was evident in those theories where scholars argued that only male semen contains hereditary information. 17th-century philosopher Nicolaas Hartsoeker theorised that male semen contains tiny humans that will grow in women’s embryos which supplies nutrition.
The book tells the scientific history of many major developments in the field. The concept of evolution was not an abrupt thought from Darvin. He was inspired by Charles Leyyl’s book on geology which talks about the structural changes that occur due to slow natural changes happening over the time scale of millennia. He argued that the complex geological patterns, the large mountains and vast oceans, are not created in a day by God but with a slow natural process of sedimentation, erosion and deposition. Rather than one biblical flood, he added, there were thousands of floods that led to the formation of landscapes that we see now. Similarly, Laplace’s theory about the formation of the solar system was also an intellectual inspiration for Darvin. Darvin also derived concepts from Thomas Malthus’ population theory from which he got the idea of natural selection. It is important to tell these stories or inspiration, to convey the scientific process of understanding to the public. Darwin was not a bearded saint who got these ideas of evolution from his meditation in the Himalayas. He read other scientists, he observed and took samples. He documented and studied his findings to come to the matured idea of evolution.
Like languages. like landscapes, like the slowly cooling cosmos, perhaps tha animal and plants had decended from earlier forms thorugh process of gradual continuous change.- From The Gene, an intimate history
The story of the discovery of DNA is indeed a fascinating one. The structure of the DNA was revealed through x-ray crystallographic studies. Maurice Wilkins, a radiation physicist from New Zeeland, was the person who was assigned to study DNA's 3-dimensional structure at King's College London. When he was away for vacation, another scientist named Rosalind Franklin joined the department. She was asked to assist Wilkins when he returned. But she did not want to “assist” anyone and continued to work on the subject while having a cold was with Wilen. Before her studies, the X-ray images of DNA was too noisy. She found that this is caused by the change of the form of DNA the chamber gets dry. This was solved by adjusting the humidity of the chamber, and she produced the most beautiful images of the DNA.
Watson and Krick were two scientists at Cambridge working towards the model of DNA. Watson attended lectures of Wilkins and Franklin separately and was inspired. Franklin was unimpressed with them and had no intention to make a toy model. The first model Watson and Krick came up with was a triple helix which was unstable and did not match the findings of Franklin. She then refused to share the new picture, photo 51, which reveals a much clearer picture of DNA. But Wilkins went inside her office, took the image from the drawer, and showed it to Watson. On the way back, train from London to Cambridge, Watson had made his first sketch of the double helix. Both Wilker and Franklin were convinced of this elegant solution. Watson and Krick completed the model in 1953 and published it in Nature magazine. Franklin and Goslin (the student who took photo 51) published crystallographic evidence of the double helix. Walkins published more experimental evidence in support of the model. Watson, Krick and Walkin shared the Nobel prize for the discovery of Gene in 1964. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and was not included in the Nobel prize.
The thought of scientists as superhumans was always an overwhelming one for me. People without any flaws with the highest form of intelligence and dedication. During my PhD, I attended a talk by Dame Jocelyn Bell, who discovered pulsars. She was another female scientist who was denied the Nobel prize for her own work. In her talk, she described her vulnerabilities and fears of coming to an intimidating research centre from a small town. The way she thought and acted was not so different from mine. Aspiring scientists need to hear such stories to have more confidence in their work and move forward. Otherwise, the history of science is an overwhelming success story of ultra-brilliant people. This is probably the first book I have read with such an approach. Talking about the failures, fights and emotions between scientists makes it more humane and engaging. He builds up a character for each scientist with flaws along with their brilliance.
The author often goes back to the stories of his father, his uncle who had schizophrenia, and his mother and her twin who looked alike but were different in character. Such narration breaks the monotony of the science subject, and the reader approaches the material from a personal approach. In his famous book titled "Thinking fast and slow", Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes the difficulty of understanding statistical facts. No matter how well you understand a counterintuitive statistical fact, it is almost impossible to convert it into actionable knowledge. You know for a fact that people who die in aeroplane failures are far lesser than the number of people who die in road accidents. But this knowledge hardly stops you from the fear of flying. One of the ways to break it, which Khanaman did in his book, is to make the reader experience the surprise. Personally relating to the content makes the learning last longer. Talking about schizophrenia from a general point of view has a lot of limitations. But when we hear about his uncle who suffered from it, the self-involvement is better. I thought about a distant relative with similar symptoms and behaviours.
The book describes how the misconception of heredity led to its use as a political tool. Many autocratic regimes wanted to start projects on Eugenics, to remove unwanted hereditary elements from the society. Later the author says: “It took the full force of human genetics to bring sanity to the study of madness”.
Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science. - From The Gene, an intimate history
He addresses the question of inequality based on race, gender and sexual orientation. Often people used to justify the poorer situation of the marginalized by saying they are genetically inferior. People used to say the Brahmins are dominating because they have genius brains. These are unscientific to the core. The author says: “We are more alike than different. Humans are a young population and the variations in our genes for different races are fewer than the variation present in Chimpanzees”. When you take the variations within humans, a vast majority of them occurs (70-90) within the so-called race than that of interracial differences. So the gene can tell about a person’s race, but race does not dictate the person’s gene. I feel addressing this question was one of the best things he has done in the book.
Every genome carries a signature of an individuals ancestry- but an individual’s racial ancestry predicts little about the person’s genome - From The Gene, an intimate history
I was wondering about the moment he decided to write about the book. Stakes are high when you choose such an important subject. The author needs to be scientifically rigorous, as this is a popular science book. But you cannot avoid talking about society and the impact of genetic studies on them. He never took a diplomatic escape route when discussing moral or ethical issues. Even if you check all boxes or scientific correctness and social responsibility, making the read enjoyable needs amazing craft.
Definitely, Sidharth Mukherjee’s The Gene: An intimate history is one of the best in the category along with Richard Dawkins Magic of reality. Especially for me. I always find it hard to understand the scientific concepts without relating to personal experience – something I can see or feel or imagine
I have also found that many scientists struggle with their desire to be objective and precise when they come across genes, atoms, or singularities which can not have a single definition that is complete in every aspect. So, they try to insist on their perspective by either ignoring others or making us more confused about other aspects.
But Mukherjee has looked at Gene from multiple aspects and perspectives helping me to understand and realize instead of teaching directly bombarding with scientific terms.
My interest in genes is primarily from its characteristic that it is a unit of heredity carrying instructions from one generation to another. What I learned from the book complements perfects with what I learned from philosophy.
As you rightly pointed out “People used to say the Brahmins are dominating because they have genius brains”. Knowing myself, I can authoritatively say that it is wrong. But when I went deeper into philosophy I realized that one becomes a ‘Dwija”(twice-born) not merely by the qualities one inherit at birth, but by developing his consciousness and moving beyond emotional pulls and pushes of Tamasik(Physical pleasures), Rajasik(emotional pleasure) and Satwik (Intellectual pleasures)Gunas. Our philosophy is much deeper, even Mukherjee mentions Plato tracing the origins of the history of genes but ignores the Indian philosophy - maybe because we jumped to consciousness dismissing the Body as a temporary form.
Similarly, I understand that irrespective of evolving definitions of the gene, it is basically a unit of heredity, and it carries across generations in the form of nucleic acid. But each human being is an experiment in process. Genetical activity is influenced by what we inherit, the environment we live in, influences of their genes, and even by what scientists call chance.
How humans think, talk, and reacts is even more complex. And you have rightly emphasized in this post, “the way she (Dame Jocelyn Bell) thought and acted was not so different from mine.” Each of us so like others at one level but unique in many other aspects. This depends upon how each consciousness evolves within the limitation of the Physical body and environment. Depending upon the attachments and associations we inherit and develop as consciousness manifest in our body.