Editorial

Abstract

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Longair Malcolm 2022EditorialBiogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc.721–8http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0001SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Malcolm Longair Malcolm Longair [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Malcolm Longair Malcolm Longair [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:06 April 2022https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0001WelcomeA warm welcome to volume 72 of Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, the first of two volumes to be published during 2022. This is another remarkable collection of memoirs, spanning so many aspects of the achievements of Fellows of the Society. There are three Nobel Prize winners, Anthony Hewish (physics 1974), Thomas Steitz (chemistry 2009) and David Thouless (physics 2016). The memoirs of two great Soviet Foreign Members of the Society, Grigory Barenblatt and Isaak Khalatnikov, are particularly notable not only for the descriptions of their achievements in science, but also for the insight they provide into Soviet science during the Cold War—more of that below. John Polkinghorne was an outstanding particle theorist who changed career to become an influential Anglican priest. Another indication of the broad scope of this volume is the inclusion of Arnold Wolfendale, former Astronomer Royal, and the major philanthropist Leonard Wolfson (Lord Wolfson of Marylebone). We also acknowledge the contributions of Neill Alexander and David Buckingham who, besides their major scientific contributions, served as Editorial Board members of Biographical Memoirs from the time this very helpful and engaged committee was founded in 2012. But all 22 memoirs in this volume are fitting tributes to the scope and originality of those celebrated.Physics in the USSR during the Cold War—personal reflectionsReaders will, I hope, forgive me if this Editorial is more personal than usual. It so happens that this volume contains the memoirs of two great Soviet scientists, Grigory Barenblatt and Isaak Khalatnikov, who were both Foreign Members of the Society. Both of them were at the height of their careers during the remarkable period from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the period 1988 to 1991. Both memoirs provide a wonderful portrayal of life and physics during these years as the USSR began relaxing somewhat after the often brutal dictatorship under Stalin. It was also the period of the Cold War and there were many restrictions upon life and work.The reason this Editorial is more personal than usual is that I was there in Moscow as a Royal Society–USSR Academy of Sciences Research Fellow for the academic year 1968–69. I had always wanted to become more familiar with Russian culture, being an avid lover of Russian music, opera and literature. I am eternally grateful to the Royal Society for organizing my exchange visit. It has to be said that the competition for such fellowships was not great, being in the middle of the Cold War and knowing that life would be somewhat proscribed, but I was very well briefed and supported by the Royal Society. From my personal perspective, my year in the USSR was a great success and my collaborations with the Soviet physicists and astrophysicists could not have been more profitable. I worked with both Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (ForMemRS 1987) and Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich (ForMemRS 1979) and their younger colleagues. Among the latter was Rashid Alievich Sunyaev (ForMemRS 2009), now director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, with whom I had a particularly productive collaboration. I knew well the work of Ginzburg, but knew less about the work of Zeldovich and his remarkable team of young researchers, by 1968 now free to work on fundamental problems of general relativity and cosmology. I participated in the Landau-style seminars (Lev Davydovitch Landau ForMemRS) of Ginzburg, Zeldovich and Shklovsky on a weekly basis and learned a vast amount of innovative astrophysics and cosmology. This was one of the most important outcomes of my visit.1Reading the memoirs of Barenblatt and Khalatnikov brought these memories vividly back to life. These marvellous memoirs describe powerfully life in the physical sciences during a period of incredible creativity on the part of the Soviet physicists. As both memoirs make clear, the scientific achievements were made against a background of surveillance by the KGB, the inability to carry out ‘normal’ academic interchanges with physicists outside the Soviet Union and serious antisemitism in both Barenblatt's and Khalatnikov's cases. But the physics they and their colleagues produced was of extraordinary quality. The author of Khalatnikov's memoir, the late Alexei Byalko, a member of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, was a post-doc in 1968–69, just as I was. I assume we both attended the same Ginzburg seminars in the Lebedev Institute every week. I can vouch for the accuracy of his account of the vibrancy of life in physics during these years. Of course, living conditions were hard and space was at a premium. As Byalko recounts, Room 5 ‘was “shared” by two secretaries, staff and all visitors to the [Institute of Theoretical Physics] who passed through Moscow’. Informal discussions sporadically occurred in Room Five at a small blackboard, amid screams from the secretaries asking the participants to tone down their voices. This is how big science was born in a small room: everyone who happened to live through this period still remembers it as a beautiful, wonderful golden age. ‘This was our Arcadia: we were young, talented, careless, and free. We had no other things besides the job we loved. All the burden of responsibility was on Khalat.’[Khalatnikov] himself, wandering sporadically into Room Five and discovering 10–20 of the scientists there, drinking coffee, shouting at each other near the blackboard, proofreading galleys, sometimes over the international phone line for foreign journals, stared at the heavens and lamented, ‘My God, what a madhouse is here!’ The response was: ‘Yes, Isaak Markovich, a madhouse indeed, and you are at its helm!’ This was not an uncommon experience. The vitality was present in all the institutes I visited during my year in the Soviet Union. Nor should I omit to mention the extremely kind friendship and hospitality I received from all my friends and colleagues in the Soviet Union.Part of the reason that physics survived relatively unscathed from the years under Stalin's rule was that he needed the expertise of the physicists for the development of nuclear weapons. Many of the best physicists, including Landau, Ginzburg, Zeldovich and Gel'fand (Izrael Moiseivich Gelfand, ForMemRS 1977), joined the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, just as many of the best American physicists participated in the Manhattan project in the USA. Disciplines such as biology and genetics suffered greatly from the constraints of ‘dialectic materialism’, the prime example being the politically-motivated and disastrous effects of the Lysenko affair on these disciplines. Another point to remember is that research in the USSR was carried out in institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which enabled the physicists to concentrate wholly upon research without the demands of teaching and administration.This is not an apologia for Soviet science, but a reminder that spectacular science can be carried out under what on the surface appear to be unpromising circumstances. The physicists and astrophysicists had the freedom to carry out wonderfully creative physics, not so different from the liberties enjoyed by our colleagues in the West. The words ring in the memory, ‘This was our Arcadia’. This is not the usual image of science in the USSR during the Cold War, but the memoirs of Barenblatt and Khalatnikov bring vividly to light the reality of the best of Soviet physical sciences through these years of international isolation.My thanks go to the authors of the memoirs of Barenblatt and Khalatnikov for the revealing insights these provide. It is a matter of considerable importance for historians of science that these memoirs provide essential background for understanding research in physics during the years of the Cold War in the USSR.Biographical Memoirs volume 72There are 22 memoirs in this, the first 2022 volume of Biographical Memoirs. The following notes are intended to act as a guide to the different disciplines represented, with brief summaries of the scientific achievements of the Fellows, largely taken from the memoirs’ summaries. These, and previous volumes, can be freely accessed on the Royal Society's website.Astronomy and physicsRonald Bullough was a theorist known for his research into the theory of dislocations and their role in the properties of metals, including their ductility and resistance to fracture and, in particular, the influence of dislocations on the development of damage during irradiation, an area in which he was a world authority. He spent most of his career at the Harwell Laboratory of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, becoming later in his career AEA Chief Scientist while maintaining a significant presence in basic research related to the stability of strained-layer semiconductor devices.Antony Hewish was the leader of the team that, in 1967, discovered the pulsars, which proved to be rapidly rotating, magnetized neutron stars. The discovery resulted from Hewish's programme of systematic all-sky surveys to detect the scintillation of small angular diameter radio sources due to electron density fluctuations in the solar wind. The discovery paved the way for the rapid development of high energy astrophysics and an appreciation that general relativity plays a key role in the stability of neutron stars. He was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in physics for ‘his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars’.Isaak Khalatnikov made major contributions to quantum liquids, particularly liquid helium, and to general relativity and cosmology. He developed our theoretical understanding of superfluidity in liquid 4He and in 3He–4He mixtures as well as the idea, originally due to Landau, that the normal fluid can be described in terms of a gas of weakly-interacting excitations. In his work on general relativity and cosmology, with V. A. Belinski and E. M. Lifshitz (ForMemRS 1982), he showed not only that general solutions could contain singularities, but also how the Universe behaved near such singularities. He became founding director of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1964, where he brought together an extraordinarily powerful group of theoreticians, creating a scientific centre that played a major role in the development of theoretical physics.John Polkinghorne made many contributions to theoretical elementary particle physics, discovering important features of the analytic properties of the scattering matrix, culminating in the jointly authored book, The analytic S-matrix. He also developed a covariant formulation of Feynman's model of partons (Richard Phillips Feynman, ForMemRS 1965), later identified as quarks and gluons. In 1979, he commenced training as an Anglican priest. He became one of the most influential figures in the growing academic field of science and religion, publishing both popular and academic texts and lecturing on the international stage.David Thouless was one of the leading theoretical condensed matter physicists of his generation. With Kosterlitz, he pointed out that two-dimensional or quasi two-dimensional physical systems undergo a completely novel type of phase transition. He developed a highly original approach to the theory of localization of electrons in disordered solids, and with his co-authors pioneered the use of topological considerations in the analysis of many-body systems, now at the basis of the field of topological insulators and superconductors. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2016.Felix Weinberg was appointed to a personal chair in combustion physics in 1967 at Imperial College, where he worked for his entire career. He was particularly noted for his optical and electrical studies of flames and his pioneering development of innovative combustion methods. He invented a family of powerful optical tools in combustion, using both broad spectrum and laser light sources. His work on electrical diagnostics led to applications of electric fields to control combustion and to improved understanding of ionization and soot formation. All his research had a strong influence on the global evolution of environmentally benign combustion furnaces.Sir Arnold Wolfendale was an international leader in the fields of cosmic ray and gamma ray astronomy. In 1965, using an installation in the Kolar Gold Mine in India, he played a major role in the first detection of the neutrinos associated with muons produced in the atmosphere. His interests in the origin of high energy cosmic rays required the development of better understanding of particle physics at energies beyond those accessible at accelerators. He used early satellite data to argue for the galactic origin of intermediate energy cosmic rays and for studies of the distribution of molecular hydrogen. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1991. He lobbied tirelessly for more government support for science and gave many lectures each year to general audiences, almost to the end of his life.Chemistry and crystallographyDavid Buckingham was a chemical physicist and theoretical chemist who made fundamental contributions to the understanding of optical, electric and magnetic properties of molecules. As a PhD student at Cambridge, he made significant advances in the theory of intermolecular forces and nonlinear optics. Then, in Oxford, he and his group performed the first direct measurement of a molecular electric quadrupole moment. After a period as the first chair of theoretical chemistry at Bristol, he returned to Cambridge as the first holder of the 1968 Chair of Chemistry. With colleagues he pioneered experiment and theory on vibrational optical activity and developed a powerful model to predict the structures of weakly-bound molecules.Alan Cowley was one of the most creative main group chemists of his generation. In his early years he made many fundamental contributions to the chemistry of phosphorus, not only in synthesizing new compounds but also in employing novel analytical and computational methods. In the 1980s he was at the forefront of emerging research into low-coordinate phosphorus chemistry and made seminal contributions in the areas of multiply bonded species, as well as in the transition metal coordination chemistry of phosphinidenes. In the second half of his career, he studied single source precursors for important solid-state electronic materials, many of which were far superior to known examples.Trevor Evans was responsible for revealing the main physical processes that take place in natural diamond, both in the upper mantle of the Earth and as it is ejected by volcanic action to the surface. He clarified the reason for its very long life as a metastable crystal, valuable both as a gemstone and as an industrial abrasive. Using transmission electron microscopy, he discovered dislocation loops and platelet precipitates in nitrogen-containing stones. In exacting laboratory experiments under geologically relevant conditions, he pioneered the study of the emergence of nitrogen from solution to precipitate during the ejection process. His work played a major role in underpinning the characterization of gemstones, explaining many features of their colour.MathematicsJohn Conway was without doubt one of the most celebrated British mathematicians of the last half century. In 1968 he constructed the automorphism group of the then recently-discovered Leech lattice, and in so doing discovered three new sporadic simple groups. He invented The Game of Life, which brought him to the attention of a much wider audience and led to a cult following. He also combined the methods of Cantor and Dedekind for extending number systems to construct what are called ‘surreal numbers’, probably his proudest achievement. He made significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including number theory, logic, algebra, combinatorics and geometry.Mechanics and engineeringGrigory Barenblatt devoted his scientific life to the analysis of difficult and important problems in mechanics: turbulence in the oceans, in the atmosphere and in polymeric fluids, as well as fracture, fatigue and damage accumulation in solids. He made use of sophisticated and innovative mathematical tools that he himself developed with his collaborators, in particular, similarity, scaling methods and intermediate asymptotics. In 1992 he was appointed the first G. I. Taylor professor of fluid mechanics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, and then in 1996 professor in residence at the Department of Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley. His work garnered many prestigious awards and world-wide recognition.Graham Wood was a world-leading corrosion scientist who bridged both the aqueous (electrochemical) corrosion and high-temperature oxidation branches of the subject. His analytical predictions of depletion and enrichment profiles in substrate and scale during preferential oxidation have long been confirmed in practice. He demonstrated that transient oxides can be vital solid lubricants in oxidative friction and wear processes. He elucidated ionic transport in amorphous anodic films, allowing the strict design of such films for practical application. While keeping active in research, he held increasingly senior administrative roles, and established a specialist graduate school.Molecular and structural biologyDame Louise Johnson was a leading architect of protein crystallography and structural enzymology. She pioneered the application of the technique to understand how enzymes function at the molecular level. Much of our current knowledge of how enzymes catalyse chemical reactions with high specificity and how their activities are regulated have their origins in her research on lysozyme, glycogen phosphorylase and protein kinases. She helped pioneer Laue protein crystallography as a method to elucidate dynamic structural changes in proteins. She was a strong advocate of synchrotron radiation as a tool for structural biology, working to establish third generation synchrotrons.Kiyoshi Nagai pioneered research in several areas of structural and molecular biology in an innovative and imaginative style. His initial work was on haemoglobin, in which he devised new methods to express haemoglobin in bacteria, enabling specific changes to be made in the amino acid sequence to test theories about the structure, function and evolution of the molecule. Later, his major research area became the elucidation of the structure of the spliceosome, the complex molecular machine that removes the intervening sequences from newly synthesized messenger RNA to create the correct template for translation into protein.Thomas Steitz was among the foremost of the generation that was responsible for an explosion in our understanding of the structure and function of biological macromolecules. His research career was one of sustained excellence over six decades, and spanned the range from determining the structures of important metabolic enzymes to understanding the structural basis of how genetic information residing in our DNA is used to make the proteins they encode. This latter effort culminated in the structure of the ribosome, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009.NeuroscienceThomas Jessell was a British neuroscientist who made pioneering discoveries in developmental neurobiology. He used late twentieth-century developments in molecular biology to unravel the genetic basis of spinal cord neuronal diversity and developmental mechanisms of circuit formation. Employing virtuoso molecular genetic, anatomical and electrophysiological techniques, he made seminal contributions to broad areas of neuroscience. Notable contributions included the discovery of extracellular factors that induce distinct neuronal cell types and guide their connectivity, as well as the identification of the transcriptional repertoires that lead to neuronal complexity in the developing spinal cord. Important insights into circuitry and behaviour followed these defining studies.Patrick Wall was a neurophysiologist and the pioneer in the science of pain. He discovered that the sensory information arising from receptors in our body could be modified, or ‘gated’, in the spinal cord by other sensory inputs and also by information from the brain. The final sensory experience is not necessarily predictable from the original pain-eliciting sensory input. He used this to explain the poor relationship between injury and pain. In 1969, with Ron Melzack, he proposed the ‘gate control theory of pain’, the circuit diagram summarizing how central spinal cord circuits can modulate sensory inputs. Fifty years after its first publication, molecular genetic dissection of dorsal horn neuronal circuitry has indisputably confirmed that sensory inputs are indeed ‘gated’ in the spinal cord dorsal horn.PhilanthropyLeonard Wolfson (Lord Wolfson of Marylebone) was a businessman and philanthropist. His family's wealth was made in the retail trade, and, with his father, he helped to turn Great Universal Stores into one the largest retail conglomerates in Europe. In 1955, alongside his father and mother, he created the foundation that bears his family name. The Wolfson Foundation's activities and grant-making have been focused on research and education—and, not least, the advancement of science and medicine.Zoology and anthropologyRobert McNeill Alexander was appointed to the chair of the Department of Pure and Applied Zoology at the University of Leeds in 1969, where he switched his research interests from fishes to the mechanics of legged locomotion. He conducted experiments with a variety of mammals, calculating forces, stresses and strains in muscle fibres, bones and tendons. His speciality became the application of mathematical models to animal locomotion, using the Froude number to estimate the speed of dinosaurs based on the spacing of their fossil footprints. Subsequent work included modelling the optimization of mammal performance and the minimization of energy costs.Quentin Bone joined the scientific staff of the Marine Biological Association Laboratory at Plymouth, where he worked until his retirement in 1991. He showed that fishes have two distinct, independently innervated locomotory systems, red muscle for cruising and white muscle for rapid swimming bursts. Later he showed that squids have convergently evolved two sorts of muscle fibre roughly equivalent to those of fishes. He also worked extensively on pelagic marine invertebrates that swim by jet propulsion. He used optical and electron microscopy combined with electrophysiology to establish the neuromuscular basis of locomotion.Phillip Tobias was best known as the doyen of African palaeoanthropology, but his interests and accomplishments ranged far beyond that. He was skilled in cytogenetics, human biology and human anatomy, while a long-time chair of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His passion also made him a leading figure as a warrior for academic freedom and human dignity in the fight against South African apartheid. His oratorical skills gave him power in the classroom and with the public.AcknowledgementsMany thanks once again to the authors of the memoirs for their outstanding work in writing biographies of lasting value. These authoritative memoirs are full of interest and pleasure for the insight they provide into the lives and works of a number of outstanding scientists. I am also personally indebted to the Editorial and Production teams at the Royal Society, whose names and roles are listed on the title page. Their outstanding efforts have enabled us to continue the enhanced rate of publication of the memoirs while maintaining the excellence of their content and high production values. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the efforts of the Editorial Board, who have been very helpful indeed in supporting the increased activity by suggesting memoir writers, helping with refereeing and keeping a sharp eye on all aspects of the evolution of Biographical Memoirs.Author profileMalcolm Longair CBE FRS FRSE is Jacksonian Professor Emeritus of Natural Philosophy and Director of Development, Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He was appointed the ninth Astronomer Royal of Scotland in 1980, as well as Regius Professor of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, and the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. He has served on and chaired many international committees, boards and panels, working with both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). His main research interests are in high energy astrophysics, astrophysical cosmology and the history of physics and astrophysics. The third edition of his book, Theoretical concepts in physics, was published in 2020. He is currently working on the third edition of his book Galaxy formation. He has continued to enhance the online digital archive of historic photographs illustrating the history of the Cavendish Laboratory. A major task is preparing for the move of the Cavendish Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments to the new Cavendish Laboratory in 2023.Footnotes2 I have given more details of my experiences in Moscow in my essay in the book Finding the Big Bang, edited by James Peebles, Lyman Page and Bruce Partridge, pp. 132–144 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009).© 2022 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. Next Article FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This IssueJune 2022Volume 72 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0001Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0080-4606Online ISSN:1748-8494History: Published online06/04/2022Published in print01/06/2022 License:© 2022 The Author(s)Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. Citations and impact PDF Download Subjectsbiographical history