Editorial

Abstract

You have accessMoreSectionsView PDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Cite this article Fox Robert 2011EditorialNotes Rec. R. Soc.65321–323http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2011.0050SectionYou have accessEditorialEditorial Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Robert Fox Robert Fox [email protected] Google Scholar Find this author on PubMed Search for more papers by this author Published:28 September 2011https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2011.0050This is the latest version of the article – see previous versions. January 1, 2011: Previous Version 1 In her article in this issue, Tilli Tansey quotes Sir Hans Krebs's contention that ‘scientists are made by those who teach them’. As Tansey observes, most claims of this kind have been made with respect to teachers who have exercised their influence at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. But many of us will recall teachers who have made their mark on us earlier in our lives. The case of Sir Henry Dale illustrates the point. For Dale, no influence was greater than that of two schoolmasters: Edward Albert Butler, a zoologist and stickler for precision and economy in the use of English who taught him at Tollington Park College in North London, and then Alfred Hutchinson at the Leys School, Cambridge, who helped to guide Dale towards physiology as the discipline he pursued as an undergraduate in Cambridge and in the distinguished career that followed, as a Nobel prizewinner in 1936 and as President of the Royal Society from 1940 to 1945. All too often such early influences are glossed over in biographical studies more concerned with the subject's mature years and with better-known teachers and mentors. Tansey's study of Dale is a welcome corrective to that tendency.As historians know well, analysing influence of any kind is a tricky business, sometimes made trickier by personal testimonies that confuse as much as they illuminate: what are we to make, for example, of Einstein's description of education as what remains ‘when you have forgotten everything you learned in school’? And why, in any case, should we assume that it is only in our school or student days that we experience decisive influences? Few who found themselves working with A. V. Hill's hand-picked ‘Brigands’ in World War I escaped unmarked by his powerful personality and gift for leadership, and by no means all of them were young. A mixture of civilians and officers that included no fewer than four Senior Wranglers, the Brigands began to be recruited early in 1916. Their task was essentially range-finding, for use in the anti-aircraft artillery installations that protected England until German air attacks ceased in May 1918. As William Van der Kloot shows, mathematical skills learned in the Tripos were by no means wasted on the complex mathematical analysis of resistance, fuse-settings, muzzle velocity and air pressure, as well as the determination of the coordinates of enemy aircraft.During World War II, Hill remained a prominent figure. He retained an advisory role in the war effort and from 1935 to 1945 served as the Royal Society's Biological Secretary. He was therefore a close and respected witness of the controversial election of a new President when discussions about Henry Dale's successor came to a head early in the spring of 1945. The imminent end of the war and anxiety about the postwar direction of science made the election an unusually important one. Informal exchanges that had begun as early as 1943 matured slowly, culminating in a report, Postwar needs, circulated among the Fellowship in January 1945. For the Society, the central issue was clear. Should the Society assume a ‘directive function’, as the radical science writer J. G. Crowther believed? Or should administrative responsibility for science be placed in the hands of government? At this point, enter Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, cantankerous and suspicious of the power that had come to be vested in the relatively closed world of the Royal Society's Council. Soon, at his initiative, 84 Fellows had signed a memorial urging Council to assert the Society's role as the ‘voice’ of British science. Andrade's aim was not centralized planning in the Soviet manner, as Crowther would have preferred. He simply wanted the Society to exert a ‘guiding influence’. To that end, he thought it essential that the new President should be neither ‘ornamental’ nor ‘quarrelsome’. But who, among the likely candidates, could be relied upon to tread the path between those snares? Andrade preferred Henry Tizard, but Tizard was reluctant, even hostile, to the idea. Another name in the frame was Hill's; the obstacle here was Hill's perception of the Presidency as something to be avoided if he was to get back to his laboratory after six years of inactivity in research. Eventually, after labyrinthine discussions that Peter Collins charts in his article, the choice fell on Robert Robinson. It was a victory for those who wanted the Royal Society to represent the interests of fundamental research and to do so with a maximum degree of detachment from the politics of science. Despite his energetic lobbying, Andrade had been thwarted, and he felt the defeat keenly. In Collins's words, his carefully planned initiative had gone ‘spectacularly wrong’. The legacy was a series of anniversary addresses by Robinson that had far more to do with the latest advances in organic chemistry than with public policy.As readers will know, Notes and Records of the Royal Society by no means limits its coverage to articles about the Society or its Fellows. Alan Mills's investigation of the belief that a red-hot iron rod can be converted into a permanent magnet by hammering it while aligned on a north–south axis responds to a belief with roots in a work that long predates the Society, William Gilbert's De magnete (1600). It shows how easily (and misleadingly) the statement of a respected authority can escape serious re-examination. Coming into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Andreas-Holger Maehle takes an international perspective in his account of the history of stem cell research. The origins of the research lay in the work of Ernst Haeckel, and it was in some of the great laboratories of Imperial Germany that work on stem cells (the term is Haeckel's, Stammzelle) first flourished. By the early twentieth century, embryologists, haematologists and histologists were all devoting serious attention to the cells, now increasingly in America and Britain as well as Germany. But it was now also that stem cells acquired what Maehle sees as their ‘ambiguous’ character, after a recognition of the possible association of embryonic cells with tumour formation. As Maehle argues, this darker side of stem cell research still clouds debate, both clinical and ethical, at the same time as we hope for an effective treatment for Parkinson's disease and other neurological conditions.Another article that broaches a currently relevant ‘big picture’ is David B. Wilson's. Arguing for a reconceptualization of the history of relations between science and religion, Wilson builds on a modern literature that has moved decisively away from the notion of science and religion as neatly defined categories of knowledge destined to be eternally in conflict. In pursuit of a more capacious and flexible perspective on our understanding of nature and God and the multiple ways in which we achieve that understanding, he would even have us abandon the words ‘science’ and ‘religion’ altogether. His exemplar is the prodigiously learned nineteenth-century polymath William Whewell, a man who saw harmony where others sought to find irreconcilability between empirically or rationally acquired understanding (in the case of science) and scripturally based understanding (in the case of religion). Above all, Whewell did not shy away from complexity or seek simple doctrinaire answers.The lesson of this discussion for our own times is clear. By studying Whewell's approach, which allowed him to take a more indulgent view of the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo than was common among Protestants of his day, we may come to see current debates in less confrontational terms. The possibility of conflict will always exist, but once we recognize which of the multiple forms of science or of religion and which ways of knowing are in play, we can at least define the nature of the conflict. Understanding may then take the place of warfare. Here, as I believe it should, history can speak to the present, just as Maehle's study of stem cell research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries speaks to us on another currently contentious debate. Of course, the voice of history has to be interpreted with care: the circumstances of the past never reproduce themselves precisely, and the lessons we might be tempted to learn have to be tempered accordingly. To value history in purely utilitarian terms is dangerous, and that path is not one that I should wish to take. But the fact remains that, judiciously used as a resource and not as a fount of hard and fast prescriptions, history has its uses as well as its purely intellectual rewards.This makes the Royal Society's support for history, through its library, archives and Centre for History of Science all the more important. Once again Notes and Records has the opportunity of displaying some of the rich historical resources available in Carlton House Terrace, in this case the four newly arrived and, in their different ways, striking portraits described by Keith Moore. The presidential portrait by Bryan Organ, which arrived towards the end of the 350th anniversary year, conveys the Society's former President as if speaking to the viewer, with hand gestures that anyone who has heard Martin Rees lecture will recognize. This is no ordinary portrait, and the same can be said of the fine portrayals of Anne McLaren (sadly, a posthumous work created from a photograph and other materials), Derek Denton (with its intriguing trompe l'oeil dimension) and Bernard Lovell (an ink sketch dating from 1963). There is no substitute for seeing these works in situ. But it is a pleasure to be able to give a flavour of them here. I do so with a reminder that they appear in colour in the online edition of the journal. Previous ArticleNext Article VIEW FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD PDF FiguresRelatedReferencesDetails This Issue20 December 2011Volume 65Issue 4 Article InformationDOI:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2011.0050Published by:Royal SocietyPrint ISSN:0035-9149Online ISSN:1743-0178History: Published online28/09/2011Published in print20/12/2011 License:This journal is © 2011 The Royal Society Citations and impact PDF Download