Terra cotta scientists

It is always something when a masterpiece achieves something other than the one the author intended. This is what Bill Bryson’s recent book A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, NY: 2004) achieved. Bill Bryson’s first books were travel books and they were really the most engaging, most hilarious travel books I have ever read. My favorite is Neither Here nor There where he juxtaposed his adult experience traveling in Europe with his memories as a teenage backpacker visiting the same continent with an ever-reluctant friend. He is the consummate observer, ever curious but always reflecting on the possible meanings of the things he observes. A Short History is his first venture into science-writing and he did it so well that he won the Aventis Prize this year, an award given for public communication of science while the book is also being distributed in all the schools in Britain for free.

Bill Bryson might be surprised that reading his book lent me an image of a famous archaeological dig in China – the terra cotta soldiers, horses and chariots in Xi’an. This is because he not only gave us a clear, amusing and well-written scientific history of nearly everything, but he also uncovered a terrain of forgotten scientists. "Forgotten" not only in name but also in the stories that make them so human. As I read his book and found out about the peculiarities and frailties of these scientists, I felt like I was unearthing terra cotta soldiers, finding each of them unique yet the same in their unflinching focus to perform what they find their mission to be. Terra cotta soldiers are the life-size clay soldiers originally found by farmers in 1974 and later dug by archaeologists in Xi’an in China. They number 6,000 to 8,000, depending on the time of count (they are still counting as they dig) and whether you count lone body parts as soldiers. Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of all of China, who started his rule in 246 B.C. at age 13, prepared for his death by ordering 720,000 people to make them to stand guard over his underground kingdom. The terra cotta figures took 32 years to make which eventually filled a 20-square mile mausoleum.

In my own clay-colored reflection on Bryson’s book, it looks as if Nature unleashed her foot soldiers, equipped with peculiar minds, to each probe a piece of her and unlock, bit by bit, her intricate mysteries. Take, for instance, the forgotten 12-year-old Mary Anning who, in 1812, unearthed a fossil of a "sea monster" 17 feet long, and continued to unearth many more marine fossils, including the first and best pterodactyl, in the next 35 years. Early in her fossil-digging career, she sold them to paying tourists that earned her the honor of being the subject of the tongue twister "she sells seashells on the seashore." She did this mostly by herself early in her career, equipped only with the most basic of tools. This would not be such a feat worth mentioning had she not been 12, and if fossils abound like air. But only .1 percent of all living organisms become fossilized because there are several conditions that should be present for an organism to be petrified, and foremost of them is choosing the right rock for one’s eternal rest and only 15 percent of all rocks serve that purpose. Mary Anning not only recognized fossils but also extracted them with the most delicate care that her collections remain unrivaled in quality, and could now be found in the Natural History Museum in London.

Another was country doctor Gideon Mantell whose career in medicine was overtaken by his passion for paleontology that caused him later on to lose his wife, his children, his house, his career, his life and quite, literally, his "spine." He was the first to ever come across a fossilized bone of an iguanodon, a dinosaur – a term that has yet to be coined later, but because he was generous to share this information with another, failed to get credit for it. But he persisted, abandoned by his family, unsupported by funds and even turning his house as a museum of fossils and not charging the hundreds of visitors who came to see his collection. He persisted after losing his house, even in poverty, to name more dinosaur fossils and submitted papers to the Royal Society, even after he met an accident that crippled him and damaged his spine. But Richard Owen, a famous influential scientist who coined the term "dinosaurian," systematically discredited Mantell and his works and even replaced them with his own authorship. Despondent, Mantell took his own life in 1852. And as if a life of insult were not enough, his spine was sent to the Royal College of Surgeons under the care of no less than Owen.

The next time you use a match to light a candle, think of Karl Scheele, a Swedish pharmacist who, in the 1750s, devised a way of manufacturing phosphorus that made Sweden famous for being the largest producer of matches. He also discovered chlorine as an element and as bleaching power, together with seven other elements, namely fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen but got credit for none of them because, as Bryson put it, the world was not "just and Swedish-speaking." Joseph Priestley, who is credited for discovering oxygen, discovered it independently but later than Scheele did; and Humphry Davy, who took the credit for chlorine, really did discover it but 36 years after Scheele already had. But Scheele’s weakness lay in his compulsion to taste everything he tested so that he was found dead in 1786, slumped in his lab.

The unleaded gasoline that you put in your car’s tank is largely due to the work of a seldom-mentioned (even in geology books) geologist named Clair Patterson who, in 1953, also came up with "4.5 billion years" as the age of the Earth that scientists, after much-heated debate, now agree on. Patterson’s focus on geology shifted to the atmosphere and we should all be thankful for that because it was because of his untiring efforts that we know that the presence and deadly human effects of lead in the atmosphere was due to the manufacture of leaded gasoline. Patterson found that there was no lead in the atmosphere before 1923 when leaded gas arrived on the scene, but since then has been rising steadily. He fought this, under mounting pressure from Ethyl Corporation, a powerful gas company and won for us unleaded gasoline.

The father-and-son team of John Scott, a physiologist born in 1860, and J.B.S. Haldane (scientist with no formal degree in science; science popularizer) handed us down a gift useful for underwater pleasure and exploration. They figured out the intervals through which an ascent to the water surface could be made by divers, without being blown into bits by the pressure or afflicted by the condition caused by a quick ascent known as "bends" (called such because you bawled over in pain from it.) They also devised the first "decompression chamber" or "pressure pot," as they called it that saved the lives of divers who suffered from the "bends." Their contributions are not really forgotten but not many people know that in order to arrive at their life-saving methods and devices, they tested them on themselves, Mrs. Scott (wife of John) and some willing houseguests. John Scott himself crushed not one vertebra performing his gas experiments that often resulted in violent seizures or his dental fillings exploding. One science writer, Norton, wrote that almost every experiment of the Haldanes "ended with someone having a seizure, bleeding and vomiting."

Henry Cavendish (1731- 1810) was the Atlas of scientists. He did not carry the world’s weight, but rather he measured it. His experiment is considered one of the most beautiful experiments ever performed. In no simpler terms, he figured out how to weigh the world, based on its density. He was obsessed with measuring things but apparently with nothing else. With singular focus, he would set about adjusting his measuring devices, looking at no one, particularly women, would wear the same style of clothes day after day, hanged his hat on the same peg, as he would lay his walking stick on the same boot. His shyness bordered on it being a disease. He avoided lady househelp and had written instructions never to pass him on the stairs. One time that this happened, he had a new set of stairs constructed at the other side of his house, just for him. An adoring fan once landed on his doorstep and terrified Cavendish so much that he fled from his house that his househelp had to write him letters to convince him that it was now safe to go back home.

Scientists are usually cited in textbooks only for their main contributions that we forget that behind those flashes of genius and brilliance where they serve as Nature’s foot soldiers guarding against and resisting ignorance, muddled thinking and laziness of thought, they also stand on feet of clay, as human beings swimming in the ironies of their craft and their lives. The scientists I cited here are only a handful but like the terra cotta soldiers, you can find more in the works of Bryson and of other science writers who continue to flesh out their lives in inked phrases. Do your part in gratitude. Unearth and discover your own terra cotta scientist.

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