Freedom to be Queer

Scientists, like poets, are peculiar people. That is a fortunate fact for civilization, thinks Zoologist John R. Baker of Oxford University, who fears that the world may wind up with a planned society after the war. He has written a bitter book, The Scientific Life (Macmillan; $2.50), demanding that scientists be allowed to be as queer as they please.

A British admiral's son who has spent much of his scientific life investigating savages in the New Hebrides, Zoologist Baker believes that scientists are in grave danger of being regimented into total sanity. An arch-individualist, he holds that scientists must have complete freedom of inquiry. In support of his theory that most great scientists have been rather odd, and many of their discoveries the result of accident rather than planning, he presents some persuasive evidence:

>The great 18th-Century British chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish (discoverer of nitric acid, the chemical composition of water, etc.) was so unsociable that he "was known to flee from a company of strangers uttering a queer cry like a frightened animal"; he was also so unworldly that when asked for a handout for a sick employe, he offered -L-10,000.

>Geneticist William Bateson was so backward in school that his headmaster wrote: "It is very doubtful whether so vague and aimless a boy will profit by University life." He remained fabulously vague: he would buy a ticket to a play and show up by mistake at a musical show, grub in his garden in a brand-new suit and go to London in dirty old garden flannels.

>People ignorant of scientific method, says Author Baker, are "apt to imagine that a substitute for sugar would be discovered by a research undertaken for the purpose of finding a substitute for sugar." Not at all, he snorts; saccharin was actually discovered by two chemists engaged in a wholly irrelevant attempt to make orthosulfobenzoic acid from orthotoluene-sulfonic acid.

>William Hyde Wollaston (discoverer of the elements palladium and rhodium), a silent, austere recluse, once had a visitor who asked to see his laboratory. Wollaston rang for his butler, had his "laboratory" wheeled in on a tea tray.

>The great chemist August Kekule discovered the theory of the benzene ring in a dream about snakes, in which one of the snakes seized its own tail and the image whirled scornfully before his eyes.

Surveying contemporary research in the light of this evidence Author Baker finds few signs of genius at work, is depressed by a trend toward ever greater organization and utilitarianism in modern scientific investigation. (U.S. publication of his book comes in the midst of a fierce debate among scientists on the Kilgore Science Mobilization bill, now in the Senate Military Affairs Committee, which would set up a $200,000,000 agency for Government-planned research.) Glooms Baker: "A dreary uniformity descends."

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