Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1997

military might”. Yet he was convinced that itwas only because of the war that democracyhad performed so well. Remove the prod ofwar and the US government would revert topast form, as shown by the Truman adminis-tration’s “exceedingly loose” handling of armscontrol in late 1945.

Bush continued to have a profound dis-trust of ‘politics as usual’ and aspired toachieving a nonpartisan expertise that couldtranscend politics and produce the rightanswer through realistic observation of thefacts and analysis untainted by wishful think-ing and political preconceptions. This aspira-tion was closely approximated in his experi-ence with the OSRD. There, shielded frompublic view by military secrecy, and withunlimited access to Roosevelt, he couldacquire the resources and authority needed tofulfil his vision of an independent civilianresearch-and-development organization thatwould serve as an equal partner with the mili-tary and the industrial leadership of the coun-try, but which would be free to initiate devel-opments without military blessing.

According to Zachary, Bush first conceivedof this wartime organization in January 1940— a remarkably bold vision. “Few civiliansshort of the president had ever imagined sogrand a role in military affairs,” says Zachary.

According to Zachary, “Bush himself laterconfessed that the creation of NDRC [Nation-al Defense Research Committee] was ‘an endrun, a grab by which a small company of scien-tists and engineers, acting outside establishedchannels, got hold of the authority and moneyfor the program of developing new weapons’.Such a power grab was necessary to launch a‘broad program… on an adequate scale’, Bushinsisted, but he conceded that it stoked resent-ment against him.” Bush attempted similartactics in getting Roosevelt to commission“Science — The Endless Frontier”, but thestrategy did not work out in the more open,participatory environment in which it wasreleased after the end of the war.

Nevertheless, in Bush’s mind thereremained an inherent tension between theincreasingly complicated and technical prob-lems facing government, even in peacetime,and the country’s democratic traditions.Bush’s solution was a body of civilian tech-nocrats, nonpartisan experts of the highestcalibre, free of operational responsibilities fordepartments or agencies, with delegations ofauthority to make decisions in the name of thepresident. In Bush’s view their effectivenesswould have to depend as much on theirdetachment from politics as on their special-ized knowledge.

This is in a sense the uneasy compromise atwhich the United States has arrived in practicetoday with the enormous growth of the staff ofthe Executive Office and a matching growth ofcongressional staff and support agencies. But,as Zachary remarks, “the specialization ofexpertise [has] advanced knowledge but also

A bluffer’s guideLoose Endsby Sydney BrennerCurrent Biology: 1997. Pp. 128. £12.50, $20

Walter Gratzer

In 1847, the aged Dr Routh, president ofMagdalen and one of the foremost scholarsof his day, was asked what precept he couldoffer to guide and sustain a young manembarking on a life of learning. After longthought, his face brightened and he spokethus: “I think, sir, since you care for theadvice of an old man sir, you will find it a verygood practice always to verify your references,sir.” A pragmatic suggestion for our timemight be “read Molecular Biology of the Cell,but don’t drop it on your foot”. This is verymuch the level of inspiration afforded bymost scientific memoirs, often sponsored bycharitable foundations, that have appearedin such numbers in recent years.

A collection of Sydney Brenner’s writingsarouses altogether higher expectations and Iam happy to report that indeed it will disap-point no one, for here we have the authenticvoice of the master himself. These pieces haveappeared in the back of the monthly issues ofCurrent Biology, which tend therefore to vanish from our library the day they arrive.The appearance of a new number is generallyheralded for me by a call from a friend in a labup the road, asking me whether I have yet readBrenner this month and regaling me with afew of the more outrageous squibs.

Loose Ends are reflections on biology andthe scientific life. Uncle Syd’s epistles to hisnephew Willie treading the path of academicvirtue from graduate student to institutedirector are laced with pungent anecdotesfrom an eventful life. Uncle Syd expatiates onthe value of intellectual innocence and thetreacherous nature of experimental phenom-ena; he informs Willy that the most abject ofresearch students has the advantage of his pro-fessor, who has little time for such trivia as thework of his laboratory. “I have to warn you,”he concludes, “that, sadly, this may be the onlytime in your career when you can enjoyresearch as an individual scientist.”

As Willie comes to man’s estate, Uncle Syd

proffers solutions to the problems that nowface him — how, for instance, to avoid com-mittees and conferences: the only acceptableexcuse, he asserts, is to plead a prior meeting.To add conviction, Uncle Syd once invented ahighly exclusive and mysterious society,which spawned numerous subcommittees tokeep its members perpetually occupied. But ata pinch, he suggests, an inscrutable reply to anunwanted invitation, on the lines of “I regretthat I am unable to accept your invitation as Ifind I cannot attend your meeting”, will oftenserve, and has even been known to elicit acourteous acknowledgement. This is un-doubtedly better than the telegraphic formulathat Proust was said to have employed whenhe was being lionized by Parisian society:“Regret unable to come. Lie follows.”

Willies the world over may also profit fromUncle Syd’s tips on how to manipulate the oldenemy, the bureaucrat. You can avert unpleas-ing decisions in committee by waiting untilthe administrators have formulated replies toyour arguments and then confess that youwere wrong after all and return to the originalpoint. “You can do this,” the wily Uncle Sydexplains, “because the hallmark of a scientistis to be able to change one’s views dependingon the evidence; no administrator can dothis.” Here he is undoubtedly right. The legendary academic casuist Maurice Bowragave it as principle never to allow scientists oncommittees: they were unreliable, he found,because their opinions could be changed byarguments. (It was also Bowra whoannounced, when outvoted by five to one, thatthe committee had evidently reached animpasse.)

Uncle Syd has also worked out how to usethe telephone as a weapon, merely by revers-ing the postures of the caller and the respon-dent. This is an excellent device: when youhave got past three secretaries and theOlympian grandee at the head of the organi-zation finally comes on the line, you greet himwith: “Why, hello, Sir Marmaduke, and whatcan I do for you today?”

In dilating on the seven deadly sins andtheir consequences, Uncle Syd again points amoral or two with some tantalizing anec-dotes. Who was that editor of “an importantbiological journal” who submitted his work inan unworthy PhD thesis, examined and frivo-lously approved by Uncle Syd? The topic givesa clue, but a tormenting doubt hangs in the air.I believe, incidentally, that the seventh sin isnot sloth, as here, but rather accidie, which liessomewhere between boredom and indiffer-ence. To me this is encapsulated by the per-haps rather sensible principle that if a researchproject is not worth doing at all it is not worthdoing properly.

“Molecular Biology by Numbers” findsBrenner in top form with reflections on thescience that he and a few friends mostly created. The number 1 stands for the principleof one gene, one enzyme, 2 the diploid chro-

autumn books

NATURE | VOL 390 | 6 NOVEMBER 1997 35

expanded the possibilities for legitimate dis-putes about its import” with ample room forthe intrusion of politics, especially in the over-lapping domains between areas of expertise.We are still struggling for a solution today.This book does not provide one, but it doesprovide a wealth of new and valuable rawmaterial for the continuation of the debate onexpertise and democracy.Harvey Brooks is emeritus professor at the John F.Kennedy School of Government, HarvardUniversity, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge,Massachusetts 02138, USA.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1997

mosome and the double helix, 3 the codon, 4the canonical nucleotides and 5 the pentago-nal faces in an icosahedral virus. Brenner’sluminous insights repeatedly bring you upshort as you read. There is also here a certainnostalgia for a glorious past, when the prob-lems of molecular biology yielded to cogita-tion and to discussion in the coffee room, andnot merely to a brutal experimental assault.

In those days theory was king, and NielsBohr’s principle that one should never believean experiment that was not confirmed by the-ory held sway. Occam’s razor was comple-mented by Brenner’s noble conceit of Occam’sbroom, which was used to sweep out of sightthe more inconvenient facts. Today’s technol-ogy allows important facets of nature to bebrought to light at such a rate that, says Bren-ner, “pausing to think about the results, orasking how cells really work, is likely to be seenas a source of irritating delay to the managerialclasses, and could even endanger the career ofthe questioner”.

He deplores also the advent of research-by-kit, for we seem indeed to be heading for afuture in which not only the sequencing ofDNA and the production of antibodies, butalso the identification of new genes and theirproducts and in due course the very formula-tion of the questions themselves, will befarmed out to commercial organizations formoney. And then perhaps the bureaucrats willsuddenly find Utopia within their grasp,because the uncouth and refractory scientistswill no longer be needed.

Brenner is dismayed by the relentlessadvance of bureaucracy in general. We haveentered an age of strategic mission statementsand management training courses. (The UKMedical Research Council actually offerscourses in how to appraise and discipline tech-nicians, though of course they are not calledthat now.) Security is another of his bugbears,although he does not mention safety, which isnow the prime growth area in many organiza-tions. To my mind, much the most dangerousplace in most laboratories is the only one thesafety officer habitually spares — the library,with its ever-present hazard that a bound vol-ume of the J. Biol. Chem. will fall from a highshelf and make an end of you.

If, then, you are not the person who hasrazored out the last page of Current Biologyand you want a guide to how to comport your-self in your scientific career and to survive andeven thrive, then I urge you, for your pleasureand profit, to buy Uncle Syd’s book. You maypossibly (especially if you are one of the camp-followers of the profession) want to gratifyhim with the abusive letters and obscene tele-phone calls of which he has so far been disap-pointed. As the old bruiser Kingsley Amisonce observed: “If you can’t annoy somebodywith what you write I think there is little pointin writing.” Walter Gratzer is at the Randall Institute, King’sCollege London, London WC2B 5RL, UK.

Life’s dead letterLifelines: Biology, Freedom,Determinationby Steven Rose Allen Lane: 1997. Pp. 335. £20. To bepublished in the United States by OxfordUniversity Press in January at $30

Benno Müller-Hill

Genetics has been one of the most successfulsciences of the twentieth century. Yet its histo-ry is not a simple success story. In the SovietUnion, genetics was almost destroyed. InGermany, it served as an argument for massmurder. In the United States, it was used tolegitimize mass sterilization, laws againstracial mixing and a restrictive immigrationpolicy.

And today, a sizeable minority of thepublic looks at developments in genetics withdisrespect.

Steven Rose is a biologist who has claimedin many books that something is deeplywrong with biology itself. In his latest offer-ing, he suspects that the culprits are reduc-tionism and biological determinism. Hewrites: “The challenge of the opponents ofbiological determinism is that, while we mayhave been effective in our critique of itsreductionist claims, we have failed to offer acoherent alternative framework withinwhich to interpret living processes…. Life-lines originated as an attempt to meet thechallenge.”

Rose begins by presenting a brief historyof biology and genetics. In a discussion of T. H. Morgan’s work on mutant fruitflies, hewrites that “they had red rather than whiteeyes”. It was in fact the other way around! Hethen points out that “the proportion ofunusual characters in the fly populationcould be greatly increased by stressing it insome way — for instance by exposing the fliesto not-quite toxic concentrations of particu-lar chemicals, or to radiation such as X-rays”.It was H. J. Muller, not Morgan, who discov-ered the mutagenic action of X-rays. Thereader will be confused by Rose’s account ofhistory.

One of Rose’s central points is that genet-ics, which deals with single genes and geneproducts, is unable to illuminate the process-es of development and evolution: “The greatexpansion of genetic knowledge in recentdecades has yet to be matched by a compara-ble increase in the understanding of develop-ment.”

He neglects to mention the work of EdLewis or Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard andtheir colleagues. In fruitflies, the first stages ofdevelopment are now well understood, andin fish we may know them soon.

It is true that mouse and human develop-ment are still mysteries. But these mysteriesare challenges to geneticists. Rose sees it dif-

ferently: “Reductionist ideology has a num-ber of serious consequences. It hinders usbiologists from thinking adequately aboutthe phenomena we wish to understand.” Ithink he is wrong, and I hope he is unsuccess-ful in selling his idea to young biologists whomight read this book.

Rose then sets out to attack the ‘ultra-Darwinists’ Daniel Dennett and RichardDawkins. Again, I think Rose’s point is badlytaken. “To isolate from this evolving web asingle factor, be it a gene or organism, as the unique determinant of change is asproblematic as isolating a single enzymefrom the metabolic web that constitutes thecell. Any such attempt at isolation is a reduc-tionism that mistakes method for theory.” Iand many others have put some effort into isolating such genes and I remain con-vinced that the results of our studies havebetter illuminated our understanding of theliving cell.

After warning his readers against thedangerously seductive character of meta-phors, Rose presents us with those of hisown choice.

Here is a selection: “We must speak of thedialectic of specificity and plasticity duringdevelopment, the dialectic through whichthe living organism constructs itself”; “…tooffer a perspective on biology which tran-scends genetic reductionism, by placing theorganism, rather than the gene at the centreof life — this perspective I call homeody-namic”; “Our lives form a developmentaltrajectory, or lifeline, stabilised by the opera-tion of homeodynamic principles. This tra-jectory is not determined by our genes, norpartitioned into neatly dichotomous cate-gories called nature and nurture. Rather it isan autopoietic process”. These quotationsgive the flavour of what is to replace reduc-tionism if we follow Rose.

So we come to what seems to me the cen-tral issue. Rose argues that “the argumentagainst hunting for neurogenetic explana-tions (for violence etc.) is not that it isimmoral or unethical to do so. It is simplythat, despite the seductive power of reduc-tionism it is the wrong level of the discipli-nary pyramid”. To my mind, violent crime isnot part of science. If it is made part of genet-ics, it converts genetics into an ideology orreligion, as has been demonstrated in NaziGermany.

Finally, Rose sets about “making Biologywhole again” by delivering, as a new Moses ofbiology, “biology’s Decalogue”. As far as Icould tell, it bears no resemblance whatso-ever to the old Decalogue. To quote its lastsentence: “And it is therefore our biology thatmakes us free.”

If I had to choose, I’d prefer the Mosaicversion.Benno Müller-Hill is at the Institute of Genetics, University of Cologne, Cologne 50931,Germany.

autumn books

36 NATURE | VOL 390 | 6 NOVEMBER 1997