Heliophage

From Profiles of the Future

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Pictures: Hubble ultra deep field image from NASA; “Minehead Blue” by Gary Newman, all rights reserved (and with many thanks)

Over the holiday I read Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings (Amazon UK), a fascinating and enjoyable book about which I may well have more to say, but which I currently wish simply to digest and to put into the context of some other current reading.

However, this passage from Edward Carpenter (mystical socialist and, wikilegedly, the man who introduced the sandal into Britain) that he quotes in a chapter called “Electric Beeches” struck such a chord of recognition with me that I thought I’d share it here, along with the passage in Eating the Sun it reminded me of:

It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and upturned fingertips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged into the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky, and full of the most amazing activity.

– Pagan and Christian Creeds, 1904

Now reverse the polarity:

Think of a beech tree in winter, its leaves lost, its architecture revealed in dark lines against cold grey cloud. Do what Robin Hill used to urge his children to do to cultivate the artist’s eye—take away the tree’s established “common sense” context by turning round, bending over and looking at it upside down through your legs. Its growth looks less like something pushed from the earth than it does something drawn from the sky. Its limbs, branches and twigs spread into the air like ink into blotting paper or cracks spreading through glass, embodying something between desire and transubstantiation.

The tree’s form tells the truth. The tree grows into the air because it grows out of the air. The bulk of the tree is not made from the soil beneath it—indeed, the soil is in large part made by the tree. Both soil and tree are made from carbon drawn from the sky above. Trees are built from sun and wind and rain. The land is just a place to stand.

– Eating the Sun, 2007

“No longer a separable organism” strikes a strong chord with me, and “ramifying into space” always seems like a good idea. Most crucially, “Sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky”, as Carpenter had it, is more or less what photosynthesis does, and as such what I set out to celebrate. But it does it by pumping celestial energies into the earth, not vice versa. As in electric circuits of a more mundane sort, the earth is the sink, not the source.

Beech tree picture from Treehugger, under a creative commons license. And while we’re at it here are some more beeches from talented people on Flickr

After my having written about Jim for a couple of decades, Jim now gets to write about me. And he says kind things (for what it’s worth, I think this piece was almost certainly written before I heaped praise on him in Time).

Adverse climate change makes this a most important and timely book—not just for scientists, but for anyone who can think. Oliver Morton writes so engagingly that it reads as a well-crafted biography of the earth on behalf of the plant kingdom, tracing its evolution from tiny cyanobacteria 3.5bn years ago to the giant trees of today. Unlike a botanical text, Eating the Sun reveals the intricate chemical mechanisms by which sunlight is used by plants and how the sun powers everything that matters on earth.

Morton’s book is also about earth science, my own Gaia theory and the lives of the scientists most involved. He explains why Gaia theory is still regarded as a heresy against orthodox science. From my viewpoint he is very fair, especially since many of his witnesses are passionate defenders of orthodoxy

[...]The key to understanding why the earth is growing too hot for comfort is to understand that it is in some sense alive. Morton clearly presents a vision of a living planet, albeit one that would appear eccentric to life scientists … Soon the incremental heating from the earth itself will exceed our inputs and then further heating is unstoppable. Fortunately for us, earth history suggests that positive feedback will come to a natural stop and temperatures will stabilise five degrees above the present. The idea that we can stabilise rising temperature at some convenient level, say just two or three degrees above the pre-industrial norm, is probably the delusion of computer modellers.

[...] What makes this book so good is the way that Morton, as well as dealing with the issues, gives us portraits of the leading personalities. I was especially moved to be reminded of that rare figure Bob Spicer. Spicer is a real naturalist—one who wears muddy boots. Not one of those whose view is limited to a computer screen, like the environmental scientist who once said, “With a click of a mouse I can change the whole earth.” … A few good scientists bring us what Nasa calls “ground truth”—the solid facts we can rely on. Men and women like them grow rarer, as those who manage science believe that research money is better spent on modelling and brainstorming sessions than on messy and dangerous experiments and observations in some distant field. We … seem to have lost the checks and balances that were part of our earlier class-based society, one that scorned egalitarianism but welcomed merit.

Read the whole thing over over at Prospect.

And while logging media coverage, here’s something nice, suprising and odd — an appearance in a “books of the year” list. Nice for the obvious reasons, surprising because the Spectator is not necessarily a place that I would have expected so to appear (and Gary Dexter is not someone I know or know much of) and odd because I doubt anyone else will ever pair me up with Les Dawson (whose work as a science fiction writer had previously passed me by — a good thing, says Langford). But odd doesn’t mean unwelcome, or unininteresting — IDIC, as we say on Vulcan:

I bought Les Dawson’s Secret Notebooks (JR Books, £15.99) to see if it could furnish an explanation of why Les wrote A Time Before Genesis, the only serious fiction he ever produced, a disturbing novel of alien conspiracy, sexual mutilation and global apocalypse. Unfortunately it couldn’t, being mainly scribblings for his show spots and monologues — but it contained some gems of Dawsonian surrealism, such as: ‘I came from a very poor neighbourhood. Petty theft was rife. It got to the stage where we had to brand the greenfly.’ Continuing with the horticultural theme, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton (Fourth Estate, £25) was a timely book. After 400 wide-ranging pages it was difficult to gainsay the author’s conclusion that the best prospect for future energy generation is solar: ‘new technologies that sit in the space between the photovoltaic cell and the leaf’.

A bunch of reviews this weekend for Craig Venter’s “A Life Decoded” (Amazon UK | US). Venter is of direct relevance for this blog because of his interest in using synthetic biology to save the world with better energy sources and carbon sinks. He’s also of relevance because he’s part of one of the great science stories of the past few decades. Here’s an extract from the book in The Guardian (and here’s The Great Beyond’s take on the “synthetic life is just round the corner” news story that went with it).

First review — Clive Cookson in the FT, who pairs the book with Jim Watson’s “Avoid boring people” (Amazon UK | US):

Enjoyment of the comforts of life is one thing that the two authors have in common. Both were born into families that counted themselves as middle class but were financially hard-pressed. Both were motivated initially more by the joy of scientific discovery than financial reward but, as they saw opportunities to accumulate wealth, they did not hesitate to seize them. [...]

Watson, born in 1928, writes – and acts – in a way that seems quaintly old-fashioned compared with Venter, born in 1946. The difference shows up particularly in their attitude to love, sex and marriage. Watson’s pursuit of what he consistently calls “pretty girls” remains largely unsuccessful until the age of 40, when he meets and marries Liz Lewis, a 19-year-old student. Venter, on the other hand, describes sex with a series of girlfriends from the age of 16 onwards, in a manner that would be unthinkable for Watson. (At 16, Watson’s passion was spotting rare birds on the shores of Lake Michigan with his father, a keen amateur ornithologist.) Last year Venter became engaged to Heather Kowalski, his public relations executive, who will be his third wife.

While both men are self-evident egotists, Venter comes across as a more forceful character. There is something almost otherworldly about Watson, as if he does not know what effect he is having on people…Venter, on the other hand, knows exactly what he is doing, whether he is taking a physical risk for sheer exhilaration, such as deliberately sailing a yacht through a storm, or a scientific risk by spending many millions of dollars on unproven DNA sequencing machines … Watson and Venter are the first two people to have had their individual genomes sequenced. Watson has revealed his personal DNA on the Cold Spring Harbor website, in the hope that this will encourage the development of “personalized medicine” – identifying and preventing diseases to which we are genetically prone before they appear. The only exception, withheld for reasons of family privacy, is the ApoE gene, variants of which are associated with Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Venter has gone further, interspersing A Life Decoded with relevant revelations about his own genome. For example, he declares that, of the two copies of ApoE inherited from his parents, one is the harmless ApoE3 but the other is ApoE4 – which can predispose carriers to Alzheimer’s and heart disease. “By reading my own book of life, I have been given a chance to address these potential conditions, because they involve a biochemical imbalance that can be treated.” [...]

Watson won his Nobel prize with Francis Crick 55 years ago. An award to Venter for his pioneering work on DNA sequencing is overdue.

In passing, it’s worth mentioning that while the Craig is an egotist/egomaniac thing can perhaps be overdone, the iconography of the US cover (left) doesn’t help. He’s shown as important enough to block out the sun — and yet at the same time well lit from some other source off to his right.

Jan Witkowski in Nature provides another long, entertaining and thoughtful review. He concludes:

I have interacted with Venter over the years since our first meeting in 1990, and have heard many strong opinions of his character. A Life Decoded is a fair representation of the man. It may even be more revealing than he thinks.

But the differing published accounts of the Drosophila and human-genome sequencing projects are reminiscent of the fable about the blind men who described an elephant by touch. Reading the books by John Sulston and Georgina Ferry (The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome), James Shreeve (The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World), Michael Ashburner (Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced) and now Venter’s contribution, it is scarcely credible that the protagonists lived through the same events. Robert Cook-Deegan’s The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome provided an authoritative, inside-the-Beltway account of the early days of the Human Genome Project, but what we need is a record of the whole project by a team of historians with no axe to grind.

Such an endeavour should begin with a comprehensive collection of material, along the lines of Thomas Kuhn’s Sources for History of Quantum Physics. Kuhn and his colleagues interviewed the participants in, and found primary documents relating to, the greatest change in our view of the physical world since Isaac Newton. The greatest project in biology so far deserves to be similarly documented. The principals are still with us, as are their e-mails.

Chargaff called the heroes of The Double Helix “a new kind of scientist, one that could hardly have been thought of before science became a mass occupation, subject to, and forming part of, all the vulgarities of the communications media”. Four decades on, our infinitely more vulgar media has called Venter many things: maverick, publicity hound, risk-taker, brash, controversial, genius, manic, rebellious, visionary, audacious, arrogant, feisty, determined, provocative. His autobiography shows that they are all justified.

While I’ve not read the Ashburner, I don’t find the accounts to date quite that divergent (though I haven’t cross referenced them thoroughly). And more specifically, I think this call for a balanced overview is a touch unfair to James Shreeve, who wanted his magnificent “The Genome War” (Amazon UK | US) to be such a book. However, though Venter provided him with remarkable access to the events and their records, subject only to a three year non-disclosure agreement, the public effort was much less forthcoming. Francis Collins, while happy to be interviewed, would not give him the same level of access to the public programme. Nor would he provide access to records of the “G-5″ coordinating meetings that the public programme held at the height of the human genome “race”; when Shreeve applied for those records under the Freedom of Information Act he had to work the request for the best part of a year before getting the records, which had almost all the salient details redacted. The reason was that the records were held to contain “commercial and financial information that is privileged and confidential”. As Shreeve notes in his book, “Considering the concerted efforts the Human Genome Project leaders made during the race to distinguish their totally free, totally public version of the genome from Celera’s [ie Venter's] commercial one, the explanation sounds oddly discordant.”

My own take on the book is in the Sunday Times. Ruminative extract:

Genes will never say everything about a life, but they will say a lot. It will cost as much to lay down a full genome analysis for a child born 10 years hence as it will to lay down a case of port. And like the port, the analysis will improve with time, as more is learnt about the meaning of the subtleties encoded in our genes, and about how the pitfalls that appear there can be avoided with foresight.

These birthday genomes will mostly be read for possibilities; only rarely will a genetic destiny be fixed beyond avoidance. But retrospective readings will also be possible. It will be odd if the next 50 years do not bring molecular biographies of figures such as Stalin, Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher (and a revised edition of this book, tricked out with more revealing detail, might be expected a fair bit sooner). Odd, too, if a well-resolved genomic dimension does not add something to all these stories. [But] nobody yet has the language for combining genetic aperçus with more familiar representations of character and narrative. In A Life Decoded we might sense that Venter’s apparent genetic predisposition to attention-deficit disorder explains something about him – but we are hard put to say, within the context of a biography, quite what function such an explanation has. It doesn’t change who he was, or even how he was. Maybe it says something about what he could have been or couldn’t be, but how that might make him or us feel is not yet clear.

There is poetry in seeing Venter’s genome through the story of the life that made genome-reading possible and sensing that his genes, these subjects within the story, were also, in some way, its shapers. But the poetry depends on the reader’s imagination – it is largely absent from the text. I doubt any writer could as yet do justice to such a view of himself, let alone one whose interest is primarily in getting his side of a fascinating set of events down for posterity.

That said, at one point Venter does manage to convey something of the excitement we might experience when the stories of molecules and men are mixed more thoroughly. It comes when he describes his first experiments on the effects of adrenaline on cells grown in the lab: “I gradually moved the [adrenaline-coated] beads to kiss the heart cells, which immediately jumped to a new pace. In elation, and due to the same mechanism, my own heart jumped, too.” The molecular life can be a moving one.

For those not Venter’d out, Carl Zimmer is interviewing him for bloggingheads.tv (not yet seen)

Update: Georgina Ferry has a review of both the Venter and the Watson books in the Guardian. I have to say that it seems to me that her position as a co-author of a book about the same events by one of Venter’s adversaries (”The Common Thread” with John Sulston — Amazon UK | US) should have been made clear to the reader.

Pictures courtesy of publisher’s websites

When I said a little while back that I would be posting occasionally on related books I meant that quite broadly — so broadly, indeed, that quite a lot of science fiction that makes no reference to photosynthesis at all might fall into the category. I quite often think of what I do as a writer as “non-fiction SF”, and I feel myself to be more explicitly in conversation with the genre than most popular science is. As it happens, though, a central image of Ken Macleod’s most-recent-but-one book, “Learning the World” (Amazon UK|US) is photosynthetic: a pair of batlike alien astronomers wondering why the starts in one particular direction in their sky are turning green. The implicit answer is that vast post-human colonization efforts are turning whole planetary systems into habitats, and if not creating Dyson spheres then at least putting enough of the starlight to photosynthetic use to shift the colour balance of the remainder. The action in the novel centres on a starship/spore from these green stars coming to the system of the alien space bats (and what a fine phrase that is); as the UK subtitle says, it is “a novel of first contact”, though it is also, rather cunningly, a novel of second contact. (In the US it’s subtitled “a scientific romance” instead).

I don’t think it’s Ken’s best book, but there’s a lot to like about it and some things to love. There’s a mixture of homage and critique towards Heinlein (and earlier Heinlein influenced work, such as Panshin’s “Rite of Passage“, I think, and maybe even Mike Ford’s “Growing Up Weightless“, but I’m out on a limb there, because I’ve never read the Ford, though typing this reminds me that I should); Constantine the Oldest Man has clear links to Heinlein’s Lazarus Long, though he is a lot less gabby, while Atomic Discourse Gale (a lot of the characters have names like that) reads like a protagonist from a Heinlein juvenile. At the same time the idea of human exceptionalism is interestingly subverted with the help of some ideas revealed right at the end that feel like a hybrid of Lee Smolin and David Brin (which I agree sounds scary). And its allied concept of manifest destiny is given very short shrift. There’s a nice feeling in the background about the simultaneous inevitability and costliness of progress, which I understand to be a theme of Winwood Reade’s “The Martyrdom of Man“, which provides both the epigraph and, movingly, tailpiece to the novel, and which I shall now endeavour to learn a little more about.

And there’s the fact that the vast spaceship is called “But The Sky, My Lady! The Sky!” For me, that’s terrific (not just in a gimmick way, but as an artfully delivered further reflection on progress). Your mileage may differ.

The book’s biggest problem, perhaps, is that it is just too close in set-up to Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness in the Sky“, which seems to me to have set the bar for such entertainments high enough that to fail to clear it is no evidence of slacking. If you have read neither and imagine yourself likely to read only one, my strong advice would be to read the Vinge. If you have read neither but like first contact novels enough to feel sure you will read both then it might be best to read Learning the World first. (If there’s anyone who meets this description and follows my advice, which I’ll admit sounds unlikely, do let me know how that works out for you.)

Occupied as I am at present with thoughts of books, I thought I might offer a few short reviews of things I’ve read recently that are at least vaguely relevant. Georgina Ferry’s Max Perutz and the Secret of Life is one such — a lovely biography of the molecular biologist who not only solved the structure of haemoglobin but also figured out how it worked. In fact, that second part is one of the book’s delights; Perutz’s most imaginative work, producing a theory of how the affinity which haemoglobin displays for oxygen differs depending on how much oxygen it is already carrying, is one of the few examples I can think of of a scientist doing his or her best work after already having received a Nobel prize.

Georgina captures a person, a place (Cambridge from the 40s to the 70s) and an intellectual transition (the creation of molecular biology) very well, it seems to me. Perutz comes across as a determined plodder more than a mercurial genius, a fussy man (spectacularly and remarkably unselfconciously so when it came to his food), probably a bit pompous and on occasion cantankerous, but well meaning, well liked and well disposed, with a great willingness to commit to his insights. In part, as the book shows, he was lucky — lucky in taking on the seemingly impossible goal of working out protein structures at just the time when it was going to become possible, and lucky in ending up at the right place to carry the goal out, Bragg’s Cavendish Laboratory. At the same time, he went out of his way to try and ensure the occasions for other peoples’ luck, setting up an inspired minimalist management structure at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology that allowed all the big brains to feel unfettered while encouraging a wonderful cross pollination of ideas.

You also have to feel fond of man who when asked for some of his Nobel-prize-worthy seed by the Repository for Germinal Choice replied

Let me tell you that I am small, bald, short-sighted and cross-eyed, that my testes have been exposed to X-rays these 44 years…and that I am plagued by multiple allergies and crippled by back trouble. This shows that the winning of the Nobel Prize does not necessarily go with other desirable genetic traits.

The bad back led him often to stretch out prone during seminars while still playing an active role, thus lending a new meaning to the idea of questions from the floor.

I usually read biographies by way of the index, starting off with an event or relationship or idea I’m curious about, reading on for a bit, then when bored going back to the index and looking for something new. In this book’s case, that meant starting off with the lovely David Keilin, a mentor to Max as he was earlier to Robin Hill (who’s the anchor for the Cambridge parts of Eating the Sun). My justification for this — which let’s face it is probably just an attention-deficit thing, at heart — is that human lives are not intrinsically story-shaped (and merely writing that phrase reminds me that sometime soon I need to get myself a copy of Ann Wroe’s deeply non-linear Shelley book) and that the traditional parents-birth-education-etc biography thus traps itself in an unsatisfactory template. But after starting this book with the Cambridge stuff I found it so interesting and agreeable that I went pretty much straight through to the end and then went back to the beginning and read all the developmental stuff I normally avoid, and quite enjoyed that too, seeing Max growing up and climbing mountains and getting a crush oh his lab partner and seeing Nazis start to exert their power in his homeland and, on returning to Austria for a holiday, being “refreshingly vulgar, a very agreeable contrast to my usual life in England”. And seeing him fall in love not just with women but also with England and Cambridge. I believe Perutz once said that a man’s country was not the one he happened to be born in, but the one he chose to die in, and this book explains a lot about how that choice shaped the life of this impressive and oddly endearing man.

Well Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet was officially published in the UK on Monday (available at a good price through Amazon.co.uk), and by wonderful chance got its first press outing just two days later. The Independent ran a feature on the 10 best nature books, listing

Heat by George Monbiot

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton

In the Beat of a Heart by John Whitfield

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge

The Creation by E O Wilson

Wildwood by Roger Deakin

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

An Ocean of Air by Gabrielle Walker

Which is all in all extremely nice, as well as exalted, company to be in. I have the pleasure of working with two of the others — Gabrielle and John — from time to time as an editor a Nature, and have been a fan and friend of Colin Tudge’s for a couple of decades (though see him only scandalously rarely). I haven’t yet read the Mabey and Macfarlane books, though I mean to, but I greatly enjoyed the serialisation of Mabey’s Nature Cure on Radio 4 when I was writing Eating the Sun. I’m reading the Deakin now and like it immensely.

I think I’ll have more to say, in time, about the different attitudes to nature in Mabey, Macfarlane and Deakin, and others such, and in my own work. There’s a contrast there which interest me. (Update: some of this has now been said.)

The little accompanying blurb in the Indy (the whole feature seems to have no home online) says

“Morton’s book explains how biologists discovered photosynthesis, and, by doing so, gained a new understanding of Earth’s history. A surprisingly fascinating read.”

Updated after publication to add a few links, and to take the capital off “nature” — for some reason capitalising it now seems second something-or-other to me…