Heliophage

A page in the Culture section full of kind words and interesting takes by Jeremy (pictured). I’d love it even if all there was was the pull quote:

“I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights.” Excerpts:

Oliver Morton has chosen, by his own admission, to write three books in one… Each informs the others, to some extent, but with a little filleting each would also stand alone, and perhaps a lesser writer would have gone for three safer, smaller books. Morton is not one for safe and small.

He gives us the big picture, and no mistake, whether he is tunnelling into the extremely intricate workings of the molecular photo-synthetic machinery or striding over the South Downs to explain the planet’s long journey from the almost lifeless waters of the late Permian ocean (250m years ago) via the shallow seas of the Cretaceous (100m years ago), through the rise of the grasses (8m years ago) to the Battle of Lewes (271,549 days ago, as I write). At times this tendency makes for jarring disjuncts, as one swoops from electron transfers to a lyrical cycle ride to the Cambridgeshire garden of a photosynthesis pioneer. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book as much for the crazed asides as for the upsetting insights…

I didn’t know that alamo is Spanish for poplar, a favourite tree of biofuel boosters. Casually dropping the little factoid that the mesa on which Los Alamos, the facility, sits is surrounded by los alamos, Morton makes his clarion call for a vast and directed scientific effort, a Manhattan Project for the solar age, one that will explore a plurality of options in search of truly renewable energy (and the fuels to store it), and that will allow the entire global population to live like Californians… This is where the detailed understanding of the inner workings of photosynthesis gain importance, for how can we change the world, as required by book three, if we have not understood it, as book one asks us to? I do wonder, though, whether the big picture of molecular machinery might possibly put some people off…If you find yourself skimming Eating the Sun in a bookshop, and you come across one of those scientific graphs, off-putting even with their avowedly user-friendly hand-style lettering, ignore it. Indeed, ignore the whole of book one, if you prefer. That way you can avoid the fascinating detail of photosynthesis, avoid an apoplexy provoked by the realisation that a writer as talented as Morton doesn’t know the difference between a pestle and a mortar, avoid the remembrance of long-forgotten biochemistry lectures, and enjoy an informative, fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Read the whole thing here.

As others have been, Jeremy is unconvinced by the necessity of the more biochemical parts of the book, or unconvinced by the idea of leading with them, or unconvinced of my ability to pull that off. When enough smart people start making a point like that you’d best take it on board… I must say that I had originally thought of putting a note to the reader at the front of the book that would have been very much along the lines of the advice Jeremy provides, somewhat in the spirit of the note on equations that Roger Penrose provides in “The Emperor’s New Mind”, and then worried that it looked arch and preemptively apologetic and decided against it. I may reconsider for future editions. (And FWIW I don’t think that applies at all to the Penrose warning, which sums up how to deal with unwelcome equations embedded in text brilliantly)

Jeremy also sort-of takes me to task a little for not writing enough about agriculture. I can see his point, I think (and appreciate that, for someone who works at the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, it is a pressing one). Maybe there should be more agriculture in the book. In my defence, I suppose I’d say that only rarely is photosynthesis the limiting step in agriculture. Also, there are other pretty good books about future agriculture out there (though I remember not entirely agreeing with it, I’d recommend Colin Tudge’s So shall we reap (Amazon UK | US) ). But I’m all for more better books about food in the future. Indeed I’d love to read the one Jeremy has in mind, if he’d care to write it…

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 thoughtful (and wonderfully positive) review which, like The Economist’s, goes long on the entropy angle. Surprisingly for the Telegraph, which is meant to be all media to all people these days, it is not on line, at least not yet. (In print, though, it has a very striking sunflower picture, so I’ve prettied up this entry with something similar). Update 18/x/07: the whole review is now online (though without sunflower). Here’s how it begins:

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Victorian physics was the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics and in particular the first law, which states that energy is conserved; it can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form (such as the chemical energy locked up in coal) into another (the heat that powers steam engines). The ‘dark side’ of thermodynamics, as Oliver Morton puts it in his highly original study of photosynthesis, is entropy. The conversion is never completely efficient: whenever energy is converted from one form to another, some of it decays from an organised form (in which it can do work) to a disorganised one (in which it cannot).

Here’s his conclusion:

Photosynthesis is, as Morton eloquently describes it, ‘an everyday miracle, needing nothing but sunlight, air and leaves — and eyes taught to make sense of them’. This book will, quite literally, change the way you see the world as it teaches you to understand the importance of that everyday miracle that we all depend on.

In among the kind words leading to this, Endersby also expresses some doubts about the workings of the book’s first part.

Morton has opted to break the photosynthetic process down into its various components and explain how each of them was discovered, which results in a series of chapters in which the reader is constantly brough up to date with one part of the story and then sent back to an earlier period to follow the parallel but distinct story of another part of the sun-eater’s intricate machinery. Despite Morton’s immense expertise and exemplary clarity, the story is occasionally a confusing one.

However, once the history and basic principles of photosynthesis are out of the way, Eating the Sun really takes off, ranging from the search for life on other planets to the Gaia hypothesis and the historic role of plants in making this planet habitable. Morton is as compelling and eloquent in describing the evolution of landscape as he is at describing the evolution of life itself.

The idea that the book lifts off late is one that I have come across elsewhere (Andrew Brown makes it too, in the most generous way possible) and I can see the sense of the critique. I’ll have to think more about whether I could have managed the narrative more elegantly, and whether my feeling that the first part of the book needs to be as it is in order for the last part to work is really justified.

I don’t know Jim Endersby, but we turn out to have a lot in common, including the HPS department at Cambridge (his connection more eminent than my undergraduate sojourn) and living by the South Downs (he’s a lecturer at the University of Sussex). Like Mapping Mars, his first book has been long listed for the Guardian First Book Award (A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com) and received a recent review by Georgina Ferry. I think I should probably buy him a pint of Harveys.

Image from Joolz Perry under a creative commons licence with thanks

This one delves a little further into the ideas:

PHOTOSYNTHESIS is the basis of life on Earth. Thermodynamics is the order and disorder in the universe. Put them together and you have the makings of a book that may re-order the way you think about the world. And that is what Oliver Morton, news editor at Nature (and who once worked for this paper), has done.

Mr Morton’s thesis is that modern biology has become so focused on the movement of information, in the form of genes, that it has neglected the processes needed to move that information around: in essence, thermodynamics. People talk glibly of “using up” energy when in fact they are doing no such thing. What is actually used up is order. An energy flow drives the process, but it is disorder (or “entropy”, to use the jargon) that changes, by increasing.

A highly ordered system such as a living thing thus needs an abundant supply of negative entropy (or unentropy, or call it what you will) to maintain its internal order. That negative entropy comes from the sun and is captured by photosynthesis, which uses light to split water molecules and combines the resulting hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form sugars. The sugars are a store of negative entropy that can be used elsewhere. The waste product, conveniently for the animals of Earth, is oxygen.

The book, then, is in part a refrain in praise of photosynthesis, the Earth’s energy and order currency-exchange market. It is also an entertaining history of how the subject arrived where it is today—and an illuminating insight for the non-scientist into how the magisterial pronouncements of science are every bit as much the result of sausage-making as Bismarck’s description of the process of legislation.

Here’s the review in full

Update: No, I don’t know what the words “currency exchange market” are doing in that paragraph either. 

A full review, nicely titled “Living colour”, that sets out a lot of what’s in the book. Excerpts:

[For Oliver Morton] the joy of looking at a tree or a landscape comes from knowing, from the level of individual molecules to the level of planetary evolution, how it came to be the way it is … You might think you know all about photosynthesis from secondary school biology lessons. You know that carbon dioxide plus water plus energy from the sun equals glucose plus oxygen. But from the earliest years of the 20th century, scientists were not satisfied with this cookery-book approach, and neither is Morton. The first section of his book introduces the key figures whose experiments arrived at today’s consensus about how photosynthesis really works … Morton enlivens what can at times be a hard read by vividly describing the passions and rivalries that drove the scientists who tracked these elusive games of pass the parcel…

Astrobiologists tend to agree that whatever forms [complex] life might take, on Earth or elsewhere, it will always need oxygen. The trick, then, is to develop telescopes that can detect oxygen in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. How many of these there might be, in Morton’s view, is “the biggest question that we currently have it in our hands to answer”…

In his final section Morton looks at the planet since the industrial revolution - the lifetime, perhaps, of an average tree. We cannot understand what impact our activity will have on the climate unless we take into account how plants will react to - and possibly exacerbate - alterations in the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles.

Hard-nosed science writer though he is, Morton does not shrink from the word “crisis” to describe what is going on in our atmosphere. Unlike many in the green movement, he is willing to put his faith in technology to solve the problem, but only given a massive investment of resources and political commitment. If just some of the energy that scientists have devoted to understanding photosynthesis goes into low-carbon technologies, we might just be able to do it. If we fail, it won’t be their fault.

A kind review (subscription required) by Richard Fortey in Nature (I had nothing to do with it). Here’s the top and bottom and a potted precis of the bits in between:

All the greatest monsters are green. The Incredible Hulk had to turn green before going on the rampage and the Eagle comic featured a supremely evil green being called the Mekon, who was opposed in almost every issue by the chisel-jawed space hero, Dan Dare. One explanation for this odd association of colour with character is that green belongs to the vegetable kingdom. Humanoids have no right to have chloroplasts in their tissues — and if they do have them, well, they are probably not quite right. In the plant world, green is a heroic tint. It’s a measure of the presence of chlorophyll and a sign that an organism captures energy from the Sun to convert it into organic matter. This is the basis of almost all life on the planet, and is arguably the single most important biochemical pathway there is.

Oliver Morton has written a biography of this organic greenery. He takes us on a grand tour from molecules to biosphere, and a very impressive journey it is. He tackles the difficulties of explaining how photosynthesis works … goes on to outline the 3.5-billion-year-plus history of photosynthesis on Earth … no escaping a kind of modified Gaia outlook here: life, nutrient cycles and rock weathering are all locked together in one inescapable dance … very good on what is needed to turn an alga into a land plant, and then to prop up that plant so that it can bathe in air and light to make a tree. The greening of the ancient continents was the final triumph of the chloroplast … proceeds smoothly to an account of climate history … describes with admirable dispassion the different hypotheses detailing how the biological and human world might cope with this challenge … of several recent accounts of what might happen to climate in the next decades, Morton’s is among the most balanced, but I am still left crossing my fingers and recycling a few plastic bags …

Morton’s account of the ubiquitous importance of photosynthesis is an original viewpoint for looking at the world. It is written with verve and an eye for detail. His breadth of scholarship could leave other science writers green — with envy.

I should mention that he also notes he would have liked more diagrams. I should probably also mention that, as it happens, I reviewed one of Richard’s books many moons ago.

Picture (which is of the Mekon, not Richard) added a day late and taken from DanDare.org, where there is also a fine Mekon poster. Copyright not inquired into…

A capsule review in the “Nonfiction in short” column in Saturday’s Times. In toto:

Unless you recently took GCSE biology, when did you last think about photosynthesis? Although Morton admits that the molecular machinery of photosynthesis is not a regular bar-room topic, he urges it upon our attention as a crucial process that creates oxygen, energy and living matter from sunlight water and carbon dioxide. An understanding of photosynthesis is even more vital now that we are dealing with the new carbon cycle and climate changes that resulted from the Industrial Revolution.

A very generous review of Eating the Sun by Jon Turney in The Independent. Here’s the conclusion:

What begins as an essay on an under-appreciated part of the history of science turns into something richer and more ruminative. The result has everything you could possibly want from a popular science book. There is wonder here, and intellectual excitement; clear explanation and lyrical writing; and much new insight into how the world works, linking the very small and very large.

It even finishes with an unfashionably optimistic take on global warming. Now that we understand the natural nanomachinery that captures solar energy, Morton reckons, it is only a matter of time before we can redesign it to generate fuel – subtly engineered, like leaves, to recycle carbon. Research funders should feel a duty to take heed. Everyone else can read Morton’s fascinating book for pleasure.

For comparison and edification, should you wish either, here is the review of Mapping Mars by the same pen from the same pages.

Kind short review on The First Post

Eating the Sun
By Oliver Morton

Oliver Morton’s fluent book fathoms the most unobserved but necessary of all Nature’s mechanisms - photosynthesis, the manufacture of life from light. The more you think about it, the more miraculous it seems: plants take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and produce oxygen from them. So no plants, no planet. Morton does not just look at the biology and chemistry of photosynthesis, but at the men who discovered how it worked and how we need to manage the carbon cycle to survive in the world we have altered. The heroes of his story include Martin Kamen (who did key work on carbon), Robin Hill (biochemistry), Robert Emerson (light) and Jim Barber (bacteria); it was these men who, little by little, worked their way to the heart of photosynthesis. Morton is an exemplary science writer, characterised by lucidity and a strong linked narrative. Some of the book is testing to non-scientists, but stick with it: his conclusions are clarity itself.

Fourth Estate, £25
To buy this book

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…