“…we must put down to pure Irish whimsy his decision to write a book on life”. A 1950s Spat Between Two Famous Scientists on the Origins of Life: Pirie versus Bernal

Penguin’s New Biology in 1952 contained a war of words between former and possibly continuing friends. For those of us encouraged as schoolboys* to read past volumes for ‘A’ levels and especially the old ’S’ or Scholarship level, the mutual slagging off by two eminent scientists was a useful introduction to the cut-throat world of research and scholarship.

The spat started with a review of a book written by John Desmond Bernal FRS (1901-1971) the ‘Sage of Science’ on the origins of life. Norman Wingate (‘Bill’) Pirie FRS (1907-1997) was the reviewer. After seven excoriating pages, headed ‘Vital Blarney’ he ended:

This little book, therefore, is unsatisfactory. It has been compared to Schrodinger’s book What is Life, but it is not as bad as that; it is at least, for the most part, about its sensible subject and Professor Bernal knows something of the matter. But he does not know enough to contribute usefully. This criticism may be looked on as simple example of he old injunction to stick to his last. To some extent it is. But such an injunction would not unreasonably restrict Professor Bernal. He would need as many arms at Briareus to attend adequately to all the lasts he is qualified to do some banging on. There are so many subject—crystallography, politics, building, bomb-damage, ethics, history, etc.—on which he writes authoritatively and convincingly that we must put down to pure Irish whimsy his decision to write a book on life. So much already has already been written on the subject that impatience is justified at a contribution made up so largely of blarney.

In the next issue, Bernal wrote a defence under the title ‘Keep off the Grass’. It began:

One of these days I will see a review by N. W. Pirie of a scientific work of which he thoroughly approves. It will no doubt be a study by an expert in the field which explores, very precisely and with every reasonable precaution, a circumscribed subject and expresses the results in an orderly way with due allowance for any possible foreseen or unforeseen error. It will certainly never be anything I write. To be criticized by Pirie therefore does not surprise me and is no mark of distinction. However, in his delight in castigating the impudence of anyone—not even a biochemist—who pretends to knowledge about the origin of something that does not exist, he has allowed himself to express opinions of his own of an extravagance of scepticism that far exceeds anything he charges against me, and it is these rather than his criticisms of my efforts that require to be answered. The burden of Pirie’s review was that firstly I had said nothing new, or even nearly new, for what I had said had been better said fifty to a hundred years ago, further, that insofar as I had said anything else it was unproven or wrong, and lastly, that not being a professional biochemist I had no right to say anything at all on the subject.

and ended:

Pirie chides me for knowing too little of our ignorance. I would wish him in return not to ignore so much of our knowledge.

Bernal (left) and Pirie
from their respective Biographical Memoirs

The whole history of Bernal’s interest in the origin of life or, perhaps, more accurately, the origin of organic compounds found in living organisms, and the background to this then famous spat have been explained by Andrew Brown in his biography of Bernal. The latter’s book arose from a lecture he gave. Pirie then wrote a criticism of the lecture and sent it to Bernal who incorporated it as an appendix to the book without checking with Pirie that he had no objection to its publication. But Pirie did object. Pirie was a stickler on the correct use of English and was concerned that he had written the criticism in a hurry, possibly while ‘tight’, and may have committed solecisms he condemned in others, the ‘others’ including Bernal!

Bernal wrote a not-so-grovelling apology in a letter to ‘Dear Bill’:

It never occurred to me that you were tight, or, even if you were, you could ever have forgotten yourself so far as not to express yourself in perfect English!…I should have asked you and I am very sorry now that I did not because you might have produced longer and even more controversial comments.

Pirie’s revenge was the review of the book.

Pirie NW. 1952. Vital Blarney (Review by N.W. Pirie of The Physical Basis of Life. J.D. Bernal. 80 pp, 1951. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 6s). New Biology 12, 106-112.

Bernal JD. 1952. Keep off the grass. A review of a review. New Biology 13, 120-126.

Brown A. 2005. J.D. Bernal. The Sage of Science. Oxford University Press.

Hodgkin DMC. 1980. John Desmond Bernal 10 May 1901-16 September 1971. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26, 17-84.

Pierpoint WS. 1999. Norman Wingate Pirie. 1 July 1907-29 March 1997. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 45, 397-415. 

*When did the use of ‘student’ creep into use as a term for school pupils?

‘I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up’. Helen Spurway’s original and neglected work from 1952

The breeding of wild animals in captivity is managed to maintain genetic diversity. Everybody knows that from television programmes on zoos, even after stripping out the anthropomorphic claptrap of the populist commentary. But even with the best management there is a limit to the number of generations that small populations can be maintained without incurring the deleterious effects of inbreeding. And when it comes to reintroducing populations into the wild is the gene pool the same as that in the original wild population? In other words, has there been artificial selection, however unintentional, so is the captive population genuinely wild?

There have been many papers and books written on this aspect of conservation biology but none that I have seen give credit to the person who drew attention to the problem nearly 70 years ago.

Under the provocative title, Can wild animals be kept in captivity?, Helen Spurway questioned not whether wild animals can be kept in captivity from the technological point of view but whether they can be maintained wild genetically. The emphasis was thus on the word ‘wild’. She wrote:

I believe it to be impossible to breed genuine wild animal under artificial conditions as to stand in a bucket of water and pick oneself up.

She argued it was inevitable that artificial selection occurs at all stages of keeping wild animals in captivity and that everybody doing so was involved in a process of domestication:

We, who keep animals, either as amateur naturalists, curators of zoological gardens, or academic biologists, cannot help taking part in some domestications.

In her admittedly rambling article (sadly, a model of organisation compared with ones she wrote on her studies of newts), Helen Spurway, considered the genetic and environmental factors that take place in captive populations which in the end produce animals different from those in the wild.

In a nutshell, artificial selection can—and did—occur at just about every stage. Captured individuals may have been may weakest or slowest in a population. The first, or only, individuals to breed in captivity would have led to selection of those least affected by stress to pass on their genes. I could continue in the same vein but the message is clear.

Helen Spurway also pointed out that even the first breeding in captivity involve inbreeding (think Golden Hamster, with only one mother and litter forming the captive/domesticated population for decades) or a degree of outbreeding never encountered in the wild. Therefore, she argued, there is an inevitable domestication of wild animals in captivity with succeeding generations and we end up with a phenotype adapted to life in captivity rather than life in the wild.

Helen Spurway (1915-1978) was a geneticist, then working at University College London. She is best remembered as the second wife of J.B.S. Haldane who shared his marxist beliefs and admiration for Joseph Stalin. They left Britain to work in India in 1956. At the time she wrote the article she was working on genetic differences between populations of European newts and was keeping a number in captivity for breeding experiments. I have written a little about that work here.

Helen Spurway and JBS Haldane in Calcutta

But how did I get to know about Spurway’s article? In 1959, starting ‘A’ level zoology and botany, we were introduced to the Biology Library at school (where a number of us hung out for much of the day in the company of museum specimens and a human skull. The senior biology master James J Key looked towards a small pile of paperbacks and suggested we work our way through them. They were old issues of Penguin New Biology and the first one I picked up contained the article by Helen Spurway.

Penguin’s series, New Biology, was published from 1945 until 1960 in 31 volumes. It was aimed at VIth form pupils and first-year undergraduates. The ‘new’ before ‘biology’ indicated several trends, not simply the promotion of then new areas of discovery, like cell biology, over traditional descriptive pursuits such as comparative anatomy. The great, and supposedly new, emphasis was on the use of biology in human affairs. The ‘new’ in this instance represented the views of the large number of marxist and communist biologists in the British university system who were arguing that progress could only come be made by having a planned economy with planned and centrally-controlled science as part of that process. I cannot help but point out that the holders of such beliefs were horrified if anybody tried to tell them what research they should be doing. Some scientists are more equal than others.

The editors who founded and ran Penguin’s New Biology were the husband and wife team, Michael Abercrombie FRS (1912-1979), the famous cell biologist and experimental embryologist, and Minnie Louie Johnson (1909-1984). 

The history of Penguin’s New Biology is told by Sir Peter Medawar in his biographical memoir on Abercrombie for the Royal Society, which, incidentally, contains acidic observations on some of the academic zoologists of the day:

It was an important event for the Abercrombies when Lancelot Hogben succeeded Munro Fox as the Mason Professor of Zoology at Birmingham and appointed Michael [Abercrombie] Lecturer in Zoology. Hogben lived with the socio­logist Professor Sargant Florence in the top floor of whose house the Aber­crombies had a flat. Hogben and the Abercrombies became very thick and it was Hogben, a great popular educationalist (cp. Mathematics for the Million) who turned the Abercrombies’ thoughts to one of the most important enter­prises of their lives… 

Hogben arranged an introduction to Allen Lane of Penguin Books and the Abercrombies undertook to produce a series of volumes to be called New Biology, each one of which would contain a number of authoritative essays at a pretty high academic level—sixth form and university first year. Lane paid £75 for the first volume, a sum which the Abercrombies shared out among the contributors, characteristically leaving themselves out. The first volume was a great success and sold something like 100,000 copies—a great success by scholarly standards—but as the series continued to a total of 31 volumes the sales dwindled to 20 000. Eventually, then, the verdict of the market place brought the series to an end… 

New Biology had a profoundly stimulating effect upon sixth formers and first year undergraduates and probably played an important part in speeding up the recruitment into biology that caused it to take up its present position as the most deeply absorbing and rapidly moving of all the sciences today.

New Scientist on 31 March 1960 in covering the demise of New Biology concluded:

New Biology has died because it could not make a living. There is something disturbingly wrong with a culture that could allow this to happen.

There was also this cartoon:

Nowadays, Penguin’s New Biology has been largely forgotten, copies in university and school libraries thrown out along with other key volumes in the battle for shelf space. As well as crackingly good articles its pages contained some notable spats between famous savants of the day and started some controversies that ran through biology and its history for decades.

Medawar PB. 1980. Michael Abercrombie 14 August 1912—28 May 1979. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26, 1-15

Spurway H. 1952. Can wild animals be kept in captivity? New Biology 13 (edited by M Abercrobie and ML Johnson), 11-30. London: Penguin

Spurway H. 1953. Genetics of specific and subspecific differences in European newts. Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology 7, 200-237