Neurologist Oliver Sacks may be famous for writing about the foibles of the human brain, but, he tells Petroc Trelawny, his new book issomething a bit different - an autobiography of the ' little chemistry-mad boy' he once was.
Oliver Sacks hates to be far from a copy of the periodic table. Today he is wearing his "heavy metals" T-shirt, showing the atomic numbers, symbols and exotic names of elements like hafnium and vanadium. Later he unzips his luggage to show me a pile of clean shirts, each displaying the complete chart, from hydrogen and lithium at top left, to nobelium and lawrencium at bottom right.
That this is an obsession becomes clear when he pulls out his wallet. Inside is yet another copy, stuck behind the clear plastic window where others might insert a photo of their partner or child.
"The periodic table and a New York driving licence," laughs Sacks. "They are the only two necessities. What else does a man need ?"
Oliver Sacks is famous for writing about the foibles of the human brain in books like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
He lives in New York, where he is clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. His interest in the central nervous system, however, didn't develop until he reached adulthood. As a child, growing up in London during the second World War, his passion was for all things chemical.
In a makeshift laboratory at the back of the family house, Sacks would spend hours mixing elements, making gases, neutralising acids, and watching different chemical reactions. On occasions, they were so violent he'd find himself running into the garden to dispose of a blazing, foul-smelling compound before it burnt the house down.
Apart from insisting that their young son wore safety goggles, Sacks's parents were unconcerned about his potentially explosive hobby. Both medical doctors, they came from families steeped in science. Sacks's maternal grandfather had emigrated from Russia to England, where he enjoyed an eclectic career. As well as being a kosher slaughterer and grocer, he was also a mathematician, inventor and expert in the new field of aeronautics.
He fathered 18 children, most of whom followed him into science. Some became specialists in diamonds and uranium in South Africa; Uncle Abe was one the inventors of Marmite, and patented luminous paint; while Uncle Dave, who specialised in lightbulbs, was nicknamed after the metal used in their filaments, tungsten.
"My uncles were amateurs and mavericks," says Sacks. "They didn't have degrees, they weren't connected with any institution. They were simply whizzes at invention and putting things together. Here was I, a young boy prepared to be enthralled, and they responded to that."
It's Uncle Tungsten who has lent his name to Sacks's new book, an autobiography of his childhood years. Working on another project, he realised that he could recall the early 1970s much better than the late 1980s. "I wondered at first if my memory was failing, but then decided that it was because the mind had already unconsciously organised events into a sort of narrative," he says.
He soon noted that he could see his youth with even greater clarity, and started writing about his "chemical childhood".
The resultant manuscript at one point ran to two million words - the equivalent of 18 volumes. Now it has been distilled down to just 300 pages, combining family biography with accounts of Sacks's personal scientific heroes.
Uncle Tungsten would excite any child. Over and over again, Sacks would visit his East End factory to watch the sleek, well-oiled machinery at work. The benevolent uncle would enthral his nephew with the wonders of science: the density of mercury, the eerie glow of fluorescent minerals kept in a special cabinet. "Feel this, Oliver," he would say, passing over an ingot of his favourite metal. "Nothing in the world feels like sintered tungsten."
"I remember so clearly experiencing a kind of epiphany when my uncle mixed hydrochloric acid and caustic soda. The mixture became very hot," says Sacks. "But when it cooled down he handed it to me to taste."
Individually, either ingredient could have been fatal. Together they neutralised each other, and tasted of nothing but salt.
Nowadays, such an experiment would send most parents into a blind panic. Back then,people were more relaxed. On one occasion,Sacks took a dish full of caesium to Hampstead Heath and hurled it into a pond. "My recollection is incredibly vivid, of the flaming reaction, and the dish smashing in all directions, glass flying everywhere," he says.
A local industrial chemist supplied him with any ingredients he needed, the assistants happily pouring out jars of lethal acids, casually warning their young customer: "Go easy with that one."
"I had enough chemicals to decimate north-west London," says Sacks. "I might have the odd scar from those days, but it was so much less of a nanny culture then. Chemistry at that time was fun for me. It was not a school subject, it was an adventure. It was a risk."
Sacks enjoyed a simple, uncomplicated friendship with his uncles. His relationship with his parents was more complex.
When war broke out, he and his brother Michael were sent to a boarding school in the country. The experience was a terrible one. The place was run by a monstrous headmaster, who starved, beat and tormented his pupils. By 1943, most parents had removed their children, and the place closed. Sacks, however, never complained, and his mother and father remained unaware of his plight.
"I felt I was ignored when I went away to school, but then I was supported and tolerated to an amazing extent when I came back," he says. "In some sense I had an unconditional love of my parents, as I think they had of me, but I also think of my mother as being rather formidable."
She specialised in gynaecology and obstetrics. One of the most shocking incidents in the book is a description of how she would bring home stillborn foetuses and dissect them on the kitchen table, her 10-year-old son looking on. "She adored anatomy, but would keep forgetting my age. One of my cousins got it right in describing her as being 'long on enthusiasm but short on empathy'."
Sacks says he thought long and hard about whether to include the episode in the book. "My publisher told me not to, and my brother thought I should be quiet about it. But I'm caught between somehow wanting to defend my parents and at the same time expose them."
IN contrast, his father comes across as a much gentler figure, who would take his son out every Saturday on his house calls. If a patient was contagious, the young Sacks would stay downstairs; otherwise he would watch the consultation. "It was common enough for a GP to take his son with him then," says Sacks. "I'm sure those visits were a model for my future medical career." Afterwards father and son would lunch in an East End kosher restaurant.
The Jewish faith played a major role in Sacks's childhood, as did the Zionist politics of the age. An aunt translated the Balfour Declaration into French and Russian, a nephew was the first Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Night after night, his parents' drawing room would be the scene for heated debates about the creation of a Jewish homeland. The young Sacks soon became "passionately negative" about Zionism and evangelical politics, writing of it as "noisy, intrusive and bullying. I longed for the quiet discourse, the rationality of science."
Though he would dress up smartly for the synagogue every Saturday, he claims to have lost his faith by the age of 10. "I'm not sure anyone believes in anything," he says, going on to quote the title of an essay by E.M. Forster, 'I do not Believe in Belief'.
The rituals of Judaism remain appealing to Sacks now, though he talks of celebrating Christmas as well as Hanukkah. Describing himself as "an old Jewish atheist", he laughs when I point out that the hotel in which he has chosen to stay is adjacent to one of London's largest synagogues. When hedoes talk about the Bible, it is to compare its key figures to his scientific heroes.
"I tend to conflate the figures of Moses and Mendeleev," the latter the inventor of the periodic table. "I imagine Mendeleev going up to some chemical Sinai and bringing down the tablets of periodic law."
"The romance of science" is one of Sacks's favourite phrases; for him it is something cultural rather than technical - its beauty, he writes, reflected in the names of chemicals. "Orpiment and realgar, two arsenic sulphides, went euphoniously together and made me think of an operatic couple like Tristan and Isolde." Throughout his book, other glorious names crop up: proustite, samarskite, even bohemium, the existence of which was, alas, eventually disproved.
He is delighted that so many chemists were also writers: Coleridge used to go to scientific lectures to renew his "stock of metaphors", while Humphry Davy, inventor of the miner's safety lamp, was a published poet.
Despite the extraordinary show of passion in Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks's relationship with chemistry was not a long one. By the time he was 14, he had fallen "out of love" and was moving towards his eventual career in medicine. Now he seems to have rekindled the friendship with his old flame. "When I was writing the book, I was often having six chemical dreams a night. I really have rediscovered my pre-adolescent enthusiasms again."
As if to prove the point, he opens the hotel-room safe and takes out a spectroscope, showing me the radically different spectrums of traditional and neon lightbulbs. Later he covers the bedspread in white-hot sparks from a flint he is carrying in his pocket.
"I had a very privileged childhood, and I just hope some boy or girl today might pause at their computer and realise what they are missing. I gave a talk in Toronto recently, and there was this intent little boy in the front row who came up afterwards and showed me his notebook. There was a letter as well, with a charming P.S.: 'Can you please send me a bottle of sulphuric acid?'
"I've often wondered if I'd recognise the little chemistry-mad boy that I was - in fact I must have been just like him."
Uncle Tungsten - Memories of a Chemical Boyhood is published by Picador at £17.99 sterling