BOOK OF THE DAY: Smoking Ears and Screaming TeethBy Trevor Norton Century, 403pp, £12.99
THIS QUIRKY compendium is a eulogy to those fearless people who have literally put their lives on the line in the interests of science.
It is a witty and fascinating sampling of researchers’ experience, drawn mainly from medicine.
One anecdote sums up the spirit of those included in this volume. George Stover, an American radiologist, tested the effects of radium on himself. As a result, he needed several amputations and a hundred skin grafts. Just before his premature death, he said: “A few dead or crippled scientists do not weigh much against a useful fact.”
An entertaining early chapter on food tells us that until the 19th century, the English ate seal and squirrel as well as delights such as roasted dolphin in porpoise sauce.
In the Orient, grubs, earthworms and rats were part of the daily diet. Some Japanese gourmets who eat the highly poisonous fugu fish (from which the poison has been removed) sometimes ask for a little of the poison to be put back in!
Perhaps it is not only the scientists who are death-defying. On a milder note, the author mentions that a marine biologist friend offered him plankton sandwiches for dinner.
The Disease Detectives section deals with the recent anthrax scare and germ warfare. Apparently MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering agencies, claim to have intercepted a hundred suspects posing as postgraduate students aiming to study biological and chemical toxins.
There is an interesting survey of ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, in which the author suggests that psychiatrists in training should themselves receive one dose of ECT before administering it to any patient. This raises anew the old question of whether judges should spend a night in prison or professors sit their own exams. The Marie Curie story of the discovery of radium is also included.
Many famous names occur in chapters on bomb disposal, marine technology, sharks and deep sea diving. French oceanographer Alain Louis Bombard, for example, set himself adrift in 1952 without food or water to survive on whatever the sea could provide; evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane risked his life investigating poisonous air and decompression in divers. In one of his ascents, one of his filled teeth emitted a high-pitched scream and exploded due to trapped air inside.
Many other familiar figures make cameo appearances: Freud’s unfortunate flirtation with cocaine is included, as are Marx’s observations on the London poor. Hans Hass’s hair-raising photography of sharks sits alongside Auguste Piccard’s invention of the bathyscaphe, the first deep sea diving vehicle. In his time, the Pacific depths had not been explored and after years of dangerous experiment Piccard was able to stay 20 minutes in the deepest hole in the ocean – seven miles down.
My favourite anecdote in this marvellous book, on tracking the causes of cholera, gives an example of academic rivalry where one man drank the cholera-infected concoction of the other to prove a point. It seems some people’s lust for knowledge far exceeds their love of life.
Ross Skelton is senior lecturer in philosophy and psychoanalysis at Trinity College Dublin. The paperback edition of his Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysisis published this month
