Pure Science

A colleague recommended that I read Arrowsmith. Written in 1925 by Sinclair Lewis, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and Lewis apparently refused to accept the honor. It traces the life of a fictional scientist-doctor-bacteriologist, torn between different worlds, and only feeling most comfortable when he is immersed in the rush of pure scientific research. The protagonist’s name is Martin Arrowsmith.

 

I have little experience reading older novels. They seem slow and ponderous now that I’ve acclimated to action-packed movies and brisk narratives. I do still enjoy the slow descriptive pace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the only “old” fiction I read in my younger years. Reading Arrowsmith was like watching an old and slow-moving movie – something I rarely do. I almost gave up partway through Arrowsmith. But my colleague has astute observations, and I’m glad I persevered through the novel. I enjoyed the second half much more!

 

Martin is a provincial kid restless to find his way in the world. When he gets to medical school, he is attracted to the “pure science” research of bacteriology, the realm of a seemingly cranky irascible old professor. His request to work in that lab is initially denied, but Martin perseveres and thence begins a love-hate relationship with his mentor and with himself. His mentor, catches a glimpse in Martin as one who may have the heart of a true scientist, if not yet the mind. But youthful Martin gets caught up in other things, and it is some time before he finds his way back to his mentor. Part of a long admonishment, here is an excerpt of his mentor’s speech describing Pure Science:

 

“To be a scientist – it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man… the scientist is intensely religious… he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith. He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws… He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. The world has always been ruled by the Philantropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand… by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them… by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors – and what a fine mess of hell they have made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody!”

 

The true scientist is a rare bird, seldom found. There’s a purity of heart and mind, yet complex in nature. It’s interesting how Lewis, the novel’s author, compares it to mysticism, poetry, religion, and how pure science “grabs” you rather than you grasping it. There is an aspect of seeming dehumanization – to be heartless – yet for the greater good of mankind. Martin will later face the hard choice of being a philanthropic physician or a cold-hearted scientist in the midst of a plague pandemic; and this part of the novel brought to mind how science and its protocols have changed in the last hundred years, especially this past year in the scramble to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

 

Martin is a bacteriologist, but both his old mentor and a contemporary chemist colleague shame him into learning more math and physical chemistry. Ha! I was not expecting that in the second half of the novel. Remember we’re in the early twentieth century, before the dawn of quantum theory. While some classical thermodynamics has been established, the law of mass action is recent, as is the work on kinetics by Svante Arrhenius, recent Nobel prize winner. Today, these basic concepts are what I teach in first-year college chemistry, along with much that has yet to be discovered. Martin’s mentor admonishes: “You can do nothing till you know a little mathematics… All living things are physicochemical machines… how can you make progress if you do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know physical chemistry without such mathematics?”

 

And what does poor Martin do? With the help of his chemistry colleague as a tutor, he starts to learn algebra, quadratic functions, logarithms, trigonometry. These are all things I take for granted that my students know when they get to G-Chem. Isn’t that amazing? Viewed in this light, 18-year old students know so much compared to scientists of yester-century, and yet perhaps still so little. Just this past week, I was jarred when grading a quiz in realizing that some of my students don’t quite understand logarithms. Several wrote that the equilibrium constant can be a negative number (rather than a number with a negative exponent). And we’ve been using them for weeks! Eeeks! I hastily wrote a short e-mail to my class to remind them of some basics.

 

As a physical chemist, I rate my mathematical abilities as mediocre, and possibly below average. (My chemistry students mistakenly think I’m a whiz at math.) I found it very amusing to read about Martin’s diving into math and P-Chem so he can be an outstanding bacteriologist, since I have been partially doing the opposite – teaching myself biology and biochemistry, as part of my study into the chemical origins of life. But as I delve into modelling the complex world of biology, I’m reminded of my mathematical inadequacies. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly so, I’m starting to bone up on more math; I recently ordered two books to help me do so as one of my summer projects. To keep myself motivated, I’ve also been reading some fun articles. A recent one that I recommend is “A mathematician’s view of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in biology” by Andre Borovik (Biosystems 2021, 104110).

 

But before I get too enamored with math, Martin’s chemistry colleague/tutor reminds him not to put too much trust in math, and “confused him with references to the thermodynamical derivation of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reduction potential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw himself as an impostor…” Well, I’m certainly confused by the math as I’m teaching myself non-equilibrium thermodynamics. My students are confused by math in equilibrium thermodynamics, that looks clear to me. And I suspect they will be confused by oxidation-reduction potentials when we get to them in the last week of G-Chem 2. In my calculus-heavy P-Chem classes, I constantly remind students that math is their friend. I’m not sure they believe me.

 

I’m also reminded not to be cocky about increasing my own knowledge, although this is unlikely to be a problem as I’m generally not impressed with myself. But I’m aware of the danger. I don’t have low self-confidence either, which our protagonist Martin suffers bouts from when not in the ecstasy of pure research. In any case, here’s what happens when Martin learns more P-Chem (perhaps contemporarily G-Chem 2): “He learned the involved mysteries of freezing point determinations, osmotic pressure determinations… he became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely predicted natural phenomena: his world was cold, exact, austerely materialistic, bitter to those who founded their logic on impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters of paving stones, the renamers of species, the compiler of irrelevant data.”

 

That last sentence I quoted is an ongoing theme throughout Arrowsmith. While there are many caricatured characters in the novel, there is much scorn aimed at the culture of Assessment and Administration. It is the realm of the “Men of Measured Merriment” – members of “high” society, not true scientists even if they hold the purse strings for funding science. Some think of themselves as scientists, but seem more interested in money, comfort, glory, fame, or the bourgeois lifestyle. They might even be well-meaning Philantropists, but true pure scientists they are not. They never will be. And perhaps they never were to begin with. I’m certainly not pure of heart and mind, and I don’t worship the god Science. I’m more the philanthropist – the teaching kind! I enjoy my research, but I also love teaching, and much else outside the singular pursuit of scientific truth.

 

Ultimately the novel is not so much about science but about humans, with their desires, greivances, and foibles, as they muddle through life. On the one hand, certain aspects of life do seem quite different a century ago (and I found parts of the novel, well… novel). On the other hand, human nature has not changed much. The human aspects of today’s scientist are not so different than those portrayed in Arrowsmith, even when caricatured. In that sense, Pure Science is a caricature, a mirage, an idealized image that we sometimes portray as professors to our students.