Coming First

Finally, there is the big question as to whether scientific creativity can produce the personal fingerprint of an idea that is the universal feature of artistic creativity. As scientists we can only discover the preformed material structure of nature and we measure our success by giving ourselves prizes of various kinds. Krebs received the Nobel Prize for his ‘discovery’ of the citric acid cycle. But if he had been only slightly slower off the mark, one of at least three others would have arrived within a year or two at this particular winning post of scientific endeavour. Then there is the value of the so-called discovery of Africa by the European explorers and the trials and tribulations of the south polar expeditions- a journey that can now be made by school children with modern technological survival kits.

I was to experience the scientific phenomenon of 'who came first' myself as a research student concerning the discovery of synaptic vesicles, which are structures in nerve endings that store and release neurotransmitters, chemicals that mediate the passage of nerve impulses, nerve to nerve and nerve to muscle. Acetylcholine is one such neurotransmitter.

In my search for mitochondria that could be isolated functionally intact from cells, I separated a particulate fraction from locust head tissue in which I found acetylcholine and the enzyme system that made it. This was in 1957 when I was in my first year as a research student. The work was written up and submitted to the Biochemical Journal on 21st April 1958. I then went on to confirm this discovery in the particulate matter of rat and pigeon brains. Here, I was following up on a discovery made by the pre-War team of Mann, Tennenbaum & Quaetel, which in 1938 presented evidence that about three-quarters of the acetylcholine in guinea-pig brain was bound to some protein constituent of the cell. A year later the same authors suggested that this was a complex of acetylcholine and its synthesizing enzyme choline acetylase. In 1952 Quaetel suggested that the bound acetylcholine could be acetylcholine held within the mitochondria, and in 1956 from indirect evidence, del Castillo & Katz made the suggestion that intracellular granules containing acetylcholine may function in synaptic transmission.

Although I did not know it, a group in the Cambridge Biochemistry Department were also following this line of research in guineapigs. Victor Whittaker, the key worker in Cambridge heard of my work and came to visit me early in 1958. Later that year, Krebs was surprised to see Whittaker had given a paper on vesicle-bound acetylcholine at the 4th International Congress of Biochemistry held in Vienna during the first week of September. Krebs was particularly annoyed that he made no reference to my work and wrote and told him so. Whittaker and his team went on into the 1960s to define the isolated vesicles giving them the name 'synaptosomes' in order to emphasize their relative homogeneity and their resemblance in physical properties to other subcellular organelles. In the many papers from Cambridge not one of them mentioned my work! This bothered Krebs more than it worried me. My feeling was that it was not a matter of who came first because everyone was really unravelling the details underlying the pre-War discovery of a biochemical structure which had evolved to establish the efficient workings of nerves. I was particularly proud of my work in that it had established that this had evolved early at the level of insects.

The classic case of two people arriving independently at the same scientific conclusion had been the discovery of natural selection itself and the separate lines lines of enquiry pursued by Darwin and Wallace that led the same conclusions.

In contrast to the inevitable unravelling of the mysteries of science, there will only ever be one expression of the horrors of war communicated by Picasso’s painting inspired by the massacre of Guernica. The truth of pictorial messages to make ‘visible’ human pain has been known since humankind first learned to predict future outcomes of group actions. But, Picasso also intertwined his message with images promoting the search for light, which brings artists in line with the real motivation of scientists which is to produce a behavioural change beyond the imagination in anticipation of things to come. Scientists and artists however differ in their motivation to be creative. For example, the British abstract sculptor Lynn Chadwick's conviction was that art must be "a manifestation of some vital force coming out of the dark".

In a recent blog of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences the question was posed " How much of our scientific discourse today has been directly or indirectly shaped by dominance hierarchies, especially governmental agencies, corporations, educational institutions, professional associations, and media outlets? And, what does all of this say about the long-term survival of scientific and/or religious discourse?" On my creativity trail I have picked up the odd accolade, such as fellowships of the Institute of Biology and Linnaen Society, but honestly I was not trying!

As the ‘modern monk’ Thomas Merton says:

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not, perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself".