The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ Julian Huxley that he should stand for Parliament, he dismissed the idea, saying that what guided his life was a passion for truth, not its ‘obscuration’. In the book he was invited to write for a series entitled ‘If I Were Dictator’ (since this was before the full development of Hitler’s Third Reich or Stalin’s USSR, the word ‘dictator’ was not freighted with the same terrible associations it later came to carry), Huxley further showed his disregard for democratic politics, proposing instead a corporatist state in which elections would be ‘superfluous’. A central planning council would replace Parliament, which was little more than a ‘talking-shop’, according to Huxley, and lacked the necessary expertise to the run the country (as, presumably by extension, the electorate lacked the necessary expertise to choose a government).

      Social issues in the 1930s had a direct bearing on the scientific community: technological advances were charged with having thrown thousands out of work, and creating machines for military savagery; the Hunger Marches were a symbol of the malnutrition of the unemployed, which Sir John Boyd Orr would quantify in 1936 in his book Food, Health and Income; Oswald Mosley was using spurious ‘scientific’ arguments to inflame anti-Semitism; genetic inheritance was the subject of much debate — the sterilisation of ‘morons’ (defined by the journal Nature as making up ‘a large proportion of the slum population … mental defectives of comparatively high grade … people lacking not only in intelligence but also in self-control, which is the basis of morality, and they reproduce recklessly’) was seriously discussed in Britain and put into practice in Nazi Germany; while the growing threat of war later in the decade rallied scientific expertise to steel defences and develop weapons of destruction.

      Moreover, world events were enlarging Britain’s scientific community. British scientists were made acutely aware of the pernicious uses to which scientific theories and inventions could be put when Jewish scientists such as the chemists Gerhard Weiler, E.F. Freundlich and Michael Polanyi, who had been dismissed or resigned from their research or teaching institutes after Hitler came to power, fled to Britain, as did the biochemist Herman Blaschko, the biologist Hans Krebs, the physicists Max Born, Hans Bethe, Heinrich Kuhn, Rudolph Peierls and Kurt Mendelssohn. Boris Chain, a young biochemist, left Germany on 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was created Chancellor, and came to Britain, where he sought the help of J.B.S. Haldane. Chain eventually moved to Oxford University, and in 1945 he and Sir Howard Florey shared the Nobel Prize for their work on isolating penicillin (though the university denied him even a readership).

      After Chain, Haldane sought out more young scientists who needed to flee Hitler’s Germany, working alongside Professor F.A. Lindemann (who had himself been born and educated in Germany and later, as Lord Cherwell, would be Churchill’s wartime scientific advisor) and an Oxford Professor of Organic Chemistry, Robert Robinson, on the Academic Assistance Council (AAC — renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936). The Council, chaired by the physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford, director of the prestigious Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, had come into existence in May 1933 after William Beveridge (then director of the London School of Economics) wrote a letter to The Times drawing attention to the plight of Jewish scientists in Germany and Austria. Beveridge had been alerted to the situation by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had worked with Einstein (who had declared his intention never to return to Germany and to resign from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in protest at Hitler’s racial policies in March 1933), and a young Englishwoman, Tess (Esther) Simpson, who went on to run the organisation.

      By 1935 around 25 per cent of all scientists and 20 per cent of all mathematicians had been dismissed from German universities under the Nazis’ harsh race laws. The AAC sought to enable such people to continue their research in British universities or industry or, as so many yearned to do, to move to the United States, thus ‘salvaging’ a number of scientists, in some cases with great difficulty. ‘Brains in Germany seem to be going cheap and we have no tariff for them,’ wrote W.J. Sollas, the aged Professor of Geology at Oxford. By May 1934, sixty-seven ‘wandering scholars’, as Rutherford called them, had found positions at London University, thirty-one at Cambridge, seventeen at Oxford and sixteen at Manchester, greatly enriching the British scientific community.

      Although the early 1930s were ‘by far the richest time there has ever been’ for scientific innovation, in the opinion of the chemist and novelist C.P. Snow, with an annus mirabilis in 1932, when John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton succeeded in splitting the atom, and James Chadwick did likewise with the neutron, there was disquiet among sections of the scientific community. Many felt that those outside their profession looked down on scientific activities as culturally inferior to the arts, and they themselves were seen as little more than lab rats producing work only ‘of great value in their own departments’, in the dismissive view of T.S. Eliot. The Bishop of Ripon, E.A. Burroughs, in his address to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds on 4 September 1927, had invited the scientific community to declare a ten-year moratorium on research, for the general good of mankind, since while science had undoubtedly advanced knowledge, it had done nothing to increase wisdom. (H.G. Wells had recently in effect suggested a similar — though permanent — ‘holiday’ for the episcopate, also in the cause of human progress.) Society was suffering, in the Bishop’s view, from a ‘moral lag, a gap between moral and scientific advance, for man’s body had in effect gone on growing while his soul had largely stood still or gone back’.

      Notwithstanding the Bishop, scientific research carried on, but the Association strove harder to break down public resistance to the advance of science. Some scientists discussed whether by growing more specialised they might have become ‘blinkered’ to the wider concerns of humanity, while others addressed the question of whether science had a particular relevance — even a special duty — to society. And a small number of radical scientists at Cambridge (particularly), London and a few other universities, or assembled round the Tots and Quots dining table, despaired that their agenda for the ‘social responsibility of science’ was not in fact what generally drove scientific endeavour or its public perception. As Zuckerman pointed out, the ‘efforts of scientists are generally misunderstood, because they are not interpreted to the world by scientists themselves, and because few of those who are immediately responsible for the conduct of social affairs are scientists. There are, for example, no scientists in the Government.’ Moreover, as the Marxist mathematician Hyman Levy argued to Julian Huxley in a BBC broadcast in 1931, ‘Since scientists, like other workers, have to earn their living … to a large extent the demands of those who provide the money will, very broadly, determine the spread of scientific interest in the field of applied science … I know of no scientist who is so free that he can study anything he likes, or who is not limited in some way by limitations such as the cost of equipment.’

      J.D. Bernal (whose book The Social Function of Science was a manifesto and a blueprint for the unlimited potential of science for progress, especially once it was freed from the shackles of capitalism) took up the theme in response to a criticism from a fellow scientist that ‘Bernalism is the doctrine of those who profess that the proper objects of scientific research are to feed people and protect them from the elements, that research workers should be organised in gangs and told what to discover.’ It wasn’t, he riposted, as if the idea that science had a social function was new. It was ‘palpable and admitted fact’, and that function was ‘largely economic under present conditions and likely to become even more so’. Nevertheless, under capitalism, science was not generally regarded as being capable of ‘solv[ing] completely the material conditions of society’, Bernal wrote in 1935, ‘but rather the best application of science is conceived of as producing such a fatuous and stupefying paradise as … Brave New World [by Aldous Huxley, Julian’s younger brother, published in 1932]; at worst, a super-efficient machine for mutual destruction with men living underground and only coming up in gas masks’.

      To Hyman Levy, as to Bernal, Lancelot Hogben, J.B.S. Haldane, Joseph Needham and other radical scientists, only a society transformed along socialist lines into a planned economy producing an abundance of socially useful goods, equitably distributed to all sections of the population who would thus СКАЧАТЬ