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| Volume 46, Number 2, Fall 1998 |
Scott Simon [Host]: Next week, at Christie’s auction house in New York City, the last part of a collection of scientific books, pamphlets, and monographs will go on the block, and could sell for hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. But is the real value in the books, or the ideas they embody?
The late Pascal F. Norman of San Francisco was a psychiatrist and dedicated collector. His personal library of science and medicine took about 40 years to amass. It contained more than 2,500 items, from Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy, which explained why we stick to the ground and don’t fly off the earth, to Wilbur Wright’s Experiments in Aviation, in which an engineer from Dayton, Ohio, explains how, maybe, we can fly.
There are no manuscripts or letters, but there are in this last lot, encompassing the 19th and 20th centuries, the literal first impressions of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, among others, men and women now considered founders of modern science, but men and women who a century ago forwarded ideas that were often considered irresponsible and dangerous.
To get a better idea of the significance of what’s coming up for bid in this last sale next Thursday, we asked a great teacher, Dr. Robert Pollack of Columbia University, to review the hard-bound sales catalogue. He then joined us in an austere, cramped little basement room at Christie’s, while auction personnel bustled in and out with a passel of fragile volumes. The first book Dr. Pollack chose to show us was by Sigmund Freud.
Dr. Robert Pollack, Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, Center for Psychoanalytic Research and Training: The Interpretation of Dreams probably is intellectually the most stunning object here, because we take for granted we have an unconscious, we have a conflict between our unconscious thoughts, and some of these conflicts emerge in our behavior. We take [that now] for granted, probably the way after Hamlet we took for granted an internal monologue, but not before him. So this is a major cultural event, the Traumdeutung, but as a book it’s a—it’s just a book. That’s the paradox.
Simon: Would it be fair to say that a good part of this collection is a collection of ideas that were ridiculed and discounted in their times?
Pollack: I found this set of discoveries to be at once rejected, at the time of their discovery, and rejected for decades after, and secondly, never overthrown once accepted. They’re now so embedded in our culture that we are astonished, I think, that anyone could have rejected them. This one is the classic book by John Snow, a doctor, which establishes the science of epidemiology. This figure here is a fold-out picture of a map of London. Every black box represents a house in which someone has died of cholera. You see that the houses cluster around a pump, a water-pump— another water-pump over there. What Dr. Snow argued was that the water to this pump was different than the water to this pump or that pump, because these pumps didn’t kill all those people…
Simon: Were there not clusters of deaths?
Pollack: Exactly. And the leap of causality was to say that the water was the cause of cholera. He simply said, “Cap that pump and make people drink water from these pumps,” and the level of cholera went down by a factor of 108.
Simon: We should take a look at another.
Pollack: In the set from the 1850s, The Origin of Species went to six editions. It’s still in print. I teach from it. What’s important to say about this book is that it has no progenitors. It is from nothing to something. It is, if you like, a real creation. And there’s the irony. And there’s the most extraordinarily modern aspect to it. Here is Darwin saying there was no creation, and in so doing, he created. We still live off the difficulty of understanding his creation of a vision of the natural living world which lacks a creator, which lacks a motor, which lacks a direction. And it is certainly the most disturbing book, to anyone of any serious religious faith, no matter what their religion…This book—this book should live forever, as long as there are people.
Leap 50 years, and the next one is the famous Croonian Lectures. Archibald Garrard, MD, Oxford, F.R.C.P. London, was an assistant physician and lecturer on chemical pathology at Saint Bart’s, in London. And his practice included parents who would bring him little babies whose nappies were black—their urine turned black on the nappy. Garrard’s reaction was to note the fact that, more often than not, these were parents who were themselves cousins of each other. Garrard knew the recently discovered work of Mendel in peas, so he said, “Perhaps black urine in babies is the result of an inborn error in metabolism, not fate, not bad diet, but actually a statement about inheritance. So he wrote this book, On Inborn Errors of Metabolism, created the science of human genetics for this book, and he created the world we’re in, in which we judge each other, for better or worse, in terms of our genetic inheritance, by DNA analysis. He is the sort of good fairy of the idea of making us better through understanding our genetics.
Simon: The debate that that pamphlet set off has been at the heart of so many controversies over the century.
Pollack: From Garrard to eugenics to concentration-camp doctors on the one hand, and from Garrard to early diagnosis of a risk for breast-cancer that leads to intervention and saves a life on the other hand, are equidistant but in opposite directions. The direction taken is not a scientific choice, it’s a political choice. Every scientist needs to be backed up by a political structure that’s benign, that does not misuse the discovery. It’s paralytic to ask of science that it be responsible for all outcomes of its discoveries. It’s also weak politically to say that they did it, let them fix it.
I want to go to Einstein. Annalen der Physik, the fourth volume, of 1905—this is the bound volume of a journal in Germany which was at that time the most important journal in physics. To me, I am enough of a scientist for enough years that to have in my hands a bound copy of a journal that might be in my own library…
It is the paradox of Christie’s that this is valuable for its binding, because what’s in it is so astonishing as to raise an otherwise avoidable question, that is, are there really people that we have to call “geniuses” that are different from the rest of us? Because in one year, in 1905, Einstein wrote all motion is relative to the frame it takes place in. So there’s no fixed frame in the universe, and all motion is relative. And then, by a set of intermediate steps he came out with the statement that “time and space are inseparable parts of a single continuum, and all forms of energy and matter are the same, incontrovertible.” One of these papers has the icon E = mc2. In 1905, one year, all of that—it was a reconfiguration of the entire universe, of the notion of time. Until this book, you could say there’s a time that something happened, or there’s a place it happened. After this, you must say, “Nothing happens at a place except at a time. Nothing happens at a time except at a place.” They’re the same. Our perceptions separate time and space, but the physical world does not. It’s a bizarre, astonishing piece of art, through science. I don’t think anybody I know would say Einstein has ever been surpassed.
Simon: To go through this collection the way you describe it, there are extraordinary ideas that have changed us and challenged us, and that we’ve copied into our system growing up in this century, and they’re familiar to us. On the other hand, if you think them through, they still have the power to scare, alarm, and amaze us.
Pollack: Yes. Scare, alarm, amaze. But I would sort of also say, enliven and thrill. I don’t wish to paint a discovery as necessarily scary only in a bad sense. I think to be scared is to be forced to rethink basic premises, and it’s a good exercise at any age.
Simon: When these items begin to go to auction next week, we can fairly project that they’re going to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps more. On the other hand, could somebody with a couple of hundred dollars walk into a bookstore and buy pretty much the same ideas?
Pollack: Absolutely. Absolutely. Almost every one of the documents I picked is either in press or can be gotten in photocopy, absolutely. Every journal is available. The Origin of Species is in press. Interpretation of Dreams is available in any language you wish. In fact, the entire canon of Freud, 25 volumes, standard edition, is available in English and German.
Simon: Is there something intriguing or enthralling
about sitting surrounded by all of this at once?
Pollack: These kinds of books are crystallizations of creative
moments, and I wish I could surround myself with every one of
them. They are desirable objects. On the way in, I thought, “To
think of the book is the same as to hold the book,” but it’s
not. It would be a great gift to have a first edition of Interpretation
of Dreams. And it would be a great thing to have the journal
that has Einstein’s discoveries. The question I’d ask
is whether the person buying is buying it for that reason, or
because of its rarity. Because to buy it for rarity seems to me
to miss a paradoxical certainty, that is, it’s important
because it’s not rare, it’s common. I’d love Snow’s
diagram on my wall, because I know we’re all alive today
because that was internalized by governments, throughout the world.
To me, that’s a—that’s a very romantic thing, that
diagram, because it’s dead simple. No instruments, just pure
thinking. So, yes, I would say, there is something wonderful about
the crystallized fact of this being how it first came out.
These kinds of books are crystallizations of creative moments…
Simon: Many collectors will have a rare volume, and then will have what they call a “reading copy”…something that’s not rare at all.
Pollack: That’s interesting! Not me. If I were in fact to have picked up a wallet on the street and been able to enter this auction as a customer, I would definitely only buy something in order to have it and read it, even if I couldn’t sell it again. I think, in other words the real respect for the ideas contained within these books would have to be shown by a willingness to lose an aspect of their resalability in order to enjoy them as objects.
Simon: Dr. Robert Pollack of Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Research and Training is a professor of biological sciences. His most recent book is Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA.
Broadcast on NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, October 24, 1998. © 1998 National Public Radio, Inc.