A terrible affliction has overcome me: I hoard biographies of great scientists. It applies with one Albert Einstein and the endless supply of books about his life. Every one has to be purchased as I search for the definitive one, reflecting his glaring contradictions: a scientist with the justifiable title of great, a pacifist who urged the US to build the atomic bomb but after Hiroshima said, "if I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker", and a person whose domestic life was more often than not in turmoil - not forgetting his often appalling attitude to the women in his wonderful but turbulent life.There is a sense that the same condition will soon apply in relation to Marie Curie, whose first Nobel Prize came only after her husband Pierre had specifically asked that her more significant contribution be acknowledged. Biographies of her seem to concentrate on her early years in Paris, her isolation of radium and discovery of radioactivity, and an affair with a fellow scientist, at the expense of a separate and momentous contribution to medicine and such basics as X-rays and ambulances.And so, on seeing that Melvyn Bragg features both Einstein and Curie in On Giants' Shoulders, among the chosen twelve from Archimedes to Watson and Crick of DNA fame, I was tempted to read his encapsulation of their lives, work and discoveries first. But the chronological approach won out.In fairness, Bragg readily accepts that he has come to science late and has got up to speed on a diet of superbly accessible popular science books opening the way into "the most dazzling intellectual pleasure-garden of the late 20th century". Indeed, it almost seems that any scientist of note today has to have a plethora of such titles to his or her credit, or a racy lid-blowing tome on their area of research, to be considered successful. Resisting the temptation to accuse Bragg himself of attempting to jump on that lucre-truck, I would point out that the script saves him. Each life is pored over in a brief but brilliant intellectual post mortem (though Watson and Crick are still alive) with the help of prominent contemporary scientists. A wholehearted attempt is made to reflect the core of their work and to position it in the realm of 20th-century science. The lay person is given access even if the science is sometimes very technical. Einstein is said to have told his publisher that his popular book on the theory of relativity would be understood by only twelve people in the world. This writer falls into the great majority of the bewildered, yet that does not diminish the fascination."Script" is the apt word, for the book is an expansion of the BBC Radio 4 series . It takes time to get used to an interview format and some unnecessary and irksome Bragg interjections. Equally objectionable is the absence of an index. To have none in a work of non-fiction may be regrettable but to have none in a science book - albeit a popular one - is unforgivable.Yet Bragg asks the right questions, and puts it up to leading commentators within the confines of a short interview. This forces them to cut to the essentials, to explain "the wonders of their worlds" and reveal the significance of the legacy left by the greats.It is not a sanitised account. Here are the paranoia, the blind alleys of research, the rivalry, and many collisions of intellectual heavyweights. There is pertinent revision of scientific record, where appropriate. Threading through it is an intriguing debate on whether great discoveries are made by geniuses, or are the result of the gradual build-up of knowledge. Threading through it is an intriguing debate about the role of genius and inevitability of discoveries based on levels of knowledge. The crucial test can be applied to his account of DNA's discovery by Watson and Crick. The story of how the nature of genetic material was revealed in 1953 cannot be written without appropriate acknowledgment of the central role of the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
Coverage at the time, notably in Watson's book The Double Helix, was unfair to her, to put it mildly. Bragg gives Franklin her due, which shows that in the case of The Double Helix, science books do not always provide the full science picture, and there is a place for revisionism. All in all, On Giants' Shoulders, gives a fair insight into this and many milestones. There are holds delights for both scientist and lay person.
