My parents emigrated from England to the United States in early 1949, just before I was born, so my five siblings and I grew up without aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents. The only relative who visited often enough to form a lasting bond was my mother's father, Sydney Harland, whom we called Grandpa. He was a geneticist and a world traveler who sometimes dropped by on his way to South America or Africa. Grandpa was a short, rather reserved man who walked with a slight limp and spoke in a raspy voice with a distinctly professorial tone.
We were pen pals for almost 20 years. "I am of course very disappointed in a way that you have decided to quit Science for Journalism," he wrote to me in 1970, when I switched majors in college. "It is, however, your life
I got to know him better in 1972, just after I graduated from college, when I spent six weeks with him and my step-grandmother Olive in their ancient stone house in the north of England. The house was untidy and in great disrepair. If anything got lost or misplaced, he explained it with his "Law of the Perversity of Inanimate Objects: When you put something down, it will sprout legs and walk away."
He was a curious blend of contradictions -- an intellectual who loved to read detective stories; a scientist who developed many new food plants but was helpless in the kitchen; a man who designed his own buildings but couldn't fix a broken window; a Victorian who deplored foul language, but fathered five children from four women, two of whom were mistresses.
Growing philosophical one day, he noted that only two decisions in life were really important -- what you chose for a profession, and who you married.
He said you couldn't be too choosy with a mate, because if you wanted someone who was just more intelligent than average, it would cut down your available choices to one in two. And if you wanted someone who was also healthier than average, the chances were one in four. Then if you wanted someone who was better looking than average, the odds were reduced to one in eight, and so on.
He once wrote to me: "I wish you would get involved with a real man's job -- one which will stretch both your mental and moral faculties to the elastic limit." That, more than money or fame, was his lifelong goal, and he mostly lived up to it. He had nine different careers, in St. Croix, Canada, Scotland, St. Vincent, England, Trinidad, Brazil, Peru and back to England. He was a schoolteacher, researcher, plant breeder, professor and author. He described all of these endeavors in Nine Lives: The Autobiography of a Yorkshire Scientist, which he spent years writing, but finally abandoned. "Inspiration is lacking. I always find an excuse to go and work in the greenhouse," he admitted in a letter. My mother found the 80,000-word manuscript after his death. She typed it into a computer with one finger and self-published it for family members in 1992. In 2000 I re-edited it and produced a new, illustrated edition for the Internet, at www.bosonbooks.com/boson/freebies/harland/harland.pdf.
Grandpa died in 1982 at the age of 91. In one of his last letters to me, he wrote: "Beauty is what I live by in my old age. I cultivate it deliberately because it is a very great good which is free for all to enjoy. I have nothing in my bedroom except my typewriter and a few books. I have a vase on a small table with one perfect flower, changed every morning. Even in a world like this, we require beautiful flowers."
The following appeared in Nature magazine on March 25, 195O: "Dr. S.C. Harland, Reader in Genetics in the University of Manchester, has been appointed Harrison Professor of Botany and Director of the Laboratories and Experimental Grounds in succession to Professor Eric Ashby, who was recently elected President and Vice Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast. Dr. Harland has had a distinguished career in economic botany and is one of the leading authorities in the world on plant genetics. Dr. Harland's principal contributions to genetics have been made with the cotton plant, and his book, The Genetics of Cotton, is the standard work on the subject. His researches are remarkable for their boldness of approach and their relevance, not only to cotton breeders but also to plant geographers and experimental taxonomists. Dr. Harland is an inspiring teacher and a man of wide interests, so it is a matter of great satisfaction that he has been called upon to maintain the high tradition of botany at the University of Manchester."
QUOTES FROM GRANDPA
Prime Minister Harold Wilson said that when he was a young man many children had no shoes, even in winter; he was accused by many members of the Conservative Party of not speaking the truth. What he said was correct. I had to teach reading to a class of about a dozen urchins of seven or eight years old. I and the pupils stood up for the lesson in an unheated corridor. Several of them wore thin canvas gym shoes, called in Scarborough sand shoes. Three had no shoes at all, and this was in January. All of them were filthy, lousy and ragged.
* * *
At eighteen I was a socialist, a revolutionary and an agnostic. This combination was displeasing to the establishment. I did not realise that wherever you were and whatever work you were doing, there were always people with whom you would have to get on. Neither did I realise, as I came to realise much later in life, that the conventions and traditions of the men around me had to come into existence to preserve the "norm," and always worked towards the suppression or obliteration of the single-minded, resolute and imaginative creative individual that I knew myself to be.
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Graham Wallace was the finest lecturer I ever heard. When he was appointed, he determined to master the art of lecturing with the dedication of an actor beginning a career on the stage. He wrote out a lecture line by line and phrase by phrase, and then committed it to memory. He then practised in front of a mirror. Of him it was written: "Here was a man who we regarded as the finest lecturer of his time, commanding the whole gamut of expositional mode, with a technique as seemingly effortless as a pattern of leaves falling spontaneously in autumn; and now it appeared that at least some of this enviable power had come by deliberately taking pains."
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The headmaster of the grammar school in St. Vincent was Frederick William Reeves. He was the first educated black man I had met at close quarters. He said that he had no trouble with his colour at Cambridge. He would go up to a group of students sitting at a table and say, "Do you mind if a damn nigger sits here?" Then they would all start to laugh and make room for him. In that way he made many friends.
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I did make one discovery that was adopted in technological cotton laboratories throughout the world. The diameter of cotton hairs is difficult to measure, because the hairs are flattened and convoluted. If the hairs are treated with caustic soda solution -- i.e., mercerized -- they swell and become cylindrical. In this state the diameter is easily measured. I also discovered that exposure of cotton fabrics to ultraviolet light altered the dyeing properties, and this made it possible to make patterns on fabrics.
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In Rangoon I arranged for the transportation to Trinidad of a superior variety of lime. The latter proved to be a great success in Dominica, which is now the centre of the West Indian lime industry. It is now the standard variety of lime, and bears the name of the Dr. Harland lime.
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My final stop on this mission was Egypt, where I stayed with my old friend C.B. Williams, then entomologist to the Egyptian government. He was of a very inventive turn of mind, and had devised an ingenious multiple temperature incubator. This consisted of a long hollow aluminium bar, one end of which was in ice and the other in boiling water. There was a slot along the top into which could be inserted test tubes. These could contain cultures of bacteria or fungi, or insects. If you put an insect in at the cold end it could walk up the tube until it felt comfortable. C.B. had a beetle from the desert which always walked up to the 92 degree point and then stopped. This was a most useful piece of apparatus, as one could study the reaction of insects to different temperatures, and also the optimum temperature for germination of seeds and for some aspects of plant growth. Plant pathologists and bacteriologists would find it invaluable, but so far as I know nobody else ever made use of it.
* * *
I talked with Lysenko for three solid hours. I found him completely ignorant of genetics and of plant physiology. I could not have predicted that this wretched little man would in a few years time get his theories accepted by the great Stalin himself, oust Vavilov from his position, suppress genetics and wield despotic power and even the power of death over the 35,000 agricultural workers.
* * *
Nicolai Ivanovitch Vavilov was the best man I had ever met. Not long afterward, he was deprived of his position as director of the Institute of Plant Industry and of the two hundred experimental stations he had founded. At the outbreak of war in 1939, he was arrested and sent to a prison camp in Siberia, where he died some time in 194O. To the end, he was talking about the wheat he was going to breed when he got out. His collection of wheat, with the genes of 20,000 varieties, was eaten in the siege of Leningrad.
* * *
I became the leading world authority on cotton. I was so immersed in cotton that I lived in a kind of symbiotic relationship with it. I published many papers and I became known to geneticists all over the world. It was during this period that I did the work that was to lead some ten years later to my election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.
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Before going to Brazil, I had the impression that there was no colour prejudice in that country. I found that this was untrue. In the Instituto Agronomico where I worked, there was only one coloured man among the 300 employed. He was a chauffeur. There did not seem to be any prejudice among children. You could see black and white children walking hand in hand coming out of school, but there were no coloured members, for example, of the tennis club. Prejudice took the form of seeing that no black man ever got a good job. Exceptions there were, but they were rare.
* * *
There are people who believe that the Amazon basin could be a sort of breadbasket of the world, that it could grow enormous quantities of food and help to solve the world's food shortage. This belief has no foundation. The soils of the whole region, once the forest canopy has been removed, are incredibly poor, acid and leached. They are deficient in phosphorus and nitrogen, and in many places subject to flooding.
Henry Ford had a big scheme for growing rubber in this area. Ships brought bulldozers and agricultural machinery direct from Detroit. A large area was cleared and planted in rubber -- unfortunately, in an area in which the soil was little more than silicious sand. Several years later the trees were only a few feet high, and all were debilitated and attacked by the defoliating South American leaf disease. This disease had proved fatal to the development of a rubber industry in British Guiana. This is, or should be, a lesson to industrialists who think a problem is an engineering one when it is a biological one. Some years later, the whole property was returned to the Brazilians for a small sum.
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When I came to discuss the phenomenon of mutation, I quoted Shakespeare: "Though his humour was nothing but mutation, ay, and that from one bad thing to worse" (Cymbeline Act 4 sc. 2). Shakespeare was uncannily correct, for mutation often does work in this way.
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Once I was talking to J.B.S. Haldane about the characteristics needed by a man to become successful. I said that a man should have a good brain and a skin like a rhinoceros. He disagreed, saying that all a man needed was a brain like a rhinoceros.
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Lawrence Balls was a man for whom I had the greatest respect and admiration. After a brilliant career at Cambridge, he went to Egypt to work on cotton research for the Khedivial Agriculture Society. With scarcely any apparatus or equipment, he carried out a series of classical researches on the cotton plant -- its genetics, physiology and agriculture. He published his work in a book, The Cotton Plant in Egypt, and became recognised as a world authority in cotton. At over seventy years of age, he was still using the dress suit he had worn as an undergraduate at Cambridge. It had faded to a shade of greenish-black, but otherwise it was a truly magnificent tribute to English tailoring, and to Ball's metabolic inability to put on weight.
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For amusement, and knowing it was bad-mannered, I once said to Rothschild, "I suppose you are very rich?" He smiled and said, "Well, I can hardly call myself poor."
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I remember sitting in Fisher's room late at night, listening to a discussion between him and an eminent astrophysicist on the subject of whether the universe was an open or closed system. The discussion went on until long after midnight. Finally the astrophysicist said that he would not be able to tolerate a closed universe, as it would give him claustrophobia.
* * *
Gardening is a subject which brings social classes in Britain near to each other. We are a nation of shopkeeping gardeners.
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As I have often said, nothing is too expensive to those who do not have to pay for it. Likewise, no task is too difficult for those who don't have to perform it.
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