Did William Astbury just miss becoming a household name? He certainly would have secured an honoured status in the history of science, not to say world history, had he uncovered the structure of DNA. The chief problem he faced is that he did not do that. The question is, did he come close?
Kersten Hall's biography of Astbury, The Man in the Monkeynut Coat, is primarily a scientific history that follows the career of Astbury through his work on the structure of proteins to his rise to head a research department at Leeds. The title refers to Astbury's experiments in fabricating textiles from vegetable proteins. The book is not intended to take readers very far at all into the culture of early twentieth-century British science and advanced science education. Rather its stated premise is to restore Astbury to a more honorable rank in the history of the race to discover the structure and function of DNA.
Hall has done a marvellous and marvellously detailed job of tracing particular relationships between key British scientists, demonstrating Astbury's central position in those networks. The book is also exceptionally informative about the development of techniques, notably X-ray crystallography, on which Astbury built his very successful career and did internationally recognized work. Hall has been careful to give full credit to graduate students and technical staff who helped make possible the glories credited to the bigger names in the story. The descriptions of the trials and dangers of early X-ray diffraction photography, for example, are both fascinating and a bit horrifying. It is difficult to believe that the profound discoveries of twentieth-century biology derived from such primitive and dangerous equipment. If ever there were historical illustrations about the critical nature of research funding, here they are.
In the end however, Hall himself cannot escape a certain ambivalence about the proper ranking of Astbury. On the one hand, early in the book Hall asserts that Astbury was indeed a principle founder of molecular biology and, concomitantly, a mighty pioneer in the technical use of X-ray diffraction studies of large biomolecules. As such, Hall argues early on, Astbury set upon a path that almost brought him to the grand prize: deciphering the DNA molecule. On the other hand, almost the entire ninth chapter is dedicated to showing where and exactly how Astbury went wrong in the hunt for DNA structure. The reasons here are legion. Shortly after the Second World War, Astbury was already feeling pressure from a veritable wave of younger scientists and technicians now returned to civil society and well situated for likely government and granting-agency funding. He was poorly placed at Leeds, which simply did not make the financial or intellectual commitment necessary for building a world-class competitive research facility or respond well to rapid developments in science. His own work there seemed superseded and insufficiently aimed at the hottest fields, like medicine. So while Astbury repeatedly lost staff to other appointments, struggled with facilities and funding, and lacked equipment, other centres of British science fared very differently. Sir John Randall at King's College London had, at times, luminaries like Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, Alex Stokes and Herbert Wilson on staff. Astbury's department never could boast of a roster like that.
Astbury himself was not fully committed to the hunt as his other duties as a department head eroded his research time and resources. It can be argued whether this was fate or compensatory behaviour on the part of Astbury, as the science moved past his previous achievements. After all, though he was only three years older than Linus Pauling, he was a generation older than Rosalind Franklin, James Watson and even Francis Crick (eighteen years junior to Astbury). John Kendrew and Max Perutz were likewise significantly younger men.
Finally, Hall is quite frank in detailing perhaps Astbury's greatest oversight: his neglect or misinterpretation of important X-ray diffraction photographs of sodium thymonucleate taken by Elwyn Beighton in the spring of 1951. These images, pre-dating Franklin's famous ‘Photo 51’ by a year, clearly bore the centered X pattern seen in Franklin's image. Yet while Franklin's photo inspired James Watson with the insight critical to describing DNA, Beighton's image stirred no such imagination in Astbury. It may have been, as Astbury's associates argued, that he was depressed and defeated by funding problems and the trials of day-to-day work at Leeds. Or rather, as Hall adds, he was simply too steeped in his previous work and his fascination with molecular motive action. In either case, Hall's ninth chapter makes clear that by 1951 Astbury was not close to unravelling DNA structure and was showing no signs of a breakthrough. His one proposed model of the molecule, analogized as ‘stacked pennies', was flatly wrong. Thus it can be questioned whether Astbury really has lost out in the historical annals of science. Being an outstanding scientist and a decent human being are sometimes cruelly not enough to win permanent popular memory at the highest levels of scientific merit.
Ultimately, the very difficulty with Hall's argument about Astbury's proper historical place is also a great invitation to read the book. The complexity of scientific discovery in the modern era is such that we should never simply accept simplified stories about the progress of knowledge. Hall's attention to detail in the story of X-ray diffraction photography and the person of William Astbury bear this out. So while this wonderful book may struggle with the imponderables of fame and historical justice, it is for that very reason also a fine piece of historical writing rich with illuminating detail and with real excitement for the subject.
