Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General PDF
Preview Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves: An Informal History of Pouring Oil on Water with Reflections on the Ups and Downs of Scientific Life in General
Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves Charles Tanford is James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Physiology at Duke University. He is the author of Physical Chemistry of Macromolecules, The Hydrophobic Effect: Forma- tion of Micelles and Biological Membranes, and coauthor with Jacqueline Reynolds of Nature’s Robots: A History of Proteins, which have become classic works in their field. He is the author of more than 200 research contribu- tions, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1979–80 was president of the Biophysical Society. Professor Tanford now lives and writes in England. This page intentionally left blank Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Charles Tanford 2004 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published in hardback by Duke University Press 1989 Published in paperback by Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data applied for ISBN 0 19 280494 4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Foreword My curiosity was piqued fourteen years ago when I saw Charles Tanford’s Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves on a shelf of new books. I had known Tanford as a distinguished biophysicist and physical chemist and had learned much from his earlier scientific works. What did Tanford have in mind in writing about Franklin and the pouring of oil on water? The unconventional title prompted me to read the book, which proved to be enlightening and delightful. A few months ago, I was gratified to learn that a paperback edition was planned and was pleased to be invited to comment on a book I highly value. The cells of living organisms are bounded by a fluid membrane that gives them their individuality by separating them from their environment. The core of all biological membranes is a closed sheet just two molecules thick, called a lipid bilayer, which serves as a barrier to the flow of matter between the inside and outside. Proteins embedded in the lipid bilayer mediate distinctive functions by serving as pumps, channels, receptors, and energy convertors. How was the lipid bilayer, a fundamental motif of life, discovered? Tanford provides a charming, informative, and highly accessible account in which Ben Franklin occupies center stage. Tanford begins with Franklin’s letter of 1773 to a scientific friend in which he mentions Pliny’s first-century description of the practice of seamen of his time to still the waves in a storm by pouring oil into the sea. Franklin then tells of his own wave-stilling experiences before describing an experiment he performed at an English country pond, in which he observed a “sudden, wide, and forcible spreading of a drop of oil on the face of the water”. Tanford is a superb guide and storyteller in leading us from Franklin’s remarkably simple and trenchant experiment to the establishment two centuries later of the lipid bilayer nature of membranes. F In following the trail, we are rewarded with vignettes of scientists who made key discoveries and vivid descriptions of the scientific and social context of different eras. I especially enjoyed the sketches of Lord Rayleigh and Irving Langmuir, which highlight their incisive and enduring contributions to our understanding of sur- faces and contrast their very different scientific and personal tem- peraments. The account of Agnes Pockels’ key experiment, carried out in her kitchen, and of her correspondence with Lord Rayleigh, is sensitive and moving. Tanford also enriches and informs by high- lighting connections made and connections missed between differ- entfields of science. Reading Ben Franklin Stilled the Waves a second time was much like savoring wine that has become richer and deeper with the passage of time. LUBERT STRYER Stanford University February 2003 vi Preface to the Paperback Edition This book was originally written about fifteen years ago, some time after it had been established that a phospholipid bilayer is the dom- inant structural component of a cell membrane and that mem- brane proteins represent a special category, preferentially associated with such a bilayer and usually not soluble in water or simple aque- ous solutions. Moreover, it had become clear that the ultimate molecular basis for all this, both the propensity of phospholipids to exist in the bilayer form and the vicinal preference of membrane proteins, must be the hydrophobic/hydrophilic dichotomy–– molecular orientation arising from the demanding physical forces between water molecules and their neighbours in the biological milieu. The very existence of the living cell and the segregation and partitioning of its contents can basically be viewed as dictated by this factor, providing a physico-chemical link between the living cell and the many phenomena of the inanimate world, in which the hydrophobic force plays a similar determining role, without, of course, any lipid or protein being involved. Who would have guessed that there might be a parallel between one of the most basic features of “life” and such a simple phenom- enon as the spreading of oil on water and the stilling of the waves that results from it? What is the history of research and comprehen- sion into this and closely related questions? In tracing the answer, we find that a fascinating assembly of people have, each in their own way, independently taken the lead along a similar trail: Nobel laureates Irving Langmuir and Lord Rayleigh, the amateur Agnes Pockels, who worked in her kitchen, the Dutch pediatrician Evert Gorter, and (perhaps most fascinating of all) the American states- man and polymath Benjamin Franklin. Physics, chemistry and biol- ogy have all been enriched by their work. This paperback reissue is essentially identical with the original P P E 1989 edition published by Duke University Press. A few small cor- rections have been made to eliminate some errors that were in the original; in other respects the text remains unaltered. Two new items have been added to the wide-ranging bibliography––because they should have been there all along––but no attempt has been made to bring the list up-to-date by including more recent work. C. T. Easingwold February 2003 viii Acknowledgments My vague idea of some years ago, to write “something” about Ben Franklin’s experiment and its relevance for biology, would never have come to fruition without the constant urging and encourage- ment of Jacqueline Reynolds. She also contributed to the necessary research and to the endless quest for little errors of fact in the text. I am deeply grateful to her. I also thank Ben Reynolds for his invalu- able advice, especially on style; Seymour Mauskopf for setting me straight on central themes in the history of chemistry; J. J. Hermans for his recollections of Evert Gorter; John Edsall for his recollec- tions of Lawrence Henderson; George Gaines and the General Electric Company for the photograph of Irving Langmuir; and the Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden and Drs. J. G. Leroy and J. Kint of the Rijksuniversiteit Gent for different versions of the photograph of Evert Gorter. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce a portion of Clarence Greig’s delightful translation of Pliny the Younger’s letter about his uncle’s death at Pompeii. I thank Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce figure 22.
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