Immigration: time to get the question right

In 1951, Rosalind Franklin took a series of pictures of DNA which a colleague, J.D. Bernal, described as “amongst the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” They led to the finding of the double-helix structure of DNA.

In 1995, Michael Portillo reached the pinnacle of his political career, when he was appointed Defence Secretary.

In 2004, Kelly Holmes took gold medals in both the 800 and 1500 metre women’s races at the Athens Olympics, the first time a British athlete had won two golds at one Olympics since 1920.

What do these three stories have in common? They all concern Britons of immigrant stock, remote or recent. Franklin came from a long family of British Jews. Portillo is the son of a Spanish refugee from Franco. Holmes’s father is Jamaican.

Admire them or not, they’ve all notched up significant achievements in Britain. We need to remember them especially in today’s atmosphere, when all we seem to talk about is the terrible danger posed by immigrants gathering ominously in Calais and threatening to invade our shores. You’d think they were a latter day Wehrmacht, from the tone of the debate, ready to undermine all we hold dear to us.

They are a “swarm” to Prime Minister David Cameron, they’re “marauding” according to Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.

The joy of an immigrant camp in Calais

In reality they are 5000 underfed, ill-lodged, unfortunates trying to find somewhere they can rebuild their lives after fleeing their homes. Most of them come from Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Somalia. These are countries devastated by war, often initiated or sustained from outside, by nations such as the US, Britain, Russia, even Kenya.

You might think that those at least whose homelands have directly suffered at the hands of Britain, notably Iraq and Libya, might expect more tolerant treatment. But our behaviour towards them is shameless: we bombed you into the dark ages, we seem to be saying, now live with it.

In any case, it’s extraordinary what a fuss we’re making about them in Britain. Only a small proportion of those 5000 will ever make it across the Channel. By contrast, Germany is expected to take 750,000 asylum seekers this year alone. And yet Britain squeals as though mortally wounded by a somehow unique crisis.

Our response is simple, too. We invest money in building more fences in Calais. We send over police to enforce the law. We treat what’s happening as a security problem, not a humanitarian one. In that respect, I’m reminded of the “war against drugs”, perceived almost entirely as a law and order issue. We make penalties more stringent, we lock up people for longer. We pay no attention to the evidence that all this effort is producing no useful results, and drug consumption stubbornly refuses to go down.

We’re coming up with the wrong answer, because we’re asking the wrong questions. The right questions are about protecting people from exploitation and helping them to find a better solution. The wrongs ones are about police action.

That’s equally true of immigration. Fences and police won’t do it. Indeed, the problems are going to get a lot worse, as immigration grows many times in the face of the effects of global warming: violent weather, food shortages, even lack of water.

Do we really want to do something about it? Then we need to make a genuine effort. Above all, on ourselves. Principally by learning generosity.

First, we need to stop making such such casual, ill-judged use of military force. Many of the migrants in Europe today have been displaced by our incompetent interventions in the Middle East.

The Iraq War:
solved nothing and contributed to the migrant problem

Next we need to invest more in the countries from which most migrants come. It’s true that as well as refugees, there are economic migrants trying to get into the advanced economies. Well, help develop their home economies and fewer of them will go looking for a better future in strange countries whose language they don’t speak and whose customs they don’t know.

So if you’ve ever whinged about overseas aid, now would be a good time to stop. It’s money well spent, and we need to spend more. As much for our sakes as for the recipients: it takes the pressure off our borders.

The other form of generosity is even more important. We need to treat incomers with humanity. They need help, and we should provide it, because we can. Who knows, some of them may turn into tomorrow’s Roger Bannister or Mo Farah, the immigrants we can celebrate. Even if they don’t, we’d do well to emulate a German woman I heard this week. As she dropped off a donation at a refugee camp, she told the BBC that there was already more than enough evil in the world, and showing a little kindness to the most unfortunate would make it a better place for all of us.

That attitude would be a great starting point to work out the right questions about immigration. Because for now we’re coming up with entirely the wrong answers.

The emancipating effect of confronting the undecidable

Pretty well everyone knows of some of the great breakthroughs that occurred in the twentieth century. We’re all aware, even if we don’t understand, the work of Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Sigmund Freud, James Watson (or should that be Rosalind Franklin?)

Curiously, though, hardly anyone seems to have heard of the work of Kurt Gödel, and yet he made a discovery that seems to me even more disturbing and transformational than those others.

Kurt Gödel
A devastating but liberating truth

Gödel established that there are certain so-called “undecidable” questions in mathematics. Such questions are unanswerable, by which I don’t mean unanswered: it’s not a matter of a lack of knowledge – we don’t know the answer – but a matter of full, exhaustive knowledge – we know they can’t be answered. Indeed, if we’re good at enough at maths, we can prove they can’t be answered.

These are often simple questions, which is not to say their subject matter is simple: the only one I know about concerns transcendental mathematics, and the word “transcendental” is a bit of a give-away, isn’t it? Something transcendental isn’t likely to be easy. The particular question I’m thinking of concerns the relative size of different infinities, and I imagine that you would agree with me in thinking that the idea that two things can be infinite but one is bigger than the other, is pretty mind-blowing in itself.

The question is simple only in the sense that the answer is yes or no. Which is where Gödel comes in. Because there’s no third answer, and he showed that both answers are wrong. Rigorously proved it: answer “yes” and you get to a logical contradiction, answer “no” and you get to another logical contradiction. So the question is simply unanswerable or, to use the preferred term, undecidable.

Think about that for a moment. There is no other field which, like mathematics, always has a right of a wrong answer. And yet even in mathematics, there are areas where there is neither right nor wrong.

These days we’re frequently told that our societies are paralysed by a terrible moral relativism. People beat pulpits, metaphorical or real, and bewail the passing of absolute truths. They hanker for the days when we knew, always and undeniably, right from wrong and could teach it to our children.

And Gödel showed that the quest isn’t just unachievable, it’s meaningless. In even the most abstract of all fields, mathematics, there is ultimately no absolute truth. If that’s true of mathematics, how much more so must it be the case for the messier disciplines in which all the uncertainties of reality cloud the picture further.

So that means we’re forced back onto our own resources. There is no simple guide that can tell us what’s right, at all times, under all conditions. Which is what those of us who rather suspected that relativism made more sense had always suspected. In the end, you have to go with what works, in any particular set of circumstances.

“Thous shalt not kill”? Well, as a general rule, thou shouldn’t indeed. But maybe in certain circumstances euthanasia, or abortion, or military action, or even execution can be justified – may, indeed, be the only option.

Which means that instead of a helpful if inflexible, general if monolithic guide to behaviour, we’re forced back on to the need to exercise judgement in the light of real circumstances. Forced to take our own decisions. Then live by the consequences.

That this may be not so much a choice as essential to the very nature of our lives is the breakthrough Gödel made. It seems to me more people should know about it.

Because I, at least, I find the notion liberating.

A woman's achievement, a man's prize

It’s a long way from a school where little girls are expected to study sewing and cookery, to a position as a leading woman scientist; it’s a long way from failing the 11+ examination, that terrible barrier that stood in the way of so many gaining access to adequate school education, to a PhD from one of the most prestigious world universities; and it’s a long way from doctoral studies to a discovery transforming our understanding of astronomy and confirming one of the key points of a theory as important as General Relativity.

The way must feel all the longer if the Nobel prize for that discovery is then awarded to others.

So spare a thought for Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Back in the sixties, having risen through an educational system which did little to open doors for her to pursue a scientific career, she was a doctoral student at Cambridge, building a four-acre array of frames and wires that formed a radio telescope. She was studying quasars, quasi-stellar radio sources, the compact cores of remote and massive galaxies. And then she came across something else, something strange and inexplicable.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell in front of her radio telescope.

As she told the BBC in 2001, ‘there was this curious, curious signal, pulsing ever-so rapidly, ever-so regularly. I though I’d connected the telescope up wrong, I’d got some wires crossed or something.’

But she hadn't. It took a lot of hard work to prove, but a month later she was able to confirm that she was on to something.

‘It was actually something out there... we nicknamed it Little Green Men, LGM, because it looked artificial, man-made, and yet it was out there with the stars.’

That was exciting enough, but there was better to come. 

‘The sweetest moment was finding the second one, very similar but not identical and in a different part of the sky, that really says it has to be something astronomical. [...] I came out here on my scooter at 3:00, 2:00 in the morning. It was perishing cold and unfortunately [...] when it was cold the telescope and the receiver seemed only to work at about half power and you had no chance of discovering anything. But I flicked switches, I breathed on the receivers, I swore at it, and I got it to work, I got it to work for five minutes and on the right setting and in on the chart came peep-peep-peep-peep-peep... very like the first one but sufficiently different. It really looked as if we’d got another type of star and we were just looking at the tip of the iceberg. It was fantastic.’

Bell's first recording of the radio signal from a pulsar

It’s excellent news for us to discover that even leading scientists use the same techniques as everyone else, swearing at bits of equipment until they work. And it was excellent news for her that she was on to something entirely new.

What she’d found was a type of stellar object later nicknamed pulsars (from pulsating radio stars) by a Daily Telegraph journalist. The name has stuck. Behind their hallmark regular pulse is a neutron star, the residue of the massive explosion we call a supernova. They are small (in astronomical terms - they can be as little as 20 km across) but colossally massive bodies rich in neutrons, which are major transmitters of radio waves.

This is a remarkable discovery in itself, but it had another even more significant impact: study of pulsars orbiting round another star has shown that this kind of ‘binary system’ transmits gravitational waves and generally behaves in the same way as Einstein’s theories of gravitation would predict – to within 0.02%. Science doesn’t do absolute certainty, so that’s remarkable accuracy.

The finding is a spectacular vindication of relativity, one of the pinnacles of human scientific achievement. It was made possible by Jocelyn Bell’s discovery. It is clearly significant enough to warrant the awarding of a Nobel Prize.

And the Nobel Prize was duly awarded. In 1974. To Anthony Hewish, Bell’s PhD supervisor and another radio astronomer, Martin Ryle. Both men.

What did Bell say about being denied her share? In an after-dinner speech to the New York Academy of Sciences in 1977, she explained:

‘Demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve.’

She argued that ‘it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project’ and also that, in her view, ‘it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them.’

Extremely generous comments and a tribute to a fine scientist. But the most telling and important comment was her last:

‘I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not?’

Indeed she is. Take Rosalind Franklin, for instance, another woman whose work on the structure of DNA made a key contribution to a radical breakthrough in science, a contribution not recognised by the Nobel Prize committee.

These things happen, of course. Not everyone’s contribution is always rewarded. It would be nice, though, if it happened a little less often to women.

In the meantime, raise a glass, or a prayer of thanks if that’s your bent, in honour of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of Lurgan, Northern Ireland, whose 70th birthday falls today, 15 July. And whose contribution to our understanding of the universe far exceeded the recognition she ever won for it.

And an update on 6 September 2018: she's finally won a top honour she clearly deserved.

In memory of an outstanding woman

Today’s a particularly good day to salute the achievements of an outstanding figure of the twentieth century. She was a woman who opened doors in ways that are being felt as strongly today as they were in her time. 

And she wasn’t Margaret Thatcher.

A single photograph is the key to the significance of her years of careful work. Of course, as a complete layman, I have to admit that when I first saw it, I was inclined to ask, ‘err... yes... but just what are we looking at?’

The justly celebrated Photo 51.
'Yes, dear, very nice. But what is it?' is not the right response.

However, for those in the know, it provides powerful evidence that DNA is not only a spiral, but a double helix, with the ‘bases’ – the bits that code the genetic message – on the inside. In other words, it was the key to understanding the structure of what has come to be known as the language of life.

It was taken by a crystallographer at King’s College London who, as well as being a skilful and painstaking experimentalist, was also, apparently, a little abrasive, a quality that cost her a few friendships. So it was without her knowledge or permission that her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the picture to two scientists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick, giving them the decisive push to build their successful model of the DNA molecule.

James Watson wrote up the story of the discovery in his book The Golden Helix. I heard Watson speak at a conference in 1970, at which he claimed that the US government could save a great deal of money and achieve precisely the same progress, by shutting down all cancer research programmes other than his own. It didn’t seem to me that he was joking, and I was left with the impression that no-one could surpass him in enthusiasm or sincerity of admiration for James Watson.

The book is less than flattering about Rosalind Franklin, who took the key photo 51. Later, Watson admitted that he had been unnecessarily dismissive of both her personality and her skill. But by then he’d shared the 1962 Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Wilkins, in recognition of their work on nucleic acids, including DNA. Franklin didn’t get a look in. But then she’d died, at the pitifully young age of 37, in 1958. 

On 16 April, as it happens, which is what makes today so suitable for commemorating her life.

The Nobel Prize isn’t awarded posthumously. But it’s also never shared between more than three laureates. Had she been alive in 1962, would Franklin have been the also-ran? The fourth scientist, the one whose work wasn’t recognised? Perhaps it’s just as well that we’ll never know for sure.

And congratulations to the American National Cancer Institute for establishing the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science, to the Royal Society in London for setting up the Rosalind Franklin Award for outstanding contributions for any area of natural science, engineering or technology and to the Finch University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School for changing its name to the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (which, to be honest, trips slightly more easily off the tongue, too).

And what a joy, one day before all the pomp and circumstance of Maggie Thatcher’s funeral, to remember another woman of that time, whose contribution may actually prove more lasting – and certainly a lot less controversial.

Rosalind Franklin at work