WNY Nobel Prize winner shares thoughts on life, God and science
In an era when pop star Miley Cyrus can put out an autobiography at the grand age of 15, it’s refreshing to read a memoir from someone who has a life worth recording. Herbert A. Hauptman is one of this area’s living treasures. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1985 for his groundbreaking work in X-ray crystallography, research that helped pave the way in the development of powerful drugs. But the 91-year-old Hauptman, long affiliated with the medical research institute that bears his name, isn’t widely known here.
Hopefully Hauptman’s new memoir will help him draw the recognition he deserves.
“On the Beauty of Science” is a thin personal history, with a detailed explanation of his research that is hard at times for lay people to follow. But, at its best, Hauptman’s memoir is a provocative account of his views on science as it relates to society, politics, education and religion.
“On the Beauty of Science” is a sure-to-be-controversial call to arms, as Hauptman argues forcefully that science and religion are incompatible and that Americans must learn to think more critically about science and other issues.
“I believe there is a direct negative connection between belief in religion, especially fundamentalist religion, and public scientific illiteracy,” he writes.
Hauptman begins his memoir, which is subtitled, “A Nobel Laureate Reflects on the Universe, God and the Nature of Discovery,” by recalling how he first got interested in science.
Growing up in the Bronx, Hauptman was a fervent reader and his parents encouraged his interest in books. He writes of the “magic” he felt at the library when he would stop by each Saturday.
He was a dedicated student, following an academic path to a magnet high school and to City College of New York. There, during the Great Depression, Hauptman ignored the politics of the day while excelling at math and physics.
During World War II, Hauptman served in the U. S. Navy, spending 18 months overseas but never seeing combat and surviving through “naivety” and “innocent luck.” After the war, Hauptman went to the University of Maryland for his doctorate and took a job with the Naval Research Lab.
It is there that he launched his career, researching X-ray diffraction with a fellow City College graduate, Jerry Karle. Hauptman states that nature reveals her secrets only reluctantly, and he worked doggedly to find these answers.
He admits to working long days, nights and weekends, while his wife did most of the work to raise their children. He reframed one purportedly unsolvable problem as a mathematical problem and ultimately, with Karle, solved it. Their solution initially was dismissed by the scientific establishment, and this depressed Hauptman, but real-world uses proved that it worked.
“It feels impossible to describe how seeing the solution take form in the three-dimensional model made me feel. I knew then that this was working and that this was a breakthrough,” he writes.
Hauptman left Maryland for Buffalo in 1970, when his position with the Navy was changing and he felt he was losing his ability to work independently. A friend and scientist, Dorita Norton, recruited him to what’s now the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.
Fifteen years after moving here, in 1985, Hauptman won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The book includes his Nobel speech and the paper for which he and Karle won the prize.
The 1953 document, titled “Solution of the Phase Problem I. The Centrosymmetric Crystal,” is indecipherable to me. But, in a nutshell, Hauptman and Karle came up with a solution to a problem that vexed scientists who tried to use X-rays to determine the internal structure of crystals.
Their elegant, mathematical solution has wide application in modern biomedicine.
Hauptman’s book is most readable when he is discussing his views on a range of scientific and social issues. First, Hauptman believes this country would be better served if people studied more physics, chemistry, mathematics and engineering. Critical thinking, the kind fostered by a closer study of the sciences, is in short supply in the United States these days, he argues.
He laments what he considers the mistaken priorities of the current administration, which he faults for cutting spending at the National Institutes of Health while spending billions in Iraq.
“This is why it is so important for the general public to have a better understanding of where science is headed, or could be headed with the right funding,” Hauptman writes.
It’s not just a matter of too little knowledge of science, Hauptman writes. The problem is compounded by too much belief in religion, ghosts, angels and alternative medicine, to boot.
“I believe that from an early age, most children in our society are inculcated in superstition and mumbo-jumbo, and so there is no development of the scientific approach to looking at the world,” he writes. Hauptman points out that surveys show 60 percent of all scientists are nonbelievers, but 90 percent of top scientists — members of the National Academy of Science — identify themselves as atheists.
Hauptman also tries to figure out why people are religious, and he wonders if human beings have a predisposition to be religious.
Hauptman contends that the fact that the universe is orderly doesn’t provide evidence for God’s existence, and he writes that there isn’t an “ultimate meaning” for life.
But, he continues, “Even if there is no God and life is ultimately meaningless, you don’t end up loving your wife any less than you would if there were a God.” Then he takes on the view held by some that, without belief in God, nothing keeps atheists from acting badly.
“But if that is the reason that you believe in God, because you are afraid of what might happen if you aren’t a decent person, that’s not a very good reason either,” Hauptman writes.
He goes further to argue that science has done far more for humanity than religion, pointing to the development of air travel, computers and modern medicine as examples.
Religion, he contends, has prompted too many people to act cruelly and murderously, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks. But belief in God also has inspired a great amount of charity and other good works, and the legacy of Father Nelson Baker is just one counterexample.
Hauptman also holds that science is more beautiful than religion, though many people don’t know enough about science and math to truly appreciate the beauty of, say, Gauss’ theorem.
But what about the beauty displayed in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or in the production of the Gutenberg Bible, each inspired by religion?
Hauptman’s memoir is sure to inspire a passionate debate between believers and nonbelievers, and I’ll bet that was his desire all along.
On the Beauty of Science
By Herbert A. Hauptman (as told to and edited by D. J. Grothe)
Prometheus Books
101 pages, $26
Stephen T. Watson is a News staff reporter. swatson@buffnews.com
