Lab Secrets
The Complex and Mysterious Polar Sea
What They're Reading On Campus
Books Received

LAB SECRETS
The author finds that Pasteur, the hero-scientist, was no saint
The Private Science of Louis Pasteur
Gerald L. Geison (history professor)
Princeton University Press, $29.95
As fame goes, the French biologist and chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) has done about as well as any scientist could have. Pasteur's name has been bestowed upon a major Parisian boulevard, and his face has graced the five-franc note; he's been portrayed by an Oscar-winning actor, and his renown (via the term "pasteurization") is canonized on virtually every milk carton in the free world.
Even so, historians have occasionally mumbled that this dour and rather frail hero might not be as saintly as popular myth has implied. Now Professor of History Gerald L. Geison, in publishing what he posits to be the fullest, most scholarly, and up-to-date of several Pasteur studies, has brought these allegations into the open. Not surprisingly, they have provoked outrage in some corners of France, where Pasteur's star has always shone brightly.
Geison's book is less a full-blown biography than a thematic investigation of important episodes in the scientist's professional career. Though the author ritually reaffirms Pasteur's scientific genius, he approaches his subject with a refreshingly critical eye.
Geison weaves a tight and mostly persuasive argument that Pasteur's scientific habits left much to be desired. What sets Geison's book apart from its predecessors is the author's access to Pasteur's laboratory notebooks, which had been held under tight control by Pasteur and then by his descendants until the last of them died in 1971. The sizable collection of documents, which wasn't even catalogued until 14 years later, is the basis of Geison's research for The Private Science of Louis Pasteur.
By Geison's estimation, Pasteur ignored key contributions by lesser-known scientists when presenting his own "discoveries"; implied (though stopped short of explicitly stating) that his successful anthrax vaccine utilized one method when in fact it used another very different one; and was willing to secretly administer to human subjects a rabies vaccine that he had not even successfully tested on laboratory animals.
But while Geison tiptoes around the question of whether it's fair to charge Pasteur with scientific fraud, the reality is that Pasteur's currency today need not hinge on such headline-grabbing accusations. Though the events in question took place more than a century ago, Geison's revisionist view of Pasteur remains relevant for the simple reason that the dilemmas Pasteur faced remain fundamental to today's scientific enterprises.
In Geison's hands, Pasteur's case also highlights several weaknesses of traditional scientific method. Some of Pasteur's most egregious missteps occurred because he was either ashamed to announce the results of failed experiments ("bad runs," in the contemporary euphemism) or because he felt compelled to defend a position consistent with earlier evidence, even though it would later be proven wrong. These dilemmas still resonate. For one thing, negative results can sometimes be as illustrative to other researchers as positive findings are, even though they're rarely found in scientific journals. And it would be refreshing to occasionally hear a scientist acknowledge publicly that he'd been wrong all along.
In some ways, the most revealing lesson we learn from Geison's portrait of Pasteur is that rhetoric, persuasion, and marketing are no less integral to science than to other endeavors. Indeed, masters like Pasteur elevated these skills to "an art." In other words, there's a tendency for sizzle to outsell steak. Oddly, Geison's conclusions noticeably underplay the powerful lessons his diligent research uncovers-that undeserved attention for a successful scientist-salesman can hinder unpopular yet promising and valuable approaches by other less vocal scientists, effectively silencing them. But to the credit of Geison's research skills, his steady accumulation of evidence on this point speaks more loudly than any conniptions his book has inspired among the French.
-Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson is associate editor of National Journal magazine and a frequent contributor to Science, for which he writes articles about infectious diseases.

THE COMPLEX AND MYSTERIOUS POLAR SEA
Ocean Enough and Time: Discovering the Waters Around Antarctica
James Gorman '71
HarperCollins, $25
Having made his reputation as a science writer and a wit, James Gorman '71 turns here to a graceful description of the polar sea and its denizens with only enough science to whet the appetite and with his humor under strict control. There are also brief histories of Antarctic exploration, whaling, and sealing, but above all there's fine writing. ("The horizon was blurred, as in a drawing done in pale gray charcoal, the boundaries of sea and sky smudged by the artist's thumb.")
Gorman observes the Southern Ocean's ecosystem for the most part from the deck of the Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea as a guest of the National Science Foundation. The NSF selects a small number of artists and writers to travel to Antarctica each austral summer. This was Gorman's second trip to Antarctic waters; his first was on a cruise ship peopled by avid birders. That adventure left him wanting more. His second sojourn lasted three months and included ample time for a visit to the U.S. research station at McMurdo to which he devotes one of the meatier chapters. There he wanders about at will observing whatever scientific experiments interest him, primarily those relating to invertebrate biology.
But science is not all. The author does full justice to the peculiar mores of McMurdo, its five bars segregated by Navy rank and the incomparable ugliness of its ramshackle buildings. He calls McMurdo "an uneasy mixture of construction site, military base, and college campus."
Gorman is an editor for The New York Times Magazine who has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. His best known previous book is The Man with No Endorphins (Viking, 1988), a collection of humorous pieces that originally appeared in a monthly column, "Light Elements," in Discover magazine. He obviously has the qualifications to have written a more substantial book than the slender Ocean Enough and Time, but it's perhaps achievement enough that he leaves his readers eager for more of everything.
Gorman is disappointed to find there are no oceanographers, birders, or whale hunters among the scientists aboard the Polar Sea, but only geologists, meteorologists, and glaciologists, who don't share his enthusiasms, including "sighting your own whale." ("Someone else's whale is just a whale, impressive but discrete, unconnected, out there.") "It bursts out of the gray, rolling sameness like a prize, like land on the horizon. The surface of the water is all suggestion and mystery. The breaching of a whale is revelation. Eureka! you want to shout."
Gorman becomes fascinated with the icebreaker itself: the power of its gas turbine engines, its capacity to roll 90 degrees without capsizing, its "three propellers, each 16 feet in diameter that milled the ice chunks-chopped, shaved and crunched them like ice cubes in a Cuisinart. . . . In the end the ship's power was irresistible."
Gorman doesn't explain his title, Ocean Enough and Time, but is it too farfetched to imagine it is an allusion to that memorable opening line by Andrew Marvell: "Were there but world enough and time"? Gorman, an English major at Princeton, knows that "world" here should be read as "space." Perhaps I'm overreaching, but the thought kept with me as I read, for the Southern Ocean is nothing if not spacious and timeless.
-Philip W. Quigg '43
Philip W. Quigg, a former editor of paw, is the author of A Pole Apart: The Emerging Issue of Antarctica (McGraw-Hill, 1983).

WHAT THEY'RE READING ON CAMPUS
1. Princeton University: The First 250 Years, Don Oberdorfer '52 and J. T. Miller '70, illustrations ed. Princeton University, $62.95
2. Princeton, Robert Gambee '64. W. W. Norton, $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper
3. The First Man, Albert Camus. Random House, $23
4. The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels (religion professor). Random House, $23
5. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields. Penguin, $11.95 paper
6. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes. Macmillan, $32.50
7. Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx. Simon & Schuster, $12 paper
8. My American Journey, Colin Powell. Random House, $25.95
9. The Hot Zone, Richard Preston *83. Bantam, $6.99 paper
10. Getting In: Inside the College Admissions Process, Bill Paul '70. Addison-Wesley, $20
SOURCE: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY STORE

BOOKS RECEIVED

The Perfect Destroyers (poems)
Stanley Koehler '36 *42
The Stinehour Press, P.O. Box 159, Lunenburg, VT 05906-9738.
$12 paper

Grow Older / Grow Pleasanter
Calvin D. MacCracken '40
Orders to Calvin D. MacCracken, 101 West Sheffield Avenue, Englewood, NJ 07631. $9.95 paper

D.C. Governance: It's Always Been a Matter of Race and Money
Robert V. Keeley '51
Orders to Five and Ten Press, 3814 Livingston Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20015-2803. $5 paper

McCarthyism and New York's Hearst Press: A Study of Roles in the Witch Hunt
Jim Tuck '51
University Press of America,
$46 cloth, $29 paper

Was This Heaven? A Self-Portrait of Iowa on Early Postcards
Lyell D. Henry, Jr. '56
University of Iowa Press, $29.95