Science works by CONVINCING not by DISCOVERING

Charles Darwin’s ideas were less radical to Victorians than has been generally claimed.

His theory, {{in their eyes}}, while scientifically and theologically unsettling, was at least  ***morally*** kosher.

In effect, Darwin said that everything about you, was ‘inherited’ from your parents’parents’parents back to the primeval slime by strictly vertical descent.

And if you have ever read much in Victorian literature, you know how often the books revolved around ‘inheritance’ issues.

Yes, Darwin said, things do change - and that is unsettling. But they change in a strictly orderly & moral fashion (and even then, change very very very slowly), so there is really nothing to worry about.

Nothing you had came from ‘the milkman’ - Victorians cherished the thought that , at least in biology, there was never ever any hanky-panky in evolution.

But what Henry seized upon, in the spring of 1928, over the objections of his still Victorian-minded elders/bosses, was the evidence (dating from around 1920 but not published till 1928) that evolutionary descent could also come horizontally.

It could happen across species and maybe even across biological families and orders - and it could happen in minutes and not just over millenniums.

In effect, this was ‘miscegenation’ on a evolutionary scale - sheer horror to the eugenically minded upper classes of the 1920s.

Henry duly got fired from his first job - the best job in the world for a scientist back then - for sticking to his guns on this semi-privately within the institute and for trying to make it public as well.

The relatively new institute (Rockefeller) that Dawson and his boss, a fellow Nova Scotian named Avery, both worked at, thought Avery was up for the institute's first Nobel prize, for proving that bacteria remained fixed into their species.

Henry said no, actually they can morph into each other in minutes and do so over and over.

The institute badly needed Nobel prizes to give it credibility with both the scientific world and the Rockefeller family who were paying all the dosh. A really big deal in other words.

And a junior nobody, albeit a promising young junior nobody, was about to rain on their parade.

He was gently and quietly let go, by finding another post for him elsewhere, in a different field of science.

But eventually, after a lot of pushing, he got a little somewhere with his ideas.

Because, in my terminology, Henry was only able to make his claim *public*, in scientific terms, but not *popular*, in scientific terms.

He got his work published in various big journals and presented it at various big conferences.

No one could refute it.

They simply refused to accept it , in their private minds, and went on as if Darwin was the only path of evolution.

Still Henry kept the idea alive, when it might have died stillborn back in 1928.

So - for an example - his obit mentioned it among his accomplishments upon his death in 1945, just as it was finally being taken up by a young female researcher Harriet Ephrussi.

Ironically, upon the death of Dawson’s first boss Oswald Avery, no mention of HGT DNA was found in his obit, quite rightly as he had firmly opposed the very idea.

But today, Avery is given much of the credit for HGT DNA and Dawson is forgotten.

Because in the 1970s, the Rockefeller Institute got its long-delayed revenge on Dawson by touting Avery as the lead man on HGT DNA and most historians have dutifully trotted along behind ever since.

Now 100 years later, HGT (horizontal gene transfers) is generally well accepted within the relatively narrow microbiology field as a key determinate in what makes living things what they are.

Again the wider scientific world says it too accepts HGT but then hastens to say to itself, privately, that ‘it rarely happens - and when it does,  it isn’t very important’. 

This is simply untrue.

For three billion years life on earth was only bacteria and would have stayed that way forever, until a single big bacteria of one scientific family swallowed a single small bacteria of a very different scientific family and then failed to digest it.

The little bacteria hid behind a physical wall inside the bigger bacteria and the two tolerated the situation because each gave each other what the other needed but couldnt really provide itself very well.

That division of labour, behind cell walls, for a common good, is the basis of all multi-celled life - like us humans.

In effect, you and I didnt come from mom and dad alone, but also from the milkman.

We now know we all have viruses and bacteria inside us, regulating our activities, sometimes for our mutual benefit, sometimes not.

Just as we probably would only have moss and ferns for plant life, it wasn’t for the HGT interaction between plant roots and bacteria and fungus.

And every time we hear ‘DNA solved another murder, we must remember that it is the techniques of HGT DNA that makes this possible, not vertical evolution ‘DNA’.

And Henry’s natural penicillin —— it actually didnt originate from penicillium fungus, but from bacteria and spread to them via ( you got it !) HGT !!

No, Henry didnt discover HGT any more than he discovered natural penicillin - but he promoted both, against huge opposition - till both finally became used and cherished by the whole scientific world.

For like trees, scientific discoveries can fall in the forest unheard,  —— Henry’s moral courage and wide-ranging mind make natural penicillin and HGT into the big things they are today.

Because Henry didnt back any old kooky scientific idea - he unerringly picked out the really really big winners among seemingly zooky scientific ideas and ran with them.

Scientists, collectively flattering their all too human and often squalid behavior, act as if the hard work is discovering something and the rest is easy.

But in fact, historians of science report that many scientists discover something and fail to realize its importance , or if they do report it, fail to follow it up in the face of stiff scientific resistance.

If I do anything in this lifetime, I’d like to show - via Henry - that the ‘discovery-biased’ view of how science works is only a partial truth...