The Atomic Gardener, Sarah Angliss (Wuthering Bytes 2019)

yes so um i'm not talking about what i normally do which is i compose music for film and theater and whatnot and um make robotic instruments i'm actually talking about something from the archives that i hope you find relevant to some of the themes that we've had today and this is about a pioneer very interesting pioneer whose story is very very close to my heart and to start um picture the scene 1950 far far away from the cares of the atomic research establishment and a pantomime cow is eating a radioactive lunch and then the cow gets up rubs its belly and then somebody pirouettes onto the stage this is something called atom man and he sort of kneels before this person who sort of swoops on with in parachutes so somebody called knowledge and at a man says to knowledge the cow will soon be a perfectly healthy animal and then seven women die right around the stage in evening gowns and and then neutrinos and this is what actually happened in the waldorf hotel uh in october 1950 and it was um a ballet isotopia an exposition in atomic structure we have no idea if it ever saw the light of day again after it was seen and it was performed by the ladies of the ladies atomic society and it was performed to 20 250 members who were absolutely enraptured by it and a completely astonished journalist from time magazine and um there's so very very little we know about this piece or the very important movement i want to talk to you today the woman that wrote this piece muriel howarth howarth was a composer she composed music for this ballet she was a choreographer and costume designer she was also the librettist and most importantly for me she was an amateur atomic physicist and an evangelist of the atomic age and what i find very interesting when i think about how this works i'm actually thinking about i'm thinking of making my next opera about halas is i think about the half-life of the isotope and i think going back to some of the things you heard earlier i also think about the half-life of pioneers like this who gets put in the record and what is the half-life of their story if we're not recording it sufficiently so muriel issues in 1949 showing a model of a lithium atom to an astonished and thrilled mayor of eastbourne she was very very fond of curiosities as muriel and she had a great eye for the theatrical one thing she often did in this is the very late 40s is she would produce events like this a an eight week old baked potato from a handbag and proceed to eat it as i'm sure you all understand the potato had been irradiated it had been blasted with gamma rays which had sterilized it so it was germ-free um a few little other fragments we know about muriel and this is a very tantalizing one that i want to investigate further the ministry of information clocked her during the war as a very smart cookie she had no formal physics training but they said please go and jen up immediately on atomic physics because we want you to explain atomic physics to the masses and this is something that she continued to do with the plump um into peace time and it's in 1960 that muriel embarked on possibly her most astonishing feat her most distancing stunt of all and it became public when she was photographed in the sunday dispatch by beverly nichols who was considered like the titchmarsh of his age and here she is tickling the results of one of her experiments and this is what he wrote beverly nichols yesterday i held in my hands the most sensational plant in britain it is the only one of its kind nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before to me it had all the romance of something from outer space it is the first atomic peanut now this wasn't just any old peanut but this was nc 4x and it had come from a crop of atom blasted peanuts so what happened was scientists in oak ridge tennessee home of the bomb had taken crops and taken seeds and um blasted them with gamma rays and as i'm sure you would all understand that battering caused remarkable things to happen to the dna of some of those plants some of them would become totally wrecked and would wither and die some might grow twisted some might grow in weird colors but if you did this to millions and millions of seeds they call this method now spray and pray if you did it to millions and millions of seeds or maybe hundreds of thousands of seeds um you might get lucky you might get what they call the golden mutant the giant mutant fruit or vegetable and um i talked to somebody called paige johnson in the u.s who is very up on muriel's story and she sort of put it to me really well she said um if today's sort of genome editing is like sort of snipping away with pair of scissors this is like swacking away at the genome with a hammer but nevertheless they got lucky into oak ridge with this particular peanut and she had been to the u.n very st i i wonder if she's i've got so many theories about howarth but she there's a record of her visiting the um and a sort of u.n event where she ate some of these and then took some home and sort of uh and and started growing them herself and um so that's that's what she was at that's what she was in the papers for in 1960 and then um around that time she had to have an eye operation and she thought what am i going to do with my beautiful crop and she was quite smart she said i know i'll go to wanak um uh just outside eastbourne and where there's this beautiful wonder garden and now the wonder gardens in wanak um you'd go along there you'd have strawberries and you'd also see all these little follies and fountains and crazy golf and all of that and then there was some sort of weird stuff there there was fred slaymaker's wonder village which was a playing with scale as you can see and um the horticulturalist that ran the wonder garden she said would you mind looking after the thing i had in the paper the other day and he said certainly i'll put it in my cactus house and then unsurprisingly the fact that he had an atom blasted peanut um was more interesting to anybody than the uh than the actual cactus and so he gave muriel run of the rabbit warren and she set up the world's first atomic garden and um what she was actually planting the world's public one what she was actually planting was all the sort of stable mutants the oak ridge had already found so here's some tomatoes and if you look so you could just sort of go along there go and see the model village and then pop next door and see some atom blasted seeds note early fruit and sturdy plant needs no support so this was all very well but she was working with other people's gear she was working with stuff other people had discovered and that wasn't enough for her she didn't just want to show off somebody else's fancy peanuts and tomatoes um she wanted to do something far more ambitious she wanted to find the golden mutant that would grow so big it could cure world hunger and so in 1960 she embarked on an amateur experiment of astonishing ambition she set up the world's first atomic gardening society anybody could join for the price of a few first-class stamps and if you did so she would send you some random seeds from her friends in oak ridge and you would grow them in your garden so this was like citizen science on an absolutely grand scale all arranged through the post office and she was very open about the methods you'd also for just for a couple of shillings get these pamphlets through the post where um she would explain how to run um how to run your own atomic garden what isotopes were and how to do some sort of basic horticulture i should point out there was no sort of test and control experiment here if you imagine the control was the un blasted seeds what she was trying to do was just do sort of spray and pray spray and pray method with them thousands upon thousands of people so yes so she also backed early early on even before she got to this stage so for instance when we go back to the time of that lithium atom she was the kind of woman that would write to the great physicists of the age she had a very long correspondence with sodi and um einstein um backed her in 1950 he sent her a very sort of gracious letter in 1950 so she knew how to sort of use the sort of power networks that were out there to sort of get some sort of recognition for what she was doing to give it a bit of wind in its sails so yeah so that was that was mural howard she set up the atomic gardening society and within that society she taught people the basics of radiation and in her mind the atom the peaceful uses of the atom because what herm what her sort of let me just go back actually because a beautiful quote from her what she felt yes this is what she felt she wanted to do she wanted to lead women out of the kitchen and into the atomic age not to know about atomic energy and the wonderful things it can do is like living in the dark ages so yes so while the rest of us you know well people were worried about you know the doomsday clock and what was was wasn't wasn't coming out of cockroft's follies and all of that she was trying to evangelize about the atom and the peaceful uses of the atom and of course this is absolute classic techno-utopianism isn't it and a very fine example here's a woman who very clearly understood the privations of rationing and famine it was not long after the end of the war there was not enough food here was a techno fix here was an easy way in inverted commerce to solve it but of course what i find so interesting about techno utopianism is often the most often here we go again yes can you hear me yes so i mean one of the things about techno utopianism is that you have to tread very very carefully because sometimes a techno fix isn't all that you need sometimes you know problems are more complicated and they need sort of more systemic solutions and this is actually a subject very close to my heart because i was actually a guinea pig in one of the big technofix experiments of the 1960s which was water fluoridation so i'm born in watford and watford was a test town for water fluoride and so if you imagine 1960s 66 i think they started in watford you kind of hope they thought about it really really hard before they put a known toxin in the water supply and we like to think that they did but i decided to go into the national archive because i'm from watford to find out exactly what went on so so as far as i was concerned we were all told as kids that we were the chosen ones we had like regular dental visits and we were told we were going to have the best teeth in the country and all of this because then we were the subjects of the water fluoridation experiment we were the test town babies and when i went into the archives there were some fascinating things there was a great resistance to florida fluoridizing the water for obvious reasons so they uh just switched it on anyway and then they said you've been drinking it for three weeks and then once they actually said that we'd be drinking it for three weeks the local radio was flooded with anxious people who said there you know their canary had fallen off its perch and things like that so it's very very interesting but what's more murky than anything to me is the reason why they fluoridated in the pur in the first place and this is my why i always tread very carefully when i hear people talking about techno fixes in 1960 the average five-year-old in the uk had five rotten teeth and the reasons for that were obvious we were all i was born in 66 but you know i'm a bird's eye kid you know we were all eating junk the amount of sugar in our diet had gone up the amount of processed food had gone up and you know unless we were from wealthy families we weren't necessarily getting enough fruit and vegetables and um that was really hard to fix because you had to fit you had to sort out equality in the country you had to take on big business all the sugar barons just as bad as the tobacco barons of old and it was really really hard to do sorting out food poverty time poverty you know getting um assertive with some of these big companies and that's really hard to do so they couldn't do that but what they could do is they could shore up people's teeth because that was quick and easy so they sorted out the symptom but not the problem so here i am into my early 50s i'm the first generation to be around in our early 50s having drunk 15 20 years of fluoridated not naturally fluoridated water and you know we are still guinea pigs i have got pretty good teeth i should say um but what are we living through we're living through an obesity epidemic because they didn't actually deal with a difficult problem they went with the techno fix here's another example of a techno fix does anybody recognize this language i mean does anybody have any personal yes so are you a personal i could read them right before i went to school yes so um well we've got somebody here who can probably explain it even better than i can but this is astonishing um just as there was uh god knows what was wrong with us log but just as around in the 60s there was an obese um a tooth decay epidemic there was also real problems with low literacy in the uk so the obvious way to fix that was with good teaching evidence-based teaching and so on and so forth but um techno fix came in from pittman and the free spelling movement so this is again the gotta be wary of the techno utopia the free spellers were utopians they had a techno fix for illiteracy and it wasn't get good teaching learn about evidence-based teaching no it was fix orthography fix orthography because you know we've got this really messed up language where it's not phonetic so make it easy for children in the first two years of school don't teach them traditional orthography traditional letters and spelling give them this made-up thing with extra letters in the alphabet called saxon spanglish which is um spelt phonetically so and this is that absolute classic law of intended consequences i'm going to send you around some examples this one is a ladybird book in ita called the policeman i'm just going to send that round it is quite an astonishing thing to see and this um i've got 15 minutes left this i find genuinely heartbreaking and i'd love to hear from this fellow here this is a child's workbook written in ita can i just i can't i can't i'm stymied by phillips right okay um so the big big problem with this experiment which was sanctioned by the government they did it with the thousands and thousands of children for a number of years in the uk was that they only taught you ita for the first two years and then in year three you went in they said all that stuff you've learnt it's not really like that and it destabilized a whole generation of children i mean i've spoken to one very very accomplished professor who's got tremendous problems with reading and writing he's dyslexic but he struggles with writing and he said it completely screwed him up because he was waiting for the day that the maths teacher came in and said all that maths we taught you it's not really like that parents are being advised not to teach their children reading at home because it would interfere with what they were doing in the classroom the whole thing was so screwed up and again this is where the utopianism has a sort of more murky underbelly in that when you go into the national archive you find that this was being spearheaded by pittman of pittman's shorthand and he was locking these schools into his books so basically he had an awful lot of money to be made out of this thing because he almost like almost owned the patent for the not the patent but he kind of owned the rights to this whole system and so it's another reason to be wary isn't it now i just want to say very briefly i've only got 10 minutes left how did muriel do well going back to our conversation about lurkers i think uh muriel was a bit of a when i said when i think about the issue with lurkers i would also like to raise the issue with gatekeepers because i think that's one of the biggest problems we have in um open source communities and other communities in the it's gatekeepers need to be educated about being the kind of gatekeepers that allow the lurkers to feel that they can raise their head above the parapet she was the worst kind of gatekeeper her letters were really really snippy and when you went to her meetings you had to wear a badge to explain your level of expertise and you had to wear it at all times and so basically she didn't get the millions of people that she wanted she didn't even get the thousands she just got a few hundred and it was all a bit snippy and a bit bossy and unsurprisingly the whole thing sort of quietly fizzled out and so she kind of just became this sort of brilliant woman and i i know who sort of her sort of legacy sort of ended there really and and i and i always think about her and i think about her strange stunts her ballet and her baked potatoes and all that and to me she just always feels like an absolutely brilliant woman who's never given the keys to the lab and was constantly saying to the world look at me look at me look what i can do. um and then i contrast her with women who were also pioneers who were much more successful because they had more sort of um they were more strategic in what they did and one of my favorite organizations was the electrical association for women from the 30s i haven't got time to talk to you much about it now in detail beautiful badges um they gave very detailed uh education on circuitry main circuitry just the basics of circuitry i have to thank andrew for sourcing me one of these beautiful beautiful this isn't mine mine's mine's pride of place in a frame at home they they they taught women how to fix things like their eye this was like in the 1930s onwards and they they petered out in the 80s how to fix irons how to rewire a plug and they they evangelized about electricity by doing wonderful things like um building commissioning this beautiful corbusian palace which is right in the middle of this sort of tudor beacon suburb in uh in um bristol and sort of packing it with wonderful inventions like the thor electric servant which was a food mixer that could double as a washing machine and things like that and and the word servant is very important because they were working with middle-class women primarily in post-war post-first world war when there was the servants crisis when all the people that come back for the war said stuff that for a game of soldiers and said i'm not going to be your servant anymore and there weren't there was actually a genuine shortage of people as well because so many of men had died on the battlefield and so they were thinking about replacing the human flesh and blood servant with these servant machines and they did some wonderful things like they designed russia and demonstrated rational kitchens this might not look that rational to you but compared to a victorian kitchen believe me this is a rational kitchen and it has and it has power points and things like that an electric clock and the way it's laid out and they were sort of basing this on sort of 1926 frankfurt designs that were sort of coming coming on stream and so that so they were they were if you like utopians too and they were utopians in many ways first of all they were trying to openly sort of scientific e5 for whatever better term science if i household drudgery almost to give it status and i find that a double-edged thing because why do you need to make it a scientific thing to give it status but that's what they were trying to do and they were sort of being led by idealists like the guild with so i don't know if you're familiar with these diagrams this is um a photograph from one of frank and lillian gilbert's experiments where somebody's doing a job sewing buttons or whatever and they're looking at their motion and seeing where they stray from if you like a machine ideal this is the scientific management of labor the early days of that gil the gilberts were ideal it's what they were trying to do was trying to make humans movement by rationalizing the layout of a workplace to make it more like an inverted commas a machine ideal because they were after what they called more happiness minutes but of course that's a double-edged thing isn't it because that's also the scientific management of labor is also where the the the technology if you like that ends up with people wandering around a warehouse at amazon in the gig economy um very briefly the um where where the electrical association of women's utopian utopianism never quite met its potential was why they were interested in electrifying the home it was so here's an example of a beautiful eaw thing about how to rationally lay out your flexes at home from the 1930s and what they were doing was they didn't just want to give women less time with housework which you know never did quite pan out but they actually saw it as the next step of beyond suffrage because women had got the vote but they felt cheated because they'd got the vote and not much else and they felt a bit let down and it was all very well having the vote but if you're stuck at home all day how the hell can you ever get to the club let alone the house of commons and so they kind of saw electricity as a sort of route to liberation and very very briefly i'll play a little bit of one of my favorite bits of music it was um this is actually the eaw teaming up with one of the electrical companies and it kind of explains their rationale [Music] foreign [Music] that's what we all like isn't it yes so um yes and of course actually what all this sort of stuff does as i say it's really just sort of atomized labor and um for many many working-class people and and and it didn't get them into the club or the houses of parliament what it actually did was um this sort of rationalized um management of work and labor ended up somewhere rather different now um so i don't want to be down on techno utopianism at all i just think that when we talk about these things that this could happen and that could happen i think all these new technologies they have to be embedded in the kind of societal structural changes that will bring about behaviour control the one that's alarming me so much at the moment involves the paris accord i was so alarmed to hear from james dyke the um who's a very good friend of mine who's a climate change scientist he models sort of dynamical systems in the climate that the these um now correct me if i'm wrong if any expert on this but these uh say you know where we're trying to hit the two degree mark and we've got all these things that we can put in place to make sure we don't go above a certain level of warning that those contingent on us reaching that goal is the coming on stream of carbon capture technology that does not exist yet so our absolute existential future our future as human beings is reliant on a treaty that assumes a techno fix is going to be here in time people do not have that techno fix yet you have to be very very wary of techno fixes and worry about behavior change in the meantime just a very very quick addendum before we stop muriel of course she she got very snippy with the geneticists who were trying to use chemical means to splice the genome she just thought they were onto a a no hoper but of course history tells us something else but interestingly muriel's stuff came back into fashion first of all obviously irradiated food it's among us all the time here's somebody who's making um cobalt 60 sauce entirely from irradiated ingredients and this i find wonderful this is a high energy garden somebody's doing now because um as you say you couldn't have done what muriel wanted to do just with a sort of a handful of sort of plucky gardeners around the uk you needed huge huge numbers of plants to get the mutations and you need many many tournaments of those plants many many generations of those plants to get the sort of interesting mutations she was after but now of course with rapid genome sequencing you can do that and if you look here is what's known as a high energy garden people um bathing plants in a radiation from cobalt 60 or whatever it is i'm not a nuclear physicist all the time waiting and hoping for a fruitful unexpected mutation and here is a photo a cut from a woodcut whatever from uh muriel's book atomic gardening from the layman in which she lays out her plans which she could never fund for a cobalt 60 garden that would do precisely that thanks you