The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 1940, the fabled chemist at the California Institute of Technology, Linus Pauling, proposed an answer—an answer so wrong that it would eventually point to the truth. Pauling’s scientific achievements were legendary. He had solved an essential feature of protein structure, and described the thermodynamics of the chemical bond—but he could also be spectacularly off-track. There’s a story that quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, as notoriously cantankerous as he was brilliant, supposedly read a student’s paper and remarked that it was “so bad that it was not even wrong.” Pauling, with his daring, off-the-wall theories, often lobbed casually during scientific meetings, achieved the converse provocation: his hypotheses or models were sometimes so wrong that they weren’t even bad. Pauling’s colleagues had gotten used to his madcap theories; they even cherished them. By analyzing the internal contradictions of Pauling’s models—in other words, by reasoning through what was wrong with the proposal, and why it couldn’t be correct—they often found that they could arrive at the real mechanism, the truth.