On a damp evening in 1660 a dozen “ingenious and curious gentlemen” met at Gresham College in London to listen to a lecture by Christopher Wren. Afterwards, and inspired by the philosopher Francis Bacon, they decided to form an association, or the Society as it was first called, to promote the accumulation of natural knowledge. In 1662 it secured a Royal Charter from King Charles II and became the Royal Society. Driven by Bacon's two imperatives—the search for enlightenment and “the relief of man's estate”—the Royal Society has undoubtedly had a major influence on the evolution and dissemination of knowledge over the years.
As part of its 350th year anniversary celebrations, the writer Bill Bryson has edited Seeing Further: The Story of Science and The Royal Society. Anybody who has read Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, surely one of the finest popular science books ever written, will not be surprised to find that the resulting work is not a conventional history and is full of unexpected insights. Bryson tells us that his favourite Fellow of the Royal Society was the Reverend Thomas Bayes, a hopeless preacher but a brilliant mathematician, who thought so little of his famous theorem that he didn't bother to publish it in his lifetime; a friend sent it to the Society in 1763 shortly after Bayes' death. Today, of course, the theorem is used widely in many fields, but only because 250 years ago somebody at the Society decided that it might be worth preserving, just in case.
Perhaps even more surprising is the delightful essay by the novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. As a child she found a second-hand edition of the unexpurgated version of Gulliver's Travels, which is quite different to the sanitised version of this great work to which most of us were exposed in our early days. The description of the Grand Academy of Lagado, Swift's satire on the Royal Society, might well have been thought inappropriate for youthful ears; one of its scientists had the brilliant idea of inflating a dog through its nether orifice to cure it of colic, which resulted in the dog exploding. Atwood describes how the childhood memory of Swift's story came back to her quite vividly when she was being inflated herself during a colonoscopy.
Subsequent essays are equally readable with several accounts of the history and philosophy of science and the work of Fellows in improving natural knowledge. There are unusually clear discussions of the physicists' endless quest for a “theory for everything” and how we may reside in a multiverse rather than a universe. The biological sciences are also well served by excellent contributions on evolution and speciation. There is no mention of the medical sciences and, apart from Georgina Ferry's account of the work of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz and occasional references to James Watson and Francis Crick, molecular biology is not discussed. But considering the scope of the field, it is remarkable how much of its achievements have been celebrated in this fine book.
Summing up, Martin Rees, the current President of the Royal Society, wonders what we will understand in 2060. After asking whether his own field will be able to develop an over-reaching theory that links the cosmos and the micro-world, and applies the quantum principle to space, time, and gravity, he goes on to liken the different levels of the sciences to those of a tall building; logic is the basement, mathematics the ground floor, then particle physics and the rest of physics and chemistry, all the way up to psychology and sociology, with economists in the penthouse. Reassuringly, he points out that the higher level sciences are not imperilled by an insecure base as is the case in a building. Problems in chemistry, biology, and environmental and human sciences simply remain unresolved because we have not yet elucidated their patterns, structure, and interconnections, not because we don't understand subatomic physics well enough. He ends with an exploration of some of the dangers that are facing our futures; while science has contributed so much to every aspect of our lives it has also given us the ability to destroy our planet one way or another.
It is appropriate that Rees ends on a cautionary note. Institutions like the Royal Society are what they are because of the scientific distinction of their Fellowship. But does the sum of the whole have more influence than its individual parts? The Society's interactions with government in recent years have had mixed results, successful in the case of embryo and stem-cell research but not so productive in the case of GM crops. Currently, relations between the scientific community and the UK Government on issues such as global warming and drug classification are going through a difficult phase. Will bodies like the Royal Society and its many global offspring be able to combine their efforts to direct their governments in more sensible directions in the future? Paradoxically, since science has provided us with the ability to destroy ourselves and our planet, Francis Bacon's imperative for the “relief of man's estate” is far more urgent than it was 350 years ago.