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Heraclitean Fire : Sketches from a Life Before Nature
The eminent biochemist reflects on his life and work in Vienna and in America, shedding light on his DNA research and the work and opinions that led to his reputation as a maverick.
252 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 1, 1978
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About the author
Erwin Chargaff
42 books4 followersErwin Chargaff was an Austrian biochemist who was a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school.
Chargaff proposed main rules in his lifetime related to DNA studies best known as Chargaff's Rules.
Chargaff proposed main rules in his lifetime related to DNA studies best known as Chargaff's Rules.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 25, 2012
I'd tap that.
Did biochemist Erwin Chargaff, of the famous "Chargarff's rules" originally write his memoir in German? If this is the case, I will cut him some slack for writing in the kind of way I have very little patience for - overwrought, melodramatic, and earnest. Imagine reading Frasier Crane or Ignatius Reilly's memoirs and you have Heraclitean Fire.
Chargaff actually complains at one point "purple" language is frowned upon and how English is not a language for celebrating language. Well, not if it comes out like this.
I mainly picked up this book because I wanted to read bitchy, bitter things about Watson and Crick. Chargaff did not disappoint on that front.
p. 101-102:
Here's an excerpt in that Chargaff explains how he feels, getting shafted from the glory: p 103
It is kind of sad to read that instead of wonder at all of the discoveries that had been made in the fields of molecular biology and cell biology, Chargaff felt only alienation from practicing science (and from his colleagues) and grim forebodings about the implications of biotechnology.
But back to the bitchy things!
p 156-157:
As a (relatively) young person with hopes of pursuing a PhD in biology, it is interesting to read some of the sad but eerily prophetic things Chargaff had to say about the state of science research in academia, with the constant pressure to publish ("publish or perish!") and the constant pressure to get funding when the sources of funding are shrinking every year. (This book was published in 1978). p 162-163
Did biochemist Erwin Chargaff, of the famous "Chargarff's rules" originally write his memoir in German? If this is the case, I will cut him some slack for writing in the kind of way I have very little patience for - overwrought, melodramatic, and earnest. Imagine reading Frasier Crane or Ignatius Reilly's memoirs and you have Heraclitean Fire.
Chargaff actually complains at one point "purple" language is frowned upon and how English is not a language for celebrating language. Well, not if it comes out like this.
I mainly picked up this book because I wanted to read bitchy, bitter things about Watson and Crick. Chargaff did not disappoint on that front.
p. 101-102:
The impression: one, thirty-five years old; the looks of a fading racing tout, something out of Hogarth ("The Rake's Progress"); Cruikshank, Daumier; an incessant falsetto, with occasional nuggets glittering in the turbid stream of prattle. The other, quite undeveloped at twenty-three, a grin, more sly than sheepish; saying little, nothing of consequence; a "gawky young figure, so reminiscent of one of the apprentice cobblers out of Nestroy's Lumpazivagabundis." I recognized a variety act, with the two partners at the time showing excellent teamwork, although in later years helical duplicity diminished considerably. The repertory was, however, unexpected. [...]
It was clear to me that I was faced with a novelty: enormous ambition and aggressiveness, coupled with an almost complete ignorance of, and a contempt for, chemistry, that most real of exact sciences - a contempt that was later to have a nefarious influence on the development of "molecular biology."
Here's an excerpt in that Chargaff explains how he feels, getting shafted from the glory: p 103
When the Artemision - one of the world wonders of antiquity - went up in flames in 356 B.C., a man was apprehended who confessed that he had done it in order to make his name immortal. The judges, in condemning him, decreed that his name must remain unknown. But soon after, the historian Theopompos claimed that the name was Herostratos. Whether this really was the name or whether Theopompos merely wanted to annoy, say, his father-in-law, cannot be ascertained. Recently, when I mentioned Herostratos in an article, the editor called up to say that nobody in the editorial office had ever heard of him, thus giving belated satisfaction to the judges of Ephesos.
If Herostratos has earned immortality for having burned down the temple of Artemis of Ephesos, maybe the man from whom he got ht matches ought not to be entirely forgotten. I am that man.
It is kind of sad to read that instead of wonder at all of the discoveries that had been made in the fields of molecular biology and cell biology, Chargaff felt only alienation from practicing science (and from his colleagues) and grim forebodings about the implications of biotechnology.
But back to the bitchy things!
p 156-157:
What is science? Truly a big question about which large books have been written that I have great difficulty in reading. I shall give a simple answer. Science is the attempt to learn the truth about those parts of nature that are explorable. Science, therefore, is not a mechanism to explore the unexplorable; and it is not its task to decide on the existence or nonexistence of God or to measure the weight of a soul. It is very unfortunate that science has become extremely arrogant - this started at the time of Darwin, but is getting worse - and that scientists arrogate to themselves a special right to speak out loudly, and often stupidly, on almost any topic. For instance, the National Academy of Sciences, which is, after all, only a sort of chamber of scientific commerce into which some very funny characters have entered through various backdoors, is widely regarded as the true receptacle of wisdom. But when you spend your life watching a bubble chamber or running cesium chloride gradients you may become an expert bubble or gradient runner, but there is little likelihood of your thus acquiring much wisdom. There is, in fact, a good chance that such people will turn into very dull fellows indeed, wasting their lives by trying to outrun ten other dull fellows with whom they are in competition.
As a (relatively) young person with hopes of pursuing a PhD in biology, it is interesting to read some of the sad but eerily prophetic things Chargaff had to say about the state of science research in academia, with the constant pressure to publish ("publish or perish!") and the constant pressure to get funding when the sources of funding are shrinking every year. (This book was published in 1978). p 162-163
Our kind of science has become so dependent on public support that nobody seems to be able to do any research without a handout. If their applications are turned down, even the youngest and most vigorous assistant professors stop all work and spend the rest of their miserable days writing more applications. This continual turning off and on of the financial faucets produces Pavlovian effects and a general neurasthenia that are bound to damage science irreversibly. It would have been much better if it had never got so rich before getting so poor, for in the meantime many young people have been lured into a career that may never materialize.
March 31, 2018
This poor, bitter man had such a bizarre view of science, esp the biological sciences. There’s almost zero mention of or appreciation for the absolutely massive revolution in medicine, which to most ppl is a cornerstone of biological science. I’m sure it’s a product of the horrible ways he saw science used during WW2, and his points there are well-taken. But unfortunately other than that and a few other minor points, this book didn’t have much perspective to give me about working in science today.
August 14, 2016
Biologist. Brilliant man. Perhaps should have shared the Nobel with Crick and Watson. His findings paved the way for the double helix. Somewhat of a curmudgeon. At one point read in 15 different languages. The book is a memoir. He is pessimistic about the future of humankind and the world. Very interesting read with the most difficult vocabulary I have encountered.
April 30, 2017
I loved this book. Written by Erwin Chargaff (1905 - 2002), a Columbia University biochemist, it is part autobiography, part critique of modern science (modern from 1978 when it was written). Chargaff is humurous, deep, and challenging. His critique of science is even more prescient today. His wariness of the direction science took began with the dropping of the A-bombs on Japan. I had never heard of Erwin Chargaff or this book, but it was excellent and highly recommended.
July 28, 2018
A very good autobiography of one of the founders of modern molecular biology. In the old style, this is an introspective journey through a life looking both forward and backward. Liberally interspersed with references to art, music, and literature in the cultured European style, it is a welcome change from the current style of "reporting" a life. Lots to ponder!! FYI...out of print
December 30, 2018
Most of the time, this book is just a pretentious critique of half a century of American academia; while it is far from a perfect entity, the contents of this autobiography are bitter and almost never justified. With that being said, the conclusion is touching, and reveals a love for biology and science in general that surpasses the failure to understand its evolution.
December 9, 2008
Erwin Chargaff, der Entdecker der Basenkomplementarität in der DNS, gilt als einer der Urväter der Gentechnik. In seiner Autobiographie aus dem Jahr 1979 rechnet er mit seiner Vergangenheit und der (damaligen) Zukunft der Gentechnik ab. Chargaff erging es somit ähnlich wie Albert Einstein - vergleichbar Goethes Zauberlehrling wurde er die Geister die er rief nicht mehr los. Was er in Bewegung gesetzt hatte entwickelte sich in eine Richtung die er nur mehr ablehnen konnte.
Als einer der wesentlichsten Sätze bleibt hängen: " Zwei verhängnisvolle wissenschaftliche Entdeckungen haben mein Leben gekennzeichnet: erstens die Spaltung des Atoms, zweitens die Aufklärung der Chemie der Vererbung. In beiden Fällen ging es um Misshandlung des Kerns: des Atomkerns, des Zellkerns. In beiden Fällen habe ich das Gefühl, dass die Wissenschaft eine Grenze überschritten hat, die sie hätte scheuen sollen."
Immer wieder kommt der spöttische, bittere und polemische Stil, seines Lehrers und Freundes Karl Kraus durch. Ein technologiekritisches Buch das trotz seines Alters noch immer Gegenwartsbezug hat und durchaus lesenswert ist.
Als einer der wesentlichsten Sätze bleibt hängen: " Zwei verhängnisvolle wissenschaftliche Entdeckungen haben mein Leben gekennzeichnet: erstens die Spaltung des Atoms, zweitens die Aufklärung der Chemie der Vererbung. In beiden Fällen ging es um Misshandlung des Kerns: des Atomkerns, des Zellkerns. In beiden Fällen habe ich das Gefühl, dass die Wissenschaft eine Grenze überschritten hat, die sie hätte scheuen sollen."
Immer wieder kommt der spöttische, bittere und polemische Stil, seines Lehrers und Freundes Karl Kraus durch. Ein technologiekritisches Buch das trotz seines Alters noch immer Gegenwartsbezug hat und durchaus lesenswert ist.
April 15, 2025
In many ways, "Heraclitean Fire," the memoir of the eminent biochemist Erwin Chargaff, parallels Camus' L'Étranger." Both are stories of men who do not fit the society they have been thrust into. Chargaff's youth, a caricature of late Hapsburg bourgeoise striving, with tutors, musical training, and classical languages, might have been ideal in 1860 but was almost immediately hopelessly out of date in the 20th century he was born into. He was a stranger to modernity thrust into the modern age.
Chargaff, raised with the classics, quixotically pursued a degree course in Chemistry claiming it was due to a love of nature. He made critical contributions, but almost despite himself, as he was a capable but not modern scientist. He was a thinker, and modern chemistry prefers technicians. Perhaps he should have tried theoretical physics, but that is another story. He was a philosopher and maybe an absurdist trapped in a hopelessly rigid, doctrinaire profession.
When he migrated to the US to escape WWII, he became a stranger in a strange land.
He made his most significant discovery at Columbia, when he observed interesting statistical properties in the proportion of different nucleotides, and, in an act of exceptional imagination, intuited that adenine and thymine bonded as did guanine and cytosine to form the "ladder" that is the essential informational structure of DNA. It was a Nobel-level accomplishment, yet his work went unacknowledged when he shared this with Watson and Crick. He was the stranger, and he did not merit consideration.
His career ended when he reached retirement age and was shown the door, with the keys changed on the lock as he left. One gets the sense that Columbia was glad to be quit of him, a stranger to what the academy had become, a machine for turning wealth into "progress."
Chargaff is difficult and, unlike Meursault, does not sublimate his resentment. But he suffers from the same existential trauma of being born into a ridiculous world and being aware of its absolute absurdity. He spends chapters elucidating the numbing short-sightedness of science and hoping for some pseudo-Jeffersonian return to the gentleman-scientist slowly revealing the wonder of nature. He loathes the bomb and genetic engineering, but more, he loathes the men of power and their carelessness. Chargaff knows that life sciences is an oxymoron, that the more capability we have, the closer we are to death.
The language in this memoir is fantastic. His vocabulary is extensive. He reads and writes in 12 (?) languages and sprinkles Latin, Spanish, French and German throughout the book. He has a gift for prose, even if he indulges in some excess. This is a book about the life of a liberal arts savant who wandered into a chemistry lab, couldn't find the exit, and spent his life trying to escape through language.
But the greatest estrangement and pain is that he is a Romantic in a world of cold, martial modernity. He worships beauty, the hidden, and the sublime, and he has somehow trapped himself in the bureaucracy of the academy, within the claustrophobic constraints of science publishing and grant-seeking, inside an America that has given up on beauty and inspiration in exchange for reckless, sterile progress.
Perhaps there was no place for Chargaff because he was born into an almost magically distinct culture of academic Austria-Hungary at the moment it imploded. He was thoroughly prepared for a life that was no longer possible. You can hear echoes of his plight in the philosophical writings of Bohr and Schroedinger, who retained the mystic and the irrational while delivering the catastrophic. But particle physics retains a mystical aspect in a way that modern chemistry cannot.
Chargaff’s memoir is a rare window into the mind of a scientist who never quite belonged—neither to the old world nor the new, neither to the humanities nor the sciences. His writing is dazzling and his insights profound, even if he occasionally dabbles in self-pity. I wish he had pursued a life of the mind or became an insurance man by day and a poet by night like Wallace Stevens. But he did not, and his bitterness is palpable. Please read this book to glean the insights of a savagely well-read, inquisitive mind estranged from everything but with a unique viewpoint to see the absurdity of our 20th-century mania for technology and progress.
Chargaff, raised with the classics, quixotically pursued a degree course in Chemistry claiming it was due to a love of nature. He made critical contributions, but almost despite himself, as he was a capable but not modern scientist. He was a thinker, and modern chemistry prefers technicians. Perhaps he should have tried theoretical physics, but that is another story. He was a philosopher and maybe an absurdist trapped in a hopelessly rigid, doctrinaire profession.
When he migrated to the US to escape WWII, he became a stranger in a strange land.
He made his most significant discovery at Columbia, when he observed interesting statistical properties in the proportion of different nucleotides, and, in an act of exceptional imagination, intuited that adenine and thymine bonded as did guanine and cytosine to form the "ladder" that is the essential informational structure of DNA. It was a Nobel-level accomplishment, yet his work went unacknowledged when he shared this with Watson and Crick. He was the stranger, and he did not merit consideration.
His career ended when he reached retirement age and was shown the door, with the keys changed on the lock as he left. One gets the sense that Columbia was glad to be quit of him, a stranger to what the academy had become, a machine for turning wealth into "progress."
Chargaff is difficult and, unlike Meursault, does not sublimate his resentment. But he suffers from the same existential trauma of being born into a ridiculous world and being aware of its absolute absurdity. He spends chapters elucidating the numbing short-sightedness of science and hoping for some pseudo-Jeffersonian return to the gentleman-scientist slowly revealing the wonder of nature. He loathes the bomb and genetic engineering, but more, he loathes the men of power and their carelessness. Chargaff knows that life sciences is an oxymoron, that the more capability we have, the closer we are to death.
The language in this memoir is fantastic. His vocabulary is extensive. He reads and writes in 12 (?) languages and sprinkles Latin, Spanish, French and German throughout the book. He has a gift for prose, even if he indulges in some excess. This is a book about the life of a liberal arts savant who wandered into a chemistry lab, couldn't find the exit, and spent his life trying to escape through language.
But the greatest estrangement and pain is that he is a Romantic in a world of cold, martial modernity. He worships beauty, the hidden, and the sublime, and he has somehow trapped himself in the bureaucracy of the academy, within the claustrophobic constraints of science publishing and grant-seeking, inside an America that has given up on beauty and inspiration in exchange for reckless, sterile progress.
Perhaps there was no place for Chargaff because he was born into an almost magically distinct culture of academic Austria-Hungary at the moment it imploded. He was thoroughly prepared for a life that was no longer possible. You can hear echoes of his plight in the philosophical writings of Bohr and Schroedinger, who retained the mystic and the irrational while delivering the catastrophic. But particle physics retains a mystical aspect in a way that modern chemistry cannot.
Chargaff’s memoir is a rare window into the mind of a scientist who never quite belonged—neither to the old world nor the new, neither to the humanities nor the sciences. His writing is dazzling and his insights profound, even if he occasionally dabbles in self-pity. I wish he had pursued a life of the mind or became an insurance man by day and a poet by night like Wallace Stevens. But he did not, and his bitterness is palpable. Please read this book to glean the insights of a savagely well-read, inquisitive mind estranged from everything but with a unique viewpoint to see the absurdity of our 20th-century mania for technology and progress.
July 29, 2016
Rather a ponderous read in my opinion.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews