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First: how is this a GreenScarf
story?
GreenScarf is 'about'
technology and science and its massive benefits. And
it is about how technology and science can bite us
in the bottom by the side effects of those benefits.
It is also about the ethics of technology. This is a
story of people caught up in war technology?
Travis Rutland, author of the GreenScarf idea and
column of that name warned in 1938 about the danger
of not developing high technology weapons to counter
a rampant Germany -- the greatest scientific power
there was and with a leader in Hitler hardly known
for half measures.
What might happen? War by rays? Seeing in what had
hitherto been the dark? War by colliding atoms? Mass
bombing of civilians? Poison gas? Travis
Rutland set the stage for the role she was to
play...
They were from different worlds, he an exile from
the Old South of the the USA, a wanderer and
environmental reporter before the term was used that
way. Damage to nature and the advances of a society
based on technology were linked and so he became, in
his way, a reporter on science.
To start with she knew nothing. And yet she was to
be the right person. She knew quite a lot about the
purity and impurity of science.
Her name was Miss Nathalie Sykes and Nathalie was
spelt the French way with a 'th'. Her mother was
Swiss and growing up in a south London that did not
like foreigners did a certain amount for her
character. So: she and war science....
Her 1930s generation of British scientists were
taught the value of pure science. Do not be
influenced by application.
That is 'German' where, God forbid!, an academic
professor may own a patent. Science and profit!
This 'pure' issue might seem marginal. It was to
prove otherwise.
British science is pure and Lord Rutherford (born in
New Zealand, nurtured in Manchester and Cambridge)
while dubbed the 'father of nuclear physics',
considered any experiment not conducted with
machinery built by hand, with tweezers, glass and
wire, to be 'industrial'.
A cyclotron! Industrial machine. Build it in an
industrial city's university, Birmingham -- a second
rate place where they make things.
Yet this
giant experimental instrument -- the Americans had
the money to build one first... this was important
when it came to understanding the application
of uranium instability to building bombs.
She was tall and she did not smile. She was also, in
part, disabled -- we'll come to that and how it
forged her character.
She was said to be too tall to marry, too thin to
marry and, by her own mother, that reading books was
not the way to attract a husband.
Miss
Nathalie Sykes (then Armstrong) was not sure about
this pigeon holing of herself, nor this purity of
science. Who was chosen (men) to do most of the
science was not so pure -- the few women in lectures
were barracked when they came to lectures and asked
to leave among titters when the reproductive organs
of the frog were demonstrated.
A bitter controversy and lying (surely not pure)
over the cause (supposedly pure or objective) of her
soldier father's death at the end of the 1914-18 war
had led to no pension being paid to her mother. |She
had a way of being on the inside of things and she
was on the inside of the un-raveling of this gross
injustice to her decorated and deceased father.
In 1938, a graduate, she had the panache to
marry a historian of empires -- twice her age, the
age of her late father -- a man who worried that the
British were so 'pure' that they failed to grasp the
economic potential of their science. A new American
empire was going to rise up on the 'imperative of
technology'. Fascist Germany and Japan were
obviously enemies of Britain. The real enemy --
Professor David Armstrong predicted -- the one the
British never saw coming -- was the ascendant USA.
His prediction was that the most fundamental enemy
of the USA was the British empire, so much of the
world sown up in trade preferences. This conflict
was to become his wife's espionage role destiny. The
1939-45 war separated them. History and
embarrassment have tended to suppress Anglo-American
conflict. Involvement in it at a high level was to
be her way, to witness the American 'theft', or
absorbing, of key British technologies in atomic
physics, radar and the new wonder drug -- notably
for wounded troops -- penicillin.
Tall,
impeccably dressed and appearing conventional, she
had a knack for seeing how ego and national interest
can trump honesty in science, notably war science --
Germany, after all, with its lack of shyness about
application, was the greatest scientific adversary
there could be. Mrs. Armstrong worked for a small
private group -- underground and she worked over
ground. If she seduced senior men, it was not to
take them to bed, but to make them talk to her
on the level.
Never smiling, always serious, beautiful in her way
-- or was she ugly? -- she became the pivot on which
a vast, $32 million (1943 prices) grant to develop
penicillin hinged.
Suspect, a woman with liberal friends, technically
Jewish through her mother, she had attracted secret
service attention science she seduced Armstrong. She
did so. It was her idea. He was gay.
She had stolen the penicillin work for the Americans
from the British. That was the accusation and, in
its odd way, partly true. This is part of the story
of a woman involved in science at its most
glistening and its most sordid and brutal.
Appearing so forceful ...the men she captured to
help her did so because she evoked profound
honesty and desire to work with them. She was a
woman who resisted the cheap way out of sleeping
with the men she recruited. And she ran, to and from
a husband who was everything to her yet who also
loved his male husband more than she, his female
wife. In the end it was a mess. Triumph. Penicillin
whose development she pursued was a medical triumph
for the Americans and all wounded troops.
Movingly penicillin would have saved her late
father's life. And then she -- not the men --
was in jail, trapped by the British, and, in an
attempt to find emotional stability, pregnant. And
in the end of the end it was not a mess. She escaped
to become another person. That woman bore the child.
In 2018 the daughter of her daughter found this
secret, the sheaf of papers she entitled Mrs
Armstrong and the Imperative of Technology.
The story of the finder, this woman, Francine Olnay,
twists into that of her beloved grandmother, Sonia
Olnay who, secretly (and deceitfully), had once been
Nathalie Armstrong.
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