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On the face of it, it is one of those stories everyone loves to tell.
The little guy, the eccentric outsider, triumphs in the end. Genius surmounts
all obstacles; truth will out. It’s Einstein in his patent office, Mendel
in his vegetable plot.

Peter Mitchell’s story is less well known but nonetheless intriguing.
Now 70, Mitchell won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1978 for his ‘chemiosmotic’
theory about how cells make the crucial energy-storing molecule ATP, adenosine
triphosphate. Yet recognition and fame came only after a long struggle in
what was probably the fiercest controversy in modern biochemistry. For years,
Mitchell stood virtually alone, his ideas ridiculed and dismissed by the
mainstream. Eventually, he was even physically isolated; he left his university
post to set up his own small laboratory in a decaying country house perched
on a Cornish hillside.

Of course, Mitchell won in the end-else who would tell the tale?-and
so say all the textbooks. Even his laboratory survives: Glynn Research Institute,
in Bodmin (Cornwall’s only research establishment) is 25 years old. But
does this moral tale of one man’s triumph hold lessons for the practitioners
of science today? Does the story show ‘another route’, as George Porter,
past president of the Royal Society, argues, to scientific fame and fortune,
via ‘self-help’ and entrepreneurial get-up-and-go?

More than 100 distinguished scientists gathered at Glynn towards the
end of last year to debate this question and celebrate the joint birthdays
of Mitchell and his laboratory. Many of the guests were old sparring partners
now reconciled, veterans of the ‘chemiosmotic wars’. Nobel laureates and
FRSs were thick on the ground.

Yet when it came to talk about creativity in science and the context
of discovery, it all sounded rather banal. No one could really put their
finger on the key to their own scientific success. The scientists fell back
on personal anecdotes. Some had had encouraging teachers or parents, others
played a lot as children, and still did. Some, as students, listened to
their mentors a bit, but not too much; others got ideas browsing through
journals in the library. All useful advice, perhaps, but we’re hardly tapping
the wellsprings of scientific genius here. And the question remains: what
kind of models do Mitchell and Glynn provide?

Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs tend to be individualists, strong on the advocacy of personal
freedoms and weak on an appreciation of the impact of their particular social
context. Would Mitchell’s story bear examination from a sociological perspective?
I embarked on an exhaustive investigation: I rang two people.

‘Peter Mitchell is an exemplary outsider,’ says Michael Mulkay, a sociologist
at the University of York. ‘His story illustrates that when you have a well-established
community it is difficult to innovate within that community.’ In an ingenious
bit of lateral thinking, Mitchell brought ideas from cellular transport
into the then quite separate field of bioenergetics. Being out of the mainstream-notably,
three or four huge American laboratories devoted to another theory-he was
free to put ideas together in a novel way.

Mitchell’s escape from financial constraints is emphasised by Harry
Collins, a sociologist at the University of Bath. Mitchell used money inherited
from his father’s construction firm to leave his post at the University
of Edinburgh and set up his own research base at Glynn. Collins sees the
‘outsider’ notion as a bit of a cliche: ‘There are lots of outsiders with
no power to make any impact,’ he says. Mitchell was different because he
had the wherewithal to do what research he liked, without having to scramble
for grants and teach undergraduates.

But what about relationships? Another crucial ingredient of Mitchell’s
success story is his 35-year harmonious working relationship with his research
colleague, Jennifer Moyle. In normal scientific practice, few forge such
long-standing and remarkable partnerships. Nor can such relationships be
reduced to a formula.

Moyle read natural sciences at Cambridge before the Second World War
and then won a grant from the Medical Research Council to work with Marjory
Stephenson, the first woman to be made an FRS. Knowing in 1948 that she
was dying of cancer, Stephenson told Moyle: ‘You’ve been successful, and
I would hate you to stop doing research. We must find someone else for you
to work with.’ Stephenson suggested Mitchell, then a young lecturer in the
department, and he agreed.

Seven years later, when Mitchell moved to join Edinburgh’s new Chemical
Biology Unit, Moyle agreed to move too, and there she was awarded a PhD
for her work. Towards the end of 1963 she moved again, this time to Glynn.
Mitchell had asked Moyle to join him and his family in the new venture.
‘If she had said no, I’m almost sure I wouldn’t have undertaken it,’ Mitchell
says.

Moyle worked with Mitchell in ‘very productive teamwork,’ she says.
‘Someone so brilliant needed someone more practical.’ She describes how
they worked: ‘The experimental work was done mostly by me. Peter concentrated
on theoretical work. We would talk about experiments and then I would do
them the next day. It was theory going with practice, intense interaction
between theory and experiment.’ Perhaps here is the real secret to Mitchell’s
success.

So it seems that Mitchell’s story is not really an example of ‘another
route’, a formula others replicate. Rather, he succeeded because he could
move outside the normal constraints-establishment mind set, money worries,
demands on time-and because he forged relationships that could not be created
to order.

In today’s political climate it is tempting to see Glynn as a form of
virtuous self-help, a sort of early venture capitalism. But Mitchell’s story
will not fit into that mould. The relationships are different: Mitchell
was building his own home, saving a crumbling bit of history and healing
his ulcers, in the company of friends. Is it any mystery, then, that Mitchell
says: ‘The two years when we did no research and rebuilt Glynn were the
happiest of my life’?