Periodic fables

UNCLE TUNGSTEN Oliver Sacks

UNCLE TUNGSTEN was Oliver Sacks's Auntie Mame. The owner of a lightbulb factory in Farringdon, he opened his nephew's eyes not to the extravagant characters and exotic locations of Patrick Dennis's wayward relative, but to a no-less-magical world of metals and compounds. His experiments demonstrating the volatility of metals filled his nephew with a mixture of fascination and horror. Yet, in an ever-changing world, Tungsten, uncle and metal, provided a rare measure of stability.

Uncle Tungsten (in reality, Dave) was one of his mother's 17 siblings, many involved in the sciences. Uncle Tin (Mick) was a research chemist who worked in South Africa. Auntie Len was a botanist with a passion for number theory. Uncle Yitzchak was a pioneer radiologist. Uncle Abe, a physicist, played a part in the development of Marmite and invented a fat-free soap and luminous paint both used in the Second World War. As Sacks remarks, this was not just a family but a walking reference library, and an extraordinary resource for a boy with an enquiring mind.

Those who were not scientists achieved success in other fields. His cousin Aubrey, as Abba Eban, was the first Israeli ambassador to the UN. One of his father's sisters was entrusted with the translation of the Balfour Declaration into French and Russian. Of his immediate family, both his parents and two of his three brothers were doctors.

The childhood that Sacks describes was a blissful one, in a rambling north London house at the hub of a family of 100 cousins and a retinue of servants. The idyll was shattered, however, by the outbreak of war. Sacks was evacuated for four years to a Midlands school where he was subjected to a regime of sustained cruelty. Many writers have described the horrors faced by such evacuees; Sacks focuses on the more desperate sense that he was being punished for some undefined fault. He vividly depicts the consequence of his treatment, when the only way he could express his anger was by abusing his beloved dog.

His parents rarely punished him for his misdemeanours and appeared remarkably sanguine about the danger of his experiments, when he set up his own lab. Although Sacks speaks of his parents with respect, they are depicted with none of the warmth that marks his eccentric uncles and aunts. His mother comes across as a forbidding woman who was so determined that her youngest son should learn about anatomy that she forced him, aged 11, to dissect the malformed foetuses she brought home.

In spite of the revulsion these lessons invoked, Sacks did become a doctor and, subsequently, a bestselling author whose case-studies have enjoyed a wider literary influence than those of any doctor since Freud. Harold Pinter and Peter Brook are among those inspired by his accounts. It is no accident that his childhood hero was Humphry Davy, the scientist who was a friend of Coleridge, and whose notebooks mix details of chemical experiments with poems and philosophical reflections.

Sacks has achieved a similar synthesis. Here, he intersperses his own story with those of 18th and 19th-century scientific giants. By the clarity of his thought and the accessibility of his style, he succeeds in making the arcane accessible. Uncle Tungsten is a brilliant book which will prove an inspiration to any girl or boy with an interest in science, while providing the general reader with an intoxicating account of intellectual growth.

Michael Arditti