Tell us, Solly

Tim Radford

• Solly Zuckerman: A Scientist out of the Ordinary by John Peyton
  Murray, 252 pp, £22.50, May 2001, ISBN 0 7195 6283 X

Solly Zuckerman was one of a group of clear thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic who helped make science a normal part of government policy. He began at floor level in 1940, when the Royal Navy asked him to find out the force at which a leg would break. When a ship hit a mine and blew up, the vertical displacement of the deck was enough to snap the ankles of a seaman standing on it. When a torpedoed ship tilted and began to sink, and a seaman tried to slide down the exposed hull, his feet were likely to hit the bilge rail, with the same consequences. Would boots save them? Zuckerman and a colleague began dropping a corpse from gradually increasing heights through a kind of hangman’s trap and X-raying the legs each time until an ankle broke. Then they did the same thing with a second corpse, this time fitted with a heavy rubber-soled boot. ‘We found that boots did to some exent protect the ankle, but that the fracture that it might have suffered now occurred higher up the leg,’ he wrote in his first volume of autobiography, From Apes to Warlords (1978).