This web page will discuss the late Dr. Harold Hillman, who died yesterday afternoon, 5 April 2016. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/hillman.htm
Ivor Catt 6 August 2016
It was my privilege to
know Harold, to exchange numerous letters with him across the oceans over many
years, to host him during a visit to Australia and to have a chapter of his in
a book I edited. His willingness to challenge orthodoxy in a careful,
systematic way is an example for others.
Brian Martin 9
August 2016
“Harold
Hillman was the greatest humanist I have met in my real life.” – Libuse Mikova-Mika.
Dear Elisabeth,
We are so sad, and
feeling alone, when Dr. Harold, your great husband, died. His
humanistic messages and his scientific research in neurology, which is in the
tradition of Leonardo da Vinci, Hippocrates, Galen,
the English doctor John Hunter and other scientists. We do not know if
Dr. Hillman had friends, but we know he helped many people in the whole world
as doctor and humanist. – Libuse Mikova-Mika
https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/96ce/5_Hillman.pdf
http://www.hedweb.com/hillman/vegethic.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hillman
http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/89BRage.html
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Harold-Hillman/e/B001KMM2SA
There is a big difficulty about
whether I should include this item. http://www.big-lies.org/harold-hillman-biology/modern-biology-fraud.htm
http://www.big-lies.org/media/HILLMAN-WEST-1.mp3
http://www.big-lies.org/media/HILLMAN-WEST-2.mp3
http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/65.htm
. It never happened.
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x59596.htm
http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/6b3.htm
http://www.ivorcatt.com/459.htm
·
The Scientist »
Good Scientists, Bad Science? Clinging To A 'Dubious' Position Can Destroy A Career
Case Two: Harold Hilman’s
attack on electron microscopy may have cost the British neurophysiologist his
job Neurophysiologist Harold Hillman has a serious career problem. He’s out of
step with his peers, and now he’s out of a job as well. For 15 years Hillman
has been leading a scientist’s version of a double life. On the one hand, he
has done mainstream neurological research and been a respected teacher of
physiology. On the other, he has been questioning, needling,
By Richard Stevenson | July 25, 1988
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Case Two: Harold Hilman’s attack on electron microscopy may have cost the
British neurophysiologist his job |
Neurophysiologist
Harold Hillman has a serious career problem. He’s out of step with his peers,
and now he’s out of a job as well.
For 15 years
Hillman has been leading a scientist’s version of a double life. On the one hand,
he has done mainstream neurological research and been a respected teacher of
physiology. On the other, he has been questioning, needling, and increasingly
infuriating those fellow biologists who use electron microscopy to study cells.
Hillman says that the things scientists do to prepare specimens for the
electron microscope so distort the objects’ structure that all observations and
conclusions are suspect.
Perhaps because of
Hillman’s personal charm, he has until recently been allowed to plow his lonely—and, most would say, arid—furrow. But now
his relentless challenge to the scientific establishment may have finally
caught up with him. His employer, the University of Surrey, has forced him to
take early retirement at the age of 57 and, in so doing, has posed an
interesting question: If Human’s mainstream work has been up to snuff (and
there is no strong evidence to doubt otherwise), is it possible that the
scientific establishment has robbed society of valuable contributions merely to
punish a dissenter?
From 1965 until
earlier this year, Human had been a reader in physiology at Surrey University
and director of the Unity Laboratory of Neurobiology. When contraction hit
British universities in 1981, Surrey’s Department of Human Biology and Health
was scrapped. Hillman remained director of the Unity Laboratory, but with its
continued funding in doubt, the university has obliged him to retire. He claims
it is because of his controversial scientific views and the notoriety they have
brought; the university maintains that it is consistent with the policy of
shedding staff over the age of 55 in areas where the research is deemed “below
average.”
A physician with
research degrees in biochemistry and physiology, Hillman has worked primarily
in neurobiology and resuscitation, and this work has never raised controversy.
But in the early 1960s, he made a fateful and disturbing discovery that put him
on the path to heresy. Human found that when centrifuged, adenosine triphosphate changed its activity. This meant that many
experiments probing this crucial substance could be wrong.
Did scientists laud
Human for such an important discovery? On the contrary, he couldn’t even get
the results published. He says that one referee for the Biochemical Journal
even wrote that “to suggest that physical agents can have chemical effects is
revolutionary” and, by implication, absurd. (This criticism, of course, is
itself ludicrous; as Hillman points out, grinding or stirring or centrifuging
puts energy into the system, which can drive chemical reactions.)
Perturbed both by
his findings and by their negative reception, Human began to investigate the
effects of other experimental techniques. He observed that for some enzymes
only 20% to 30% recovery is recorded, and concluded: “So we know prima fade
that the technique is changing them.” Yet he couldn’t get funding to do the
control experiments he believed necessary to put such techniques as
chromatography, biochemistry, or electrophoresis to the test.
He was reduced to
laying out his arguments in a book entitled Certainty and Uncertainty in
Biochemical Techniques (Surrey University Press). But when the book appeared in
1972, the reviews were almost uniformly hostile. The most common complaint was
that the arguments were old hat—the problems of preparation artifacts
and degradation had all been solved or corrected for in the early days of the
techniques. However, no one has answered to Hillman’s satisfaction the
questions of when these confirmatory tests were ever done and where they were
published. He believes to this day that no one has ever bothered to do the
control experiments.
Still, one reviewer
made a point that Hillman was prepared to ac cept:
Although biochemists make many assumptions when they break a cell up into its
components—for instance, they assume the pieces work just the same way outside
the cell as they do in the complete cell—they somehow manage to arrive at a
consistent and coherent picture of how the cell works.
That answer
temporarily satisfied Hillman; he stopped pushing his heretical positions. But
a couple of years later, he was doing work on nerve cells with microscopist Peter Sartory. To
get the best images, they used transmission electron microscopy (EM) and were
astonished by what they saw.
“We noticed
something so peculiar that we really couldn’t’ believe it,” Hillman recalls.
“About 80% of the membranes in the cell appeared end-on, [as if the cell had
been sliced through its center]. It took Sartory and myself several weeks
to realize that it simply wasn’t possible.” Yet that is what virtually all
electron micrographs and illustrations in papers and textbooks show. “That was
our first shock,” says Human. That implied that every electron microscopist was cutting virtually everything in the cell
perfectly at right angles.”
According to
conventional thinking, cell membranes consist of two layers. In stained EM
sections the two layers show as two parallel lines of dark stain, like railroad
tracks. But, Human observes, however you cut a cell, the two lines are always
the same distance apart in the EM image. He draws the analogy of a chef cutting
an orange. If he slices it clean through the center,
the sliced surface will show a thin rim of peel. If he cuts it with a glancing
blow, so that only a small slice is taken off, the peel won’t be cut at right
angles—it will show as a much “thicker” rim. Human reasons
that because the rim is always the same width in EM sections, it cannot
represent a thick two-layer membrane. Rather, he believes, it is a
single thin membrane stained on both sides.
“I have challenged
electron microscopists to make a three-dimensional
model of any living cell in which this [a membrane appearing to have identical
thickness however it is cut] is so. It simply isn’t possible. All the stains
they examine them with are heavy metals that deposit on both sides of the
membrane, thus any real membrane will appear as two lines.”
According to
Hillman, the consequences are profound. He insists that any experiment
involving electron microscopy is incomplete and its conclusions cannot be
justified. In an article in The Practitioner last year (July 1987, Vol 231, page 998), he suggested that the problems with
techniques used to study cells were one major cause of slow progress in
understanding such diseases as cancer, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s
disease.
Flawed cell
pictures are only part of the problems inherent in these studies, says Hillman.
He also feels that a string of other hypotheses, crucial to this research—the
existence of receptors that no one has ever seen, for example--are unproven yet
accepted as gospel. In the article he likened medical orthodoxy to a religion,
with its preisthood and theology.
Hillman’s reasoning
is simple, attractive—and wrong, according to virtually every cell biologist and
electron microscopist. It’s not as if the problems of
preparation artifacts were unrecognized. As Audrey Glauert, head of electron microscopy at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge and herself
one of the pioneers of the technique, told The Scientist, “Every electron image
is an artifact. With EM you’re a long way from the
original cell—you’ve treated it and sectioned it and fixed it and done all
kinds of things to it.”
But the fixation
techniques have been compared with other microscopic preparations,
and cell biologists are generally satisfied that EM features correlate with
living cells. Furthermore, even if the preparations do distort the cells, there
seems no good reason why all the different techniques should produce identical artifacts.
Hillman will not
accept these arguments. He asserts that established EM researchers have much to
lose in career terms if they were to admit their research has been based on
faulty technique. And he claims EM manufacturers denigrate him because they
have a vested interest in the status quo.
Not so, say
manufacturers. Bill Clarke of Philips Analytical puts it simply: “No one came
out and supported Hillman, so in a sense it was a democratic vote.
Surely, it’s
harmless enough if a lone researcher (Sartory died in
1983) chooses to disagree publicly with the received wisdom, isn’t it? No, say
specialists like Glauert. “Some of the things he was
saying were destructive and not helpful [for science],” she says. She is
particularly upset that in their quest to get published, Hillman and Sartory wrote their ideas up for School Science Review, a
journal for science teachers (Vol 62, page 241,
1980). Robert H. Michell, John B. Finean,
and Roger Coleman of Birmingham University, authors of one of the textbooks
included in the general attack by Hillman and Sartory,
thought so too, and wrote a detailed defense of “this
essential component of the intellectual toolkit of every working biological
scientist” in a later issue of SSR (March 1982, page 434). “They [Human and Sartory] have signally failed to gain converts to their
view among academic scientists, so they now seek, through the SSR, to persuade
teachers to present their generally unaccepted and, we believe, mistaken view
to our children.”
The reaction of the
scientific community, however, has gone beyond censure of Hillman's charges;
rightly or wrongly, Hillman’s extravagant claims have made it more difficult
for him to do his mainstream work. “I cannot now get research funds for my work
in resuscitation, which is absolutely respectable and totally different,” he
says. His heresies have also blighted his academic career. He believes that his
notoriety was directly responsible for the removal of his teaching
responsibilities in physiology during the 1970s—”despite,” he says, “the fact
that I have always taught what was in the textbooks because I want my students
to pass their examinations.”
John Estall, one of his former students from those days,
remembers him as an “inspiring” lecturer. Now principal of St. George’s College
in North London, Estall told The Scientist “I thought
he was a very good teacher—the others at Surrey were as dull as dishwater. He
probably was always a little controversial—it made him outstanding in that
environment, and I can still remember being enthused
by him.”
Colleagues appear
to like Hillman personally. “He’s zany,” Peter Goodhew,
director of Surrey’s Microstructural Studies Unit,
says. “He breezes in with a cry of ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ His heart is genuinely
in the right place—he has done fine work for Amnesty International—but he lets
his eccentricities carry him away, and he won’t back down when he’s wrong. I
think it would strengthen rather than weaken his case if he sometimes admitted
he was wrong.”
Hillman maintains
that he always listens to his critics, notes their objections, and takes them
away to ponder over. “I never dodge a single question,” he says, “and there am
times when I have admitted we were wrong.” Nevertheless, these are always on
peripheral issues; terrier-like he clings to the core of his beliefs.
So Hillman has now
had to face the ultimate career sacrifice. Surrey has decided to close his lab.
The vice-chancellor, Anthony Kelly, said that this was done following a survey
of the university by the University Grants Committee, the government funding
authority. The UGC concluded that certain aspects of Surrey’s science,
including the remaining parts of the biology department, were below average.
Hillman claims that
his laboratory was not specifically assessed by the UGC and should not have
been included with the others. UGC assessments are partly based on scientific
reputation and partly on success in attracting outside finance. Hillman admits
that he can’t get any research grants because any peer-review committee is
bound to have an electron microscopist: “They don’t
simply disagree with me,” he says, “they have a
venomous hatred of me.”
His laboratory has
some charitable funding, which will enable him to complete an atlas of nerve
cells. But if he can’t obtain further funding, then he will have to retire from
active research this summer and concentrate on writing.
Goodhew says that Hillman “has been pretty unbending in his opposition to the
system. If the system was more affluent it would have been fine to have him
about, but we all need to justify our support now.”
Several microscopists were surprised when contacted by The
Scientist. “I thought all that was finished seven or eight years ago” was the
common reaction. But for Hillman it’s never over. “I believe the question has
gotten onto a theological plane. That is, instead of a proper scientific debate
they’ve in effect declared me a heretic,” he sighs.
The high priests of
biochemistry have, so to speak, excommunicated Human. But one can imagine him
going into retirement still clinging tenaciously to his heresies.
Richard Stevenson
is deputy editor of Chemistry in Britain.