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Making Genes, Making Waves: a Social Activist in Science

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Making Genes, Making Waves: a Social Activist in Science Making Genes, Making Waves Making Genes, Making Waves A SOCIAL ACTIVIST IN SCIENCE .......JON BECKWITH HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS AND LONDON, ENGLAND 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Jon Beckwith All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Beckwith, Jonathan R. Making genes, making waves : a social activist in science / Jon Beckwith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-674-00928-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Beckwith, Jonathan R. 2. Geneticists—United States—Biography. 3. Political activists—United States—Biography. 4. Science—Social aspects. I. Title. QH429.2.B38 A3 2002 576.5Ј092—dc21 [B] 2002022747 Designed by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt ▲▲▲ Contents 1 The Quail Farmer and the Scientist 1 2 Becoming a Scientist 13 3 Becoming an Activist 38 4 On Which Side Are the Angels? 54 5 The Tarantella of the Living 68 6 Does Science Take a Back Seat to Politics? 83 7 Their Own Atomic History 98 8 The Myth of the Criminal Chromosome 116 9 It’s the Devil in Your DNA 135 10 I’m Not Very Scary Anymore 153 11 Story-Telling in Science 171 12 Geneticists and the Two Cultures 191 13 The Scientist and the Quail Farmer 211 Bibliography 219 Acknowledgments 227 Index 229 Making Genes, Making Waves CHAPTER ▲ 1 The Quail Farmer and the Scientist The stone farmhouse surrounded by fields of rapeseed and wheat is unassuming. Yet enveloped within it is the story of a dramatic life. It is 1998 and I have come to this isolated spot to renew an old friendship, perhaps to find out something about myself, and cer- tainly to explore a mystery. I am nervous about my meeting with Robert Williams—the first time we will have seen each other in thirty-five years. Since we were graduate students in the same bio- chemistry laboratory in the late 1950s, our lives have taken turns neither of us could have foreseen, Bob’s being the most surprising. For while I have remained a scientist, Bob is now a quail farmer in Normandy. ▲▲▲ Bob Williams and I met when we started graduate school at Harvard University in 1957. He was far from his birthplace, Paris, where he grew up, the child of an American father and a French mother. I was only a few miles from home and just a mile from Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where I was born. Bob was enthusiastically committed to science. I was much less sure of my future, not having found the inspiration in science that I needed, and wondering what science had to do with real life. I was close to 2 ▲ The Quail Farmer and the Scientist quitting in my first year as a chemistry graduate student when Bob suggested, “You should talk to Lowell Hager, my Ph.D. supervisor. I think you’d like working in his lab.” I made an appointment right away. A few days later, as I ap- proached Professor Hager’s office, I heard a series of sporadic clicks coming from inside, sounding like an erratic grandfather’s clock. Puzzled, I waited a short time and then decided to knock. A voice said “come in,” and as I entered, the source of the strange noise be- came clear. Lowell was standing in front of his desk, facing the door, with a Ping-Pong ball and paddle. The clicks were produced when the ball hit the door—Lowell was honing his skills for his next match. In the Harvard of the 1950s, this casualness was unusual. Most of my professors were very formal, addressing me as “Mr. Beck- with,” never as Jon, acting with what they considered to be the dignity appropriate to their position. Lowell’s un-Harvard, uncon- strained personality was a refreshing change and his lab was a re- laxing place to work. It was clear that part of my lack of enthusiasm for science related to the work environments I had experienced in other labs—where students were driven to work long days and into the nights, so that their professors could add more papers to their bibliographies. Bob had been right. It took me very little time to decide that I wanted to do my Ph.D. with Lowell, switching from chemistry to biochemistry. So Bob and I ended up doing our Ph.D. work in the same lab for the next several years; without his sugges- tion I would probably no longer be in science. Yet I was still not convinced that I was going to make a vocation of science. I looked at Bob and saw how committed he was to a sci- entific career, how he talked of nothing but science and did so with evident enthusiasm. He worked long hours in the lab apparently for the joy of it; there was no pressure from Lowell. He didn’t seem to have a life outside of the lab. Could I make the same commit- The Quail Farmer and the Scientist ▲ 3 ment? For those who knew us at the time, a bet on Bob rather than myself as the future scientist would have seemed a sure thing. Nev- ertheless, it was during my graduate years that I finally found the spark that carried me into my scientific career. The research papers of a group of French geneticists led by François Jacob and Jacques Monod at the Institut Pasteur in Paris overwhelmed me with the ingenuity of their genetic approaches, the clean logic that guided their experiments, and their elegant writing style. I was not a ge- neticist, but I now wanted to become one. Bob and I finished our Ph.D.’s and set out on separate paths. I pursued my goal of working with my Parisian idols and began to learn bacterial genetics. I moved through several labs, traveling from Berkeley to Princeton, New Jersey, and then on to London and Cambridge, England. Several times, I asked François Jacob if there might be space for me in his laboratory; finally, in 1964, I was accepted and arrived at the Institut Pasteur for my last year of postdoctoral work. Meanwhile, Bob had spent a few years learning the genetics of bacterial viruses with Seymour Benzer at Purdue University and had then taken a position at the Institut de Biolo- gie Physicochimique in Paris with Marianne Grunberg-Manago, a well-known biochemist. I saw Bob once during this period, while my wife, Barbara, and I were living in England. One of my dreams, in addition to becom- ing a Pastorien (a researcher at the Institut Pasteur), was to own an old French car—the Citroen “traction avant” (front-wheel drive). This sleek black Citroen was as much the star of French gangster films of the forties and fifties as were Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura. Luckily, Bob’s cousin in Paris ran a garage and had a used “traction avant.” On a trip to Paris, Bob introduced Barbara and me to his cousin and we returned to England with the car of my dreams. Bob and I did not see each other again for thirty-five years. I thought that we had little in common other than our involvement 4 ▲ The Quail Farmer and the Scientist in science. And even in that realm, our specific interests had di- verged. I still imagined that I might not be in science for the rest of my life. The friendship fostered by our close working relationship seemed to have ended. ▲▲▲ I hadn’t thought much about Bob until late in the 1970s, when I visited Lowell Hager, who had moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lowell brought me up to date on Bob’s life since I had last seen him. The story he told shattered my image of Bob and challenged my facile impression of a man totally immersed in science. In the late 1960s in Paris, Bob had married and moved into a commune, which surprised me. But after a year, the marriage soured and Bob’s attitudes toward science also soured. He quit his laboratory research position, and ended up unem- ployed for some time. The next events recounted by Lowell were even more startling and worrisome. In 1971, Bob moved to Chile with Sarah, the daughter from his marriage. Then governed by the Socialist Party of Salvador Allende, Chile sought international help to improve the nutrition and health of its poorest citizens. Bob started projects to find new sources of food in the seas that washed Chile’s extensive coastline. Then, in 1973, came the violent military coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chilean supporters of Allende tortured and murdered, but some foreigners who had helped the government were also targeted. The 1982 Costa-Gavras movie Missing presents the story of an American who suffered this fate. Neither Lowell nor Marianne had heard anything from Bob since the coup and feared that he was dead. Bob, at least as far as his sci- entific colleagues were concerned, had disappeared. Here was a man who had seemed to me totally devoted to sci- ence and who rarely discussed political issues. How could he have The Quail Farmer and the Scientist ▲ 5 changed so much—to reject science and plunge into such a deep political commitment? ▲▲▲ Perhaps if I had thought of the changes in my own life I might have considered more the parallels as well as the mirror im- ages of the evolution of the two of us. I might have understood ear- lier what had led to the startling changes in Bob’s life.
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