A TRIPLE PLEASURE WORTH SHARING

I was invited by the Molecular Biology Institute and Biology Department at Indiana University in Bloomington to give a talk in their weekly seminar series. My host was Michael Lynch a well known molecular population geneticist whose work on mutations, evolution, and mutation rates is well known and appreciated among geneticists.  I gave the lecture on H J Muller, my mentor and Indiana University’s first Nobel laureate.  I had never used Power Point before and the day before my lecture I visited Lynch at his office in Jordan Hall.  He downloaded my disc onto his computer and showed me what I would have to do to move slides back and forth.  The lecture was in Myers hall where the Molecular Biology Institute is housed.  The auditorium holds about 300 people and at 4 PM it was packed.  I botched the moving of the slides from the computer to the large screen but fortunately Lynch came to my rescue.  But I was in full control in delivering the lecture which was rich in anecdotes.  Nedra said that I hadn’t lost my touch (she took my genetics course in the summer of 1958). Equally engaging was the question and answer period.  I showed two pages from my notebook for Muller’s course in Mutation and the Gene which I took in early 1955. I was interested in Muller since my high school days and when I took his course I wanted to see how he thought. So not only did I take notes on the “winning of the facts” as he called it, but his reasons for the course and the value of knowledge of the history of genetics.  My talk was well received and afterwards Nedra and I were invited to a dinner at a steak house where I enjoyed a margarita (which I shared with Nedra). It was delightful to have two hours of conversation and a superb filet mignon. I thanked my host because I felt rejuvenated.  It has been about 14 years since I have given a lecture to a large audience.  It carried me back to the endorphin rushes of lecturing in my Biology 101-102 course at Stony Brook University.  It gave me great satisfaction to discuss Muller’s life and the significance of his work in radiation genetics and evolutionary genetics and his efforts to help humanity. Muller denounced the racism, sexism, and class prejudice of the eugenics movement in the United States. He condemned (in Moscow in 1937) the attacks on genetics by a politically backed view of heredity whose advocate in that audience (T D Lysenko) Muller denounced as a charlatan.  During the Cold War, Muller was a leading critic of the abuses of radiation exposure.  It was also important, I felt to show his flawed personality, and I included a photocopy of his suicide note in 1932 in Texas when psychological depression made him feel unworthy of carrying on his career or life.  Fortunately he recovered and found positive outlets for the insecurities he harbored. The capstone of my pleasure was that I was giving this lecture at Indiana University where I had gotten my PhD working in Muller’s laboratory.

Life Lines 41

JUDGING JIM WATSON BY HIS DEEDS AND NOT BY HIS OFF THE CUFF REMARKS

I was saddened by the mess Jim Watson found himself in when he went to London. Contrary to what most people think occurred, Watson was not interviewed in England on a book tour when his racist and sexist remarks occurred but interviewed earlier in the United States by a former student whom he had recruited from an English girl’s school. A former student of mine in Edinburgh sent me the 12-page article on Watson. In it the author of the article described Watson’s beneficial influence on her life and his views on genetics and society. He had recruited the student ten years ago to help bring more women into science. She described his positive accomplishments at Cold Spring Harbor bringing many of the most creative scientists there to make substantial contributions to our knowledge of human genetics and health. She gave a balanced account and remarked that his thinking and conversation was often erratic and blunt, sometime hurting his own reputation and she cited several of these from his past. She also recounted his remarks about IQ and race and it was this that led to his resignation from the Chancellorship of the CSH Laboratory and the Watson school. This does not exonerate Watson if he made those remarks. He apologized immediately for them and felt he was quoted out of context.

I read his latest book, Avoid Boring People. It is part autobiography and part a homily on how to be an effective scientist. Any young science student reading it will get a lot of practical advice and good insights in how to have a successful career. He mentions growing up in Chicago in the Depression. His parents were both liberal Democrats who believed in Roosevelt’s programs. He mentions sneaking a peak at his own IQ scores in high school and finding to his dismay that at best his IQ was 120. Those are not boasting scores; they are five points above the upper end of normalcy. He would need another 20 to 25 points to be in the genius category (145 and up). To Watson’s credit he succeeded in his career and he did not let his modest IQ prevent him from achieving eminence as a scientist. It is also to Watson’s credit that he insisted on a portion of the funding of the money for the human genome project to go to studies of the ethical, legal, and social aspects of the use of that new knowledge. When I heard Watson give a talk on the history of CSHL Press in 1999 he spoke of the importance of subsidizing books on the history of genetics and eugenics. I asked him if he would read a manuscript I was working on that covered the history of allegedly “unfit people” from Biblical times to the present. He not only read it, he recommended it for publication to CSHL Press. On many occasions when I was working with groups at CSHL on various eugenic history studies, he stated the importance of making all of the “skeletons in the closet” at CSHL to be made available on line for the world to see so the errors of the past will not be repeated. I would rather associate myself with a person who does good things and occasionally says regretful things than a person who says good things and acts to undermine those things by deeds that damage what we were misled to believe. I felt sorry for Reverend Jesse Jackson for his incautious comments some years ago but he is a person who far more consistently acts for the public good. We live in an age where off the cuff remarks become epitaphs to destroy reputations built over decades.

Life Lines 11

A PUBLIC APOLOGY FOR A PUBLIC MISDEED

On April 13, 2007 I was in Indianapolis for an unusual event. The State of Indiana was making an apology for an event that occurred one hundred years earlier. That event was the passage into law of the first compulsory sterilization law in the world. Actually

At the ceremony was a historical marker that was unveiled by a woman who was sterilized by that act. She said she was 15 when she was sterilized against her will and she was deceived and told she was having an appendectomy. When she later married and attempted to have children she learned the truth about her surgery. When she confronted the physician who did the surgery, he lied also, and denied she was sterilized. I thought about this situation. If you were not middle class and pretty helpless and ignorant, you could have been deceived and harmed by people who believed that they were wiser than you and could manipulate your body as they wished with the power of the state behind them. Would those who are still sympathetic to sterilizing “unfit” people be willing to sterilize the physician for lying to the patient and blame his lying habit on his genes?

I was attending the ceremony and symposium because I have written articles and books on the history of genetics and eugenics. Most people are unaware that some thirty states passed such laws in the first third of the twentieth century (including New York) and some 40,000 people (mostly white, the eugenics movement was motivated more by class than race) were sterilized against their will. Most of the sterilizations were carried out in California, where the support for sterilizations was strong among health groups and the middle class. The Supreme Court in 1927 even upheld the right of states to pass such laws by an 8-1 vote. They used Virginia’s law as consistent with the Bill of Rights and justified the sterilizations by citing the Constitutional right of the state to draft its youth during wartime against the will of the drafted. Fortunately most state courts have found their sterilization laws unconstitutional for their own state constitutions or the states have repealed them long ago. I have not read any news accounts of such sterilizations since the mid 1990s. Few of us appreciate the role of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s in giving all of us autonomy of decision-making and freedom from state discrimination that did not exist for humanity before then. The history of eugenic laws around the world teaches us that they are more often used to harm the innocent than to benefit the health of humanity as a whole. That was certainly true for the Nazi Nuremberg laws and for the American eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century.