ONE SIN PUNISHES ALL HAS HISTORIC ROOTS

        I have often been puzzled by the over-reactive response to injustice whether that behavior is justified or not.  In the Biblical tradition that comes about several times.  First is Adam and Eve’s sin of eating a forbidden fruit.  The punishment involves aging and death to all future humanity (along with wearying toil for men and the pain of childbirth for women).  A similar response for a single misdeed involves Ham laughing at his drunken naked father (Noah). All of Ham’s descendants will serve (presumably as slaves) his siblings’ descendants. During the era of 18^th and 19^th century slavery in the United States that was frequently used to justify slavery. It’s not just the Bible that does this.  In Greek mythology, Pandora’s curiosity in opening a forbidden box, unleashed all sorts of misery and disasters (only hope was left in the box). Back to the Bible again, God tells Moses to kill all Amalekites including their wives and children because they hectored the Jews as they left Egypt.  It is not just religion that practices overkill response.  Nazi ideology sought to kill all Jews for what?  Trying to make a living as doctors, lawyers, professors, or merchants thereby depriving “real” Germans from earning a living?  Death for people who lived there for 1000 years or more?  That genocidal mentality was seen among those who settled the western territories and starved, deported, or killed Native Americans leaving the few survivors in isolated reservations.  What was their crime? They wanted to live as their ancestors did on their hunting grounds or their own farmlands and European descendants who came to North America felt that the land was theirs because they were civilized and Native Americans were savages to be chased away. Fortunately humans are diverse and some choose diplomacy over war, some choose an appreciation for diversity rather than a wiping out of anything but sameness whether that sameness is religious creed, ethnicity, race, or political ideology. On a smaller level we see it in the response to anger.  Some choose a lawsuit and sue for damages.  Some individuals settle for a bar-room brawl. Some (in this age of easy access to guns) come back with guns blazing for insults (loud music, an insulting phrase, being “uppity,” not being deferential).  In a vague way we try to understand but not justify that overkill response if a person is psychotic as seems to be the case for our mass murders in schools, theatres, or churches.  But so many people end  up in court cases for attempted or realized killing of others and use rationalizations to defend their horrible actions (eating Twinkies did it;  spoiled by excess wealth; used stand one’s ground laws; self-defense; couldn’t stand it anymore; substance abuse weakened my judgment; loyalty to a gang’s ethical code, family honor demands it).   Most people, fortunately, do not respond with excess violence to their sorrows real or imagined. What we do not know is the brain physiology that allows one person to “lose it” and most people to find less violent ways to find justice.  Whether it is genetic, viral, epigenetic, hormonal, or induced during gestation by yet unknown factors we do not know.  That is a much needed area for basic research.

MY MORNING CUP OF COFFEE

        I began drinking coffee when I was in high school.  My father was my alarm clock and at 6:30 AM he scratched my head and as I sat at the edge of the bed, he handed me a cup of his Swedish style coffee—with lots of cream and sugar.  I glugged it down and was fired up for the day.  At NYU, GIs from WWII taught me to drink coffee black and unsweetened and that I have done ever since. Coffee was cultivated in the Middle East but got its origins as a beverage in Ethiopia and it spread to Yemen. It got to Europe from Constantinople to Venice by Italian traders during the Renaissance. Coffee beans were smuggled out of the Middle East to India and later to Java (hence a cup of Java), and then to the Caribbean and South America. The first coffee houses in England began in 1637.  It was not until 1683 that coffee shifted from black and unsweetened to cream and honey in Vienna.  Coffee houses spawned the stock exchange and the Royal Society among other enterprises.  In 1773 our Boston Tea Party led to the American patriotic duty to drink coffee and shun tea. Coffee percolators were invented in 1818.  Decaffeinated coffee was invented in 1903.  Instant coffee was introduced in 1938. The coffee break was invented by a clever marketer in 1952 and the variety coffee house became nationwide with Starbucks in 1982.

      Coffee comes from a red berry of the tree Coffea arabica. The berries are dried, the seeds removed and roasted and then the seeds are ground.  Coffee’s appealing qualities include its stimulation from caffeine that in many people represses drowsiness.  Caffeine is a purine (like adenine and guanine found in DNA) but it is only weakly mutagenic at high doses. At various times coffee was considered satanic (but Pope Clement VIII approved it in 1607) or equivalent to alcohol (and hence not permitted for early Moslems). It is still banned by Mormons (Latter Day Saints) and when I spent a semester as a visiting professor teaching at the University of Utah, those who drank caffeinated coffee were called “Jack Mormons.”  Most observant Mormon students drank decaffeinated coffee (such as Sanka) or ersatz coffee (such as Postum that C. W. Post made from roasted wheat bran and molasses). During World War II when coffee was rationed, I remember hearing on the radio Eleanor Roosevelt describe how she mixed yesterday's coffee grinds with Postum and a spoon of fresh coffee grounds to make coffee for Franklin. 

FEBRUARY HAS SOME NOTABLE BIRTHDAYS FOR SCIENTISTS

February 12 is Charles Darwin’s birthday (1809-1882) and this year I celebrated drinking my morning coffee in a glass cup engraved with my name and the occasion – Darwin Day 2007 where I gave a talk on Darwin at Rutgers University.  Darwin of course provided massive evidence for evolution and proposed a mechanism, natural selection by which environments selected among variations (later called mutations) and over time this led to species divergence and change. February 15 is Galileo Galilei’s birthday (1581-1585).  We honor him for his telescopic support for the heliocentric model of the solar system proposed by Copernicus.  His observations of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the sunspots on our sun, and the presence of mountains and craters on the moons made modern astronomy possible.  February 16 is the birthday of Hugo de Vries (1848-1935).  We honor him as a rediscoverer of Mendel’s laws on the transmission of hereditary traits.  He also stimulated interest in mutations and attracted a new generation of geneticists to work in that field. February 19 is the birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) whose heliocentric model of the solar system he first formulated as a privately circulated letter (the Commentariolus) and did not allow publication of his larger book until he was near death for fear of the repercussions of his ideas despite his being a priest.  February 28 is the birthday of Linus Pauling (1901-1994) a noted chemist who received a Nobel prize for his work on the chemical bond, his recognition and description of sickle cell anemia as a “molecular disease,” and his activism to bring about nuclear weapons testing restrictions (for which he added a second Nobel prize).

              Scientists of note are distributed across all twelve months.  This is a particularly nice group of my favorite scientists.

WHY BOOK DISCUSSION GROUPS MATTER

I first joined a book discussion group when I was in Los Angeles in 1961.  We were going to the Westwood Unitarian Fellowship and met Peter Gary, a Hungarian composer and Holocaust survivor.  He led a monthly book discussion group and we read books that were stimulating – classics, provocative novels, and non-fiction that enlightened us. In 1968 Nedra and I moved to Stony Brook, New York  and joined the Stony Brook Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship.  They had a book discussion group led by Ernie Kamperman, a dentist.  It used a similar format of books recommended by participants and lively discussions.  In both cases these were held in a host’s home (either Gary’s or Kamperman’s).  When Kamperman got ill and died in 1975, I kept the book discussion going for the next 30 years and they were rotated among a half dozen homes of participants. When we moved to Bloomington, Indiana in November 2009 and joined the UU Church of Bloomington, there was no book discussion group.  I volunteered to start it and so far we meet in our home which has a spacious living room that can hold 12 people comfortably. We pick books that are prize winners or nominees for Nobels, Pulitzers, National Book Awards or Booker Prizes.  We occasionally read a classic (like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America or Lessing’s Nathan the Wise).  The person who recommends the book starts the discussion by telling us why that book was chosen. The conversation for an hour is lively and we then have coffee and cake and discuss what we should read next, alternating a work of fiction and a work of non-fiction.  The result of some 50 years of reading at least a book each month outside my fields of genetics or history of science has been enriching.  I learn from others and see how differently we interpret the works we read. It is also nice to have a sustained discussion on ideas that matter in a world that has abandoned soirees and replaced them with full time pundits on television. 

WHY I LIKE TO WRITE

I like to write.  My interest arose when I was in high school. It was coupled with an equal passion to read widely.  I was also fortunate in having read some of Samuel Pepys’s diary entries on the great London Fire of 1666 and the Plague year that preceded it. It was such a revelation that someone who lived 300 years ago was giving an eyewitness account of what he saw and experienced. I began my own diary using speckled covered composition books.  I did as Pepys did.  I recorded the day.  I wasn’t interest in contemplation or probing for deep meanings about life.  Just capturing the present day in one page was my intent.  I did not address my diary as “Dear Diary.”  This was not a letter to an abstract being.  This was me writing for me to sum up the day.  Writing also led me to use the subject-verb-object narrative  flow of the sentence.  It is easier to read than complex sentences with passive constructions. I had no idea I would be writing books someday. Writing a diary made writing as effortless as eating or breathing.  It became a natural function of my life.  

My first book had the working title “:The Gene Concept.” I had originally intended to write a genetics text while on sabbatical leave from UCLA in 1965. I thought I would work on the historical section first.  I soon found myself steeped in reading the articles of past geneticists in the Woods Hole Marine Biology Library. My 5 x 8 cards were filled with notes and quotes from these articles. I began writing them as chapters of conflict among contending ideas and personalities that emerged from the papers I read. By the end of the sabbatical, I had a manuscript.  I changed the title when I learned the title I desired was already being used in a paperback book.  I then renamed it “The Gene: A Critical History.”  That was 1966.  Since then I have written about a dozen books almost half of them after I retired at the age of 70.  The most time I put into a book was Muller’s biography [Genes, Radiation, and Society: the Life and work of H. J. Muller]. I spent seven summers just reading Muller’s papers at the Lilly Library on the Indiana University campus. My preference for writing is scholarly books, not popularizations of science. I want my books to reveal what I discover from reading on a topic.  My scientific approach is that of a Baconian, trying to infer meaning from a mass of information, looking for connections.

I also learned to tolerate disappointment.  Not every book will appeal to a publisher. Not every book will get glowing praise.  My reward for doing scholarly books comes from their status as works which taught me something that I did not know before.  I had immense joy teaching science to undergraduates and books give me a similar joy when I receive a kind comment from a reader in another country and know that what I found added to that reader’s view of life. 

MAKERS AND TAKERS DESCRIBE WHO WE ARE

       I am a maker and a taker.  In high school I benefited from reading aloud the classics to my teacher, Morris Cohen, who was going blind.  He did this as a voluntary act because he liked my habit of reading widely. I was a maker in high school because I volunteered to help teachers, painting posters, mimeographing, and helping keep tally of the number of students in classes as they registered for their elective courses.  I became a taker when I was an undergraduate because I accepted a full tuition scholarship to NYU.  I became a tax paying maker by being an elevator operator in the summers and delivered people to their floors in Manhattan’s office buildings.  I also served (unpaid) as managing Editor of the NYU Literary magazine.

      At Indiana University I was a taker again as a Teaching Assistant which gave me free tuition. I was a maker by helping undergraduates in their laboratory courses in comparative anatomy and introductory zoology. I was a taker in accepting fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.  I was a maker by working on several of Muller’s experiments and publishing smaller articles as I prepared my PhD dissertation.

      At Queen’s University I was a maker earning my first full time salary and paying taxes (to Canada) and became a taker when Christina was born and Canada gave a monthly subsidy for each child born because it was promoting population growth.  I was also a maker (for Canada’s economy) by securing grants from the National Research Council of Canada and from the US National Science Foundation and employed my first full time laboratory helper.  AT UCLA I was a maker as I eventually supervised six students who received PhDs in my laboratory and published my first book. I also had a full time laboratory helper paid from my grants.  I was a taker as I received generous grants from the National Science Foundation to support my research. I was also a maker because I paid for my mother’s stay at an assisted living facility for the psychotic and I was a maker because I paid for both my parents’ funerals neither of whom had any insurance.  I was a taker, by forcing my father to apply for his Social Security.  He did not want to receive any money he did not make by his own labor. I convinced him he paid for that Social Security since Roosevelt started it in the mid 1930s.  He had no health insurance so I paid his medical expenses.

     At Stony Brook University I became a maker as a professor doing research, teaching, writing books and articles, and serving as the founding Master of the Honor’s College.  I was a taker as I applied for sabbatical leaves and learned new fields and wrote new books. I was a taker as I asked for a leave of absence to spend a semester teaching on the SS Universe for Semester at Sea.  But I was a maker in teaching three courses and providing shipboard entertainment by writing a play my students put on.

I am now retired since 2001.  I am a maker in writing five books since retirement and serving as the historian for the local Unitarian-Universalist Church of Bloomington.  I am a taker as my Social Security supplements my retirement fund from TIAA-CREF. 

     Anyone who says he or she is a maker and not a taker, is a liar. You cannot survive as a human without being both. You were once a baby, weren't you? Tell me that is not a taker. 

ACTS OF VIOLENCE STILL DEFY A USEFUL EXPLANATION

              We don’t have problems interpreting the behavior of a seven year old child who sets fire to an apartment or house.  It is usually attributed to “playing with matches.” We don’t seek a deeper cause or wonder why some children don’t play with matches.  We also don’t usually think of the child as evil. Children are curious and like to play with things.  I stuck a hairpin in a light socket when I was a child and quickly learned that was a dumb act. Sometimes those trial and error learning experiences end in tragedy.  Think of the children who lost a finger or damaged an eye playing with firecrackers.

              Guns are a different story.  While a match or firecracker or hairpin in a light socket can be deadly, most children do not seriously hurt themselves or others.  But a loaded gun in a house is asking for trouble if a child finds it.  Children are curious and they explore.  I found my father’s “eight-page bibles” (a sort of comic strip pornography) hidden behind the top row of his books and had to stand on a chair to reach it.  Pity the parent who would be dumb enough to hide a weapon that way (some people are dumb that way).  Guns are dangerous because they have a stunning lethality when they are accidentally or deliberately used by a child or by a person possessed with rage. I saw a neighbor’s child chase his brother with a metal chain and if he had caught up with him, I do not doubt he would have swung it with all his might.   We can understand rage, and barroom brawls and spats between spouses and betrayed lovers.

              What is still hard to figure out is what goes on in the mind of psychotic individual who plots mayhem, buying guns, lots of ammunition, occasionally making homemade bombs, and then goes out to a school, church, mall, or movie theater and tries to kill as many people as possible. Is the person driven by ideology (sometimes), by a desire for execution by police instead of “simple” self-inflicted suicide (sometimes), or by something we may never know (sometimes)?  My mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and had frequent fights with our neighbors. She once tore the doorknob off a neighbor’s door. At home she sometimes took dishes and smashed them on the floor.  My brother and I would run to our bedroom and dive under it until her rages passed.   I’ve known other psychotic individuals who do not express physical rage when they are in an emotional stew.  Some are suicidal.  Some withdraw into a shell and cut themselves off from other human contact. Some run away.  I don’t think there is anyone who could predict what type of specific behavior a psychotic mind will produce.  At the same time there are stressed individuals who take that tension and sublimate it into creative work, art, science, scholarship, or invention.  We do not know if there is a switch in our minds that allows some of us to handle disappointment and insecurity with creative acts and others to brood their way to plotting mass murder. Anyone who has a gun in the house and has a troubled relative is taking terrific risks.