vistas are long gone. Essays today, mine included, are written in the realm of a viral Internet, where imaginary gardens of fancy have yielded to a thicket of facts and “alternative facts” through which reason is the surest guide.
In the first four sections of this book, the essays deal with four themes to which I’ve returned over the years. “Going Viral” connects a 2016 Woods Hole lecture on gene splicing to a fictional discovery made in Sinclair Lewis’s 1925 novel Arrowsmith: a virus that cures the plague. We also find a link between the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and gun violence in the United States, both of which have gone viral. We trace Zika virus and the drug thalidomide to fetal abnormalities, forms of which have not deterred their victims from fame or infamy. Figuring out how viruses turned purple petunias white led to a Nobel prize and an inscription on a monument on Columbus Avenue in New York City, while a disease of British royalty (lupus) directly affected the history of health care in the United States.
“Science Fictions” lays out histories of the age-long contest between experimental reason and febrile beliefs such as “animal magnetism,” “homeopathy,” “distant healing,” and “intelligent design.” We meet Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Anton Mesmer, Edgar Allan Poe and Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. We conclude that truth is no stranger to fiction.
In “Two for the Road,” we remember lifelong partnerships between two people, married or not, unions that have given us oxygen (the Lavoisiers), radium (the Curies), women in medicine (the Blackwells), “America the Beautiful” and the New Deal (Bates and Comans), and the neatest prose written by a member of the James family (Alice James and her Katharine).
The fourth section, “Beside the Golden Door,” considers contributions made to American science by immigrants who passed by that Lady lifting her lamp. I write about Albert Einstein and Currier McEwen, then dean of the NYU Medical School, and about Richard Dawkins, who returned to Oxford from the United States with a Gene McCarthy sticker on his Ford. I contrast the experiences of scientists like Jan Vilcek and Roslyn Yalow, who became Americans to escape racial prejudice in Europe, with that of Percy Julian, a black American scientist who learned chemistry in Vienna and returned to face racial prejudice at home.
The last chapter is a personal memoir dedicated to my mentor in the lands of reason, Lewis Thomas, a polymath who merged arts and science in all his works. He was also a mean wit who enjoyed H. L. Mencken’s quip “Martinis are the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.” I’d say that Thomas’s first book of essays, The Lives of a Cell, is a martini—with a twist. Cheers!
Arrowsmith and CRISPR at the Marine Biological Laboratory
As the audience flows out of the auditorium [after] the Friday Evening Lecture, the MBL’s weekly grand occasion when the guest lecturers from around the world turn up to present their most stunning pieces of science, there is the same jubilant descant . . . half shout, half song made by confluent, simultaneously raised human voices explaining things to each other.
—Lewis Thomas, The MBL (1972)
ON ONE OF THOSE GRAND OCCASIONS, Jennifer Doudna of Berkeley presented the latest news of CRISPR to a packed auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory. Her audience was the usual mixed crowd one finds at the Friday Evening Lectures in Woods Hole. I spotted working scientists, grad students, lab assistants, undergraduates, a score of academicians, a Nobel laureate or two, attentive families and friends, hailing from all corners of the globe. The dress code ranged from country jeans to khakis, bike gear to saris, backpacks to bow ties.
After the smartphones were turned off and the tablets stowed, Doudna proceeded to hold the audience in thrall for an hour with bulletins from the front lines of the war against error—in the gene.
Doudna began by spelling out the acronym CRISPR, explaining that it stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” in the DNA of bacteria. When viruses called bacteriophages infect a bacterium, the CRISPR system filches DNA from the phage virus and inserts it into its own DNA. That genetic memory of the encounter will be passed to its progeny. In 2005, French scientists (Pourcel et al.) studying genes of a bacterium (Yersinia pestis) that caused plague in 1960s Indochina, found remnants of bacteriophage DNA at CRISPR spacers in the plague bacilli. They proposed that the locus “may represent a memory of past genetic aggressions.” With its neighboring cas (CRISPR-associated system) genes, CRISPR works in bacteria like a smallpox vaccination in humans, providing adaptive immunity to a virus.
CRISPR generates a unique set of RNAs that guide Cas proteins directly to the DNA of any future phage aggressor. The neatest of the Cas proteins is Cas9, from a streptococcus; it’s a DNA-cleaving enzyme. But progress with the Cas9 system for gene editing had been hampered because it required two different guide RNAs. Doudna detailed the remarkable contribution she and Emanuelle Charpentier made to the field in 2012, as described in Jinek et al. They engineered single, specific RNAs that could guide the Cas protein to cleave DNA of any species at any given site, permitting normal DNA repair by the cell’s built-in machinery.
By excising an unwanted gene and replacing it with a desired substitute, they’d waved the magic wand of genetic engineering. Doudna went on to show dazzling animations in which twists in RNA, tweaks of DNA, and acrobatics of the Cas proteins accomplished the task. She gave examples of how the method had already been applied to modify the color of mushrooms and to repair the faulty genes in models of muscular dystrophy.
Doudna closed by warning that perhaps “the science is going too fast.” While CRISPR technology can erase crippling misprints in our genes, there remain ethical roadblocks to extending the method to cells of the human germ line. At present, she argued, CRISPR should be kept away from human sperm and eggs until there is a general consensus as to how, when—and if. The audience was clearly in accord and showed their agreement by waves of applause at the end of the talk.
AS THE AUDIENCE MOVED OUT over the steps of the auditorium, one heard—as Thomas put it—the customary descant of “confluent, simultaneously raised human voices explaining things to each other.”
A senior scientist enthused, “Great stuff! No wonder her paper went viral! But, on the other hand . . .”
A course instructor interrupted, “You know, that egg slide of Doudna’s looked like the old MBL physiology experiment: you get sea urchin eggs to divide by changing salts rather than adding sperm.”
A grad student chimed in, “That was Jacques Loeb, the guy who got famous for parthenogenesis!”
“Wasn’t he the old prof with the accent in Arrowsmith?” a jean-clad fan of oldies asked.
That one clicked: “Yeah sure, Loeb was Dr. Gottlieb in Arrowsmith, the book and the movie.” . . . “I think the young doc tried to use phage to cure the plague.” . . . “Great movie, but the wife died.”
As the group broke up and traipsed along to the evening reception, it seemed to me I had heard that song before. Sure enough, guided by the rich archives of the MBL library and my tattered copies of Loeb’s The Mechanistic Conception of Life (1912) and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowmith (1925), I came
