Exuberance: The Passion for Life (50 page)

74.
“Damn the men”: Sinclair Lewis,
Arrowsmith
, p. 272.

75.
“just wanted the answer”: Crick,
What Mad Pursuit
, pp. 69–70.

76.
“Maurice continually frustrated Francis”: Watson,
The Double Helix
, pp. 19–20.

77.
“Our characters were imperfect”: James Watson, speech at Harvard University, March 11, 2002.

78.
When I asked him: author’s interview with James Watson, February 24, 2002.

79.
“It is necessary to share it”: ibid.

80.
“Both young men are somewhat mad hatters”: from Gerard Pomerat’s diary, April 1, 1953; quoted in
Inspiring Science
, p. 66.

81.
“would pop up from his chair”: Watson,
Double Helix
, p. 127.

82.
“winged into the Eagle”: ibid., p. 126.

83.
more innate than learned: I asked most of the individuals I interviewed for my book whether they thought exuberance was innate, learned, or a mixture of both. They responded as follows: Dr. Samuel Barondes—“Heredity plays a big role but environment does too. I think you can teach people to be a little more or less exuberant. But it remains difficult to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear”; J. Carter Brown—“Primarily innate”; Dr. Andrew Cheng—“It’s innate. In my experience, it can’t really be learned. But it can be influenced”; Dr. Robert Farquhar—“It’s in you”; Dr. Robert Gallo—“One’s innate biology cannot be excluded as a major force dictating emotions, and exuberance must be regarded chiefly as part of the emotions not the intellect. I come back to favoring the innate because there are many ways one can select to avoid hurt [and I] seem prone to use exuberance”; Senator George McGovern—“Equally innate and learned”; Dr. James Watson—“Most likely of innate origin”; Senator Paul
Wellstone—“Innate. I was born bouncing”; Dr. Ellen Winner—“My guess is that it is temperamental and inborn. I think that the environment can kill it, but I don’t think the environment can create it.”

84.
“I just like to know”: quoted in Melvyn Bragg, with Ruth Gardiner,
On Giants’ Shoulders: Great Scientists and Their Discoveries from Archimedes to DNA
(New York: John Wiley, 1998), p. 327.

85.
“it’s not the precious”: quoted in J. D. McClatchy, “Braving the Elements,”
The New Yorker
, March 27, 1995.

86.
“Our various brains have been programmed”: James Watson, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Liberty Medal Address, City of Philadelphia, July 4, 2000.

87.
“always a student”: quoted in Victor K. McElheny,
Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003), pp. 193–94.

88.
“It was not only in the lab”: Lionel Crawford, “It Smells Right …,” in
Inspiring Science
, p. 179.

89.
“very depressing, but it’s not really”: James Watson, remarks at Harvard University, May 24, 1998; quoted in McElheny,
Watson and DNA
, p. 275.

90.
Passion in the service of reason: James Watson, lecture at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, April 14, 2003.

91.
“Have Fun and Stay Connected”: James D. Watson,
A Passion for DNA
(Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000), p. 125.

92.
“I may not be religious”: James D. Watson, with Andrew Berry,
DNA: The Secret of Life
(New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 404–5.

93.
When asked to define “exuberance”: author’s interview and correspondence with Robert Gallo, August 24 and September 6, 2000.

94.
“One might anticipate”: Office of Research Integrity, United States Department of Health and Human Services, November 1993. Accounts of the decision are given in
Nature
, 366: 191 (November 11, 1993) and in
Science
, 262: 1202–3 (November 19, 1993).

95.
This critical issue of dispute: The issue of cell culture contamination is exceptionally complicated in the dispute over the discovery of the AIDS virus. The codiscoverers, Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, in discussing their related discoveries, have acknowledged the problem of cross-contamination in public interviews and in jointly published scientific writings, most recently R. C. Gallo and L. Montagnier, “The Discovery of HIV as the Cause of AIDS,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, 349: 2283–85 (2003). Dr. Gallo has summarized the controversy and its resolution as follows, a summary that has been endorsed by Professor Montagnier (May 2004).

Gallo and Montagnier each proved he independently isolated HIV from different patients. Montagnier reported the first virus isolate from a person
with enlarged lymph glands in 1983, a syndrome considered to be a prelude to AIDS. By early 1984, Gallo was able to report that he and his coworkers had obtained HIV in cell cultures from forty-eight different patients. This linkage was one of his demonstrations that this new virus was the cause of AIDS. He and his colleague Mika Popovic were also the first to succeed in propagating
some
strains of HIV continuously in laboratory cell cultures, a technique that would be crucial in their development of the HIV blood test. One of the HIV strains grew better than the rest, so Gallo selected it for use in the blood test.

Later it became clear that this HIV strain was one that Montagnier had sent to Gallo to examine as a part of their planned collaboration. It had accidentally cross-contaminated the Gallo-Popovic culture and would thus cause years of controversy. However, Montagnier had emphatically stated that his first HIV strain (BRU) could not replicate continuously in cell culture, and indeed Gallo and Popovic verified this the first time Montagnier sent them his virus sample. Not having adequate virus material, they asked Montagnier to send another sample to build their collaboration. Unbeknownst to Montagnier, by this time his original HIV isolate had been accidentally contaminated with HIV from a specimen from an AIDS patient he had just began to work with. When sent to Gallo, the new HIV strain also contaminated one of the Gallo-Popovic cultures—the one they had selected for the blood test. This very strain remains the best strain of HIV for growth in cell culture, and because of this property later contaminated the cultures of several other scientists.

Ironically, the HIV strain that was to cause so much political turmoil not only grew best in the laboratory but also saved many lives.

 

A similar account of the contaminated strains was recounted by Montagnier in “A History of HIV Discovery”
(Science
, 298: 1727–28 [2002]), and jointly by Gallo and Montagnier in their 2003 article in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, reflecting back on their discoveries of twenty years earlier. Two short but excellent journalistic accounts have been given, by Malcolm Gladwell (“NIH Vindicates Researcher Gallo in AIDS Virus Dispute,”
Washington Post
, April 26, 1992) and Nicholas Wade (“Method and Madness: The Vindication of Robert Gallo,”
New York Times Magazine
, December 26, 1993).

96.
“He’s incredibly resilient”: quoted in Francis X. Clines, “For Besieged Scientist, New Start in New Lab,”
New York Times
, March 11, 1997.

97.
“We are not alike in our styles”: Robert Gallo,
Virus Hunting
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 169.

98.
“It is highly competitive in science”: “In Their Own Words: NIH Researchers Recall the Early Years of AIDS,” oral history interview at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, November 4, 1994. The interviewers were Dr. Victoria Harden and Dennis Rodrigues. Archived at
http://aidshistory.nih.gov
.

99.
“He does an excellent job”: Bernie Poiesz, quoted in “The Untold Story of HUT78,”
Science
, 248: 1499–1507 (1990), p. 1501.

100.
“No. Empathetic is a better word”: quoted in Clines, “For Besieged Scientist.”

101.
“capacity to reemerge”: Gallo interview with author.

102.
“You know, the juices flow”: quoted in “The Untold Story of HUT78,” p. 1507.

103.
“I have to say”: Oral history interview at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, August 25, 1994. The interviewers were Dr. Victoria Harden and Dennis Rodrigues. Archived at
http://aidshistory.nih.gov
.

104.
“To Dr. Gallo for his tenacious”: citation for the 1982 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.

105.
“To a desperate moment”: citation for the 1986 Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award.

106.
“I am here only to introduce”: letter from Robert Gallo to the author, April 27, 2001.

107.
“I saw science”: Gallo,
Virus Hunting
, p. 19.

108.
“I read the books”: author’s conversation with James Watson, June 18, 2003.

109.
“values criticism almost higher than friendship”: author’s conversation with James Watson, August 6, 2000.

110.
“temperament for laughter”: D. Carleton Gajdusek, autobiographical preface to “Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru,” Nobel Lecture, December 13, 1976, Stockholm, Sweden; reprinted in
Science
, 197: 943–60 (1977).

111.
“As a boy of five”: ibid.

112.
“intellectual curiosity and playful enthusiasm”: D. Carleton Gajdusek, “Early Inspiration,”
Creativity Research Journal
, 7: 341–49 (1994), p. 341.

113.
“Everything he possessed”: quoted in Richard Rhodes,
Deadly Feasts: The “Prion” Controversy and the Public’s Health
(New York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 28.

114.
“extraordinarily fundamental advance”: citation for the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

115.
“who combines the intelligence”: quoted in Rhodes,
Deadly Feasts
, p. 55.

116.
“exceeded the sacred forty-five-minute limit”: George Klein,
Live Now
(New York: Prometheus, 1997), pp. 89–90.

117.
When I asked Gajdusek: letters to the author from Carleton Gajdusek, April 5, 2000; November 16, 2001; July 24, 2002; October 30, 2003.

118.
“I often radiate it”: letter from Gajdusek to the author, November 16, 2001.

119.
“Gajdusek is quite manically energetic”: quoted in Rhodes,
Deadly Feasts
, p. 32.

120.
“I play with ideas”: Gajdusek, “Early Inspiration,” p. 343.

121.
“I look on my current joyful years”: letter from Carleton Gajdusek to Richard Wyatt, April 5, 2000.

122.
Samuel Barondes: letter from Samuel Barondes to the author, April 12, 2000.

123.
“is a genius with celestial pinball”: Don Yeomans, quoted in Oliver Morton, “The Art of Falling,”
Wired
, December 1999.

124.
“a classic case study”: author’s interview with Robert Farquhar, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, May 11, 2001.

125.
Exuberance, Cheng makes clear: author’s interview with Andrew Cheng, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, May 11, 2001.

126.
“I remember my first encounter”: Katy Payne,
Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants
(New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 38–39.

127.
“the water tastes of the pipes”: ibid., p. 10.

128.
“The organ was alive”: ibid., pp. 20–21.

129.
“Happy fishermen”: ibid., p. 109.

130.
When I asked Payne: letter from Katy Payne to the author, August 8, 2000.

131.
“I went into an intensely manic state”: Joyce Poole,
Coming of Age with Elephants
(New York: Hyperion, 1996), p. 106.

132.
“Cynthia and I spent the long days”: ibid., p. 82.

133.
“What do elephants think about?”: Joyce Poole, keynote address to the 22nd Annual Elephant Managers Workshop, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Orlando, Fla., November 9–12, 2001.

134.
“for giving me a life of meaning”: Poole,
Coming of Age
, p. xi.

135.
When I asked Poole: letter from Joyce Poole to the author, September 27, 2000.

136.
“my response to what I see”: letter from Hope Ryden to the author, April 22, 2000.

137.
“Good science as a way of life”: James Watson, speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1962, printed in
Les Prix Nobel
(Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1963).

1.
“just a little more cheerful”: Hans Bethe, quoted in John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin,
Richard Feynman: A Life in Science
(London: Penguin, 1997), p. 102.

2.
To teach is to show: The word goes back to the prehistoric Indo-European base
deik
, “show,” which also produced the Greek
deiknunai
, “show.” See John Ayto,
Dictionary of Word Origins
(New York: Arcade, 1991), p. 522.

3.
“All vigor is contagious”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Progress of Culture,” in
The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims
(Boston: Fireside,
1919)
, pp. 217–18; essay based on a lecture given by Emerson in 1867.

4.
“My life was extacy”: Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, July 16, 1851, in Henry D. Thoreau,
Journal
, vol. 3: 1848–1851, gen. ed. John C. Broderick, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark R. Patterson, and William Rossi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 305–6.

5.
“Summer was drunken”: Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams (1
907; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 8.

The contrast between city and country and the lasting influence of nature on a young child were similarly observed by Robert Louis Stevenson: “I have never again been happy in the same way. For indeed, it was scarce a happiness of this world, as we conceive it when we are grown up, and was more akin to that of an animal than that of a man. The sense of sunshine, of green leaves, and of the singing of birds, seems never to have been so strong in me as in that place. The deodar upon the lawn, the laurel thickets, the mills, the river, the church bell, the sight of people ploughing … the sharp contrast between this place and the city where I spent the other portion of my time, all these took hold of me, and still remain upon my memory, with a peculiar sparkle and sensuous excitement”
(Memories and Portraits, Memoirs of Himself, Selections from His Notebook
[London: William Heinemann, 1924], p. 151).

6.
“hot pine-woods”: Adams,
Education
, p. 8.

7.
“knew the taste of everything”: ibid.

8.
“the taste of A-B”: ibid.

9.
“the cumuli in a June afternoon sky”: ibid.

10.
“passed in summer”: ibid., p. 39.

11.
“The justification for a university”: Alfred North Whitehead, “Universities and Their Function,” in
The Aims of Education and Other Essays
(New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 139

12.
“so few went to hear Him”: quoted in Richard S. Westfall,
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 209.

13.
“When Newton saw an apple fall”: George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Don Juan
, Canto X, in
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works
, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press), vol. 5, p. 437.

14.
“buckles flew, stays popped”: James Hamilton,
Faraday: The Life
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 17.

15.
“talks rapidly”: quoted in J. G. Crowther,
British Scientists of the Nineteenth Century
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1935), p. 8.

16.
“I have never witnessed”: quoted in June Z. Fullmer,
Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2000), p. 148.

17.
“naturally ardent and speculative”: Sir Henry Holland, quoted in Gwendy Caroe,
The Royal Institution
(London: John Murray, 1985), p. 39.

18.
“The temperament of Davy”: J. A. Paris,
The Life of Sir Humphry Davy
(London: Colburn, 1831).

19.
“minute globules of potassium”: quoted in Crowther,
British Scientists
, pp. 48–49.

20.
“are like blessings of heaven”: Humphry Davy,
Fragmentary Remains, Literary and Scientific
, ed. John Davy (London: John Churchill, 1858), p. 59.

21.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: quoted in Crowther,
British Scientists
, p. 17.

22.
“The sensation created”: quoted in Anne Treneer,
The Mercurial Chemist: A Life of Sir Humphry Davy
(London: Methuen, 1963), p. 86.

23.
“I was seized with the desire”: from the memoirs of Humphry Davy, quoted in Fullmer,
Young Humphry Davy
, p. 181.

24.
“The appearances of the greater number”: quoted in Crowther,
British Scientists
, pp. 7–8.

25.
“A lecturer should exert”: quoted in Caroe,
Royal Institution
, p. 123.

26.
“bangs, flashes, soap bubbles”: Michael Faraday,
A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical History of a Candle
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1861), p. 88.

27.
“placed two vessels”: ibid.

28.
“The Christmas lectures”: Hamilton,
Faraday
, p. 208.

29.
“I claim the privilege”: Faraday,
Chemical History of a Candle
, p. 10; a course of six lectures delivered at the Royal Institution during the Christmas holidays of 1860–1861.

30.
“Nothing is too wonderful”: diary entry for March 19, 1849, in
Faraday’s Diary
, ed. Thomas Martin (London: Royal Institution, 1932–36), vol. 5, p. 152.

31.
“Wonderful
it is”: All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Faraday’s
Chemical History of a Candle
.

32.
“Look at the way we see it”: Richard Feynman,
The Meaning of It All
(London: Penguin, 1998), p. 10; lectures given at the University of Washington in April 1963. For an excellent biography of Feynman, see James Gleick’s
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
(New York: Vintage, 1993).

33.
“the most brilliant young physicist”: quoted in Gribbin and Gribbin,
Richard Feynman
, p. 101.

34.
“I think Dick”: David Goodstein, “Richard P. Feynman, Teacher,” in
“Most of the Good Stuff”: Memories of Richard Feynman
, ed. Laurie M. Brown and John S. Rigden (New York: Springer Verlag, 1993), pp. 115–24, quotes on pp. 115, 118.

35.
“He urged each of us”: Laurie M. Brown, “To Have Been a Student of Richard Feynman,” ibid., pp. 53–58, quote on p. 54.

36.
“I never heard him”: quoted in Gribbin and Gribbin,
Richard Feynman
, p. xiv.

37.
“this excitement in the house”: quoted ibid., p. 9.

38.
“discussions turned into laughter”: John Wheeler, “The Young Feynman,” in Brown and Rigden,
“Most of the Good Stuff,”
p. 19.

39.
“When people asked him”: Joan Feynman, “The Beginnings of a Teacher,” in Brown and Rigden,
“Most of the Good Stuff,”
p. 169.

40.
“As I watched”: John S. Rigden, “Feynman at La Cañada High School,” in Brown and Rigden,
“Most of the Good Stuff,”
p. 157.

41.
“done for the excitement”: Feynman,
Meaning of It All
, p. 9.

42.
“understand and appreciate the great adventure”: ibid.

43.
“It is a great adventure”: ibid., p. 39.

44.
“The world is so wonderful”: Richard P. Feynman,
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
, ed. Jeffrey Robbins (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1999), p. 101.

45.
“Where did the stuff of life”: Feynman,
Meaning of It All
, p. 12.

46.
“I think we should teach them wonders”: Feynman,
Pleasure of Finding Things Out
, p. 102.

47.
“The most beautiful and deepest experience”: Albert Einstein, “My Credo,” speech given to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, 1932.

48.
“to penetrate deeper still”: Feynman,
Pleasure of Finding Things Out
, p. 144.

49.
“makes a straight-cut ditch”: Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, September 19, 1850, in
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
, ed. B. Tarrey and F. H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 22.

50.
“Not explaining science”: Carl Sagan, “Describing the World as It Is, Not as It Would Be,” in
The Writing Life
, ed. Marie Arana (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 306.

51.
“we’re moved”: ibid., p. 308.

52.
“I’m delighted with the width of the world!”: Feynman,
Pleasure of Finding Things Out
, p. 203.

53.
“I love to teach”: ibid.

54.
“concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory”: Pat Conroy,
The Water Is Wide
(1972; New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 33. For a recent account of the exuberant teaching of disadvantaged children, see Rafe Esquith’s
There Are No Shortcuts
(New York: Pantheon, 2003).

55.
“What could I teach them”: Conroy,
Water Is Wide
, p. 81.

56.
“All right, young cats”: ibid., pp. 51–52.

57.
“life was good”: ibid., p. 319.

58.
“going to have more”: ibid., p. 120.

59.
“The chief wonder of education”: Adams,
Education
, p. 55.

60.
“embrace life openly”: Conroy,
Water Is Wide
, p. 251.

61.
“Lord, I am a teacher”: Pat Conroy,
The Prince of Tides
(New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 662.