The People in the Trees (8 page)

This was perhaps even more true fifty years ago than it is today. My classmates—or at least those I came in contact with over my four years—were easily divided into two categories. Those in the first category, the less objectionable of the two, were dull and obedient and enjoyed memorization. Those in the second, more offensive group were grasping and dreamy, bewitched by their own future
status in the world. But they were all ambitious, competitive, and eager for their own bit of glory.

I was not a particularly distinguished student. Although I was probably one of the most intellectually curious and creative members of my class, or even the entire school, there were many, many others who were better, more diligent students than I: they went to every class, they took notes, they did each night’s reading. But I was occupied with other things. At the time I was an avid beetle collector, a habit and interest I had maintained since childhood; naturally, the opportunities to find unusual beetles in Boston were somewhat limited, but during the spring months, I would take sometimes days at a time and ride a train down to Connecticut, where Owen was earning a doctorate in American literature at Yale. I would leave my bag at his place and then catch another, smaller, dozier train out to the countryside, where I would spend the day in one field or another with my net and my notebook and a pickle jar containing a bloom of cotton damp with formaldehyde. When the sky grew orange, I would hitchhike back to New Haven, where I would spend the evening in Owen’s suite, eating whatever he had prepared and trying, with limited success, to engage him in conversation. Owen had grown more and more silent over the years (for which I must admit I was grateful, for his elaboration on his studies, which concerned Walt Whitman and the American imagination, sorely tested my claims of intellectual promiscuity), and watching him cut his omelet into small, fussy trapezoids, I had to stop myself thinking that he reminded me of our stolid, lumpen father.

Naturally, my professors were not enthusiastic about my skipping so many classes, but since I always did well on my tests and papers, there was little they could do to punish me but deliver lectures on how my lack of discipline would all but ensure mediocrity in my professional life. I didn’t doubt their seriousness or their sincerity, but neither did I allow myself to worry about my own future; even then I knew that I was bound to have the sort of adventures for which I would not be best or usefully equipped by a perfect attendance record.

I do not wish, however, to idealize what was at least partially a fit of tiresome and immature disrespect for my professors and the institution. Now, in retrospect, with my career and legacy being what
they are, I suppose it is all very easy to say that I knew everything would resolve itself in my favor in the end and that my lack of ambition was genuine. Though if I am to be honest, I suppose I should acknowledge too that I was even then so eager for a certain sort of greatness, the sort that seemed both possible and yet so distant, a blurry-edged dream on the periphery of my vision, that at the time it seemed easier to pretend to all and to myself that I did not care for a spectacular future at all, lest I come to think that my time in medical school—and my successes or failures there—might become a predictor for the rest of my life, something that might determine the chances of that shimmering image coalescing into something more vivid, or not.

But it was in my third year of medical school that things really changed for me, or rather, that I really changed things. This was the year that Gregory Smythe extended to me an invitation to work in his lab. You will now understand why this was so surprising, and indeed, for many years I was asked about my time there with some regularity.
¹³

I would be lying if I said I was not initially flattered. Nowadays, a mention of Gregory Smythe is greeted (if it is answered with any sort of recognition at all) with ridicule, the sort of self-assured, self-satisfied smirk that is always girded with both relief and fear, the kind of response the mention of many of today’s most highly regarded scientists’ names will no doubt provoke a generation or two from now. But back when I was in school, Smythe was considered an important mind, a visionary, the sort of doctor and scientist it was expected one wanted to become.
¹⁴

Smythe was also something of an unusual figure on the campus
and in the scientific community. For one, he was involved in what was widely acknowledged as some of the more interesting medical work at the time. Today it is very easy to laugh at the sorts of misguided notions and theories that were once considered groundbreaking, but there is no denying that the 1940s were, in their way, a period of great scientific expansion. As wrong (and there is no gentler way to state it) as many of Smythe’s and his colleagues’ theories were eventually revealed to be, his generation also possessed an admirable degree of curiosity, and their thirst—motivated by any number of things, but undeniably genuine—resulted in the foundation of what we recognize today as modern science. Without them, there would have been nothing for you or I to refute, nothing for us to dispel or debunk. I sometimes think, looking back at Smythe’s work, that his most important legacy was identifying the
sorts
of questions that would occupy the scientific community for the next half-century, even if he was ultimately unable to provide the correct answers.

I knew of Smythe before I had even met him. One of the most popular theories in the mid-1940s was that cancer was caused by a viral infection. This theory had been proposed decades earlier, but it had been aggressively promoted by Smythe, who had spent much of the early part of the decade trying to prove that cancer (which, for all scientists knew back then, was caused by demons or sorcery) was not only tidily explainable but also eminently treatable: if, the thinking went, you could isolate the viruses that caused cancer, you would then be able to develop a vaccine to kill it, thus eradicating cancer forever. Like all the most pleasing theories, it was inspired but disciplined, as well as neat, logical, and satisfyingly plausible. It was also accessible, and Smythe’s theory (which became known in the popular press as “Smythe’s conceit,” as if it were the Pythagorean theorem or the theory of evolution, or as if Smythe were the Aristotle-like author of some ancient, semimystical, heavily allegorical philosophy) soon made him a quite famous (and, inevitably, much envied) man in both academic and popular circles.
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But I will return to him later, which seems fitting, as it was only after I had been working in his lab for several months that I actually met Smythe. Unsurprisingly, given my grades, my attitude, and my general unsuitability, I was rather a nonentity for almost the entire time I was there; my colleagues never spoke to me, and my tasks were the most menial. I felt no resentment, however—students such as myself were, it seemed, continually arriving and departing, there one day and vanished the next to someplace else, a presence as temporal as the monkeys we were responsible for feeding, the mice whose water bottles we changed, the dogs with terrified eyes we injected, until one day they too vanished from the lab, taking with them their sounds and smells.

There were usually around fifteen of us—and Smythe, of course—in the lab at any time, and although I had been somehow, romantically, anticipating a free and creative exchange of ideas and theories (I was that naive), it was in truth strictly hierarchical; although a controlled environment and peopled with only a very narrow sliver of society, it hewed slavishly to the formalities and distinctions of rank of the outside world. At the top was Smythe, and what he said—or what his immediate inferiors said he said, which was more often the case—had to be followed without questions or debate. But Smythe was a less and less frequent presence by the time I arrived, more interested, it seemed, in giving interviews to the
New York Times
and to Edward R. Murrow.

The next most important people in the office were the two chief residents, Walter Brassard and Monroe Fitch, both M.D.’s and both (as they managed to remind you every week or so) handpicked by Smythe to run his lab. It was their job to supervise the experiments, write first drafts of Smythe’s research papers and handle them through their eventual publication, and administer the daily goings-on at the lab, which included the hiring of medical students and undergraduates. Both of them disliked me, Brassard more than Fitch, but I had been hired directly by Smythe, and so they were forced to tolerate me. Both of them—again, Brassard more than Fitch—were not unknown in their own right; at school I had heard
professors speak of their brilliance and promise. They were sometimes called “the Turks,” and it was thought that they would be the scientific minds who would succeed Smythe and in the meantime carry his projects to fruition. The two of them rarely spoke to each other and, I saw, were quite competitive. Each disdained the other for the supposed inferiority of his education (a curious thing, as they had been classmates from prep school through medical school), his intellectual vivacity (again, both seemed equally unimaginative to me), and, it became clear, for his relative favor with Smythe at any moment.

Beneath Brassard and Fitch were four junior residents, also M.D.’s, named Parton, Nesser, Ulliver, and Curtis. The four of them were in their way even more insufferable than Brassard and Fitch, who had chosen them (with Smythe’s approval). All of them too had gone to boarding school (though not Brassard and Fitch’s), and all of them walked about the lab with an expression that aspired to solemnity—a gently furrowed brow underneath hair still cut in a schoolboy style, their hands clasped behind their backs in an approximation of greatness—but that was, despite its ambition and seriousness of intent, unable to conceal the slight smiles they wore when they thought others weren’t looking, that admiring preen that women affect upon encountering a mirrored surface. I was assigned to work with Parton, whom I liked best of the bunch, for his smooth, fat-cheeked face and messy shirt (for which he was always being rebuked by the Turks, to whom these sorts of details mattered) and for the fact that he left me alone, forgetting for days that I was assisting him with his experiments and that he was therefore responsible for monitoring my movements and, as they called it, daily output of activity.

After the junior residents came the two medical students: me and a fellow named Julian Turnbull, who was a great favorite of the Turks’ and who never once spoke to me, as if my very inappropriateness were a condition he might be able to contract by even the briefest communication. So he stayed away, and that suited me fine; I knew he was in my year, and that he was from somewhere in Connecticut, and that he had a fiancée at Wellesley, but I knew nothing of how he thought nor where his intelligence lay, for he never
spoke of those matters, almost as if they were incidental to his life at the lab.

Next came two undergraduates, both of them usually biology majors at the college (these turned over so quickly and were at any rate so interchangeable that none of us ever bothered to learn their names), both of them headed for medical school, both of them always looking rather frightened: to be working in Smythe’s lab as an undergraduate was an almost kingly honor, and they wore on their faces expressions of fear and pride. Looking at them, I sometimes wondered what promises had been extracted from them to win them these slots, what tests they had had to pass with their advisers, what obligations they now carried.

After the undergraduates came a man named Dean O’Grady, who, in the humor of the day, was known as Fat Irish because he was fat and Irish. Fat Irish was the person in the lab whose work was the most visible and qualifiable: while the rest of us took notes and flicked our fingernails against air bubbles in syringes and extracted blood and took more notes, Fat Irish took care of the animals, and did the things we would not. He cleaned the monkeys’ cages and fed them a slurry of browned bananas and oatmeal. He changed the mice’s water and cleaned weeping scabs from the dogs’ eyes. I was impressed by his impassivity: he was neither an animal lover nor a sentimentalist (the lab had once had one of those, I learned, and it had ended disastrously when Fitch had discovered him late one night trying to shoo the dogs from their cages and into his waiting truck), nor did he seem impressed by or interested in the lab itself. You sometimes had animal caretakers—as I would have myself one day—whose hatred for the people who ran the lab was visceral. It was not because they were animal lovers (a job application from anyone who admitted to loving animals was immediately thrown away) but because they abhorred science and the people who practiced science, all of us in our white coats and what they considered our despicable arrogance, though whether it was our education they hated or what we were doing
with
our education (they considered one excessive and the other self-indulgent) was difficult to say. They were not people capable of superior cognitive reasoning, and because they were unable to understand what it was we were doing and yet
were equally unwilling to admit their limitations, they found it easier to call us names and detest us. (It is not only animal caretakers who behave like this, but also journalists, and animal activists, and priests, and politicians, and housewives, and artists—people, in other words, for whom every mystery must be attributed to human arrogance and evil.)