The Price of Altruism (15 page)

It was like Display all over again. Using a Schott BG 12 primary filter, about 4 mm thick, plus a 405 mu interference filter, George went searching for porphyrins in slices of rat liver tissue. The usual secondary filter was the Wratten No. 15 gelatin, sometimes supplanted by a Corning didymium glass, Color Specification No. 1-60 (Glass No. 5120), to increase red-green contrast by removing yellow. His light source was an Osram HBO 200 mercury arc. The problem was that the fluorescence faded too quickly, so George constructed a slide-cooling system to reduce the rate of fading. He decided to try first a simple system in which rapid jets of air are cooled and dried by dry ice and then blown over and under the slide, with the microscope enclosed in a box to keep out moist room air. On occasion he’d take the girls to the lab to marvel at the sight of the mysterious freezing smokers.

Preliminary results seemed promising when a second difficulty arose: Most animal tissues showed comparatively weak fluorescence, except when stained with fluorescent dyes called fluorochromes. This made it difficult to recognize cell types and to observe the exact localization of the porphyrin. So George developed special equipment by which a phase contrast image of contrasting color and smoothly controllable intensity could be combined with the fluorescence image. A beam splitter was used to combine the irradiating violet or ultraviolet light and the visible light of contrasting color, and the intensity of the visible light could be controlled by a variable transformer.
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The problem had been solved, and Schwartz was ecstatic. George was “one of the most remarkable individuals” he had ever known, and the only person with whom he had worked who deserved to be called “a man of genius.”
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His relationship with Julia was unraveling. Religion, temperament, and now sex, his limerick made clear, placed them in universes squarely apart. The move to Minnesota had failed to save their marriage. He was growing edgy; she increasingly, and understandably, hurt. He had met another woman, and over the summer, another from Kansas City, named Jan.
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By the beginning of 1953 George left the cottage on Fortieth Street, saying good-bye to his two little girls. “This, I believe, automatically makes me owe you $20,” he wrote to his old friend Al, whose skepticism had been right all along.
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George had come a long way from the leaky apartment on Ninety-fourth Street, where he and Edison and Alice had huddled together in the twenties and thirties to survive during the Depression. He had graduated with highest honors from a top university, worked on the Manhattan Project, married, started a family, and now separated. In a decade he had moved six times: from New York to Cambridge to Chicago and back, then to Morristown, then to Minnesota. Like a real-life Forrest Gump, he was present at every important juncture: the making of the bomb, the development of the transistor, the growth of modern medicine. Never at the center, he arrived to solve problems, winning admiration before disappearing like a ghost. Things that seemed to baffle everyone else came easily to him. But he was restless and unhappy. Maybe the people at the co-op had been right: Maybe he really was different from the rest.

When the Russians got their own bomb in the summer of 1949, the world seemed to change in an instant. There would not be years of a lag to enjoy. Russia had caught up and the Cold War had arrived. For the time being it was playing itself out in Asia, around the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, and in the development of hydrogen bombs. When Truman left the Oval Office in 1953 just as George was settling into a dingy student complex north of the university, and Stalin died two months later, it was anyone’s guess where the world was heading.
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Meanwhile little Kathleen had contracted polio but was recovering. The doctors recommended blowing air into her brain, but, reading up on the subject at the medical library and at her bedside, Julia refused. Soon Kathleen was recovering. Since supply had been short, George was the only Price not to get his gamma globulin. Away from his family now, he had contracted the disease and was in a hospital bed, exhausted. Alice begged him to remember how much she loved him. Hoping to pick up her boy’s spirits, she wrote of a lavish banquet at the Waldorf thrown by her Japanese boarder Mr. Washio in honor of the imperial prince of Japan. It gave him little comfort. He was thirty-one years old. His future was uncertain. Depressed and alone, George Price was helplessly roaming.
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John von Neumann (1903–1957)

Warder Clyde Allee (1885–1955)

I
am violently anti-Communist,” the man intoned in a low accented voice, “and a good deal more militaristic than most.” It was January 1955, Capitol Hill, and not a senator in the confirmation hearing room stirred. John von Neumann was going to be sworn in as a new member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and John von Neumann was a man to listen to.
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The H-bomb was on everyone’s mind. Back in 1952 the “Ivy Mike” trial had destroyed the Enewetok atoll. It was official: The bomb was terrible and viable. But it would take years to build an arsenal, be massively expensive, and would have to be accomplished under a veil of complete secrecy. Still, in possession of a large stockpile, America would unequivocally rule the world. That is, if Russia didn’t have its own program too. If it did, the arsenals would cancel each other out, with the already costly expense and effort incurred. Should she “defect,” then, and build the arsenal, or “cooperate” and hold off? Clearly each side would prefer that no one stockpile, rather than both stockpiling for no net gain. But each side might also decide to build its H-bombs either in the hopes of gaining the upper hand or out of fear of being caught without them.

It was a prisoner’s dilemma, and for von Neumann the solution was clear. The Soviets could not be trusted. To save itself and the world, America would need to wage a preventive war, to become, as Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews had called it earlier in the decade, vicious “aggressors for peace.” But when? Von Neumann was adamant. With the room hanging on his every word, he said: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”
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Why was a mathematician being asked by the U.S. Senate whether and when to use the most destructive weapon in history? Surely he was one of the few people who had the knowledge to make the crucial calculations that would make or break the project. But the real reason was different. The H-bomb dilemma hinged on the mystery of human nature. It had been a quest that traveled through economics and biology. And John von Neumann, people said, had finally cracked the nut.

The eighteenth century Scottish economist Adam Smith had a simple message to convey: Under certain conditions free economic competition will lead to the best allocation of society’s resources. It sounded like a paradox, but it was unequivocally true: Unfettered contest will by an “invisible hand” maximize society’s benefits. The more ruthless the competition, the greater the social good; individual selfishness leads to collective benefit and plenty.
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By the time Thorstein Veblen arrived as a professor at the University of Chicago when it opened its gates in 1892, this economic worldview was referred to as “classical.” Welded now more strongly to the political theory of laissez-faire, Adam Smith’s legacy beckoned a new name. Veblen called it “neoclassical economics” and didn’t shy away from expressing his view: He absolutely hated it.
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It was said of Veblen—born in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents—that taking one of his classes was like “undergoing a vivisection without anesthetic.” A notoriously bad teacher, he was also a formidable critic. The basic assumption that individuals pursuing their own self-interest necessarily promote the good of society was to him both insipid and false. Capitalism was leading to “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure.” Not only did this bring waste and inefficiency, it suppressed fundamental human instincts: acquisitiveness, workmanship, parenthood, and idle curiosity. Forms of social control could be used to reawaken them, but this could only be accomplished with the help of a broad science of human behavior. With its exclusive dependence on price theory, neoclassical economics was nothing but a narrow “hedonistic calculus.” Based on “immutable premises,” it had little to do with reality.
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At Yale political economy was associated with social science, at Johns Hopkins with political science, and at Columbia with politics. Chicago was the first university in North America to create an independent department of economics. Veblen had long been kicked out of the university for impropriety; girls liked him, it was said, and he didn’t exactly object.
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Gradually, a worldview almost directly opposed to his own became dominant.

“All talk of social control is nonsense,” Frank Knight was often heard saying in his deep, magisterial voice. The oldest of eleven children raised in religious orthodoxy in McLean County, Illinois, Knight had grown up to become a Chicago professor of economics and a notorious slayer of sacred cows. Clergy and medics were quacks, the institutions of social order imposters, the prevailing moral norms—slaves to fashion. Knight was suspicious of the political system and even more of politicians. “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.” In
Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit
he provided the first complete formulation of perfect competition—unfettered, unencumbered, uncontrolled. Perfect competition was important not because it was always most economically efficient, though it most certainly usually was. Perfect competition was important because it guaranteed individual freedom, and nothing—not the injustice of luck nor the trampling of acceptable standards of fairness—was more important than that.
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The way Knight saw things, societies have five economic problems: How to decide which goods and services to produce and how much of them; how to organize the available productive forces and materials among the various lines of industry and coordinate their use; how to distribute the goods and services; how to bring consumption in line with production; and how to ensure continued economic growth and improvement of the social structure. All five of the problems involve making choices, and there are two alternative mechanisms for directing how such choices should be made: at one extreme, central planning based on the command principle, at the other—a free-market system with voluntary exchange. More and more people in the Economics Department at Chicago had fewer and fewer doubts about which was the superior system. Central planning inevitably became linked with political totalitarianism; free-market went hand in hand with democracy.
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“The theory and teaching that there is a God is a lie.”

The words hit Warder Clyde Allee on the head like an iron gavel hurled from a heavenless sky. He had not been prepared for this. There was silence in the lecture hall. He was confused, saddened. Most of all he was filled with a surge of pity. He felt sorry for the misguided man, his animal evolution professor, a controversial figure who would leave his post some years later on account of an ugly courtroom divorce. He had often heard of such people—infidels, atheists and that sort—but this was the first one he had met, and he planned to show him the error of his ways.
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It was the fall of 1908, Hull Court, University of Chicago. Allee had arrived that summer from Indiana, a strapping, broad-faced twenty-three-year-old, his burly frame and callused hands signs of years of labor on the family farm. Balding and sporting round spectacles, he looked like an intellectual football player, which, in fact, he had been as an undergraduate at Earlham College. Warder’s father, John Wesley Allee, was the son of a Methodist minister from Parke County. When he fell in love with and married Mary Emily Newlin, whose forefathers had established the nearby Quaker settlement of Bloomingdale, he became a “convinced Friend,” but still took the family to the Methodist church from time to time. At eleven Warder was officially converted at a revival meeting. Earlham was the pride of the old Quaker settlements south of Lake Michigan, which had played a role in the Underground Railroad, sneaking black slaves on “Tracks to Freedom” into Canada in the mid-1800s. When he graduated from high school it was only natural that Warder enrolled, joining the football team and becoming a “Hustlin’ Quaker.”
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Now he was at Chicago, a graduate student in the Zoology Department. The cloistered walkways, grass quads, and stone Gothic buildings were a far cry from the open fields and broad woodlands of Indiana where, as a boy, he had fallen in love with nature. Still,
Oekologie
had been a term invented by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel back in 1866 to designate the study of the relations of organisms to their environments, and Chicago was one of the few places in America where ecology could be studied. Warder had arrived a traditional believer. He was excited: Here he would study the nature God had instilled in all His creatures. Wide-eyed, he did not yet know that science would soon fix all that.

Isopods are ugly little creatures. Leggy and segmented, they look like a mysterious aquatic blend of scorpion and cricket. Allee was in love. Excited, he determined he’d crack the mystery of the tiny crustacean, abundant in shallow waters, the deep sea, and freshwater streams and ponds.

Creating artificial currents in the lab, he observed that stream isopods moved toward the current more than pond ones, except when their metabolic rate was low when they were breeding. Since oxygen and carbon dioxide affected metabolic rate, and differed from streams to ponds, it had to be the gases that explained the creatures’ behavior.

Using depression agents like low oxygen, chloretone, potassium cyanide, low temperature and starvation, he could make stream isopods act like pond ones. Conversely, with high oxygen, caffeine, and elevated temperatures, lazy pond dwellers morphed into energized stream sprinters. Since all the isopods were from the same species, differences in behavior could not be due to heredity. Clearly it was all about interaction with the environment.

The discovery shook his religious foundations. Hadn’t the Deity instilled behavior in His creations? If so, how could coffee be so powerful? The iron gavel, he now saw, really did fall from a heavenless sky. There was no “hand of God” to behold, only physics and chemistry. Science was winning out over the supernatural.
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After graduating with a doctorate, Allee was growing uneasy. Married now with a child, he was increasingly disturbed by the war. Why, for heaven’s sake, this horrific bloodshed and carnage? At Chicago science might have laid his childhood belief in an all-powerful God to eternal rest, but at times like this roots provided comfort. If he couldn’t pacify unbelief, he could sure as hell deify pacifism. That March he was appointed chairman of the Quaker War Service for civilian relief in Chicago, an outfit that had grown out of the Monthly Meeting of Friends.

It was early 1917, and the United States still remained on the sidelines. Already conscientious objectors were being humiliated and beaten in military training camps and prisons. Couldn’t enlistment in the newly formed American Friends Service Committee, aiding relief and reconstruction work abroad, qualify as conscription, a form of noncombatant service during war? After all, liberal pacifism held both the individual and the state responsible for the welfare and rights of the citizen. Conscription to go kill and die in war was in direct violation of this most holy of commitments. Individualism was the bedrock of democracy because it meant the assertion of human freedom, not the vulgar triumph of egoism. The least government could do in times of war was to allow pacifists to provide their service in nonviolent currencies.

Allee had recently been appointed professor of biology at Lake Forest College. He had read Kropotkin and in his gut knew that he must be right. But he had yet to convince himself of the biological justification for peace and cooperation with an original scientific discovery of his own.

In the college chapel he preached on the rights of conscientious objectors. When the administration forbade him to preach in the chapel again, he spoke up in the classroom. The college docked his salary. A few faculty and students were heard murmuring the word “traitor” under their breath. Traitor? The local
Springfield News-Report
wasn’t so inhibited: “Sometimes war is unavoidable, and college professors are no more necessary to civilization than carpenters and cobblers.” Allee’s was a “most convenient theory.” If a choice had to be made, “we should prefer to give up the professors.”
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In April, Congress voted to enter the Great War. The requests of the American Friends’ Service had been rejected. At Lake Forest, Allee waited for more peaceful times. If he wanted to find scientific proof to combat the folly of human warfare, he would need to go someplace else.

On the afternoon of December 28, 1917, the delegates shuffled into the Animal Morphology Building at the University of Minnesota blowing into their freezing hands. The newly established National Research Council could easily envision how physicists and mathematicians, chemists and geologists, might lend a hand to the war effort. But what about biologists? At the annual meeting of American Society of Zoologists, a special session on “The Value and Service of Zoological Science” had been hurriedly convened. The delegates settled quietly in their chairs.
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Darwinism had become about as German as liverwurst. Back in 1859, when he was under attack in England for
The Origin of Species
, Darwin wrote to a colleague: “The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” And although he himself had carefully avoided any political implications for man, in Germany, Darwinism was interpreted as having repercussions for the future of civilization. It was Ludwig Woltmann, a German, who first gave the enterprise its name. Amounting to a revolt against Judeo-Christian and neo-Kantian ethics, “social Darwinism” advanced a set of biologized beliefs: The moral sense is a biological instinct, not a spiritual endowment; human races are unequal; biology is destiny; the welfare of the individual is subservient to the health of the group; the struggle for existence renders war and death necessary to progress; progress and biological purification are one and the same. It was this distortion of Darwin’s theory, many American zoologists claimed, that was blowing wind into Germany’s war sails.
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