1—
Boyhood and Youth—
The Molding

"The past is a foreign land."

A child accepts his world as given. Only much later can he look back and see how the twig was bent.

My mind is a time capsule. A memory is stirred, a scene appears with color, sound, and feel as it was fifty years ago, a half century ago. The others in the scene are dead now, some long since departed. Only my images, my impressions remain—for a time.

I am looking at a small, aging photograph of a boy, about five years old, with a thick mop of hair, dressed in overalls and sandals, walking along a dusty gravel road. He is looking down at the road—pensively? With him is a smaller boy, probably three years old, with short curly hair, also dressed in overalls and sandals, walking along head up, eyes forward.

The older boy is—was—me. I don't recall the taking of the photograph, but I know the setting. Summertime on Washington Island off the Door Peninsula of northern Wisconsin, on a gravel road from the farmhouse to the grocery. Washington Island had no electricity then, no telephones or indoor plumbing. Water came from a pump, ice from the icehouse where it was stored up during the winter and insulated with sawdust. It was one of the few remaining sites of nineteenth-century life, lived according to the rhythms of the sun.

I try, to put myself inside the head of that boy, to peel back the layers of years of experiences since accumulated. Of course I can't; the successive years are not simply layered on. They are infiltrated, intertwined,

and interwoven oven into the very nature of one's being. In some deep sense that boy is stall here, but I can't "access" him. I vaguely perceive that the world was fresher then, more immediate—the tastes cleaner, the smells more direct, the sights sharper, the sounds more distinct.

Life was still a succession of days of sun or rain or snow, of meals and naps, of games with other children and directives from parents. Compared to the life of today, the life of my childhood seems singularly insulated from outside influence. There was school of course and playmates, but the home was the primary influence and was little perturbed or violated by the outside world. No TV screens brought distant scenes to our living room. Radio, in its infancy, brought little of interest. Even the telephone, which required a coin for each call, was used sparingly, and long-distance calls were reserved for calamity. The newspapers and magazines—more decorous in that day—brought in the world, but distilled through the flatness of print and the linear, rational process of reading.

We were all less subject to the seductive commercial values of the media and their induced "peer pressures" but all the more captive of the idiosyncratic, sometimes skewed views of our elders. Thus, parents and, later, teachers by precept and example, through word and action and selected reading provided me with a framework in which to order the myriad events of the vast, confusing outer world—a lens selective of importance, a gate sensitive to values. Indeed, the Midwest in which I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s was still very insular. Europe was a week away, Asia two weeks. International commerce was negligible. Issues of global overpopulation, environmental pollution, and international economic management were unimaginable.

When one is young, at least in America, the world is young. The past, all of history, is telescoped. The constraints the past imposes, the hard-won wisdom it contains, the debt we owe our forebears all seem of little moment. Only later, when our lives have been merged into the stream of human existence, do we better recognize the finite scope of our place in human time. I see now that in my earliest years, the 1920s, I was raised in the America of exuberance. The United States was the greatest, the most advanced nation in the world. We had the most advanced technology, the most advanced political system, and newer was always better. Freed of the palsied hand of Europe with its ancient feuds and antiquated governments and frozen social classes, our democracy had liberated the creativity of the people. Our citizens had civilized a continent and created a great industrial society. Secure between two

oceans, with no perceived rivals, our destiny was in our hands, and it gleamed. So we thought. Recognition of the side effects of ever more powerful technology or of the social traumas accompanying unlimited free enterprise was yet in the future.

In contrast, my second decade, the 1930s, was gray and grim, a time bleak and foreboding. The Great Depression was psychologically a free fall from the earlier near-euphoria, and the growing menace of Hitler and the war in Europe deepened the gloom.

My forebears on both sides were Germanic and Jewish and thereby melded elements of Teutonic authority and Jewish moral rigidity. My father, Allen, born in 1888 in Chicago, was the elder of two sons. My mother, Rose Davidson, born in 1891 in New York, was the eldest of five children, with two sisters and two brothers. Both of my grandfathers emigrated from Germany to the United States as children with their families, in the 1860s. Their families came for the usual reasons—to escape poverty and prejudice, to seek a better future. Both boys had a limited education; one was for most of his life a salesman in shoe stores, the other a pharmacist who operated a small drugstore. They raised their families in Chicago and New York respectively at only a little above the poverty level, and the education of their children was truncated by economic necessity.

After eight years of grammar school and one year of manual arts high school, my father had to earn a living. After a succession of odd jobs, he discovered a talent for writing. He became a writer for, and ultimately editor of, trade journals. Before and during World War I, he was a feature writer for Automotive Age, a magazine for automobile enthusiasts. During that war, the army's use of motorized vehicles was his principal story, so he was sent to Washington, D.C. There I was born in 1920; soon thereafter however, he returned with his family to Chicago, where I grew up. During most of my childhood, he was editor of a trade journal for retail clothing stores.

Despite his limited education, my father was widely read, a self-taught man. Unguided, some of his reading was enlightening and some quite misleading. He was resolved, however, that his children should at least have the opportunity for more advanced education. He sought to encourage intellectual interests by taking us as children on weekends to the Field Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium. The Field Museum was endlessly fascinating. I particularly remember the huge reconstructed mastodon and the intriguing, yet eerie, ancient Egyptian mummies.

After three years of high school, including a final year of secretarial training, my mother was similarly obliged to go to work. However, she intensely disliked office work. She was a very pretty woman and met my father on one of his trips to New York. They were married in 1913 (he was twenty-four, she twenty-one). My older brother, Allen, Jr., was born a year later. In Germanic fashion, my father dominated the household. With three sons (my younger brother, Richard, was born two years after me), my mother played a relatively passive role in the household, occupying herself with projects at the synagogue and social activities such as bridge and mah-jongg.

In our home, there was a strong emphasis on intellectual and cultural development, but at a cost. Emotions were not to be trusted. Emotional display, except through such refined media as music or art, was to be repressed as crude, primitive, and unworthy. A distant mother and the absence of sisters reinforced this atmosphere. We learned to be self-reliant, to make our own way in this world. We could expect some support from the family but not much else. The anguish of the Great Depression confirmed this view as did, later, the "sink-or-swim" attitude prevalent during my years at MIT.

I was also brought up with a strong sense of duty—with the charge to use my talents, which it appeared early were considerable, for the benefit of others in whatever way seemed at the time most propitious, and not to be distracted or seduced from that obligation by transient pleasures. At the same time, my upbringing oddly provided rather little sense of community or belonging to an ongoing stream of human life and endeavor; this has only come to me much later in the global community of science. I was brought up not to expect much from life unless I "earned" it. Perhaps this attitude was simply in the American tradition of "rugged individualism." Perhaps it was the lost contact with our ancestors, buried far away in a decadent Europe from which we were thankfully delivered. Perhaps it was our Jewish identity, which we understood excluded us from the American mainstream. No Jewish boy would ever be president, head of a great corporation, or even mayor of Chicago. America was much freer than Europe and many professions were open to us, but the exclusionary pattern was still there, still real and strong. A Jewish boy would have to be better, we heard, as we hear today for a woman, an African American, or an Asian American.

Much later, I came to realize that, in part, these perspectives reflected, beyond any intrinsic merit, my father's psychology, even pathology. He was a deeply fearful man. He was beset by, and transmitted

to his children, the convictions that life was a hazardous enterprise, that one could easily make an irreversible mistake that would forever blight one's health or economic or social status, and that the path to avoid such disaster was one of constant caution, moderation, and modesty in behavior and action. Not to dare greatly, not to plunge wildly. He was highly conscious of appearances and highly threatened by possible loss of dignity, or community censure. To become drunk, for instance, was not merely an immoderate act but a disgrace, a blot on one's image.

To me, growing up in his household, all of this seemed reasonable and proper; questioning of parental authority and wisdom was not encouraged. And the apparent correctness of the basic proposition was certainly corroborated by the external events of the 1930s. The Great Depression and the looming abyss of World War II reinforced the concept that one's individual destiny was subject to great and perilous forces far beyond one's control. So it was not until many years later that I came to realize how skewed, pinched, and constrained a view of the world this was and to escape, at least in part, from its thrall.

I am left-handed. Fortunately, my father had read of the traumatic consequences of forced conversion from left- to right-handed use and intervened at school to prevent such a requirement. However, for many years I thought I was clumsy because I had much more difficulty than others with scissors or screwdrivers (and later, corkscrews).

Schoolwork was ridiculously easy for me. I passed the first two grades in one year, likewise the fifth and sixth. Of course, this advancement into an older age group distorted and retarded my social development. Because of this, and because school was mostly boring, I took refuge in reading. I certainly read the majority of books in the children's section of the local branch library.

In my teens, two books markedly changed my view of biological life. In my family, life in the biological sense (much less sex) was rarely discussed. It was a given fact of nature not subject to analysis or human understanding. Our bodies were bequeathed to us and we had limited control over their subsequent fates. But from Wells and Huxley's The Science of Life I first realized that one could regard living organisms as very complex machines, with varied components whose functions and interactions could be dissected and analyzed. Of course, we have now carried that perception down to within the cell, even to the genes, and have found machines within machines within machines to the limiting level of molecular devices.

Except in the crudest sense that like begets like, my upbringing pro-

vided no appreciation of heredity. Thus, the book You and Heredity by Sheinfeld was a stunning entry to a new world. We are what we are by virtue of our specific, inherited genes. Of course! But how? What wondrous processes could produce this result? Not immediately, but subtly, these new insights gathered deep within me and generated powerful fountains of interest and curiosity that have continually renewed and refreshed a lifetime. Indeed, I seem to have been endowed with an unending curiosity and I have always found that my interest in almost any subject grew in proportion to my knowledge about it. But biology, has had a first claim.

Although the youngest, I was the valedictorian of my grammar school class and went on to high school, a larger world of some five thousand students. At this same age, several other influences affected my life, among them the Great Depression, boys' camp, Sunday school, the World's Fair.

Although the Depression heightened my father's fearfulness, it did not in fact greatly alter our economic status. My father had always lived well within his income and, while his salary was reduced, he was never unemployed and our standard of living changed little. But I well recall grown men coming daily to the back door of our apartment to beg for food; we never turned them away empty-handed.

And I recall a favorite uncle who arrived at our door at a very early hour one morning because he literally had no money to buy food for his family. My father helped out for a time. These images of despair remain sixty years later.

For four summers, my brothers and I went to a boys' camp in northern Wisconsin. Here I was introduced to a more elemental, more natural world. Northern Wisconsin is dotted with clear lakes set in pine forests. In those days, before motorboats and water skiers, the lakes were extraordinarily quiet and tranquil. Paddling across in a canoe, I could imagine a kinship with the Hiawatha of legend.

Camp was also my first interaction, in many aspects of living, with a considerable diversity of other children, many from families much less repressed and with values quite different from my own. The experience was illuminating, although insufficient to raise strong doubts about parental strictures.

I was also introduced to athletics, especially baseball and tennis for which it turned out I had some aptitude and which I greatly enjoyed. Baseball was softball and I pitched reasonably well. I became a fan, following all the major league teams and players and devouring statis-

tics. Baseball has remained a lifelong passion, although opportunities to play were always limited by the need to field eighteen players. Tennis became a more readily supported addiction, and I spent countless hours after school and in the summer on the local public courts. If no opponents were about and a court was available, I would practice serving by the hour. I became a good player.

My parents belonged to a reform Jewish synagogue and I had attended Sunday school from an early age. But now, as confirmation age approached, the lessons and sermons took on more significance. The tenets of reform Judaism are morally lofty but leave little scope for human frailty. With its insistent command to consider all the consequences of one's deeds, it was not a creed to encourage spontaneous action or uninhibited emotion.

A World's Fair was held in Chicago in 1933 to celebrate the city's hundredth birthday and was extended to 1934. Its theme was "A Century of Progress," and it featured many exhibits of the latest science and technology. I and a school chum, Jim Flood, went frequently each summer. The advances displayed in science and transportation and communications were exciting. I remember particularly an exhibit featuring samples of all of the chemical elements that had then been isolated, arranged in a periodic table; also a fascinating display of human embryos at the various stages of development. But, surprisingly, the most memorable event was my discovery of Shakespeare. An Elizabethan theater featured a replica of the Old Globe, with a repertory company that daily performed Shakespearean plays. I was mesmerized not so much by the plots, which seemed archaic, even contrived, but by the language. I had never heard such beautiful and poetic language used to express profound thought and emotion. This response was reinforced later in high school when we read Shakespeare. To this day, I am enraptured and inspired by Shakespeare's speech, so soaring and lilting and at the same time so replete with meaning.

Our genes provide our physical frame, much of the specific basis for our personality, and the raw material for our intellect. Circumstance, environment, and culture, however, map the specific routes for intellect.

In high school, I had two extraordinary teachers, Miss Shoesmith in mathematics and Mr. McClain in chemistry, who surely influenced my future. Miss Shoesmith inspired me throughout geometry, trigonometry, and college algebra through the use of "special credit" problems, all beyond the regular class assignment and of increasing difficulty.

These interested and stretched my mind and, in a subtle way, generated a growing capacity for innovative problem-solving. Moreover, I enjoyed the challenges.

Similarly, Mr. McClain, by letting us perform "extra credit" experiments in the chemistry laboratory, expanded and strengthened my facility with laboratory apparatus and my capacity to plan an experiment and record and analyze the outcome. One Parents' Night, he let us design a set of demonstrations using liquid air, involving such oddities as a hammer made of frozen mercury and a small steam locomotive that ran by the expansion of vaporizing liquid air.

As a teenager, I discovered the joys of science fiction and eagerly awaited the next issues of Astounding Stories and Wonder magazines. The science fiction of that era was thin on plot and characterization and emphasized technological extrapolation, much of which has, in fact, come to pass. Science fiction today is more literary and indeed much of it is social-science fiction, based on extrapolation of one or another societal facet.

In senior English, in the spring of 1936, the principal assignment for the first semester was the preparation of a lengthy theme, involving library research, on some significant topic. With seeming prescience, I chose "The Transmutation of the Elements." My theme covered the older, misguided efforts to achieve transmutation, doomed to failure by ignorance of the basic nature of the changes required. After this, I discussed the current understanding of the nature of the atom and the atomic nucleus, the achievement of transmutation on a minute scale by nuclear physicists, and the potential source of energy locked in the nucleus. I anticipated that, some day, large-scale transmutation and large-scale energy release would indeed be possible. I did not imagine that day would come within but a few years, to change all our lives.

In grammar school, at about seventh grade, I had become aware that I was, in public, painfully shy. To be called on to speak before the class—or worse, to read to the class an essay I had composed—was an agonizing experience. Yet, from my parents, and somehow from within, I knew this experience could not be averted. In future life, it would be essential to be able to make known my views by speaking in public. So in high school I enrolled in a yearlong course in public speaking. This was learning by doing, for me by ordeal. We were taught some rudimentary, techniques of public speaking and even a few acting skills, but the important lesson was simply the conditioning, the confidence

gained by repeated public presence without resultant censure. Yet even today, while a technical seminar or lecture on a scientific subject is no problem for me, a speech expressing personal views on a controversial subject generates a tautness, an anxious tension.

I have always been a future-oriented person, a fact that causes some internal conflict now as my future grows increasingly finite. In part, this orientation may have arisen from, or perhaps accounted for, my interest in chess. Chess, of course, requires that one plan and anticipate the consequences of one's moves for several steps ahead. I first started chess with my father, at about age ten. Then, he could defeat me easily and would give me a piece advantage to make the game more even. After a time we became more equal. In high school, I joined the chess club and, with this exposure to other players, soon surpassed my father, a small but psychologically important step. I also began to read chess books. Subsequently, I made the school chess team and in my last year, I was first board. Our team won the Chicago high school city championship. Later, in college, I simply lacked the time to continue with chess; since, I have played only sporadically.

This future orientation likely also derives in part from my rearing in the Jewish tradition with the sense that one should not merely while away one's time here on earth; that one should contribute to and be part of a more enduring human enterprise. And so my life has been spent in education and research, the two ways in which our society most directly invests in the future.

When I graduated from high school, I was not quite 17. Because I was a year younger than most of my classmates and was regarded—to varied reaction—as a "brain," my social development, and particularly my relationship with girls, was quite retarded. It was my serious misfortune to have no sisters. With only brothers and a remote mother, the world of women—their desires, needs, interests, and goals—was foreign and obscure to me and, despite considerable interaction since, has in good part remained so.

It was time to think about college. My older brother had gone to the nearby University of Chicago to study law. My interests more clearly lay with mathematics and science. My mother, reared in New York, had long believed that the Eastern schools were superior to those of the Midwest, and she felt that my talent merited the best education. Stan Jarrow had been my laboratory partner in chemistry and we were good friends. He had his heart set on an engineering education at MIT. MIT,

or Boston Tech, as it was sometimes called, was held in high repute even in Chicago. It seemed an apt match to my interests, which at the time leaned toward chemistry.

But we knew no scientists. I had no role models.

My father had a limited understanding of science and was unsure about the employment prospects for chemists. Their contribution to, and therefore worth in, society was unclear to him. Even a conversation with Mr. McClain did not help. Chemical engineering, however, seemed to him to be a more practical subject, so it was agreed that I should apply to MIT to enroll in that field.

This was 1936, in the depth of the Depression. Living away at MIT would manifestly be more costly than living at home where I could attend the University of Chicago. But my father agreed that if I could receive a scholarship from MIT (in those days scholarships were primarily merit-based), he would send me there for at least one year. While I was not the valedictorian in my high school class, I was the highest ranking male and am sure I received good letters of recommendation from my teachers. I was awarded an MIT scholarship for full tuition at $500 per year.

This lad with my name, age sixteen, steadily gazing out from his allotted square in the high school yearbook is closer to me today but still indistinct. His features are recognizable, but he himself is yet only half-formed, half-educated, half-emerged from the parental cocoon, still trailing wisps of old myths and superstitions and prejudices, with views not yet his own, skills partly honed, perspectives short and fractured, but an absorbent mind and an endless curiosity. Sure, but quite unsure, and somehow imbued with the stiff determination and internal discipline to "make it," to succeed, wherever the amorphous future would lead.

In 1932, M. Knoll and E. Ruska invent the electron microscope, which extends human vision to the submicroscopic and, in time, to the macromolecular level. Viruses can be seen and essential structures and processes of living cells revealed.

Also in 1932, Curie and Joliot discover artificial radioactivity, the production of radioactive isotopes not found in nature. The use of these isotopes as tracers, substituting for the natural atoms, has been essential to the elucidation of biochemical pathways and structures.

In 1935, Wendell Stanley produces crystals of the tobacco mosaic virus, leading to the possibility of subjecting viruses to detailed physical and chemical analysis.