Further Reflections

FURTHER REFLECTIONS PHILIP SIEKEVITZ* Aging Molecular biology is a young science, barely twenty years old; its practitioners are all relative youngsters, most of them hardly past that acclaimed magical age of thirty. Its outstanding achievements—the beauty of its predicates, of the deductions, of the techniques; the simplicity of the basic ideas combined with the didactiveness of the conclusions—all have given the science an aura of greatness, of wonder , and have endowed its young celebrities with a somewhat swaggering bravado, well earned in many cases, but nevertheless a slap in the face of old dodos like myself. After all the hard years we have put in, the frustrating experiments, we sometimes resent the quickness of result, the shortcut methods, the front page stories in the newspapers . We have the feeling that we have been relegated to that pile of used-up journals—worse, footnotes to short papers—whose results no one under thirty knows anything about—worse, does not give a hoot. Trust us they will, but snub us they do, and this is our particular hurt. I know most of the answers: that science is more than the individual scientists, even more than the sum of the individual scientists; that it is that grand mystique where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, where even the parts are as nothing compared with the organized higher order of entity; that except for a few geniuses here and there, all the rest of us will be forgotten, not even remembered as notations going back more than ten years in the bibliographies of present-day papers. But we are human beings and the hurt is still there. I know another answer: that sour grapes are no substitutes for getting aboard a speeding bandwagon; that least of all in science should a hardening of the cranial arteries set in; that obtuseness modified by jealousy makes us pitiful, scorned, mocked. But the cor- * Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Spring 1972 | 385 rect answer is that, along with countless other enterprises in our vaunted technological society, the rate of change has provoked a mental havoc, a tumbling of comfortable household walls, among those of us who have bridged that notion of the generation gap beloved of revolutionaries. And lo, this monster of obsolescence has turned on us, we scientists-technologists, the bringers of change, the uprooters and rebuilders; its chopping down of established results and ceremonious theories is pushing us to an early scientific grave. We curse the treadmill and end up exhausted; we are being crowded and end up as nothings before our designated times. So these days I am constantly besieged by salesmen who seem to me to know more biochemistry than I do, and who will spout off the latest in molecular biology before the library journals hit my desk. I feel small, ashamed, mumble inconsequentialities, cough out learned appreciations, make wide eye movements, knowledgeable hand signals, and inwardly withdraw to my Warburg respirometer days. I am putty; technology has molded my science; I am only the sand to be poured into the jigs of the innovative laboratory experience . The new machines design the great experiments; I am only hands without nerve endings, auxiliary hands pushed here and pulled there to the tunes of spectacular new devices, unheard of probes, undreamed of assays, the cumulative experience in the form of dials, buttons, knobs, digits, buzzers, whirrs, meters, miscellaneons templates for plastic boxes and molded minds. In short, I feel that I have been had; but again, look at the results: wow! In a way, all this tends to affirm a favorite thesis of mine: that it is not so much that science advances the technology of the age, but that technology, the tinkerers, are the guiding lights of science, that their whistles are the directional guides for the future of laboratory research. It is conceivably possible that the great innovations in biochemical research, in molecular biology to take an example, are the results not so much of youthful genius, but of technological process in some small industrial laboratory. The salesmen who besiege us are the real Nobel Prize winners; they bring...