By lunchtime, more than twenty people had joined in, making a focused conversation impossible. “It was a disaster,” Fox recalled. “It was clear from the beginning that Szilard wasn’t interested in alpha rhythms of the brain and Wiener wasn’t interested in biological clocks.” The conversation quavered, wandered, and soon “degenerated into a discussion about the origin of life.” Given another planet like Earth, would life emerge? Yes, many agreed, and their reasons for this dribbled out as Szilard’s eyelids fluttered and he nodded off. Finally, someone said, “Given many planets like Earth, would man emerge on one of them?”
“What do you think, Leo?” Shedlovsky asked.
“No!” Szilard answered, his eyes popping open.
“But why not?” Shedlovsky asked.
“God wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”60
For all Szilard’s mental agility, few of his own ideas were ever pursued to theories or discoveries that are today recognized as his own work. Instead, he is remembered for the sincere and encompassing energy he brought to conversations and for the insightful questions and bold hypotheses that startled groups and stirred up ideas. In 1950–51, Szilard organized, with Richard L. Meier, a series of evening seminars in the Social Science Building at the University of Chicago, each time discussing a different problem that might merit research; one night it was world food supplies, another energy, a third, water redistribution from global climate change. Inspired at these discussions to study the “carrying capacity” of the earth, chemist Harrison Brown organized another seminar that Szilard often attended on the factors limiting the earth’s human population and from this Brown wrote The Challenge of Man’s Future.
These sessions aided Szilard’s work in birth-control research for the Conservation Foundation, including, in 1951, his invention of an electric “birth-control clock,” renamed a “fertility clock” to appease the Cath olic church.61 Designed for use at family-planning clinics in developing countries, the clock was to be reset monthly for each woman in order to sound alarms during her menstrual cycle when conception was most likely. Szilard had a model built at the University of Chicago, and Brown took it with him when he moved to Cal Tech. Brown even demonstrated the clock to the Ford Foundation, but found “little interest” there.62 Szilard also devised a “fertility necklace,” with colored beads that moved and locked for counting menstrual-cycle days. He wore this at some lectures on population control but never developed the idea further.63 These gimmicks aside, Szilard is today credited with work on the study and preservation of sperm and with promoting research that led to the oral contraceptive at a time when few scientific or medical institutions would take the idea seriously.
Szilard’s laboratory situation became unworkable in the fall of 1953, after Novick left for a year of research at the Pasteur Institute. Desperate for a more supportive situation, Szilard turned to Einstein, drafting for his friend and mentor a letter of recommendation to the new Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. When that attempt failed, Szilard admitted reluctantly, as he had when he first fled Hungary, “I would rather have roots than wings, but if I cannot have roots I shall use wings.”64
He focused next on the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, where Trude Weiss, his wife since 1951, taught public health. Szilard had craved a professorship there, in the new biophysics department created by his Chicago colleague Theodore T. Puck, but while Puck assured him that a place would be found, years passed with nothing more offered than a visiting professorship. “Puck is paying me for not being here,” Szilard complained to Trude.65 Instead, Szilard became a visiting professor at Brandeis University and a part-time consultant to Abe Spanel, the quixotic president of the International Latex Corporation in New York.
In a dispute unresolved for years, Szilard is both credited with proposing a novel method for the quantitative biological cloning of mammalian cells and chided as an interloper for doing so. The discovery—and dispute— occurred at Puck’s department during the summer of 1954. Chatting over lunch with Philip Marcus, a former research assistant of Novick’s and Szilard’s at Chicago who was then Puck’s student, Szilard learned that they were trying to increase the efficiency at which individual mammalian cells would grow into self-sustaining colonies (clones). These cloned cells would provide cell biologists with the powerful tools of genetic manipulation available to microbiologists and help usher in the era of somatic cell genetics.
Puck and Marcus sought to reduce the loss of diffusible nutrients by plating cells into microdrops of growth medium. If there were more than a hundred cells in a drop, Marcus said, growth occurred in virtually all of the drops. The efficiency of self-sustained growth fell off sharply as the initial number of cells in a drop was reduced; if there was only one cell, it had a 1 in 100 chance of developing into a full-size colony. How, Szilard wondered, might they maintain a high reproductive efficiency when cell numbers were small? He knew almost nothing about the field but found the problem fascinating.
According to Marcus, Szilard sat quietly for a few moments, then said, “Since cells grow with high efficiency when they have many neighbors, you should not let a single cell know it’s alone.” At first, Marcus thought Szilard’s remark a joke—a flippant excursion into psychobiology. But what Szilard meant is that the cells should be grown in the same biochemical environment as that created by large numbers of cells. On a restaurant napkin, Szilard drew a mass culture, then sketched single cells on a glass plate over it.
“I told Puck about this idea, but he did not express an interest in it,” Marcus later recalled. “But as a new graduate student I found the experiment too compelling.” He had the department machinist make a small plastic platform to hold the glass slides on which the single cells were to grow while submersed in growth medium shared by a mass culture of cells. “I started the experiment on a Friday,” he remembered, “and on Saturday I went back to examine the cells. Every place where I had put one cell there were two, and the day after—on Sunday—there were four.” Marcus telephoned Szilard, and he and Trude visited the lab.
“We’ll call Puck,” Szilard said. Marcus did, but when Puck walked in, he looked at the dish, turned, and left in silence. “I didn’t see him for a long time,” maybe several days, Marcus recalled. “When I did, he said he had thought of a solution to prevent the viable cells of a mass culture from contaminating the single cells that grew on the glass slides above them.”66 While Szilard’s idea was to separate the cells by a glass layer, Puck’s solution, explained in later papers, was to X-ray the bottom cells, which kills their reproductive capacity but not their biochemical or metabolic activity. In May 1955, Puck and Marcus published their first paper about the biological cloning of mammalian cells and in it added a footnote thanking Szilard, “who suggested a more advantageous geometrical arrangement” for placing the cell in the test dish.67 Szilard later called this note his “punishment” for intruding in the work.68
After that, Szilard’s relationship with Puck was strained, and in December 1955, Puck admitted that no permanent post would be offered in Denver. “With the greatest possible reluctance I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible for me personally to work with you scientifically,” he wrote Szilard. “Your mind is so much more powerful than mine that I find it impossible when I am with you to resist the tremendous polarizing forces of your ideas and outlook.” Puck feared his “own flow of ideas would slow up & productivity suffer if we were to become continuously associated working in the same place and the same general kind of field.” Puck said, “There is no living scientist whose intellect I respect more. But your tremendous intellectual force is a strain on a limited person like myself.”69
Instead, Puck suggested that Szilard continue to visit Colorado, and three or four other universities, as a “roving professor.” That scheme collapsed because Szilard—in a typical fit of “independence”—refused to tell a National Science Foundation grants officer exactly how much time he might spend at each
institution.
Szilard and Puck clashed again, in 1958, during a biology conference in Boulder. At the time, Szilard was drafting a paper about the aging process and asked if Puck was working on any related topics. When he heard no answer, Szilard asked Puck’s assistant, Conant (Cody) Webb, for help locating reprints. But a few days later, Puck again accused Szilard of meddling with his assistants—and, possibly, infringing on his research. Now certain that he was not welcome at Denver, Szilard scouted for a way to flee his awkward situation in Chicago, where his hybrid faculty position continued without lab space.
When in Chicago, Szilard stayed at the Quadrangle Club and wandered about the campus calling on friends and associates. Physicist Samuel Allison often invited Szilard to solve rigorous mathematical problems whenever they met.70 On his strolls, Szilard always looked in on chemist Nathan Sugarman and physicist Alexander Langsdorf—usually just in time for their coffee breaks. Szilard’s only use of laboratory equipment at this time was to handle the beakers this group used to brew and drink coffee.
When Szilard could find no institution that honored his quirky blend of science and social policy, he decided to create one—at least in his mind. His brainstorming, and later behind-the-scenes plotting, led to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the intellectual refuge where he would spend his life’s happiest, and last, days. As early as 1946, Szilard encouraged federal support for scientists’ “leisure.” As a way to assure their creativity, he asked that the proposed National Science Foundation pay researchers $12,000 a year for life, freeing them to pursue whatever ideas they fancied.71 And in 1949 he advised the new Ford Foundation’s directors on how to fund research on both scientific and political topics. So when Szilard devised his ideal research institution, it naturally merged many of his own projects and interests. His added twist was to tie the new institute to a famous scientist; this to give the place instant recognition and to aid fund-raising.
In 1953, Jonas Salk quickly became a medical celebrity when he announced development of a polio vaccine. Szilard first met Salk in October 1956, at a time when Salk himself was beginning to think about forming a research center in Pittsburgh and had signs of support from the March of Dimes antipolio foundation. They met again, early in January 1957, at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel during a biology conference,72 and two days after the conference ended, Szilard completed a memo he had been drafting with his Conservation Foundation colleague, chemist William Doering, on a proposal to create two interdependent research institutes.73 One Szilard called the Research Institute for Fundamental Biology and Public Health, the other the Institute for Problem Studies. Together they would integrate science and social studies. Szilard sent the memo to Cass Canfield, a self-styled “urbane go-getter” with an abiding interest in birth-control research, who was head of Harper & Brothers publishers. Szilard’s memo cited Salk as a scientist who had struck out from “the realm of pure science” to work on one of the “acute problems of our times”—and succeeded.
“Usually such diversions from pure research involve a great personal sacrifice, and those who engage in them must struggle against heavy odds,” said Szilard, echoing his own lifelong frustrations. Some “recognized problems” that Szilard cited as worth pursuing were a biological method of birth control suitable to developing countries and the health risks from cigarette smoking. But, he warned, “unrecognized problems are of even greater importance.” These occur in the realm of “political thought” and would not be solved by most social scientists because they care more for methods than results. “In the circumstances,” he warned, betraying his own biases, “we may have to make a new start and to begin pretty much where Plato has left off.” Szilard aspired to devise a new “form of democracy” suitable for developing countries and even suggested that the British Colonial Office might be employed to “field test” his institute’s political solutions.74
A “confidential” appendix named researchers who might be invited to join the new institute, and among those who later joined the Salk Institute he named François Jacob, Renato Dulbecco, Melvin Cohn, and Edwin Lennox.75 Like many of Szilard’s proposals, this one dives too quickly into intricate schemes for hiring and organizing the staff and for financing day-to-day operations. But its appeal is twofold, as it both addresses current issues and suggests unknown areas for discovery. Besides, unlike almost any other institution at the time, this one matched Szilard’s own unique exuberance.
Not content to enjoy his institute as a lovely idea, Szilard decided to press for its creation. He wooed Salk with a letter describing the Canfield memo, seeking his reaction to the dual research institutes, and asking him to consider becoming an Affiliate Member.76 The next week, Szilard met Salk in Chicago to explain the proposal, and when Salk replied to Canfield in early February, saying that he supported this “good idea” but was too busy to join, Szilard pressed his case in a playful, teasing way.77 You might attend for two reasons, Szilard wrote Salk. “First, as a ‘duty’ because these first few meetings may decide the shape of things to come. And second— more important—on grounds of the principle [of] ‘pleasure before business’ ” Szilard promised to argue for this pleasure principle when they met again, because, he wrote, “if we do not manage to get together an enjoyable group of Affiliate Members—at the very least—we have no right to be in this ‘business’ at all.”78 When Canfield saw a copy of this letter to Salk, he told Szilard, “You handled him perfectly. . .”79
In April, at a research conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Szilard sat next to Salk on a bus ride in the Great Smoky Mountains and again urged him to join the institute.80 Then, trying humor, Szilard wrote Salk proposing compulsory “insurance” against polio, just as Social Security is required for old age. This would be an inducement for vaccination, since parents escaped paying the premiums if their children were treated.81
When in Cambridge, England, that fall for a Pugwash conference on arms control, Szilard met with molecular biologists Seymour Benzer and Sydney Brenner, Dulbecco, and Cohn and at this meeting shaped a consensus on what an institute should be like. Among the glistening lab equipment and chemical smells of the Molecular Biology Center and in the musty splendor of the ancient college dining halls, Szilard proposed that they all try to enlist Salk to head the new institute. He was well known, Szilard argued, could testify well before Congress, and in this role the public could repay its debt for his work curing polio.82
In 1959, when Salk seemed determined to stay in Pittsburgh, Szilard dangled another lure: the offer of land—and affiliation with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)—if he chose to locate in La Jolla.83 “Frankly,” Szilard warned, “I see no possibility of getting many first-class people to move to Pittsburgh.”84 And on a trip to Europe, Szilard wrote Salk twice more, urging him to explore the La Jolla proposal with James Watson and UCSD founder Roger Revelle.85 Ultimately, this connection worked: The city of San Diego donated a twenty-seven-acre site on a cliff above the Pacific, near the new UCSD campus, and in 1961 the Salk Institute for Biological Studies was created.
A 1966 institute publication credited Szilard as “one of the moving spirits who helped to conceive the idea of the Salk Institute and to bring it into being,”86 and by then it was prospering. But while Szilard was enticing Salk to join in his “dream” in 1957 and 1958, Szilard still lacked basic laboratory space and funding for his own scattered research. Still craving “roots,” Szilard even considered the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. He went there in May 1958 to explain a research proposal and, while awaiting a decision, lingered as a consultant. Szilard liked the NIH’s suburban campus and for a while roomed nearby at the institute’s villas in Kensington and later stayed at the Kenwood Country Club.87 Although Szilard feared water and always dressed formally in public, he enjoyed relaxing by tennis courts and swimming pools when he worked. By the villa pool one afternoon, Danish-born biochemist Herman Kalckar (an acquaintanc
e from Berlin) recognized Szilard and stopped to chat.
“Would you like to swim?” Kalckar asked.
“No,” Szilard replied, “I’d rather think.”88
Because Szilard enjoyed lounging outdoors, he was able to find the “leisure” he considered necessary for serious work.89 But he quickly came to hate the NIH’s modern, air-conditioned offices. “I can’t smell the grass,” he complained, looking from his desk to the broad lawn— through windows he couldn’t open. “Everything is sterile!” He asked colleagues with suburban houses to bring him grass they had mown, and this he stuffed into empty file drawers, giving his office a sweet country smell.90
In June 1958, Robert Livingston offered Szilard a $19,000-a-year fulltime position at the NIH, “effective within a few weeks.”91 But when Livingston could not offer the 2,500-square-foot laboratory space Szilard wanted, he tried to arrange a joint appointment between the NIH and the Rockefeller Institute in New York.92 Szilard reported on this proposal to Herbert Anderson, director of the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago and still his boss. At this, Anderson became annoyed with Szilard’s long absences from campus and replied sarcastically, “If I knew that all it would take to get you to lecture was to pay you, I’d be glad to double your salary.”93
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