At the NIH, Szilard planned “memory and recall” as his general topic and in one note to Livingston proposed an “amusing experiment” that suggests the odd pursuits he may have had in mind. To test the link between memory and humor, Szilard wanted to anesthetize half a man’s brain, then have him read jokes. “After the man is warmed up, ask him to tell the jokes which he has read,” Szilard proposed. “Since the left half of the brain contains the speech center, he should have no difficulty in doing so. The question is, will the right half of the brain laugh about the joke that it hears?”94
At the NIH, Szilard became intrigued by dolphins, thanks to long talks with John C. Lilly, a visionary medical researcher who studied the animals’ mental and linguistic development. Intrigued with intelligence, learning, and memory, Szilard questioned Lilly about how dolphins’ brains function—often over lunches in the NIH cafeteria and dinners at Italian and Chinese restaurants around Washington’s Dupont Circle. “Szilard was seeking the source and location of the memory function and was particularly interested in my work on the cortex,” Lilly recalled.95 In brain size and functions, Szilard learned, dolphins were remarkably close to humans. And, like humans, their brains controlled acts involuntary in most other mammals, such as deliberate breathing and penile erections. Two years later, Szilard would write Lilly and his discoveries into The Voice of the Dolphins, a popular political satire about arms control, scientific research, and other human foibles.
In the summer of 1958, before accepting the NIH appointment, Szilard left for a biology conference in Boulder, then attended a Pugwash conference in Kitzbuhel, Austria. He returned in September to learn that Livingston had reneged on his offer.96 A friend advised Szilard that the job might have been canceled because some people perceived him “as tactless and even as somewhat intrusive in relationship to other people’s work.”97 To Livingston, Szilard fumed that “at least part of the trouble comes from a fear that I might be a ‘headache’ from the administrative point of view because I may be expected to think, say, and occasionally do unusual things. . . .”98 But worried about his financial security, Szilard wrote Livingston again, recounting how he needed the NIH appointment and offering to take two months’ unpaid leave each year to trim his salary.99 Szilard longed to gather a team of young and energetic scientists, he wrote, for “really imaginative experiments,” not “trivial experiments, where you can virtually guarantee publishable results.” But he could find no institution to welcome him.
During the next six months, Szilard published a paper “On the Nature of the Aging Process,” spent two months at General Atomics in La Jolla consulting on advanced nuclear-reactor designs, wrote a proposal for the Los Alamos National Laboratory to take up molecular biology, worked through the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to plan a scientists’ arms-control conference in Moscow, and again nudged Salk to site a research center at La Jolla.100 In June 1959, Szilard applied to the NIH for a four-year research grant, then resumed his whirligig life with a three-month trip to Europe. He attended a Pugwash conference in Baden, visited scientists in Vienna and Zurich, and from Geneva wrote his first letter on arms control to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.101
A molecular biology conference in Copenhagen and a visit to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm later in 1959 left Szilard wondering how to explain the way a microbial cell regulates the level of different enzymes by induction. An answer came to him while botching on a flight from Stockholm to London. He had to reconcile induction with antibody formation. Induction involves a small molecule turning on the synthesis of a specific enzyme, while antibody formation involves a large molecule turning on the formation of a specific protein (the antibody).
“The trouble is that in antibody formation you have to explain two phenomena simultaneously,” he recalled.
One is that if you inject protein into a rabbit and then the same protein a month later, the rabbit responds with a much stronger antibody formation. It’s called the secondary response. At the same time you have to explain a phenomenon which is called tolerance—when you inject large quantities of a foreign protein into a newborn rabbit, when that rabbit grows up, it cannot make antibodies against this specific protein. . . .
My explanation of the secondary response invokes a mechanism which is endowed with memory; the rabbit “remembers” that it was exposed to that protein before. I had a model for induced enzyme formation, but I had failed to see earlier that if I just changed a constant in it, made it bigger, the model became endowed with “memory.”102
Here was more of Szilard’s creative psychoscience, as when he endowed Maxwell’s demon with a memory and urged Marcus to trick the single cells into thinking they were not alone. Here, again, was Szilard’s mind over matter.
Returning to New York in October 1959, where Szilard had scheduled surgery for a prostate infection, he became so enchanted with his insights about antibody formation that he worked furiously to draft two related papers, turning for criticism and help to Maurice Fox at the Rockefeller Institute, to Howard Green and Baruj Benacerraf (then at New York University, both later at Harvard), and to Herbert Anker at the University of Chicago. “I didn’t think I was seriously ill,” Szilard recalled, and began fresh calculations for the papers.
Then, in November, the four-year NIH grant came through.103 At last he had the financial—and institutional—security he long craved, the “roving professorship” that had eluded him for years. At last he could visit and brainstorm with his friend Novick at the University of Oregon, with George Beadle and Linus Pauling at Cal Tech, with George Klein at Karolinska, with Monod and his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, with James Watson at Harvard, with the Lederbergs at Stanford, with Manhattan Project colleague Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge, and with other friends in New York, Philadelphia, Berkeley, and Cambridge, England.104 At last, Szilard could have both roots and wings.
His joy was brief, however. The morning after Szilard finished his antibody manuscripts, he checked into the hospital and discovered that his problem was not the prostate. He had bladder cancer.105
CHAPTER 26
Beating Cancer
1960
Room 812 at Memorial Hospital was seldom quiet. From the early calls by nurses and the clatter of breakfast dishes through doctors’ visits in the late morning, to the parade of afternoon callers and the chitchat of surprise evening visitors, Leo Szilard’s room buzzed with conversation. The telephone rang steadily. Papers rustled and flapped in their constant shifts from the cluttered bed to the low armchairs to the long window ledge as people arrived and places were cleared. Bright light beamed above Manhattan’s skyline and through the broad windows, and with it came also the city’s inescapable muffled roar. In calmer moments a Grundig stenograph whirred and clicked through bursts of Szilard’s resolute dictation. Some visitors found it hard to believe that the plump, gray-haired man in the blue-and-white-striped robe at the center of this commotion was dying of cancer. Even late at night Szilard’s room resonated with a busy cadence—his leonine snore.
This routine began almost as soon as Szilard transferred to the Sloan- Kettering Memorial Cancer Center on January 7, 1960. He moved from New York Hospital, where he was first diagnosed to have cancer, because doctors there had proposed removing his bladder by surgery. He balked at this and sent Trude scurrying to medical libraries for articles and books. He telephoned doctors and scientists he knew. He studied mortality statistics for bladder cancer that Trude had compiled. All this convinced him that the odds for survival were much better with radiation therapy and that Memorial was the place for such treatment. So, in his room there, Szilard planned to live out a gamble by trying to use his remaining time productively. “I’m not in distress,” he told CBS newsman Howard K. Smith that spring. “It is true that I don’t expect to live, but still I hope to be active for a few months, and perhaps for a year.”1
In a part of the interview not broadcast, Szilard explained his thoughts about living and dying. “I always
liked . . . the story of a man who had heart trouble and who went to see his doctor. And the doctor told him that he could live out his normal life expectancy if he were willing to go slow and to restrict his activities. The man thought this over—and finally, he told his doctor that he is not going to slow down. ‘You see, Doctor,’ he said, ‘if worst comes to the worst, I’ll be dead ten years longer.’ This, I think, is a healthy attitude to take towards life and towards death.”
Even as a child, Szilard recalled, he had tried to visualize what he would do if faced with early death and reached the same conclusion: Continue what you enjoy. But now, at age sixty-two, there was one difference. He had less interest in “short-range issues,” such as the East-West standoff over Berlin, and much more interest in general problems, such as the bomb. “Now,” he added, “that doesn’t mean that if you want me to I couldn’t give you a solution of the Berlin problem at the drop of a hat. . . .”2
Szilard was just as confident about directing his own treatment. He had his doctor authorize the nurses to tell the name and dose of all his medicines. He often took his own temperature and sometimes wouldn’t tell the nurses what it was. He preferred to wash himself, with Trude’s help, and to have her change his surgical dressings. And he awoke and slept when he pleased. Szilard had decided to remain active as long as he could by having two tumors removed endoscopically and then undergoing radiation treatment to his whole bladder.3
Two days after checking into Memorial, Szilard directed the first irradiation of his bladder. At the time, patients received lengthy but relatively low doses of radiation for several months. In many cases, this caused nausea and other uncomfortable complications. Szilard and his doctors decided, instead, on much higher doses almost daily, but for only a few weeks. The “patient tolerated treatment well,” Szilard’s chief physician, James J. Nickson, concluded, and after a few days of treatment, Szilard’s only complaint was fatigue and diarrhea. An examination on January 25 revealed that around Szilard’s cystoscopy the neoplasm, or uncontrolled tumor growth, could not be distinguished from inflamed bladder tissue.4
A recurrence of tumor growth would be detected in blood and urine samples, and when these were taken every few weeks, Leo and Trude waited anxiously for the results. Radiation therapy ended on February 13, and within a week Szilard’s urine showed no signs of neoplasm. The news was also good for two samples taken in March. As the testing routine continued, the Szilards began to feel they were living month to month, sample to sample.5
Once word of Szilard’s illness spread, letters and calls flooded in from friends and colleagues. It was as if he had survived to read—and savor—his own obituaries. His time in room 812 also gave Szilard his first continuous residence in years and made him the center of attention in an expanded world. His restless shuffle between Chicago, New York, and Denver and his forays around North America and Europe had ended. But from his hospital bed, Szilard soon realized, he attracted new attention for his quirky ideas about science and public policy. To Life’s science reporter Albert Rosenfeld, Szilard looked more like “a reclining, cherubfaced Roman emperor than a declining cancer victim.”6 Ironically, Szilard’s gamble with death had yielded him a new and satisfying life.
For Trude, too, Szilard’s year in the hospital gave fresh meaning to their nine-year marriage. This was the first time they shared a daily routine. Trude lived nearby, in Abby Aldrich Hall at the Rockefeller Institute, and as Leo’s wife and doctor, she was at his bedside many hours each day, in new and fulfilling roles that his nomadic life had prevented. She met and ushered in visitors, arranged for stenographers, managed their social calendar, tidied his cluttered room, and opened his mail. She also watched Leo’s symptoms and vital signs and dressed and changed the catheter tube and drainage bag he now wore.
“I don’t think my doctors would agree that my case is incurable even though they may be willing to admit that they themselves cannot cure it,” Szilard wrote to his former colleague Harold Urey the week he shifted hospitals. “In any case, I am not changed in any way, I am not much more of a sight than before, and there is no point in making too much fuss about dying.” Confronting cancer, he said, involves “putting my affairs in order, and this I find very comforting.”7
Yet there were also setbacks: recurrent fatigue and sudden temperature changes. The harder Szilard worked, the more vulnerable he felt— reminded anew of his gamble. He reread his will, listed for Trude his bank accounts (in New York, Frankfurt, and Zurich) and pensions (in the United States and Germany), and gave a book editor permission to revise a manuscript “in case I should take a turn for the worse or die.”8 Understandably, the friendly bustle in room 812 sometimes gave way to darker thoughts: to recurrent fears of a painful, lingering death. If his tumors spread, if his body failed him, then Szilard still wanted to be in control—to take his own life swiftly and painlessly. Characteristically, Szilard thought about the worst in a fresh way.
“How terrible it is,” Szilard complained to chemist William Doering, “that you can’t walk into a drugstore and buy something to kill yourself without pain.” Friends like Doering soon realized Szilard had been studying poisons and suicide as well as radiation treatments. “Barbiturates are effective,” Szilard reasoned, “but you have to take a lot of them and then be left alone for hours. Otherwise, someone can save you.”
On a stroll to the eighth-floor solarium one day, while gazing at Manhattan’s skyline and the East River, Szilard asked his friend Cody Webb about the effects of cyanide. Webb acted uneasy and Szilard dropped the subject, but later he learned from Doering that cyanide is so astringent it seems to choke you to death in an agonizing way. He asked Doering to mix a potion of cyanide and citric acid, to mask the poison’s painful grip. Doering avoided this request as long as he could, but soon there came the longdistance phone calls to his office in New Haven. “Doering!” Szilard said brusquely, “I’m calling for the concoction you’re going to make.” Eventually, Doering delivered a small vial of cyanide, which Szilard would have to mix with orange or lemon juice.
But poison posed a further problem for Szilard: An autopsy would reveal the cause of death, negating life insurance payments to Trude. Szilard’s thoughts sprang to a “suicide kit” that should be painless and leave no trace. He brainstormed on this device with a few close friends. Doering found the subject curious, and in its own way, healthy; Szilard was trying to make the end of his life easy for everyone concerned. But Benjamin Liebowitz was shocked, considered the idea ghastly, and refused to talk about it. Brother Bela, an eager coinventor since their childhood, vetted Leo’s ideas conscientiously. They might even produce and patent something salable, the brothers agreed.
Research in the hospital library had convinced Szilard that asphyxiation would be the most difficult suicide to detect but would also be among the most painful. The pain, he learned, comes from the body’s own survival mechanism. When you hold your breath for several seconds, your body absorbs oxygen and expels carbon dioxide into your lungs. Soon your lungs become uncomfortable, stinging as they swell with the carbon dioxide. To relieve this pain, you start panting naturally, both to exhale the carbon dioxide and inhale fresh oxygen. How, Szilard wondered, could he remove the carbon dioxide—to avoid the pain and the panting—yet still deplete the oxygen to lose consciousness? He decided on breathing in and out of an airtight plastic bag, with a filter to trap the carbon dioxide.
Szilard thought this simple device should be sold in drugstores. It had the added feature, he realized, as if drafting advertising copy, that a person once committed to suicide still had time to reconsider during the process—an impossibility with poisons or self-inflicted wounds. When asked to, Liebowitz refused to buy a plastic bag and plastic tubes or to be Szilard’s accomplice, if necessary, by delivering and later removing the breathing device. But Szilard kept on scheming and devised another air bag that held cyanide vapors. These vapors could be released only by a second step, giving the person another chance to reconsider.9
For all the fear and foreboding, the year Szilard spent in the hospital was probably the happiest of his life. The radiation was completed within six weeks, and once fatigue from this passed, Szilard set a busy pace of writing, reading, dictating, and meeting. Before long, the hospital’s operators were complaining that room 812 was tying up the switchboard. “For the moment I feel very well and even though I am confined to the hospital I am fully active and go out to dinner every day,” Szilard reported that summer to Alexander V. Topchiev, head of the Soviet Pugwash group.10
To visitors, Szilard sometimes appeared frumpy in his broad-striped blue-and-white hospital robe, especially when he wore calf-length socks and garters as well. Callers remember that Szilard’s bed and chairs were so strewn with books and manuscripts that he had to lead them to the solarium to find a place to sit. Szilard ambled in and out of his room impulsively and even took taxis to the St. Moritz Hotel, on Central Park South, where he rented a room to serve as his office. Rumpelmayer’s, the delightful confectionery and pastry shop off the hotel lobby, was also a frequent stop. As his recovery progressed, Szilard and Trude went out to dinner often: to the homes of friends; to restaurants, including the Budapest, a lively Hungarian place on the East Side; and to the Czech National Club on Seventy-seventh Street, a neighborhood social center whose homey and inexpensive cafe served authentic mid-European dishes.11
Intermittently, Szilard tinkered in microbiology, but never on a single or sustained topic.12 Public policy—and the stature he was gaining in it— was more fun. With his increasing celebrity, Szilard received offers from several publishers. He began dictating “Memoirs” and in several attempts managed to complete a few dozen pages.13 Robert Livingston, his colleague and friend from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried to help by interviewing Szilard about his life and drafted some “Biographical Notes.”14 Szilard also signed a contract for a personal memoir with New American Library (NAL)15 and discussed with Knopf a history of the A-bomb.16
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