“I am rather pessimistic about getting arms control in the predictable future,” Szilard wrote to his friend the German physicist Carl von Weizsäcker, “but this does not mean that we ought to give up fighting for it; on the contrary, I believe the time has come to fight for it in earnest.”11 But how would he fight? Szilard revealed a growing pessimism two weeks later when declining an invitation to be commencement speaker at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. To Dean Marcus Kogel, Szilard complained about the irrelevance of his work on arms control. At first, he wrote, he thought his latest paper on “Sting of the Bee” might have offered a theme for an address. But, he continued,
The events of the last few weeks have brought home to me rather forcefully, however, that to a very great extent our policies are determined by expediency and nothing but expediency. I rather doubt that the rational considerations upon which my article is based can prevail if they are not supported by moral considerations—the kind of moral considerations which are the very antithesis of considerations of pure expediency. It seems to me that the best thing I could do for the time being is to keep silent, and silent I propose to keep.12
In early March, with the frustrations of arms control seemingly put aside, Szilard focused on the mysteries of the human mind as he began dictating “The Molecular Basis of Long-Term Memory.”13 But within minutes of sitting down in his office, a meandering thought led him astray, and he dictated, instead, a memorandum on antibody formations. His speculation about memory was interrupted again the next day when Szilard described the induction of the sugar betagalactosidase and dictated a second paper on antibody formations.14 It wasn’t until the third day, after a lively lunch with some economists at La Valencia, that Szilard rode back to the Salk Institute, sat down again, dictated a memo about antibody allotypes, and at last returned to his memory and recall paper.15
Even in this peaceful setting, his mind raced in urgent and unpredictable ways. When finally thinking again about memory, Szilard began in his own subconscious freely associating, testing, and twisting ideas. He focused on the topic for hours at a time, almost every day, and a few days later he boasted to his friend Eugene Wigner that “this paper is a result of my not thinking about the problem for three years, and I am quite pleased with it.”16
Most days at the institute, Szilard sat on the open veranda that connected the temporary laboratory buildings, staring at the Pacific and botching in his playfully persistent way. Salk remembers him in a deck chair, blissfully “sitting in the sun, thinking and churning, as in a cocoon, weaving ideas.”17
If the Salk Institute runs short of funding, Szilard walked in to tell immunologist Melvin Cohn one sunny day, the fellows should simply invest in a huge ship. Anchored offshore, beyond the US territorial limit, it would feature gambling and prostitutes, and the profits could be used to finance important research. Another time, Szilard walked in to tell Cohn that rules should be devised to limit useless and irrelevant scientific papers. Under Szilard’s scheme, “when you get your Ph.D., you are given 100 slips for publications. You can use one for each article you write. No more. That way you will decide which ideas are important enough to publish.” Szilard also thought about the human body; not just how it worked, but how it ought to work.
“You know, Cohn,” Szilard interrupted one day after a time lounging on the veranda, “humans should be born with platinum teeth.” Then he toddled off to think about how that much platinum might be concentrated by nature in the earth’s evolutionary scheme. “Often Leo was interested in how it might have worked rather than how it works,” Cohn recalled.
At first, this brainstorming routine amused Cohn, until he realized that when daydreaming, Szilard sometimes stopped breathing; he nodded off and became very still, then suddenly heaved up and gasped for the breath he had lost. At institute seminars, too, Szilard sometimes appeared to doze, then sprang to life just when a critical point seemed apt. Rather than a sign of distress, this behavior was taken as Szilard’s style of focused thinking. And although Szilard did sometimes nod off after heavy lunches, no speaker could be sure when he might be interrupted with an incisive question or comment.
At one neurobiology seminar, when a boring and pretentious speaker droned on, Szilard put the whole enterprise into an amusing perspective. The speaker was so confident about his interpretation of how the brain works that at one point he turned to the front row and stared at Francis Crick, a fellow of the institute and 1962 Nobel laureate (with James D. Watson and Maurice H. F. Wilkins).
“Francis,” he asked, “ what do you think of that idea?” “Oh,” Crick said, embarrassed for the speaker but not wanting to hurt his feelings, “Seymour [Benzer] here didn’t understand it, and I was spending so much time explaining it to him that I missed some of your points.”
“Well, Seymour,” the speaker persisted, “what do you think of it?”
“I’m still thinking about it,” Benzer answered. “I’m not quite sure.”
“Dr. Szilard,” the speaker asked next, “what do you think of my idea?”
With no pause, Szilard answered, “I think it explains how your brain works.”
At other seminars, Szilard applied his well-known “index” to guest speakers, listening for a few minutes to decide if the ideas were original and, if they were not, rising from the front row and striding out the door. Szilard could be more polite, but just as insistent, with his institute colleagues. “Mel,” he once scolded Cohn in a strong voice, “you listen to me now, because when you understand this you’ll need it.”18 He characterized academic pettiness by saying to Salk about his successful ideas for developing a vaccine, “Jonas, they’ll never forgive you for having been right.” In another conversation with Salk, Szilard declared his “three stages of truth,” demonstrating how well he understood his colleagues, if not his own habits of thought. Confront scientists with a new idea, Szilard said, and most will say, “It’s not true!” Next, they’ll say, “If true, it’s not very important.” Finally, they’ll say, “We knew it all along!”19
Cohn and Szilard were both interested in how human immune systems work and for a while focused on betagalactosidase as a possible triggering mechanism. This inquiry led nowhere, but from it Szilard became the first theorist to press for a unified concept of the immune system. Many of Szilard’s other ideas in biology were wrong, Cohn believes, because he applied a physicist’s search for elegance and parsimony to a process that is evolutionary, at some stages needlessly complex, and forever changing.
“He read very little but used people as his information sources,” Cohn recalled. “He had a way of putting order into confusion. When considering a problem he could think of thirty fields at once,” relating one to another, and not only analogously but with working details from each. After listening intently, Szilard tried to synthesize what he had just heard: to clarify apparent contradictions, to pose new questions, to discover paradox, and to make his informant restate the topic in Szilard’s own terms. It is better to be clear and wrong than to be right and confused, Szilard believed. By consuming other people’s information, research results, and hypotheses, all the while trying to find ways to order and unify the confusion, Szilard raised his “sweet voice of reason” amid a chorus of dissonant creativity.
When Cohn said he liked The Voice of the Dolphins, Szilard was at first pleased, then pained.
“Why aren’t you saying it’s great literature?”
“Because it’s not great literature,” Cohn replied. Consider a story by Kafka, by Sartre, by Faulkner, he continued. “They have complexity and overtone. They require an emotional response.” Szilard couldn’t see that.
“I’m emotionally moved by extraordinary reasoning,” he declared.20
Szilard generalized so aggressively because he tried to explain almost everything—from moral values to paintings to music to immune systems—as quantitative statements about universal truth. Szilard judged one painting as better than another not because it is prettier or technically more compl
ex, or somehow inspired but simply because it “reduces the entropy of the universe” more efficiently, he once explained to Cohn. And when speculating about how the natural universe works, Szilard would not talk about making his guesses correct but about making them clear and concise. Experience appealed to Szilard not for its individual excitements but for the chance that a multitude of events might somehow reveal a common pattern or purpose or law.
In his own engrossing way, Szilard consumed foods as voraciously as he took in thoughts—in a direct, eclectic, and unaffected manner and often without restraint. Some mornings he poked his smiling face into Cohn’s lab to say, “Let’s go eat!” Szilard seldom cared where they went or what they ate. The important thing about eating, he believed, was not to feel hungry; so the more often you ate, the better you should feel. On one occasion, however, his lifelong passion for sweets led to a distressing problem. The Szilards came to the Cohns’ house for dinner and began the evening by sitting on the patio. Szilard was under a fruit tree, and when Cohn told him the ripe fruit were sapota mangos, he plucked and ate one. “Delicious,” he announced, and nibbled on another. Ignoring the hors d’oeuvres, Szilard plucked another sapota. And another. Suddenly, he groaned deeply and seemed to faint. He felt weak and looked ill; so distressed, in fact, that he had to be rushed to Scripps Hospital to have his stomach pumped.21
His unquenchable appetite for work got Szilard into medical trouble of another kind a few weeks later. He seemed impatient and energetic once he was able to concentrate on the memory paper. He dictated and rephrased, edited and rewrote his ideas with new force. When stumped in this thinking, Szilard turned to another institute fellow, mathematician and historian Jacob Bronowski, for help with a statistical problem: how to count two overlapping neurons in the brain that are connected through a synapse.22 The two men enjoyed statistics and each other’s company. They met every morning for a week to consider the problem, at first over coffee in the Bronowskis’ seaside garden, then in their offices. They filled pages with their calculations, Bronowski carefully jotting in his leatherbound diary, Szilard scribbling in a cheap composition notebook. And they punctuated this intense work with abrupt belly laughs, usually over the many East European stories they shared: about morality in small villages or smart-alecky boys and wise rabbis.23
Seeking help elsewhere, Szilard also telephoned the mathematicians Mark Kac and Leo Goodman, but before they could reply, Bronowski produced an answer. His statistical problem with the neurons solved, Szilard worked briskly to complete the first part of his memory paper and sent it off to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the effort left him so weary that he had to cease all work and rest at his cottage for several days.24
The paper that Szilard completed for the Proceedings described a “hypothetical biological process on which the capability of the central nervous system to record and to recall a sensory experience might conceivably be based.”25 This problem, his colleague Aaron Novick later noticed, was in a sense the same one he had begun his career with as a physicist in the early 1920s. Then trying to exorcise Maxwell’s demon, Szilard had asked “whether the brain violated the laws of thermodynamics.” With memory and recall, Novick said, Szilard “sought to understand how the brain could ‘learn.’ ”26 Over breakfast in the Del Charro dining room one day, Szilard met Nicholas Kurti, a visiting physicist from Oxford whom he had known since the 1930s, and explained how his theory on human memory was going. Then he leaned forward. “Kurti, it will not be right,” Szilard whispered in a conspiratorial way. “But it will be impossible to prove it wrong!”27
Szilard’s “Memory and Recall” paper is more significant for what it attempted than for what it achieved, although many questions he raised still remain unanswered. The theory it offered provided an effective chemical basis for recording and tracing the many parts that constitute a single memory in different brain cells. Bronowski later explained to Salk that the paper “made it possible to understand how a memory can be reinforced by repetition and also how it can be extinguished (that is, forgotten) if it is not reinforced.” Bronowski concluded that “Szilard’s theory was bold in general conception and yet searching in its detail: for example, it took account of the constant fluctuations in the level of chemical and electrical activity in the brain which no other theory had tried to accommodate.”28
As Szilard became more comfortable at the Salk Institute and in his cottage at the Del Charro, he consciously embraced other disciplines, perhaps hoping with each encounter to spot fresh, unifying details. He organized Sunday brunches for friends and associates, which the motel staff catered. Tables and chairs were arranged around the lawn for jolly, freewheeling conversations with economists, medical doctors, local artists, political scientists, and educators. On one visit to La Jolla that spring, physicist Freeman Dyson joined the group, and a few colleagues from the Salk Institute became regulars, among them Cohn and the Bronowskis.29
Most of Szilard’s ventures out-of-doors were for fresh ideas rather than fresh air, and while many other institute colleagues enjoyed Southern California’s natural life-style and the nonurban setting, efforts to move him beyond his habitual physical lassitude invariably failed. For example, when Cohn suggested a drive northeast into the Anza-Borrego Desert for a hike among the rare spring wildflowers, the Szilards agreed. But on the Sunday morning when Cohn and his wife set out in their white convertible, along with the Szilards and visiting biologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, Leo was ill at ease: He wore his habitual dark suit and tie and slumped in the backseat, seeming to notice almost nothing. Throughout the day, he was oblivious to the dramatic terrain, and while the others climbed and scampered among colored rocks and flowering bushes, with Trude eagerly photographing the desert’s fresh light and color, Leo sat in the car, staring ahead, botching.
“Like an Indian guru, Leo had an inner world that was totally sufficient for him,” Cohn observed later. “You had to interact with his world to force him to consider your world outside.” Trude returned with several stunning photographs of the dramatic flowers and landscape, so perhaps in this way Szilard eventually did see the desert’s bloom in springtime. But for all the hours he reclined in Cohn’s convertible, he might just as well have been seated at his desk or slumped in his deck chair.30
On April 1, Szilard realized his longtime dream of becoming a resident fellow at the institute. With a yearly salary of $25,000, another $10,000 for a secretary and travel expenses, and the promise of more money for researchers and laboratory equipment, the institute offered him financial security and intellectual challenge, which he had rarely enjoyed together.31
“An appointment for life,” he liked to boast to old friends. “For life.” Those words sounded wonderful. But now that he had this ideal position, Szilard still needed to fret. In a letter that spring to Abram Spanel, a friend and collaborator who had long worried over Szilard’s retirement problems, he praised La Jolla as “a wonderful place” to live and boasted about his “life” appointment. All that will be fine, Szilard added, “except, of course, if I should outlive the institute.”32
At the institute, Szilard soon turned to a second topic that had long intrigued him, the aging process. He began to lay plans to host a conference on the subject and, working with chemist Leslie Orgel, drew up topics and a guest list. Over the years, Szilard had both challenged and annoyed his colleagues (and other experts) by confronting them with basic and seemingly simple questions, which they often could not answer. His approach to biological aging took the same quizzical form, as a few of the forty-eight questions he posed reveal.
Can aging be defined? What is the evidence that it is a general phenomenon throughout an organism rather than a phenomenon involving only key molecules or cells? How do genes affect the rate of aging? Do all organisms and tissues now growing age? Do complex molecules change their properties with time? Are hormonal differences with age causes or effects? Are individual cells capable of living indefinitely? Do individual cells a
ge more rapidly under radiation? For each topic, Szilard also asked direct questions about experiments. How could they be designed? Conducted? Evaluated?33
This approach suited Szilard, and the new institute, because it explored scientific questions that might not be solved, indeed might not be seen by some researchers as legitimate questions. Most scientific research, Szilard believed, focused instead on the many questions that we know, ones that have a reasonable chance of being answered with obvious solutions.
During the last week in April, Julius Tabin came to La Jolla and stopped in at the Del Charro. A physicist who had first met Szilard during the Manhattan Project at Chicago, Tabin later specialized in patent law and worked for General Atomics at the time Szilard was a consultant there in the 1950s. They met for dinner, and as the two men drove into town to Szilard’s favorite French restaurant, they talked about many things— Szilard’s fondness for his new life in La Jolla, his work at the institute, and Tabin’s work as a patent lawyer in Chicago. Only later, as their leisurely meal progressed, did Szilard reveal he had a reason for their meeting.
After years of neglect and rejection, Szilard said, he still craved some compensation from the federal government for his early pioneering work in atomic energy. “He made it quite clear that he was not interested in seeking such compensation for himself,” Tabin recalled about their conversation that night. Rather, “he wished to provide for [Trude] in the event that anything should happen to him.” Over dinner, Szilard recounted vividly the pressure that General Groves had used in their 1943 meeting to gain his signature on a patent agreement, adding the fact that a notation was later typed on the assignment stating that the signature was obtained without coercion. Tabin found that “highly unusual” and an indication that Szilard probably was pressured to sign away his patent rights. Szilard said that he would be satisfied to receive the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Award, a $50,000 tax-free prize for distinguished achievements in atomic science. In 1962 the award had gone to Teller; in 1963, to Oppenheimer.34 Now, Szilard thought, it was his turn. With that, he said, he would make no further claims.
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