The Fevers of Reason

by Gerald Weissmann

  Cannon found another solution. He persuaded Homer Smith, professor of physiology at NYU School of Medicine, to offer Loewi a full-time professorship in pharmacology; Smith had been a research fellow in Cannon’s laboratory from 1925 to 1926. Dean McEwen chimed in, funding was obtained, and Loewi arrived for work in 1940. When Cannon visited him in New York, Loewi expressed his heartfelt “admiration for American freedom and the generous attitude of the American people for refugee scholars.” In 1952, when Otto Loewi gave a pharmacology lecture on his frog-heart experiments to my medical school class, Rudolf Ehrmann, his faculty colleague, was sitting in the front row.

  Loewi was the first of three Nobel laureates to have worked at NYU School of Medicine; each was foreign born. The others were Severo Ochoa (recipient of a Nobel prize in 1959 for work on RNA polymerase), who came as a refugee from Loyalist Spain in 1942, and Baruj Benacerraf (recipient of a Nobel prize in 1980 for work on immunogenetics), who arrived in 1956 after years in Paris and the American boondocks. Today, their students fill the halls of academe and the laboratories at Woods Hole where Loewi, Ochoa, and Benacerraf established a yearly beachhead at the Marine Biologic Laboratory. It is where Loewi told students that “a drug is a substance which, if injected into a rabbit, produces a paper.”

  A RECENT STUDY BY THE VILCEK FOUNDATION (Fig. 1) found that of the 277 Nobel prizes awarded to scientists working in the United States from 1901 to 2014, 35 percent went to the foreign-born.

  Fig. 1. Foreign-born American Nobel laureates before and after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 relaxed quota restrictions. (The Vilcek Foundation)

  However, the foundation argues that the statistics are “end loaded.” Almost 75 percent of those Nobel prizes were awarded only after the Immigration and Nationality Act (the Hart–Celler Act) was passed in 1965, eliminating discriminatory national-origin quotas and increasing employment-based green cards. This permitted a dramatic increase of the Asian population in America from less than 1 million in 1960 to more than 17 million in 2010, becoming approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population. Science got more than its share: of those 72 post–1965 Nobel laureates, 13 were Asian-Americans; that is 17 percent of U.S. laureates, and three times the percentage of Asians in America. Biologists will recognize Har Gobind Khorana (Nobel prize in 1968 for work on the genetic code) and Roger Tsien (Nobel prize in 2008 for work on green fluorescent protein).

  Asian-Americans and others who come to the United States for pre-and postdoctoral studies with hopes for a green card are a human resource in science that has been indispensable to the success of the enterprise. A random issue of the FASEB Journal (December 2015) can serve as an example of international contributions to the field of biology. It contains 27 articles, of which 11 are from the United States—a proportion that has held steady for a decade. Those articles list a total of 69 authors, 35 of which have Asian surnames. Any quick survey of other biomedical journals will confirm this ratio. Without this influx of immigrant post-docs, biomedical science would be the poorer.

  Signing the Hart–Celler Act on October 3, 1965, at Ellis Island, President Lyndon Johnson promised that, from that day onward, we would welcome immigrants “because of what they are and not because of the land from which they sprung.” So now, let’s revive Ellis Island as an entry point and welcome to America some of those ragged refugees from the shores of the Mediterranean. It would honor the promise of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

  Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

  19.

  Modernism and the Hippocampus: Kandel’s Vienna

  “‘The Scream’ is more than a painting, it’s a symbol of psychology as it anticipates the 20th-century traumas of mankind.”

  —Ivor Braka in the New York Times (May 12, 2012)

  ERIC KANDEL, PERHAPS THE PRE-EMINENT NEUROBIOLOGIST of our day, proves in The Age of Insight that he is also a cultural historian with a fine eye, a good ear, and—in his words—“a heart that dances in three-quarter time.” No wonder that, although his family escaped Hitler to come to New York, he has never forgotten his “city of dreams.”

  Through the lens of Vienna 1900, a city on the brink of the modern age, Kandel explores the science of the brain today, explaining that we’re on the brink of understanding emotional responses to the visual arts. He introduces us to the new science of neuroesthetics, in which cognitive psychology, brain imaging, and psychopharmacology play complementary roles in working out how vision, emotion, and empathy shape our experience of art.

  The salons and cafes of Vienna 1900 were home to transgressive artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt; louche writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler; masters of new design and architecture such as Josef Hoffman and Otto Wagner; and probing medical intellects such as Carl von Rokitansky and the great anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl. Vienna also spawned an influential school of art history with Alois Riegl, Ernst Gombrich, and Ernst Kris—and then, of course, there were Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud. Many of them were entertained at the fashionable salon presided over by Berta Zuckerkandl, wife of Emil.

  From this matrix, Kandel has precipitated a work that bids fair to rank with Arthur Koestler’s magisterial The Act of Creation as a classic analysis of how art and science inform each other. In his volume, superbly illustrated by masterpieces of the movement, Kandel suggests that Viennese modernism had three major themes.

  The first theme is that the human mind is largely irrational by nature and that if unconscious conflicts were brought to the surface, they would produce “new ways of thoughts and feeling.” These new ways, often explicitly erotic or aggressive, would, as it were, get to the bottom of things. Kandel illustrates this point in a striking comparison of two paintings. He contrasts the reclining nude Venus in a sixteenth-century painting by Giorgione with a sprawling nude woman drawn by Egon Schiele. In the Renaissance painting, the gently curving hand of the goddess slopes to cover her mons pubis; in Schiele’s drawing, a knees-up bawd is masturbating.

  The second theme, writes Kandel, is the introduction of self-examination as a means of transcending outward appearances. In the search for the dynamics of self, the seeker would discover rules that govern human individuality. In addition, the artist’s engagement with the self would evoke an empathic response from the viewer, a “vicarious experiencing of the subject of a painting.” Kandel presents several portraits by Schiele and Kokoschka in which the artist’s own visage is projected onto the face of the subject. Each portrait by a Viennese self-examiner is in fact a self-portrait:

  One reason for our emotional and visual response to faces in art is the important role that face perception plays in social interactions, emotions, and memory. Indeed, face perception has evolved to occupy more space in the brain than any other figural representation.

  The third theme is the integration of human knowledge. Vienna opened a dialogue among biological sciences and psychology, literature, music, and art, and thereby “initiated an integration of knowledge that we are still engaged in to this day. It also transformed science in Vienna, especially medicine.” Berta Zuckerkandl’s anatomist husband introduced Klimt to descriptive biology in general and to Darwinian theory in particular. Klimt learned these facts of life well. His iconic Byzantine portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (these days as popular as the “Mona Lisa”) is filled with enough elliptical ova, square spermatids, and major endocrine organs to fill a gynecology text. No matter: it’s glorious. If you would seek a monument to the unity of arts and science, look no further than the many college dorm rooms over which Adele presides.

  These three themes fill roughly one-third of Kandel’s engaging work. The remainder of The Age of Insight is devoted to bringing into confluence tw
o other major intellectual efforts that have engaged us since Vienna 1900. Art historians and cognitive psychologists have tried to explain the subjective response to a work of art that Gombrich called the “beholder’s part.” On the other hand, neurobiologists and psychiatrists have aimed to understand the objective forms and function of memory and desire. This part of Kandel’s book, written by a master of the craft, is both an introduction to neurobiology and a critical review of what neuroesthetics is all about.

  We learn that ancient applications in two regions of the inferior temporal cortex send visual information to three target sites in the brain: the lateral prefrontal cortex for downloading and filing the image; the hippocampus, which holds it on the memory drive; and the amygdala, which sends the up- or down-beat for the soundtrack. We get genetics, esthetics, history, and the latest in kinetic imaging. Any book that can go from neatly outlining the work of Kuffler, Hubel, and Wiesel on “figural primitives” to brisk analyses of recent observations by Larry Squire, Nancy Kanwisher, and Jonathan Cohen is broad indeed. But then again, we’re in the hands of the man who, with Jim Schwartz and Tom Jessel, literally wrote the book on neural science.

  But Kandel’s The Age of Insight (and his experience) also touch on somewhat darker aspects of Hapsburgian Vienna. He concludes that Freud, Schnitzler, and artists of Vienna 1900 had explored in their work

  the ubiquitous presence of sexuality and its onset in early childhood; the existence in women of an independent sexual drive and erotic life that is equal to that of men; the pervasive existence of aggression; the continuous struggle between the instinctual forces of sexuality and aggression and the resulting anxiety to which this conflict gives rise.

  Some may quibble that what’s missing in The Age of Insight is a discussion of why Ernst Gombrich, Stephen Kuffler, Ernst Kris, and Sigmund Freud—not to speak of Eric Kandel—could not live out their lives in Vienna, but that’s another story. Perhaps all of that unedited self-examination, aggression, and anxiety did more than just anticipate “the 20th-century traumas of mankind,” to quote the Times on Edvard Munch. The explanation must be stored somewhere between the hippocampus and the amygdala. That brings us to more neurobiology.

  KANDEL HAS SUGGESTED THAT THE MIRROR NEURONS in the motor areas of the brain “make us perceive the actions of others as if they were our own,” and proposed that that’s how the “beholder’s part” is wired. I’d disagree. A trip to a Claes Oldenburg exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York suggested to me that an equally important group of cells, the “grid cells,” might also come into play in our experience of art. The exhibit was filled not only with the expected Oldenburg images of everyday objects, like forks and sneakers transformed into caryatids or crucifixions, but also huge plaster constructions of hot dogs, chocolate cakes, and cream pies. The mirror-neuron theory needs some help here. These room-size objects made me scramble around the exhibition like a mouse in a maze that the artworks defined. My grid cells were firing to help me work my way about: checking the brain’s GPS.

  Kandel is probably correct in defining a major role of mirror neurons when it comes to working out Kokoschka et al., but not for a lot of art from mid-twentieth century on. Think of all those “installations,” “assemblies,” and “tableaus” that fill galleries and museums these days. Many such works fill spaces that demand circumnavigation, like Oldenburg’s cream pie. Their placement in space defines our map of attention, and so we turn to the brain’s GPS: the grid cells.

  And as for Oldenburg, I’d say that beauty is in the pie of the beholder.

  20.

  A Taste of the Oyster: Jan Vilcek’s Love and Science

  All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

  —Federico Fellini (1965)

  WERE JAN VILCEK’S BOOK Love and Science: A Memoir just an autobiography, it would present itself simply as another American immigrant success story: A bright middle-class boy survives the Nazis in Czechoslovakia after family conversion to Catholicism. He obtains his medical and research education under the constraints of a Communist regime and begins laboratory work on viruses and interferon. He marries a beautiful art curator and both escape to New York, where he continues to study interferon until he comes up with a chimeric antibody to tumor necrosis factor, a drug called infliximab. The antibody doesn’t cure tumors but works like gangbusters in autoimmunity. Infliximab is marketed commercially as Remicade and becomes a $10 billion a year drug for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. Profits are used to fund major philanthropic efforts and patronage of the arts. Our hero receives the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama in 2013.

  But Jan Vilcek’s engaging book is not just an autobiography. It’s the very model of the memoir as a literary genre.

  IF, FOLLOWING FELLINI, A PEARL IS THE OYSTER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, a memoir describes how the oyster tasted. In a memoir, personal experience lends flavor to historical fact, and Vilcek’s Love and Science gives us both. I’d place his gentle, scholarly reflections on a small shelf with those of other fine scientists who have given us a taste of their oyster: Peter Medawar in Memoirs of a Thinking Radish, Francis Crick in What Mad Pursuit, and Erwin Chargaff in Heraclitean Fire.

  The facts are tough reading; they include the stormy history of what happened to the Czechoslovakia of Vilcek’s childhood. Forged from the embers of the Hapsburg Empire, the map of Czechoslovakia between 1919 and 1939 looked like a pancreas pushed into a fat, liver-shaped Germany. The Nazis lopped off the juicy Sudentenland in 1938 to provoke World War II, and the Slovaks split off a new state a year later. Nazi rule followed until the end of the war, and the Soviet coup of 1948 shifted the map again; Vilcek’s book spells out the geography and chronology of those perilous years. The names changed, regimes were overturned, and the map of Central Europe turned cystic. Jewish families were threatened, fragmented, or—like Vilcek’s grandmother—sent to the camps to perish.

  In a section called “A Tumultuous Childhood,” Vilcek tells us how at age 8 he was separated from his parents and placed in a Catholic orphanage, then hidden in the provinces with his mother: “We did have the feeling that they viewed us with some suspicion, because despite my mother’s kerchief and my worn clothes, neither one of us looked as if we belonged there.” Dodging Wehrmacht soldiers from the west and the Russians from the east, the family was reunited with their absent father at the end of the war: “My mother and I were standing by the highway contemplating what to do next, when, only a few minutes later, a civilian passenger car stopped, seemingly for us. The door opened and out stepped father.”

  VILCEK EVENTUALLY ENTERED MEDICAL SCHOOL in Bratislava’s Comenius University and was soon attracted to its Institute of Virology, where visiting dignitaries such as Alick Isaacs (interferon) and Macfarlane Burnet (clonal selection) lit the fires of ambition. Tough slogging at first; about a year and a half after joining the Institute he asked himself, “Why am I wasting my time here? I have a medical degree. I could be doing something more productive!” He applied for a clinical appointment, was put on hold, and plugged away at his painstaking work on tick-borne encephalitis virus. The work paid off. In July 1960, just a few weeks after his 27th birthday, three years after graduation from medical school and two years before his PhD, he published his first, single-authored paper in Nature, “An Interferon-like Substance Released from Tick-Borne Encephalitis Virus-Infected Chick Embryo Fibroblast Cells.” More and more interferon papers followed, chiefly in the house organ of the Institute, Acta Virologica. Soon acknowledged by others in the field, he was permitted a short “study visit” to Louvain and London in 1962. At the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, he presented his work to Alick Isaacs and other mavens of British immunology, beginning his seminar by saying, “I feel like a country vicar who comes to Rome to lecture about the Bible to the pope and his cardinals.”

  But although the Soviet authorities denied him a chance to spend a post-doc y
ear at Mill Hill, that brief visit was enough to open his eyes to the West. Defection loomed, and he’d acquired a new helpmeet to speed his way. He had met, matched, and married the statuesque Marica Gerháth, an assistant curator at the Slovak National Gallery. She was stunning in her New York wardrobe, faithfully shipped to her by her elder brother Ivan, who had defected to the United States a few years earlier. Marica became the “Love” of his memoir’s title—and his life. The young couple soon planned defection. “I am too tall for this country,” Marica would say, and Jan agreed—on professional grounds—that “if the opportunity to leave ever arose, we would get out.”

  In October 1964, the opportunity arose. The authorities permitted the Vilceks to accept an invitation from friends in Vienna to join them at the State Opera (“Can you bring your tuxedo?” their friends asked.) The young couple packed all their wordly goods (no tuxedo) into a small Skoda automobile and crossed to the West. Bratislava is only thirty-five miles from Vienna, but in those days the cities were separated by “watchtowers, minefields and electrified wire fences: the Iron Curtain.” Their papers checked out, and the Vilceks crossed into the West, where the next evening was spent at a performance of The Magic Flute: “Listening to the lovely music,” Vilcek remembers, “there were moments when I almost forgot the profound change we had made in our lives that day.”