Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  “So, what is it, son? I can see the wheels turning. Is it about my sex course and all that?”

  Hank shrugged, but did not reply.

  “Is it about you and Wendy?”

  Hank and Wendy had been dating steadily for the past year. She had been a dinner guest with Hank a few times. She was an attractive, lively girl, but oh, so young, still unformed. As was Hank. Just kids. Neither was ready for a serious commitment. Emma knew she shouldn’t meddle, but, well, she wanted to be sure that Hank didn’t make a poor choice. He was so passionate, impulsive—like Joe.

  “Well, sorta.”

  “Are the two of you sexually active? Is that it?”

  “Mom!”

  “Oh, I know it’s none of my business, but, ’Rico, it is. There are so many ways to get it wrong. I just want what’s . . . right . . . for you.”

  Hank reddened and stared at the floor.

  “You can talk to me about this. I’m the sex professor, remember?”

  “Well, it’s embarrassing . . . well, yeah, OK. Maybe we do wanna . . . I mean, just necking gets awfully frustrating. It makes you want more.”

  “I’m sure it does. Do you feel as if you really care for each other? You don’t want to hurt her—or get hurt yourself—if you break up later.” Intimacy led to commitment, Emma mused, and ’Rico needed to be free to back out.

  Hank shrugged. “How can you be sure about that?”

  “You probably can’t, but you should talk about it. Understand whether Wendy is assuming that it will lead to marriage. Most girls do. They feel as though they’ve been spoiled for another man after they’ve had sex with one. That’s silly, but that’s how it is. I like Wendy. She’s a bright girl. Has a nice personality. But you’re both very young. Only twenty and both of you have two more years of college to go. Marriage is for people who are emotionally mature and financially self-sufficient.”

  “Can’t you just have sex for fun, even if you’re not planning on getting married?”

  Emma mulled over her reply. Should she tell her son about Victor and Herschel? She decided against it. “Well, yes, lots of people do, but the kind, responsible thing to do is to be sure that you both agree that that’s what you’re doing. You have to understand, sex is powerful stuff. You can’t always predict how it’s going to affect your feelings. In the best cases it creates love, it deepens love, it generates great intimacy and trust. That’s what I had with your father. I admit that we were . . . intimate . . . before we got married. It makes you want to marry, even if you hadn’t planned to. But sometimes one of you is more in love than the other.

  “And, son, if you and Wendy decide that you’re going to have sex, come here. You can have privacy here at our house. I’ll stay at the office. I don’t want you getting kicked out of college because you got caught sneaking into a dorm room or making love out on the grass somewhere. And, for heaven’s sake, use contraceptives. Every time. Can you get them OK?”

  Hank, now blushing again, nodded. “Yeah. Gas stations have machines, you know.”

  “Well, this has been quite a day. I guess you made me practice what I preach.”

  “Have I . . . upset you? I mean, being so . . . randy and all?”

  “No, it’s just biology after all. A force that perpetuates the species. You come by it naturally. It’s just that, oh, ’Rico, I’m still getting used to the idea that you’re a young man, not my little boy any more.”

  ON A TUESDAY morning in mid-October Emma turned to page three of her newspaper and spotted a headline that read

  PRINCETON PROFESSOR WINS NOBEL

  “The award of the 1955 Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology to Princeton biology professor Philip Schleicher was announced in Stockholm, Sweden this morning. Schleicher was honored for his groundbreaking studies of the biochemical mechanism of gene action, specifically for the demonstration that each gene encodes a specific protein inside the cell.”

  Emma didn’t read the rest of the news story. She didn’t need to; she knew the rest. Her throat tightened; she bit her lip and tossed the newspaper aside. It was an old wound that she thought had healed, now ripped open after so many years. Damn it! But for the delay of a few months, the unnecessary obstacles that had denied publication and a claim of priority, that Nobel Prize would have been her and Joe’s Nobel Prize. They had done it alone and they had done it first. Yes, first! But not in the eyes of the world. That honor was now enshrined forever in the name of Philip Schleicher.

  The research findings of Hansen and Bellafiori would be relegated to a footnote, if they were to be remembered at all. They had merely “replicated” or “confirmed” the original discoveries credited to Schleicher. It stung like hell. At least Joe had not lived to experience this final insult.

  She and Joe had gotten it right too. The accumulated research of the seventeen years since they first submitted their work for publication proved that. Emma’s collaborative research with other investigators had demonstrated the one to one correspondence between genes and enzymes many times, as had the work of many others working with a variety of different species. Already a decade ago Avery, MacLeod and McCarty had shown that the genetic material—in bacteria at least—was DNA. They had done it just as James Sumner had suggested to her back in 1925: by isolating pure genetic material. And now, just two years ago, the stunning insights that flowed directly from the elucidation of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick that explained with remarkable clarity and simplicity both how DNA could be replicated into exact copies when cells divide and how DNA could encode the information to specify the structure of proteins within its own chemical structure. The question how does it work had now been answered at a fundamental level. Emma and Joe’s work—and Schleicher’s—had merely been steps along the path to the deeper understanding that now emerged.

  Did it matter who did the research that led to this understanding? No, not to the collective enterprise of Science itself, not a whit. All that mattered was that the findings were robust, reproducible, and led to new predictions that could be tested experimentally, findings that provided a deeper and lasting view into the intricate workings of the natural world.

  Science was a huge, complex fabric woven of many strands. It was like a massive stone edifice, of great strength and beauty, constructed of myriads of stones of many sizes. Did it matter who put the stones in place? No, it only mattered whether they sustained and perfected the structure.

  Some stones were so critical to the stability of the walls that they would bear the masons’ names forever: Newton, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin, Pasteur, who knows, perhaps even the newcomers Watson and Crick. But most of those who had placed stones were soon forgotten. It simply did not matter who they were. It was like life itself. As a biologist she should understand that all that mattered was that the species continued, that new cells, new individuals replaced the old ones. We live and grow, reproduce and die. Individual lives were generated and discarded with reckless abandon. Eat or be eaten. Survival of the species requires only that reproduction outrun death. The individual does not matter. There is no malice, no favoritism, only serene indifference.

  But to the individual it matters. Oh, hell yes, it matters!

  CHAPTER 25

  1968

  I SHOULD BE out there with them, Emma mused, as she watched from her office window the band of students marching with their picket signs and chanting anti-war slogans outside of the Administration Building. I have more reason to hate war than they do. War destroyed the spirit of my brother Henrik and drove him into mad exile, running from what he would never escape. He would be over seventy now, but surely he was long dead, buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. I will never know. War killed the great love of my life, my husband, the father of my son, my closest scientific collaborator, my playful, spirited lover. Dead twenty-five years. It would never cease hurting. Yes, I could give these children reasons to hate war.

  They were sending them off to foreign lands to be slaughtered again. They
were drafting young men from college campuses again. It never stops. But this time, the mood was different from the two world wars. The blind patriotism was absent; bitterness and dissention filled the air. The students of the past were too weighted down by the Great Depression, too caught up in the fervor of World War, to take to the streets like this.

  Emma had been around college campuses for more than half a century now. These students were different. They were confident, angry, confrontational, idealistic, and more than a little self-righteous. President Johnson, scarred and vilified for expanding the war, had recently chosen not to run for re-election. There had been assassinations, riots, and burning in the cities. But the war went on. Yes, I should be out there, a gray-haired lady professor nearing retirement, a respected researcher, a popular biology teacher who once was notorious as the college’s sex professor,—ha!, those lessons had been taken to heart. I should be out there carrying a sign with them, show them that at least some of their elders agree with them.

  But Emma did not join the demonstrators. A feeling of weariness and resignation lay over her, a numbing cloud. She had been arguing against war since her high school days—to little effect. She had fought barriers and resistance every step of the way to acquire her education, to obtain an academic appointment, to establish her research, and to gain recognition for it. There had been bitter disappointments and losses along with her successes. She pushed her glasses up onto her short, gray hair and rubbed her tired eyes. Perhaps it was time to give up a lifetime of struggle. Time to rest. Did she even know how to do that?

  At least she could take pleasure in the private world of her little family. Enrico (who even Emma now called Hank) and Wendy had invited her to dinner to celebrate her granddaughter Maria’s tenth birthday. At the age of thirty-three and as the father of three children, Hank was safely beyond the reach of the draft. Emma was selfishly grateful for that. She could not bear another loss to yet another war.

  Emma had hoped that Hank would follow her into biology or perhaps his father’s path into chemistry, but he chose to major in mathematics and physics and discovered that he loved to teach. He took a Master’s in education at Ohio State and returned to teach at Harrington Central High School, where he was now the Assistant Principal. He and Wendy married right after graduating from college and a year later Maria was born, followed by two boys, now four and six years old.

  Emma wondered whether Hank and Wendy’s decision to return to Harrington to make their lives was motivated by Hank’s desire to remain close to her and to protect her as she grew older and continued to live alone in her big old house-museum next to the campus. If so, she was glad for it. They were often together for family dinners and holidays. She took great pleasure in her grandchildren, though she had to admit to herself that the eldest, Maria, had become her favorite.

  The girl shared the intense curiosity and acute observation of the natural world that Emma recalled from her own childhood on the farm. From an early age she had coaxed Emma to take her on nature walks where she pointed out birds and their nests, trees, and plants, signs of the activity of small animals that many would overlook. She loved Emma’s upstairs rooms full of specimens and taxidermy, and Emma patiently explained them to her, as she did to the biology students who still visited twice a week. For the past two years Maria had taken to coming to Emma’s house alone after school, and Emma set up an informal tutorial for her. Her birthday gift was a student microscope. Perhaps now, she thought, I will get my biologist. It will be easier for her than it was for me.

  “I HEAR IT’S getting kind of rough out on the campus, Mama,” Hank said as he, Wendy, and Emma settled into the living room after dinner. “Blocking traffic in the streets. Broken windows. Apparently the local police have asked for help from the State Police.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. Everyone gets distracted from the important message when there’s violence. I was just thinking this afternoon that I should be out there with them. Maybe if some older people joined in, the hotheads could have been restrained.”

  “Would you really join the demonstrations, Emma?” Wendy asked.

  “I don’t know. No. I’ve never been a political activist—I had enough walls to bang my head against as it was. But I agree with them. We need to get out of Vietnam. All that senseless killing.”

  “Well, maybe after the election,” Hank offered.

  “Humpf. Don’t bet on it.”

  “Are you looking forward to summer, Mama?” Hank asked. “Going to work in the lab again?”

  “Yes, but I have to start thinking about winding things down. I will certainly have to retire in two more years. The Board of Trustees made an exception to the mandatory retirement at sixty-five rule for me, but they will surely not do it again.”

  “Are you going to miss teaching? Or does it become repetitive after a while?”

  “It could, but I keep revising the content. For the first year biology course, the rewards always came from arousing the students’ excitement about the intricate beauty and complexity of living systems. Of helping them see how clever Nature is. Genetics has changed so much over the years, it’s a completely different course now. Molecular genetics they call it. You remember that I persuaded the biology department to hire Morris Friedkin three years ago. He and I teach genetics together. He’s a bacterial geneticist, but he knows a lot of biochemistry too. My goodness, there was no such thing as bacterial genetics when I started. No one knew that bacteria had sexes. And he does a lot of work with bacteriophages. It’s all I can do to keep up.”

  “So you’re trying to nudge the biology department into modern biology?”

  “Right. And I’ve been working on the chemists too. They finally hired a biochemist. An enzymologist. They were so conservative, so backward about it. For heaven’s sakes, your father was really a biochemist. Way back then.”

  “So what about retirement, then? What are you going to do when you stop teaching? Will you still work in the lab?”

  “I hope so. I may give up my dear old Neurospora, though. I like Friedkin. He’s offered to teach me how to do genetics with his funny little bacteriophages. You know, you can’t even see them under a microscope. You only see where they’ve been by the holes they make in bacterial cultures.”

  “What about the natural history museum in your house?”

  “I’ll keep it open for biology students, school children. The college has no place for it. That’s another project. I’m going to work with the college to try to raise funds for a new science building. Biology and chemistry together, the way they should be. Modern teaching labs, space for senior honors and faculty research. A couple of rooms for the natural history museum.”

  THREE WEEKS LATER Emma collected her mail as usual from the rack of pigeonholes in the Department of Biology office. Among a few letters and a genetics journal was a letter marked CONFIDENTIAL. The typewritten return address on the envelope was unfamiliar and included no sender’s name. What was this? Emma returned to her office, sat at her desk, carefully opened the envelope with a letter knife, and read:

  Dear Professor Hansen,

  Although a good many years have passed, I daresay you will remember that I was the editor of the American Journal of Genetics who handled the review and publication after revision of your paper with the late Professor Joseph Bellafiori entitled “Genetic Determination of Biochemical Steps in Carotenoid Pigment Formation in Neurospora crassa.” The passage of time has amply confirmed that this paper presented truly groundbreaking discoveries. The manner in which it was handled has weighed on my conscience for a long time, for I believe that I was unwittingly involved in a great injustice to you and Dr. Bellafiori. I pushed the matter to the back of my mind, as one is inclined to do with acts of which one is ashamed, but it was brought forcefully to my attention again when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Professor Philip Schleicher. The news of Prof. Schleicher’s recent death sets me free to share with you my knowledge of certain improprieties in the review of y
our paper. It is pressing that I do so now, as my physicians tell me that I may not plan to live longer than another year. I write to you in the strictest confidence, which I trust you will honor.

  “As were you and Prof. Bellafiori, I was shocked when Prof. Schleicher’s paper appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy some ten months after your paper was submitted to Am. J. Genet. and rejected. The similarities in the content and conclusions of the two papers were remarkable—too remarkable to be overlooked. I can now tell you that, as you suspected, Prof. Schleicher was in fact a referee for your paper and that he recommended rejection in the strongest terms. I did not retain his review, but I recall having to excise much of the language because it was so dismissive of ‘the extravagant and inadequately documented claims of some lady professor at a midwestern cow college.’ Schleicher was a highly respected geneticist at a distinguished university, so I felt compelled to accept his judgment, the more positive comments from the other referee not withstanding. When I later read the Proceedings paper and saw that Prof. Schleicher had reached the same conclusions as you and Bellafiori on the basis of similar evidence and that he had not met the exceptionally demanding standard of proof that he had insisted that you provide, I knew that a wrong had been committed in which I had unintentionally participated. But the damage was done and irreparable without a major scandal. Schleicher’s paper gave him priority in claims to the new discoveries. The ethical rules of our journal did not permit to me reveal the identity of referees.

  One cannot know, of course, exactly what occurred. We cannot know the extent to which Prof. Schleicher may have used the information he gained from your unpublished manuscript to influence the content of his own paper. It is scandalous to think that he actually plagiarized its contents, and I have no proof of that. I have long believed, however, that at the very least, he recommended rejection of your paper so as to delay its publication and to gain time to publish his own research first. That ploy was successful, and he was rewarded with the highest recognition for those discoveries. I believe that you and Prof. Bellafiori should have received equal, if not exclusive, recognition for them.