Perhaps I should have spoken up at the time, but I did not. I confess that I was unwilling to become embroiled in an ugly public exchange of accusations and denials. For my cowardice I beg your pardon. I also request that you keep the contents of this letter in confidence. I see no good coming from airing these old wrongs after nearly thirty years. To do so would unnecessarily sully the reputation of the American Journal of Genetics. Furthermore, it is quite clear that no scientific errors that require correction resulted from Schleicher’s action. I simply want you to have the private pleasure of knowing what you hopefully already know, that you have been one of the great pioneers of modern biochemical genetics.
Sincerely,
Cornelius J. Burke-Jones, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Genetics, Yale University
CHAPTER 26
1995
IN THE END I compromised. It seemed to be the best I could achieve. It wasn’t the full, ringing vindication that Grandma hoped for, but she might have settled for what I did. I don’t know. She wasn’t here to advise me. She had voluntarily ended her life a week after I last saw her ten years ago.
A year after I first communicated with them, the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Genetics agreed—after considerable negotiation—to publish the complete text of the Hansen-Bellafiori paper “Genetic Determination of Biochemical Steps in Carotenoid Pigment Formation in Neurospora crassa” exactly as it was submitted to them for publication in November of 1938. The paper was preceded by an editorial note, which read:
We have recently become aware of certain irregularities that occurred during the review of the following manuscript, which was submitted to this journal by Professors Emma Hansen and Joseph Bellafiori in November of 1938, that lead us to the extraordinary decision to print the contents of that manuscript verbatim as it was submitted. We believe that, absent these irregularities, the manuscript would have been accepted and promptly published after the normal review process. The contents of the manuscript, here reprinted, justify the conclusion that Professors Hansen and Bellafiori had provided in 1938 strong evidence for what has come to be known as the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, which was a crucial insight in the development of modern molecular genetics, and that therefore they deserve to be regarded as independent co-discoverers of this concept with a credible claim of priority to the discovery.
I had provided the journal with the exact copy of the manuscript from Grandma’s files. They refused to print the letter from the former editor, Burke-Jones, or Grandma’s letter demanding that his letter be published. The name of Philip Schleicher did not appear anywhere.
“We cannot countenance besmirching the reputation of a renown scientist when he is not in a position to defend himself,” the journal’s current editor argued, and I reluctantly agreed.
As part of the compromise, I had to promise not to send Burke-Jones’ letter to the New York Times, but I saved all of Grandma’s papers, including the incriminating letter. Just last week a diligent and persistent science historian telephoned me, asking questions, and I will show her everything. As Grandma predicted, the truth will be known.
The extraordinary act of publishing a manuscript nearly half a century after it was first submitted attracted quite a lot of attention, though, and I believe it has led to a reappraisal of this bit of scientific history. Here at UC San Francisco, where I do research in molecular oncology, I am occasionally asked if I am related to the Bellafiori of the Hansen-Bellafiori paper, and it is always a thrill to reply, “They were my grandparents, both of them.”
I am confident that the growing recognition of the importance of their research led to the decision of Harrington College to name its new science building Hansen-Bellafiori Hall. Dad and Mom and my brothers and I were invited to attend the dedication this year, and, since I am the only biological scientist in the family, I agreed to give a short talk about the nature and importance of their work. At the end I remarked, “Emma Hansen was not only a pioneer in genetic research, she was a pioneer in advancing the role of women in science and in professional life in general. ‘Why would we waste half of the brains, half of the imagination in the human race?’ I can recall her asking. Why indeed? And Joseph Bellafiori was also a pioneer in his cheerful acceptance of a woman as his equal partner in science and in his life. Let us follow their examples.”
The next day after the ceremonies were over, I wandered the campus alone. The new building had set aside three rooms for a natural history museum that included most of the familiar objects from Grandma’s big old house.
The worried-looking baby boy still floated in his formaldehyde, as did an array of snakes, fishes, flatworms, and amphibians. A great horned owl presided over a menagerie of forty species of Midwestern birds nicely mounted in glass cases in a room where stuffed foxes, beavers, badgers, and squirrels roamed beside fossilized skeletons and boxes of crustaceans. Most of the collection has been carefully catalogued, preserved, and stored in banks of drawers, where students can withdraw them and examine them in an adjacent room that is equipped with tables and microscopes. I could feel Grandma’s gentle hand on my shoulder as I wandered among the collection.
But she is dead now. Gone for ten years. I like to think of her in heaven: running through a fragrant field of clover with Henrik in search of a bird’s nest to raid, looking up from her microscope and happily recording what she sees in her notebook, showing her genetic maps to a grinning Joe. Maybe she even teaches classes in angelic sexuality. (Do they have sex in heaven? It could hardly be heaven if they don’t.) She and Joe are surely cataloguing the natural history of their celestial home. What is it made of? How does it work?
But that’s sentimental nonsense. Grandma didn’t believe that and neither do I. She is beyond knowing, beyond caring. Only the memory of her persists, the work she did. Her body is gone; only the atoms that made up her body are immortal. They have been disassembled and re-knit into a million new forms. She left instructions to be cremated, and her ashes were scattered on the Harrington College campus. Carbon dioxide from the combustion of her body was fixed via photosynthesis into the leaves of trees, grasses, perhaps even into the wisteria that still grows on the porch of the old house near the campus where I spent my afternoons after school.
The water vapor rose up into the atmosphere and later fell as rain on the cornfields and cow pastures of Illinois. The verdant lawns of the campus are nourished by the minerals from her ashes. Perhaps an atom or two made its way into a scarab beetle patiently rolling a ball of dung or into a gracefully swimming paramecium cell; maybe a single carbon atom found a home in a molecule of the brilliant red neurosporaxanthin pigment that decorates the bread mold Neurospora crassa. Not very likely, I know. Fanciful, to be sure, but it is the only kind of immortality that Emma Hansen expected.
But she lives on. Her genes live on. I carry them. They sometimes govern my actions in ways that I only dimly understand. I carry her genes, and I will pass them on. I plan to have a large family. These are good genes, these Hansen-Bellafiori genes.
Good genes. They live on.
Author’s Notes
The Lady Professor is a work of fiction. All of the principle characters are fictional; no resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is intended.
However, certain real scientists, none presently living, appear in the novel and play significant roles in Emma’s early research career. Two of the most important of these appear in Chapter 8: Barbara McClintock and James Sumner. Both were present at Cornell University during the time period of the novel, and both were then performing the research they describe to Emma. They worked in relative obscurity for years, but both were eventually recognized by the award of Nobel Prizes. Their contrasting ideas about fruitful approaches to the investigation of biology were central throughout the twentieth century. Barbara McClintock faced all of the barriers to women in science that were placed in Emma’s fictional path. Her remarkable story has been well told by E. F. Keller in A Feeling for the
Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. W. H. Freeman, New York and San Francisco (1983). Despite the handicap of having lost an arm as a youth, James Sumner eventually succeeded in isolating a pure crystalline enzyme, urease, and demonstrated that it was a protein.
Bernard O. Dodge was a USDA scientist who actually performed the early genetic characterization of the fungus Neurospora crassa described in the novel (although a few years later) and eventually passed this research topic on to others, most importantly to Carl and Margaret Lindgren and George Beadle. The work in Emma’s fictional Ph.D. thesis on genetics of N. crassa was later performed by the Lindgrens, and Emma’s preliminary cytogenetic characterization of this species was actually published in 1945 by Barbara McClintock. Genetic studies with N. crassa eventually yielded some of the cornerstones of modern molecular biology, as detailed by R. H. Davis in Neurospora: Contributions of a Model Organism. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York (2000).
Many other real scientists are briefly named in this novel, always with the intent of accurately portraying the roles they played in the science of their times. These include, in order of appearance in the novel, Robert Koch, Gregor Mendel, C. B. Hutchison, T. H. Morgan, Paul Ehrlich, Justus von Liebig, Roger Adams, Mikhail Tswett, J. H. Northrup, M. Kunitz, Otto Warburg, Alfred Kinsey, O. T. Avery, C. MacLeod, M. McCarty, James Watson and Francis Crick.
Stanton Mills, Illinois and all persons living in or around there are imaginary. Hancock College and Harrington College are fictional inventions, as are all persons described as members of their faculties or students. Cornell University is a real and very fine research university, of course, and was indeed an early leader in higher education for women. Professor Osborne, Leonard (Lenny) Hallowell, Rosa Levin, and Herschel Greenspan are fictional persons.
All of the scientific research described as having been done by Emma Hansen and Joseph Bellafiori is fictional, although care was taken to invent activities and findings that would have been feasible in the time period and places described. Much of the research ascribed to Emma and Joe during their years at Harrington College was actually performed by real scientists in various locations and times during the twentieth century. Emma and Joe’s imaginary work on the genetics and biochemistry of carotenoid pigment biosynthesis was invented for this novel because it would have been (just barely) feasible for two very energetic and imaginative scientists to accomplish at the time with limited resources, and it would have had the far-reaching consequences ascribed to it. The pathway for pigment biosynthesis was, however, drastically altered and simplified from the actual pathway in N. crassa to make the fictional science easier for a lay reader (and Emma and Joe) to comprehend. Joe’s adaptations of Mikhail Tswett’s procedures for column chromatography and paper chromatography were developed by others, especially by A. J. P. Martin and R. L. M. Synge, some years after the time period of the novel.
There is no American Journal of Genetics and no editor, Burke-Jones or otherwise; these are fictions. Other scientific journals named in the novel exist, but, of course, did not publish the fictional scientific papers described in the novel.
Readers who are familiar with the history of molecular genetics will recognize at once that the “one gene-one enzyme” hypothesis, ascribed in the novel to Emma and Joe and their fictional rivals Philip Schleicher and his co-worker Martin Fox, was actually developed by George W. Beadle and Edward L. Tatum on the basis of studies with N. crassa, although not from the genetics of carotenoid pigment formation; Beadle and Tatum were honored with the Nobel Prize in 1958 for this work. It must be emphasized in the strongest possible terms that this novel’s imputation of unethical conduct to a fictional character, Prof. Schleicher, during the review for publication of the novel’s imaginary research on the “one gene-one enzyme” hypothesis, does not suggest any kind of impropriety on the part of Beadle and Tatum or any other real scientist. Such is certainly not the case. The work of Beadle and Tatum is beyond reproach scientifically and ethically. This novel must not be construed to suggest otherwise.
The pseudoscience of eugenics was considered scientifically respectable in the first half of the twentieth century and was widely taught in high schools, colleges and universities. The quote in Chapter 6 from Charles B. Davenport’s 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, is verbatim. Davenport was a prominent scientist and leader of the American eugenics movement; he was the Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1912. Eugenics has been largely discredited today, but the question of the degree to which behavior and personality are genetically determined remains an area of vigorous scientific debate.
The Lady Professor is above all the story of the life and loves of a woman who is determined to build a career in science at a time when women were generally barred from such careers. The obstacles and prejudices she faces in the novel are not invented. Many—though not all—of these barriers to women in science have been removed today, and the world of science is much richer for it. The Lady Professor is also a novel about the human side of science. What does it feel like to do science? It is not science fiction (a genre with which I am rather impatient), but what Carl Djerassi has called “science in fiction.” As Emma reflects at the end of Chapter 24, science is a great, impersonal, self-correcting international cultural monument that cares only about the truth. But science is performed by humans; it is a very human activity and subject to the foibles and imperfections of human behavior, as this novel makes clear. The attempt of very imperfect actors to build perfect structures lies at the core of what makes us human, whether we are scientists or writers.
Urbana, Illinois
June 2014
Robert L. Switzer is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1961, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 and joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1968. He is the author or co-author of 138 original scientific research articles, reviews and book chapters and the co-author of the textbook Experimental Biochemistry (W. H. Freeman). He was a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
In recent years Robert has turned to a career in creative writing. His non-fiction memoir A Family Farm: Life on an Illinois Dairy Farm was published in 2012 by the Center for American Places, Columbia College, Chicago. He is currently working on a new novel and a collection of short stories. The Lady Professor is his first published novel.
Robert and his wife Bonnie, an artist, live in Urbana, Illinois. They are the proud parents of a son and a daughter and four grandchildren.
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