by Lewis Thomas
I have learned, one time or another, all sorts of things that I remember learning, but now they are lost to me. I cannot place the Thirty Years War or the Hundred Years War in the right centuries, nor have I at hand the barest facts about the issues involved. I once knew Keats, lots of Keats, by heart; he is still there, I suppose, probably scattered across the lobes of my left hemisphere, or maybe translated into the wordless language of my right hemisphere and preserved there forever as a set of hunches, but irretrievable as language. I have lost most of the philosophers I studied long ago and liked; the only sure memory I retain of Heidegger, even when I reread him today, is bewilderment. I have forgotten how to do cube roots, and will never learn again. Slide rules. Solid geometry. Thomas Hardy. Chinese etymology, which I learned in great volumes just a few years ago. The Bible, most of all the Sunday-school Bible, long since gone, obliterated.
It occurs to me that the computer-brain analogy needs to take account of what must otherwise seem an unnatural degree of fallibility on the part of the brain. Maybe what we do, by compulsion, in order to make sure that our minds are always reasonably well prepared to get us through any new day, is something like what happens to a computer when you walk past it carrying a powerful magnet. Perhaps we are in possession of similar devices—maybe chemical messengers of some sort—that periodically sweep the mind clear of surplus information, leaving the chips and circuits open to the new needs of the day. I cannot remember Keats because he was expunged one day; if I want him back, which I don’t very badly, I am obliged to learn him all over again; he is gone out of my temporal lobe, where I had him once lodged.
In a way, this could be a reassuring notion, especially for anyone getting on, as I am, in years. It would be nice to know that I have a mechanism, even if it is beyond my control, that sweeps through my brain periodically, editing away the accumulations of old and no longer usable information, clearing the desk so to speak, disposing of all the old magazines and partly read books, getting the rooms of the mind ready for new lodgers. Indeed, if there were not such a mechanism, the brain would sooner or later be stuffed, swollen, bulging with facts, and unable to take in anything new. Signs would have to be displayed in all the lobes, reading OCCUPIED. Or NO ENTRY. Or, worst of all, signs repainted, changed to read EXIT.
Come to think of it, you could not run a human brain in any other way, and the clearing out of excess information must be going on, automatically, autonomically, all the time. Perhaps there are certain pieces of thought that must be classed as nonbiodegradable, like addition and one’s family’s names and how to read a taximeter, but a great deal of material is surely disposable. And the need for a quick and ready sanitation system is real: you cannot ever be sure, from minute to minute, when you will have to find a place to put something new. At the very least, you are required to have, and use, a mechanism for edging facts to one side, pushing them out of the way into something like a plastic kitchen bag. Otherwise you would run the risk of losing all good ideas. Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea—the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything—tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? On good days it happens all the time. There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking hard about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You’d better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark. Computers cannot do this sort of thing. They can perform feats of mathematics beyond my comprehension, construct animated graphs at the touch of a finger, write with ease something like second-rate poetry, and they can even generate surprise for the operator, but I doubt very much that a computer, no matter how large and intricate, can itself be surprised, feel surprised; there isn’t room enough for that.
Computers are good at seeing patterns, better than we are. They can connect things that seem unrelated to each other, scanning the night sky or the stained blotches of 50,000 proteins on an electrophoretic gel or the numbers generated by all the world’s stock markets, and find relationships that matter. We do something like this with our brains, but we do it differently; we get things wrong. We use information not so much for its own sake as for leading to thoughts that really are unrelated, unconnected, patternless, and sometimes therefore quite new. If the human brain had not possessed this special gift, we would still be sharpening bones, muttering to ourselves, unable to make a poem or even whistle.
These two gifts, the ability to lose information unpredictably and to get relationships wrong, distinguish our brains from any computer I can imagine ever being manufactured. Artificial Intelligence is one thing, and I never spend a day without admiring it, but human intelligence is something else again. If I succeed in understanding the Shwartzman phenomenon, or in learning Homeric Greek, it will not be because the impulse to do so came in linear fashion from some prior stimulus. I will have blundered into it, thinking that something else led to it, when in fact the something else was heading in another direction, intent on other business.
This is not to say that I do not respect my mind, or anyone else’s mind. I do, and I count it an added mark of respect to acknowledge that I do not understand it. My own mind, fallible, error-prone, forgetful, unpredictable, and ungovernable, is way over my head.
9
GUAM AND OKINAWA
I had the guiltiest of wars, doing under orders one thing after another that I liked doing. The Rockefeller Institute (now University) had been signed up as a navy medical research unit, and I was taken on to work in the laboratory of the Rockefeller Hospital director, Dr. Thomas M. Rivers, who had one of the most extensive collections of viruses in the world stored under dry ice.
The Rockefeller Institute Hospital, mobilized as a naval unit in 1942, went to work in New York on several disease problems that were causing concern in the armed forces at that time: streptococcal infections and rheumatic fever, an epidemic form of pneumonia then known as primary atypical pneumonia (“atypical” because of the absence of pneumococci or other recognizable pathogens), hepatitis, yellow fever, malaria, parasitic infections, and meningitis. The hospital wards were filled with navy and marine personnel sent in from local training bases, most of them with pneumonia. My quarters were in Rivers’s laboratory, which up to then had been devoted entirely to the study of highly pathogenic and uncongenial viruses; I had for my own use a dry-ice box filled with frozen samples of most of the known virus species, including rabies, equine encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, choriomeningitis, ten different varieties of psittacosis, and several samples of typhus rickettsiae (not a virus but classed with the viruses because of its inability to grow unless contained in living cells). Scrub typhus, a highly lethal disease also known as tsutsugamushi fever, was of interest to the navy because of its occurrence in Japanese-occupied areas in the Pacific.
I was given four simultaneous assignments in the New York laboratory. The first was to try to isolate a virus from the patients with primary atypical pneumonia. The second was to learn whatever I could about typhus fever, in particular scrub typhus, and specifically to learn how to handle this agent without catching it; there had already been several deaths among laboratory workers in other institutions. The third was to continue some work on psittacosis among New York City pigeons, which had been in progress under Joseph Smadel in Rivers’s laboratory for several years; this was not really a military problem but was thought to be of considerable public health importance for the city.
My fourth assignment was the only one in which I felt safe and unthreatened. Once a month I received a box filled with urine specimens from each of the naval bases in the Northeastern states, for Ascheim-Zondek tests. Pregnancy was something the navy worried a lot about, and the top officials had decided that Dr. Rivers’s laboratory could be relied on for the appropriate facilit
ies (mice, really) and also for confidentiality. Each month I reported two or three positive tests, resulting presumably in a return to civilian life of that number of Waves.
I spent most of that summer in Washington as a visiting investigator in Norman Topping’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Health. Topping was the ranking authority on typhus fever, and his laboratory was busy with efforts to develop an effective vaccine against scrub typhus. I was taught how to cultivate the agent in chick embryos, how to prepare concentrated suspensions of the live agent for serological tests, and, above all, how to keep it from contaminating the air of the laboratory. The Waring blender had just been introduced as a useful instrument for homogenizing various tissues in research laboratories, and was in routine use in Topping’s laboratory for getting smooth suspensions of the scrub typhus organism. It was not until later that year, long after I’d left, that it was recognized that taking the cover off the blender too soon after homogenization could be hazardous; one of the senior staff members, who had been my personal teacher in the summer, died of scrub typhus picked up from the air around the Waring blender.
In 1943 we were told that the Rockefeller naval research unit was to be sent to the Pacific, and preparations for the move were begun. It took a year to get ready. By the autumn of 1944 the purchases of laboratory equipment had been completed, and the necessary additions to the professional staff of the unit had been negotiated. When we left for the West Coast on the transcontinental railroad, we had representatives of almost every biological discipline in uniform and on board: entomologists, mammalogists, malacologists (snails), ornithologists, biochemists, clinicians, microbiologists, immunologists, virologists, two rickettsiologists (Jerome Syverton and me), and a large number of administrative officers and noncommissioned ranks who had been signed on as technicians. We ended up at San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, for a mandatory period of military training before shipping out.
I think we must have been one of the strangest lots of trainees ever to pass through San Bruno. We were all housed together in our own barracks, away from the thousands of other navy and marine people on their way to the Pacific. Early each morning we were assembled for drill, marching to the cadence of a full-throated marine sergeant who had little use for us; what he knew for sure about us was that we would be of little value in any hand-to-hand fight. Before drill, he called the roll, and it always went the same way, down through the alphabet; each of us was supposed to bark “Here!” the instant our name was called. Just before my name was Jerome Syverton, an extremely dignified professor from Rochester. Syverton’s name was pronounced Siverton, but the first day of drill the sergeant called out Syverton with the long y; Syverton’s response was “Siverton—here!” This went on for four weeks—every morning the sergeant getting down to the S’s, all of us waiting, then the firmly and loudly mispronounced name, then Syverton’s correction followed by “Here!” The moment had everything: the military versus the academic mind, a touch of class warfare, territoriality, human rights, pure fun. It lightened each day at its beginning.
Three days each week we were piled onto half-track trucks and driven west to the cliff overlooking the Pacific and taught to use the Browning Automatic Rifle—the BAR—the most terrifying and lethal weapon any of us had ever seen. One man in our group, an insect systematist and one of the country’s major figures in taxonomy, but not quick on his feet and possessed of extremely thick eyeglass lenses, took up the instrument when it was his turn to fire and, his attention caught by something moving in the grass alongside, swung around in the direction of the drill sergeant with his finger on the trigger, almost but not quite firing, then waking up in surprise to see that everyone, the drill master and all his academic colleagues, were face down on the ground, yelling at him to put the damn thing down or point it toward the ocean.
We shipped out in early December, landing at Honolulu for a week or so, and then went on to Guam, a cluster of scientists and technicians in the midst of a huge convoy of marines and army infantry on their way to combat. We set up camp, living in tents while the construction work proceeded, and all of us—all ranks, from commander to marine private—built as fine a set of research laboratories as ever existed on a Pacific Island. The metal panels for the roofs and sides were labeled and ready to be screwed together; it was the simplest task to fit them together, hard to get wrong, but we finished with a sense of immense pride in our workmanship while we watched a crew of Seabees, professional construction workers, on a neighboring plot of ground putting up the island’s navy hospital using the same materials. Later we learned that the Seabees had originally been scheduled to build our laboratories, but our commanding officer had decided that it would be better if we did it ourselves, thus preserving our political independence from other parts of the Guam establishment. This was believed to be important for the unit’s future; we were supposed to be autonomous, capable of making our own selection of research problems to work on, not subject to orders from other authorities on the island who might, it was feared, be inclined to make a routine health department laboratory out of the unit.
The first call on our services came from Iwo Jima, where it was reported that tiny red mites had been encountered in the deep caves being taken from the Japanese. The invasion of that island had just started, and the casualties were beginning to arrive at the marine hospital down the road, along with rumors that the invasion was becoming an impossibility. The presence of mites added to the disaster; an outbreak of scrub typhus on Iwo Jima would have been a catastrophe. A team of technicians were sent to obtain samples of the insects, returning with the news that they were the wrong sort of mites, not the vectors of tsutsugamushi fever. Congratulations were exchanged all round. The unit, which was always at risk for seeming an academic frivolity, a Guam ivory tower, was acknowledged for its usefulness to the navy, and our reputation was, at least for the time, solid.
At about the same time an outbreak of infectious hepatitis was reported from the Philippines, and a small group under Dr. George Mirick was flown off to pick up blood and fecal samples for study in the Guam laboratories. The disease was believed to be caused by a virus, but there was no information about the nature of the agent nor any experimental animal to which it could be transmitted. Beyond isolating the new cases and carrying out conventional epidemiological surveys in attempts to locate a source of the infection, there was nothing to be done about the problem. Nevertheless, it was a reassurance to the navy to know that the Guam unit was available and working on the matter.
Richard Shope occupied the laboratory across the path from mine, and in the early months on Guam there were no direct assignments for his group. He was at that time one of the country’s leading virologists, having discovered the viruses of swine influenza and rabbit papilloma. He had already been told that he would be leading a team scheduled to land in Okinawa when the invasion took place the following spring, but he now had time on his hands. I watched him with fascination every morning, stepping out the front door of his laboratory holding a petri dish containing blood agar in each hand. He performed the same ritual each day, arms outspread, holding the open dishes first to the north for a full minute, then in successive right turns, facing each compass point for whatever might land on his agar plates, then back inside to put the dishes in his incubator. He was looking for any wild microorganism which might possess antibiotic properties for the influenza virus being propagated in his mouse colony. Shope was not only persistent and careful, he had always been an extremely lucky investigator. Within a matter of weeks he had isolated a strain of penicillium with exactly the action he wanted: filtrates of broth cultures of the bug protected his mice against virus infections. It was, so far as I know, the first demonstration of an antiviral antibiotic. He named it, for his wife, Helen, “Helenin.” It was effective against equine encephalitis viruses, not effective enough to be clinically useful, but an important clue for future work on antiviral agents.
While this was going on, Shope was organizing the contingent for Okinawa, ten officers and about twenty enlisted men, equipped with mobile laboratories for work on scrub typhus, insect and rodent studies, viruses, and a parasitology group with firsthand knowledge in schistosomiasis and the snails that transmit this disease. My assignment was to look for scrub typhus, and I had charge of a box containing fifty white mice for the purpose.
We left Guam for Okinawa on an army transport vessel in March and cast anchor in the harbor just north of the town of Naha two days after D-day. The battle for the southern end of the island had already begun, and we could hear the bombing from our carrier aircraft and the cannon and small-arms fire and, at night, see the flashes a mile or so inland. It looked like a dangerous place, but we were more anxious to land than to stay on board the transport, which seemed to us a lot more hazardous. The kamikaze raids had begun, and we were sitting targets, along with scores of other ships densely packed in the harbor. Several ships were hit in the first days of the battle, but not ours. After a few days, I forget how many, we went ashore, climbing down a rope net strung along the side of the ship and into small launches. I had to clamber my way down with one hand, using the other to clutch the rope around my box of white mice. During the voyage I had kept the box beneath my bunk, adding reams of toilet paper each day as bedding for the mice. This was, therefore, the first time the mice had come into public view, and I could see the astonished faces of the marine troops lining the rail overhead, calling to each other and pointing at the box. All I remember, apart from the general sounds of wonderment, was one comment: “Now I’ve seen every fuckin thing!”