The Youngest Science

by Lewis Thomas

May peer upon the moving world with slight nystagmus trouble,

  May know the rich experience of seeing Leo double!

  But now remove his sustenance, deprive him of his B,

  Withdraw his food and let him brood on crusts and Irish tea.

  —He undergoes Mutation, becomes like me or you,

  Becomes an almost-human thing, and ends up on Ward 2.

  A pigeon with religion, a pigeon with the shakes,

  A little dove protesting love to twenty thousand snakes,

  A pigeon having horrors of being hung on hooks,

  Or being chased and then defaced by busts of Phillips Brooks.

  Oh, Happy Lot! Oh, Joyous News! Oh, Science on the Brink!

  The Mammillary Bodies are susceptible to drink!

  The Region of the Thalamus delights in getting blotto,

  And also the entire damned Medulla Oblongato!

  p. 71

  Rivers, T. M. and Schwentker, F. F. Encephalomyelitis accompanied by myelin destruction experimentally produced in monkeys. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 61: 689, 1935.

  p. 72

  Thomas, L. A single-stage method to produce brain abscess in cats. Archives of Pathology, 33:472–76, 1942.

  p. 73

  Dingle, J. H., Thomas, L. and Morton, A. R. Treatment of meningococcic meningitis and meningococcemia with sulfadiazine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 116: 2666–68, 1941.

  p. 76

  Thomas, L., Smith, H. W. and Dingle, J. H. Investigations of meningococceal infection. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 22: 353–85, 1943.

  p. 98

  Thomas, L. and Peck, J. H. Results of inoculating Okinawan horses with virus of Japanese B encephalitis. Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 61: 5–6, 1946.

  p. 99

  Alvin Coburn must have been one of the country’s all-time most successful interns. He graduated from P & S with a consuming interest in rheumatic fever and some strong hunches about its causation, and during the months of his internship, in the midst of all the endless duties of a house officer, somehow or other he managed to solve the most crucial part of the problem. Single-handed, in what there was of his spare time, he established the causal linkage between infection of the throat by Group A hemolytic streptococci and the onset, ten or twelve days later, of inflammation affecting the heart and joints.

  Not that he wasn’t working on his wards. A co-intern of his told me that Coburn would arrive on his ward promptly at 6:45 each morning, stand in the doorway, flap his arms, and crow like a rooster.

  I’ll never know how he accomplished that masterpiece of applied microbiology so clearly and conclusively and in so short a space of time. So far as I know, although he continued to study rheumatic fever for most of the rest of his professional life, he never matched that single achievement, and he never received all the credit he deserved.

  p. 107

  Avery, O. T., MacLeod, C. M. and McCarty, M. Transformation of pneumococcal types induced by a desoxyribonucleic acid fraction isolated from Pneumococcus Type III. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 79: 137, 1944.

  I have never understood why this work, one of the great pieces of biological science in history, was never recognized by a Nobel Prize. The paper in which it was first announced that the “transforming principle” of pneumococci was DNA was written with meticulous care and caution but in full awareness of the implications for genetics. Avery and his associates knew exactly what they had, and what it meant. Some have said that the writing was too cautious, that perhaps Avery had doubts of his own, and this is why the prize was withheld. I cannot believe it.

  p. 139

  Simon’s original notion was that there might be specific sets of cells within the nervous system to which morphine and related opiates are specifically bound. He obtained suggestive evidence for this in 1966, and published a preliminary note in the Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine (122: 6–11, 1966). Seven years later conclusive proof of the phenomenon was obtained by his group and by Pert and Snyder at Johns Hopkins. Within two years, in 1975, other investigators discovered the existence of endogenous opiates (the “endorphins”) in pituitary gland secretion. The history of this remarkable work, involving several different laboratories here and abroad, can be found in two review articles published in 1978.

  Terenius, L. Endogenous peptides and analgesia. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 18: 189–204, 1978.

  Simon, E. J. The opiate receptors. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 18: 371–94, 1978.

  p. 142

  Thomas, L. The physiological disturbances produced by endotoxins. Annual Review of Physiology, 16: 467, 1954.

  p. 147

  Good, R. A. and Thomas, L. Studies on the generalized Shwartzman reaction. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 97: 871–88, 1953.

  p. 148

  Thomas, L. Reversible collapse of rabbit ears after intravenous papain and prevention of recovery by cortisone. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 104: 245–52, 1956.

  p. 149

  Barber, B. and Fox, R. The case of the floppy-eared rabbits: An instance of serendipity gained and serendipity lost. American Journal of Sociology, 64: 128–36, 1958.

  p. 151

  Thomas, L., Douglas, G. W. and Carr, M. C. The continual migration of syncytial trophoblasts from the fetal placenta in the maternal circulation. Transactions of the Association of American Physicians, 72: 140–48, 1959.

  p. 155

  Fell, H. B. and Thomas, L. Comparison of the effects of papain and vitamin A on cartilage: The effects on organ cultures of embryonic skeletal muscle. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 111: 719–44, 1960.

  Thomas, L., McCluskey, R. T., Potter, J. L. and Weissman, G. Comparison of the effects of papain and vitamin A on cartilage: The effects in rabbits. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 111: 705–18, 1960.

  p. 156

  Thomas, L. Papain, vitamin A, lysosomes and endotoxin: An essay on useful irrelevancies in the study of tissue damage. Archives of Internal Medicine, 110: 782–86, 1962.

  p. 165

  I was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to membership on the President’s Science Advisory Committee (known in academic circles as PSAC) in 1967. The committee, composed principally of physicists and chemists at that time, met for two days each month in the Executive Office Building next to the White House under the chairmanship of the President’s Science Adviser (in the years of my term, the advisers were Donald Hornig, then Lee Du Bridge, then Edward David). In 1968 we were asked by the White House to make a study of the scientific needs of the country’s health-care system, with special attention to the rapidly rising costs of hospital care. I became chairman of a small panel that worked on the matter for about a year and emerged with the conclusion that the only hope of reducing expenditures for health care lay in better and more fundamental research on the mechanisms of human disease, which meant, in our view, more funds for NIH. We recognized three levels of medical technology: (1) genuine high technology, exemplified by Salk and Sabin poliomyelitis vaccines, which simply eliminated a major disease at very low cost by providing protection against the three strains of virus known to exist; (2) “halfway” technology, applied to the management of disease when the underlying mechanism is not understood and when medicine is obliged to do whatever it can to shore things up and postpone incapacitation and death, at whatever cost, usually very high cost indeed, illustrated by open-heart surgery, coronary artery bypass, and the replacement of damaged organs by transplanting new ones (at extremely high cost); and (3) nontechnology, the kind of things doctors do when there is nothing at all to be done, as in the care of patients with advanced cancer and senile dementia. We suggested that the rising cost of health care was resulting from efforts to treat diseases of the halfway or nontechnology class, and recommended that more basic research on thes
e ailments be sponsored by NIH.

  Our report was approved by the full committee and sent along to the President’s office, where I imagine it was filed and probably forgotten. The Vietnam War was becoming the sole preoccupation of the Johnson White House, and medical science was not among the high priorities. A few years later, in the Nixon administration, PSAC itself was abolished, I think because its members, almost all of whom came from the academic world, were regarded as too liberal for that administration. Also, I am sure, because some of the members made public their opposition to the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) program then being contemplated, as well as their disagreement with the administration’s plans for sponsoring the development of supersonic aircraft on a grand scale.

  Too bad, too. PSAC, the Science Adviser, and the staff of the White House Office of Science and Technology were a potentially valuable resource for the government, and I hope that some future President will put the apparatus together again. The need for highly sophisticated, impartial, and sensible advice on matters of science and technology will surely become more and more urgent in the years ahead, and I do not believe that such advice is sufficiently at hand within the bureaucracy of administrative agencies. I would be feeling considerably less apprehensive about the immediate hazard of nuclear warfare if PSAC, or something like PSAC, were back in place. If it were up to me, I would leave off the medical people and biologists, or perhaps have them there as a small minority, and I would load the committee with the best physicists in the United States.

  p. 169

  Thomas, L. Mechanisms of pathogenesis in mycoplasma infection. The Harvey Lectures. New York: Academic Press, 1969, pp. 73–98.

  p. 178

  Sabin, A. and Warren, J. Journal of Bacteriology, 40: 828, 1940.

  p. 187

  Milton, G. W. Self-willed death or the bone-pointing syndrome. Lancet, 1435–36, 1973.

  p. 191

  Thomas, L. Discussion of P. B. Medawar, in Cellular & Humoral Aspects of the Hypersensitive States. H. Sherwood Lawrence, editor. New York: Hoeber/Harper, Publishers, 1959, pp. 451–68.

  p. 196

  McCartney, W. Olfaction and Odours. Berlin-New York: Springer-Verlag, 1968.

  This book is a rich source of convincing anecdotes about the tracking behavior of trained dogs, with the best bibliography I have seen. McCartney has collected references to a vast amount of European and British literature, much of it written by police investigators, some of it published by dog breeding societies. The most active period of research was between the two world wars. Surprisingly, to me anyway, there has been relatively little research recorded in the last three decades.

  p. 197

  Theodor, J. L. The distinction between “self” and “non-self” in lower invertebrates. Nature, 227: 690–92, 1970.

  Hildemann, W. H., Bigger, C. H., Johnston, I. S., and Jokiel, P. L. Characteristics of transplantation immunity in the sponge. Transplantation, 30: 362–67, 1980.

  p. 198

  Thomas, L. Biological signals for self-identification. In Progress in Immunology Vol. 2, editors: L. Brent and J. Holborow. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1974, pp. 239–47.

  Thomas, L. Symbiosis as an immunologic problem. In The Immune System and Infectious Disease. Basel: S. Kargen, 1975, pp. 2–11.

  Thomas, L. The Lives of a Cell. New York: The Viking Press, 1974, p. 19.

  p. 199

  Yamazaki, K., Boyse, E. A., Mike, V., Thaler, H. T., Mathiesen, B. J., Abbott, J., Boyse, J., Zayas, Z. A. and Thomas, L. Control of mating preferences in mice by genes in the major histocompatibility complex. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 144: 1224–35, 1976.

  Boyse, E. A., Yamazaki, K., Yamaguchi, M. and Thomas, L. Sensory communication among mice according to their MHC types. In The Immune System. Functions and Therapy of Dysfunction, edited by G. Doria and A. Eshkol. New York: Academic Press, 1980, pp. 45–63.

  p. 201

  Yamaguchi, M., Yamazaki, K., Beauchamp, G. K., Bard, J., Thomas, L. and Boyse, E. A. Distinctive urinary odors governed by the major histocompatibility locus of the mouse. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 78: 5817–20, 1981.

  p. 217

  The scabies-scrapie conversation took place one day in 1981, when we were having our third semisabbatical at Cambridge and were in London for a weekend. I had been invited by Sir Michael Stoker, the president of Clare Hall, to come as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall for the Michaelmas term, from September to December. We lived in rooms in the college on Herschel Road, a few hundred yards from the university library, with no responsibilities beyond a few lectures and seminars and time enough to write and read through all the rainy days. Our nearest neighbor was a Visiting Fellow from Poland, Professor Gregory Seidler, Rector of Lublin University, a considerable scholar in the philosophy and history of law, and a vivacious, indefatigable conversationalist. The Solidarity crisis and military takeover in Poland were in the British newspaper headlines throughout the time of our friendship, but Seidler and his wife talked of other things. We had a long lunch one Sunday at the Fire Engine House in Ely, a small restaurant just beyond the shadow of Ely Cathedral, and Seidler spoke his mind on politics for the first and only time. Poland was part of Europe, he said; he and his wife were Europeans. The political problems in Poland were out of hand, beyond solving, for the time being anyway, because they had become “emotional” problems, a disaster. He hoped that the people of Europe could begin thinking together, using their excellent brains, avoiding “emotion.” When he spoke of emotion and the problems it raised for his country, he became red in the face.

  He presented Beryl with a copy of the English translation of his book The Emergence of the Eastern World (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968), his only copy, I fear. I have not read it (no time, I keep saying) but Beryl has, and I have been learning, secondhand, some things I never knew about the influence of the Mongol empire on the development of European civilization. I had never heard of Genghis Khan’s mother, but now I know that her name was Yulun and that she was a powerful lady, capable all by herself of persuading the nomadic tribes that they should be unified under the leadership of her son.

  Professor Seidler and his wife went back to Poland in early January 1982. We got a letter from them in New York, mailed from Cambridge just before their departure, wishing us well. I have never known a more civilized, equable, deeply skeptical but still hopeful man.

  p. 224

  Thomas, L. Adaptive Aspects of Inflammation. Presented at Third Symposium of the International Inflammation Club. Published by Upjohn Co., Kalamazoo, 1970.

  p. 228

  Lovelock, J. E. and Margulis, L. Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothesis. Tellus, 26: 2, 1973.

  p. 245

  Lovelock, J. E. Gaia. A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

  p. 245

  Margulis, L. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. Life and Its Environment on the Early Earth. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1981.

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