by Oren Harman
Meanwhile the second “breakthrough” was increasingly grabbing his attention. Again it started off related to IBM work: a memo on “Approaches to Object Recognition for Complex Graphic Images.” Soon, however, it had shifted in another direction, with George trying to crack the basic mysteries of animal vision. How precisely did the neural wiring in the eye work to produce a picture of the world? Delving into the literature with abandon, he had read all he could get his hands on relating to retinal microanatomy and electrophysiology. He was working on two papers he planned to send to Science—“Structure and Function in the Invaginated Synapses of Retinal Receptor Cells” and “Cone Pigments and Spectrophotometry Artifacts”—when the insight finally hit him. “I think I may at last have the key missing piece in the puzzle,” he wrote to his boss, Fred Brooks, the computer man: It was the glial cells, nonneurons in the nervous system, and George had discovered their role in vision.
He had “neglected everybody, including my kids.” Annamarie and Kathleen were teenagers; he hadn’t seen them for almost ten years. The price had been steep, there was no doubt about it. But could he have done it? Could it all have been worthwhile? Could the difficult road from chemistry to economics to writing to computers finally have led him to glory? It was “a discovery of major importance,” he thought, as original as it was bold. Finally, he had found his piece of truth. “Very optimistic,” he confided to a friend. “Think it will make a big difference in my situation in the world.”29
It was not to be. Like the big ESP experiment with John Scarne and the Argentine, Ricardo Musso; the amazing Design Machine; the vital No Easy Way; and like his economics-rattling optimization models—the eye “discovery” just fizzled away. The Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine Sir John Eccles, to whom George had sent his paper, replied politely that it was “remarkable” but that he himself could not follow. “Your physical treatment of this important problem,” he wrote, “is beyond my mediocre attainments.”30
Meanwhile George’s thyroid was acting up again, and he was contemplating an operation. There was a fine surgeon at Memorial, but he decided to go with Don Ferguson in Chicago instead. Ferguson had overseen a thyroidectomy on his own wife, who had recovered completely. He was known to be conservative. He was an old friend.
Only when George was in his hospital gown at Billings did Ferguson tell him that he always did a radical neck dissection when he found thyroid cancer. There was no need to worry, though. The surgery would leave no more that “a slight deformity.” Too cowardly to change his decision now, George gave his okay and went under his friend’s knife. It was February 1966.31
Back in New York following the operation, he wrote to Ferguson that he was “recovering well.” He couldn’t quite yet do mathematics (“that will be the sign of true recovery”) but he was on his way. He was very grateful “for all your kindness to me—for the flowers, the radio, the phone call to my mother, the books, the music lessons, the hospitality at your home, and the beautiful stitching.”32
Into the summer and through to the fall, the recovery had begun to reverse itself. He was doing physical therapy at the NYU Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, but he could hardly move his right arm. What’s worse, much of the right side of his neck and face and shoulder were completely without sensation. He was contemplating a nerve graft but was told by an expert that no one ever obtained significant motor recovery through a graft of ten centimeters, even if an autograft were used. He had stopped going out, stopped dating women, hadn’t been to the theater for months. Then, in January 1967, Ferguson wrote a startled letter to say how shocked he had been by yesterday’s package in the mail: With only a note to say who it was from, there in the box were George’s ice-skates.33
“I wish he would go to someone for a hernia repair and have his penis denervated,” George wrote to a friend. Ferguson was a “butcher.” How could he have done this to him? It would make George much happier if he could sue him “under the law of Moses” instead of merely for money. Julia was after him again for alimony. Kathleen needed him to foot the bill for her final year at a fancy private school in New York City, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s. He could hardly feel half of his face. Doubleday lawyers were writing to ask that he return the $2,500 advance for No Easy Way. Things were getting darker and darker. Depressed and neglecting to take his thyroid medicine, he was admitted for a short while by his brother, Edison, to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.34
Everyone who knew the story at IBM thought George was over-reacting, but he was quitting his job all the same. There has been “a radical change in my purposes, attitudes, motivations,” he explained to Mr. Brocker of IBM Department 630 in his letter of resignation. To a colleague from Chicago he expressed his interest in writing some papers “on the evolutionary origin of a number of the peculiarities of human anatomy, physiology, and behavior.” To his daughters he wrote that he was off to Europe for two to three months “to do some article magazines [sic].” And to a friend he told the truth: “My family will think that I am going over for a couple of months to write some magazine articles, but then I will keep postponing my return.” He had saved enough to last him more than a year on account of winning a rather generous health insurance payment. One might not have guessed it from his behavior, but George was now interested in the evolution of the family. Maybe that would be where he’d finally make his breakthrough.35
The decade had passed like a manic scavenger hunt, but what, in God’s name, was George Price after? From sleepy downtown Minneapolis he had moved to the center of beat culture in New York City’s Village, and then to gray Poughkeepsie. Along his route he had made hopeful visits to disparate worlds: porphyrins and cancer, telepathy, computer-aided design, economic cycles, the Soviet-Sino challenge, brain neural networks, the hymen, optimization systems, vision. He had been a chemist, economist, writer, mathematician, psychologist, physiologist, and self-appointed prophet. He had brushed against great men seeking to impress them: three Nobel laureates in physics (Bardeen, Shockley, and Bridgman), one in genetics (Muller), one in physiology (Eccles) and a sixth on his way to the prize in economics (Samuelson). He had engaged America’s most influential psychologist (Skinner), the father of information theory (Shannon), the respected senior senator from Minnesota (Humphrey), and two of the day’s greatest writers (Huxley and Sinclair). He had thought about rationality and about learning. He had thought about human nature and about the workings of the brain. He had studied the latest theories in psychology and economics. He had worked hard.
All this, and what did he have to show for it? His family was broken. His body was broken. He had switched countless jobs. He was unemployed. He hardly spoke to his brother. He barely knew his daughters. His mother was writing herself letters from his dead father and feeding pigeons illegally. He was forty-five years old. He had utterly failed to make his mark.
And yet, strangely, beneath the despair, the ingredients had somehow assembled: Optimality thinking; the penchant to break problems into their components; the consideration of individual versus community; the problem of free will; a search for a Boyle-like law of human nature; an interest in evolution. Most of all there was a tenacity: a singularly dogged, bizarre, egoistic resolve to find a piece of truth whatever it took.
On the windy Monday morning of November 13, 1967, he stepped onto the deck of the Queen Elizabeth, ready to sail away from America. What lay in the future was as faceless as the transatlantic night. Unknowingly he was following in the footsteps of those who had come before him: Kropotkin and Huxley, Allee and Fisher, Haldane and Wynne-Edwards, von Neumann, Hamilton, and Maynard Smith. George Robert Price was on his way to England to crack the problem of altruism.
Part Two
George Price’s flat on Little Titchfield Street, above a butcher shop (now a delicatessen)
London
It was the end of 1967, and London was on fire. There were the trendy nightclubs—Ad Lib off Leicester Square and the Bag o’ Nails arou
nd the corner from Carnaby Street. There were the off shore pirate stations, Radio Caroline and Radio City, and the Friday-night music-TV show Ready Steady Go, hosting the newest and grooviest in crackling black-and-white broadcasts (slogan: “The weekend starts here!”). There were the Stones and The Who, and Rory Gallagher’s new band, Taste. The Beatles themselves, contra outfitters and clothing stores, had just opened their very own Apple boutique off Baker Street, where a psychedelic mural by the Dutch trio The Fool greeted shoppers hungry for the very latest in trend.1
Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake were giving pop art a home-grown slant; David Hockney was refining ironic understatement for the age; Mary Quant and Ossie Clark inventing new worldwide fashions. Men-about-town sported hair to their collars, sideburns, and three-quarter-length leather coats. Following Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, women redefined skinny and the miniskirt, bell-bottomed pantsuits, and little coats with oversize buttons and high-heeled go-go boots. Pulse, vibration, bustle, groove—the city was a jungle overflowing with human spirit. No one could say where the name had come from, but after years of postwar austerity it was Swinging London: the outrageous, flamboyant world capital of cool.2
Not that George was paying any attention. Stepping off the boat into a world apart from Poughkeepsie, his life was in disarray. Everything outside seemed a blur.
“I continue to be anti-social,” he wrote to his old girlfriend Tatiana back in the United States. He had moved into a cramped sublet on Whitfield Street, near the University of London. Amid the clutter of his landlord’s bric-a-brac and, due to high storage costs, his own boxes from the United States, he ate 99 percent of his meals alone. Already on the boat he’d consigned himself to enjoying the last central heating he would have for a very long time; now American Express and Foyle’s bookstore were the only places that offered a modicum of warmth. Traffic was confusing (“I don’t like the driver-versus-pedestrian situation”), food was from a different planet, flats were expensive, service slow, and everything annoyingly, oddly inefficient. On November 21 George applied for a post office box at the Overseas Visitors Club on Earl’s Court Road and was told he would get one, if all went well, by late January. Of cultural London he had “seen or heard practically nothing.”3
Most of all the “flame of hatred” for Ferguson continued to burn brightly. He could hardly use his right arm, not to mention his neck and shoulder, and with little to do and no one to see, hating his old surgeon friend had become a major pastime, even a philosophy. Ferguson’s butchering was an extension of the Protestant ethic into the Puritan ethic—an unconscious though deliberate attempt to improve him morally by showing that what really matters in life is not appearance or trivial sports but work, family, and the cultivation of the arts. George was a divorcé who had abandoned his girls, enjoyed exercise and dapper clothing and dabbled in drugs; severing the nerves to his trapezius was the perfect way for a frugal family man from Minnesota like Ferguson to correct his ways for good. In fact George was so obsessed about this that he was planning to publish a theory along the lines of “Unconscious Factors in Radical Surgery.”4
His bitterness was growing. “I have not reacted to his butchering,” he wrote to his editor at Doubleday by way of deferring once again his return of the advance for No Easy Way,
in the way that surgeons feel patients “ought” to react. (The “good patient” sits in his wheel chair paralyzed from the neck down, saying fervently, with tears rolling down his cheeks, “I thank first my brave surgeon, and then God, that I am still alive to enjoy the beauties of the sunset and hear the singing of the little birds”).5
In fact, since he had derived little enjoyment from the state of being alive since Ferguson “fixed” him, George was pretty sure that he “would not live for more than a rather small number of additional years, and perhaps for quite a bit less, depending upon how things go during the next year.” He had a $25,000 life insurance settlement, which was more than Annamarie and Kathleen, now nineteen and eighteen, required. Since experience had taught him that selling magazine articles depended on scientific notoriety—the Fortune and Life pieces having panned out thanks to his 1955 article on ESP in Science—George was planning to do some scientific work in his everlasting hopes of making a miraculous breakthrough; then he’d surely be able to return to freelance writing in order to pay his bills. If he was successful, Doubleday should hear something about him in the newspapers a few months from now. Otherwise they’d be getting a call from the Manhattan Life Insurance Company at 111 West Fifty-seventh Street.6
As he enveloped himself deeper in a cocoon of self-pity, the world outside was burning. On March 17, 1968, ten thousand people crowded into Trafalgar Square to protest the war in Vietnam. Led by Vanessa Redgrave, the hordes decided to march peacefully down to Grosvenor Square to lay their petitions at the gates of the American Embassy. Anarchists, hard-boiled Trots, and flower kids all marched together hoping to bow America’s crown. As they turned left on Alderney Street singing “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,” the sea of demonstrators came to a halt before a wall of police. Soon rabble-rousers took control. Amid cries and waving red flags, rumors began to filter back that those close to the embassy had been machine-gunned. In an instant the peace demonstration had turned into a riot: Mounted police on white steeds charged into the crowd with long clubs in hand, like sabers. Crouching demonstrators kicked in the head, women screeching, coppers pulled off their horses, tear gas, mayhem—London had rarely seen anything of the kind. By the evening the toll of injured policemen was 117, the count of injured demonstrators unknown.7
“Did you get yourself a nice sturdy English girl to serve you a hot meal once in a while?” Tatiana wrote to George, trying to be encouraging. He hadn’t. He was depressed, alone, hating Ferguson, unemployed. Trying to live on $5 a day, he cursed his brother, Edison, who was married now to Laura, a daughter of original General Motors stockholders, for not having repaid a loan. Ever since childhood they had vied for their mother’s affection; now, when she was getting old, years of pent-up anger threatened to explode what little family unity remained. It was a dour conclusion. Wary of filial neglect, George sent Alice a book on “pigeons and people.”8
And yet, beneath the despair a passion had already been planted. He’d been going to the libraries: the Senate House at UCL just across the way was his mainstay, but he roamed to thirteen others—including Camden Town, Highgate, the Zoological Society, the British and Natural History museums. When he was kicked out at closing time he’d run over to the late-opening Holborn Public. He had cast his net widely: anthropology, linguistics, medicine, neurophysiology, psychology, behavior—anything that might provide a clue.9 The hours were long and lonely, but he pushed ahead all the same. Then one day, in early March, he came across something that caught his eye.
“I have just been reading your very interesting paper on ‘The genetical evolution of social behaviour,’” his letter to Bill Hamilton began, “and would very much like to have reprints if you still have any to spare.” It was the 1964 kin-selection paper, the one Maynard Smith had asked to split in two, and although George had yet to master all its mathematics, he was planning to use it as a basis for a paper of his own. In particular, did Hamilton know of any evidence for genes that enable those who carry them to detect the presence of exact copies of those same genes in the bodies of others? Could genetic similarity, in other words, somehow be sensed? It seemed a far-fetched idea for most species, but perhaps in humans—a species highly developed both in genetic and cultural inheritance—“some interesting effects could, in theory, occur.”10
It was a road he had traveled before: Alice’s letters from the dead morphing into a rant against ESP in Science; qualms about free will giving rise to papers about Skinner’s “Teaching Machines” for IBM; fear of egoism translating into a global philosophy of imminent national disaster. Now, once again, George Price was turning his most personal, existential quandaries into a scientific project. His father had died when he was four; he
had abandoned his daughters in America; and the Depression-era trio, Alice-Edison-George, was finally unraveling after long years of jealousy and neglect. His thought process was confused, still searching for an anchor to set in stone. Like a storm, a question deep inside him now began to roar: What was the meaning of family, and how had it been born in the first place?
He’d been consuming the new cadre of popular books on human evolution—Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape and Robert Ardrey’s Genesis Flood, the kind that explained behaviors like aggression and sexuality by natural selection adapting prehistoric humans to the vagaries of hunter-gatherer existence. Morris, a Wiltshire-born zoologist, surrealist artist, and author, had already put in print about half of George’s own “new” provocative theories, but ideas just kept on coming, and soon anticipation had dropped to only 15 percent. To Kathleen he wrote that he was thinking about the evolutionary origins of fatherhood and family.11
Then, a week after the Grosvenor Square riot, he found a letter of reply from Bill Hamilton in his mailbox.
No, Hamilton was sorry, he’d no reprints of his 1964 paper left. He was sending the latest—his 1967 article on sex ratios, instead; after all, it too, in its way, dealt with the issue of genetic recognition. Of course he had no idea who this George Price from the Overseas Visitors Club was; still, he himself had not thought hard about the interaction of genetic and cultural inheritance in man, but he’d be interested to know what George made of it.
So far I haven’t arrived at any clear idea even as to what sort of “game” the genes are expected to be playing when operating together (on different chromosomes or linked on a particular pair). Something like socialism (or is it racialism—can’t tell), admittedly, seems indicated, but I have only vague ideas as to the mechanisms by which biological and cultural evolution interact. With man culture did once, in the form of primitive religions, reinforce socialism, but now what we take to be highest in culture has swung strongly against nepotism and the like. Can this be just a higher hypocrisy induced by the need which civilization creates for genetic diversity—and perhaps even racial diversity—in human groups? I wonder whether this is the field in which you think you see some light.12