by Primo Levi
Luria tells how by chance he observed (he is not a gambler!) a colleague who was playing one of these machines, in which a coin is inserted, and then, not really by chance (because they are shrewdly programmed to ensure that the machine wins), the player sometimes gets back a little more than what he put in, often nothing at all, very rarely a sizable sum. This, for Luria, was the unexpected stimulus: “What struck me was that the pattern of slot-machine returns had a lesson to teach me about bacteria.”
I confess that to the uninitiated, like me, the text that followed did not clarify the analogy or, if you like, the symbol; still, the moral is clear. To the researcher (and who is not a researcher?), the world appears as an immense jumble of symbols: it is up to him to find their interpretation. Often a moment’s intuition is enough to untangle a centuries-old knot, over which powerful minds have exhausted themselves. For Luria, the episode yielded an understanding of the mechanism by which bacteria resist (or do not resist) the action of the bacteriophage. From this, the genetics of bacteria got its start, which led, in turn, to the fusion of biochemistry with genetics—namely, molecular biology.
The author himself states, in another context, that examples like this illustrate how necessary it is to be flexible in scientific research, that is, one must be ready to transfer procedures and concepts between distant and apparently unrelated fields. The story of Newton’s apple might be something more than a childish legend.
The other half of the title contains a complementary allusion. The “broken test tube” was an important test tube: it contained a bacterial culture that was the product of long hard labor; it had been carefully selected and was intended for a crucial experiment. Luria, at work, is always rushing around: elsewhere he describes himself as frenzied, and the many colleagues whom the book portrays are frenzied, possessed. As one who loves “unplowed fields,” he has no intention of wasting time reproducing the culture, and asks a colleague for another one, of completely different bacteria. The experiment succeeds just the same, in fact, even too well, and from it arises the discovery of an unsuspected phenomenon: in essence, the fact that a virus grown on a particular bacterial strain encounters resistance to its normal development, while it multiplies quite well on bacteria belonging to other species.
The phenomenon, Luria says, opened the way to the technology of recombinant DNA, that is, modern genetic engineering, which is full of promise (and, he assures us, devoid of danger). He adds: “My finding was completely serendipitous. . . . The discovery itself . . . was there for the asking. If I had not discovered it, someone else would soon have done so. My fluctuation-test work, on the other hand, was essentially unique.” Luria’s justified and differentiated pride recalls Machiavelli’s saying: that victory belongs to the strong, aided by fortune.
What is striking, in this bold and at times epic account of research and of a life, is an opinion that is rarely found in the history of science (a subject that, strangely, Luria asserts holds little interest for him, although he contributes to it generously with this very book). The life of the scientist, the author states, may indeed be contentious, filled with battles, defeats, and victories, but the adversary is always merely the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a civil war; scientists, even if they have diverse opinions or diverse political tendencies, argue among themselves, compete, but do not fight. They are bound by a strong alliance, by a common faith “in the correctness of Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s equations,” and by a common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.
The scientist-counterfeiter does not exist, and he cannot exist, because fraud doesn’t pay: like the inveterate gambler, he goes to his own certain ruin. “Seldom do scientists race with each other in hostile secrecy”; the sessions of Luria’s group, at MIT, “are truly moments of grace,” in which the scientists enjoy as a community “the human aspect of science,” with the happiness of a thirsty man who has found a fountain. These declarations astonish and, at the same time, cheer us. Perhaps they are not true in every time, place, or academic setting, but they are, or were, true for Salvador Luria, whose life they embellished; and therefore they can be, or become, true again, at least for someone.
June 6, 1985
1. All quotations in this essay are from the American edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
Among Manhattan’s Skyscrapers
It is easy to verify that written English is the most concise among the European languages: you can see it, for example, in the multilingual instruction manuals for household appliances. I do not know if some quantitative linguist has measured the concision of spoken languages, but, after my first visit to the United States, I would have no doubt about the result: an American says twelve or fifteen things in the time it takes an Italian to say ten. Whether he makes himself understood equally well remains to be seen. It seems to me that, on average, an American should admit that he is deaf at a younger age than an Italian, since he becomes incapable of grasping certain very slight (only for us?) aspirations, certain evanescent vowel shadings, earlier than an Italian. “Do you know English?” is a question without a precise meaning: one can profitably read an English text, even from the eighteenth century, and still find oneself deaf and dumb before the customs officer.
Despite the distance between the two languages, a rudimentary hybrid has developed among Italian immigrants in America: they say that a house is “senza stima” (literally, without esteem) when they mean without steam, that is, unheated; they call the greengrocer’s shop the fruttistoro, the truck tracca, the gearshift ghiro, and the clutch claccia. A friend who, like me, collects linguistic monstrosities assures me that he once heard someone say, “Your husband will be becco soon” (“will be back”—“cuckolded”—“soon”). Purists shudder; yet perhaps, in some distant future, a true Esperanto will evolve from these deformed seeds.
Sunday runners can be found in our country, too, but in Central Park it’s a mass phenomenon. The fat ones run to lose weight, the thin ones to stay in shape, the sick to get well, the healthy to show that they are healthy. They run with a radio headset, with the dog (not very enthusiastic) on a leash. A young father runs pushing a stroller with a sleeping child; an elegant, coffee-colored young woman runs to do the shopping, and returns half an hour later, running, with plastic bags dangling crazily from her forearms. Even those who don’t run wear running shoes. I tried them: they’re wonderful, light, airy, quiet, but attractive? No. About beauty New Yorkers, men and women, care little; they dress any old way, “casually.”
By contrast they care a lot about calories: that’s why they run so much, though in three years everything could change. The press is powerful; another two or three heart attacks among joggers and contemplative walking, or even the sedentary life, might become trendy. We might also be at a turning point in the matter of calories: newspapers praise the Mediterranean diet, and coffee is served with a little box full of small white and pink envelopes. In the white ones there is sugar; the label reads “Only sixteen calories,” but they are still calories, and will make you fat. In the pink envelopes there is an unpleasant mixture of sweeteners, and a warning coldly informs us that it has sometimes caused cancer in test animals. For believers, there is no choice: either obesity or cancer, or, of course, bitter coffee.
If I may venture to set myself up as a judge of customs—and with the permission of my most kind hosts—a single party is more harmful to one’s health than two hundred little white or pink envelopes. At a party you stand for one or two hours, with a cracker in one hand and a glass in the other, so that there is no hand free for gesturing or for shaking hands with those to whom you are pointlessly introduced.
You are assailed from behind and on both sides by garrulous and querulous people, while the serious people whom you would like to speak to are inaccessible, surrounded in turn by the garrulous. Everyone is speaking, and everyone is speaking English; to make yourself heard, you must raise your voice, but since everyon
e is raising his voice, the result is futile and the acoustic effort escalates. It’s an effort that I had never before experienced. In such a situation, expressive paralysis develops: you are reduced to pretending to understand and can respond only by making faces and nodding your head, and, instead of talking, you make do with uttering indistinct sounds; the result doesn’t change in any case.
From end to end, Manhattan is proud and gigantic. The most recent skyscrapers are extraordinarily beautiful: it’s an insolent, lyrical, and cynical beauty. They defy the sky and, at the same time, on clear days, reflect it from the thousands of windows that form the surface of the façade. At night, the towers shine like Dolomites of light. Their verticality is the fruit of speculation, but it expresses something else as well: it’s work of ingenuity and audacity, and harbors within it the upward thrust that in Europe six hundred years ago produced the Gothic cathedrals. Religion, in America, is something serious and vigorous; it has little to do with asceticism. Here all religions have undergone a transformation toward action and efficiency, and efficiency itself is a religion: the skyscrapers are its temples. From the top of the twin towers of the World Trade Center the view is as breathtaking as from an alpine summit: the walls drop straight down for four hundred meters, and at the bottom vehicles and pedestrians can be seen swarming like frantic insects. In the splendid bay, a maze of islands, channels, and isthmuses, the Statue of Liberty is a dwarf, but the pamphlet that describes the twin towers exaggerates: “You will never be so close to the stars!” All you have to do is go to Lanzo. . . .1
• • •
On the ground, on the sidewalks between the crystal giants, a well-assorted sampling of the human race wanders around: no subspecies is missing, but, inescapably, the unacceptable, poor devils, stand out conspicuously. Men and women, white and black (the blacks are in the majority, however), in rags or properly dressed, sit on the ground or lean against the walls. They don’t ask for anything; they gaze into space. They smoke or chew gum in silence; some sleep among the feet of passersby, under a roof of corrugated cardboard, others rummage through garbage cans.
They do not rummage in vain: they find half-eaten sandwiches, half-drunk Coca-Colas, shoes, clothes, books, magazines; the culture of consumption is prodigal. If it’s windy or raining, they wrap themselves in plastic bags, which the wind itself scatters abundantly everywhere. They are, for the most part, former inmates of psychiatric hospitals: if they are not dangerous, they are discharged and abandoned to their own devices.
At the opposite extreme, at the apex of Western civilization, are the fonts of culture: museums, libraries, schools, theaters. The cultural offerings are terrific*: that’s what people say, and the term is positive. It’s terrific in its quality and its quantity, and inspires reverence. My American friend gives me a simplified explanation, which doesn’t satisfy me: for the wealthy, establishing a cultural institution is worth it; they can deduct the cost from their tax return.
I don’t believe it’s only this. There is a thirst for culture and a respect for culture; in the long term, culture is considered a good investment. They deserve praise, those uncultured Texan and Californian billionaires who invest their dollars in culture. But for now, in the short term, the results seem meager. American culture has some very high peaks, it produces excellent specialists, but on average it’s lower than Europe’s. Like the humus of the underbrush, culture requires centuries; quick, instant* surrogates do not exist.
June 23, 1985
1. A massif in the Italian Alps.
A Bottle of Sunshine
The question of how to define a human being is not an idle one. If we limit ourselves to the creatures who exist on Earth today, there are no ambiguities. But doubts arise and become magnified as discoveries of “fossil men” accumulate: starting when, from which genetic or cultural rung, do they merit the label Homo? Since our ancestors walked upright? from the time they began speaking (though here, unfortunately, material evidence is and always will be lacking)? since they learned to make fire? since they made tools? since they began burying their dead? since they instituted “marriage, courts of law, and altars”?1 As you can see, the choice is broad, and largely arbitrary, and so I would venture to propose a further alternative: man is a constructor of containers. A species that does not construct containers is by definition not human. It seems to me, in other words, that making containers is indicative of two qualities that, for better or worse, are exquisitely human.
The first is the ability to think about tomorrow. Certainly there are animals “not imprudent concerning the future”: ants, bees, squirrels, certain birds. And some of them do, in fact, construct containers: bees in particular, with admirable skill and economy of material. But their small hexagonal cell is only singular, and their art, though it is at least hundreds of millions of years old, has remained what it was, while ours, in a few millennia, has given rise to a myriad of objects. The second specifically human quality is the ability to predict the behavior of materials. With regard to containers, we can predict what the container and its contents “will do,” and how they will react with each other, at the moment of contact and over time.
From these two requirements a boundless forest of ideas has emerged, each endowed with its own particular development. The result is an assortment of containers (casks, jugs, vials, handbags, suitcases, baskets, sacks, buckets, inkpots, jars, wineskins, oxygen tanks, boxes, bowls, chests, lead capsules for radioactive elements, cages, snuff boxes, garbage cans, horns for gunpowder, cans for preserves, mailboxes, velvet jewel cases, sheaths for swords, pyxes for the Host, needlecases, inner tubes, carryalls and carry-ons, gas tanks as big as cathedrals, cradles, urns, coffins) so varied as to make you want to develop a system of classification, as we have done for animals, plants, and minerals.
Some containers, such as amphoras and bottles, quickly achieved a perfect shape, and have not substantially changed. Given the problem (to contain a liquid without imparting foreign odors or flavors to it; to be able to stand on a support; and to allow pouring without dripping down the sides), there was only one solution, and such it has remained. Now, by contrast, think about the series of new problems that accompanied the start of industrial civilization: on the one hand, the appearance of substances with new, more valuable, and more aggressive properties; on the other hand, and complementary, construction materials that are more resistant, or more lightweight, or more economical.
Even the kitchen, that most ancient of workshops and also the most conservative, has not resisted the thrust of technological innovation. The copper pots described by Nievo, the pride of the kitchen in Fratta,2 have nearly disappeared, driven off by aluminum, which costs less, and by stainless steel, which lasts longer and doesn’t dent. We find the copper ones displayed at antique dealers and secondhand shops, but no one wants them anymore, not even as decoration, much less as a symbol of social status. In place of them, we find today in even the most modest kitchens at least a hundred containers classifiable into no less than twenty different types.
If we limit ourselves to those which chemists call “processing containers” (that is, those in which foods are cooked or fried, and not simply stored), the relationship between the surface area and the height seems essential for a first rough taxonomy: frying pans when you want volatile products to evaporate; pots or casseroles when you do not want too much liquid to be “consumed”; and finally airtight pressure cookers, from which nothing escapes, not even aromas. As for “serving containers,” the fable of the fox and the stork remains relevant. Aesop was an ingenious man.
The shape of these domestic objects is for the most part logical, dictated by long experience; but upon a more careful examination we can sometimes see stylized elements that are not logical, or are no longer so. The small spout on a pot, in its customary shape, of a narrow, upside-down semi-cone, serves no purpose: it idealizes a channel for a flow that in fact never occurs, either with water or with thicker liquids (much less with granular solids, lik
e peas).
Years ago, a talented, versatile friend of mine managed a factory in which, among other things, coffeepots were produced. He diligently studied the problem of coffee’s flow lines, and came up with an elaborate, hunchbacked profile for the small spout, very different from the traditional one. After making a prototype and verifying that the coffee poured better, more quickly and with greater precision, he did not hesitate to modify the molds and begin production. But the outcome was disastrous. Consumers rejected the new shape: the small spout must be a small spout, as its name says, and as it was in Mycenaean pitchers.
Besides its shape, a container is characterized by the material that its walls are made of. Naturally it must be impermeable to the liquid or gas that is expected to be stored in it, but this is not enough. It must, for example, hold the wine but let the light pass through, and here the glass of bottles comes to our aid. Or it must keep heat in or out, hence the felt placed around canteens, or the more elegant (though more fragile) double-walled, silver-coated vacuum bottle created by Professor Dewar. He designed it to hold liquid helium, but today it is remarkably useful for picnics as well. Or the container has to hold solids and let fluids pass through, and here we have countless progeny, ranging from the semipermeable membranes of reverse-osmosis desalinators to the microporous candles used to sterilize water, to paper or cloth filters, sieves, mosquito netting, fishing nets, and the barbed wire of battlefields and prison camps.