He asked a purely rhetorical question of Tom: Should the president of Harvard be guided by the views of the perennial winners in the research game at Harvard or the losers? By “the winners” Summers was referring to the medical school, whose clinical studies had in recent decades brought the university its lion’s share of awards and patents; the losers were the practitioners of basic science at FAS, which despite illustrious figures like Tom had lagged behind rivals, most notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Summers would afterwards inform a close aide that the meeting had gone extremely well; Tom, meanwhile, had walked out of Massachusetts Hall seething—and more apprehensive than ever about the future of science at Harvard.

Only two years were to pass before Summers’ inability to get outside his own head would land him in fatally hot water. The boiling point was reached following an appearance at a conference on women in science held in Cambridge in mid-January of 2005. There he suggested that the relatively small number of women in tenured positions in the physical sciences might in part be attributable to a relatively low frequency among females of innate potential for doing science at the highest level. Obviously aware that this was not to be welcomed as the most palatable hypothesis, he was careful to offer as well the more broadly subscribed to alternative explanation that many talented women had been strongly discouraged by their teachers from ever trying to master top level mathematics and sciences.

Summers’ remarks might have gone unnoticed outside the meeting were it not for the presence of my former student, now a professor of biology at MIT, Nancy Hopkins. Over the past decade she had worked tirelessly to improve the working conditions of women scientists there. Before Nancy’s highly visible efforts, the salaries and space assignments of women at MIT were notably unequal to those of their male counterparts. But Nancy did not challenge Summers at the meeting. Instead she bolted from the room, later saying Summers’ words made her sick, and soon appeared on TV attacking him.

It did Nancy Hopkins no credit as a scientist to admit that the mere utterance of a hypothesis that there might be genetic differences between male and female brains—and therefore differences in the distribution of one form of cognitive potential—made her sick. Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must be prepared to consider the extent to which nature may figure in the matter. To my regret, Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist voiced a word in Summers’ defense, the majority, I suspect, fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness. If I had still been a member of the faculty, the number of tenured scientists standing visibly behind the president in this matter would have literally doubled.

The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers’ resignation in February 2006 as Harvard’s president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of seemingly rude disregard for the social niceties that ordinarily permit human beings to work together for a common good. While academia almost expects its younger members to be brash and full of themselves, these qualities are most unbecoming in more seasoned members of the society, and generally fatal in leaders.

It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social ineptitude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist—the very cards that endowed him with great quantitative intelligence may also have disabled the normal faculties for reading human faces and voices. The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger’s syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral “disabilities.” Like exceptional math aptitude, Asperger’s occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. Why this is so will remain a mystery without much more effort at uncovering how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.

If Summers’ tactlessness does have a genetic basis, much of the anger toward him should rightly yield to sympathy. No longer can his upbringing be blamed for failing to instill in him the graces of the civilized individual. Still, Summers’ departure has to be seen as the first of many necessary steps to reclaim for Harvard its once legitimate claim to science primacy, at least relative to MIT. Toward that end, Tom Maniatis prevailed upon me to agree to meet with Derek Bok, the former president, whom the Harvard Corporation had called to serve again until a new leader could be found. A time was soon set for Derek and me to get together at Loeb House, the grand Georgian structure on Quincy Street.

Knowing that a petitioner’s allotted hour always passes quickly, I went straight to my main message: It was wrongheaded to build a huge Allston biology complex to compensate for the non-greatness increasingly enveloping the biology labs along Divinity Avenue. Most likely, I argued, it was the B+ level of Harvard’s life sciences, both in Cambridge and across the vast medical complex, that would gravitate to the brochure-perfect new campus, eventuating in very little bang for the vast bucks that would be spent.

Before proceeding, I said, Bok and the Harvard Corporation would be well advised to ask why MIT’s life sciences now so completely outclass Harvard’s. Past stinginess of Harvard deans had played a big role in the problem that indiscriminate lavishness could not now fix. For far too long, University Hall had witlessly acted as if Harvard did not have to spend its own money to keep a place in the top league of science. The leadership assumed that Harvard’s golden name would naturally move the federal government to fund not only its research but also the creation of new facilities. But brand names count for very little in science. And so, foolishly, Harvard sat on its heels for about two decades while MIT smoothly integrated the privately funded Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research into its biology operations, and under the never-shy Eric Lander, the renowned biologist, created a huge DNA sequencing facility. Thus MIT became a major player in the Human Genome Project, the intellectual driveshaft for much of today’s most exciting biology and medicine.

Only belatedly did Harvard try to enter the Genome Age by committing itself, as the 21st century began, to becoming strong in systems biology, a discipline so sprawling and unwieldy as to merit comparison to Enron in its limitless expansions before the collapse into nothingness. In turn, the large MIT Genome Center, thanks to the generosity of California-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, was able to metamorphose in 2003 into an even more ambitious incarnation, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. By diverting funds that might have been spent along Divinity Avenue, Harvard under Summers bought a say in how and by whom the Broad’s massive genomic resources would be utilized.

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