While such lavish commitments to joint ventures were under way, the pain of being shortchanged continued to be felt along Divinity Avenue. Still much rued was the failure in 2001 of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to lure the clever Roderick MacKinnon, then in his early forties, away from the Rockefeller University. Longtime Harvard stalwart and X-ray structure wiz Steve Harrison, who was convinced that MacKinnon’s crystallographic studies on ion channels would earn him a Nobel Prize (they did, in 2003), felt equally certain that with the right inducement MacKinnon would return to Harvard, where he’d had a lab at the medical school before leaving for Rockefeller. The package offered MacKinnon by then-FAS dean Jeremy Knowles, however, was not remotely competitive with Rockefeller’s commitment. (Upon seeing Knowles’ letter, MacKinnon’s wife wondered whether a mistake had been made in locating the decimal point.) Depressed at Knowles’ failure to think big, Steve Harrison himself developed a case of wanderlust and spied a much brighter future for himself at Harvard Medical School. He wasted little time moving his highly productive X-ray crystallographic research group across the Charles.

Several years before, a dinner party at Mark and Lucy Ptashne’s house on Sparks Street in Cambridge had reunited me and Jeremy, whom I first knew when he was one of Oxford’s stars in chemistry. Given his background, I had assumed he would use his new powers as FAS dean to brighten the future of science at Harvard. So I was slack-jawed as Jeremy told the assembled scientists of the forthcoming boon to their work in the form of one million dollars for supplies and equipment he would soon disburse among all the science departments. I blurted out that such a pittance would scarcely cover a small fraction of the scientists working in my laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. I added that the miserly way Oxford was being run into insignificance was no way for Harvard to keep pace with MIT. The stunned silence made me realize that no one had ever before witnessed such brazen disrespect for University Hall.

We now know that the next FAS dean will be professor of engineering Michael D. Smith. But even if Smith possesses former Dean Henry Rosovsky’s uncanny sense of knowing when not to say no, he will be taking on a role now too large for one individual. For the sake of excellence in all areas of inquiry, Harvard should divide the FAS deanship into three more manageable groupings –science, humanities, and social sciences. Each group should be led by a distinguished academic with substantial powers of the purse.

Harvard salaries must once again be much higher than those of serious competitors. To get stars, you need to offer star salaries. The best of academia no longer will come to Harvard because it is Harvard. No one goes into scientific research to get rich, but nor does one undertake it to evade the comforts of life. Living close enough to Harvard Yard to enjoy its ambiance and diversions is now beyond the means of new Harvard appointees with families unless the faculty salary is matched by another of the same magnitude. Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth—provided that the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allston expansion, at present envisioned to cover the area of 25 football fields, is abandoned. The creation or restoration of a great scientific institution is not a matter of real estate development. Science that leads over the horizon depends before anything else on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the times. Such minds inevitably draw their like, and the rest takes care of itself.

Before leaving Bok’s temporary office in Loeb House, mindful of the Summers fiasco, I remarked to Derek that the time was not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to prove its hypotheses ever more indisputably, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes likely malfunctioning to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our desire to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of good will may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek, who had spent most of our meeting listening, asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “15 years” meant that Summers’ then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

Upon returning to the Yard, however, I wondered if even 10 years would pass.

---

Adapted from Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, by James D. Watson, with the permission of Knopf Publishers. All Rights Reserved. ■

Page | 1 | 2 | 3