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Blinded by Science

by James Watson
September / October 2007 , Page 102

Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images The author in London, May 2005

“THE BEST OF ACADEMIA NO LONGER WILL COME TO HARVARD BECAUSE IT IS HARVARD. ...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 IS ABANDONED.”

Thirty years after I left Harvard, it would please me to report that the state of science at Harvard has righted itself in a manner befitting the world’s richest and most influential university. The relatively short reign of Lawrence Summers as its 27th president, however, suggests that Harvard is once again headed in the wrong direction. Nothing may have distinguished Summers’ time in office like the leaving it, but his proposals for the future of science—which have yet to be modified by his successor, Drew Faust—figured more critically in his vexed relations with the faculty than any clumsy words that marked the beginning of his ultimate undoing.

Despite Summers’ professed desire to move science onto Harvard’s front burner, as his vision for the future of Harvard science became clear, many leading scientists on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) grew worried. Prominent among the uneasy was Tom Maniatis, who came back from Caltech in 1981 to become a professor of cellular and molecular biology. In his time at Harvard, Maniatis had been at the forefront of work in gene isolation and cloning. And so it was notable when, in the spring of 2003, he went to Massachusetts Hall to voice his concerns about Summers’ plan to make Harvard the engine for a “second Silicon Valley” whose center would be a vast new campus of biology and medicine across the Charles River in Allston. The Allston vision was to be dominated by “translational research”—a term denoting science directed toward immediate application and, one might add, marketing.

Tom was no stranger to the development of medical advances from cutting-edge science; he had after all founded, with geneticist Mark Ptashne, the successful biotech firm Genetics Institute. In Tom’s mind, however, Summers’ plans would further weaken the already feeble heart of Harvard’s historically distinguished pure biology programs still located in laboratories along Divinity Avenue north of Harvard Yard.

Maniatis had barely begun to voice his opinions when Summers seized control of the conversation, using the remainder of the appointed hour to expound on his grand vision.

Blinded by Science

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.

Blinded by Science

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.