A Tale of Two Books

Of Mice and Men

When Janice asked me a simple question, I often have much to say.  She knew my article of “Of Money and Medicine” comes from Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and asked my impression about the book.

Steinbeck loved to look into literature to get the titles of his books: The Grapes of Wrath is from the lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic and The Winter of Our Discontent is the opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III.  And Of Mice and Men is no exception; it is from a poem with a title of To a Mouse.

I have read many of the writings or books of both James Watson and Francis Crick and feel Watson is a better writer. Crick’s Of Molecules and Men was apparently inspired by Of Mice and Men and his What Mad Pursuit is also taken from a poem.  Studying literature, Crick’s wife might be the one behind these titles, though.

Of Mice and Men is a very short novel.  The characters were those typically seen in his novels:  the poor, the disadvantaged, and the downtrodden. I at times wonder if John Steinbeck and Scott Fitzgerald (of The Great Gatsby fame) had a dinner together, could they find a common ground or topic?  They seemed to live in two different worlds.

The story tells Steinbeck had a great insight about the mind of the imbecile (retarded).  The physically powerful and intelligently challenged ‘giant’ (Lennie) killed a mouse while trying to pet it and it shouldn’t be a surprise that he might end up killing a girl this way.

Steinbeck got his Nobel in Literature the same year (1962) as Watson and Crick did, Max Perutz (hemoglobin structure) and John Kendrew (myoglobin structure) were also there; glory to the Cavendish Lab of University of Cambridge—the four who received the Prizes in Medicine and Chemistry were all from Cavendish Lab.  And Linus Pauling was also there to receive his second Nobel—this time in Peace.

The 40^th Anniversary Edition of Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology

Janice expressed her big surprise that I had to wait several months at Carnegie Library for the book Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology; she said unless it was “assigned to a college class somewhere.”  (Yes, it should be on the assigned readings list for the pre-med or the medical students.)   

When I am not concerned about turning away the readers from my blog, I’ll write an article about the Phage Group (phage is short for bacteriophage, a virus that invades/infects bacteria), of which Max Delbruck and Salvador Luria were the founding fathers and leaders or add Alfred Hershey, if you will; the three shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1969.

The book was a collection of essays by those contributed to this revolution, thus historically important and interesting.  James Watson was one of the editors.  It was published for the 60^th birthday tribute to Max Delbruck (the father of molecular biology).  The 40^th Anniversary Edition (an expanded version, including some articles from the Scientific American) is coming soon (at the end of June, 2007).  I see it on the Amazon.com and Wal-Mart online.  So I may not be alone out there in reading this book.

When Delbruck died in 1981, James Watson spoke at a memorial service at Cal Tech, “On a spring evening at the Lauria's flat, [Watson was Luria’s Ph.D. student at Indiana U then] I caught my initial glimpse of Max.  Instantly my hero worship became adoration, and soon I wanted to be much like Max as possible, including someday marrying a girl as perfect as his Manny.” and ended with “ . . . Even now I cannot accept that Max is not still here and worry that my words today will not please him.  I want badly to be with him yet one more time to say what I never had the courage to reveal to him, that save for my wife and children, he, Max, meant more to me than anyone else, and I hope I did not too often needlessly disappoint him.”

You may have read it that the entire genome of James Watson was recently sequenced by a company called 454 Life Science Corporation and Baylor College of Medicine.  Watson requested that it is not to be revealed, including to himself, if he has a gene variant associated with Alzheimer’s disease.  “He fears that if he knew he has, he would interpret each slip of memory as impending dementia.”  I read in the past that he has a son born with Down syndrome, but a recent article in Time (or Newsweek?) said he has two sons, “one suffers from a mental illness that causes symptoms of both autism and schizophrenia.”

How does our body manage to make a vast array of diverse anitibodies?

Antibodies are proteins, which are encoded by genes; one gene one protein.  The human genome contains fewer than 50,000 genes, and yet we seem to have capability to make unlimited diverse antibodies as the need arises.  This puzzle was solved by Susumu Tonegawa who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1987.

Our immune system has evolved a unique genetic mechanism that enables it to generate virtually unlimited number of different antibodies by joining separate gene segments together before the codes (nucleotides sequence) are transcribed into messenger RNA, which are then translated into a different language—sequence of amino acids of a protein, or antibody in this case.

We all know it was Salvador Luria who sent James Watson to to meet with Crick.  It is less well known that both Luria and Renato Dulbecco had a strong impact on Tonegawa’s career.  In his autobiography (A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube), Luria wrote about his stay at Indiana University,

And my very first graduate student in Bloomington, in 1947, was a thin young man named Jim Watson, of twice double-helix fame—for his discovery of DNA structure (for which he shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick) and for the excellent book he wrote about that discovery.  With me Jim worked on the reactivation [of killed bacteriophage] phenomenon.  My role in arranging Watson’s fateful move from Copenhagen to Cambridge has been recounted many times in books on the DNA story.  That I arranged the move is true; that it was arranged when I met the British spectroscopist John Kendrew, and that John and I were congenial because we both were socialists is also true.

When the U.S. Immigration wouldn’t extend his stay in the States, it was Dulbecco sent him to to work with Niels Jerne.  On his Nobel Lecture in 1987, Tonegawa began with

One day in the fall of 1970, I received an airmail letter from Renato Dulbecco who was travelling in Europe. At that time I was a postdoctoral fellow in his laboratory at the Salk Institute. The letter, written on stationery of the Hotel Hassler in Rome said:

“Dear Susumu,

I don’t know what arrangements you have made for after your departure from La Jolla [where Salk Institute is] at the end of the year but I would like to mention to you another possibility. The Institute of  Immunology in Basel, Switzerland will start operating in a month. They already have an excellent collection of immunologists, but have not yet built an adequate background in molecular biology. I talked about you to Niels Jerne, the Director, and they are interested in having you there …

Thanks partly to this remarkably prophetic letter and partly to the immigration law that prevented me from remaining in the U.S.A., in February 1971 I found myself in this cozy Swiss town almost completely surrounded by immunologists.

Luria later recruited Tonegawa to MIT where he was at the time of his Nobel Prize award.  Tonegawa also bridged the molecular biology to immunology.

Antibody doesn’t always confer immunity or protection: even a Nobel laureate had a misconception about it

The invention of polymerase chain reaction or PCR by Karis Mullis (see photo) propelled the genetic science to a higher level—a quantum leap.  Mullis has been ‘carried away’ after he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.  He has since made outrageous anti-science statements, saying things without merit and without taste.  I honored him sarcastically with a ‘Flamboyant Flame’ Intellectual Cologne (see the article of ‘Intellectual Cologne’)

Ted Koppel on ABC’s ‘Nightline,’ once said, rightly so.

Take all MVPs from professional baseball, basketball, and football.  Throw in a dozen favorite movie stars and a half dozen rock stars for good measure, add all the television anchor people now on the air, and collectively, we have not affected the current good or the future welfare of mankind as much as Kary Mullis.

In his Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (published 1998), questioning HIV causes AIDS, Mullis wrote,

I read the Papers in Science for which they had become well known as the AIDS doctors, but all they had said there was that they had found evidence of a past infection by something which was probably HIV in some AIDS patients.  They found antibodies.  Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease.  Antibodies signaled that the virus had been defeated.  The patient had saved himself.  There was no indication in these papers that this virus caused a disease.  They didn't show that everybody with the antibodies had the disease.  In fact, they found some healthy people with antibodies.

His writing (as late as 1998) revealed he had misconception of antibody.  He only knew “Antibodies to viruses had always been considered evidence of past disease, not present disease.”  Little did he know that some viruses are smarter than he is (or all of us) and can master their genetic know-how to evade our immune system.

He wrote, “they found some healthy people with antibodies.”  It has been a common knowledge that HIV patients with antibody may remain ‘healthy’ until they fell ill with AIDS (after CD4 count drops to certain level).  And yet Mullis used this phenomenon refuting HIV as the cause of AIDS.  Ironically PCR (Mullis’ great invention) greatly helps the advancement of HIV research.

He did admit that “It was a little out of my field of biochemistry, and these men were specialists in retroviruses [HIV]”  This turned out to be his only correct statement.

Wearing a Nobel laurel, Mullis’s words carry weight and general readers would believe in every word he utters.  Thus he is recklessly irresponsible.  Reading may be hazardous to your mind or health.

Comparing with Young Abe Lincoln: a grandiose delusion of mine?

Lincoln’s mother died when he was 9-years-old and his step mother, Sarah Bush Johnston, raised him like her own (“She was all of a mother to him [Lincoln].  He was her boy more than any born to her.” She brought three of her own children when she married Thomas Lincoln.) She lived to see her step son became the greatest President in the country, and survived him four years.  Lincoln once said of her, “All I am, and all I hope to be, I owe to my darling mother!”

The most amazing characteristic of his life is the expansion of his mind through the written words, which lifted him out of the Indiana’s wilderness, where “books ain’t as plenty as wildcats in these parts o’ Indianny.” 
Carl Sandburg wrote,

“At age of 7 the young Abe would lie on the dry leaves [his soft bed] at night contemplating what ‘independent’ or ‘predestination’ means. . . . His father talks about the waste of time in ‘eddication’; . . . but the stanch [staunch], yearning stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, comes between the boy and the father.  And the father listens to the stepmother and lets her have her way. . . . The farm boys talked about how Abe Lincoln was always reading, digging into books, stretching out flat on his stomach in front of the fire place, studying till midnight and past midnight . . .”

Lincoln told Dennis Hank (his cousin), “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”

My family: June 1956 (lunar calendar) on the birthday of my maternal grandmother

My mother often said she never had to ask me to read the books because I was always reading.  The electric outage was common and routine in the village, Xia-tang (下潭) where I grew up; many times a week and often lasting for hours.  I recall my mother would discourage me reading with a candle light saying it would hurt my eyes.

While attending the Chia-yi Middle School and High School, for a while I lived with my second sister and biked to school and after school I often diverted to the city library or ‘People Service Station’ (民眾服務處, sponsored by KuoMing Party [國民黨], thus a propaganda site) where newspapers and magazines are provided.  I was never happy or satisfied as the books were so limited and scarce; I could hardly find books of poignant interest.  My second sister was my very first teacher (first grade—there was no kindergarten in our village) and she would say if I read I would go places.

Lincoln would read between the plow handles and would be reading while walking, and would stop in the middle of the road from time to time until he got it straight.  During my middle school days (grade 7 to 9) and part of high school years I rode a primitive small train (used to haul the sugar canes as well as passengers) from Po-tzu to Chia-yi where my school locates.  It took the train one hour to travel the distance of about 10-11 miles.  Then all the students walked 30 minutes from the train station to the school in files; we usually formed 3 rows and I always stood in the middle so that I could walk and read all the way to school without worrying being hit by the cars or bikes.

Lincoln’s family moved from Kentucky to Illinois when he was 18 years of age, Carl Sandburg wrote,

“Two of the wagons had two yoke of oxen each and one wagon had four horses.  On the wagons were Tom and Sarah Bush Lincoln [Lincoln’s step mother], her three children, . . . Abraham Lincoln on and off an ox wagon with a goad coaxing or prodding the animals and bawling at them to get along.  They stopped where night found them, cooked supper, slept, and started at daybreak.  What with the ground freezing at night and thawing in the day, the oxen and horses slipped and tugged, the wagon axles groaned, the wooden pegs and cleats squeaked—a journey, Lincoln said later, “slow and tiresome.” . . . After traveling over 200 miles to Macon County, Illinois. . . . ”

We moved from Xia-Tang (下潭) to Po-Tzu (朴子) when I was at my fifth grade and water buffalo was our U-Haul.  I vividly recall that once the water buffalo suddenly stopped and defecated exactly in front of me; then I realized why my sisters gave me the honor of sitting in the middle in charge of the water buffalo.  Lincoln said their journey was “slow and tiresome,” but, ours was “slow but exciting,” as I thought we’re moving into a big city (朴子).

Our ox-vehicle (牛車) is a 4-wheel “medium sized car”, fancier than the photo shown; the water buffalo is essentially the same.

You may have noticed that I used quotes excessively on purpose in my writings; I constantly write down something on a piece of paper, on the notebook or type into computer.  Abe Lincoln apparently also had this habit.  He might even write on the fire shovel by using a piece of charcoal, and later copied into a piece of paper or notebook.

Lincoln was born and raised in a log cabin; the house in which I was born was comparable.  Jo and Sean saw the house in which I grew up until my fifth grade when we moved to the ‘big city’—Po-tzu, 朴子 (We never had a running water inside that house.  I saw a similar water pump in Harvard Yard some years ago; I was an expert using it, even though my left thumb was once half crushed operating it.) 

Jo and Sean also met my playmate and without the benefit of communication with him when we visited Xia-tang (下潭); they marvelled at the skill of chewing and spitting 檳榔; they could appreciate the two sets of mind made all the more difference by readings only. 

Our large family all slept in the bed room—the one and only; I now may call it ‘master bed room.’  The youngest one had the privilege of sleeping next to my mother; when my younger sister was born, I asked to sleep at the feet of my mother near the edge of the bed.  (I do not recall this, but my elder sisters attest to it.)  A wrong turn, I would be on the hard, shinning dirt floor, which impressed and amazed Jo and Sean.  Carl Sandburg also described “the floor was packed-down dirt” in Lincoln's home.

The house in which I was born was in the even smaller village; the mud house was torn down and a new modern-looking house was built in the same site when Jo and Sean visited; they did see the chickens running around in the front yard of the house.  

I was born at the end of WWII, at which time Taiwan was still occupied by Japan, making us in the Axis camp.  Bombing by American airplanes became more often and intense, and that is why my mother retreated to the small village where I was delivered to this world by my father.  The mud house was literally built by the mud mixing with the shells of the rice, and no cement at all.  

Jo and Sean had visited the village and field where my father studied while having his water buffaloes grazing.  He knew the only way could lift him out of the desolate swamp was through education to expand his mind.  It was extremely difficult to enter the only medical school in Taiwan then—the one that became the now prestigious National Taiwan University College of Medicine after the Japanese surrendered at the end of WWII—as the Japanese, being the ‘occupier’, reserved most of the spots for Japanese living in Taiwan .   

My father (photo at his medical school days) managed to enter that medical school through his motivation and determination and Jenny and Jason Lin’s grandfather was his classmate.