Expanded EditionEditor's Note: This is excerpted from that magnificent history of the past 30 years of biology research, The Eighth Day of Creation. It was originally published in 1978 and was sadly out of print the past couple of years.
Now it's back, thanks to CSHL Press, in an expanded edition with updates from the author. In the selected passage below, Francis Crick, Max Delbrück, Jaques Monod, and Samuel Beckett (!) muse about the minds and psyche of people who devote their lives to creation and discovery.
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"Always the same impasse...."
"My impression is that other people have gone into molecular biology with the same general motives that I had, but sometimes with a difference in point of view," Francis Crick said. "I went into it, for example, to try to show that you can explain all these phenomena - the term molecular biology wasn't common then, certainly I didn't know it, but the phrase I had in my mind was 'the borderline between the living and the dead' - that you could explain these phenomena just by the laws of ordinary physics and chemistry. But then you ought to consider Max Delbrück. He went into it because he hoped that by looking at biological things you would find new laws of physics and chemistry. And yet, you see, it's very remarkable that these two approaches have in the end amounted to much the same thing." The medium in which [the scientist] works does not lend itself to the delight of the listener's ear. When he designs his experiments or executes them with devoted attention to the details he may say to himself, "This is my composition; the pipette is my clarinet." And the orchestra may include instruments of the most subtle design. To others, however, his music is as silent as the music of the spheres. He may say to himself, "My story is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten," but he fools only himself. The books of the great scientists are gathering dust on the shelves of learned libraries. And rightly so. The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but its universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with its original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with th!
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e ideas and results of others, and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he
can find no better retreat from the world and also no stronger link with the world than his work.
One day in July of 1972, in the course of the conversation with Delbrück sitting in the shade of a tree at the top of the long lawn at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I asked him about his interest in Beckett. In certain passages, Beckett had conveyed as well as anyone the nature of scientific intuition, and with that the desperately, irreducibly obsessive quality beyond all measure of reason - of the scientist's preoccupation with his problem. That much I knew Delbrück thought, because he had told me so once before. But now his answer was hesitant and tangential.
"I am very - This is difficult to talk about," he said. "I am very poor at it. It seems to me there is a very fundamental conflict between science and - and existence. In science we pretend that we are immortal. I mean, we ignore the fact that we - that any one of us will be non-existent. And not only in science, in daily life we always pretend that we are immortal." He laughed lightly. "Our whole mode of thinking in life, even more so in science, I think, is acting as if we were immortal, as if death didn't exist - and certainly as if the death of the scientist didn't exist." . . .
Several years later, in London, I told Beckett of what Delbrück had said about him. We were coming out of the Royal Court Theatre, after a rehearsal he had directed, into the sun of a late spring afternoon, blinking a little and stiff. "I read that talk of Delbrück's you gave me," Beckett said. "He does me too much honor." His voice was deep, quiet, melodious; his manner inward, thoughtful - in fact startlingly like Delbrück's. We went into the pub next to the theatre for a whisky. I described Delbrück's work briefly, as an effort to apprehend life by stripping it to its most elementary processes. Beckett was listening attentively and warily. Now he stirred as if in recognition.
"When one looks at one's work coldly - I can hardly bear to look at a work again once it is finished - one sees that one reaches the same impasse. Always the same impasse," Beckett said. "Each time one thinks one starts fresh, new - yet each time one reaches the same impasse. There are many ways to begin, many roads to it, but always the same impasse at the end." He asked about Delbrück's work: "Have these discoveries any therapeutic use?" And, "Could they be visualized? Seen?" He said, "I'm not trying to find answers. Rather, shapes."
Outside again, Beckett said, "I am ignorant of science. My work consists of little attempts to make shapes with words - attempts that always break down in the same way. It's curious: one knows that they are going to break down but still one persists."
On 4 December 1975, Monod and I had lunch at his apartment in Paris. The day was cool, sunny, hazy. When I arrived, the housekeeper answered the door. Monod came home a few minutes later. For the first time, I noticed him limp. We talked about Ephrussi, and Morgan's interest in embryology at Caltech when Monod was there in 1956. Monod told an ironical story about how Watson had got him to come to Cold Spring Harbor to give a talk about some of the ideas in Chance and Necessity - and how he discovered only at the last minute that it was not a serious occasion but "a pep talk to the millionaires who have these big, beautiful houses around there. In fact, it was a trap." Lunch was perfect for the season, the city, the occasion - and curiously distancing, in consequence. The table was set formally for two. The napkins were heavy. The wine glasses were slightly chipped. The housekeeper brought avocado pears with a vinaigrette. Then she came around with two small steaks, medium, ! ! and the excellent crisp French string beans and small yellow-fleshed potatoes. Monod served a decent claret from a bottle by his place, the label turned away. He drank almost none himself. The sun streamed in, golden and autumnal. The room seem ed entirely of the nineteenth century. The afternoon was plucked from time. We talked again about the Lysenko controversy, and about the work he had done at the Institüt Pasteur during the war. The housekeeper brought a salad of lettuce, the dressing fines herbes. She brought a plate of five cheeses. Monod poured a little more wine.
"I have always thought of myself as an amateur in science," he said. "I don't feel bound to keep on doing science. Why should I?" The housekeeper brought a bowl of fruit. "Why do you want to oblige me to go on working at the bench if I prefer to write a book?" I asked if he had the book in mind. "Yes I do. To some extent. I have the title. That's the great secret, of course. L'Homme et Temps - Man and Time. It's to be a series of essays. Where the central theme is the nature of time, and the relation of man to time, as an individual, as a biological object, and in history, as societies in history - what concepts men have had of time, depending on the cultures in which they were living."
A month after that, Monod learned that he had leukemia. He continued as Director of the Institüt Pasteur, though his medical regimen grew increasingly onerous, including repeated transfusions. In May of 1976, he went for a few days' visit to his family home in Cannes. While there, he suffered a massive hemorrhage of the liver, and died in the hospital in Cannes on May 31. Some time later, his elder brother told me that Monod's last intelligible words had been "je cherche á comprendre." I am trying to understand.Purchase this book at Amazon.com,
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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.
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