Exuberance: The Passion for Life (27 page)

The biologist Robert Pollack has observed that Watson is “
always a student, always ready to hear a new idea, always ready to get the picture, always ready to be excited.… [He has] an absolute enthusiasm for ideas.” His enthusiasm is infectious, albeit yoked to occasional irascibility and brusqueness. The British scientist Lionel Crawford wrote of the intimidating yet inebriating effect of working in Watson’s lab, fending off barbs and impatience, keeping up a relentless pace: “
It was not only in the lab that patience was in short supply, it was also true of the seminar room. In a seminar by Julian Davies, I remember Jim suddenly standing up about halfway through and saying ‘That’s enough of that crap Julian, you’ve got another ten minutes and just give us the facts.’ ” It was “very different from the deferential attitude of the seminar audiences [Crawford] had been used to in England.” But “together with the impatience came a great deal of encouragement and enthusiasm. This is what made our summers in Jim’s lab exciting, sometimes exhilarating, and finally exhausting.”

When he turned seventy, Watson told a gathering at Harvard
that he thought it would be “
very depressing, but it’s not really, because there’s so much exciting still to hear.” At seventy-five he remains an unalloyed enthusiast: optimistic, exuberant, and passionately involved in both science and life. Conversations with Watson gallop through an unbounded range of topics and iconoclastic opinions: the idiocy of one scientist or another, tennis, things Irish, things Scottish, beautiful women, the value of green tea, science (always), the idiocy of most psychiatrists, why fat people are happy, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (always), his plan to tell the Pope that if saints get credit for their miracles so should scientists, a fiendish delight in Francis Crick’s notion that everyone should be declared legally dead after the age of eighty-five, the satisfactions of revenge, and whether or not, somewhere, we have the new Copernicus in our midst and are unaware of it.

Watson, in full pursuit of an idea, is an unnerving mix of exuberant intuition and deadly logic: one side of his brain lopes ebulliently from thought to thought and the other side applies a quick, remorseless logic to ill-conceived ideas. He is a man of enormous passion. His idealistic but practical mind and heart are drawn far more to the future than to the past. At a scientific meeting in Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, Watson talked about the role of passion and reason in the Scottish Enlightenment and touched upon his own lowland Scots ancestry.
Passion in the service of reason, he said, was what his scientific life had been all about: it had been at the heart of how a problem in chemistry, the structure of DNA, could be solved by a birdwatcher (himself) and a physicist (Crick). His life, he said, had been all about curiosity and passion.

The next evening, at a book signing in Virginia, Watson’s curiosity and restlessness were at full throttle: yes, the double helix was important; yes, the Human Genome Project was important; but
How does the brain work? How do we cure mental illness? How does
the golden plover navigate?
His enthusiasm for understanding how the world works is palpable and he remains a case study in his own Fourth Rule for How to Succeed in Science: “
Have Fun and Stay Connected. Never do anything that bores you.” His experience in science, he says, is that “someone is always telling you to do things that leave you flat. Bad idea.”

In his most recent book,
DNA: The Secret of Life
, Watson ends on an optimistic, indeed a near-quixotic note. “
I may not be religious,” he writes, “but I still see much in scripture that is profoundly true.” He quotes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—“if I understand all mysteries but have not love, I am nothing”—and says, “Paul has in my judgment proclaimed rightly the essence of our humanity. Love, that impulse which promotes our caring for one another, is what has permitted our survival and success on the planet.… So fundamental is it to human nature that I am sure that the capacity to love is inscribed in our DNA—a secular Paul would say that love is the greatest gift of our genes to humanity.” Love, certainly, but perhaps exuberance and a passionate curiosity as well.

No one would agree more on the importance of passion in science than Robert Gallo, who for many years was the chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute and is now director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland.
When asked to define “exuberance,” he says that it is, for him, “an over-average bite of life … a zest for fun, an overoptimistic view of one’s prospects, an overreaction or hypersensitivity to things one does or is involved in.” Being exuberant, he believes, “is linked to openness, confidence, overconfidence, and a delight in one’s work. It may favor (all things being roughly equal) discovery and, perhaps to the same extent, making mistakes. Its role in research may be inclining some spirits to try to open a field even when they do not always realize it.”

Gallo draws upon Jacques Barzun’s discussion of Romanticism in
From Dawn to Decadence
, comparing Barzun’s concept of passionate love with the intensity some scientists bring to their work. “His concept of this love,” Gallo says, “is not only Eros but also much more, crystallizing on the loved one much imagery and the almost perfect joy in its presence. He said it favors youthful feelings, naiveness. Is this a form of exuberance? Aren’t some this way with their work in science? Would this lead to more imagination? A tendency to love hypothesis as much as the answer, if a scientist was bent this way.” The role of exuberance in other aspects of scientific research, he adds—with considerable personal experience to back it up—may be to supply inspirational leadership, “as long as the leader is not decapitated.”

At a more personal level, Gallo—who describes himself as “very highly exuberant” and once told an interviewer that he did not wear shoes with laces because he couldn’t wait to get to work and tying his shoes would slow him down too much—talks about exuberance in his own life: “Hyperenthusiasm, the joy of competitiveness, not only with colleagues but with scientific riddles, the great fun in telling your colleagues about your work, the feeling on occasion of ‘knowing’ one will be right, the energy that fills you, is central to what propels me but I do not know why. Honestly, it is not just winning a race. It is much more internal. The same feelings tell me [even] if I am wrong I will eventually get there.”

Resilience is something Gallo understands well and, more than almost anyone I know, personifies. For years he was the subject of unrelenting journalistic and federal investigation into a dispute about contaminated laboratory samples and claims of primacy in the discovery of the AIDS virus, a dispute that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, near-continuous assaults on his character, and a scandalous number of hours away from his scientific work. (All charges against him were ultimately dropped and
a closely related case against a collaborator was dismissed with the pointed comment from the federal appeals board, “
One might anticipate from all this evidence, after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing. That is not the case.”) Recently the codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier, acknowledged that cell cultures in both his and Gallo’s laboratories had been contaminated.
This critical issue of dispute is discussed further in the chapter notes in a description of events agreed upon by the two scientists.

During the time of the investigation—a nightmare for him, his family, and his laboratory—Gallo kept doing science and somehow managed to regenerate energy and enthusiasm with which to pursue new ideas. Indeed, during the 1980s his was the most referenced scientific laboratory in the world, and it remained, even in the times of greatest controversy, incomparably productive. “
He’s incredibly resilient,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “If you look at the stress and the strain Bob went through over these several years when he was literally under a microscope virtually every day, every week, I think it would have worn down and perhaps broken a lesser spirit.”

Gallo’s temperament—fiery, exuberant, competitive—fuels his accomplishments even as it inflames criticism. Luc Montagnier, the French codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, stands in stark contrast to Gallo: less controversial, less intense, and less imaginative. To see the two scientists together in person is to see the range of temperaments in science and to witness the opposite ends of exuberance: Gallo gesticulates and laughs a lot, is quick, warm, almost frighteningly intuitive, fast-talking, irritable, mercurial, and fiercely caught up in the topic at hand, whether it is molecular biology or the hills of Rome. Montagnier, on the other hand, is cool, cerebral, distant, and difficult to engage. “
We are not alike in our styles, as people or
as scientists,” Gallo has written in his memoir,
Virus Hunting:
“He is quiet, almost formal, holding his own counsel when competing ideas are being presented.… I love the rough-and-tumble of intellectual debate.” Gallo is, in fact, far more outspoken than many other scientists about the intense rivalries that exist in science. “
It is highly competitive in science,” he says. “I cannot tell you that it is more than in business, or more than in politics, but it is more than in some fields, without doubt.… Why do we go into it? You think you are good enough to solve problems of nature.”

Some combination of competitiveness and natural ebullience kept Gallo and his laboratory going during the years of government investigation, testimony, and innuendo. His exuberance and vivacity are legendary. One scientist, who trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Gallo’s lab, said that the two years he spent there were the most exciting of his life and that Gallo’s vitality was the uniting force: “
He does an excellent job of organizing such a large group of people with diverse personalities, backgrounds, and scientific interests into a cohesive team, and he’s able to maintain the energy of the lab via his own personal energy.” Gallo’s energy and enthusiasm may have ebbed and flowed during the worst years, but they seem always to have come back to revitalize not only him but those in his laboratory. He was asked once by a
New York Times
reporter whether he had been “humbled” by the bruising investigation, an experience that would have brought anyone else to his knees. He responded, “
No. Empathetic is a better word: I’m more understanding of other people’s hurts and problems. Humbled? No. You get too humble, you lose all your confidence, and then you can’t think about science.”

Exuberance, according to Gallo, is in part the “
capacity to reemerge, not seeing all the reasons why one should not”; it helps to buffer one against hurt and setback. “If I’m down,” he says, “exuberance makes it more likely that I’ll surely get up and it will
be better. There are many ways one can select to avoid hurt, and [I] seem prone to use exuberance.” Its other advantages, he believes, are “to make life and work ever so much more fun and to overcome the fear of failure; i.e., to take risks.” The disadvantages of exuberance, on the other hand, are that “if one is unaware of it, the possibilities for error increase”; and, he adds, “the appearance of too much joy might solicit some jealousy and even hatred.”

In a 1990
Science
interview, Gallo gave a pell-mell sense of the excitement and competitive fervor in his lab during the first flush of AIDS research in the 1980s: “
You know, the juices flow, right? Your mind is thinking and moving and you’re saying: ‘What’s the next question?’ We discover HIV goes to the brain—we publish it. What’s the target in the brain? Microglial cells—we publish it first. How much does this correlate with the dementia in the brain? We tried to establish that. Is the virus present in plasma? We found it was.… When is the virus expressed?.… What about the genes of the virus: what are their functions? Could we make the blood test better? Can we make an antigen test? We tried, we failed.… Those were the things that were on my mind: get rid of the goddamned virus after you figure out how it works.”

Like James Watson’s, Gallo’s are not the words of a dispassionate scientist: curiosity and exuberance drive the chase; competition speeds it onward. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given his temperament, Gallo once remarked, “
I have to say that I was never overwhelmed with the need to pipette. I think there are people who need it for the serenity of it all. I am not one who feels this is necessarily a great pleasure.” No one has ever accused Gallo of taking life or science at a leisurely pace, and, significantly, the citations for both of his Lasker Awards allude to the pace he set for other scientists. The commendation for the 1982 Lasker Award, given for basic medical research, ends: “
To Dr. Gallo for his tenacious and thorough investigations leading to the discovery of the human T-cell
leukemia virus and carrying resounding implications that will reshape approaches to cancer much sooner than scientists had expected or humanity had hoped.” The 1986 Lasker Award for clinical research acknowledged not only his fundamental scientific contributions, but his essential and energetic leadership: “
To a desperate moment of public alarm when physicians lacked any means of treating AIDS patients, Dr. Gallo brought clarity of vision and an invigorating spirit of inquiry that has set a pace for research unprecedented in medical history.”

In introducing Gallo at a winter science meeting in Colorado, the Nobel laureate Howard Temin gave the most compelling description of Gallo’s temperament, a temperament that, he suggests, is an exuberant life force not far removed from nature itself. Temin said, “
I am here only to introduce the keynote speaker. I would like to do it with a very short and simple story. One fine day, when I was a graduate student with Max Delbrück [who received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on bacteriophages], a few of us were walking with Max among the pine trees. Suddenly one young but famous (I won’t say his name) scientist stopped and asked Max this question: ‘Max, why is it that Josh Lederberg [also a Nobel laureate, for his work in bacterial genetics] makes so many discoveries when, in fact, we are so much smarter?’ Delbrück paused, looked up at the trees, and then responded: ‘Because Josh was born much closer to nature.’ With that I introduce Bob Gallo.”