An Evening With Sol Spiegelman: The Creativity Dispute

[Editor's note: Is the work of a scientist creative by nature? Or, is the scientist's function to reflect reality by mirroring nature in a series of experiments reproducible by others? How does one measure the value of contributions made by any one scientist? By how well a particular researcher is remembered after he or she is dead? By the number of accolades and honors accrued? Or by the number of other scientists inspired by the researcher's work? These are among the questions world-renowned Swedish biomedical scientist George Klein raises as he reminisces about a visit with the late cancer researcher Sol Spiegelman, an American molecular biologist legendary for his laboratory productivity and willingness to aggressively investigate the longest of scientific long shots. In 1936, for example, Spiegelman, trained in both mathematics and biology, began to study bacteria in search of an understanding of cell genetics. This was indeed a revolutionary concept at a time when leading geneticists held that bacteria have no nucleus and therefore can have no genetics. But a year later, Spiegelman reported that bacteria could be an ideal model for studies of cell genetics and cancer, since--he correctly theorized--cancer is fundamentally a problem in cell pop- ulation genetics. In the following essay, excerpted from Klein's forthcoming book, The Atheist and the Holy City: Reflections and Encounters, Spiegelman's fellow researcher and friend talks about what other scientists might learn about themselves and the doing of science not so much by examining Spiegelman's scientific successes, but by taking a closer look at his motives and expectations. Klein's book will be published in October by the MIT Press. The author is a researcher at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, which he joined in 1951, and a 30-year member of the Nobel Assembly.] In the mid-1960s Sol Spiegelman had it in mind to visit Stockholm as part of a trip to Europe, and he very much wanted to give a talk about his latest studies. I gathered my group to inform them. I told them that Sol was one of the most stimulating scientists in current biology, and that his crystal-clear lectures were packed with many unexpected new results from his large lab. We could look forward to meeting this dynamic intellect and scientifically stimulating person, famous for daring experiments that pushed back the frontiers of knowledge. His ambition was to solve important central questions rather than to waste time on the minutia of fields that were already relatively well understood. Spiegelman's penchant for formulating daring and at times hair-raising theories was balanced by his talents as a biochemist. His theories irritated some, but others were stimulated to test them experimentally. Most of the time, when tested, his theories were wrong; but that was relatively unimportant. A somewhat sarcastic French col- league who himself had often proved Sol wrong described him in the following terms: "Sol is often found standing at the top of the mountain. He waves both arms around, and declaims to all in the valley below, `Come up here right away--look what I can see from here!' Throngs of people rush up the mountain, but when they reach the top, out of breath, and stand beside Sol, they don't see anything of what he claims to see. But no one denies that it is indeed a very interesting view." On the way out to the airport, I was thinking about my most recent meeting with Sol, five or six years earlier. We sat by the lake. Sol was under heavy fire, but he took it in good spirits. He was building dazzling and vertiginous speculations on a dubious experimental foundation. He sat there with his legs crossed, aggressive and happy. His barblike retorts always started with a triumphant "Look!" They were followed by a prolonged barrage until the enemy's fort was laid to waste, at least for the time being. Great things had happened in Sol's laboratory since I saw him last. He had developed a 20 new method that was revolutionizing biochemistry and was about to become one of the most important methods in gene technology. Even the molecular biology of today is based more on an extension of Spiegelman's methods than on any other single technical procedure. He had found that a small fragment of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA, could "hybridize" (in other words pair up) with another fragment that contained the same message code. One could therefore use a known gene, for instance a viral gene, to search for similar corresponding genes in the great cosmos of the living cell. It's like finding a needle in a year's harvest of hay. Today this is the most important everyday method used in all molecular biology laboratories, and is one of every beginner's basic learning exercises. When it was first presented, though, it seemed just as unbelievable as Spiegelman's earlier work. But this time the discovery was true, easily confirmed, and within the capability of everyone. Even as Sol was flying to Stockholm, his method had already become accepted and his great contribution was acknowledged and acclaimed worldwide. When he came through customs, I hardly recognized him at first. If it hadn't been for the characteristic short silhouette, I might easily have mistaken this ashen man with dark glasses for someone else. He reacted to my enthusiastic greetings curtly, with a muffled voice and without any sign of delight. During the ride back to Stockholm, he sat, quiet and sullen, without removing his dark glasses. I described the schedule for his visit. We would have time for lunch together, and immediately afterward he would give his lecture. Then we would go to my home, where my young colleagues would get together--they were so looking forward to meeting him. He didn't say a word. It was painful. I described the experiments we were doing. No reaction. We arrived at the restaurant, and I tried to talk about current events in Sweden. He was totally uninterested. I asked him about some mutual friends. Yes, they were well--nothing special had happened. And how was his own family? Well. I asked what he'd like to drink. "Aquavit," he answered. The drink vanished in one gulp. "Can I have another one?" he said. He got it, and after a while he wanted still another. I thought that I should point out to Sol that the alcohol content of aquavit was the same as that of vodka, and that unfortunately he had to begin his lecture in less than a hour. "Never mind," he said. The third drink disappeared as quickly as the other two. He kept his dark glasses on all the while. Spiegelman's lecture was as perfect and as well presented as ever. I was the only one who seemed to notice a hint of unsteadiness in his movements and a tendency to keep a grip on the table. But in the middle of the lecture, all these symptoms disappeared and his voice regained some of its usual spark. He even took off his dark glasses for a while, revealing a pair of rather bloodshot eyes. He mentioned his epoch-making new technique only in passing, devoting most of the lecture to his ingenious but farfetched attempts to achieve self-replication (or, as he put it, playing God). It was obvious that the interests of the lecturer and those of his audience were quite different. Spiegelman was already tired of talking about his wonderful new technique, the subject of such great interest to most of us. After a few polite but perfunctory questions of the kind that guest speakers in Sweden often have to content themselves with, we went to my home. The dark glasses were back on. All attempts at conversation were fruitless. Oh, well, he's probably tired after his lecture, I thought. My young colleagues will cheer him up! They were already sitting around in a circle in the living room. The air bristled with expectation. "What would you like to drink?" "Brandy." That was the first word Spiegelman had uttered since we left the lecture hall. We tried to start a conversation. No success. We all became rather glum, and our joy vanished like air from a released balloon. Our guest refilled his brandy glass quite frequently, and I felt an intense desire to be somewhere else. Finally, I decided to start a discussion with my young colleagues. I chose the one student in the group who was the least difficult to talk to, and tried to find a subject that would interest him and the others as well: the world of the scientist. How does one get to be a scientist? How should one divide one's time between lab work and reading the literature? How can one avoid depression when work goes badly, and how can one know when one is on the wrong track? When is it time to halt a project? How can one recognize the subtle but crucial differences between constructive patience and obstinate stubbornness? How can one avoid being so seduced by hypothesis that one loses touch with reality? "The most important question is how to become truly creative," my student said. "Isn't the best recipe to try to understand how creative scientists work, what makes them tick?" "What nonsense," shouted Spiegelman suddenly, slamming his fist on the table. "I am dead tired of all the conceited scientists! Who do they think they are? No one would ever have written Bach's music if he hadn't lived. No one could ever have painted like Picasso. That's what I call creativity. But a scientist? If A doesn't discover a phenomenon today, B will do it tomorrow. A scientist is the mirror of nature, and nothing more. His individual contribution, the creation of his experimental results and the rules derived from them--they're all insignificant. Only a charlatan is creative, because he conjures up a world that doesn't really exist." The monologue gushed out of Sol like a torrential roaring river, occasionally interrupted by small volcanic eruptions. They always started with the exclamation "Look!" Every "Look!" was followed by a very specific example of unrealistic illusions, conceit, or megalomania, of scientists' inability to view their fleeting, butterfly-like existence as it really is, undefined and interchangeable. His articulation was perfect, without the slightest detectable effect from the brandy. Finally, the monologue subsided. The dark glasses went back on. The evening was over. I later heard that Sol put on the same kind of show, with only a few minor variations, at every stop on his trip. Our French colleague took a fresh look at the man on the mountaintop and came up with the following explanation: "As long as Spiegelman was wrong, everyone was against him. He had suffered a great deal from the failures in his lab and from the hostility of his colleagues. When success suddenly came to him and his results were not only correct but also of immense importance to all of biomedical science, he wanted to prove that it was devoid of importance by going through such a bizarre psychological somersault. If his success was meaningless, then so were his failures and his sufferings." I don't believe this explanation. It isn't consistent with Sol's past and his subsequent growth. Long before he became interested in biology, he wanted to become a musician or a mathematician. He often talked about his longing for the imaginative world of mathematics and the fantasy world of music. His scientific hypotheses had always had a certain aesthetic quality that contributed not only to their being accepted so quickly but also to their being discarded when it became obvious that they were based on incomplete and at times erroneous experiments. When he finally succeeded in developing that ingeniously simple method that opened the way for others to attack such important but previously inaccessible problems, it must have seemed to him a kind of anticlimax. It was his practical laboratory technique, and not his ingenious intellectual and artistic musings, that represented the beginning of a new epoch in biomedicine. The virtuoso biochemist, with his impressive intellectual gifts, must have experienced all the accolades with a certain disappointment. This is probably not the entire explanation. It might be added that Spiegelman's work after his visit to Stockholm was perfectly in line with his earlier style of behavior. He devoted his last decade entirely to the problem of cancer. All signs of depression vanished. Again he was the man on the mountaintop, waving his arms with the same kind of enthusiasm. He succeeded in inspiring even larger numbers of scientists, who in turn went on to discover many interesting things. The fact that what they discovered was not necessarily what Sol claimed he had found didn't bother him in the least. I saw him again many times, but never wearing dark glasses. The introductory "Look!" regained its exuberant, challenging ring, followed by a torrent of exciting but often badly interpreted results from Sol's lab. Those of us who witnessed Sol's little performance in Stockholm have had a question in the back of our minds since then. Could it be that he was really right? The incident came to mind suddenly and quite unexpectedly as I sat in the Paris studio of the Hungarian-French artist Simon Hantai. I hadn't seen Hantai for 35 years. We had been in our twenties when we had last met. At that time, Hantai was living with his wife in a studio loft. They had hardly enough money even to buy bread--all their money went for paint. The studio was cluttered with his enormous paintings. One whole wall was entirely taken up by a bizarre abstract creation. Today the same kind of abstractions by Hantai cover entire walls in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I admitted my doubts to Hantai. I wondered exactly what criteria are used in judging abstract art. How is it that one artist can be successful while many others who produce similar kinds of art, at least to the eyes of the layman, are not successful? Hantai is a quiet man, and it is rather difficult for him to express himself. But this time, he became unusually talkative. No, it wasn't at all how I thought it would be. The appreciation of art today is not radically different from what it used to be. It is as impossible now to define simple norms, and we can't now, nor could we ever, predict which works of art will survive over the long run. In the course of time, the only art that can survive is "true" art. "What do you mean by `true'?" He couldn't quite define it, but he thought that the criteria were probably similar to those used for determining scientific truth and survival. I said to him that truth in science is always based on objective proof and on the repetition of findings by others. Therefore, scientific truth must be different in some fundamental ways from artistic "truth," since the latter is based on an accurate reflection of a subjective experience and/or on the ability to create a resonant response in the viewer. A painting, whether it be concrete or abstract, that evokes a feeling in the observer is considered "true" in its own right. Whether the experience of the observer is in harmony with that of the artist is irrelevant. A scientific conclusion becomes true only after it is verified by several other scientists. It is therefore to be expected that the bond between the name of the discoverer and the ultimate surviving truth breaks down quite quickly. It happens today faster than ever before. There are more scientists today than during all preceding times put together. Each of us has to make an individual contribution to be able to continue working at all. On the other hand, an enduring painting is forever associated with the name of its creator. Had Sol fallen into a logical trap--had he confused the survival of a name with a fundamental difference in the process of creativity? The scientist is often unaware that he is sitting in a diving bell, but that is in fact what he is doing. He imagines himself suspended in an infinite sea where he has come to examine some small detail. His ambition is to use his diving lamp to cast light into a dark cave for the very first time. He may suspect that the cave is really deeper than he first anticipated, and that his lamp is weaker than it ought to be, even though it may be the latest wonder of technology. If he is fortunate enough to illuminate a small corner and discover something new, he publishes it immediately. Then he goes a little further, until he is pushed aside by others with more powerful lamps, better strategies, or greater perseverance. They confirm his vision or complement and enlarge it. This is the general view that the scientist has of his work. With certain rare exceptions, well exemplified by Spiegelman, most scientists realize that their contribution is, and should remain, only a small part of a greater, communal effort, one with many participants. Most recognize that their discoveries might, at best, eventually become part of the body of universal knowledge, the shared property of the species, and that they themselves sooner or later will become as anonymous as the monks of the Middle Ages. But this insight rarely makes them depressed. They don't usually hide behind dark glasses or wallow in the depths of a brandy bottle. From the outset, they have accepted this as a self-evident condition of their original contract. Very few scientists are aware that their so-called objective science can be thought of as a diving bell. This insight requires some propensity for philosophical thought, some education in the humanities, or an extremely skeptical disposition. But the diving bell of a scientist has room for many more individuals than the solitary cell of the artist or author. The necessarily collaborative nature of scientific work, the communal nature of scientific ideas, and the inevitable demands of sociological and conceptual adjustments force scientists to function, and want to function, within the boundaries of the spirit of their time. Without any doubt, the attitudes of scientists are formed by a real or imagined urge to reflect reality--to function like a mirror to nature, as Sol, the "mirror man" expressed it--but their findings and interpretations can never accurately reflect all reality. Even the immediate details of a scientific study are, or often become, distorted by being squeezed into a straitjacket of the reference framework. In the worst case, fortunately rarely, the perception of the scientist may become out of touch with the perceptible reality. Here, and only here, lies the essential difference between art and science. The message of the artist need not be rationalized or documented in some kind of objective protocol, as if it were a cookbook of reproducible experiments. It suffices that the approach of an artist to the expression of truth in language, sound or form strikes a responsive and resonant chord in many listeners or viewers. It doesn't matter to the recipient if it's the right resonance for the wrong reason--only that he experience it as "true." For the scientist, however, this is taboo. The charlatan is neither a scientist nor an artist. He is merely a charlatan. Spiegelman was a great scientist who could also act like a charlatan when he wished. Fortunately, he did so only occasionally, and usually in order to be provocative. Real charlatans, who often choose the field of cancer as their favorite playground, contend that even Pasteur was misunderstood and at first even renounced. The astute among them can tell many tales, some true and some false, of scientists whose discoveries didn't conform to the spirit of their time and who therefore had to struggle forcefully against the establishment before being accepted. That phenomenon does occur, and often--it is intrinsic to the scientific process. It is difficult to widen the perspective, and even more difficult to break through the "diving bell" of the prevailing conceptual framework. But in our times it is hard to find any examples of scientific geniuses who have to fight against feudal repression. A more appropriate analogy might be the departure of the queen bee from the hive after transferring her role to the new queen. She dies in isolation--she has no individual existence at all. She must be attended by a small but complete social group in order to be able to form a new community. When that task is finished, the new community functions in essentially the same way as the previous one, and within the same constraints. The word creativity can have many meanings. Spiegelman has emphasized a hazardous, relative and actually unimportant criterion: the "survival" of a piece of scientific work. There is no immortality under the skies of eternity. The soul is immortal, but the dead do not exist. Like Proteus, scientific creativity can take many different forms. However, in the final analysis, the survival of the individual names is totally unimportant. The scientists whose work paves the way toward a major paradigmatic shift is just as important as the one whose name, because of good luck, pure chance, or (rarely) a special talent, is associated with the shift itself. Having great talent is often, but far from always, an asset, but some important and even seminal contributions have been made by scientists whom one could not call talented or even particularly intelligent, try as one might wish. But what then is the most important basic trait of a good scientist? How should Sol and I have answered the student on the unpleasant but memorable evening? We were too locked into our suddenly inflexible positions to come up with a serious answer. But could one give any answer after having pondered the question seriously? Does scientific creativity have any single common feature that deserves to be identified above all others? I once heard an anecdote from a Russian colleague whose teacher was Pasteur's last student. When he arrived in Paris, the master was already old and had very fixed and regular habits. A stroll back and forth in the same hallway between 3:00 and 3:30 every afternoon was part of his unvarying routine. His lab staff watched Pasteur from a distance and would never have dared to disturb him, but they could see that he was mumbling something to himself. It seemed as if he was repeating the same words over and over again--something important, something that under no circumstances was to be forgotten. What could it be that Pasteur was repeating to himself all that time? The young Russian was quite small, and so the others asked him to hide behind a curtain to listen to Pasteur. It worked. The message consisted of three words: "Il faut travailler--one must work."

An Evening With Sol Spiegelman: The Creativity Dispute

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George Klein

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August 1990

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