by Lewis Thomas
If there is not enough money, there are ways to save. There was a time when many doctors were glad to volunteer their services on a part-time basis, indeed competed to do so, unpaid by state or federal funds and unreimbursed by insurance companies, in order to look after people unable to care for themselves. We should be looking around again for such doctors, not necessarily specialists in psychiatric medicine, but well-trained physicians possessing affection for people in trouble—a quality on which recruitment to the profession of medicine has always, we hope, been based. We cannot leave the situation of insane human beings where it is today.
A society can be judged by the way it treats its most disadvantaged, its least beloved, its mad. As things now stand, we must be judged a poor lot, and it is time to mend our ways.
ALTRUISM
Altruism has always been one of biology’s deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else? Nature, long viewed as a wild, chaotic battlefield swarmed across by more than ten million different species, comprising unnumbered billions of competing selves locked in endless combat, offers only one sure measure of success: survival. Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow.
At first glance, it seems an unnatural act, a violation of nature, to give away one’s life, or even one’s possessions, to another. And yet, in the face of improbability, examples of altruism abound. When a worker bee, patrolling the frontiers of the hive, senses the nearness of a human intruder, the bee’s attack is pure, unqualified suicide; the sting is barbed, and in the act of pulling away the insect is fatally injured. Other varieties of social insects, most spectacularly the ants and higher termites, contain castes of soldiers for whom self-sacrifice is an everyday chore.
It is easy to dismiss the problem by saying that “altruism” is the wrong technical term for behavior of this kind. The word is a human word, pieced together to describe an unusual aspect of human behavior, and we should not be using it for the behavior of mindless automata. A honeybee has no connection to creatures like us, no brain for figuring out the future, no way of predicting the inevitable outcome of that sting.
But the meditation of the 50,000 or so connected minds of a whole hive is not so easy to dismiss. A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun’s position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
Altruism is not restricted to the social insects, in any case. Birds risk their lives, sometimes lose them, in efforts to distract the attention of predators from the nest. Among baboons, zebras, moose, wildebeests, and wild dogs there are always stubbornly fated guardians, prepared to be done in first in order to buy time for the herd to escape.
It is genetically determined behavior, no doubt about it. Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species. It is, looked at in this way, not the emotion-laden problem that we feel when we try to put ourselves in the animal’s place; it is just another plain fact of life, perhaps not as hard a fact as some others, something rather nice, in fact, to think about.
J. B. S. Haldane, the eminent British geneticist, summarized the chilly arithmetic of the problem by announcing, “I would give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” This calculates the requirement for ultimate self-interest: the preservation and survival of an individual’s complement of genes. Trivers, Hamilton, and others have constructed mathematical models to account nicely for the altruistic behavior of social insects, quantifying the self-serving profit for the genes of the defending bee in the act of tearing its abdomen apart. The hive is filled with siblings, ready to carry the persona of the dying bee through all the hive’s succeeding generations. Altruism is based on kinship; by preserving kin, one preserves one’s self. In a sense.
Haldane’s prediction has the sound of a beginning sequence: two brothers, eight (presumably) first cousins, and then another series of much larger numbers of more distant relatives. Where does the influence tail off? At what point does the sharing of the putative altruist’s genes become so diluted as to be meaningless? Would the line on a graph charting altruism plummet to zero soon after those eight cousins, or is it a long, gradual slope? When the combat marine throws himself belly-down on the live grenade in order to preserve the rest of his platoon, is this the same sort of altruism, or is this an act without any technically biological meaning? Surely the marine’s genes, most of them, will be blown away forever; the statistical likelihood of having two brothers or eight cousins in that platoon is extremely small. And yet there he is, belly-down as if by instinct, and the same kind of event has been recorded often enough in wartime to make it seem a natural human act, normal enough, even though rare, to warrant the stocking of medals by the armed services.
At what point do our genetic ties to each other become so remote that we feel no instinctual urge to help? I can imagine an argument about this, with two sides, but it would be a highly speculative discussion, not by any means pointless but still impossible to settle one way or the other. One side might assert, with total justification, that altruistic behavior among human beings has nothing at all to do with genetics, that there is no such thing as a gene for self-sacrifice, not even a gene for helpfulness, or concern, or even affection. These are attributes that must be learned from society, acquired by cultures, taught by example. The other side could maintain, with equal justification, since the facts are not known, precisely the opposite position: we get along together in human society because we are genetically designed to be social animals, and we are obliged, by instructions from our genes, to be useful to each other. This side would argue further that when we behave badly, killing or maiming or snatching, we are acting on misleading information learned from the wrong kinds of society we put together; if our cultures were not deformed, we would be better company, paying attention to what our genes are telling us.
For the purposes of the moment I shall take the side of the sociobiologists because I wish to carry their side of the argument a certain distance afield, beyond the human realm. I have no difficulty in imagining a close enough resemblance among the genomes of all human beings, of all races and geographic origins, to warrant a biological mandate for all of us to do whatever we can to keep the rest of us, the species, alive. I maintain, despite the moment’s evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection. Hard-of-hearing, we go to war. Stone-deaf, we make thermonuclear missiles. Nonetheless, the music is there, waiting for more listeners.
But the matter does not end with our species. If we are to take seriously the notion that the sharing of similar genes imposes a responsibility on the sharers to sustain each other, and if I am right in guessing that even very distant cousins carry at least traces of this responsibility and will act on it whenever they can, then the whole world becomes something to be concerned about on solidly scientific, reductionist, genetic grounds. For we have cousins more than we can count, and they are all over the place, run by genes so similar to ours that the differences are minor technicalities. All of us, men, women, children, fish, sea grass, sandworms, dolphins, hamsters, and soil bacteria, everything alive on the planet, roll ourselves along through all our generations by replicating DNA and RNA, and although the alignments of nucleotides within these molecules are different in different species, the molecules themselves are fundamentally the same substance. We make our proteins in the same old way, and many of the enzymes most needed for ce
llular life are everywhere identical.
This is, in fact, the way it should be. If cousins are defined by common descent, the human family is only one small and very recent addition to a much larger family in a tree extending back at least 3.5 billion years. Our common ancestor was a single cell from which all subsequent cells derived, most likely a cell resembling one of today’s bacteria in today’s soil. For almost three-fourths of the earth’s life, cells of that first kind were the whole biosphere. It was less than a billion years ago that cells like ours appeared in the first marine invertebrates, and these were somehow pieced together by the joining up and fusion of the earlier primitive cells, retaining the same blood lines. Some of the joiners, bacteria that had learned how to use oxygen, are with us still, part of our flesh, lodged inside the cells of all animals, all plants, moving us from place to place and doing our breathing for us. Now there’s a set of cousins!
Even if I try to discount the other genetic similarities linking human beings to all other creatures by common descent, the existence of these beings in my cells is enough, in itself, to relate me to the chestnut tree in my backyard and to the squirrel in that tree.
There ought to be a mathematics for connections like this before claiming any kinship function, but the numbers are too big. At the same time, even if we wanted to, we cannot think the sense of obligation away. It is there, maybe in our genes for the recognition of cousins, or, if not, it ought to be there in our intellects for having learned about the matter. Altruism, in its biological sense, is required of us. We have an enormous family to look after, or perhaps that assumes too much, making us sound like official gardeners and zookeepers for the planet, responsibilities for which we are probably not yet grown-up enough. We may need new technical terms for concern, respect, affection, substitutes for altruism. But at least we should acknowledge the family ties and, with them, the obligations. If we do it wrong, scattering pollutants, clouding the atmosphere with too much carbon dioxide, extinguishing the thin carapace of ozone, burning up the forests, dropping the bombs, rampaging at large through nature as though we owned the place, there will be a lot of paying back to do and, at the end, nothing to pay back with.
FALSITY AND FAILURE
Two friends of mine, eminent scientists with high responsibilities for science management and policy, were recently called before a congressional committee to testify in defense of the morals of American research. Why is it, they were asked, that there have been so many instances of outright fraud and plagiarism in recent years, so many publications of experiments never actually performed, so much fudging of data?
At about the same time, articles about falsification of research—particularly in biomedical science—appeared in The New York Times and in two respected and widely read technical periodicals, Nature (published in London) and Science (in Washington). The general drift of the thoughtful, worried essays was that the reported instances of deliberate mistruth on the part of scientists seem to be on the increase, and the self-monitoring system, traditionally relied upon to spot and immediately expose all cases of faked data, appears to be malfunctioning.
The list of fraudulent research reports is not a long one, but several of the studies were carried out within the walls of the country’s most distinguished scientific institutions, long regarded as models of scientific probity. Science stated flat out, in its April 10, 1981, issue: “There is little doubt that a dark side of science has emerged during the past decade. . . . Four major cases of cheating in biomedical research came to light in 1980 alone with some observers in the lay press calling it a ‘crime wave.’” It is the same list in all the reports: the case of a pathologist knowingly employing a contaminated cell-culture line, two junior researchers who plagiarized work already done by others, a clinical investigator found to have inserted bogus data on cancer chemotherapy into the project’s computer. None of these studies involved crucial issues of science; the papers in question dealt with relatively minor matters, unlikely to upheave any field but requiring, nonetheless, a significant waste of time and money in other laboratories attempting to confirm the unconfirmable. The real damage has been done to the public confidence in the scientific method, and there are apprehensions within the scientific community itself that someone, somewhere, perhaps in Washington, will begin framing new regulations to ensure exactitude and honesty in an endeavor that has always prided itself, and depended for its very progress, on these two characteristics.
Now that the issue has surfaced so publicly it is likely that story will lead to another story, and there will be more speculations and skepticism about any piece of science that seems to carry surprising or unorthodox implications. Indeed, a number of old stories are being exhumed and revived, as though to reveal a pattern of habitual falsehood in the process of science: Ptolemy and his unearthly second-century A.D. data establishing the sun’s movement around the earth, supposed examples of seventeenth-century fudging in Newton’s calculations, even some small questions about the perfection of Gregor Mendel’s classical (and absolutely solid) generalizations about plant genetics one hundred years ago. Lumped in with these are some outright examples of bent science: Cyril Burt’s 1930s data on the inheritance of intelligence in identical twins, the falsified synthesis of a cellular protein by a postdoctoral student at the Rockefeller Institute twenty years ago, and the notorious episode of skin-graft fabrication at Sloan-Kettering in 1974. These can, if you like, be made to seem all of a piece, a constantly spreading blot on the record of science. Or, if you prefer (and I do prefer), they can be viewed as anomalies, the work of researchers with unhinged minds or, as in the cases of Newton and Mendel, gross exaggerations of the fallibility of even superb scientists.
It is an impossibility for a scientist to fake his results and get away with it, unless he is lucky enough to have the faked data conform, in every fine detail, to a guessed-at truth about nature (the probability of this kind of luck is exceedingly small), or unless the work he describes is too trivial to be of interest to other investigators. Either way, he cannot win. If he reports something of genuine significance, he knows for a certainty that other workers will repeat his experiments, or try to, and if he has cooked his data the word will soon be out, to the ruin of his career. If he has plagiarized someone else’s paper, the computer retrieval systems available to scientific libraries everywhere will catch him at it, sooner or later, with the same result.
In short, the system does indeed work, and the fact that only four instances of scientific malfeasance have been identified in a year during which some 18,000 research projects were sponsored by the National Institutes of Health means just what the fact says: such events are extremely rare. This is not a claim that scientists are necessarily, by nature, an impeccably honest lot, although I am convinced that all the best ones are. It says, simply, that people are not inclined to try cheating in a game where cheating leads almost inevitably to losing.
You have only to glance through other pages of the same issue of Nature in which the editorial comment on fraud appears to catch a sense of how the system really works, and works at its very best. There are two extensive papers dealing with an important and fascinating question raised last year by a Canadian group of immunologists, who had found evidence suggesting, cautiously but not conclusively, that mice can inherit through the male line an acquired abnormality in their immune cells known technically as “tolerance.” If true, the claim would support nothing less than Lamarckianism, long since jettisoned from biology; it would be an upheaval indeed to face again, as an open problem, the question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The two new papers explore the matter in elegantly designed and meticulously executed experiments, with the conclusion that the Canadian work could not be confirmed. There is, in this instance, no question at all of contrived data or even the misguided reading of results; it is a typical instance of disagreement in science, something that happens whenever major ideas are under exploration. It will, in
this case, lead to more work in the three laboratories now caught up in the problem and no doubt in others not yet involved. It may also lead to new knowledge, a deeper comprehension of immunology, and conceivably to something surprising, even if the Canadians turn out at the end to have been totally wrong.
In the same journal there are three marvelous papers—one from the University of Cambridge, two from Cal Tech—that will cause even more of a stir in biomedical science, generating surprise, argument, and new bursts of research in laboratories around the world. The genetic composition of human mitochondria has been elucidated, and these structures, long believed to be the descendants of bacteria living as permanent lodgers inside all nucleated cells, are turning out to have an arrangement of their genes like nothing else on earth: they display an astonishing economy in their circles of DNA, and in some respects the genetic code is different from what has, up to now, been regarded as a universal code. It is something quite new, unorthodox, unexpected, and therefore certain to be challenged but also likely to be repeated, confirmed, and extended. Molecular genetics may then be moved on to new ground, new explanations for the origin of mitochondria will be thought up and tested, and science itself will be off and running in a new direction.
With work like this going on in the pages of a single issue of Nature, and with similar things to be read in Science, week after week these days, I cannot find time to worry so much about falsity and fraud. Only to reflect that my dictionary gives the Latin root for “falsity” as fallere, which is the same root for the word “failure.”
