Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  After two wars have shattered the civilization of a continent, few Europeans have any conviction of the meaning or the stability of their world. At no time since the fifteenth century … has terror walked so nakedly through the land. It is not simply a physical fear, produced by the brutality and the difficulty of daily life … It is also the metaphysical fear of the terrible solitude and helplessness of man in a universe that seems increasingly “absurd” and incomprehensible.

  No modern French writer has a greater feeling for these problems than 32-year-old Albert Camus. None has expressed them more strikingly and in a greater variety of forms: the philosophical essay, the novel, the drama. He has led, moreover, an active as well as a contemplative life …

  If there is a prophet for the students in Paris at the present moment … it is probably Camus … Camus commands our attention not simply as a writer … but especially as the symbol and the spokesman of the whole generation that reached intellectual maturity under the Occupation.

  The press coverage stirred interest wherever Camus was to appear. On his fourth evening in the city, an unprecedented crowd of 1,200 people turned out at Columbia University to hear him speak in French. He told his audience that rather than discuss French literature or theater, as might be expected, he had chosen the topic “The Human Crisis.” Camus had written only a single editorial over the previous seven months, while he continued to fill his notebooks with observations and ideas. His speech, while dwelling on matters that were his stock-in-trade, reflected that he had carried some ideas further, and that his thinking had clarified about certain issues in his months away from Combat. The talk was a combination of editorial and philosophy, and it foreshadowed several directions that future work and projects would take.

  Camus explained that he would examine the crisis from the point of view of the “spiritual experience of the men of my generation,” men who “were born just before or during the first great war, reached adolescence during the world economic crisis, and were twenty the year Hitler took power. To complete their education they were then provided with the war in Spain, Munich, the war of 1939, the defeat, and four years of occupation and secret struggle. I suppose this is what is called an interesting generation.” It was this generation, Camus said, that was “led to think that there might be a Human Crisis, for they had to live the most heartbreaking of contradictions,” one in which, while loathing war and violence, they had to accept war and exercise violence.

  In order to illustrate what he described as a “crisis in human consciousness,” Camus shared vignettes from the war. “A time,” he told his American audience, “the world is beginning to forget but which still burns in our hearts.” His stories reflected ambiguous attitudes toward cruelty, torture, and death. Camus asserted that these anecdotes, by illustrating that “the death or torture of a human being can, in our world, be examined with a feeling of indifference, with friendly or experimental interest, or without response” demonstrated that there was indeed a human crisis.

  Camus said that it would be too easy and too simple to blame all of these symptoms on Hitler. Rather, he sought out more general causes that made Hitlerism possible. Among the many contributors to the rise of terror, Camus suggested that one overriding factor was the emphasis on doctrine and bureaucracy over human dignity. The resulting loss of the protection of “a respect for man,” Camus asserted, created a situation in which people of his generation were forced to choose between being either “the victim or the executioner.” Camus had used this phrase once before in Combat the previous June. He would return to it again in the future. He dwelled upon it in his speech: “The only question for us was whether or not to accept a world in which there was no choice possible save whether to be victim or executioner.”

  Camus explained that people of his generation wanted to be neither, and thus faced a terrible dilemma. He then described how the Resistance revolted against this choice, against “the civilization of death that was being prepared for us.” Hence, for Camus, the spirit of the Resistance embodied his philosophy of revolt that at once denied death and affirmed life. Moreover, in their struggle, the resistants discovered that they were affirming something of value in all people, a common good. “The great lesson of these terrible years,” Camus said, “was that we were caught in a collective tragedy, the stake of which was a common dignity, a communion of men which it was important to defend and sustain.”

  He continued: “It took the war, the occupation, the mass-murders, the thousands of prisons, the sight of Europe wracked with grief, for some of us to finally acquire two or three insights that may somewhat diminish our despair.” From this painful experience, Camus declared, “we know what we must do in this crisis-torn world.” He offered several prescriptions: to “realize that we kill millions of men each time we permit ourselves to think certain thoughts”; to “cleanse the world of the terror congesting it”; to eliminate the death penalty “throughout the universe”; to put politics “back in its rightful place, which is a secondary one”; to create a “universalism” through which “all men of good will may find themselves in touch with one another.”

  Lest his audience go away drowning in pessimism and despair, Camus closed by stating that his generation held out an immense hope for man and envisioned a world that was not one of policemen, soldiers, and money, but a world for “man and woman, of fruitful work, and reflective leisure”—a vision to which “we should devote our strength, our thought, and if need be, our lives.”

  Those who met Camus were struck by the contrast between the gravity of his remarks and the lightness of his personality, which seemed almost “unduly cheerful” to some. Camus lived his days in America to the fullest. His smile, his laugh, his sense of humor caught many questioners off guard, and many found the combination of his personality, talent, and Humphrey Bogart–esque looks attractive. That included nineteen-year-old Smith College student Patricia Blake, who, the day after meeting Camus at one of his speaking engagements, became his romantic companion and tour guide for the remainder of his visit, and even typed part of The Plague for him.

  WORDS OVER BULLETS

  After returning to France, Camus expanded some of the themes from his “Human Crisis” speech into a series of eight articles for Combat in November—the only articles he would publish in the newspaper in all of 1946. Prompted by the conviction that tensions between the East (USSR) and West (USA) were putting the world on the path to conflict in which the casualties would dwarf those of World War II, Camus asked his readers to reflect upon a question of murder: Would they under any circumstances commit or condone murder, or would they categorically refuse to do so? Prominently featured on the front page under the overall title “Neither Victims nor Executioners,” Camus’s article explored the personal, political, and societal ramifications of either a “yes” or “no” answer to the question.

  Camus declared his position: “I, for one, am practically certain that I have made my choice. And having chosen, it seemed to me that I ought to speak, to say that I would never count myself among people of whatever stripe who are willing to countenance murder, and I would draw whatever consequence followed from this.” One of those consequences was his call for an international code of justice “whose first article would abolish the death penalty everywhere.”

  Across several articles, Camus made the case that the world was living in terror and that no matter what ideology one subscribed to—Communist, Socialist, or capitalist—in any contest among these ideologies, the end could never justify violent means. The unprecedented pace of weapons development ensured that war would leave little remaining in the world for the survivors to claim. War was thus unacceptable from any perspective, but nothing was being done to prevent it. Camus appealed for a new “civilization based on dialogue,” a new “social contract,” and a “new way of life” in order to prevent an apocalypse.

  He understood, of course, that in the light of history, the odds were stacked against him, but he was willin
g to state his wager: “Across five continents, an endless struggle between violence and preaching will rage in the years to come. And it is true that the former is a thousand times more likely to succeed than the latter. But I have always believed that if people who placed their hopes in the human condition were mad, those who despaired of events were cowards. Henceforth, there will be only one honorable choice: to wager everything on the belief that in the end words will prove stronger than bullets.”

  A few weeks after his series in Combat, The Plague went to the printer. Threads of “Neither Victims nor Executioners” were woven into the novel. In a nine-page-long monologue Tarrou confesses to Rieux that as a teenager he discovered that his father was a prosecutor who had men sentenced to death. Repulsed by this revelation, he had joined various revolutionary movements, only to discover they, too, involved killing and the passing of death sentences. When he witnessed an execution in person, he was so horrified that he refused thereafter to kill. “There’s something lacking in my mental makeup,” he tells Rieux, “and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer … All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”

  At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Dr. Rieux is the narrator, who, after the gates had been reopened and the celebrations begun, “resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who held their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

  In closing his tale, Camus balanced this note of optimism with one of caution:

  Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts …

  And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good … and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

  The novel would be a bestseller in France, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first year at a time when book-buying was a luxury, and it would become one of the top-selling books of the decade following World War II. In Stockholm, the Swedish Academy even considered giving thirty-four-year-old Camus the Nobel Prize in Literature, which would have made him the youngest winning author ever.

  As was his compulsion, Camus had already begun a new project well before the first copies were printed. Another plague was festering in the world, but once again, few in France had recognized it. It was a plague that would drive Camus and Sartre apart, and bring Camus and Jacques Monod together.

  CHAPTER 19

  BOURGEOIS GENETICS

  Science is the record of dead religions.

  —OSCAR WILDE, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”

  MONOD HAD HURLED HIMSELF BACK INTO HIS WAR-INTERRUPTED research. He was happy to be once again designing experiments, working at the lab bench, puzzling over new results, and mixing it up with colleagues. Madeleine Vuillet marveled at Monod’s enthusiasm, as he would come bounding up the three flights of stairs to the Pasteur’s attic each day and stride down the corridor, smiling and whistling Bach cantatas. A font of ideas, Monod always gave Vuillet several experimental projects to pursue at the same time, so that “there is always something that comes out right.” He explained, “It keeps up our spirit and in that way we get several results every day.”

  After hiring Vuillet, the next orders of business for Monod were to complete and publish the work he had left unfinished when he plunged into clandestinity, and to catch up on what was going on in biology elsewhere in the world. In late 1943, he and Alice Audureau had found that a strain of E. coli that could not grow on lactose occasionally produced colonies that could grow on lactose, and that these lactose-metabolizing colonies were due to inherited genetic mutations. The result was important because it made Monod understand that the capability to metabolize lactose depended upon genes. Understanding those genes was key to enzyme adaptation.

  Monod and Audureau’s report was a solid contribution to bacterial genetics in 1946, but there was much bigger news coming out of the United States. Oswald Avery’s lab at Rockefeller University in New York was working on the identification of a substance that, when extracted from a virulent type of the pneumococcus bacteria and then given to a harmless, avirulent type of the bacteria, could transform the avirulent bacteria into a lethal, virulent strain. During the war, they published their first results indicating that the active ingredient was associated with the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) fraction of the extract, although they could not be certain that the activity was not due to some impurity. In early 1946, they reported that the active ingredient was selectively destroyed by treatment with a purified enzyme that broke down DNA. To a good number of biologists, this was persuasive evidence that DNA was the heredity material. However, since the chemical structure of DNA was unknown, it was entirely a mystery how DNA molecules carried specific genetic information. Indeed, despite Avery’s results, some biologists still thought that something else had to be involved.

  With such exciting developments unfolding, the small community of the world’s “molecular biologists” gathered in the summer of 1946 in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, for a two-week-long symposium on “Hereditary Variation in Microorganisms.” The former whaling town on Long Island was home to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a biological research station that had hosted ten previous summer gatherings on major topics in biology. These annual meetings had been interrupted by the war, so it was the first time in a long while, particularly for European scientists, to see colleagues, and for new students to meet the leaders in the young field. Most anyone interested in the nature of heredity attended. Monod and Lwoff took advantage of the new transatlantic commercial plane service to fly to New York from Paris, via Ireland and Newfoundland. Monod described the novel experience in a letter to Odette: “Twelve hours above the water, in reality above wonderful skies of clouds. Constant impression of high mountains. Then the black night with several twinkling stars.”

  The meeting grounds were situated on a scenic inlet; the symposium mixed formal presentations with swimming, canoeing, picnicking, casual conversation, and late-night beer and whiskey drinking. The attendees heard about Avery’s work on the evidence for DNA in heredity, and from Luria and Delbrück and Edward Tatum—all future Nobel laureates—on mutations in bacteria. Joshua Lederberg, a twenty-one-year-old graduate student, reported the stunning discovery that bacteria actually mated and exchanged genes—another Nobel-winning breakthrough that would allow Monod and others to map genes and mutations.

  Monod found the many important talks and the new results extraordinary. But at the same time, he had to fend off feelings of discouragement. Research in the United States was progressing so quickly that he confessed to Odette “the difficulty in being current and working usefully in the half-asleep French laboratories.” That sense of disadvantage was compounded when he visited labs at Rockefeller University and Yale and saw how much better equipped they were than French labs, having all of the latest gadgets.

  There were several very promising developments in the course of Monod’s two-month-long visit to the United States. He met with officers of the Rockefeller Foundation who pledged to help French science get restarted with generous grants for equipment. He made many new scientific friends, even among potential competitors, who began to correspond with him, to plan visits to Paris, and to mention the Pasteur Institute to their students as
a place to work after their PhDs. And Monod saw that enzymatic adaptation was also starting to get more attention.

  Monod was asked to review the field in 1947. As would become his habit, he undertook a comprehensive analysis of all available information and ideas, and developed a persuasive case for the general importance of the phenomenon. Monod drew the connection between the specific puzzle of enzyme adaptation in microbes and the wider, fundamental mystery of cell differentiation in more complex creatures. The latter concerned the unsolved problem, as Monod put it, “of understanding how cells with identical genomes [genetic information] may be differentiated.” It was believed from various studies that different cells in the body contained the same chromosomes and the same genes. The differences between the properties of blood cells, brain cells, kidney cells, or other cell types were in the molecules that each cell type produced. Therefore, Monod suggested, understanding how the genes of a microbe caused the production of a certain enzyme under specific conditions and not others “may help in understanding the processes of gene action and cellular differentiation.” In the course of writing his review, Monod came to recognize more clearly the potential importance of his own work. He later recalled, “Its significance appeared so profound that there could no longer be any question of my not pursuing it.”

  Others were also convinced of its importance, and Monod’s team at the Pasteur started to grow, although there was not much physical space for anyone. Monod’s office was so small it barely had room for a desk, a bench, and a table, around which his small group usually had lunch. Food was still rationed in France, and everyone cooked or warmed their own small meal. It was not the cuisine that drew everyone together; it was the lively conversation and sense of camaraderie that Monod engendered that made attendance at the midday ritual almost obligatory. In addition to scientific ideas, fodder for conversation included music, art, religion, de Gaulle, America, the atomic bomb, new books such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and the latest editorials in Combat.