atta boy, Greg!  Thank you for everything you and AJ are doing and sharing with us.

Charlotte Mancuso



----- Original Message -----
From: "Greg Wasson"
To:

Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 12:40 AM
Subject: Death Threats and Dendrites-Random Thoughts from the Future
Eggheads of America Symposium


> Death Threats and Dendrites-Random Thoughts from the Future Eggheads of
America Symposium
>
> I was sitting waiting for the cattle call at the Southwest Airlines gate
at John Wayne airport in Orange County, one of the richest counties in
California and the only one to ever go bankrupt. I was reading the papers
and saw that Gov. Gray Davis, as bland as his name but no crook, had just
been qualified by the state to be subjected to a recall vote. Seems the
Republicans really want to have a shot at taking California for Bush in
2004. Interesting.
> AJ and I were leaving on separate planes from the Beckman Foundation
Scholars Symposium and heading back to Cotati by way of Oakland. I was
mulling over the last couple of days in the Southland county of smog,
smugness, and airports named after celluloid heroes. We had just presented
the patient advocate perspective on stem cell and followed up with a panel
discussion in front 150 or so young chemists and biologists who had competed
all year to be invited to this seminar.
> These kids were frighteningly smart. Many of them had been selected for
the honor of putting up posterboard presentations in the halls describing
what they had been working on that had gotten them an invitation to fly to
California and hobnob with their fellow wizards. It was like being at
Hogwarts except the kids were a little older and I didn't see one of them
ride a broom. Had I seen one, though, I would not have been surprised. These
kids were focused and committed and driven and excited and happy to be where
they were. They were 20 and 21, many were already doing important work, and
the future was all before them.
> At first I felt remarkably intimidated, surprised at being such an
outsider. I looked at the poster presentations and studied one that appeared
vaguely comprehensible, for 20 minutes. I was thinking as hard as I could.
Eventually the creator of the project leaned over and said nicely "if there
are any questions you have that I can answer, please let me know." I looked
at her trying to appear knowledgeable and dignified, and then I became me
again and I started laughing and said "As soon as I get to something I
understand I'll ask every question I can think of." She laughed courteously
and then turned to someone had made the IQ cut when God was passing out
brains.
> AJ and I can be remarkably symptomatic at the oddest times. As we walked
down to an outdoor patio where all the undergrads and their mentors were
busily devouring Chinese and Mexican dishes, we became aware that we were
being closely regarded by the undergrads and their mentors alike. Other than
a lady from the San Diego zoo, whose role in this whole extravaganza I never
discerned, we were the only two people there who were not academics, and the
only ones with an obvious medical abnormality. These kids were toned,
apparently healthy, and for scientists, cool.
> We sat down at a table with a dozen or so mentors and scholars. They were
all busily engaged in conversation which might have been in another language
for all I could understand of it. But we decided to simply plunge in,
introduce ourselves, and hopefully start the ball rolling. To a person they
were quite friendly. After some chitchat we became fairly comfortable, and
started asking the $64 question: are you aware of the fact that there are
bills in Congress that would imprison scientists doing certain kinds of work
for 10 years and fine them no less than one million dollar dollars. The
answer was invariably no. And so we decided the night before we were to give
our presentation, to change it substantially in order to pound home the
simple enormous fact of the existence of such legislation.
> Although both of us were tired to the bone, I think we made the right
decision -- the decision to confront them with their own ignorance of
history, contemporary politics, and matters of social policy in which they
had direct stake and indeed might go to jail for failing to deal with it
properly.
> I don't usually begin a presentation by saying to a group of scientists "a
very important fact that you should know is that scientists are not held in
particularly high regard today." After murmuring as if they had received a
light but unexpected slap, I contrasted the 1950s and 1960s, in which I grew
up, with an earlier time in American history. When I was a kid, we all knew
who Jonas Salk was, baseball teams were named after astronauts instead of
corporate contributors, and Albert Einstein's grin under a shock white hair
was the image of the scientist to most folks.
> The 1920's, by contrast, saw part-time teacher John Scopes tried and found
guilty of violating the Dayton Tennessee criminal statute against teaching
evolution in the public school system. Clearly contemporary attitudes
towards science more closely resemble the "Monkey Trial" days of 1925 than
the 1960s when we all followed the space race and "Houston" entered the
English-language as a synonym for control center. Can you imagine a city
getting an expansion baseball club and naming it, for example, the Rochester
Genomes?
> We tended to think of scientific progress in my youth as just that:
progress. We trusted scientists to know more than we did. We don't anymore,
and a small but very influential minority believes that they are positively
a force for evil in the world. When did "humanism" become a synonym for the
social decay and loss of moral value? It would be wise of these young
scientists to pay attention to the world around them, because progress in
solving the scientific challenges of the world, as important as it is, does
not mean progress in achieving tolerance and balance in the social relations
among competing value systems in America.
> And so we ended our remarks with a quote from the late Abbie Hoffman, who
was merely repeating Thoreau with a bullhorn when he shouted at students at
NYU in 1969, "you'd better be ready to question authority, so damn ready
that your ready to defy authority."
> And with that I promptly crashed to the floor as my knee buckled in the
return of an old symptom that I had not experienced in at least five years.
I tried putting my weight on it three more times with the same result and
settled for sitting in the nearest chair on the dais for the panel
discussion which followed. It was perfect, though unexpected, timing.
> It was something that I heard at lunch with other members of the stem cell
panel, however, that truly nailed home from me the seriousness of the
so-called stem cell wars. An embryonic stem cell researcher at a major
university casually mentioned that she did not like to have her picture
appear in brochures anymore because she periodically received death threats
for the work that she was doing. She went on to say that two of the biggest
names in embryonic stem cell research had been forced to take affirmative
steps to avoid appearances and publicity generally because they received
dozens of death threats every month. I was dumbfounded.
> But I should not have been surprised, because the fever whipped up by
extremist anti-abortion organizations had no doubt contributed to the
killing of physicians working in Planned Parenthood clinics across the
country. The same organizations oppose ESC research with the same fury. No
doubt they do not condone such violence, but their words and
characterizations of those conducting such research makes them, at least in
my mind, accessories before the fact.
> It would behoove our budding crop of science stars to check their backs
once in a while and be certain that no one has painted a bull's-eye on their
shirts while they were concentrating on the finer points of the effect of
oxidation on protein folding and its link to Alzheimer's disease.
> God bless them everyone.
>
>
>
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