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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. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software