Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (4 page)

In the absence of anyone or any animal, it is easy to see that no rainbow is present. Or, if you prefer, there are countless trillions of
potential
bows, each one blurrily offset from the next by the minutest margin. None of this is speculative or philosophical. It’s the basic science that would be encountered in any grade-school Earth Science class.

Few would dispute the subjective nature of rainbows, which figure so prominently in fairytales that they seem only marginally to belong to our world in the first place. It is when we fully grasp that the sight of a skyscraper is just as dependent on the observer that we have made the first required leap to the true nature of things.

This leads us to the first principle of biocentrism:

L
ong before medical school, long before my research into the life of cells and cloning human embryos, I was fascinated by the complex and elusive wonder of the natural world. Some of these early experiences led to the development of my biocentric viewpoint: from my boyhood exploring nature and my adventures with a tiny primate I ordered for $18.95 from an ad at the back of
Field and Stream
magazine to my genetic experiments with chickens as a young teenager, which resulted in me being taken under the wing of Stephen Kuffler, a renowned neurobiologist at Harvard.

My road to Kuffler began, appropriately enough, with science fairs, which for me were an antidote against those who looked down on me because of my family’s circumstances. Once, after my sister was suspended from school, the principal told my mother she was not fit to be a parent. By trying earnestly, I thought I could improve my situation. I had a vision of accepting an award someday in front of all those teachers and classmates who laughed when I said I was going to enter the science fair. I applied myself to a new project,
an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens and make them black. My biology teacher told me it was impossible, and my parents thought I was just trying to hatch chicken eggs and refused to drive me to the farm to get them.

I persuaded myself to make a journey by bus and trolley car from my house in Stoughton to Harvard Medical School, one of the world’s most prestigious institutions of medical science. I mounted the stairs that led up to the front doors; the huge granite slabs were worn by past generations. Once inside, I hoped the men of science would receive me kindly and aid in my efforts. This was science, wasn’t it, and shouldn’t that have been enough? As it turned out, I never got past the guard.

I felt like Dorothy at Emerald City when the palace guard said, “Go away!” I found some breathing space at the back of the building to figure out my next move. The doors were all locked. I stood by the dumpster for perhaps half an hour. Then I saw a man approaching me, no taller than I was, clad in a T-shirt and khaki work pants—the janitor, I supposed, coming in the back door and all. Thinking that, I realized for the first time how I was going to get inside.

In another moment, we were standing face to face inside. “He doesn’t know or care that I’m here,” I thought. “He just cleans the floors.”

“Can I help you?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I have to ask a Harvard professor a question.”

“Are you looking for any professor in particular?”

“Well, actually, no—it’s about DNA and nucleoprotein. I’m trying to induce melanin synthesis in albino chickens,” I said. My words met with a stare of surprise. Seeing the impact they were having, I went on, though I was certain he didn’t know what DNA was. “You see, albinism is an autosomal recessive disease . . .”

As we got to talking, I told him how I worked in the school cafeteria myself, and how I was good friends with Mr. Chapman, the janitor who lived up the street. He asked me if my father was a
doctor. I laughed. “No, he’s a professional gambler. He plays poker.” It was at that moment, I think, we became friends. After all, we were both, I assumed, from the same underprivileged class.

Of course, what I didn’t know was that he was Dr. Stephen Kuffler, the world-famous neurobiologist who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Had he told me so, I would have rushed off. At the time, however, I felt like a schoolmaster lecturing to a pupil. I told him about the experiment I had performed in my basement—how I altered the genetic makeup of a white chicken to make it black.

“Your parents must be proud of you,” he said.

“They don’t know what I do,” I said. “I stay out of their way. They just think I’m trying to hatch chicken eggs.”

“They didn’t drive you here?”

“No, they’d kill me if they knew where I was. They think I’m playing out in my treehouse.”

He insisted upon introducing me to a “Harvard doctor.” I hesitated. After all, he was just the janitor, and I didn’t want him to get into trouble.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a little grin.

He took me into a room crammed with sophisticated equipment. A “doctor” looking through an instrument with strange, manipulative probes was about to insert an electrode into the nerve cell of a caterpillar (although I didn’t know it at the time, the “doctor” was actually a graduate student, Josh Sanes, who is now a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University). Beside him, a small centrifuge loaded with samples was going round and round. My friend whispered something over the doctor’s shoulder. The whining sound of the motor drowned out what he said. The doctor smiled at me with a curious gentle glance.

“I’ll stop back later,” my newfound friend said.

From that moment on, everything was a dream come true. The doctor and I talked all afternoon. And then I looked at the clock. “Oh, no!” I said. “It’s late. I must go!”

I hurried home and went straight to my treehouse. That evening, the call of my mother penetrated the woods, sounding like the whistle of a locomotive: “Rob—by! Time for dinner!”

No one had any idea that evening—including me—that I had met one of the greatest scientists in the world. In the 1950s, Kuffler had perfected an idea that combined several medical disciplines, fusing elements of physiology, biochemistry, histology, anatomy, and electron microscopy into a single group. His new name for the field: “Neurobiology.”

Harvard’s Department of Neurobiology was created in 1966 with Kuffler as its chairman. As a medical student, I eventually ended up using his
From Neurons to Brain
as a textbook.

I could not have predicted it, but in the months ahead Dr. Kuffler would help me enter the world of science. I returned many times, chatting with the scientists in his lab as they probed the neurons of caterpillars. In fact, I recently came across a letter Josh Sanes sent to the Jackson Laboratories at the time: “If you check your records, you will find that Bob ordered four mice from the laboratories a few months ago. That bankrupted him for a month. At present, he is faced with a choice between going to his prom or buying a few dozen more eggs.” Although I ultimately decided to go to the prom, I became so intrigued by the importance of the “sensorymotor system”—of consciousness and animal sense perception—that I went back to Harvard to work with the famed psychologist B.F. Skinner several years later.

Oh, and by the way, I won the science fair with my chicken project. And the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the whole school.

Like Emerson and Thoreau—two of the greatest American Transcendentalists—my youth was spent exploring the forested woods of Massachusetts, which teemed with life. More important, I found that for each life, there was a universe, its
own
universe. Witnessing my fellow creatures, I began to see that each appeared to generate a sphere of existence, and realized that our perceptions may be unique but perhaps not special.

One of my earliest memories of boyhood was venturing beyond the mown boundary of our backyard into the wild, overgrown region bordering the woods. Today, the world’s population is twice what it was then, but even now many kids undoubtedly still know where the known world ends and the wild, slightly spooky and dangerous, untamed universe begins. One day, after crossing that boundary from the orderly to the feral, and after working my way through the thickets, I came to an old, gnarled apple tree smothered in vines. I squeezed my way into the hidden clearing underneath it. It seemed wonderful, on the one hand, that I had discovered a place that no other human being knew existed; on the other hand, I was confused about how such a place could exist if I hadn’t discovered it. I was raised as a Catholic, so I thought I had found a special place on God’s stage—and from some celestial vantage point, I was being scrutinized and watched by the Supreme Creator, perhaps almost as narrowly as I, as a medical student with a microscope, would one day scrutinize the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

At that moment long ago, other questions came to disturb my wonder, though I did not yet appreciate that those musings were at least as ancient as my species itself. If, indeed, God had made the world, then who made God? This question kept tormenting me long before I would see micrographs of DNA or the tracks of matter and antimatter created in a bubble chamber by the collision of high-energy particles. I felt on both an instinctive and intellectual level that it did not make sense for this place to exist if no one observed it.

My home life, as I’ve already implied, was less than the Norman Rockwell ideal. My father was a professional gambler who played cards for a living, and none of my three sisters finished high school. The efforts that my older sister and I made to escape beatings at home steeled me to expect a life of confrontation. Because my parents didn’t allow me to hang around the house unless to eat or sleep, I was basically on my own. For play, I took excursions deep into the surrounding forests, following streams and animal tracks. No
swamp or creek bed was too muddy or dangerous. I was sure no one had ever seen or been to those places, and I imagined that so far as almost everyone was concerned, they didn’t exist. But, of course, they did exist. They teemed with as much life as any large city, with snakes, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, and birds.

My understanding of nature began on those journeys. I rolled logs looking for salamanders and climbed trees to investigate bird nests and holes in trees. As I pondered the larger existential questions about the nature of life, I began to intuit that there was something wrong with the static, objective reality I was being taught in school. The animals I observed had their own perceptions of the world, their own realities. Although it wasn’t the world of human beings—of parking lots and malls—it was just as real to them. What, then, was really going on in this universe?

Once I found an old tree with knots and dead limbs. There was a giant hole in its trunk, and I couldn’t resist becoming another Jack to this beanstalk. Quietly taking my socks off and slipping them onto my hands, I reached inside the hole to investigate. A great beating of flying feathers startled me as I felt claws and a beak sink into my fingers. As I withdrew my hand, a small screech owl with tufted ears stared back at me. Here was another creature, living in its own world and yet a realm it somehow shared with me. I let the little fellow go, but I went home a slightly changed young boy. My world of home and neighborhood became but one part of a universe inhabited by consciousness—the same and yet seemingly different from mine.

I was around nine when the inexplicable and elusive quality of life truly gripped me. It had become increasingly clear that there was something fundamentally unexplainable about life, a force that I felt, though I didn’t yet understand. It was on this day that I set out to trap a woodchuck that had its burrow next to Barbara’s house. Her husband Eugene—Mr. O’Donnell—was one of the last blacksmiths in New England, and as I arrived, I noticed that the chimney cap over his shop was rotating round and round, squeak, squeak, rattle, rattle. Then the blacksmith suddenly emerged with his shotgun in
hand and, scarcely giving me a glance, blew it off. The chimney cap’s noise came to a sudden stop. No, I told myself, I didn’t want to be caught by him.

The hole of the woodchuck was not easy to reach, lying in such close proximity to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, I remember, that I could hear the bellows that fanned the coals in his forge. I crawled noiselessly through the long grass, occasionally stirring a grasshopper or a butterfly. I dug a hole under a clump of grass and set a new steel trap that I had just purchased at the hardware store. Then I placed dirt from the hole in front and concealed the trap under soil at the edge of the hole, making certain that there were no stones or roots to obstruct the functioning of the metal device. Lastly, I took a stake and, rock in hand, pounded it again and again, driving it into the ground. This was my mistake. I was still so engaged, I didn’t notice anyone approaching, so I was thoroughly startled to hear:

“What are you doing?”

I looked up to see Mr. O’Donnell standing there, his eyes carefully inspecting the ground, slowly and inquiringly, until he spotted the trap. I said nothing, trying to restrain myself from crying.

“Give me that trap, child,” said Mr. O’Donnell, “and come with me.”

I was much too afraid of him to refuse compliance. I did as I was told, and followed him into the shop, a strange new world crammed with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds hanging from the ceiling. Against the wall was his forge, opening into the center of the room. Starting the bellows, Mr. O’Donnell tossed the trap over the coals and a tiny fire appeared underneath, getting hotter and hotter, until, with a sudden puff, it burst into flame.

“This thing can injure dogs and even children!” said Mr. O’Donnell, poking the coals with a toasting fork. When the trap was red hot, he took it from the forge, and pounded it into a little square with his hammer.