Exuberance: The Passion for Life (28 page)

Like James Watson, Bob Gallo is simultaneously intuitive and analytical, fiercely competitive, often controversial, and at heart a romantic. Both were influenced when young by the idealistic but driven scientists portrayed in
Arrowsmith
and Paul de Kruif’s
Microbe Hunters
. (Gallo says that when he was young, “
I saw science as another kind of religion, certainly one that would yield more predictable results if one served it faithfully.”
Arrowsmith
and
Microbe Hunters
encouraged this view. Watson says,
“I read the
books at the same time. I got very excited. They made you want to be a scientist.”) Both men love gossip, science, and competition. Both are mercurial and can be intemperate and abrasive; both are exceptionally kind and generous to their friends, impatient, and slow to muzzle their impulses. They are, above all, passionately engaged in science; exuberance is elemental to this and to their interactions with other scientists. They are keen to engage in vehement debate and criticism, and feel strongly that the best way to learn is by arguing with someone who will point out the flaws in an experiment, or the Achilles’ heel in an idea.

Watson believes that he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA before their competitors at least in part because no one at Caltech would confront Linus Pauling about his basic error in chemistry and because Rosalind Franklin was isolated from colleagues who might otherwise have given her a different perspective on her crystallography studies. A good scientist, says Crick, “
values criticism almost higher than friendship.” This is a belief that requires a thick hide and a resilient nature, both of which are aided by an exuberant temperament. Exuberance makes the reaching out to other scientists more likely and makes the rebound from criticism into enthusiasm a near certainty.

The only person I know, scientist or otherwise, who is usually referred to by his peers as a true genius is Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist who received the Nobel Prize for his research on the “slow viruses” (or, as most now believe, prions) responsible for degenerative diseases of the brain. Gajdusek seems always to have loved science and to have been unrestrainedly exuberant. His father, an immigrant butcher in Yonkers, New York, exerted a powerful emotional influence—he had, writes Gajdusek, a “
temperament for laughter and ribald fun, lust for life in work and play,
music, song, dance and food, and above all, conversation”—and his mother’s love of folklore and literature fostered a lifelong passion for studying other cultures and the arts. Before he and his brother had learned to read, they were listening to Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Plutarch, and Virgil. As a child he read Scandinavian literature as well as the biographies of scientists such as Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur. Like Watson and Gallo, Gajdusek was influenced by Paul de Kruif’s
Microbe Hunters
, although his enthusiasm for the book took him further: he stenciled the names of de Kruif’s microbiologists—Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani, Pasteur, Koch, Reed, Ehrlich—on the steps leading up to his attic chemistry lab, where they have remained for more than fifty years.

Like many scientists, Gajdusek knew from the time he was young that he wanted to study nature. “
As a boy of five,” he said, “I wandered through gardens, fields and woods with my mother’s entomologist-sister, Tante Irene, as we overturned rocks and sought to find how many different plant and animal species of previously hidden life lay before us. We cut open galls to find insects responsible for the tumors.… In petri dishes we watched some leaf-eating insects succumb to insecticide poison while others survived.” It was his aunt who introduced him to the pleasures of studying the natural world. She was, he says, the dominant influence on his “
intellectual curiosity and playful enthusiasm.… She made my child’s curiosity into a game of investigation and enquiry, and had me doing experiments just after I was a toddler, not just collecting and classifying insects. With passionate zeal she showed me the beauty in complex life cycles of insects in decaying flesh and vegetation, and even in the murders accomplished by ichneumon flies by implanting their eggs into their victims, and in the cannibalism of the praying mantis after mating … it was she herself who instilled into me the quest for beauty in nature and taught me to live creatively.”

Gajdusek received his medical degree from Harvard in 1946 and set forth on a lifetime of diverse interests and remarkable work. He studied the cultures of the Hopi, Navajo, and Mexican Indians; researched scurvy, bubonic plague, and rabies in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey; organized expeditions to the valleys of the Himalaya; and treated diseases in the jungles of South America and the swamps and highlands of Papua New Guinea and Malaysia. Along the way he learned German, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovak, several of the more than seven hundred languages of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea, and Persian, Bahasa Indonesian, and Dutch. In 1954 he went to Australia to do basic and clinical research in immunology and virology in Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations.

Gajdusek was impatient and restless: “
Everything he possessed spoke of his being peripatetic,” said one colleague. “Even standing still, he seemed to be on the move, with top tilted forward, in the breathless posture of someone who never had time enough to get where he had to be.” It was while living among the Fore, a Stone Age people of New Guinea, that he and another scientist, Vincent Zigas, discovered kuru, a progressive degenerative brain disease characterized by shivering, pathological laughter, loss of coordination, and, invariably, death.

Kuru had killed thirty thousand people, mostly women and children, in the cannibal population living in the highlands of the central ranges of eastern New Guinea. The pattern of deaths was familial but not genetic, and it took Gajdusek and his colleagues more than five years of tracking down possible causes and studying autopsied brains (which they showed to be “spongiform,” or full of holes) to establish that the infectious agent was a previously unknown “slow virus” (later thought to be a prion). Kuru, they demonstrated, was transmitted, often to infants and children, through the ritual eating of the brains of dead relatives. Gajdusek
concluded that its transmission took place not just through the eating of the infected brains, but also through the ritual butchery of the dead body. This was carried out by women, who used sharp bamboo instruments while holding their infants on their laps or feeding them. The steaming of body organs was not sufficient to kill the infectious agent and, because the dead were eaten only by close family members, the transmission of the disease followed a familial pattern. Women and children, who ate the brains of the deceased, were far more likely than the men to die of kuru.

Gajdusek’s research, which demonstrated beyond doubt the link between the Fore mortuary rituals and kuru, effectively eliminated both the cannibalism practices and kuru. It also led to entirely new ways of understanding the origins and dissemination of infectious diseases. He and his colleagues found that other deadly brain diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”), were caused by similar agents. His research, according to the Nobel Committee, represented an “
extraordinarily fundamental advance in human neurology and in mammalian biology and microbiology.”

Gajdusek has been described by one of his colleagues as unique in medicine, a man “
who combines the intelligence of a near genius with the adventurous spirit of a privateer.” This description is as apt for him at the age of eighty as it was when he was a young scientist. Gajdusek retains a level of enthusiasm and adventurousness exhausting to anyone around him. He is legendary for his rapid, nonstop, and expansive monologues. My husband and I once jotted down as many topics as we could remember from a dinner conversation we had had with him. A very partial list included immunology, love, the French, the Americans, the Dutch, suicide, Puritanism and sex, schizophrenia, rat poison, molecular biology, tuberculosis, the FBI, the idiocy of American politics, Melville, Russian explorers, Plato, anthropology, mad cow disease, New
Guinea boys, courage, moods, navigation, linguistics, and meadow mice. Listening to Carleton and remaining indifferent is like staying calm while taking cocaine and listening to Fats Waller. It can’t be done. George Klein, a friend and colleague of Gajdusek from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, recounts that when Carleton received the Nobel Prize he “
exceeded the sacred forty-five-minute limit of the Nobel lecture without the slightest embarrassment, speaking as he did for two hours and ruining the whole afternoon’s schedule. Strangely enough, no worried organizer tried to intervene.… Whatever had enticed you to attend the lecture, you had no reason to regret coming.” People sat in the aisles, mesmerized.

When I asked Gajdusek for his thoughts about exuberance, he replied that, in his view, it was a concept “closely related to manic-depressive psychosis,” and that the word had been attached to him often, once defined as “outrageous ardor.” Exuberance, he said, is “seductive and closely linked to maturation or the stimulation of motivation. It may engender devotion and love. Like everything associated with seduction, it may be viewed as manipulative and coercive by those fearful of being the subject of desire.” Society, he feels, is ambivalent about exuberance and often inhibits its expression. “Enthusiasm, ardor, exuberance are ways of expressing desire, of using it. We should be proud of our ability to do so—our society would make us ashamed.”

To be exuberant, maintains Gajdusek, “is to be considered
pas sérieux
—light-headed and flighty!” As a result, exuberance “demands a reverse to be respected and admired—namely withdrawal and contemplation, silent thought. Thus, it is akin to cyclothymia in its necessary swings and reversal.… To have force, affect, meaning, requires depth, and that requires subdued colors and sounds and cyclothymia. Manic depression would be the model.… Not to show [exuberance] suggests ennui but to have too much is madness!” Surely, he said, exuberance is “linked to life and youth! Those who lack it inhibit its expression.”

Exuberance, Gajdusek emphasizes, is infectious: “
I often radiate it and from radiators, such as me, it is contagious, communicable.… I have recognized that when in my scientific career I have managed to ignite an intense interest and enthusiastic striving for a goal in myself and my coworkers, our team was living ‘high,’ almost hypomanically, obsessed with our problem and our activity. The feeling was almost like that of piloerection of the scalp with awe or wonder, the thrill of quest.” (This is confirmed by the Australian virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, who has said that “
Gajdusek is quite manically energetic when his enthusiasm is roused.”)

Exuberance, for Gajdusek, is associated with fun, play, and creativity. “Creative persons,” he told me, “are usually exuberant and never bored. Ennui and noncreativity and plodding exactitude go hand in hand with nonexuberance and fear of originality and change and the untried.” Elsewhere, he remarked to a group of scientists who were studying creativity, “
I play with ideas.… I’m rather confused by having a subject of ‘creativity,’ and then launching off into a discussion of what, in my opinion, is a very late stage of creative research, after a great deal of creativity is finished—namely, the testing, be it confirmatory or disconfirmatory, of a specific hypothesis. There was little mention of fun and play; these are the maxims on the wall for my forty years in the laboratory; that’s all we’ve ever done, to have fun and play, and all we ever will do.” A few years ago, when he was approaching eighty, Gajdusek wrote to my husband in the same spirit: “
I look on my current joyful years packed with play and fun and joy and adventure as bonus years little expected.” To me he added, “I can never ‘finish’! It is fun. I amaze myself.”

Samuel Barondes, a molecular biologist and psychiatrist at the University of California—San Francisco, speculates, like Gajdusek and Watson, that some types of exuberant states overlap with mild forms of mania. “To me,” he says, “there are two kinds of happiness: a euphoric type of serenity that I became well acquainted with through formal meditation, and which I can now call up at will; and
a euphoric type of excitement and anticipation which is what I think of as exuberance. I’m not sure where to draw the line between exuberance and hypomania, but I think the most important difference is in the area of judgment and self-observation. As I think of it, exuberance is still monitored by judgment. In a state of exuberance, judgment is put on hold—but is not turned off completely. In hypomania judgment is napping, but still wakes up periodically to check things out. In mania, judgment is out like a light.”

Barondes, who studies the genetics of behavior and psychopathology, believes that exuberance is determined by the environment as well as heredity. “My father was quite exuberant,” he says, “and I think I learned some of this from him (and inherited some via his DNA). My father explicitly recommended exuberance as well as serenity. We talked a lot about these matters. Having been raised as an Orthodox Jew of the scholarly and self-questioning type (rather than the more exuberant Hassidic type) has tempered my exuberance very little. I think you can teach people to be a little bit more or less exuberant. But it remains difficult to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” (Most of those I interviewed expressed similar views, namely, that it may be possible to influence the level of exuberance expressed, but not the underlying capacity for it. The child psychologist Ellen Winner, for example, believes that exuberance is inborn. “I think that the environment can kill it,” she says, “but I don’t think the environment can create it.”)

Barondes, like many, believes that exuberance entices scientists toward discovery and helps overcome obstacles. It is, he says, the engine that drives discoveries. “When you feel exuberant”—he characterizes exuberance as “enthusiasm, energy, motivation, optimism, anticipation of wonderful things, and a great deal of pleasure”—“you believe you have a good chance of doing something new and important and exciting. You downplay obstacles and personal limitations, anticipate the joy of doing something special and
worthwhile. Exuberance increases risk taking, innovative thinking, and the anticipation of success.”