The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education

The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education

From heading a campus of the largest public university in the nation to participating in the birth of molecular biology, Robert L. Sinsheimer's experiences have given him a unique vantage point from which to view the paths that science and education have taken in the twentieth century. This book tells the story of his life, of his own growth, and of his leading role in both science and higher learning during the past fifty years. Robert L. Sinsheimer's experiences have given him a unique vantage point from which to view the paths that science and education have taken in the twentieth century. He has witnessed and participated in the birth of molecular biology, taught at leading universities, and headed a campus of the largest public university in the nation. This book tells the story of his life, of his own growth, and of his leading role in both science and higher learning during the past fifty years. While a student and then a researcher at MIT, and as a professor at Iowa State University and later at Caltech, Sinsheimer was a major participant in the "molecular revolution" that radically transformed the science of life. He was also one of the first to foresee the potential of molecular biology and to draw attention to some of the ethical quandaries the new science would pose. In 1977 Sinsheimer became chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, at a crucial time in the campus's evolution. He played a key part in revitalizing the educational experiment that has made the campus unique among the state's institutions of higher learning. Sinsheimer's life has been lived at the ever-advancing edge of knowledge. In simple, elegant language, he offers historical and philosophical insights into the world of science and the mind of a scientist. His reflections are both fascinating and valuable. Robert L. Sinsheimer is Chancellor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Strands of a Life: The Science of DNA and the Art of Education By Robert L. Sinsheimer University of California Press Copyright © 1994 Robert L. Sinsheimer All right reserved. ISBN: 0520082486 1— Boyhood and Youth— The Molding "The past is a foreign land." A child accepts his world as given. Only much later can he look back and see how the twig was bent. My mind is a time capsule. A memory is stirred, a scene appears with color, sound, and feel as it was fifty years ago, a half century ago. The others in the scene are dead now, some long since departed. Only my images, my impressions remain—for a time. I am looking at a small, aging photograph of a boy, about five years old, with a thick mop of hair, dressed in overalls and sandals, walking along a dusty gravel road. He is looking down at the road—pensively? With him is a smaller boy, probably three years old, with short curly hair, also dressed in overalls and sandals, walking along head up, eyes forward. The older boy is—was—me. I don't recall the taking of the photograph, but I know the setting. Summertime on Washington Island off the Door Peninsula of northern Wisconsin, on a gravel road from the farmhouse to the grocery. Washington Island had no electricity then, no telephones or indoor plumbing. Water came from a pump, ice from the icehouse where it was stored up during the winter and insulated with sawdust. It was one of the few remaining sites of nineteenth-century life, lived according to the rhythms of the sun. I try, to put myself inside the head of that boy, to peel back the layers of years of experiences since accumulated. Of course I can't; the successive years are not simply layered on. They are infiltrated, intertwined, and interwoven oven into the very nature of one's being. In some deep sense that boy is stall here, but I can't "access" him. I vaguely perceive that the world was fresher then, more immediate—the tastes cleaner, the smells more direct, the sights sharper, the sounds more distinct. Life was still a succession of days of sun or rain or snow, of meals and naps, of games with other children and directives from parents. Compared to the life of today, the life of my childhood seems singularly insulated from outside influence. There was school of course and playmates, but the home was the primary influence and was little perturbed or violated by the outside world. No TV screens brought distant scenes to our living room. Radio, in its infancy, brought little of interest. Even the telephone, which required a coin for each call, was used sparingly, and long-distance calls were reserved for calamity. The newspapers and magazines—more decorous in that day—brought in the world, but distilled through the flatness of print and the linear, rational process of reading. We were all less subject to the seductive commercial values of the media and their induced "peer pressures" but all the more captive of the idiosyncra