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

Sinsheimer, Robert L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520082486 ISBN 13: 9780520082489

Verlag: University of California Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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 idiosyncratic, sometimes skewed views of our elders. Thus, parents and, later, teachers by precept and example, through word and action and selected reading provided me with a framework in which to order the myriad events of the vast, confusing outer world—a lens selective of importance, a gate sensitive to values. Indeed, the Midwest in which I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s was still very insular. Europe was a week away, Asia two weeks. International commerce was negligible. Issues of global overpopulation, environmental pollution, and international economic management were unimaginable.

When one is young, at least in America, the world is young. The past, all of history, is telescoped. The constraints the past imposes, the hard-won wisdom it contains, the debt we owe our forebears all seem of little moment. Only later, when our lives have been merged into the stream of human existence, do we better recognize the finite scope of our place in human time. I see now that in my earliest years, the 1920s, I was raised in the America of exuberance. The United States was the greatest, the most advanced nation in the world. We had the most advanced technology, the most advanced political system, and newer was always better. Freed of the palsied hand of Europe with its ancient feuds and antiquated governments and frozen social classes, our democracy had liberated the creativity of the people. Our citizens had civilized a continent and created a great industrial society. Secure between two

oceans, with no perceived rivals, our destiny was in our hands, and it gleamed. So we thought. Recognition of the side effects of ever more powerful technology or of the social traumas accompanying unlimited free enterprise was yet in the future.

In contrast, my second decade, the 1930s, was gray and grim, a time bleak and foreboding. The Great Depression was psychologically a free fall from the earlier near-euphoria, and the growing menace of Hitler and the war in Europe deepened the gloom.

My forebears on both sides were Germanic and Jewish and thereby melded elements of Teutonic authority and Jewish moral rigidity. My father, Allen, born in 1888 in Chicago, was the elder of two sons. My mother, Rose Davidson, born in 1891 in New York, was the eldest of five children, with two sisters and two brothers. Both of my grandfathers emigrated from Germany to the United States as children with their families, in the 1860s. Their families came for the usual reasons—to escape poverty and prejudice, to seek a better future. Both boys had a limited education; one was for most of his life a salesman in shoe stores, the other a pharmacist who operated a small drugstore. They raised their families in Chicago and New York respectively at only a little above the poverty level, and the education of their children was truncated by economic necessity.

After eight years of grammar school and one year of manual arts high school, my father had to earn a living. After a succession of odd jobs, he discovered a talent for writing. He became a writer for, and ultimately editor of, trade journals. Before and during World War I, he was a feature writer for Automotive Age, a magazine for automobile enthusiasts. During that war, the army's use of motorized vehicles was his principal story, so he was sent to Washington, D.C. There I was born in 1920; soon thereafter however, he returned with his family to Chicago, where I grew up. During most of my childhood, he was editor of a trade journal for retail clothing stores.

Despite his limited education, my father was widely read, a self-taught man. Unguided, some of his reading was enlightening and some quite misleading. He was resolved, however, that his children should at least have the opportunity for more advanced education. He sought to encourage intellectual interests by taking us as children on weekends to the Field Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium. The Field Museum was endlessly fascinating. I particularly remember the huge reconstructed mastodon and the intriguing, yet eerie, ancient Egyptian mummies.

After three years of high school, including a final year of secretarial training, my mother was similarly obliged to go to work. However, she intensely disliked office work. She was a very pretty woman and met my father on one of his trips to New York. They were married in 1913 (he was twenty-four, she twenty-one). My older brother, Allen, Jr., was born a year later....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520082486
• ISBN 13: 9780520082489
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 318
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar