I wish I liked
this book much more.  In theory, Jon Beckwith’s account of his life as a
molecular biologist and as a social activist, really ought to push every button
for me, articulating as it does a lot of the tensions that troubled my own career
in molecular biology.  There are substantial differences between the two of us of
course, not least of which is that Beckwith is by several orders of magnitude the
better scientist.  And in his case, the context of his activism was the social
and political ferment of America in the 1960s, a long way from the sleazy depression of Britain under Thatcher. 

Beckwith’s book begins
with an account of his meeting, after a gap of 35 years, with a fellow
postgraduate student whose life had taken a very different course. (He decided
science and activism were incompatible, and ended up a quail farmer in Normandy .) The rest of the story effectively
offers an explanation for why their paths diverged, and is naturally a
justification for Beckwith’s own road.  The chapter ‘Becoming a scientist’
charts the young Jon’s early days as a less than totally committed Harvard
chemistry student, and his conversion to molecular biology and to the study of
gene control that would lead, some years later, to a finding of major
significance in the field.  The next chapter, ‘Becoming an Activist’, then describes
his life outside the lab, in what seems to be a very un-Harvard like parallel
universe of out gay poets, jazz players, and people who drank homemade
absinthe. (You see, chemistry can be useful after all.) 

Postdoctoral work
abroad exposed him to the liberal American expatriate scene in Paris , and there was more political
activity back home during the years of the civil rights movement and the
Vietnam War. One chapter describes the profound effect that reading about the US ‘s eugenic history had on him.
Afterwards he came to the conclusion that the problem lay not so much in the scientists
or even the science, but in the ideological stances that fueled its misuse: interestingly,
at this point he doesn’t consider science’s influence on the development of
those same social phenomena. Like the Central Dogma of molecular biology, in
which DNA makes RNA makes protein, the flow of information is only one-way.

His growing
political consciousness meant that when it came to concocting the press release
about his team’s big discovery, it was exploited "as an opportunity to
heighten public awareness of the potential social consequences of genetics
research".  Throughout the book the professional consequences of his
activism are glided over — either that, or else he got off very lightly
indeed.   (The personal consequences of his professional and political choices get
even less of a mention.) When he received the prestigious Eli Lilly award from
the American Society of Microbiology, his decision to donate the $1000 to the Black
Panthers was received with "outrage and acclaim", but the "anonymous
threatening letters" were nevertheless "more than balanced by other
responses".  Beckwith spent years working for grassroots organisations,
notably Science for the People, tirelessly discussing and providing arguments to
counter the extremes of sociobiology and genetic determinism. Deservedly, he
has been rehabilitated as a good guy, one of the handful of biologists who continue
to be taken seriously in their profession while making much-needed nuisances of
themselves as political consciences (the chapter describing this is entitled, "I’m
Not Very Scary Anymore").

Beckwith says he "wrote
this book to make the claim that a scientist can pursue a productive scientific
career and still be a social activist within science", and this is exactly
what he does. This may be why, in the end, it’s naggingly unsatisfying.  It’s a
report of how to do it, or at least how one man did it, but what would
be equally (or more) interesting would be to know why he bothered in the first
place, and that Beckwith is unable or unwilling to tell us. He says that, "over
the years, accumulating experiences had changed my political sensitivities,"
but lots of people’s politics are changed by experience without them feeling the
urge to take up social transformation as a major life goal.  He is demonstrably
committed to his science and his activism, but where does this commitment come
from? Hanging out with proto-hippies at Harvard, Beckwith says he "saw
values in these subcultures that I felt much closer to than those of the
mainstream", but the attraction of a comfortably middle-class boy to the
marginalised remains obscure. The writing is always eminently reasonable, and
so there’s no trace of the passion about injustice that one feels
(perhaps wrongly) must be there. Perhaps this is just a reflection of the
limits of Beckwith’s literary ability, but it’s also notable that he devotes less
than two paragraphs to his childhood: his involvement in science begins  "In
high school…", as if in the making of a scientist or a social activist, nothing
that came before then mattered.

The book is a good
read, it’s interesting, and it tells you quite a lot about what is now
considered the early modern period of molecular biology.  It’s just a shame that
in the end the overall impression is of a nonscientist’s caricature of how a
scientist would write about their most passionately held beliefs.

© 2003 Jackie Scully

Jackie Scully works at the Unit
for Ethics in the Biosciences, Institute for the History and Epistemology of
Medicine, University of Basel, Switzerland.  She is author of Quaker
Approaches to Moral Issues in Genetics (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).

Categories: Genetics, Ethics