Creativity (37 page)

In the meantime, World War II was nearing its end, and the fate of the Jews in the formerly protected nations of Central Europe was getting increasingly precarious, as the local governments were caving in under Nazi pressure. Klein worked for the Jewish Council in Budapest, as a secretary to one of its members, and he heard ominous news whispered about atrocities committed in the territories where the German armies had been entrenched. But nobody wanted to accept the truth of these heinous tales, and especially not the comfortably bourgeois, assimilated Jews of Budapest.

The Hungarian government succeeded in protecting the Jews for as long as possible, but on March 19, 1944, German troops occupied the country and installed a fascist regime, which began to assist in the deportation of Jews from the countryside to the extermination camps. Shortly after, Klein read a manuscript circulated underground, which contained the account of Vrba and Wetzler, the first two Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz. The account was horrifying; in objective, nonemotional terms, it gave concrete details of the workings of the death factory. Yet Klein also felt a s
ense of intellectual satisfaction in learning a truth that was more credible than the disinformation and wishful thinking most of his peers preferred to cling to. The Jewish Council decided to keep the information secret to prevent panic and reprisal from the fascists; but the report reinforced Klein’s determination to escape as soon as he had a chance. The thrill of getting at truth, no matter how unpleasant, was to remain a hallmark of his intellectual life.

In October 1944 the Arrow Cross, as the Hungarian fascists were called, escalated their terror. Suspects were rounded up and herded on death marches, or killed outright. Klein was shipped to a labor camp the next month, but he escaped, and, having obtained false papers, he lived in hiding until the Soviet Army arrived on January 10, 1945. Liberated from the Nazi terror, he decided to start medical school as soon as possible. Because the University of Budapest was still in ruins from the war, he and some friends walked to the city of Szeged at the other end of the country, where the
university had remained relatively undamaged and courses were starting.

As soon as the University of Budapest reopened its doors, Klein was back in the capital to continue medical studies and started
research in histology and pathology. In 1947 two momentous events took place: He met Eva, a fellow student, and they fell in love. Almost immediately afterward he was invited to visit Sweden with a group of students. Given the desolate condition of the country still reeling from the war, such an opportunity would have been a dream come true except that now George regretted leaving the girl he was sure he wanted to marry, even for a short trip abroad.

The visit in Sweden turned out to be a turning point in Klein’s life. His research experience in Budapest, slight as it was, happened to fit the needs of Torbjörn Caspersson, the head of the Cell Research Department at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who offered him a job at the lab. He describes his feeling at that time:

Before taking up his position, Klein returned to Budapest for a few days, and at the end of the visit he and Eva were secretly married. In the meantime the Iron Curtain was descending between Hungary and the West, ushering in new decades of terror. Fortunately, after a few months Eva was able to follow George to Stockholm, where they both finished their medical studies, and where, after forty-seven years, they are still collaborating on research and pursuing their own independent work—as well as a full married life.

Being a witness to one of the most tragic periods of European history left Klein a “sunshine-colored pessimist.” An atheist with a positive outlook, he feels happy even though he is sure that life has no meaning at all. His goal is not to save humanity from disease, or to build a scientific empire, or to be successful. He has identified flow as the moving force of his life. The important thing is not to be bored and not to disappoint those close to him. “Whenever I am concentrating, I am happy,” he says. “I am horrified by the very concept of
‘taking it easy,’ of taking a vacation. I get panic-stricken when at a formal dinner I have to sit next to boring people.” But when working on a scientific problem, or involved in anything challenging, Klein feels “the happiness of a deer running through a meadow.”

The Synergy of Arrogance and Modesty

The early years in Sweden were not easy for Klein. He had to learn a new language, a new lifestyle, under severe competitive pressures. At first, it took only a cold greeting from a technician at the lab to ruin his entire day. He worked with senior scientists who were bored and alienated, and for a while it seemed that scientific research might be a trap that led to an alienated life. But after a few years he found supportive and inspiring mentors.

A visit to the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) near Philadelphia was especially memorable in this respect. The U.S. scientific environment was much more friendly and egalitarian than anything comparable in Europe. Despite his youth and inexperience he was treated almost as an equal by older researchers. The description of his boss at ICR is a good model for what a laboratory chief should be, a model that Klein has adopted as his own:

Having tasted the acceptance of the field, Klein lost his “immigrant complex” and started to take the intellectual risks that made his
career. In this he was helped by that unusual combination of opposite traits that we see repeatedly characterize creative people. As Klein’s friends say, he is a “combination of infinite modesty and a stubbornness bordering on arrogance.” Whether because he never had to defer to a father, or because he experienced the ineffectiveness of formal education, or because he saw the blindness of his elders during World War II, or for some still deeper reason, Klein has never been intimidated by established authorities.

One example of how Klein works concerns his early insight into the development of tumors from antibody-forming cells (B-lymphocytes) in different mammals. He had been studying a tumor that affects particularly children in Africa, called Burkitt’s lymphoma, which was believed to be caused by a virus. Klein and other researchers found evidence that 97 percent of such tumors contained what came to be called the Epstein-Barr, or EBV, virus. However, this virus alone could not cause the tumor, because most individuals carry it without ever developing the disease. What was the miss
ing piece of the puzzle?

At this point, Klein began to put together information from a variety of sources—cell biology, virology, and immunology. It is this process of connecting seemingly disparate ideas that he finds most enjoyable about his work. He found that for patients who had Burkitt’s lymphomas the tips of two chromosomes broke off and changed places. After long and painstaking work aimed at identifying the function of the genes involved in this reciprocal translocation, Klein postulated that the displaced chromosomal fragment contained a growth-controlling gene that upon coming in contact wi
th a highly active immunoglobin gene permanently activated it, driving the cell to the continuous division that results in cancer.

At first his hypothesis was regarded as a “most hair-raising extrapolation” from what was known about chromosomes to the much more minute world of the genes. But only a year after the hypothesis was published in
Nature
, five different laboratories around the world verified the insight that chromosomal translocation plays a decisive role in the development of many forms of cancer by bringing two unrelated genes into close proximity to each other.

Klein sees infinite vistas opening up in his domain; the main challenge is to combine detailed information from the sequencing and splicing of genes, from “the protean foresight of the immune sys
tem,” and from the understanding of cell pathology, and then put together this information in an understandable scheme of how organisms work. The more one knows about the complexity of the world within the cell, the more wonderful it all seems. “As you go in, it’s a jungle,” he says, a jungle full of perils and stark beauty.

T
HE
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OURNEY

Few people have had the good fortune to increase substantially human well-being by discovering a new way of healing. One thinks of Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, who first made vaccination against disease a feasible cure; of John Snow, who in 1854 discovered that the source of the London cholera epidemic was the Broad Street pump that had been contaminated by sewage, and thus established the link between bacteria and drinking water; of Ignaz Semmelweis, who understood how to avoid mothers’ death from infections at childbirth; of Alexander Fleming, whose discovery of penicil
lin saved untold lives. There are few satisfactions as deep as the knowledge that one has brought such improvements to human welfare.

It is among this fortunate elite that Jonas Salk belongs. As a young medical student he joined a research team studying the tragic disease of poliomyelitis at the University of Pittsburgh. Until that time, polio had been a disease that ruined the lives of tens of thousands of children annually. Every summer, when the rates of the illness peaked, mothers would dread sending their children to camp, or to the movies, or anywhere where they could catch the contagion.

After identifying different strains of the virus in the laboratory, Salk was able to demonstrate first with monkeys, then with humans, that injecting dead viruses induced the formation of antibodies and hence could prevent the disease. The widespread use of what came to be called the Salk vaccine almost completely eradicated an illness that had cast a pall on the lives of every person in the United States.

This breakthrough made Salk a scientific celebrity. Foundations and individual donors vied to offer financial support for his next projects. But Salk, while still interested in continuing laboratory research, had raised his sights even higher: His goal was now to understand the immense journey of evolution from inorganic forms to biological life and finally to the metabiological realm of ideas. To achieve this synthesis it was necessary to bring together people representing every
branch of human knowledge. So he planned to use his enormous prestige and financial backing to establish a new interdisciplinary center, a “crucible of creativity” where scientists, artists, and thinkers of different persuasions would come together to stimulate one another’s minds. It was to be a physically beautiful space that re-created for our times the intellectual brilliance of Goethe’s Weimar, the Medici court, the Platonic academy. In 1960 he teamed up with the visionary architect Louis Kahn, and together they built the splendid structures of the Salk Institute, which sta
nds like a contemporary descendant of ancient Greek temples in a grove above the Pacific Ocean at La Jolla, in southern California. It was in these buildings that Salk’s dream of a powerhouse of ideas was to be realized.

Yet history provides ample evidence that even the benefactors of humanity are not immune to the entropy that bedevils ordinary lives. Pasteur had to fight strong criticism against his efforts to use the rabies vaccine; Semmelweis suffered a terminal mental breakdown when all his medical colleagues laughed at his true but too far advanced ideas. It is perhaps not surprising that Salk’s second career encountered unexpected obstacles. In order to establish the scientific credentials of the institute, its founder started out by hiring traditional biologists to run its laboratorie
s. Because he wanted to have an institution run along democratic lines, Salk relinquished most of the power to his younger colleagues. Unfortunately, when time came to begin transforming the laboratory into the center of his dreams, Salk found out that traditional scientists had no sympathy for his novel vision. His colleagues preferred to devote all the resources of the institute to pursuing safer, more orthodox biological research. The idea of bringing in astronomers and physicists, not to mention musicians and philosophers, for serious discussions seemed to them mere self-indulgence. The ensuing con
flict played itself out along the lines of classical mythology: The creator was dethroned by his offspring. Salk retained an office and ceremonial status but could not implement the ideas that made the institute possible in the first place.

With the resiliency typical of creative individuals, Salk did not let the defeat stop his march toward the synthesis he sought. In several books he developed his thoughts about the evolutionary continuities that stretch from the distant past into the future, where we have to follow them if we wish to survive as a species. As a member of the board of powerful foundations he shaped research and philanthropy.
And with the sudden appearance of AIDS, he rolled up his sleeves once more and returned to the laboratory in the hope of finding a way to prevent this plague by immunological means. But whether in the boardroom or the lab, Salk in his seventies followed a direction discovered very early in life: to reduce human suffering and to become, to paraphrase the title of one of his books, “a good ancestor.”