Composing a Further Life

than an academic position, this time at DuPont, another industrial giant that supports highly competitive research. Eventually, however, Arthur Galston, a Yale professor of botany who was a consultant for DuPont, told Dick, “You really ought to be at a college. You ought to be teaching.”
    “He stole me away to Yale,” Dick said. “And I spent a year at Yale. I enjoyed it a great deal, and then somebody rubbed me the wrong way by telling me I’d be lucky if I got tenure. Tenure! I said, I don’t have to stay here. And I went back to DuPont. Totally selfish, thoughtless. So this guy, Art, who had brought me to Yale at great risk to his consultancy at DuPont, remained my friend, and they took me back at DuPont with open arms. I stayed at DuPont for a year then decided, No, I don’t think I want to be here. I would like to go back to Yale. Art could have discouraged me, or he could have discouraged the people at Yale, but he did quite the opposite, and I came back to Yale in 1966.
    “Art really taught me how to teach. He was an artist at teaching, a truly gifted teacher. He knew how to set topics up so students would learn things, building courses so that students would become progressively interested in topics. He did pedagogy as a science, so to speak, and spent a great deal of time doing it. He sort of brought me in there as a protégé, and saw that I got this very good teaching assignment so that I had a chance to succeed. I wasn’t very good when I got started there. He was very much a mentor, a very patient one, and he developed me into a very good person in the classroom, taught me how to listen to students.”
    Dick went on to tell me about Art Galston’s history, the anti-Semitism and hazing he had faced as a student, and the senior scientists—George Beadle and Linus Pauling—who had encouraged him. “Art was kind of a wunderkind, a Jewish kid who grew up in New York; his father lost his money during the depression. The first year he was teaching at Caltech, George Beadle, who won a Nobel Prize, said to him, ‘You’re going to teach with me; any jackass can lecture, it takes talent to run a lab, so
I’m
going to run the lab and you’re going to have the job of giving the lectures.’ Imagine somebody doing that for a young assistant!” When some of Art’s research provided clues that led to the development of Agent Orange, this disturbed him greatly and led him to an interest in the ethics of how science is used. In later years Dick brought Galston to Amherst to lecture on the ethics of science. As Dick spoke, it struck me that the laboratory bench is one of the places where apprenticeship continues.
    Dick always emphasizes the centrality of basic lab research, but I could also hear a theme running through his life of communicating with the public and with students who were not going into research. While he was at Yale, he wrote a book on elementary biochemistry and a biology book called
Race and Races
, which went into the small ways in which human populations differ, yet made it clear that these unfamiliar differences, like the more obvious ones, are insignificant in relation to the unity of the species (different textures of earwax, for heaven’s sake!). 2 This is a book that he plans to revise when he retires from teaching and lab work. The book he and I coauthored on HIV/AIDS was intended for the general public, and he and his wife Barbara Osborne coauthored a textbook of immunology.
    As Dick described individuals who had been important to him, he tended to mention the ways they composed their lives around this balance between different kinds of work, such as physicians conducting research or teaching but also keeping up with clinical work, because, as he quoted John Littlefield, a senior medical researcher at Harvard, in whose lab Dick spent a year, “If you’re not seeing patients, you’re not really a doctor. You can’t with any kind of confidence teach medical students once you lose your clinical edge, and you’ve got to practice to keep it going.” Of one research colleague he said, “For a month every year John would come to the office around five o’clock in the morning, get through his administrative stuff that had to be done, and go out on the ward to take a swing at clinical bat.”
    It seemed to me that as he spoke Dick was discerning patterns in his work that he had never spelled out before and experiencing their emotional meanings in new ways. At one point he