Composing a Further Life

said, “Right now I do three different kinds of teaching. First, I teach immunology—there I feel is an opportunity to take a bunch of very able Amherst undergraduates and they by and large are able to do it. So there I get a chance to actually teach people at something that approaches a graduate level.
    “Then I have students who are basically liberal arts students. That’s interesting because you get to wake people up. People have these stereotypes of what science is. They think science is dull; they think it’s all written down somewhere. They are surprised to find that, as a working process, science is about checking and sometimes disproving earlier results, about finding out something new, and that what we think is right today almost always turns out not to be the case tomorrow. Most of the students, these very sophisticated students I have in class, are really surprised and enlightened. They are also surprised by some of the people I have come in as guest lecturers. And they’re surprised about bioethics and that scientists care about things like this, I mean really care.
    “Then of course, you get, not so much to reproduce yourself as much as to develop people who will go beyond you. In most cases, the people I have had as graduate students had no idea they were as good as they are. Barbara tends to get the people who come in acknowledged as the best students entering U Mass. By and large, with one or two exceptions, the students I have gotten from U Mass have been students who are second or third tier. Students somebody has written off, students who in some cases had almost written themselves off and when they finished had real confidence, got out and fared well.” Dick described a student who seemed to be “just kind of biding her time and not billing herself a whole lot as a scientist or an intellectual,” whom he and Barbara hired to work at Hematech and who “became an extraordinarily good scientist.” Dick and his present wife, Barbara Osborne, had been involved in creating Hematech, a biotech company that developed techniques for producing human immunoglobulin in cows and was subsequently sold to a company in Japan.
    “I take what people think of as very ordinary material, and they make much more rapid progress than expected. Part of it is you can’t hit them too hard initially so they lose confidence in themselves. They have to have time. You have to give them a problem that is interesting and important scientifically, but it’s much more important to get a problem that will work, so they get some data and they have some success they can show other people, because how your peers regard you and how the faculty regard you has a lot to do with how well you’re going to make your way in our business. It’s funny, what you find is that they become much more ambitious as they gather strength. They themselves will make their problems more demanding by going deeper, and that’s been one of the very bright spots.”
    There are many professors who regard research as their real work and teaching as a part of their job that interferes with their real work, something that the stars can often avoid completely. When Dick was considering accepting an appointment at Amherst and Barbara was looking at local institutions where she might work if they moved, they were both concerned about teaching loads and reluctant to compromise their research. Dick said, “Now I look at what my wife is doing—and Barbara is now a star, a real honest to God star. Barbara teaches even though she complains about it, says she hates it and so forth. She is the honors coordinator, which means she has fifty advisees or honor students. She cares. She knows these people. She writes letters for them. She’s also taken a couple of junior faculty people under her wings, and she cares about them. When they get their grants, it’s like
she’s
got the grant, that’s the kind of joy she feels about it.”
    I commented that teaching is only one of several ways of supporting the next generation. “The big researchers may be putting their energy into mentoring the people that work in their lab or, true enough, they may just be exploiting them.”
    Dick shook his head and began to speak about the next semester, when he would be on sabbatical at MIT. “You have probably the best scientific technical institute in the world, with the best faculty in aggregate in the world to teach. And these people are so powerful and they are so