{"id":591,"date":"2016-05-30T19:41:57","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T19:41:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=591"},"modified":"2016-05-30T22:18:13","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T22:18:13","slug":"golden-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/591\/golden-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Golden opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fabled Karolinska Institutet (KI). To anyone involved with science in the last century or so, that name springs to the mind\u2019s eye plated with the gold of the Nobel Prize. It conjures images of elegant, wealthy Stockholm, a supermodel of a city: cold to the touch, remote, yet gifted with such stunning beauty, elegance, and wealth that it almost seems unfair, hoarded. Is has the glamor and pomp of royalty, the self-confidence (and cost of living) of New York, yet the cozy social democracy that provides reliable, clean public transportation and schools.<\/p>\n

The KI\u00a0is Stockholm\u2019s crown jewel. Every December, Nobel week transforms almost the entire city into an opulent, charming celebration of science. Historians of science know that the curtain before the prize archives moves slowly forward, revealing the nominations and evaluations of individual laureates fifty years after the prize is awarded. The Chemistry and Physics prize archives are maintained at and administered by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Physiology or Medicine archives and prize, however, are administered by and housed at the Nobel Forum, a separate entity on the Karolinska campus. Alfred Nobel constructed an administrative architecture designed to maintain the integrity of his prizes, but the result is Byzantine.<\/p>\n

Like the Rockefeller University or the PhD program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Karolinska is all science. Almost. They do have a small staff of trained, credentialed historians, who work at the Hagstr\u00f6mer Medico-Historical Library<\/a>, a medium-sized yet rich collection\u2014larger than Johns Hopkins now, yet much smaller than London\u2019s Wellcome Library)\u2014yet rich collection that focuses on works from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Located in a nineteenth century building that was, until recently, a courthouse. The facilities are solid with stone, warmed with wood, and softened by thick rugs.<\/p>\n

In May, I had the great fortune to both work in the Nobel Forum archive and to be a guest at the Hagstr\u00f6mer Library. Both were thanks to the effort, persistence, and generosity of Eva \u00c5hren a historian of science and medicine and now the head of the Unit for Medical History and Heritage, which includes the library and also houses a number of scholars in medical history,<\/p>\n

\"Hagstro\u0308mer\"
The old courtroom at the Hagstr\u00f6mer Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
<\/div>\n

I first gave the Hagstr\u00f6mer Lecture, a public talk, sponsored by the\u00a0Friends of the Hagstr\u00f6mer Library, to showcase the value of historical studies of science and demonstrate their relationship to both current science and current events. My lecture, based on my last book, was titled \u201cFrom medical genetics to genomic medicine.\u201d The main argument is that a medical-eugenic thread runs through Progressive-era eugenics all the way through the birth of medical genetics and the emergence of modern personalized genomic medicine. Thus, the \u201cold, bad eugenics\u201d was less hostile to medicine than scholars have thought\u2014and contemporary medical genetics and genomics have a stronger connection to human population improvement than most of us are comfortable acknowledging. I\u2019ve never seen much intellectual value in making people comfortable.<\/p>\n

The lecture took place in what is certainly the most beautiful venue in which I have ever given a talk. It was in the former main courtroom, built on a circular plan, now lined with old books, and lit by a vast picture window that admitted the long Swedish evening throughout the lecture and the following reception.<\/p>\n

Judging from the audience and the questions, we got the attention of the Karolinska scientists and some of the intellectual public of Stockholm. After the lecture, we had a luxuriously long question-and-answer period, in which scientists and laypeople alike peppered me with thoughtful questions on everything from the history of European eugenics to CRISPR and the possibility of designer babies. Near the end, Eva and I had a fun one-on-one conversation\u2014a sort of scholarly stand-up routine\u2014about the value and the need for historical studies of science. My argument, as regular readers will know, is that the more dominant science becomes in our culture, the more we need historians to help interpret it. The sciences and the humanities are not\u2014or should not be\u2014in competition. It\u2019s more like human evolution: the better your fine motor skills become, the more valuable it is to have a well-developed prefrontal cortex to aid in planning, strategizing, choosing future options.<\/p>\n

\"Dumanski
Ms Dumanski and me, at the podium where they announce the prize. You see? She’s actually very nice!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Having sung, I then had my scholar\u2019s supper: Eva was pivotal in arranging for me to work in the Nobel Forum archives. The entire Physiology or Medicine prize, from sending out the nomination forms to organizing and hosting the meetings of the Nobel Committee, to arranging the banquet is done by three full-time staff. There is no trained archivist, even part-time. The administrator Ann-Marie Dumanski is gatekeeper to the archive and the Nobel Forum. By necessity, one of her principal jobs is to keep out the kooks and riff-raff. Not even my Johns Hopkins and Library of Congress affiliations satisfied her. For me to gain access, we had to persuade her that I was not a loony.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The fierce Ms Dumanski was in a good mood. Indeed, she was warm, welcoming, even chatty. Before handing over the documents I had requested, she regaled us with stories from her years there. The Nobel Prize is not the richest prize in science, but, thanks in large measure to Marie Curie, who won it twice (in 1903 and 1911) it is the most famous and the most prestigious. Some people will do almost anything to get one. They forge nominations. They show up at the front door with their inventions, saying, \u201cI can haz Nobel Prize?\u201d One man mailed them a generic silver trophy, on which he had had engraved:<\/p>\n

\n

Nobel Peace Prize<\/p>\n

Nature\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Science<\/p>\n

Awarded to [his name]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The cover letter simply asked that they return the cup to his address, registered mail. That way, he could say, truthfully, that he had received a Nobel prize from the Karolinska Institute! Ms Dumanski said, \u201cThat cup will never leave this building!\u201d I began to understand why she needs to be so protective.<\/p>\n

\"Nobel
Where the Knights of the Nobel (in Physiology or Medicine) congregate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The documents themselves were rich and fascinating. I was looking at the prize for the double helix, to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins in 1962. I received every nomination they received (which spanned 1960, 1961, and 1962), as well as some of the evaluations conducted by members of the Nobel committee. You will have to wait for the book for all the details, but the story behind this prize is a good deal more complicated than the histories thus far have told. Maurice Wilkins has a much more interesting role than has been acknowledged, as does Laurence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Institute, where Watson and Crick (but not Wilkins) worked. This in turn has implications for the social history of DNA, such as Watson\u2019s treatment of Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin in his best-selling book, The Double Helix.\u00a0<\/em>Looking at the nominations, one would have expected Watson and Crick to win the prize in Chemistry, not Physiology or Medicine. Nearly all their nominations were in Chemistry\u2014and most did not include Wilkins. But Wilkins had a strong partisan on the Nobel committee, and Bragg and Arne Tiselius (the head of the committee) played a good deal of politics. It is not a coincidence that the Chemistry prize went to two other Cavendish scientists who worked with X-ray crystallography: Max Perutz and John Kendrew. It was a red-letter day for X-ray work, for the Cavendish, and for Bragg.In all, it was an exhilarating trip.<\/p>\n

\"Linnaeus\"
Linnaeus’s house<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I haven\u2019t even mentioned the jaunt up to Uppsala before Stockholm, in which I stayed next to Linnaeus\u2019s garden, gave another talk, on DNA, to the history of science colloquium, and saw some of the sights of this charming old university town. These events were organized by another good friend and colleague, Maria Bj\u00f6rkman. Maria also did me the indispensable favor of arranging for a graduate student, Felicia Edvardsson, to assist me by translating the Swedish evaluations.
\nI\u2019ll admit, there was a bit of glamor to the trip. At the Hagstr\u00f6mer, I felt a slightly embarrassing surge of pride as I came onstage via the small back door through which the judge once entered the courtroom from his chambers. At the Nobel Forum, Ms Dumanski allowed me to sit at the seven-meter-diameter table, carved from a single piece of wood, where the Nobel committee deliberates the prizes, and let me stand at the podium where the prize is announced every October. We took a ferry that entered Stockholm harbor\u2014for centuries, the primary way one arrived in Stockholm\u2014with its grandly imposing buildings on full display. These moments are folded now into my life\u2019s narrative, among the colorful stories with which one can bore one\u2019s grandchildren.<\/p>\n

\"UppsalaCathedral\"
Uppsala cathedral makes you believe in *something.*<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most important and valuable, though, were the opportunities to be a real historian: tracking down and poring over difficult-to-obtain documents; discussing both history and the value <\/em>of history with scientists and the public; and spending time with generous and intelligent colleagues who are also friends.<\/p>\n

This was not \u201ccollegiality,\u201d the canned concept, often paired with \u201cinterdisciplinarity,\u201d that is rife in university mission plans and which largely stands for not pissing anyone off. My experience in Sweden, however, was collegiality without quotation marks. It was the real deal: the genuine mutual affection, the shared joy of working with ideas, books, manuscripts, and past actors, the dedication to humanistic values that is eroding so quickly in today\u2019s neoliberal university.<\/p>\n

One can still find pockets of true collegiality. When we do find it, we need to enjoy every second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fabled Karolinska Institutet (KI). To anyone involved with science in the last century or so, that name springs to the mind\u2019s eye plated with the gold of the Nobel Prize. It conjures images of elegant, wealthy Stockholm, a supermodel of a city: cold to the touch, remote, yet gifted with such stunning beauty, elegance, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[419,20,418,112,179,417,416],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archives","tag-dna","tag-karolinska-institutet","tag-nobel-prize","tag-politics","tag-stockholm","tag-travel"],"yoast_head":"\nGolden opportunity - Genotopia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/591\/golden-opportunity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Golden opportunity\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The fabled Karolinska Institutet (KI). To anyone involved with science in the last century or so, that name springs to the mind\u2019s eye plated with the gold of the Nobel Prize. It conjures images of elegant, wealthy Stockholm, a supermodel of a city: cold to the touch, remote, yet gifted with such stunning beauty, elegance, ... 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. 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From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center\u2019s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort\u2019s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock\u2019s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda\u2019s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.","sameAs":["http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com"],"url":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/author\/genotopia\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgtNP1-9x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}