Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday September 29, 2010
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The chemistry of a good story
ISBN NA
Reviewed by Harold Varmus
When high school students ask to spend their afternoons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn't develop that kind of enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old. In the 1950s, in my Long Island public high school, science courses were at best uninspiring; it would never have occurred to me to sacrifice after-school hours to a laboratory. But as the son of a family physician and a psychiatric social worker, I assumed I was destined for a medical career, so I was diligent in those classes, even though I preferred novels to chemistry and tennis to science fairs.
Later, at Amherst College, my exposure to science was dutiful, pre-ordained by an inflexible curriculum and pre-med requirements. My pleasures came instead from Chaucer, Milton, Dickens and college journalism. After college, finally acknowledging what I enjoyed, I entered graduate school in English literature, heading toward a scholarly career that would emphasize the 17th century.
Then disenchantment with Harvard graduate school and anxiety that I was irreversibly detaching myself from the modern world sent me to medical school at Columbia. I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist or academic internist.
Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service. Despite my lack of scientific credentials, I was able to secure a training position in the laboratory of Ira Pastan, a young physician-scientist at the National Institutes of Health. There, for the first time in a lengthy education, I learned the joys of science. I was asked to attack an important unsolved problem (how cyclic AMP, a chemical mediator of cell action, controls gene activity). I devised an accurate test that convincingly answered the question. Then I told other scientists about my pretty findings, wrote papers for publication, received praise and contemplated the next experiments.
I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered. It was so exhilarating that I decided to abandon medicine and pursue a scientific career, studying viruses that cause cancer in animals. This precipitated a move to San Francisco, a long-term alliance with a like-minded young scientist (J. Michael Bishop), and the gradual mobilization of a team to figure out how those viruses multiply, how they cause tumors in animals, and what they can teach us about human cancer.
I have pursued these questions (and other questions that the answers prompted) -- working initially at a laboratory bench with my own hands and, increasingly over time, overseeing experiments done by others -- for almost 40 years. But until a few years ago, I could not have imagined myself writing a book for a general audience about my life as a scientist. I thought that the routines of a medical scientist in a laboratory -- unlike the peripatetic, glamorous and even dangerous exploits of, say, an Amazonian ornithologist -- would seem physically dull and intellectually impenetrable. I didn't realize that we had stories about discovery -- about the logic and excitement of science and about the people who did it -- that could be told and were worth telling. Moreover, I was wary of being personal on paper, of getting away from the secure data and cautious interpretations that are the reliable tools of those writing for scientific journals.
But suddenly, in 2004, I found myself obliged to write that book anyway. I had been asked to deliver a series of three weekly lectures at the New York Public Library. The offer was seductive: a familiar and limited format (50-minute lectures, with slides), an interested but nontechnical audience, a prestigious venue and an impressive title: the Norton Lectures. Sponsorship by a publisher meant that the lectures would eventually be turned into a book.
The imperative to connect with a lay audience on three fall evenings seemed daunting, but I settled on three narrative lines that seemed interesting, one for each lecture. In the first, I would recount my meanderings as an adolescent and a young adult through literature and medicine toward science. In the second, I would outline our experiments with cancer viruses that unveiled genes now implicated in human cancer and describe how those genes are used as targets for novel therapies. In the third, I would describe my unexpected foray into public policy after President Bill Clinton chose me, despite my lack of administrative experience, to become the director of the National Institutes of Health in 1993. This final lecture would allow me to speak, albeit briefly, about several matters of interest to both scientists and the general public: how the government funds science, how a large federal agency works with Congress, how the NIH oversees controversial research (for instance, on stem cells or embryos), how scientific work is published, and how science and health can be promoted globally.
Turning these lectures into a book was a more complicated business than conceiving and delivering them. The task of becoming a different kind of writer took almost four years. Once the constraints of a 50-minute lecture were removed, I became aware of a new and intimidating freedom -- in principle, I could go on as long as I wanted! Moreover, I needed to learn to write in a new way, a way that established relationships with readers, encouraged humor, commanded a reader's sustained attention, and exposed an author's feelings and personality.
It was not enough to summarize our major findings about cancer viruses and cancer genes or their recent applications to patient care. I wanted to describe how and when ideas popped into my head (for instance, while wheeling our infant son around an English churchyard). I tried to see a pattern to my experimental failures (such as when I committed the sin of Thinking Too Much and advised my trainees to take what proved to be the harder and slower routes to answers). Because I have benefited enormously from scientific collaborations, I also sought to show how our students and colleagues at other institutions helped to make discoveries and how I entered -- and many years later left -- an unusually long and productive partnership. None of this could have been done in 50 minutes at a podium or without a newly liberated attitude toward my role as a writer.
If I could describe my writing experience as a kind of science, the lectures were the pilot experiments, and the book was the full analysis. But I can also see a story emerge: As an author, I discovered things about myself and was changed in the process. Perhaps, after all, I still prefer novels to chemistry.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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NASHVILLE CHROME
Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 547 31726 7
253 pages
$24
Reviewed by Dave Shiflett, a writer and musician who posts his original music at www.DaveShiflett.com
Fame is something you wish only for those at the very top of your enemies list, at least according to "Nashville Chrome," a darkly engaging "reality-based" novel that might make you think twice before trying out for "American Idol."
Rick Bass, an O. Henry Award winner, based the novel on the lives of siblings Maxine, Bonnie and Jim Ed Brown, whose peerless vocal harmonies, at least according to him, were much imitated but never matched, not even by the Beatles, who were mesmerized by the rustic trio. So why don't we remember the Browns? Their flame flickered and died in the early 1960s, which turned out to be a blessing to Bonnie and Jim Ed, though it was Maxine's undoing.
Bass, who spent five years working with the Browns on the project, launches the tale in Poplar Creek, Ark., where the family, though humble, lived a life of sometimes extravagant misfortune. Father Floyd guzzled moonshine, caroused a bit and ran a sawmill that provided hard wages while relieving him of a few fingers. He also lost a leg in the timber trade, which he occasionally abandoned for the restaurant business. His wife, Birdie, was renowned for her pies and hard work, though their buildings were somewhat prone to burning to the ground.
Yet the sawmill was a conservatory of sorts for Maxine, Jim Ed and Bonnie, who early on revealed their musical precociousness by identifying exactly when a spinning saw blade had been properly tempered. Their precise ears informed their precise harmonies, which first caught the attention of parents and neighbors, then of a predatory manager named Fabor Robinson, whose credo, Bass writes, was that while "a star might be born, a star would most assuredly not get paid."
There's no downside these days to whipping music-industry weasels, and Bass lashes Fabor as a parasite's parasite, living large off the sweat of the Browns' brows while showing them all the warmth of a wolverine. They were paid next to nothing, and when they went broke touring, he refused to send gas money, leaving them to wash dishes to make enough to get back home. The eventual falling-out, however, was in response to Fabor's monstrously lecherous move on Bonnie, who had also caught the eye of the young and not-yet-jaded Elvis Presley.
The Browns rubbed shoulders with many greats -- Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly and eventually the Beatles, with whom they played a series of U.K. gigs. They also worked closely with Chet Atkins, the guitar god who Bass says eventually discovered that "what he really loved doing was helping other musicians bring out the best in themselves." While there will be readers who consider Atkins' "Nashville sound" sappy enough to make Mantovani blush, he's pretty much the only guy wearing a white hat in this tale. Elvis, meantime, is Exhibit A of how greatness and fame can corrode an otherwise charming mama's boy.
The Browns knew him early on, and for several years, at least according to this story, Elvis was a gentle soul who walked in their shadow. Yet he was a marked man who was eventually transformed into what Brown calls "the bloated extrapolation of insatiable American appetite and surface showmanship." Even after becoming famous beyond earlier imagining, he told the Browns, "he was pretty sad most of the time."
Poor Maxine led a train wreck of a life. She married a philandering lawyer who flew the coop, leaving her with a couple of kids. She retired to the deeper recesses of the bottle, spicing her morning coffee with rum, though she eventually shook that demon.
The fame devil, however, did not go so easily. Maxine spent half a century desperately hoping to somehow launch a comeback. How desperate? She posted an ad on a Piggly Wiggly grocery store bulletin board seeking someone -- anyone -- who would make a movie about her life. Her ad was answered, albeit not by Tom Hanks, though the film project and its unlikely director gave something of a happy ending to her tale of woe.
The novel is fairly short but richly written. There are times, to be sure, when a reader hears a loud Faulknerian echo -- but there are far greater sins. Bass can certainly leave you with an arresting mental image, including this one from Elvis' funeral: The King, he writes, lay "in an open casket on ice, his insides baking, they said, decomposing faster than most normal people, falling apart, riven by violent internal chemistries, the simmerings of errant prescriptions and unsustainable excess."
Bass has clear sympathy for those whose fate is to haunt some A-list or another. "There is no right or wrong to greatness," he writes, "there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it." Yet you're left with the impression that the desire for fame might well be considered a form of mental illness. The next time you feel the urge to hire a publicist, you might be better off hiring an exorcist instead.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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