Albert Lasker Award
for Special Achievement in Medical Science

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An Interview with Matthew Meselson
Interview by Sidney Altman

Altman: Hi, I am Sidney Altman. I am affiliated with Yale University. And I have the pleasure today of speaking with Matthew Meselson, who is at Harvard University and is one of this year's Lasker prize awardees. I will start by asking Matt about his education. How is it that you wound up going to the University of Chicago, although you are a Southern California person?

Meselson: I grew up during the war — that is, the Second World War. Although it was very far away, it was the focus of our attention even as young, young people. And it seemed the wrong thing to do to just enjoy one self in the summer. Many of us went to summer school and took jobs. I had a job at a vitamin factory, and I went to summer school. As a result of that, I accumulated all of the necessary credits to be graduated from high school. One fall, I went to the registrar at my high school expecting to be given a diploma, and she said, "No, in California, one must have three full years of physical education in order to get a diploma." I wanted to get started with my college education. These were serious times. So she said, "Well, you could just take the courses that you like best over again," as though they were like desserts that you would want more of. It seems such a strange idea to me.

Up to then I thought that my elders, for sure, knew best. And it was a shock to realize suddenly that the system didn't know best. I knew that my body would grow anyway. It was my mind that was supposed to get something out of education. So I started asking people, "What can I do. I am stuck. I can't get a diploma. How can I get to college?" And then I heard that there was a place, the University of Chicago, which had instituted a system on the thought that the last couple of years in high school for a lot of people weren't very usefully spent anyway. And they actually wanted people who had not finished high school. That is why I went there. I was expecting to study chemistry. But I learned when I got there that they had abolished the bachelor's degree in chemistry, and in all of the specialized subjects. They still had advanced degrees. Of course, it was a great school. But undergraduates all took liberal arts. So without knowing what I was getting into, I got a little bit of smattering of a classical education. We read great, great works.

Altman: Great books?

Meselson: Great works.

Altman: Okay. How do you think your view of education at that time, or the general view, has changed for today's young student? What would a student expect today from a college education that you may or may not have had at the University of Chicago?

Meselson: I think the university that I know most about, of course, is Harvard, because that is where I am. I am not a specialist in education, so I can talk only about Harvard. At Harvard, there is an enormous variety of courses from which students may choose with considerable freedom. And students seem to value that. Even when applying for colleges they — I know from my own children — have sought out places that accord a great deal of freedom. This is in a way a paradox because it is assuming that a student already knows what it is he should be knowing. And that is not necessarily true.

It is a bit circular, in fact. So for example, I think there are some fundamental things that it would be good for everybody to know. There would be commonality of knowledge. Some base that people had in common. But that is pretty much shattered by the modern system of a huge number of electives.

I have proposed to a succession of deans at Harvard to institute a different system that would be voluntary. Students wouldn't be required to do it, but they could enroll in a special program in which the courses were, in a sense, inter-digitated. The faculty would coordinate the different course offerings and they would be historically based. They would try to show people how we got where were are. It would require also that they would take their meals together, because they would all be reading the same works at the same time. And therefore at meal time they would discuss them. Whereas now, at any given table in one of the residence halls at Harvard, seldom do you find a small group of people, all of whom have anything in common to talk about except sports and politics and current events, and social things. So their living together doesn't contribute nearly as much to their education as it could.

Altman: Well I understand the arguments you made, and I have various experiences of mine...

Meselson: You were a dean.

Altman: Well that is true, I was. And I was in charge of curriculum at Yale. But we won't get into that at the moment. I will say that several years ago I was interviewing a son of a friend of mine who wanted to got to university. And he asked me the direct question, "Why should I pay any attention to you in terms of what courses I should take?" Well I guess I maybe missed my calling as a professor, but anyway...you were talking about a general mode of education, which I happen to agree with. But what about the people in the sciences? Surely there must be common ground in the sciences in which we must all undertake to pursue knowledge in the appropriate way.

Meselson: Yes, but a common knowledge of science doesn't equip you to be a citizen of a democracy. It doesn't give you any fundamental understanding of how we got to where we are, what struggles our species has gone through to achieve the degree of freedom that does exist in some places or in some subcultures. So then just knowing chemistry and physics is not equipment for being a citizen. It is a different thing. And ultimately the nature of the citizenry is going to determine the environment for everybody in a democracy.

Altman: Once again, I agree with you. But let's say somebody chooses science as a topic to pursue — is their education going to be any different today from what yours was? Or what was advantageous about your education that made it such a rewarding career in the end?

Meselson: Well, I had to begin all over again as a freshman at Cal Tech, having gone through a bachelor's program in Liberal Arts at Chicago. So my scientific education was quite the same, I think, as scientific educations are today. I took the usual courses in calculus and physics and chemistry. Not much biology until later. So I don't know that there is that much difference in science education. The high schools are critically important in this, and that if they did their job — when I went to high school in California, it was, if not the highest rated high school system and public school system in the country, certainly near the top. And now it is very near the bottom. And that, of course, is because of people who don't want to pay real estate tax to support our schools. We have a very peculiar system in this country where the schools are supported by real estate tax from essentially small sub-units of our country. So that if it is a poor sub-unit, the schools are poor because that is where their income comes from. If it is a rich sub-unit, the schools are wealthy. And this creates inequalities in educational opportunity for people, because of the strange way in which we finance our public education. I don't know of any other country that does it on the basis of small units such as counties, or cities.

Altman: Let's consider that for a while. I know that, in conversation with you, you told me that you had a very important chemistry teacher in high school. I had some excellent teachers, too. And my general feeling is, at that time, people who taught specialized subjects in high school were educated in those subjects, which I am afraid does not seem to be the case anymore. So I think there has to be not only a change in funding, but also a change in what we expect from our high school teachers. But that is just my personal comment.

Meselson: Well of course. And of course, how well do we regard them, what respect do we pay to them, so that people who think highly of themselves will go into that field?

Altman: Right, exactly.

Meselson: I was very lucky, too, in the timing in which I got into science. It was just when the DNA structure was discovered, and it was a kind of road map of what to do. You see, most molecules, if you look at a protein molecule or that lipid molecule, or a carbohydrate molecule, it doesn't tell you what it does. We are beginning to learn how to look at a protein and say, "well, probably it is a hydrolyzer." You can do a little bit, but DNA was totally different. You look at DNA, and in a way it speaks to you. It says, "Here I am. I have two chains, and they are complementary to each other. Obviously that is how I replicate. Go out and show it." It says to you, "I have a sequence of nucleotides that can be any sequence, and will still have the same acceptable, stable structure. Therefore, this can encode information. Go out and show that is really how the information is encoded." It has two chains, so that if you damage one, you can recover the information from the other, which is still intact. So there is a suggestion in the structure for how DNA repairs its own mistakes. Go out in the laboratory and show how that is done.

DNA can recognize other nucleotides like it because of the base pairing rules. So you look at the DNA molecule and you say, "To get the information out, it must take some other nucleotide to be able to recognize it." And okay, in fact that is exactly the way Francis Crick looked at it and predicted the adaptor molecule. So DNA was a remarkable molecule in that not only did it tell you everything in a sense. It didn't quite tell you, it hinted it, it whispered it. A little bit above a whisper, but below a shout. And then the other thing about it was, it wasn't the molecule that does a job like a carbohydrate or a protein — it is the very center and the heart of life. What is life? It means something that can, first of all, reproduce itself. But it must also be something that can change. So the then changed forms can be the stuff of which evolution happens.

And so, DNA can mutate. You can change one nucleotide to another. The third thing you need to have [in] a living system is [that] it needs to be able to express itself in some way, create its own environment, build stuff around its cells — more complicated things like us. DNA does that, too, because it carries the information which then can be transcribed and translated into things around it. So that it is the secret of life, in a way. When I got into science, there wasn't the faintest clue how these things could happen. People were still talking — there was this famous book by Irwin Schroedinger, a physicist, one of the founders of quantum mechanics — and many people were deeply impressed by it. I read it as a young chemist and thought it was bunk. Because all he ended up saying was that if the gene or the chromosomes were made up of a lot of loose molecules, heat motion would disrupt their structure. That wouldn't be stable enough to represent the genetic information. So the chromosome, or at least chunks of it, must be based on covalent bonds.

So I read that thinking I was going to find the answer, and it wasn't there. And a young person didn't know what to do until the DNA structure was available.

Altman: I remember Schroedinger talking about crystals, and the order of crystals. But it didn't make any sense to me, either.

Meselson: No, it didn't.

Altman: Now I had a slightly different tack in my own education. When I was in graduate school, I read the famous Brenner paper on the triple nature of the code. I looked at that, and I wondered how they could have found out what they actually said they had found out. That was a complete mystery to me. I read that paper and it did a lot to convince me to change fields. You were very fortunate as a graduate student to engage in an absolutely wonderful experiment, "Meselson-Stahl," as it is called. And I think that you probably knew where to go after that. But today, our field has expanded rapidly because of it's own success. There are hundreds, if not thousands or more people in it at this time, than there were 30 or 40 years ago. What is one going to look for in today's field compared to 30 or 40 years ago, in terms of how you are going to choose where to work, or what to do?

Meselson: It is clearly very different. There is no way to try and say that you can repeat the approach and the experience from nearly 50 years ago and make it work today. There is nothing like DNA to tell you what the most fundamental things are still left to do, I am afraid. But fields reach a kind of maturity, like a living thing. And in some areas of biology, it is mostly a question of just doing something like what has already been done, but in another system, another gene.

But there are still some big problems. There always will be some big ones. Some of them concern evolution. For example, students are taught that the reason why sex exists, why there are males and females, is to generate a variation on which natural selection can actually improve fitness. It turns out that the people who have really thought about this have no general agreement amongst themselves as to why there are males and females. That is a deep problem in evolution. And there may be some very surprising answers out there. Until recently, there has been an almost complete dichotomy between those people who try to deal with this problem theoretically and those who try do deal with it experimentally, because there haven't been many ways of dealing with it experimentally.

There are other problems involved in evolution, the very difficult ones: the whole problem of how to represent the interaction between genes. That will require totally different kinds of disciplines, to some extent, much more mathematical. And that is a problem because a lot of people who come into biology from mathematics and from other fields don't have biological intuition. So they maybe very sophisticated and understand a lot about their methodology, but not know how to hook the horse to the carriage, so to speak.

I was very lucky. I got into this field at just the right time. I was very lucky because I got into it at just the right place. For me it was a total accident. I had taken freshman chemistry at Cal Tech. And then I left Cal Tech. I was already older than the other boys, and I went back to the University Of Chicago, and then I went to Berkeley as a graduate student for a year in physics. And then I was going to go back to Chicago to a program that was called "Mathematical Biophysics." This was just on the eve of the discovery by Watson and Crick of the structure of DNA. And Mathematical Biophysics, those were very good key words for a young person interested in applying chemistry and physics to biology.

The man who was doing it had a big black beard, which seemed like a good thing. I had gotten to know Linus Pauling's children, Peter and Linda. They had a party at their house one day in the swimming pool. I was in the water, and Linus came out and he knew me because I had taken his undergraduate chemistry course as a freshman. And he asked me, what I was going to do in the coming year? I said I was going to go and join the Department of Mathematical Biophysics as a graduate student in Chicago. He looked astounded, and he said, "But Matt, that is baloney. Why don't you come to Cal Tech and be my graduate student?" And so I just looked up at him out of the water and said, "Okay, I will." And that was that. If that hadn't happened — well, you would be talking to someone else today.

Altman: Well if similar things hadn't happened to me, you would be talking to somebody else today.

Meselson: That paper you mentioned — you are ten years younger than I am, roughly. And it came ten years later. I think that is the greatest paper in molecular genetics that was ever written.

Altman: I agree.

Meselson: That is an astonishing paper.

Altman: ... I have no compunction about agreeing with you. Now, we are both in biology or some associated aspect of biology. I know why I continued in this field for some extent. I know a little bit about what you did. But can you tell us more about what you hope for biology in the future? What today's student should be looking for in their degree, besides paying their own living, let's say?

Meselson: I think it is very important that one be delighted with what one does, and find it very enjoyable. Because that just has to do with your life, and there are lots of people, I think, who are in biological research who are not very happy with it today — because they're parts of big projects, they are little cogs in the wheel. Some people do well in that kind of situation as a member of a large team. But others don't. So I think that the very beginning, you have to ask yourself, "Am I really enjoying this?" And if the answer is "no," you should be careful. But if the answer is "yes," then you are probably going to do some really good things. Because it is being deeply interested in something or really enjoying it that is likely to lead you to discoveries that are very enjoyable to make.

As far as the broader implications of where biology is taking us — who knows. People who make predictions are usually shown wrong after just a few years. But I will still stick my neck out and say that it's bound to have profound political and philosophical implications. Because now we are learning how to manipulate every aspect of living systems. What we can do today is nothing compared to what will be possible. We will be able to manipulate cognition, the way people think. Not right away, but it will happen. We will be able to manipulate development, how to develop a physical form. We will be able to manipulate heredity, what genes we pass on. How we choose to do these things, but what they all add up to is we can change what it means to be human.

That, of course, leads to the question, what does it mean to be human? What is it? You know, I don't know if there is even an answer to that question. But I do know that as we begin to apply knowledge of ourselves of the most profound kind, and usually at each step of that kind of application, the reason for it is minor, or relatively trivial. Like keeps you from having headaches, or makes your vision better, or keeps you from getting some bad disease. So the decision, although important to individual life is not a big philosophical decision about the future of the species. But when you add it all together, when you add all those things together, it changes the whole concept of what it is to be human. It changes the whole concept of what human life might, might, might yield in terms of satisfaction. And instead becomes the postponement of unpleasant things. It is not clear to me that this is going to lead in a good or bad direction. It is very open, I think, which way our species will be led by its use of biology.

Altman: I think a lot of what you said has something to do with the actual workers and the field of science improving one thing or another. But the larger question you asked about — what it means for our lives — it is not clear to me that scientist will ever answer that question, or might even be involved in answering that question. So I think there is a large load or burden placed on the rest of society to grapple with these ideas, and analyze them carefully.

Meselson: Yes, in our system the market will decide about how science is used...

Altman: Now you spent a lot of your time over the last several decades on activities that had nothing to do with, let's say, basic research. This is on chemical and biological warfare, and understanding the dangers and preventing them from occurring on a widespread scale. Do you feel that that activity was worthwhile? And where do you think it's going at the moment?

Meselson: I think it was very important what President Nixon did in 1969. Before that, we had a large offensive biological weapons program. We were designing and stockpiling biological weapons. And the program had not been reviewed at a high level — so far as I know, ever! At a White House level, a careful review...President Nixon renounced biological weapons categorically for the United States. What would the world be like today if he hadn't done that? If instead the United States had a major program of applying the most modern biological methods to the design and production of weapons of war? Where we would be? Would we be better off? Of course, we'd have been emulated by many countries. If it's something that the United States does, why shouldn't everybody have the right to do it? And of course, these are not expensive things, after they're developed. So this would mean that many hands could hold weapons of great destructiveness, and increasingly sophisticated ones, too. So I think that what he did may come to be looked upon as a real turning point in the life of the human species, even. Very important. So that, I think, was important to do that. And I played some part in that.

Altman: What part did you play in that?

Meselson: Well, one never knows for sure. It's a bit like the blind man and the elephant. But I can tell you what one blind man's view was. Because I got to know Henry Kissinger a bit at Harvard when he was a professor at Harvard, shortly after he became President Nixon's National Security Advisor. We collided at the Boston Airport — physically. I was going down the ramp and he was coming up, or vice versa. And he knew of my interest in biological weapons because I'd worked in the government, in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, on these things.

He asked me what I thought we should do. And I said "I don't know. Let me write you a paper." I spent a long time writing a paper. But in the end, I concluded that for the wealthiest country in the world to be pioneering what would eventually become ultra-cheap weapons of mass destruction was foolish.

So I wrote that and turned that paper in September of 1969. And I wrote some other papers for him. I know that the president read at least one of them, President Nixon, but what impact this had on him, I don't know.

Altman: Well, actually I think you're doing quite well if you know that he read at least one of your papers.

Meselson: He did. That's a kind of funny story. But it was a paper on toxins. President Nixon had renounced biological weapons, but that review that was given to him to decide on was already a pretty fat document. And so they left out the problem of what to do about toxins. These were, at that time, viewed as chemical substances. Not living, but made by living things, like botulinum toxin. So a whole new review was done, and the president and Henry Kissinger were on Key Biscayne, where President Nixon would often go. Henry called me — I apparently was at the movies. So I wasn't home. They'd misplaced their copy, and they wanted to know if I had one that I could read over the phone.

They called a friend of mine, Paul Doty. Did he have a copy? He looked to see if he could find his. No, he couldn't find it either. And then Henry called him back some time around midnight, and said "We found it. The President has made his decision," and what really impressed him was Matt's paper. Oddly enough, what was in the paper — that according to Paul, according to Henry, that impressed the President — was something that I had simply quoted from the Washington Post, that I almost didn't put it in there, because my paper was based on science.

But I did put in something rather hesitantly about the credibility of the President of the United States. And it was a quotation from an editorial in the Washington Post, which said something to this effect: "How can the President renounce plague, only to embrace botulism?" And I thought the meaning of that was, the credibility of the prior decision might be threatened, which was a very wise decision, by trying to equivocate on toxins. The president anyway renounced toxins categorically, whether made by living systems or by chemists, which was wise. My argument was based on other things. Military utility.

Altman: Now I know that most of your scientific life was spent at looking at molecules that could be broken and rejoined in various ways, or replication of DNA molecules. But in the last ten years or so, you've been very interested in Bdelloid rotifers, which are very small organisms that live in pools. And they have an interesting method of non-sexual evolution. Perhaps you can tell us something about that.

Meselson: I will. But I'll tell you something first about the other work I have tried to do. And that is, that it's completely dictated by that DNA molecule. I just looked at it and said, "Okay, replication."

Altman: Recombination.

Meselson: ... Recombination. How does it do that? I was interested in how does it express itself. The messenger RNA. We did an experiment showing that ribosomal RNA was completely stable. So you could argue that maybe it wasn't the message. Had to be something else...

Altman: ... if I may interject. Is it true that Sydney and the rest of you were sitting on a beach in California, and Sydney Brenner said, "I know what the answer is with messenger RNA. It's the magnesium ion."

Meselson: I wasn't there. This was after I left Cal Tech ...

Altman: Oh, I see.

Meselson: ... to go to propose to a young lady in New York...

Altman: Yes.

Meselson: And Sydney was on the beach with Francois.

Altman: Yes.

Meselson: And there was a young lady there. Not the one I was going to propose to. And Sydney then, according to Sydney jumped up and said "It must be the magnesium. The ribosomes were falling apart in the cesium chloride gradients. This stabilized them, and made the whole experience..."

A remarkable thing, by the way, about that experiment is, that after it was finished, Sydney wrote the first draft of the manuscript. I made a few changes in it. Francois probably did a lot. And then we waited for months to have it published, even though it was all done, so that colleagues, Jim Watson and his group at Harvard, could publish their paper on this subject, which was a completely different approach, in the same issue. Side by side. In those days, people did things like that! Waited! Can you imagine that happening today? The spirit of competitiveness ...

Altman: Oh, I can't imagine. (Laughs)

Meselson: It's hard to imagine. But there was a collegiality then that is largely weakened, I think.

But now about these Bdelloid rotifers. I taught genetics for many years — still do. And you sooner or later come to the point of saying certainly the reason that you can do genetic crosses is not so you can teach courses in genetics. In other words, why are there two sexes? That's why I began to read about it. And I realized that there was no general agreement. Because although you can imagine benefits of generating variability, genetic recombination — that is, the mixing of genes from father and mother to produce offspring — can give you a less fit mixture as well as a more fit mixture. And exactly how it will turn out depends on a lot of parameters that we cannot measure. Too complicated.

Furthermore, there are costs beyond that. Beyond the tearing apart of good gene combinations, namely males have to be fed — they take up eco-space. There's a cost to producing males. If species didn't have to produce males, if each female could produce the same number of offspring by her eggs simply developing, without benefit of fertilization, the reproductive potential of the female would be doubled. Because every one of the offspring would be a reproductive entity, whereas if there are equal numbers of males and females — boy, and I'm not talking about people only — but of all the sexual creatures, only half of the reproductive potential is realized. So there's a twofold cost. There's a huge cost. And there are ways of arguing this.

I wondered if there's some experimental way of dealing with this, and I asked a professor at Yale, who you knew well ...

Altman: Yes.

Meselson: G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a wonderful naturalist. And he said — he was probably 87 then and he was still working in his lab — he said, "Well, you know about the Bdelloid rotifers, don't you?" I'd never heard of them. I didn't have a proper biological education. But I got a jar of them from a Carolina Biological Supply for $2.50. These animals had been very accurately described by Leeuwenhoek in his letter to the Royal Society, 300 years ago, with his microscope, a single lens microscope. And no one in all that time, though many have studied these little creatures, has ever seen a male. Or a hermaphrodite. Or any vestigial male organs or parts. So that's already very unusual. There are 370 described species of these. They have succeeded very well in evolution. By using DNA clock estimates, it seems they've been around for maybe 50 or maybe even 100 million years. Evolving to the 370 — and there are probably more species yet to be found.

So if we knew why they escaped the fate of most things that become asexual — very often lizards, plants, all kinds of animal populations throw off an asexual variant. And it can thrive. Dandelions in North America are asexual. Those things that look like pollen — they don't really work. The seeds just develop into new plants without fertilization. And there are many — there's a lizard living in the southwestern desert, [of which] there are only females. But they produce eggs which give more lizards, and so on. We know from various lines of evidence that these asexual populations go extinct after a little while, a few thousand years, maybe.

And so the real question of why sex exists can be asked in a different way — namely, what goes wrong when you lose it? There must be a difference between these Bdelloid rotifers, and their near relatives, or any other sexual system. We've been investigating them. And we have a hypothesis. It is that the reason that sex exists is to keep genetic parasites, which inhabit our genomes, from unchecked replication that would overwhelm our genomes, and drive us to extinction.

There are certain aspects of sexual reproduction involving genetic recombination that keep these elements pretty much at bay. Not completely. Our genome has about 40 percent of this stuff, called retro-transposons. But if you lose sexual reproduction, then they can multiply unchecked. And eventually cause extinction of lineage. The Bdelloid rotifers don't have any of these. Everything else, virtually everything else, does. So our hypothesis — which could easily be wrong, but it's a very different kind of hypothesis — is that when sex is lost, that eventually that line will be driven to extinction by being overwhelmed with its own genetic parasites.

Altman: I hope that young scientists who are listening to this will be somewhat inspired by that and go on.

We talked a little bit about your science high school teacher, your interest in chemistry and the scientists, but you have told me that you were interested in chemistry even before you began doing a little bit of research on rare earths as a consequence of something that your science teacher suggested to you. Can you give us any example — or not an example, but an idea — of how you got interested in chemistry, or did it just occur to you one day that there were some things you could do with chemistry that were interesting?

Meselson: I was interested in science from as early as I can remember. I can put one date on it, because our family moved in 1938, when I was eight years old, from one house to another. And I know that I had a little laboratory in the earlier house when I was eight and younger. I know that I was building crystal sets. I was making little batteries with pieces of zinc and pieces of copper, stuck into lemons, and lighting up light bulbs with this little lemon battery kind of a thing.

Altman: That's terrific.

Meselson: And then there was a radio amateur, in the building next door to us, the house next door. I remember that I would spend a lot of time with him, building — helping him solder, and build radios and things like that. From my earliest years, I always was interested in science. And I think there's an important point there, too. Clearly, little kids that young don't know anything about prizes or prestige or interviews, like this one. They just — for some reason they love it. So that it's just wrong to say that scientists do stuff because... maybe at a later age they get competitive and so on, but there's something that can happen much, much earlier, which is intrinsic. And I suppose this is true for music and art, and poetry — everything. That different people are attracted to different things.

Altman: Well, I think that's quite true. I haven't heard many people saying they were interested in scientists as young an age as you were, but a lot of people are. And I must say myself, I've been asked frequently about prizes and things like that, and I have nothing but discouraging words for people about that. If you think about a prize, you might as well give it up and do something else. Or put your own money in a prize, and give it to yourself. That's the end of your career, as far as I'm concerned.

Meselson: Yes.

Altman: But there are a lot of people out there and certainly in newspapers and magazines these days you can read a lot about science, which you could do before, let's say, 1960.

Meselson: Some papers, though, have canceled their science pages.

Altman: I didn't know that.

Meselson: The New York Times still has one. But a lot of newspapers that used to have a regular weekly science page have abandoned it.

Altman: Because nobody reads them?

Meselson: I don't know why. I guess it must have something to do with the advertising, and the economics. Because that's what newspapers have to do.

Altman: But in any case, there is a lot more science out there.

Meselson: You know, there are maybe not as many science role models out there. When we...when we were growing up there was Einstein, there were all kinds of other physicists who we admired enormously. Boer. There were great chemists: Linus Pauling, who we admired enormously. Today I don't think you could make such a list, could you? High school students would know those names and regard them as role models.

Altman: I think you're right about that, and that's partly because of the proliferation of the media in all events. At Yale, about 20 years ago or so, Jim Watson came to give a lecture, and he was absolutely mobbed afterwards — not necessarily by Yale students, but by the general public, in terms of getting his autograph. And I teach a first-year course in introduction to biology, and at that time, 80 to 90 percent of the class had read his book about the discovery of DNA. I asked about that again this fall, and maybe five percent of the class had read the book. So even Jim is disappearing as a role model. But I think aside from him and Francis Crick, who never made a public image out of himself, there are very few people at the moment. I think you're right about that.

But let's say somebody does have an intrinsic interest in the science, aside from the fact that we can say, as you said before, that one should do whatever you got a great deal of satisfaction out of — and I agree with that, too. What else can we tell these people at the moment? That they're going to change humanity in the way you're suggesting? That they're going to understand things that nobody else has understood before?

Meselson: A very privileged few of them will. Most of them of course will not. And there are just too many people out there and you're very fortunate when you can make a great discovery, or any kind of a discovery. It's a special tingle. I don't think there's any generalization that you can say to people. Leo Szilard did have one piece of advice, which was that whatever you're doing, whatever it may be, every several years, whether it's seven, or...stop it. Or go away. Or at least depart from what you're doing. This is for scientists.

Altman: He hardly did anything else.

Meselson: Something else. That's right. And ask yourself, get some distance, and ask yourself what you really think you should be doing. Look back on — see who you've become. See what you have become in the years since you last did something like that. If you can afford to that, sabbaticals are supposed to give us academics that opportunity. I think that's, although a minor prescription, it's a useful thing to do.

Altman: Thinking about what you are and what you've become is an essential part of one's being. Maybe other people may not think that.

Meselson: Who said the unexamined life is not worth living? I think it was Socrates who said it, but I'm not sure. We mustn't broadcast this exhibit of ignorance.

Altman: We can go on, but I've covered most of the things that I want to ask about. I don't know if there's something that you want to talk about now at the moment?

Meselson: I think we all value democracy as the system that can provide an atmosphere of free inquiry. But there's a hidden assumption, and that is that the people who do the voting in the democracy cherish those values. That comes out of education. I don't know that we are regarding our education as importantly as we should. Not in the sense of training people in skills, to be competitive in the world economy — important as though that is — but rather in the basic common values. How many students read John Locke? Or know anything about the Federalist Papers? Or anything about the general idea on which democracy has to be based? I worry that as our system gets older, like any system, it has to refresh itself — even the human body it ages, and systems age. They become dysfunctional. Some last a long time. The Roman Empire did for 1000 years. But I think I see signs that our educational system is hampering our drawing the benefits out of the Democratic system. So I get very discouraged that thinking that there might be places where you're not allowed to teach evolution. That's an extreme case of course.

Altman: But it's home — in the U.S....

Meselson: I'm afraid so. It seems to be kind of recrudescence of some very primitive attitudes. Now that's not surprising. Our brains haven't changed just because years have passed. We're still pretty much the same genetic design. So I think we have to be very careful to preserve and enhance a liberal education. And if we don't do it in the high schools, the last chance is the colleges, and maybe that's too late already. People want a specialized education. But there's really something missing in our education system.

Altman: Well, as other people have done, let me congratulate you once again on winning a Lasker award. And as someone who was one of your students at one time, that goes at least double for me.

Meselson: What a pleasure, Sid, to be with you.