The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Order, Meaning, and Free Will in Modern Medical Science

The Faith of Biology & the Biology of Faith

The Columbia Series in Science and Religion

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS   NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press

Paberback edition, 2013

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52905-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pollack, Robert, 1940–

The faith of biology & the biology of faith : order, meaning, and free will in modern medical science / Robert Pollack.

      p. cm.—(The Columbia series in science and religion)

Originally published: C2000. With new pref.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-11506-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-11507-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-52905-1 (e-book)

1. Judaism and science.  2. Meaning (Philosophy)—Religious aspects.  3. Natural selection.  4. Free will and determinism.  5. Genetics—Moral and ethical aspects.  I. Title.  II. Title: Faith of biology and the biology of faith.

BM538.S3P65 2013

296.3'75—dc23

2012027359

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Title page: Jerusalem and a cell are both busy places. Jerusalem’s Old City and the cell’s nucleus respectively codify and direct the comings and goings of people and molecules.

Title page illustration by Amy Pollack

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The Columbia Series in Science and Religion

The Columbia Series in Science and Religion is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR) at Columbia University. It is a forum for the examination of issues that lie at the boundary of these two complementary ways of comprehending the world and our place in it. By examining the intersections between one or more of the sciences and one or more religions, the CSSR hopes to stimulate dialogue and encourage understanding.

Robert Pollack

The Faith of Biology & the Biology of Faith

B. Alan Wallace, ed.

Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground

Lisa Sideris

Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theory, and Natural Selection: Suffering and Responsibility

Wayne Proudfoot, ed.

William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience

Mortimer Ostow

Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion

B. Alan Wallace

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

Philip Clayton and Jim Schaal, editors

Practicing Science, Living Faith: Interviews with Twelve Scientists

B. Alan Wallace

Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness

Pier Luigi Luisi, with the assistance of Zara Houshmand

Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality

B. Alan Wallace

Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity

For Amy

Contents

Preface to the 2013 Paperback Edition

Preface

Acknowledgments

Postscript

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the 2013 Paperback Edition

THE FAITH OF Biology & The Biology of Faith first appeared in 2000 and, in writing this introduction to the new paperback edition, I was pleased to find that its arguments are no less timely a decade, a recession, and three wars later. These arguments may be summarized in one sentence: scientists cannot escape personal responsibility for their actions by appealing either to faith in their own good intentions or to social expressions of that faith within science, that is, to peer-review.

I learned this the hard way when I was first starting out as a scientist, running a laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, under the directorship of James D. Watson. Let me tell that story from the beginning. Here is a brief quote from an unpublished talk I gave at the opening of the Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1988:

From the beginning I have known the lab to be a place of education as well as research. In fact, that’s how the unique moment in the 1970s came to pass, when molecular biologists all over the world voluntarily agreed to suspend certain experiments in gene splicing. When I first came to the lab it was at Joe Sambrook’s invitation, to give a class in the 1969 summer course on culturing mammalian cells, and to chair a session of the very first Tumor Virus Meeting later that summer.¹

The rest of the story is this: a few summers later, in 1971, I was leading a course on tumor viruses at Cold Spring Harbor when I learned from one of Stanford biochemist Paul Berg’s students attending my course that he was about to construct a recombinant DNA including the transforming gene of the tumor virus SV40, and planned to insert that sequence into the bacterial virus Lambda in order to grow it in large quantitities. Lambda’s natural home is the gut bacterium E. coli, so this experimental protocol seemed to me capable of generating a recombinant DNA molecule from a tumor virus that would live in the genome of a bacterium that lived in the gut, and therefore create a new agent with a novel, unpredictable, and possibly malignant infectivity. That was troubling. It was a worry that could be dealt with by experimentation, so I called him in California and asked him if he was worried, too.

He wasn’t, but nor was he able to answer my concerns, so he did the honorable thing and helped the National Institutes of Health to set up the experiments to test whether our worries were grounded. I’m pleased to say the experiments absolved SV40 recombinant molecules of the novel danger I had imagined. That makes a nice story for some people, but not for others. In his biography of Jim Watson, Victor McElheny gives his narration of this incident under the heading Robert Pollack Has a Fit.²

My call led to the Asilomar conferences, which in turn led to the formation of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee or RAC, a model of bioethics at work.³ But as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes might have noted, there’s something funny going on: there’s a dog that has not barked. That is, I called Paul Berg in 1971, more than four decades ago, and since then there have been no reports I’ve seen of any scientist, in any field, precipitating an internal moratorium on any line of active basic research, ever. Why not?

Two reasons come to mind, at this long remove from those days. First, I had been close enough to the work to understand it and its implications more fully than most observers might have been, but not so close nor so involved with it that my own lab would be immediately impacted by my call. Not right away perhaps, but before I gave my grants back to the NIH in the mid-1990s, I had plenty of time to think about the additional work I had given everyone, including myself. And second, I was aware that fears—my own fears and the fears of others around me—were expected to be kept from the daily discourse of the lab, and even then I knew that was wrong.

What, then, has kept other scientists from being open about their own fears? Are they simply fearless? A quote from Albert Einstein may help us to see another explanation: scientists have a faith all their own.

Now even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and tendencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. [my italics]. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.⁴

Einstein wrote of his belief that no scientist lacked his profound religion of science for a symposium on science, technology and religion held at the Jewish Theological Seminary in September 1940, the month and year of my own birth. It was then quickly published across the street, in the November 1940 issue of the Union Review by the students of the Union Theological Seminary, under Paul Tillich’s guidance.

Einstein’s essay and Tillich’s response both were published in the season of the Blitzkrieg’s greatest successes. Surely Einstein knew by then that if he was right in his judgment—that no serious scientist failed to share his faith in science—then that faith in science was extremely dangerous in and of itself. By then a scientifically-designed, medically-authorized, and technologically-superb program designed to extinguish the lives of anyone who could claim at least one Jewish grandparent had already assured the deaths of his family at the hands of, among many other criminals, a considerable number of genuine scientists, many of whom happily burned his books.

Here is a much larger context for my question than my own narrative: how could Einstein have kept these facts from himself when he wrote this paper? And if he, the greatest mind of the twentieth century, was capable of such strong faith in the goodness and purity of science even in the face of such astonishing evidence, what self-awareness can the rest of us hope to have?

Meaning, Denial, and Repression

Every living person needs to make some sense of life to give it some meaning. In the past century scientists and doctors have made four interlocking discoveries that have made the task of finding meaning much more difficult. The oldest discovery has had the deepest impact: DNA-based natural selection generates life in all its diversity and orderliness—including a scientist with a brain of great capacity to understand life’s structures and functions—while, by itself, natural selection contains no element of design nor purpose.

The second discovery concerns the mind. Scientists have shown that the conscious mind is the product of cells in the brain, an expression of the capacity of genes in these brain cells to respond to the outside world as well as to selectively recall memories of earlier interactions with it. Third, they have found that the brain that does this is a tissue made of cells like any other tissue, albeit one that can imagine it has—or is—an ineffable, nonmaterial soul. And most painful of all, they have found that the entropic tendency of large and complicated structures to degrade into smaller ones assures that death—including the death of the inner voice we each hear when there is no one else in the room—is irreversible.

Together these discoveries paint a coherent and clear picture of the living world and of our place in it that is notable for its complete lack of meaning. Everyone who learns of these discoveries has the double task of finding a way to accept them, despite their cumulative power to exclude design and purpose from the living world, and of helping to assure that the science of the future will be made by men and women who have found meaning in their lives despite these facts of nature.

It has not been easy. Scientists cannot simply avoid thinking about these discoveries, as so many of the rest of us do. Many aspects of today’s medicine are based on precisely these discoveries, which is why medicine has come to reject any larger meaning or purpose to life beyond the workings of genes and the capricious choices of natural selection. Yet one must—or at least I think one must—see life as more meaningful than that if one is to lead a life worth living. The alternative is denial. This is the unconscious rejection of one or all of these facts of life. Denial allows one to avoid confronting one’s fears, but it can lead to fateful errors of judgment.

In Einstein’s case perhaps there would have been no way to save his family, even if