Syntheses and Their Communication: The Case of Carleton Gajdusek
Sometime in the spring of 1996, I was seated at Countway, the Harvard Medical Library, conducting research for a book that I was writing. One of the librarians sidled over to me and said, “Dr. Gardner, I think you should see this.” He showed me a news clipping about Carleton Gajdusek, the subject of the biography that I was writing, having just been arrested for pedophilia. Carleton was accused of having sexual relations with one of the numerous boys that he had adopted from islands in the South Pacific. As it turned out, Carleton was subsequently convicted of pedophilia and then, under a plea bargain, was eventually allowed to leave the United States. He spent his remaining days at various sites in Europe, dying in Norway in 2008.
Carleton was a brilliant polymath, known across the scientific community. In the 1950s, travelling in the South Pacific, he had learned about kuru, a neurological disease that was apparently causing the death of many women and children. Carleton caried out a series of careful studies of the brains of the deceased, which included feeding the neural tissue of the deceased to chimpanzees at the National Institutes of Health. He was ultimately able to demonstrate that this tissue contained slow growing viruses, which are now called prions—misfolded proteins that can trigger neural tissue to function abnormally. For this and related work, Carleton shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1976.
But it was for a different reason that I was working on a biography of Carleton Gajdusek. I had recently written a book about 7 exceptionally creative individuals (Creating Minds) and a complementary volume about 11 outstanding leaders (Leading Minds). And I had now been given the opportunity to write about the individual known to me personally who had the most extraordinary mind that I’d encountered. As someone who had lived and worked in the Boston area with many family members in the New York area, and with the chance to travel to many sites, I had met many individuals with impressive minds. But because of his unusual breadth—and frankly, his dramatic biography—I had little difficulty in deciding to write a short biography of Carleton Gajdusek—and he readily gave me permission to do so.
Why did Carleton stand out in this group? I believe that he had four distinct facets:
He was a master. He had become a physician—indeed a pediatrician—but he spanned the disciplinary terrain from mathematics and physics, to biology, chemistry, and genetics. He was also an expert clinician, attending sensibly and sensitively to children and adults in dozens of nonliterate societies in New Guinea and other parts of the south seas.
He was a maker. I coined this term for an individual who transcends creativity in established domains. His newly configured domain was the physical, cognitive, and spiritual lives of the preliterate individuals who lived in these societies. He learned their languages; he collected their bone and blood samples; chronicled them speaking, singing, drawing, and dancing; and collected all sorts of artifacts in the manner of a cultural anthropologist (he was friendly with Margaret Mead, the doyenne of cultural anthropology of the era). He also preserved and documented what he had collected in over 100 journals, most of them initially handwritten, but now typed and available in a few libraries (including Countway).
He was an introspector. Not only had Carleton documented all he had seen and collected, he also wrote copiously about his own ideas, feelings, emotions, aspirations, and anxieties. He read voluminously, particularly in classical writings, with a particular focus on other introspective writers; and he seemed to be in implicit conversation with numerous great minds of the past, to twist the old quip “No unrecorded thought.”
He was an influencer. To be sure, there was nothing particularly alluring about his appearance—at least at the time that I knew him, when he was well into middle age. But he had an incredible ability to hold sway over people. He had a luminous personality, such that when in his presence, you inevitably were drawn to him, listened to him, and were persuaded by him. I often quipped that if you were sitting in an anonymous crowd, perhaps at a bus station, and Carleton came over and asked the crowd to walk with him for three blocks to help an injured party, the members of the crowd would simply rise and follow his bidding—a genuine pied piper!
Tiny examples:
When he won the Nobel Prize, he was expected to give a talk of 45 minutes. Carleton spoke nonstop for over two hours, and no one thought to call the clock on him.
I once flew to New York to visit him in his ancestral home. I listened while he talked nonstop for several hours. I finally interrupted him to ask if I could please go to the bathroom.
Larger examples: He was able to convince individuals of all ages and backgrounds to engage with him; and indeed, convinced over 50 young persons (mostly boys) from the South Pacific to leave their homes and families and become his adopted children in Maryland.
That, in a tiny nutshell, is why I find Carleton to be an extraordinary mind. Once he had been arrested, I weighed whether to complete the biography but decided I could not. One editor said to me, “Howard, if you elect to finish the biography with this new knowledge, it will take too much mood music.” Another editor advised me, “Howard, you can only complete the biography if you are completely truthful.” It’s a good thing that I did not complete the biography because, even now, we do not know the full story of Carleton’s adoptive family; and I never was able to find the appropriate mood music. For now, we need to rely on the wonderful portrait of Carleton given by his friend, George Klein, in a 1990 book Live Now; and to await the drafted, but not yet published, portrait by Carleton’s dedicated student and colleague, Robert Klitzman.
And what happened to my own musings about one extraordinary mind? With a book contract to fulfill, I pluralized the concept and wrote about four gifted individuals:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a master of traditional classical music
Sigmund Freud, a maker of a new field of psychology and psychiatric treatment
Virginia Woolf, an outstanding introspector in her fiction (and non-fiction) writing
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, an influencer who inspired millions of individuals in India and around the world
If you combine these four types, you get a sense of the extraordinary mind of Carleton Gajdusek. For details on my conclusions, see Extraordinary minds: Portraits of 4 Exceptional Individuals and an Examination of our own Extraordinariness.
At the time that I knew Carleton (roughly 1981-1998), I did not have a vivid sense of what it meant to be a synthesizer, nor did I think of myself explicitly with that descriptor. Nonetheless, in retrospect, it’s clear to me that he was a masterful, indeed an extraordinary, synthesizer. He had devoured many bodies of work, ranging from the physical and biological sciences (and he knew a lot about psychology and psychiatry), to philosophy, arts, and literature—certainly across the Western canon with generous forays into other literate cultures (China and Persia, for example).
But in addition, Carleton had unusual—possibly unique!—knowledge of so many facets of the lives and persons of many hundreds of individuals living across the dots of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Blessed with an extraordinary mind, he had essentially instant access to virtually all of these persons, cases, measurements, other bits of data, and could draw on them at will—I don’t recall his ever having to search for a name or a number! And that’s probably why he could mesmerize listeners—essentially listeners were given a peek into that uniquely well-stored body of information and were seeing the dots being connected—as Carleton connected the dots when he completed the long cycle from mysterious deaths due to kuru, to laboratory experiments with chimpanzees in a Bethesda laboratory.
And unlike the bards of old, this opulence of information was not restricted to the oral mode. Carleton wrote down his observations and his thoughts in those numerous journals. And in his spidery handwriting—legible, though barely—he was able to send long letters not only to luminaries around the world but even to curious fans and would-be biographers like me.
And yet—there is a yet! As far I can ascertain, Carleton was not able to record his conclusions about what he had learned and concluded into a legible form, and certainly not in the customary form of his era—a book or, like medical writer Lewis Thomas, a set of loosely-linked essays. No problem with journal articles: there’s a formula there, and he mastered it as well as any other benchtop scientist. But he was never able to write up what he had learned more broadly about human beings and human nature—not like the anthropologists Margaret Mead or Claude Levi-Strauss, both of whom he knew; not like his medical peers and friends, George Klein or Robert Klitzman, both of whom had written about him. And not like major science writer, Jared Diamond, also a student of his, and another scientist who studied the flora and fauna of the Pacific. In fact, I would not be surprised if he expected that one of his biographers—if not me—could ultimately accomplish that task.
In pondering Carleton’s life—what worked, what did not work—I’ve arrived at an insight.
First there is collecting information in whatever way it’s available (talking, watching, measuring, reading, then synthesizing): Carleton gets a straight A.
Then, there’s being able to synthesize the information in talks and conversation: Carleton gets a straight A.
Then there’ recording it in some kind of symbol system—probably most of it’s there in Carleton’s diaries, journals, talks, and letters: we can give him a distributed A-.
BUT and there is a but: The final link involved writing the synthesis in book or monographic form—as Charles Darwin famously did in The Origin of Species, and there’s where Carleton was lacking.
And so, the insight:
The very same individuals who can be brilliant oral synthesizers may lack the ability—or, to use a German word—the sitzfleisch (according to Wikipedia the ability to sit still for long periods of time) required to be truly comprehensive; the stamina to follow through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end. In short, to write a real book. Or, as another dictionary says of sitzfleisch, “staying power.”
This insight has helped me to solve another mystery: The Gift of Nathan Glazer.
Nat Glazer was a social scientist—largely qualitative as am I—who studied American society in depth and with considerable subtlety over the last seventy years. He was known and respected—but he was not as well-known as sociologist, David Riesman, or political scientist-turned-senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
What did Riesman and Moynihan (who were Glazer’s approximate contemporaries) have in common? They were both brilliant oral synthesizers. They could talk brilliantly and endlessly about innumerable topics—American and also from other parts of the world. They also gave effective lectures. And they had mastered respective literary forms—in Riesman’s case, letters (he is said to have the largest set of letters in the Harvard archives); in Moynihan’s case, memos (he wrote dozens of memos to American presidents, who actually read them and sometimes acted upon them.) They also wrote books, but these books were often essentially write-ups of lectures; and they left promised books that did not get completed.
Each of them is remembered chiefly for one book: Riesman, for The Lonely Crowd; Moynihan, for Beyond the Melting Pot. And in each case, Nat Glazer was the other author! Right after attending City College of New York, Glazer had gone into magazine and book publishing; and he himself had been trained by a master editor, Jason Epstein. What Glazer was able to do, according to my analysis, was to take the wonderful ideas and oral syntheses of Riesman and Moynihan respectively, add to them his own considerable insights, and convert them into Real Books, into syntheses of hundreds of pages. And since that is what I’ve sought to do over the decades, I have enormous regard for an individual who is able to do so—and modest enough to let others take the limelight.
Here's to syntheses of all sorts!