During the time of the investigation—a nightmare for him, his family, and his laboratory—Gallo kept doing science and somehow managed to regenerate energy and enthusiasm with which to pursue new ideas. Indeed, during the 1980s his was the most referenced scientific laboratory in the world, and it remained, even in the times of greatest controversy, incomparably productive. “He’s incredibly resilient,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “If you look at the stress and the strain Bob went through over these several years when he was literally under a microscope virtually every day, every week, I think it would have worn down and perhaps broken a lesser spirit.”
Gallo’s temperament—fiery, exuberant, competitive—fuels his accomplishments even as it inflames criticism. Luc Montagnier, the French codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, stands in stark contrast to Gallo: less controversial, less intense, and less imaginative. To see the two scientists together in person is to see the range of temperaments in science and to witness the opposite ends of exuberance: Gallo gesticulates and laughs a lot, is quick, warm, almost frighteningly intuitive, fast-talking, irritable, mercurial, and fiercely caught up in the topic at hand, whether it is molecular biology or the hills of Rome. Montagnier, on the other hand, is cool, cerebral, distant, and difficult to engage. “We are not alike in our styles, as people or as scientists,” Gallo has written in his memoir, Virus Hunting: “He is quiet, almost formal, holding his own counsel when competing ideas are being presented.… I love the rough-and-tumble of intellectual debate.” Gallo is, in fact, far more outspoken than many other scientists about the intense rivalries that exist in science. “It is highly competitive in science,” he says. “I cannot tell you that it is more than in business, or more than in politics, but it is more than in some fields, without doubt.… Why do we go into it? You think you are good enough to solve problems of nature.”
Some combination of competitiveness and natural ebullience kept Gallo and his laboratory going during the years of government investigation, testimony, and innuendo. His exuberance and vivacity are legendary. One scientist, who trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Gallo’s lab, said that the two years he spent there were the most exciting of his life and that Gallo’s vitality was the uniting force: “He does an excellent job of organizing such a large group of people with diverse personalities, backgrounds, and scientific interests into a cohesive team, and he’s able to maintain the energy of the lab via his own personal energy.” Gallo’s energy and enthusiasm may have ebbed and flowed during the worst years, but they seem always to have come back to revitalize not only him but those in his laboratory. He was asked once by a New York Times reporter whether he had been “humbled” by the bruising investigation, an experience that would have brought anyone else to his knees. He responded, “No. Empathetic is a better word: I’m more understanding of other people’s hurts and problems. Humbled? No. You get too humble, you lose all your confidence, and then you can’t think about science.”
Exuberance, according to Gallo, is in part the “capacity to reemerge, not seeing all the reasons why one should not”; it helps to buffer one against hurt and setback. “If I’m down,” he says, “exuberance makes it more likely that I’ll surely get up and it will be better. There are many ways one can select to avoid hurt, and [I] seem prone to use exuberance.” Its other advantages, he believes, are “to make life and work ever so much more fun and to overcome the fear of failure; i.e., to take risks.” The disadvantages of exuberance, on the other hand, are that “if one is unaware of it, the possibilities for error increase”; and, he adds, “the appearance of too much joy might solicit some jealousy and even hatred.”
In a 1990 Science interview, Gallo gave a pell-mell sense of the excitement and competitive fervor in his lab during the first flush of AIDS research in the 1980s: “You know, the juices flow, right? Your mind is thinking and moving and you’re saying: ‘What’s the next question?’ We discover HIV goes to the brain—we publish it. What’s the target in the brain? Microglial cells—we publish it first. How much does this correlate with the dementia in the brain? We tried to establish that. Is the virus present in plasma? We found it was.… When is the virus expressed?.… What about the genes of the virus: what are their functions? Could we make the blood test better? Can we make an antigen test? We tried, we failed.… Those were the things that were on my mind: get rid of the goddamned virus after you figure out how it works.”
Like James Watson’s, Gallo’s are not the words of a dispassionate scientist: curiosity and exuberance drive the chase; competition speeds it onward. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given his temperament, Gallo once remarked, “I have to say that I was never overwhelmed with the need to pipette. I think there are people who need it for the serenity of it all. I am not one who feels this is necessarily a great pleasure.” No one has ever accused Gallo of taking life or science at a leisurely pace, and, significantly, the citations for both of his Lasker Awards allude to the pace he set for other scientists. The commendation for the 1982 Lasker Award, given for basic medical research, ends: “To Dr. Gallo for his tenacious and thorough investigations leading to the discovery of the human T-cell leukemia virus and carrying resounding implications that will reshape approaches to cancer much sooner than scientists had expected or humanity had hoped.” The 1986 Lasker Award for clinical research acknowledged not only his fundamental scientific contributions, but his essential and energetic leadership: “To a desperate moment of public alarm when physicians lacked any means of treating AIDS patients, Dr. Gallo brought clarity of vision and an invigorating spirit of inquiry that has set a pace for research unprecedented in medical history.”
In introducing Gallo at a winter science meeting in Colorado, the Nobel laureate Howard Temin gave the most compelling description of Gallo’s temperament, a temperament that, he suggests, is an exuberant life force not far removed from nature itself. Temin said, “I am here only to introduce the keynote speaker. I would like to do it with a very short and simple story. One fine day, when I was a graduate student with Max Delbrück [who received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on bacteriophages], a few of us were walking with Max among the pine trees. Suddenly one young but famous (I won’t say his name) scientist stopped and asked Max this question: ‘Max, why is it that Josh Lederberg [also a Nobel laureate, for his work in bacterial genetics] makes so many discoveries when, in fact, we are so much smarter?’ Delbrück paused, looked up at the trees, and then responded: ‘Because Josh was born much closer to nature.’ With that I introduce Bob Gallo.”
Like James Watson, Bob Gallo is simultaneously intuitive and analytical, fiercely competitive, often controversial, and at heart a romantic. Both were influenced when young by the idealistic but driven scientists portrayed in Arrowsmith and Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters. (Gallo says that when he was young, “I saw science as another kind of religion, certainly one that would yield more predictable results if one served it faithfully.” Arrowsmith and Microbe Hunters encouraged this view. Watson says, “I read the books at the same time. I got very excited. They made you want to be a scientist.”) Both men love gossip, science, and competition. Both are mercurial and can be intemperate and abrasive; both are exceptionally kind and generous to their friends, impatient, and slow to muzzle their impulses. They are, above all, passionately engaged in science; exuberance is elemental to this and to their interactions with other scientists. They are keen to engage in vehement debate and criticism, and feel strongly that the best way to learn is by arguing with someone who will point out the flaws in an experiment, or the Achilles’ heel in an idea.
Watson believes that he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA before their competitors at least in part because no one at Caltech would confront Linus Pauling about his basic error in chemistry and because Rosalind Franklin was isolated from colleagues who might otherwise have given her a different perspective on her crystallography studies. A good scientist, says Crick
, “values criticism almost higher than friendship.” This is a belief that requires a thick hide and a resilient nature, both of which are aided by an exuberant temperament. Exuberance makes the reaching out to other scientists more likely and makes the rebound from criticism into enthusiasm a near certainty.
The only person I know, scientist or otherwise, who is usually referred to by his peers as a true genius is Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist who received the Nobel Prize for his research on the “slow viruses” (or, as most now believe, prions) responsible for degenerative diseases of the brain. Gajdusek seems always to have loved science and to have been unrestrainedly exuberant. His father, an immigrant butcher in Yonkers, New York, exerted a powerful emotional influence—he had, writes Gajdusek, a “temperament for laughter and ribald fun, lust for life in work and play, music, song, dance and food, and above all, conversation”—and his mother’s love of folklore and literature fostered a lifelong passion for studying other cultures and the arts. Before he and his brother had learned to read, they were listening to Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Plutarch, and Virgil. As a child he read Scandinavian literature as well as the biographies of scientists such as Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur. Like Watson and Gallo, Gajdusek was influenced by Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, although his enthusiasm for the book took him further: he stenciled the names of de Kruif’s microbiologists—Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani, Pasteur, Koch, Reed, Ehrlich—on the steps leading up to his attic chemistry lab, where they have remained for more than fifty years.
Like many scientists, Gajdusek knew from the time he was young that he wanted to study nature. “As a boy of five,” he said, “I wandered through gardens, fields and woods with my mother’s entomologist-sister, Tante Irene, as we overturned rocks and sought to find how many different plant and animal species of previously hidden life lay before us. We cut open galls to find insects responsible for the tumors.… In petri dishes we watched some leaf-eating insects succumb to insecticide poison while others survived.” It was his aunt who introduced him to the pleasures of studying the natural world. She was, he says, the dominant influence on his “intellectual curiosity and playful enthusiasm.… She made my child’s curiosity into a game of investigation and enquiry, and had me doing experiments just after I was a toddler, not just collecting and classifying insects. With passionate zeal she showed me the beauty in complex life cycles of insects in decaying flesh and vegetation, and even in the murders accomplished by ichneumon flies by implanting their eggs into their victims, and in the cannibalism of the praying mantis after mating … it was she herself who instilled into me the quest for beauty in nature and taught me to live creatively.”
Gajdusek received his medical degree from Harvard in 1946 and set forth on a lifetime of diverse interests and remarkable work. He studied the cultures of the Hopi, Navajo, and Mexican Indians; researched scurvy, bubonic plague, and rabies in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey; organized expeditions to the valleys of the Himalaya; and treated diseases in the jungles of South America and the swamps and highlands of Papua New Guinea and Malaysia. Along the way he learned German, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovak, several of the more than seven hundred languages of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea, and Persian, Bahasa Indonesian, and Dutch. In 1954 he went to Australia to do basic and clinical research in immunology and virology in Australian Aboriginal and New Guinean populations.
Gajdusek was impatient and restless: “Everything he possessed spoke of his being peripatetic,” said one colleague. “Even standing still, he seemed to be on the move, with top tilted forward, in the breathless posture of someone who never had time enough to get where he had to be.” It was while living among the Fore, a Stone Age people of New Guinea, that he and another scientist, Vincent Zigas, discovered kuru, a progressive degenerative brain disease characterized by shivering, pathological laughter, loss of coordination, and, invariably, death.
Kuru had killed thirty thousand people, mostly women and children, in the cannibal population living in the highlands of the central ranges of eastern New Guinea. The pattern of deaths was familial but not genetic, and it took Gajdusek and his colleagues more than five years of tracking down possible causes and studying autopsied brains (which they showed to be “spongiform,” or full of holes) to establish that the infectious agent was a previously unknown “slow virus” (later thought to be a prion). Kuru, they demonstrated, was transmitted, often to infants and children, through the ritual eating of the brains of dead relatives. Gajdusek concluded that its transmission took place not just through the eating of the infected brains, but also through the ritual butchery of the dead body. This was carried out by women, who used sharp bamboo instruments while holding their infants on their laps or feeding them. The steaming of body organs was not sufficient to kill the infectious agent and, because the dead were eaten only by close family members, the transmission of the disease followed a familial pattern. Women and children, who ate the brains of the deceased, were far more likely than the men to die of kuru.
Gajdusek’s research, which demonstrated beyond doubt the link between the Fore mortuary rituals and kuru, effectively eliminated both the cannibalism practices and kuru. It also led to entirely new ways of understanding the origins and dissemination of infectious diseases. He and his colleagues found that other deadly brain diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”), were caused by similar agents. His research, according to the Nobel Committee, represented an “extraordinarily fundamental advance in human neurology and in mammalian biology and microbiology.”
Gajdusek has been described by one of his colleagues as unique in medicine, a man “who combines the intelligence of a near genius with the adventurous spirit of a privateer.” This description is as apt for him at the age of eighty as it was when he was a young scientist. Gajdusek retains a level of enthusiasm and adventurousness exhausting to anyone around him. He is legendary for his rapid, nonstop, and expansive monologues. My husband and I once jotted down as many topics as we could remember from a dinner conversation we had had with him. A very partial list included immunology, love, the French, the Americans, the Dutch, suicide, Puritanism and sex, schizophrenia, rat poison, molecular biology, tuberculosis, the FBI, the idiocy of American politics, Melville, Russian explorers, Plato, anthropology, mad cow disease, New Guinea boys, courage, moods, navigation, linguistics, and meadow mice. Listening to Carleton and remaining indifferent is like staying calm while taking cocaine and listening to Fats Waller. It can’t be done. George Klein, a friend and colleague of Gajdusek from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, recounts that when Carleton received the Nobel Prize he “exceeded the sacred forty-five-minute limit of the Nobel lecture without the slightest embarrassment, speaking as he did for two hours and ruining the whole afternoon’s schedule. Strangely enough, no worried organizer tried to intervene.… Whatever had enticed you to attend the lecture, you had no reason to regret coming.” People sat in the aisles, mesmerized.
When I asked Gajdusek for his thoughts about exuberance, he replied that, in his view, it was a concept “closely related to manic-depressive psychosis,” and that the word had been attached to him often, once defined as “outrageous ardor.” Exuberance, he said, is “seductive and closely linked to maturation or the stimulation of motivation. It may engender devotion and love. Like everything associated with seduction, it may be viewed as manipulative and coercive by those fearful of being the subject of desire.” Society, he feels, is ambivalent about exuberance and often inhibits its expression. “Enthusiasm, ardor, exuberance are ways of expressing desire, of using it. We should be proud of our ability to do so—our society would make us ashamed.”
To be exuberant, maintains Gajdusek, “is to be considered pas sérieux—light-headed and flighty!” As a result, exuberance “demands a reverse to be respected and admired—namely withdrawal and contemplation, silent thought. Thus, it is akin to cyclothymia in its necessary swings and reversal.… To have force, affect, mean
ing, requires depth, and that requires subdued colors and sounds and cyclothymia. Manic depression would be the model.… Not to show [exuberance] suggests ennui but to have too much is madness!” Surely, he said, exuberance is “linked to life and youth! Those who lack it inhibit its expression.”
Exuberance, Gajdusek emphasizes, is infectious: “I often radiate it and from radiators, such as me, it is contagious, communicable.… I have recognized that when in my scientific career I have managed to ignite an intense interest and enthusiastic striving for a goal in myself and my coworkers, our team was living ‘high,’ almost hypomanically, obsessed with our problem and our activity. The feeling was almost like that of piloerection of the scalp with awe or wonder, the thrill of quest.” (This is confirmed by the Australian virologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, who has said that “Gajdusek is quite manically energetic when his enthusiasm is roused.”)
Exuberance, for Gajdusek, is associated with fun, play, and creativity. “Creative persons,” he told me, “are usually exuberant and never bored. Ennui and noncreativity and plodding exactitude go hand in hand with nonexuberance and fear of originality and change and the untried.” Elsewhere, he remarked to a group of scientists who were studying creativity, “I play with ideas.… I’m rather confused by having a subject of ‘creativity,’ and then launching off into a discussion of what, in my opinion, is a very late stage of creative research, after a great deal of creativity is finished—namely, the testing, be it confirmatory or disconfirmatory, of a specific hypothesis. There was little mention of fun and play; these are the maxims on the wall for my forty years in the laboratory; that’s all we’ve ever done, to have fun and play, and all we ever will do.” A few years ago, when he was approaching eighty, Gajdusek wrote to my husband in the same spirit: “I look on my current joyful years packed with play and fun and joy and adventure as bonus years little expected.” To me he added, “I can never ‘finish’! It is fun. I amaze myself.”