An incubation

CHRISTIAN B. ANFINSEN

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Christian B. Anfinsen, Jr.’37, is Chief of the Laboratory
of Chemical Biology, National Institute of Arthritis
and Metabolic Diseases, National Institutes of Health.
He was formerly Professor of Biological Chemistry at
Harvard Medical School. He holds the M.A. degree
from the University of Pennsylvania and the Ph.D. de-
gree from Harvard University, where he was a Univer-
sity Fellow. He has also been a Fellow of the American
Scandinavian Foundation, the American Cancer So-
ciety, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and he was a
Markle Scholar. In 1954 he received the Rockefeller
Foundation Public Service Award.
However turbulent the four years at Swarthmore
might have been, individual events have drifted
almost out of memory. College now comes to
mind as one large, amorphous blob of recollec-
tion. After some all-too-infrequent back-looking,
I was shocked to discover that my own time at
Swarthmore could really best be described as an
incubation. I was a rather embryonic animal in
1933, and I suspect that a fair proportion of my
classmates fell into the same category. In retro-
spect, I must thank the College for furnishing
just the right intellectual challenge, just enough
social activity, and a set of peers and teachers who
were sufficiently bright, brash, and even occasion-
ally cold-blooded to allow the egg to hatch with-
out crushing it, shell and all.

Swarthmore became a reality only after gradu-
ation, when the formerly unappreciated impact of
our college environment became obvious. The
Honors program, with its emphasis on a fair de-
gree of self-reliance and its excellent didactic con-
tent, made graduate study relatively clear sailing.
Perhaps most important was the influence of the
intellectually cosmopolitan student body. A class-
mate of mine (a Social Science type) frequently

CHRISTIAN B. ANFINSEN 151

enjoyed pointing out that whereas he and his
colleagues soaked up The Atlantic and The New
Republic like comic books, chemists and engi-
neers generally wallowed in Liberty magazine ex-
cept for occasional flights into the stratosphere of
Collier's.

Although his remarks were undoubtedly meant
to be biting, he really came quite close to hitting
the nail on the head. Most of us who majored in
the natural or exact sciences were, verbally and
socially, a pretty incoherent and clumsy lot, and
the glibness and glitter of the Humanities bunch
frequently made us feel uncomfortably drab. I
would imagine that our superficially more grace-
ful colleagues must also have been driven to a
certain degree of self-examination by the occa-
sional penetration of a minor pearl of scientific
logic, albeit uttered in sentences of limited com-
plexity. The process of discovering the world of
muance was continuous and cumulative, and we
were fortunate that it was ever so much more gen-
tle than, for example, the sort of exposure that
students in the fancier British universities receive.

I have belabored the matter of extracurricular
mind sharpening because I feel that, although
many colleges could equal Swarthmore in aca-
demic excellence (perhaps I should add “in the
thirties”), few could offer as strong a tradition of,
and respect for, scholarliness. Furthermore, the
152

student body automatically assumed this attitude.
It really was very difficult not to develop some ap-
preciation of the Leonardo da Vinci “complete
man” idea, unpromising though we were as raw

material.