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Book Review : Isis, 78 (3): 462-463 (1987)


Robert Kanigel, Apprentice to Genius:  The Making of a
Scientific Dynasty.  xiv + 271 pp., index.
New York: Macmillan, 1986. $19.95

.fi
     Apprentice to Genius is a Joseph's coat of variegated
threads, a beguiling combination of sociological and scientific
scholarship, straight reporting and titillating voyeurism.
This helps communicate far more of the substance of neuropharmacology
than most of its readers would voluntarily ingest.  One must still be
on guard against taking the book as the last word on many
judiciable items of testimony, e.g. about competing claims for
priority.  The author shows every sign of earnest effort at
balance and fairness; but without personal depositions, we
cannot be certain how faithfully each protagonist is represented.

     The scientific dynasty of this book starts with Bernard
Brodie.  However, James Shannon is masterfully portrayed as the
Eminence Grise of the enterprise.  As a research director at New
York's Goldwater Hospital, and later as Director of the National
Institutes of Health, Shannon had the insight and organizational
acumen that launched Brodie and many of his followers, and
shaped the institutions that enabled their work.  The dynastic
mantle is not strictly primogenitive; but the lineage mainly
discussed passes to Julius Axelrod to Sol Snyder to Candace
Pert, who with many collaterals, have revolutionized our
understanding of the chemical basis of the nervous system and of
the drugs that influence it.  The scientific fascination and
practical importance of the field notwithstanding (e.g.
"Tylenol", and our best shots at understanding schizophrenia) ,
the dynastic work is not a Kuhnian revolution of conceptual
paradigm.  The individual steps of progress are remarkably
straightforward.  They comprise mainly the application of
analytical chemical methods to the distribution and metabolism
of substances that influence the nervous system.  The aggressive
mood of appeal to experiment at every opportunity -- don't be
afraid to be wrong some of the time, and by no means wait for
theoretical clarity -- is probably the central operational and
psychological theme.

     The warp that binds the weft of personality, institutional
setting, research strategy and scientific circumstance is the
mentorial relationship, from generation to generation.  That
relationship resembles family life as an exemplar of affection and
cooperation; like the family it may also harbor ambivalence,
intergenerational conflict, even exploitation and the bitterness
of divorce.  The competitive striving for individual recognition
is central to the incentive systems and the work opportunities
of science.  This is the main stressor in the interpersonal
relationships of scientists, and the more for saplings in the
shade of their academic progenitor.

     So here, Kanigel recites in rich detail how all the
generations of "apprentices to genius" acknowledge their
profound mutual debts, and how each has striven for particular
individual recognition.

     Why are scientific dynasties so successful? (Keep in mind
that we have not sampled the failures.  We particularly ignore
the distressing pathologies of fraud that are most likely to
arise where mentorial supervision of too large research groups
was inevitably superficial.)  With appropriate leadership the
young scientist may have the ideal incubator furnishing friendly
but unrelenting criticism, guidance in the development of taste
in the selection of research projects and in overarching
strategies and in problem solving methods.  How much the student
has to learn of discipline, integrity, optimism and
perseverance!  Ideally this is followed by strong encouragement
for ever increasing independence.  Such incubators also offer
untrammeled facilities, access to informal scientific
communication, knowhow in seeking funds.  When good taste and
success in the selection of young apprentices have been
demonstrated, they lead to a virtuous cycle of attracting the
best qualified candidates and in augmenting the mentor's
experience and skill in selecting from them.  Finally, the
apprentice will be educated and socialized in a like
responsibility towards the next following generation.  This is
sometimes mocked as a "Matthew effect" but it has been an
extraordinarily effective system of finding and nurturing the
best scientific talent.

     This picture does not clarify how the dynasty starts.
Bernard Brodie came out of nowhere.\"detail suppressed
He and many of his line were atypically late starters:  Brodie
was a high school dropout, a gambler and a boxer before discovering
his scientific bent.  Julius Axelrod first won his Ph.D. at age
43.  Sol Snyder's original career plan was the practice of
psychiatry: his boyhood talents were in music.  Candace Pert
hopped from school to school:  her first ambitions were in
English literature.

     For a work that borrows many arcane terms from the
professional journals there are rather few errors and
misspellings.  Some should be remarked to forfend a propagation
of errors.  Gobind Khorana is (like myself) a great admirer and
sometime collaborator, but not a scion, of Arthur Kornberg.  The
oft mentioned Roland Ciarnello is in fact Ciaranello.
L.G. Whitby came to Axelrod from Cambridge University, not the
Rockefeller University.

     Systematic scrutiny of the mentor apprentice relationship in
science was initiated by Harriet Zuckerman in her
"Scientific Elite".  Kanigel's flavorsome contribution
may now stimulate some ISIS readers to add to the
small body of equally informed and scholarly history
of contemporary science.  It will be quite an assignment to do
that and achieve so readable a book as well.
.br
.tl '''Joshua Lederberg      '


Joshua Lederberg is president of The Rockefeller University in
New York City, having previously served as professor of genetics
at the University of Wisconsin and at Stanford.  His filial debts
to Francis J. Ryan and Edward L. Tatum are recounted in a memoir
published in Nature, 324:627 (1986).