The Price of Altruism Read online

  Just a few miles down the road, at Murray Hill, Bell Labs were shaping the way people live, work, and play. In the 1920s the first public demonstration of the fax, the invention of the synchronous-sound motion picture system, and the very first long-distance transmission of television images (of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York) had all been gloriously accomplished. Then came Karl Jansky and the amazing discovery that radio waves were being emitted from the center of the galaxy. In 1933 stereo signals were transmitted live from Philadelphia to the capital, and four years later Bell researchers won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of electron diffraction, laying the foundation for solid-state electronics. Then, in 1939, came the world’s first binary-digital computer, and, after the war, the transistor.

  It had been John Bardeen, together with Walter Brattain, who observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was greater than the input. With the help of William Shockley, also at Bell Labs, the three men had conceived and invented the transistor, for which they would win the Nobel Prize. George was already hard at work mapping germanium surfaces, grinding off the surface, reetching, polishing, then remap-ping. His experiments were yielding “unambiguous information,” he wrote, regarding the relative importance of surface treatment and bulk properties in determining transistor characteristics. This was electrical-engineering stuff, applied short-term research. He’d been contracted to work on long-term basic science in the Chemistry Department but was pursuing his own interests. Meanwhile Bardeen and Shockley wanted to know more about temperature effects on transistor properties, and had turned to George to do the measurements.47

  The photos that survive from 1948–50 are a picture of small town living: A lawn, an asphalt path, a dog, a two-storied redbrick home with hatched roof and shuttered windows; George in white pressed shirt with tie, Julia in colored dress and lipstick, Annamarie with a balloon, everyone smiling. A second daughter, Kathleen Barbara Elizabeth, had arrived in late summer of 1949. The war was over, the fifties just under way. The Prices were living the American dream.

  It was a lie. Beneath the facade, cracks had begun to emerge. George’s quirkiness had started off endearing, but his unorthodoxy was growing maddening. Julia didn’t like being called a “hippopotamus.” She didn’t like the idea of raising Annamarie and Kathleen in a Skinner box. George, for his part, was finding it hard to swallow her religion. “Better the girls become prostitutes than nuns,” he would goad her, pushing Julia into a cocoon of bitter silence.48 She was glum, he thought, and kept in her anger. When it came out in other places, its irrationality drove him up the wall. From the get-go it had been an unlikely union.

  George never performed Bardeen and Shockley’s experiments. When his old Manhattan Project boss, Sam Schwartz, invited him to come work with him again, this time in Minnesota, it didn’t take much to persuade an increasingly depressed Julia to pick up and leave. Maybe a change could save their marriage.

  Quietly the Prices settled in St. Paul in a quaint two-story cottage with a red roof and two small lawns up front and in the back. Just a short ride in the 1940 Chevy from Fortieth Avenue was the medical school, where George would now be working in the Radioisotope Lab at the Veterans Administration Hospital.49

  Minnesota was a powerhouse in medicine. Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, who arrived at just about the same time, was pioneering open-heart surgery, and together with Earl Bakken, a medical equipment repairman, would soon invent the pacemaker and incorporate Medtronic. Work on X-ray diagnosis, radiation therapy, diseases of the liver, “deep-freeze” surgery, and the new specialty, oncology, was considered the top in the country. By the mid-1950s a Minneapolis Star editorial referred to the med school “as one of the greatest in the world—in the opinion of some, the best anywhere.”50

  For George it was just like during the war, back to uranium fluorescence. But there was now also the Porphyrins, Tumors, and X-Ray group, which met biweekly in Schwartz’s office.

  Porphyrins are a group of organic pigments with four linked nitrogen-containing rings that bind to metals, including the heme in hemoglobin. What Schwartz had found was that by localizing the fluorescence of intravenously administered porphyrin in tumor tissues, surgeons could get an idea of the extent of the metastatic spread of a cancer. He also found that porphyrins could either enhance or protect against the effects of ionizing radiation, depending on the type of porphyrin and its dose. If they could figure out a way to administer the right dose with the right pigment, controlled radiation combined with hematoporphyrin could be used to get rid of tumors. The implications were obvious, and Merck and Company were hot on the trail. Once again George’s tinkering genius would be needed.51

  It was like Display all over again. Using a Schott BG 12 primary filter, about 4 mm thick, plus a 405 mu interference filter, George went searching for porphyrins in slices of rat liver tissue. The usual secondary filter was the Wratten No. 15 gelatin, sometimes supplanted by a Corning didymium glass, Color Specification No. 1-60 (Glass No. 5120), to increase red-green contrast by removing yellow. His light source was an Osram HBO 200 mercury arc. The problem was that the fluorescence faded too quickly, so George constructed a slide-cooling system to reduce the rate of fading. He decided to try first a simple system in which rapid jets of air are cooled and dried by dry ice and then blown over and under the slide, with the microscope enclosed in a box to keep out moist room air. On occasion he’d take the girls to the lab to marvel at the sight of the mysterious freezing smokers.

  Preliminary results seemed promising when a second difficulty arose: Most animal tissues showed comparatively weak fluorescence, except when stained with fluorescent dyes called fluorochromes. This made it difficult to recognize cell types and to observe the exact localization of the porphyrin. So George developed special equipment by which a phase contrast image of contrasting color and smoothly controllable intensity could be combined with the fluorescence image. A beam splitter was used to combine the irradiating violet or ultraviolet light and the visible light of contrasting color, and the intensity of the visible light could be controlled by a variable transformer.52

  The problem had been solved, and Schwartz was ecstatic. George was “one of the most remarkable individuals” he had ever known, and the only person with whom he had worked who deserved to be called “a man of genius.”53

  A certain young man with porphyria

  Whose existence grew drearier and drearier.

  His agonized yells

  Were due to phorphyrinized cells

  And not psychosexual hysteria.54

  His relationship with Julia was unraveling. Religion, temperament, and now sex, his limerick made clear, placed them in universes squarely apart. The move to Minnesota had failed to save their marriage. He was growing edgy; she increasingly, and understandably, hurt. He had met another woman, and over the summer, another from Kansas City, named Jan.55 By the beginning of 1953 George left the cottage on Fortieth Street, saying good-bye to his two little girls. “This, I believe, automatically makes me owe you $20,” he wrote to his old friend Al, whose skepticism had been right all along.56

  George had come a long way from the leaky apartment on Ninety-fourth Street, where he and Edison and Alice had huddled together in the twenties and thirties to survive during the Depression. He had graduated with highest honors from a top university, worked on the Manhattan Project, married, started a family, and now separated. In a decade he had moved six times: from New York to Cambridge to Chicago and back, then to Morristown, then to Minnesota. Like a real-life Forrest Gump, he was present at every important juncture: the making of the bomb, the development of the transistor, the growth of modern medicine. Never at the center, he arrived to solve problems, winning admiration before disappearing like a ghost. Things that seemed to baffle everyone else came easily to him. But he was restless and unhappy. Maybe the people at the co-op had been right: Maybe he really was different from the rest.

  When
the Russians got their own bomb in the summer of 1949, the world seemed to change in an instant. There would not be years of a lag to enjoy. Russia had caught up and the Cold War had arrived. For the time being it was playing itself out in Asia, around the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, and in the development of hydrogen bombs. When Truman left the Oval Office in 1953 just as George was settling into a dingy student complex north of the university, and Stalin died two months later, it was anyone’s guess where the world was heading.57

  Meanwhile little Kathleen had contracted polio but was recovering. The doctors recommended blowing air into her brain, but, reading up on the subject at the medical library and at her bedside, Julia refused. Soon Kathleen was recovering. Since supply had been short, George was the only Price not to get his gamma globulin. Away from his family now, he had contracted the disease and was in a hospital bed, exhausted. Alice begged him to remember how much she loved him. Hoping to pick up her boy’s spirits, she wrote of a lavish banquet at the Waldorf thrown by her Japanese boarder Mr. Washio in honor of the imperial prince of Japan. It gave him little comfort. He was thirty-one years old. His future was uncertain. Depressed and alone, George Price was helplessly roaming.58

  John von Neumann (1903–1957)

  Warder Clyde Allee (1885–1955)

  Friendly Starfish, Selfish Games

  I am violently anti-Communist,” the man intoned in a low accented voice, “and a good deal more militaristic than most.” It was January 1955, Capitol Hill, and not a senator in the confirmation hearing room stirred. John von Neumann was going to be sworn in as a new member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and John von Neumann was a man to listen to.1

  The H-bomb was on everyone’s mind. Back in 1952 the “Ivy Mike” trial had destroyed the Enewetok atoll. It was official: The bomb was terrible and viable. But it would take years to build an arsenal, be massively expensive, and would have to be accomplished under a veil of complete secrecy. Still, in possession of a large stockpile, America would unequivocally rule the world. That is, if Russia didn’t have its own program too. If it did, the arsenals would cancel each other out, with the already costly expense and effort incurred. Should she “defect,” then, and build the arsenal, or “cooperate” and hold off? Clearly each side would prefer that no one stockpile, rather than both stockpiling for no net gain. But each side might also decide to build its H-bombs either in the hopes of gaining the upper hand or out of fear of being caught without them.

  It was a prisoner’s dilemma, and for von Neumann the solution was clear. The Soviets could not be trusted. To save itself and the world, America would need to wage a preventive war, to become, as Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews had called it earlier in the decade, vicious “aggressors for peace.” But when? Von Neumann was adamant. With the room hanging on his every word, he said: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”2

  Why was a mathematician being asked by the U.S. Senate whether and when to use the most destructive weapon in history? Surely he was one of the few people who had the knowledge to make the crucial calculations that would make or break the project. But the real reason was different. The H-bomb dilemma hinged on the mystery of human nature. It had been a quest that traveled through economics and biology. And John von Neumann, people said, had finally cracked the nut.

  The eighteenth century Scottish economist Adam Smith had a simple message to convey: Under certain conditions free economic competition will lead to the best allocation of society’s resources. It sounded like a paradox, but it was unequivocally true: Unfettered contest will by an “invisible hand” maximize society’s benefits. The more ruthless the competition, the greater the social good; individual selfishness leads to collective benefit and plenty.3

  By the time Thorstein Veblen arrived as a professor at the University of Chicago when it opened its gates in 1892, this economic worldview was referred to as “classical.” Welded now more strongly to the political theory of laissez-faire, Adam Smith’s legacy beckoned a new name. Veblen called it “neoclassical economics” and didn’t shy away from expressing his view: He absolutely hated it.4

  It was said of Veblen—born in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents—that taking one of his classes was like “undergoing a vivisection without anesthetic.” A notoriously bad teacher, he was also a formidable critic. The basic assumption that individuals pursuing their own self-interest necessarily promote the good of society was to him both insipid and false. Capitalism was leading to “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure.” Not only did this bring waste and inefficiency, it suppressed fundamental human instincts: acquisitiveness, workmanship, parenthood, and idle curiosity. Forms of social control could be used to reawaken them, but this could only be accomplished with the help of a broad science of human behavior. With its exclusive dependence on price theory, neoclassical economics was nothing but a narrow “hedonistic calculus.” Based on “immutable premises,” it had little to do with reality.5

  At Yale political economy was associated with social science, at Johns Hopkins with political science, and at Columbia with politics. Chicago was the first university in North America to create an independent department of economics. Veblen had long been kicked out of the university for impropriety; girls liked him, it was said, and he didn’t exactly object.6 Gradually, a worldview almost directly opposed to his own became dominant.

  “All talk of social control is nonsense,” Frank Knight was often heard saying in his deep, magisterial voice. The oldest of eleven children raised in religious orthodoxy in McLean County, Illinois, Knight had grown up to become a Chicago professor of economics and a notorious slayer of sacred cows. Clergy and medics were quacks, the institutions of social order imposters, the prevailing moral norms—slaves to fashion. Knight was suspicious of the political system and even more of politicians. “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.” In Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit he provided the first complete formulation of perfect competition—unfettered, unencumbered, uncontrolled. Perfect competition was important not because it was always most economically efficient, though it most certainly usually was. Perfect competition was important because it guaranteed individual freedom, and nothing—not the injustice of luck nor the trampling of acceptable standards of fairness—was more important than that.7

  The way Knight saw things, societies have five economic problems: How to decide which goods and services to produce and how much of them; how to organize the available productive forces and materials among the various lines of industry and coordinate their use; how to distribute the goods and services; how to bring consumption in line with production; and how to ensure continued economic growth and improvement of the social structure. All five of the problems involve making choices, and there are two alternative mechanisms for directing how such choices should be made: at one extreme, central planning based on the command principle, at the other—a free-market system with voluntary exchange. More and more people in the Economics Department at Chicago had fewer and fewer doubts about which was the superior system. Central planning inevitably became linked with political totalitarianism; free-market went hand in hand with democracy.8

  “The theory and teaching that there is a God is a lie.”

  The words hit Warder Clyde Allee on the head like an iron gavel hurled from a heavenless sky. He had not been prepared for this. There was silence in the lecture hall. He was confused, saddened. Most of all he was filled with a surge of pity. He felt sorry for the misguided man, his animal evolution professor, a controversial figure who would leave his post some years later on account of an ugly courtroom divorce. He had often heard of such people—infidels, atheists and that sort—but this was the first one he had met, and he planned to sh
ow him the error of his ways.9

  It was the fall of 1908, Hull Court, University of Chicago. Allee had arrived that summer from Indiana, a strapping, broad-faced twenty-three-year-old, his burly frame and callused hands signs of years of labor on the family farm. Balding and sporting round spectacles, he looked like an intellectual football player, which, in fact, he had been as an undergraduate at Earlham College. Warder’s father, John Wesley Allee, was the son of a Methodist minister from Parke County. When he fell in love with and married Mary Emily Newlin, whose forefathers had established the nearby Quaker settlement of Bloomingdale, he became a “convinced Friend,” but still took the family to the Methodist church from time to time. At eleven Warder was officially converted at a revival meeting. Earlham was the pride of the old Quaker settlements south of Lake Michigan, which had played a role in the Underground Railroad, sneaking black slaves on “Tracks to Freedom” into Canada in the mid-1800s. When he graduated from high school it was only natural that Warder enrolled, joining the football team and becoming a “Hustlin’ Quaker.”10

  Now he was at Chicago, a graduate student in the Zoology Department. The cloistered walkways, grass quads, and stone Gothic buildings were a far cry from the open fields and broad woodlands of Indiana where, as a boy, he had fallen in love with nature. Still, Oekologie had been a term invented by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel back in 1866 to designate the study of the relations of organisms to their environments, and Chicago was one of the few places in America where ecology could be studied. Warder had arrived a traditional believer. He was excited: Here he would study the nature God had instilled in all His creatures. Wide-eyed, he did not yet know that science would soon fix all that.