The Price of Altruism Read online

  And so, in the pages of Science, for all the world to see, he suggested six ways in which Soal could have cheated. Rejecting the peddled notion that parapsychology and science were compatible, he demanded “not 1000 experiments with 10 million trials and by 100 separate investigators giving total odds against chance of 101000 to 1.” What George Price wanted was “just one good experiment” one convincing experiment that didn’t have to be accepted “simply on a basis of faith in human honesty.” The essence of science was mechanism. The essence of magic was animism. Until Rhine and Soal could show a mechanism to explain their findings, George would not be impressed. And, he hoped, all thinking people, too, would withhold belief in such pabulum.8

  Who this George Price was no one quite knew, but he sure had excited a furor. In an exposé in Esquire, Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Darwin’s “bulldog,” called it “almost unique as a piece of bad manners.” Lambasting the author’s “fetish for facts” and his shamanlike belief in his “favorite metaphysical hypothesis,” Huxley churlishly apologized that the human mind wasn’t as tidy as the physicist’s “molecules.” Was the essence of science really mechanism and nothing more? “No date, no qualifications of any kind—just a flat statement of the Eternal Truth by direct wire from Mount Sinai to the University of Minnesota.” If Price was after repeatability and would not acknowledge ESP without it, then why acknowledge Bach or Shakespeare or Wordsworth? After all, such men had beaten all odds against chance, and even their brilliance couldn’t be summoned at a coin drop.9

  The muckraking writer Upton Sinclair, too, was unenlightened by George’s diatribe. Arriving in Chicago at the turn of the century, he had exclaimed: “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair, and I’m here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement!” His classic study of the corruption of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, had stunned America and won him a Pulitzer Prize. But Sinclair himself was most stunned by his wife’s clairvoyant abilities, powers that became apparent when she sensed Jack London’s impending suicide from afar. In Mental Radio from 1929, he and his wife described three hundred carefully controlled experiments in which she had guessed what doodle he had placed in an envelope in another room. The book was such a hit that it played a role in Duke University’s creation of Rhine’s department, and even received a preface in its German edition from Albert Einstein. Now nearly an octogenarian, Sinclair wrote to Price excitedly challenging him to explain that!10

  Thousands of readers who had seen the write-up in the New York Times, wrote to express their thanks, advice, or outrage. A reverend from Vallejo, California, reminded George politely that “there are many things in heaven and earth that scientists do not know.” A woman from France animatedly shared how her dead husband teleported which kind of spaghetti sauce to make for dinner each night. Another, from New Haven, Connecticut, puzzled over how it was that she had performed Rhine’s experiment on pigs and gotten the same results as he had in humans. Mr. Chalmers of Chalmers Oil Burning Company in Chicago suggested how cards could be rigged at their edges (“Thanks a lot!” George replied). And Fern Clarke from Los Angeles wondered why George “could not see and talk to God,” and then offered her complete psychological evaluation (“Thank you,” he replied kindly, “but your guesses about me are not particularly accurate”).11

  The public reaction was so great that Science decided to dedicate its next issue to rebuttal in the winter of 1956. Here Rhine and Soal and even some Minnesota colleagues came at George like clairvoyants after a scrap of the future. The editorial had called for “skepticism…on both sides of the argument,” but Soal found George “grossly unfair,” and his Minnesota colleagues deemed his attack “pointless” and “irresponsible.” Could any one really believe that respectable scientists were mere mountebanks and swindlers? Price had offered no shred of evidence. His unlikely “act,” Rhine suggested, must be a deliberate undertaking to sell parapsychology to the public in the guise of a slanderous critique. After all, George had done parapsychology an unheard of service: “Yes, either the present mechanistic theory of man is wrong—that is, fundamentally incomplete—or, of course, the parapsychologists are all utterly mistaken. One of these opponents is wrong; take it, now, from the pages of Science!” 12

  Only Harvard’s emeritus professor of physics, the Nobel Laureate Percy Williams Bridgman, expressed any doubt about the claimants. “The paradox inherent in the application of a probability calculation to any concrete situation,” he wrote in a dry academic demeanor, “is well brought out by Bertrand Russell, who remarked that we encounter a miracle every time we read the license number of a passing automobile.” If a calculation had been made for that happening, the chances against odds would be overwhelming. “Probability” was a confused concept. Until it was untangled Bridgman would pass.13

  George was unperturbed. He had the uttermost respect for Bridgman, but his probability argument didn’t provide an escape from having to choose between ESP or fraud. Human psychology was a strange and curious beast: However he detested the thought of unpredictability, man would rather believe in a suspension of natural law than countenance the possibility of deception. A strange mixture of credulity and incredulity was our lot, but it needn’t take over our reason. “Where is the definitive experiment?” George stubbornly demanded. Nothing else would satisfy him.14

  Preparations were being made. Born Orlando Carmelo Scarnecchia, John Scarne had come a long way since a local shark taught him three-card monte on the streets of Fairview, New Jersey. He was now America’s most famous magician and authority on gambling, and many times over a millionaire. His signature trick, “Scarne’s Aces,” was a dazzler, and his “Triple Coincidence,” too. Sure, he would be glad to take part in George’s challenge. In fact he would even pay for flying the expert antitrickster, the Argentine Ricardo Musso, all the way from Buenos Aires for the event.15

  It was just the kind of attention for which an awkward outsider yearned. First the bigwigs at the Manhattan Project, then Bardeen and Shockley at Bell, now Bridgman and also his hero, Claude Shannon, to whom George had written for his thoughts about “Science and the Supernatural” (Shannon replied that if ESP were real, it would “undermine everything”).16 Aldous Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Albert Einstein…. His name was right up there with the big ones. The “definitive experiment” would make him famous.

  It never happened. There was the business of translation problems of Ricardo Musso’s excited letters from Argentina. There was an old porphyrin paper to get off. There was fatigue. And then there were Julia and the kids. “All I can say,” George wrote to his buddy Al in their usual oddball humor, “is that I got up to a 5 mile run (run?), and last spring I did 140 in a clean and jerk. Oh yes, also I was divorced January 20.”17 The “definitive experiment” had been killed before it was born, a victim of alimony, inertia, and Babel. In truth these were all just excuses. George never quite finished what he started, and he knew it. Besides, his heart was already somewhere else.

  In November 1952 America had obliterated a Pacific island with an H-bomb. A Central Asian desert was rocked by a Soviet trial just nine months later. By that time the number of CIA agents was ten times greater than it had been only three years earlier, and the budget for secret activities had grown from $4.7 to $82 million. “You have a row of dominos set up,” President Eisenhower waxed metaphorically in the spring of 1954. “You knock over the first one, and…the last one will go over very quickly.” The Cold War race for the allegiance of the unaffiliated nations was well into its blistering noon. George Price had already come to the rescue of modern science. Now, from his cramped little apartment on Sixth Street in South East Minneapolis, he was hatching a plan to save the world.18

  It started with economics. He had been wondering whether poverty leads to communism, as many were claiming. Since he could find no negative correlations between per capita income in different countries and the degree of sympathy toward communism, it didn’t look as if it did, after all. Communism, he thought, w
as rather usually brought about by professional agitators, and agitation flourished under conditions of unhappiness. Correlations between poverty and unhappiness were known to be weak, but George thought that if they could somehow be measured, unhappiness and communism would track. What America needed to do was to tell this to the world, especially to those “domino” nations dangling precariously in the balance.19

  With no training in the field, but with confidence that hardly disclosed it, he had sent an article on the matter to Science. Miraculously his demolition of a Marxist theory by an economist named George Altman was accepted for publication. Altman had argued that since markets ebb and flow according to fixed laws of capacity, governments needed to intervene and take control; socialism was the only answer to the laws of economics. George disagreed. “To try to reduce economic cycles to a simple question of ‘too much capital’ or ’too little capital,’ is like trying to explain all of chemistry in terms of the four elements of the alchemists.” He proceeded to review Altman’s calculations one by one with a steel-trap logic. Economic booms and busts were not the result of investment above some imagined “capacity of the economy,” a function of a Malthusian “ecological law of nature.” In free economies they were rather always the sum result of decisions of entrepreneurs based on expectations of gain or loss. And expectations themselves were determined by all sorts of things, ranging from sophisticated mathematical models to—George knew all too well—“communication from the spirit world.” Economic behavior was complicated; no single-cause mathematical model stood a chance to be of any value. It was high time, he thought, to approach such problems with new tools. And since economics was still at a developmental stage from which the natural sciences had largely emerged, George suggested that it would be worthwhile to see what contributions the natural sciences could make to economics. Maybe there were deeper natural laws pertaining to behavior. “Perhaps the time approaches,” he wrote rather mysteriously, “for a new Boyle to produce a Skeptical Economist.”20

  Was he talking about himself?

  Next he turned to the second part of the plan: research and development. Possession of a superior economic system would not suffice to win the Cold War, nor even would a deeper understanding of human nature. What was needed further was superiority in technology, the means by which to produce faster and better and more. Now, in “How to Speed Up Invention” in Fortune magazine, George presented the answer.

  He called it the “Design Machine.” Certainly, industry needed to plot “optimum strategies,” to set “impossible goals,” and to reward engineers more handsomely. But the Design Machine would be the true panacea. A machine to take over the mathematical and mechanical operations of the drafting department and model shop, it would revolutionize American industry. How it worked was simple:

  An engineer will first describe the shape of a mechanical part, introducing this information quickly by pressing keys and moving levers. The machine then translates this into its own internal mathematical language, and within a few seconds presents to the operator a stereoscopic picture of the part viewed from any direction specified. Or, within minutes, it will machine the part from metal.21

  It was a system for dealing with models—models constructed out of mathematical equations stored in the computer memory—and nothing like it yet existed. If marshaled on a national scale, it could become a repository for all the design and engineering information able to be programmed. And though intended for mechanical design, analogs for electronics and for chemistry could easily be imagined. Finally, here was an idea to make his old teachers at Stuyvesant proud.

  Shown the proposal, a leading computer expert was skeptical. In reply George quickly prepared a seventy-five-page, single-spaced supplementary memorandum showing how an IBM 704 computer could be incorporated into a Design Machine, how a complex part could be described to the machine, and how the machine could display the part—in 3D. The skeptic conceded, and other IBM experts did, too. Not only could it be done, but it could be done in three to five years for less than 5 million dollars. The Russians, with their Bison bomber, took only four years to go through the eight-year development cycle that Americans needed for the B-52. “The tempo of U.S. technological progress,” George wrote, “is not an academic matter.” Time was of the essence. No less than the “fate of the non-communist world” was at stake.22

  George was growing nervous. The “Reds” had just launched Sputnik II, and marched machines and men in an awesome celebration in Moscow to mark forty years since the Bolshevik revolution. Russia was gaining on America. In a strongly worded essay in Life magazine titled “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” he now detailed the precise steps by which the United States would become a member of the USSR by 1975—if it didn’t wake up and smell the kvass. Americans were like the people in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “who stood and watched their emperor parade naked though the streets, and then turned to one another to praise the beauty of his clothing.” America was like Babylon, Baghdad, Constantinople, and Rome: the rich, proud, luxuriant nation, smugly confident and dangerously oblivious to the “tough barbarian adversary, poorly provisioned and shabbily dressed but high spirited and strong in its drive to conquer.”23

  The article appeared interspersed by a full-page ad from Bell touting the “Seven Ages of the Telephone.” There was a photo of a smiling mom holding the receiver to her blond baby’s ear: “Hello, Daddy!” the caption read. Another, of a “Dynamic Teen” resting on a sofa with plaid skirt and varsity letter, obviated the footer: “Girls talk to girls. And boy talks to girl. And there are two happy hearts when she says, ‘I’d love to go!’” And what about “Just Married,” with a brunette in an office chair with phone and adoring hubby reclining above her?: “Two starry-eyed young people starting a new life together. The telephone, which is so much a part of courtship, is also a big help in all the marriage plans.”

  What more did Americans want? George asked, indignant: “A Cadillac? A color television? Lower income taxes?—or to live in freedom?” Would it be luxury or liberty? The World Series or the Nobel Prize? And who would play the part of a Franklin or a Hamilton? “Optimism talks” felt good but were confusing. If America didn’t double its defense budget now, it wouldn’t be long before it became a Soviet province.24

  He had parachuted from nowhere to the center of a debate about the foundations of science. He had jumped into the fray over world economics. He had invented a “Design Machine.” And now he had used a premiere stage to warn of impending national disaster. With his crew cut, steel-framed round clear-rims, pursed lips, and bow tie, the unknown thirty-four-year-old from Minnesota cut an original figure. Whatever you said of him, he was hustling.

  Still, there was a weird duality to these disparate interventions: What seemed like genuine concern for the welfare of America and the world also had the panatela reek of egotistic smugness. Was he a cocky chemist? A sober economist? A restless engineer? A prophet? Somehow George Price was simultaneously all of these—and none.

  Whether this was altruism, patriotism, or diarrheic self-promotion, people were beginning to take notice. “We are proud of you,” Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey wrote to him following a full-spread write-up of the Design Machine in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune. It was a welcome piece of encouragement: George was supporting two apartments, two cars, two telephones, and two attorneys. It was freezing. There were no women to meet, and he was sex starved. His shoulder still bothered him. Already he considered himself an “ex-chemist,” yet this was still his job. No, he wrote to Al, it wasn’t due to his usual “masochism” that he had yet to leave Minnesota; it was due to his reluctance to work as a chemist, and others’ reluctance to employ him “as a physicist, economist, writer, or anything else for which I have little training.”25

  Finally he quit, in the winter of 1957, leaving porphyrins, Schwartz, a steady salary, and his daughters, who had since moved with their mother to Marquette, all behind. He was moving to Kingston, New York
. A respected researcher at one of America’s premier hospitals, he would now become a rather low-rung subcontract technical “reviewer,” working for Stevens Engineering Company on instruction manuals for IBM computers.

  George brushed aside accusations of self-destruction. Whether others believed in his reality meter or not, he was on his way to turning his fortunes around. He hadn’t yet secured a “big” job, but prospects seemed encouraging. From IBM’s headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue in New York City, Emanuel Piore had expressed interest in his Fortune Design Machine. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, Piore had risen to become the navy’s top-ranking scientist, winning its Distinguished Civilian Service Award and serving on President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee. As IBM’s director of research, he was leading the corporation into the era of digital computers. Would George mind coming down to the offices, he wrote to him, to discuss some of his ideas?26

  The day before the meeting with Piore, on July 15, 1957, an old girlfriend from the time he was breaking up with Julia appeared rather suddenly in town. Her name was Anne, she was from the Midwest, and, like Julia, was a Roman Catholic. He had thought of marrying her before he fell ill with polio, but she had broken it off for another man. Now, she made it clear, she was once again for the taking. Still jealous, George said he’d think about it.