Jack : You’re a Harvard boy aren't you?

Andrew: I got my Ph.D. at Berkeley. Post-doc at Harvard.

Jack: And then you went to Iowa - for the sake of your children?

Andrew: For the sake of my children. I've always been in a big city, and I went to Iowa. I went to a small pond to try to begin a research program there that was independent of the big fish at Harvard.

Jack: And now you're off to Chicago

Andrew: I’ve begun there. University of Illinois, Chicago.

Jack: You’re from an artistic background. You were going to be a concert pianist

Andrew: Uh, huh.

Jack: Your parents are artistic. Your presentation was extraordinary. I don't know what the scientists made of it, but it was rather theatrical. And it helps to show cool videos of chromosomes being yanked out of cells.

Andrew: Well, thank you. [LAUGHTER] I've had a lot of good comments and feedback about my presentation, you know, from the scientists here, which is very gratifying. That’s better than money in the bank for us. That kind of acceptance is an important component of one’s productivity and of one’s desire to continue doing what ones does. If what you are doing is met constantly with the reaction that you’re doing the wrong thing or ‘we’re not interested’, or ‘that's not important’ - which can be the case — then it’s really tough.

Andrew: My publications have. Our approach is pretty fundamental. On purpose. You take really important contributors to science, you read about Max Delbrück, for example, or Barbara McClintock or Jane Goodall; it’s good to read what other people have written about these figures and their discoveries. It’s through them that one can learn what creative science is all about. It may be necessary, if you have made a discovery, to set your findings up against a fundamental premise, and to undermine it. That may be the whole task. That's where the innovations come from. There’s a procedure to doing revolutionary science or even science that pushes back the boundaries a little bit.

Jack: And you're a revolutionary scientist?

Andrew: I try to do revolutionary science. I don't derive a lot of pleasure from dotting I's and crossing T's. I've only rarely published on the same thing twice for example. In terms of the nervous system, the first group I really worked with was the first to map out the cytostatic pathway that causes seizures - down to the synaptic level in the brain. That was done through paying exquisite attention to the continuity of nerve fibers that course from the brain via the nervous system and through the body. We could label every one of those fibers, so our study essentially entailed the watching of continuity in the way that system works. As a matter of fact that's where animal cell tissue culture came from in the 1930's. They didn't know if the nervous system was this continuous mesh until Harrison took brains out of animals and put ‘em in dishes and saw that there are individual units called neurons.

Jack: Let’s talk about the cell, and that may bring us to the question of reductionism. I have had a lot of lessons here at this conference, about the cell, the division of the cell, and the things that are travelling around within the cell. It is tremendously busy inside there, inside that lil’ cell.

Andrew: Yes. And I use to love reading about it, going back to when people were first talking about cells, which is where you have to start to understand the history and the thinking about a subject. So for me it begins on the public library bookshelf with one of E.B. Wilson’s, ‘The Cell in Development and Inheritance’, 1925

It’s peculiar in a way, but its very interesting the way he begins that book. The very first sentence in the very first paragraph in the first chapter says that the term ‘cell’ is a misnomer. And you must remember that the cell was though of as an ‘empty room’. Another image of the cell that people had was of a ‘water-filled balloon.’ Now those ideas that we had about cells came from a different century of plant biologists who were looking mostly at dead material.

I am thinking here of people like Robert Hook. [Robert Hook (1635-1703), English Physicist who looked at a thin slice of cork under powerful hand lens and discovered a large number of ‘cells’.] Well, we now know that the cell is anything but an empty room, or a water-filled balloon. The cell is filled. It is packed. It contains fibers, vesicles, proteins, and different arrays of structures; we are still trying to find them all, study them all, and understand them.

The modern definition of the cell has changed and, strictly speaking, they should do away with the word altogether, and invent something else to call it, more on the level of what it really does. I mean a single cell gives rise to a whale. The potential of a cell is truly enormous. Imagine the biomass of the earth, all of this planet’s organic material. It all came from one cell, and then another and another; and each cell was not an empty room. It was all built up from little, living entities, some which remain ill-defined, the size of a few wavelengths of light. The study of cells and biological systems is different from the other exact and physical sciences; that’s one of the reasons why, for example, researchers from the physical sciences are now coming in droves to study biology.

Essentially we are learning to see our work in a more comprehensive fashion as being connected to the other sciences, to Nature in general, to the Universe and to Time itself. It is to me a wonderful thought about Nature and Time that the clam that we have here around us today tastes or may exactly the same as the clams did around 800. We know that from the fossil record. As George Gaylord Simpson and other evolutionists used to say, they probably -if you cooked them the same way — they’d taste the same. [LAUGHTER] Whereas a mountain range like this would come and go 40 -50 times in that same period. this [The interview took place in Banff, Canada, looking out at the Rocky mountains] So there is something stable about these so-called cells and the way they hook up to their external environment, which we call the matrix. And the modern definition of the cell has become the cell plus its unit matrix. This indicates outward connection, a connection outside the cell

Jack: I’ve interviewed quite a few people here about cells and the like. Different people have described the cell in different ways. It’s like a castle. It’s like an American city and City Hall is in the cell’s nucleus. That the genes were some kind of ah, minister of finance. They inform the rest of the system you could have so much resources here and so much there —

Andrew: This is what people have been saying -?

Jack: Yes, And one scientist told me she thinks the cell is a complete control freak. I asked her if she thought the cell is like a fascist state and she said, ‘Yes, yes, it sort of is’. fascist state?

Andrew: Fascist state Hmm!!!

[LAUGHTER]

Jack: I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER] You’re not comfortable with that?

Andrew: Well, I had a moment to think about it. You’re making an analogy obviously, because we don’t have such terms in biology. If you were to ask me is it a democratic state I’d have to take a moment. [LAUGHTER]. What does come to mind is a new concept that’s emerging in the biological sciences; so we might be able to talk of a mutualist state. Its an extreme example of mutualism between different entities co-operating. The prime example is the mitochondria [energy-producing units that power all cells] and the way they’ve become co-operative. What’s more, co-called eukaryotic cells are made up or organisms other than bacteria, but it’s thought that they were once bacteria — that is to say, free living organisms which then got incorporated. All of your cells essentially have these ‘protobacteria’ in them that have come from a different era. Even the genes in each cell have been shuttled around such that 80% or so have been contained in the host cell’s nucleus. And these protobacteria and these genes have acquired higher selective advantages. Down through the ages, they have been become incorporated but also they’ve exchanged parts. Now they’re functioning like a watch. It is via this mutualism that everything is driven. In much that takes place within the cell there is this mutualistic interaction.

Jack: It’s collaborative

Andrew: Yeah. For the most part. I study cancer cells where things aren’t collaborating so well. You can have both sides of the story. The living state has beautiful examples of co-operativity and mutualism. And it’s opposites as well. They’re co-existing in the same system, in the same place at the same time.

Jack: Right.

Andrew: It’s a very large thing. When you think of a cell it’s quite natural for you to think of something microscopic often, but you have to extend your

thinking to -

Jack: The yolk of an ostrich egg [Which, large as it is, is still regarded as a cell]

Andrew: Well, no, even bigger than that. You have to look at lichens, look at the oceans. They’re filled with blue or green algae.