Moving a gene around a bacterial chromosome was a neat technical trick, but the breakthrough came with the next steps: incorporating it into a virus and isolating it outside the bacterium. Jon Beckwith and his colleagues were investigating that workhorse of microbiology, E. coli, at Harvard Medical School. Beckwith is equally well known for his political statements, and his commitment to politics was recognised by being given a position on the Human Genome Project’s ethics committee.
Why did you decide to teach a course on social issues in science? Can you really teach someone to be an activist?
I had always included some discussion of the social implications of science in my genetics course. But in 1987, some students came to me and asked if I would be willing to lead a course on social issues in biology. They were dismayed at the absence of any inkling of these issues in their education. The course includes readings from the philosophy, history and sociology of science, as well as dealing with more overtly political aspects. I want to show that it is possible to be both a scientist and politically engaged.
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What inspired you to become a scientist?
I was very good at mathematics and science in high school. As I moved along in science I kept changing fields, trying to get closer to a science that had something to do with living things. So from mathematics I switched to chemistry and then to biochemistry in graduate school, and eventually to genetics.
You’ve admitted you nearly left Harvard University as a postgraduate because you found it so stultifying. What changed your mind?
I found a laboratory that I was very happy working in. Then – and this is a very vivid memory to me – in my second year in graduate school I was in the library doing some research for a course I was taking from Jim Watson. I discovered papers by French researchers Fran¸ois Jacob, Elie Wollman and Jacques Monod. They were using bacterial genetics to solve fundamental problems of biology. It was not only the elegant science that attracted me. The elegant rhetorical style, typically French, came alive in ways that no other scientific papers did.
After deciding to remain a scientist, you began to worry about the ways in which science could be misused. What radicalised you?
I had become more and more politically involved, particularly when I came back to the US in 1965, to Harvard, after living in England and France. I pretty quickly got involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Boston was one of the strongholds of opposition to the war. Later, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, I became active on issues of racial discrimination. At first I didn’t connect any of this with my science or see science as an arena for political activism. This was because in my science education, as in pretty much everyone else’s, science is presented as a neutral pursuit. It’s implied that scientists have nothing much to do with the outside world except to provide scientific results. You never learn in your science courses that scientists have sometimes regretted what they have done, or have worked to prevent misuses of science by becoming politically active.
When did you start thinking about the social implications of genetics research?
At a press conference I convened in 1969 to discuss my paper on the transfer of a bacterial gene to a virus, I and my colleagues warned that an era of genetic engineering was imminent. I had been thinking for years that one might be able to do genetic engineering with human beings without thinking about any negative consequences. My political thought began to evolve as more scientists were beginning to consider how their science was used for destructive ends. The Vietnam War had a lot to do with that, mobilising physicists in particular. They started the organisation Science for the People, which was the most radical organisation of scientists at the time. They were unhappy with the way in which principles, ideas and results from physics had been used to develop weapons for Vietnam. It’s hard to connect that with genes and genetic engineering, but it catalysed my thinking about these questions.
In 1970 you gave your Eli Lilly award for microbiology to the Black Panthers. Why?
The major reason was that the government at that time was using all sorts of illicit methods to try to destroy this organisation. If a government is allowed to destroy an organisation in that way, they can certainly move onto other groups, in effect creating a police state. It was in part a political statement. I also had to face the question of how I could accept an award from a drugs company when I was unhappy with the way a lot of drugs companies were exploiting people.
What do you think of the new restrictions on visas for foreign students? Could it damage research?
The visa question is particularly important. For instance, I know that they have started to restrict visas for people coming from outside the US who want to work in microbiology. I have heard that in some countries students are told they can’t apply to PhD programmes in microbiology departments in the US. At the same time the government is asking for more work in this area and putting more money into it. Yet with a limited number of labs, they are restricting the personnel who have been, to some extent, the main workforce in a lot of these labs. When I look at my own lab, for example, I don’t have a single American post-doc fellow. Several are from Europe, others are from Israel, Japan and Argentina. It is similar around Harvard. I think that is going to be a serious problem. But it’s part of a larger political picture. I hope that at some point a change of government will liberalise things because these immigration policies go hand in hand with some other very restrictive and dangerous social policies.
I am also very unhappy at how some states in the US have ended affirmative action for ethnic minorities. The work we and others did to open up medical colleges and universities to minorities seems to have gone into reverse. In Texas and California, for example, this has led to tremendous reductions in the numbers of African Americans in law schools.
In your new book, you write that in some ways it was easier to accept being a target of the Ku Klux Klan’s hatred than your colleagues’ antagonism. Could you explain?
It seems that scientists who are not interested in the world beyond the laboratory find it difficult to work with colleagues who are. I have heard of numerous instances of professors who are heads of labs making it clear to people in their labs that they don’t like to see them involved in political activities, that this wasn’t the role of scientists and it was distracting them from their work. This certainly makes it difficult to interact with such people. This has come up at my own workplace, with students or postdoctoral fellows I know who are interested in being socially active in science. It’s made clear that this is a problem for them.
Why is it so hard to get people involved?
The attitude seems to be that politics takes effort, and so it takes something away from your science. There are so many more biologists today than when I was starting out, and so many of them are facing the same problems. Competition is fast and money is becoming a big issue. In contrast, at the undergraduate and graduate level there seems to be much more interest in politics than there was even back in the 1960s and 1970s. They feel they are lacking exposure to these issues. I see it in students I talk with here at Harvard. The course I have been teaching on the social context of science has expanded enormously in the past few years. Yet once students progress in their careers and get into the rat race, it becomes very hard for them to get involved.
You began your work with E. coli. Does it still fascinate you?
To begin with, it amazed me how much you could find out with very simple experiments. I feel that the work of our own lab and the work of others has shown that simple experiments in these bacteria could lead to major findings.
After all these years of working with it, how do you feel about E. coli?
I guess I love it. I have a new post-doc in my lab from France who was having trouble getting experiments to work, so together we repeated some of the earlier experiments first performed by Jacob and Wollman in the 1950s. She was so excited by that and how beautifully they worked. I was too. Every experiment that works is a miracle, but repeating something I hadn’t done in 30 years was particularly gratifying.
How has political activism affected your science?
It has allowed me to step back and appreciate science even more. That’s been very exciting. This might seem ironic, because I have been involved politically with groups of people who spend most of their time criticising aspects of science. Part of this appreciation comes from trying to understand in a deeper sense where I have gone wrong in my own science, and what false assumptions I may have started out with. It’s caused me to think more about how science is done, in a way that most of us tend not to do.
You say that you are now on the side of the angels, no longer a scary radical. Do you see yourself as part of the establishment?
I wouldn’t say that. My strongest and longest-lasting activity is still with a group that began alongside Science for the People in the 1970s. Most recently we published a book that I and five other members co-edited, called The Double Edged Helix. It’s about the social implications of genetics. Within this group, we still often feel that we are working against mainstream social trends. What’s different now is that I am also working with more mainstream organisations, such as the ethical, legal and social issues committee of the Human Genome Project, or the Hastings Centre in Garrison, New York, which is the leading bioethics institution in the country. I find that some of these groups are now more receptive to the kinds of ideas that we have been presenting for years.
Which areas of genetics research concern you most?
What I worry about most is the ever-increasing amount of genetic information that is becoming available about both people and groups. There is good reason to worry that this information will be used to stigmatise and discriminate against people – or worse. To prevent these misuses will require a much more activist community of geneticists, who are involved both in education and exposing misrepresentations of scientific information.