Science

“The Corridors of the Heart,” LIFE magazine, January 1968

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the first adult human-to-human heart transplant in the United States, at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, under the direction of Dr. Norman Shumway.  The unidentified 54-year-old patient, who received the heart of a 43-year-old man, died 15 days later of multiple systemic complications.  The very first human-to-human heart transplant operation had been performed just a few weeks earlier, in South Africa, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who had consequently become an international celebrity.  The operations launched a virtual “space race” in risky heart operations, with doctors on several continents one-upping each other.

The frenzy over (and frequency of) heart transplants only intensified during the period 1968-70, before backing off for some years.  In this early, “heroic” period, however, the focus on the heart reflected larger cultural preoccupations with the human body– with knowing about it, visualizing it, exposing it, really seeing it in new and sometimes shocking ways.

One of the most vivid reflections of this new obsession with the body and its “mysteries” was to be found in the startling images made by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (born 1922).    His series of photographs of living human fetuses, published in 1965 in LIFE magazine, had an extraordinary–and probably still unmeasured–impact on public consciousness about reproduction and contraception.  LIFE sold millions of copies of its issue with the Nilsson photos, and may have hoped to have a similar effect with this issue, from January 19, 1968, with a ten-page spread of still amazing photos of the inside of a beating human heart.  Eerily lit and enlarged to fit on LIFE-sized pages, the photos are stunningly reminiscent of the 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage, about a nano-journey by scientists through the human body.  There is, in this January 1968 issue, barely a glimmer of the horrors of the year to come: not a single mention about the war, or civil rights, and only a few bouyant pieces about the emerging presidential race.  There’s an article about the boys in the cast of Oliver!, then in production, and critic Richard Schickel’s review (lukewarm) of The Graduate.

Trumping all the news and reviews are those blood-red photos of a beating heart.  It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Nilsson’s photographs changed the way we saw the world.  In the article that accompanies the photos, LIFE’s staff writer Loudon Wainwright, Jr. (the singer/songwriter’s father) writes:  ”The heart. Before, when it wore out, that was the end.  Death.  But just in the past month, a new operation–taking a healthy heart from a newly dead person and planting it in a person whose heart was failing–has stirred the world.  It is a wondrous beginning, but in that beginning failure is almost certain.”

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Science rocks the Sixties

In retrospectives of the 1960s, particularly of 1968–so dominated by violence, war, racial conflict, sex, drugs and rock-and-roll–it can sometimes be forgotten that the decade was also intensely focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs.

A surprising bestseller

On the non-fiction bestseller lists in 1968, jostling for rank with diet books and cookbooks, was this extraordinary little volume.   The Double Helix was a publishing sensation; it spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in the spring and summer of 1968, eventually rising to Number 3.  (Meanwhile, over on the Fiction side, there was Airport, Myra Breckinridge, Updike’s Couples, and the eventual winner of the Pulitzer, The Confessions of Nat Turner– more on all of those in future posts.)

“DNA?”  What’s that?

The Double Helix has a kind of archaic subtitle, printed on the cover:  ”Being a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, a major scientific advance which led to the award of a Nobel Prize.”  That discovery had occurred more than 15 years earlier, in the hothouse scientific environment of postwar England, at Cambridge University.  Indeed, the 1953 discovery had already had its day in the sun, and Watson and his partners, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, had already (1962) collected their Nobel Prize.  In the Foreword, Sir Lawrence Bragg (himself a Nobel laureate) calls the Watson/Crick discovery “one of the major scientific events of the century,” which has “caused an explosion in biochemistry which has transformed the science.”  Watson writes in the Preface that he hoped the book will show that “science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders,” that its “steps forward (and sometime backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.”

Robert K. Merton, in his review in the New York Times, called it a “wonderfully candid self-portrait of the scientist as a young man in a hurry . . . a fascinating case history in the psychology and sociology of science as it describes the events that led up to one of the great biological discoveries of our time. . . . I know of nothing quite like it all the literature about scientists at work.”  Merton calls attention to one of the book’s most memorable–and most deplored–features: Watson’s frank admission that his lab’s work on DNA was something of a cutthroat race against rival scientists (particularly Linus Pauling), complete with gleeful gloating when the Watson/Crick team wins.

Who was reading The Double Helix?

I wonder who propelled this book to (nearly) the top of the charts?  Books about science — and “science”– were not unknown on the bestseller lists, especially since the end of the war when the development of an atomic bomb made scientists, for a moment at least, into military heroes; or since 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik and set off a desperate boom in American science education.  Another scientific book, Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape, was a huge popular success this same year, 1968.  But that was different: Morris’ book (we’ll get to it in a future post) was pure “pop anthropology,” and it was also kind of sexy.  Watson’s book–essentially a memoir of two years spent in scientific discovery–is written in an extraordinarily candid, even intimate way that, as Merton wrote, “conscientiously violated the mores that govern the public demeanor of scientists.”

My guess is that The Double Helix sold exceptionally well on America’s college campuses, suddenly booming with, well, Baby Boomers in 1968.  (I think I recall reading a paperback copy of it, in 1969, in Richard Lewontin’s Biology I class at the University of Chicago, which was also Watson’s alma mater.)   The book’s “hero” (every book has a hero), James Watson himself, was just 25 at the time of the discovery, and the pictures in the book make him look even younger.

James Watson in Paris, Spring 1952, back cover of The Double Helix

In the book’s very first lines, he writes that he wanted to “convey the spirit of an adventure characterized by youthful arrogance.” He later opines that a “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.”  For his younger readers in 1968, this is raw meat:  a brash, rules-busting young man, who lives by the rule to “question authority.”

But Helix is not a just a “college-boy’s” book.  My guess is that those boys’ Dads (and Moms) were also reading it–or at least buying it.  These members of the “greatest generation,” by 1968 in their 40s and 50s, many of whom had experienced the horrors and devastation of global war, were still looking for answers to the harrowing questions raised by a war that had killed nearly 50 million people.  In some ways, although Helix is more purely “scientific” than almost any other popular literary product of 1968, it also, for many people, contained a germ of the spiritual, some pathway to an understanding about the “meaning of life” that had recently been so brutally shaken.

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