Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Atomic: Beauty vs. Horror in Science

Sometimes it seems as if horror is the only story that science has to tell, or the only one we want to hear. Somebody has a gadget they have to build, an experiment too sweet to resist. .. The tug of war between beauty and horror is the theme of " Doctor Atomic. When I was a boy, I looked out into the star-filled sky one night and was awestruck by its beauty. .. A few days later, I happened on a book called " The Microbe Hunters " and became equally enchanted by the stories of microbes and their role in disease. It dawned on me that I wanted to explore this hidden universe. It's a rare event when a neglected work of popular literature, Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters, is linked to the birth of recombinant DNA. It's also a rare event when a 17th century sonnet, John Donne's " Batter My Heart, " becomes an aria in a new opera sung by a poetically inclined physicist at the birth of the atom bomb. Both events took place in mid-Manhattan last fall and the coincidence is more than geographic. It was also mid-election, 2008. One recalls that Paul Ehrlich, the Microbe Hunter, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, of " Batter My Heart, " underwent shameful public trials fueled by notions resurrected by Joe the Plumber. Ehrlich and Oppie became targets of nativist, neo-Luddite rhetoric directed not only against their persons , but against science itself: " I kid you not " as they say in the sub-Arctic (3). Stanley Cohen evoked Paul de Kruif's 1926 book, The Microbe Hunters as he presented a 2008 Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Research to his Stan-ford colleague, Stanley Falkow. He hailed Falkow's discovery that bacterial plasmids determine antibiotic resistance and virulence, explaining how they had made the revolution in molecular biology possible. Cohen proposed his colleague for a new " pantheon of great Microbe Hunters, " recalling that in 1972 Falkow contributed to a discussion at a Waikiki beach delica