Nancy C. Andreasen's Induction Remarks

Cambridge, MA, October 5, 2002 - As a representative of the biological sciences, I'd like to speak briefly about the importance of integrity, particularly integrity in the 21st Century. As a context, I would like to remind us all of a comment made by Albert Einstein in a lecture at the California Institute of Technology: "Concern for man himself and his fate must always be the chief interest of all technical endeavors…in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind." Einstein, above all, understood the promises and the perils of science.

Why integrity? Because the essence of its meaning - derived from integer or oneness - provides us with a compass that we may use to navigate between the perils and promises, the Scylla and Charybdis, that we will confront in the biological sciences during the 21st century. It may serve to remind us that we must seek, achieve, and teach integration rather than divisiveness, and that our decisions today must be shaped by a recognition that we all share a oneness with humanity here on the one planet on which we live, now and into what we all hope will be the many generations who will follow us in the future.

Einstein's century was the century of physics. Basic and applied physics have given us many things - airplanes and spaceships, telephones and television, computers and CDs, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. In the year 2002 we can communicate with one another, and also harm one another, in ways that we would never have dreamt of in the year 1902.

Our century is likely to become the age of biology. At the fine-grained level of cells and molecules, we have launched the 21st Century by mapping the genome. This accomplishment, much touted in the media, is exceedingly modest in comparison with what is yet to be done. We are already beginning to perceive just a few of the sensational (and sensationalized!) implications, such as the ability to clone sheep or human beings. The science of molecular biology offers us many benefits. We can potentially replace damaged genes or damaged cells in order to treat, and perhaps even cure, a variety of diseases: cystic fibrosis and multiple polyposis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease, cardiac disease and cancer. We will also be able to summarize the biological contents of every individual human being by the ultimate identity card: a profile of our individual genetic mutations that uniquely characterizes each of us, or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPS), colloquially referred to as "snips." This summary of personal genetic endowment is a quintessential definition of what each person actually is or is going to become, at the biological level. Will we know how to use this and other genetic information wisely, once we have it?

At a higher level we are also mapping the human brain, using the tools that I happen to pursue. Technology such as magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography permit us to look inside the human head and literally watch the brain think and feel. Within a few minutes after obtaining an MR scan, we can give someone a picture of her brain and tell her its size in cubic centimeters and how much of it is gray matter and how much is white matter. Only a few years ago such vivid pictures of the whole brain surface could only be obtained after death, but now we can obtain these measures in living human beings, repeat them every year if we wish, and plot how the brain is growing in young children or shrinking in older people as they age. We can see the brain shift its blood flow to multiple interconnected regions when people perform the many complex mental tasks that make us human - remembering the past, planning the future, or feeling joy or sorrow. Through magnetoencephalography we can even watch this happen in real time, observing how the visual cortex records an image of the face and then passes it on to areas such as frontal or temporal lobes so the brain can recognize whose face it is. And we can see how the brains of people with illnesses such as schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease or autism perform these mental activities differently. Someday these imaging tools may permit us to predict who is likely to become ill even before the illness itself begins. Such measures of personal brain endowment may also someday tell us what each person not only "is", but also is going to become, at the biological level. Again, will we know how to use this information wisely, once we have it? Will we use it to prevent diseases and develop new treatments, or will we use it to find more sophisticated ways to discriminate against and stigmatize the unfortunate people who have or will develop brain illnesses such as schizophrenia?

We biological scientists are being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, not arts or sciences. C. P. Snow warned many years ago about the dangers of creating "two cultures," the culture of the humanities and the culture of science. My own personal journey has taken me from being a young professor of renaissance English literature to now being a (somewhat) older physician and neuroscientist. Although people sometimes comment on how disparate these two careers are, I personally have been sustained by my training in the humanities on an almost daily basis as I perform my activities as a scientist. In order to use wisely the enormous biological knowledge that we will develop in the 21st Century, we must use it by creating a healthy integration between domains such as philosophy or history and domains such as molecular genetics or neuroscience. Ultimately, we will find the integrity that we need to exploit the promises and avoid the perils of modern biology by creating a unified discourse between the two cultures embodied in this academy, the cultures of Arts and Sciences.

This sense of our 21st century need for oneness, integrity, and integration- whether it be a unity of past, present, and future, of I and Thou, or of arts and sciences - is beautifully expressed by William Butler Yeats in the final lines of one of my favorite poems, "Among School Children":

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

For more information about this year's new class or about the Induction Ceremony and other Academy events, please call Phyllis Bendell at (617) 576-5047 or email pbendell@amacad.org.

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