S P O T L I G H T D E P A R T M E N T S - The Taft School

E N D N O T E
—By Dr. Alfred Gilman ’58
This is truly an interesting experience for
me. I speak formally to medical students,
Ph.D. students, and scientific colleagues all
the time, but I have never had the chance to
speak formally to a group of young men and
women in high school. I want you all to
dream about being explorers. You must be
an explorer in every aspect of your life, no
matter what your pursuit.
A goal as a scientist, teacher, or any
other type of scholar should be to discover
new truth and knowledge and/or better
ways to impart that knowledge to the community.
A goal as a physician should be to
discover new ways to earn the trust that
your patients have placed in you. A goal as
an attorney should be to discover new and
simple paths to fairness for all. A goal as a
business person might be to discover new
approaches to improve productivity and
enhance satisfaction for your employees.
When you look back, you will want to
be able to say to yourself that you made a
difference. You will want to be able to feel
that you left the world a bit better for your
presence. Otherwise, what was it all about?
We are frighteningly insignificant in the
grand scheme of things. We must not
strive for less than making a difference.
Here is a truism of life, but you will
only believe it as you age: each fractional
increment in life passes in equal apparent
time. It is a geometric/ logarithmic system.
For a 15-year-old to pass to age 20, you
grow older by 33 percent in 5 years. To
pass from 40 to 54 you age by 33 percent
in 14 years. To pass from 60 to 80 you age
by 33 percent in 20 years. But the bad news
is that the 5 years starting at 15, the 14
years starting at 40, and the 20 years starting
at 60 seem to pass in equal time!
A corollary of this truism is that most of
you currently think you are immortal. You
know that you are not, but you really believe
that you are. You think you have all the time
in the world, but you don’t. It is time to start
the serious dreaming and planning.
Now I want to spend a little bit of my
time talking with you about science, particularly
about biology and medicine. I was
fortunate to start serious study of biology
near the dawn of the age of enlightenment.
1953 has been called “the end of history” in
biology because it witnessed publication of
the most important paper about biology to
have ever been written.
This paper is likely the most important
ever published in all of science. And to go
out on a limb, it is perhaps the most important
paper that will ever be published in all
of science, including the first descriptions of
extra terrestrial life forms, which will happen
some day. I hope that you know that
the authors were James Watson and Francis
Crick, and the discovery, published in a
very brief two-page report, was of the
double-helical structure of DNA.
This fabulous structure showed two
long strands of DNA wound helically around
the same axis but running in opposite directions.
The two strands were joined together
because of beautifully complementary
chemical bonding between pairs of the four
bases that constitute the alphabet of DNA.
An A on one strand dictated a T on the
other, and vice versa, while a G on one
strand dictated a C on the other, and vice
versa. Thus, if the sequence of letters on one
chain is given, the sequence on the other
chain is determined automatically.
When you look at some structures
you don’t learn much about function. But
when you look at this structure, you suddenly
learn the secret of the most fundamental
property of life—replication. In
the most classic of all understatements,
Watson and Crick wrote at the end of this
brief report: “It has not escaped our notice
that the specific pairing we have postulated
immediately suggests a possible copying
mechanism for the genetic material.”
Where have we come since then? First,
appreciation of the central dogma of biology:
that DNA encodes the blueprint for life by
specifying the sequences of RNA, and that
the sequences of RNA specify the order of
amino acids in proteins, which are the fundamental
building blocks of cells. We have
learned to read the blueprints of life and to
clone and manipulate the genes in DNA.
These basic discoveries have had enormous
practical consequences over the past
20 years. To name just a few: The complete
DNA sequence of most major pathogenic
bacteria is now known, greatly facilitating
design of new antibiotics, which we
need very badly as bacteria become resistant
to the older drugs. The complete
DNA sequence of more complex eukaryotic
organisms, such as yeast, worms, and
fruit flies, is now known or will be soon.
“…most of you currently think you are immortal. You know that
you are not, but you really believe that you are. You think you
have all the time in the world, but you don’t. It is time to start
the serious dreaming and planning.”
32 Winter 1999