BECKWITH, Jonathan R(oger) 1935-
(Jon Beckwith)

PERSONAL:

Born December 25, 1935, in Cambridge, MA; son of Manuel and Mildred Beckwith; married Barbara Shutt, December 26, 1960; children: Benjamin Hunter, Anthony Rhys. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1957, Ph.D., 1961.

ADDRESSES:

Home—8A Appleton Rd., Cambridge, MA 02138-2226. Office—Harvard Medical School, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 200 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA 02115. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Geneticist. Harvard University Medical School, Boston, MA, faculty member 1965—, professor of microbiology, 1969—, American Cancer Society Research Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 1971—. University of California—Berkeley, visiting professor, 1985; member of advisory boards, including board of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research Program, Human Genome Project.

MEMBER:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), European Molecular Biology Organization, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, American Society of Microbiology, Genetics Society of America, National Academy of Science.

AWARDS, HONORS:

University of Cambridge fellowship; National Institutes of Health fellow, 1961-65; Guggenheim fellow, 1970; Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology, 1970; Genetics Society of America medal, 1993.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with David Zipser) The Lactose Operon (conference papers), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY), 1970.

(Editor, with Julian Davies and Jonathan A. Gallant) Gene Function in Prokaryotes (symposium papers), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY), 1983.

(Editor, with Thomas J. Silhavy) The Power of Bacterial Genetics: A Literature-based Course, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (Plainview, NY), 1992.

Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science (memoir), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(As Jon Beckwith; editor, with others) The Double-edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2002.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including New Scientist, New York Review of Books and American Scientist.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jonathan R. Beckwith has spent his life studying genetics, particularly how genes in bacteria work. In 1969 he became the first person to isolate a gene, an E. coli gene, and the process he used has since been used to isolate the genes of any organism, including humans. Beckwith and his team published their findings in Nature, adding a warning about the dangers of genetic engineering and discrimination.

Beckwith's memoir, Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science, recalls the many milestones of his career and the controversies that have surrounded his work. Educated at Harvard, Beckwith also studied at Berkeley and Princeton universities, performing his postdoctoral work with Arthur Pardee, coauthor with Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod of a highly regarded study. These men were Beckwith's idols and inspired his career. He writes that their papers had "a style of doing science new to me—daring leaps of logic, simple experiments that seemed to yield profound insights.… I had never imagined science being like this—almost literary, artistic, and scientific at the same time." Beckwith chose science because he found it enjoyable and easy. He also observed that James Watson liked to throw parties and drive around Cambridge in his red sports car. This "made the idea of being a scientist and having an outside life seem like a real possibility," writes Beckwith.

While at Princeton, Beckwith discovered an error in the Pasteurians' assumptions. As a result, he became a "name" in the scientific community and received a fellowship to study at Cambridge. He was eventually offered a faculty position at Harvard, which he began only after accepting a long-hoped-for invitation to visit the Institut Pasteur.

At Harvard, Beckwith developed his technique for isolating genes. During the 1960s, he was also heavily involved with the culture of the time, reading the Beat poets and frequenting jazz clubs where he developed relationships with African Americans and came to understand their political views. He fought to increase black admissions to Harvard Medical School and opposed the university's plan to dislocate poor blacks in nearby Roxbury in order to build a hospital. In 1969, the year of his discovery, a backlash developed against the claims of Arthur Jensen that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. When Beckwith received his 1970 Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology, he announced that he would donate the prize to the Black Panther Free Health Clinic in Boston and to the defense fund of Panther 13. While most scientists believe that science should not be used for social activism, Beckwith feels scientists have a duty to be socially committed.

In an interview with Maggie McDonald for New Scientist, Beckwith said that after returning to Harvard in 1965, he "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.… 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."

Beckwith told McDonald that the main reason he gave his prize to the Black Panthers was because "the government at that time was using all sorts of illicit methods to try to destroy this organization. If a government is allowed to destroy an organization in that way, they can certainly move on to other groups, in effect creating a police state.… I also had to face the question of how I could accept an award from a drug company when I was unhappy with the way a lot of drug companies were exploiting people."

Many scientists were highly critical of Beckwith's warnings about the genetic manipulation of humans. Some considered him a traitor for raising doubts about science. Beckwith joined Science for the People, a group that opposed the inappropriate use of science, in particular the use of physics to construct weapons of war. Beckwith opposed a study of the extra Y chromosome in some boys that was presumed to be associated with a high level of aggression, extending to criminal behavior. The investigators wanted to screen newborns at Massachusetts General Hospital, a program that would have no benefit for the children or the parents. Beckwith and Jonathan King of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology questioned the program at Harvard and put their objections in print in New Scientist. The research was halted approximately one year later, but in voicing his opinion Beckwith put his career in jeopardy. He also attracted criticism when he questioned the sociobiological theories of human behavior promoted by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson.

"Beckwith brought to his activism an innate decency," wrote Daniel J. Kevles in American Scientist, "and his radicalism was increasingly tempered by reason and experience. During a stay at a biological research institute in Naples in 1970, he was exposed to Neapolitan culture and found that 'some of the hard dogmatic trends in left-wing politics that I had been attracted to began to appear less attractive.' When several radical rowdies poured ice water on Wilson's head at a symposium on sociobiology in 1975, charging him with genocide, Beckwith rose to denounce the action."

In reviewing Making Genes, Making Waves in Nation, Jonathan Marks wrote that "for scientific role models, they don't come much better. This engaged citizen-scholar has fought the good fight, at some considerable professional risk, but he has survived and flourished, his ideals unsullied, and he is a reason to take some honest pride in the academy. A scientist who follows his convictions and still achieves world-class status, who thinks carefully about this work and about social issues, and who actually takes seriously the Baconian promise of better living through science, putting his career on the line and surviving to tell the tale—this is a rare bird indeed."

Beckwith's research has since extended into other areas, but his concern with genetics research remains uppermost in his mind. He told McDonald, "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 stigmatize 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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Beckwith, Jonathan R., Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

PERIODICALS

American Scientist, January-February, 2003, Daniel J. Kevles, review of Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science, p. 76.

JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 16, 2003, Terri Peterson, review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 1998; June 25, 2003, Doris Teichler Zallen, review of The Double-edged Helix: Social Implications of Genetics in a Diverse Society, p. 3309.

Journal of Bacteriology, January, 2003, Howard A. Shuman, "Just Toothpicks and Logic: How Some Labs Succeed at Solving Complex Problems," p. 378-390.

Journal of College Science Teaching, May, 1994, Robert H. Tamarin, review of The Power of Bacterial Genetics: A Literature-based Course, pp. 340-341.

Library Journal, October 1, 2002, Gregg Sapp, review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 122.

Nation, April 7, 2003, Jonathan Marks, review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 29.

Nature, November 28, 2002, Ute Deichmann, review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 363.

New England Journal of Medicine, February 13, 2003, H. William Schnaper, review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 672; May 1, 2003, Jeffrey C. Long, review of The Double-edged Helix, p. 1825.

New Scientist, October 12, 2002, Maggie McDonald, "Free Radical" (interview), pp. 46-49.

Quarterly Review of Biology, June, 2003, John P. Jackson, Jr., review of Making Genes, Making Waves, p. 226.

Science, July 9, 1971, Henry J. Vogel, review of The Lactose Operon, p. 136.