Road to research: An Interview with Dr. Lewis Thomas;

              An Interview
With Dr. Lewis Thomas
Ttie Road
CO
Research nlong the tile corridor of the sixth floor of
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
New York City stand cylinders of compressed
gas, portable trays on wheels, metal stands holding
plastic jugs of colorless liquids, and cabinets filled
with beakers, glasses, and boxes of chemicals. One
passes labs with glass tubing and glowing Bunsen
burners, refrigerated labs behind metal doors, and
white -coated men and women. At the end of the hall
is the office of Dr. Lewis Thomas, chancellor of the
institute as well as the author of such renowned
books as The Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the
Snail, and, most recently, The Youngest Science, Notes
of a Medicine-Watcher.
Dr. Thomas is a soft-spoken scientist whose
outward calm belies his invigorating mind. As he
discusses issues facing the scientific and business
communities, he chooses to focus on what he calls the
"intellectual connections" between the two fields,
particularly the shared concerns about basic and
applied research.
His thoughts come slowly, softly. His fingers move
gently, cupping a cigarette, twirling tortoise shell
glasses, cradling his j aw as he speaks. The following
is an edited version of a recent conversation.
You have said that you are not sure that the
term "high technology" could be applied to the
biomedical field. Would you care to explain?
What I meant is that I don't regard machinery, such
as a CAT scanner or the artificial heart, as represent­ing
high technology. I think today's version of high
technology in the biomedical field is the working out
of techniques for manipulating DNA in vivo. Recom­binant
DNA is an advance that I would regard as the
greatest thing that has ever happened in biological
science. It is now possible for cell biologists and
immunologists and molecular geneticists to get
answers that were inconceivable just a few years ago.
I think that when historians one day write about the
biological revolution, they'll date it in the past decade.
The significance of recombinant DNA technology is
that we can now begin to look at events not just
inside the cell but inside the intricate machinery of
these cells, and this means to me that we ought to be
able to explore disease mechanisms in a way we've
never been able to do before. This is why I'm so
optimistic about our being able to do something
decisive with the problem of cancer in some sort of
real time. The work is moving very fast, and the
investigators who are doing this work are extremely
enthusiastic, highly competent, and pretty sure that
before long they're going to understand what goes on
at a deep level in cancer. And when that happens, it is
likely that we will be able to devise either pharmaco­logical
or immunological approaches that we would
not have been able to come up with otherwise.
So the great need in medicine is for more basic
biomedical research, and I would like to talk about
something fascinating that is happening today in
this field.
What do you see taking place?
Well, there are new connections being made between
industrial science and academic science. It used to be
that industrial science—or applied science—was
targeted toward a product, while what -went on in the
university world was largely basic science that was
aimed at acquiring an understanding of the mecha­nisms
in nature. And there was no connection
between those two communities. A few decades ago,
this changed in the physical sciences, as institutions
like MIT and Cal-Tech began working with the
industrial world, and some major corporations began