User:Harveybialy/TravellingPhD
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Tales of a Travelling PhD: Cuba, No. Mexico, Si.
by Harvey Bialy
July 11, 2006
Inspired by an article by James Bovard
My life in science has gifted me with a wealth of wonderful stories and some grand adventures. Here is one example that I think to write now because of the remarkable display of democracy that is unfolding in my country of exile, Mexico.
If you bear with the autobiography for a few paragraphs, the political commentary follows quickly and I believe is invigorated by the preceding narrative.
In 1994, I conceived an international biotechnology partnership I called CISABE (Cuba, Israel, South Africa Biotechnology Exchange), and was the reason I left my full-time position at Nature Biotechnology — two years later, it came almost to fruition, and I moved to La Habana to manage the project full time from the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) to which I had been a senior adviser for ten years. I think I am maybe the only person in the world who has these three visas on facing pages of their passport.
Anyway, the entire project went to hell in a hand basket within a few weeks, and to keep from trying to kill Fidel or one of his Secretaries I wrote a review of a book entitled Making PCR, which promised to be a structural anthropological study of the invention by Kary Mullis of the polymerase chain reaction of Jurassic Park and OJ fame, and instead turned out to be a politically corrected, badly written piece of revisionist history. (It may be read in all its vicious brilliance here.)
As a killer review it was quite successful as this truly awful book was remaindered shortly thereafter despite a good (not great) piece in Nature by Sydney Brenner. Even Sydney could not bring himself to praise it outright, although he was obviously more than annoyed at Kary for having a Prize that he did not as yet have. It also had the salubrious effect of causing the author to phone Peter Duesberg begging him to intercede with me to intercede with Andrew Marshall, the editor of Nature Biotechnology, so that he could publish a reply. This was after Andy had informed him that it was after all a book review, and the author of a book being reviewed does not 'generally' get a "right of reply." [1]
Needless to say, despite the razor prose, I was still more than a little chagrined, as not only had the project vanished, but along with it almost 30 years of blind love of something called “the revolution”. A single, (very expensive) cell phone call to Francisco Bolivar, the founding director of Mexico’s equivalent of the CIGB — the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the National University — saved my bacon (once again).
After hearing an abridged version of my tale of lost faith, Bolivar, famous as the co-inventor of pBR322 (the cloning vector that enabled genetic engineering) and also a founding scientist of Genentech, invited me to Cuernavaca saying, “Harvey, if you do for us what you did for Cuba, we will not treat you that way”. [2]
Now as everyone who has seen the film with Marlon Brando in the title role knows, Cuernavaca was a favorite haunt of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and I thought it suitably ironic that it was to be my new home too. The fact that Fidel had plotted the magnificently disastrous Granma landing from Mexico also “did not escape my notice” (to paraphrase a famous remark penned by Watson and Crick in Nature in its better days, where they presented their model for the 2D structure of DNA and ended the short paper with a remark that their model had implications for the replication of the genetic material that “did not escape” their notice).
But having my heart so broken by the heartless machinations of “real politik”, I vowed that I would never again involve myself in the political doings of any country and condemned them all to the deepest hells.
This was an easy vow to keep for 10 years because Mexican politics is like totally confusing, and more importantly even our circle of friends, who span the political spectrum, was united in declaring that the entire system was so corrupted that no public, political figure was anything more than a figurehead for the special interests that run the country anyway.
Easy to keep, that is, until now. The ongoing determination of who the next president of the republic will be has shaken the cynicism of even our most jaded of friends, and me and Z. as well.
I have no interest in pronouncing on the specifics of Calderon and Obrador’s contest, which have been quite reasonably covered by the international media, but I do want to make one observation.
Mexico suddenly looks like the most transparent, real democracy in the world and should give serious pause for thought to the inhabitants of its northern neighbor. [3]
Footnotes
- ↑ The review produced another, and long-term, unanticipated benefit. Kary was so grateful for it that he came out of AIDS dissident seclusion in 2004 to write the wonderful review of my biography of Peter that graces the Amazon listing.
- ↑ Paco also said during that memorable telephone call, "You know I could have told you this would happen a year ago, as could have a few others like Rafael Rangel, but nobody wanted to burst your beautiful bubble". The irony in this promise became clear 12 years later when, after having done much more for the IBT than I ever did for the CIGB, I was capriciously and unilaterally dismissed from my long-held positions by the present director of the institute, Carlos Arias.
- ↑ The above was written at a time in the presidential contest when it appeared as though the democratic process was actually at work. It goes, almost without saying, that the election was subverted by the entrenched special interests as soon as the polls showed that Obrador had a very good chance of winning.
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