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Wednesday, December 08, 2004
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UD SALUTES...
...GUNTER BLOBEL. UD recalls sitting, about ten years ago, at a talk given by a way obtuse Freudian English professor who taught at Hopkins. After his enigmatic performance, a graduate student in the audience wondered why he could not have been - many English professors could not seem to be - more clear in the use of the English language. With a haughty impatience conveying barely-suppressed rage, the Freudian said: "Would you ask an advanced cellular biologist to reduce his research in that way? A physicist? Some fields of endeavor are complex." Of course UD had heard versions of this defense of linguistic hebephrenia many times in similar settings; she had heard a student of Paul de Man's reject with contempt any notion that de Man had been a "fascist," since anyone stupid enough to think you could deploy such simple terms as "fascist," or "socialist" or "democrat" without deconstructing their authoritarian claims to truth was beneath consideration. UD knows there are still graduate students and professors impressed and even intimidated by this line of argument, and, in simple English, she finds it sad. Anyway, there's that world, UD's world, and then there's the real world. In which Nobelist Gunter Blobel, a cellular biologist, spoke recently to the New York Times. Blobel's prize money went toward the reconstruction of a church and a synagogue in Dresden, a gesture that encouraged other prize winners to do similar charitable things with their money. Blobel says to the interviewer: "I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing to their grandmothers then they probably don't understand it themselves." He proceeds to explain, in beautiful clear English, what it is he and his colleagues did with proteins. Blobel's work was always controversial; it met with a good deal of skepticism from fellow scientists. "When your colleagues were doubting you," asks the interviewer, "what gave you the confidence to keep plugging on?" "I've never cared about being judged," he replies. "There is an internal revolt in me against conforming. After the war, my family lived in East Germany, and that taught me that truth is the most holy and important thing in life." |