Links to Literature

Abstract

One of my favorite stories about a career in biology concerns John Enders, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for discovering how to grow the poliovirus in culture. Enders had begun his academic career studying English literature and was doing doctoral work in Middle English. His roommate was studying microbiology under Hans Zinsser and visits to Zinsser's lab awakened Enders' interest in microbiology. In Enders' obituary, F.S. Rosen (1985) noted that Enders died unexpectedly on 8 September 1985 [at the age of 88] just as he had finished a volume of poems by T.S. Eliot. This seems a particularly fitting end to a life in science that had begun in literature. But this is more than just a nice story. It has two important lessons for students. First, it shows the sharp twists and turns a career path can take. Many students worry about what they will do with their lives, and they feel that the choice of a college, a major, a first job, leads irrevocably down a particular path. Naturally, a decision becomes difficult when the entire future seems to depend on it. The career shift that Enders made, though rather radical, is hardly unique. As a math-turned-biology major married to an engineering-turnedhistory major, I can safely say that a vast number of students leave college in a major other than what they intended on entrance. As in Enders' case, a number of noted biologists originally had literary aspirations. The great 19th-century French physiologist Claude Bernard traveled to Paris to pursue a career as a playwright, and Hans Zinsser himself began his college studies as a budding poet. Such links between science and literature provide another lesson for students: The realms of the mind are all interrelated. This is an important but difficult lesson for students to learn because they take history courses, English courses and science courses in which the areas of knowledge seem very different from one another in content, in vocabulary and in attitude. Arguing for interdisciplinary studies is hardly new, and steps in this direction have again been proposed by some of the recent science curriculum studies (AAAS 1989; 1990). But at the moment, biology teachers have enough to do without taking on the burden of singlehandedly reorienting the curriculum to reveal the unity underlying all human knowledge. However, we can make a start. Within the context of a general biology course, we can select readings that reveal a great deal about nature, even though they were not written by biologists but by those involved in literature. The writings of several professors of literature come to mind in this context. I recently read Deep Enough for Ivorybills by James Kilgo (1988) and fell in love with it, even though it describes a philosophy of nature very different from my own. Kilgo is a professor of English at the University of Georgia. A native of South Carolina, he has always been close to the natural environment of the South. The point of his book's title essay is that there are few places left that are unspoiled enough and remote enough for the elusive and rare ivorybill woodpecker. He recalls passing the Pee Dee River Swamp as a child and his father saying: You get lost in there, they'd never find you .... I bet there're still ivorybills in there. . . . Could be. There're places in that swamp nobody's even been in. That's where Kilgo's lifelong fascination with nature, and with ivorybills in particular, began. While working on his doctorate in English at Tulane University, he explored the woods of Louisiana and one day thought he heard an ivorybill in an area close to where Audubon himself did his painting of the bird. Though Kilgo never actually saw the bird, that experience had a profound effect upon him: