Rama Ratnam
March 3, 2012
The last two months have been utterly tedious. Here I am, an assistant professor, who had at last found his perch in a nice university. I was feeling nice and comfy. I was happily cracking nuts and such with my beak. And now they have gone and pushed me off it. I am referring to that great American tragedy, the denial of tenure.
For my lay friends who are roaming the world at large, let me explain. The American tenure system guarantees a job for life. This is an astonishing and extraordinary luxury, but it is true. Once we have tenure we can choose when to retire. It doesn’t mean that we will do anything much further on, but there is the hope that we will. This is of course rather a moot point, and so tenure can be a tricky decision. There is an amusing tale about the Sea Squirt (Tunicates) told by Daniel Dennett, the cognitive scientist:
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.
Often times, as we get too old with tenure and are shuffling about, perpetually smelling of chalk and urine, we may be eased into an emeritus position. Eased is a good word, as in "eased into a coffin". This is the penultimate stage before death. Or is it? Is there life after achieving an emeritus position?
When I was a graduate student in Illinois, I remember a most interesting physiologist by the name of Ladd Prosser. He was a phenomenon, a scientist with great breadth of interests. When he was young he had worked with Adrian and Eccles, both Nobel laureates. Later, at Woods Hole, he worked with John Z. Young, another scientific giant who was the first to work on the squid giant axon. Prosser trained with some of the greats, and in time he became a great physiologist.
Prosser moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but World War II began. He was recruited as the chief physiologist in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos (where the first atomic bomb was developed). He was among the first to study the effects of radiation on physiology. After the war he returned to Illinois. I was 28 when I first met him in the early 1990s, and he was ancient even then, probably close to 90. I was scouring the campus for a chemical recipe, a special type of Ringer’s solution (saline), and I was directed to Professor Prosser's lab.
So I wandered in and looked around. But it was silent. There was not a soul in sight. Then I saw him. He was bent over, and he was slowly shuffling to a Faraday Cage with an electrode in his hand. In the cage was a frog with an incision down its gut. He asked me "what do you want young man?" And I explained, but he was not satisfied. He wanted to know on what animal I wanted to use the solution, to what purpose, what was the anesthesia, etc. I was exhausted. I was just trying to get on with my research and I wanted answers, not questions. Finally he yielded and let me have the recipe.
I asked him out of curiosity "what are you doing Dr. Prosser?" He held up the glass electrode, and his hand was trembling just a little, "I am going to record activity from the smooth muscle fiber of a frog!" I watched him, bent over and shuffling slowly to the electrophysiology rig. He was totally indifferent to me. How many young students like me had he seen in his long life? Some had died while they were young and he was old, and they had died growing old even as he kept going. They came and they went, but he marched on. He had seen impatient whippersnappers like us for many years, and he forgot us as soon as he saw us. Sometimes you get a feeling. Not so much that you are in the presence of the ancients, but that you are in the presence of ancient wisdom. For an electrophysiologist who is 28, an electrophysiologist at 90 is an affront.
In his emeritus status he still managed to shuffle over to the rig, and stick an electrode into the gut of a frog. I wondered what kinds of questions he was asking and why did he have to ask them now? He probably had asked them all, or had he not? He should be at home playing with his great grand-children and reading the newspaper. I was suddenly irritated. I had to span nearly three score years to reach him, and it was much too far ahead. I was irritated because I did not know what that great span of time meant for an electrophysiologist. He had seen so much.
I watched him. Even for the young, positioning an electrode in vivo requires a fine hand. And it took him time, but he had forgotten me. I watched him silently and I understood. I would want to be an emeritus professor, pottering about the lab with an electrode in hand, and record electrical potentials. And one day, when I grew as old as Professor Prosser, and I was recording from the gut or the brain of a frog, I would like to fall into a deep sleep. The last thing I would hear was the slow sputtering of action potentials played over the audio monitor. That is the best way for an electrophysiologist to die.
It is not easy to know death when you are 28. There was a standing joke in Illinois about Prosser. In the Star Trek series, when the Vulcans encounter friends, they hold up their hand and splay their fingers and say "Live long and prosper!" In Illinois we used to do the same with our hand, except that we would say "Live long and Prosser!"
Professor Prosser died in 2002 at the age of 95. I do not know how he died although I was at the University of Illinois at that time. I hoped that he was recording electrical activity from smooth muscle fibers of the frog. He was indomitable, one of the last great integrative physiologists. He was one of the greats. I didn't understand his death just as I could not comprehend his life. When I had seen him there was a timelessness to him. In my mind I see him stooped, shuffling silently with an electrode in hand, as he wandered through dingy and dark labs. He drifted, and he drifted silently into the mists of eternal time.
Live long and Prosser.