Medal Winners : How the Vietnam War Launched Nobel Careers

One of the most memorable dinners hosted by President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy at the White House was on Sunday, April 29, 1962. The event honored living Nobel Prize winners from the Western Hemisphere, and among the 177 guests, forty-nine Nobel laureates attended along with other luminaries in the arts and sciences. Scheduled at the height of the Cold War, the evening's subtext was American dominance in science and technology. In the first six decades since the Nobel Prize was awarded beginning in 1901, seventy-six Americans had been so honored-more than any other nation and accounting for nearly a quarter of all laureates. Russia could muster only eight recipients. This celebration came about a year after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space. The Kennedy administration was eager to spotlight America's heroes in science. Invitees included the writers James Baldwin, John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, William xiv PROLOGUE Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Frost, the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, and John Glenn, who just two months earlier had followed Gagarin into space and successfully orbited the earth. Another guest, the 1954 laureate in Chemistry, Linus Pauling, had that weekend protested along with 3,000 others outside the White House against the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the United States. Earlier that Sunday, Pauling, carrying a placard with a message to Kennedy and the British prime minister Harold Macmillan ("we have no right to test"), managed to change into blacktie attire by eight o'clock. The president greeted Pauling at the door with a smile and his familiar wry sense of humor: "I understand you've been around the White House for a couple of days already." Pauling, who soon would win a second Nobel for contributions to Peace, acknowledged as much. President Kennedy was gracious in reply: "I hope you will continue to express your feelings." 1 The evening is remembered for Kennedy's toast to laureates, departing from remarks prepared by the Harvard historian and special assistant to the president Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: I want to tell you how welcome you are in the White House. I think that this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Later in the toast, Kennedy again spoke unscripted, expressing the hope that the dinner would also "encourage young Americans and young people in this hemisphere to develop the same drive and deep desire for knowledge and peace." 2 Kennedy, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, was a big believer in the powers of both technology and bold visions. Three weeks after Gagarin's spaceflight, the president stood before a joint session of Congress and famously declared: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Now, his broader charge to the next generation of Americans was equally audacious. Many of those who would bring Kennedy's Nobel vision to reality had no idea xv PROLOGUE that they would become scientists-much less Nobel laureates. Among the unsuspecting future researchers were three college seniors and a firstyear English literature graduate student. Joe Goldstein, a native of rural Kingstree, South Carolina, was nearing graduation as the valedictorian at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Mike Brown, raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, was preparing to graduate at the top of his class at the University of Pennsylvania, where he briefly served as editor of the student newspaper. Bob Lefkowitz, a hometown prodigy from the High School of Science in the Bronx, was about to graduate from Columbia University at nineteen. All three were chemistry majors and aspired to be practicing physicians, and none had any mentored research experience. The graduate student among this quartet was Harold Varmus, who was struggling between pursuing a passion for English literature versus following his father's path into medicine. Varmus grew up on the South Shore of Long Island and matriculated at Amherst College, where he majored in English literature (and barely survived a premed prerequisite in organic chemistry). Even though he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attend graduate school at Harvard, Varmus soon became disenchanted with the program there and applied to medical school. As with Goldstein, Brown, and Lefkowitz, Varmus avoided any opportunity to pursue laboratory research experience, anticipating a career in patient care. All four young men were stellar undergraduates and were admitted to excellent medical schools. Goldstein, the lone southerner in the group, made a last-minute decision to attend Southwestern Medical College of the University of Texas. Brown remained at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lefkowitz and Varmus became classmates at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. All four finished at or among the very top of their medical school classes in 1966, securing clinical training positions at two of the premier teaching hospitals in the country. Goldstein and Brown became fellow interns at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Lefkowitz and Varmus stayed at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. 3 All four anticipated futures as professors at medical schools, primarily serving as clinicians and teachers. They thought that they might dabble in research but had PART I SOLDIERS FOR SCIENCE THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK CHAPTER 1 ## ANNUS HORRIBILIS 1968 and America's Conflict on Two Fronts For President Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam was an unwanted distraction from his ambitious social agenda, known as the Great Society. In late May 1964, with America's commitment still limited to providing advisers, financing, and matériel, Johnson made clear his reservations about Vietnam to Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy: "It looks to me that we're getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we're committed. I believe that the Chinese Communists are coming into it." Johnson added prophetically: "I don't think it is worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out. And it's just the biggest damn mess I ever saw." 1 About two months later, a limited exchange of fire ten miles off the coast of North Vietnam turned into a critical test of Johnson's reservations. On August 2, an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, operating by his opposition to the war, was Senator Eugene McCarthy. After Robert Kennedy's assassination, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, also an early opponent of the war, joined the race. The peace vote, previously divided between Kennedy and McCarthy, now was split between McGovern and McCarthy, providing Humphrey a clear path to nomination. Antiwar forces in fifteen states attempted to bolster their representation through repeated challenges of the credentials of Humphrey delegates, but it was to no avail and Humphrey was nominated. The biggest battle of the convention, however, was fought outside on the hot and humid streets of Chicago. Beginning five months before the convention, plans were laid for large-scale antiwar protests involving more than a hundred groups. Tens of thousands of protesters came to Chicago. In a show of strength, Mayor Richard J. Daley refused permits for parades, established curfews at public parks, and amassed a force of nearly 12,000 Chicago police, 7,500 Army troops, 7,500 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 Secret Service agents. Violence erupted when law enforcement attempted to relocate protestors from areas in which they were not permitted and when protestors attempted to march to the convention site. Scenes of police in full riot gear, using tear gas, and wielding clubs to beat protestors were telecast live around the country. Reporters who happened to be caught in the crossfire were attacked as well. Nearly 600 arrests were made, and more than 100 protestors and a comparable number of law enforcement personnel were injured. 58 Chicago only served to put an exclamation point on a year of violence and division. As soldiers fought an ocean away, the dreams of the Great Society and the nonviolence movement at home had been shattered by assassinations, looting, burning, and the heavy-handed response of elected officials and law enforcement. CHAPTER 2 BEST IN CLASS "As the ground war in Vietnam escalated in the late 1960s, the US government leveraged the so-called doctor draft to secure adequate numbers of medical personnel in the armed forces. Among newly minted physicians' few alternatives to military service was the Clinical Associate Training Program at the National Institutes of Health. Though only a small percentage of applicants were accepted, the elite program launched an unprecedented number of remarkable scientific careers that would revolutionize medicine at the end of the twentieth century. Medal Winners recounts this overlooked chapter and unforeseen byproduct of the Vietnam War through the lives of four former NIH clinical associates who would go on to become Nobel laureates. Raymond S. Greenberg traces their stories from their pre-NIH years and apprenticeships through their subsequent Nobel Prize-winning work, which transformed treatment of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. Greenberg shows how the Vietnam draft unintentionally ushered in a golden era of research by bringing talented young physicians under the tutelage of leading scientists and offers a lesson in what it may take to replicate such a towering center of scientific innovation as the NIH in the 1960s and 1970s."--Google Books viewed March 10, 2022