136
The Body Electric
As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.
I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily
business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-
lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he
nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why
they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years
in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying
preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily
visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course,
we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended
to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film
reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual busi-
ness of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells
potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer
than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a
process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which
we'd been ignorant until then.
The film was shown at a workshop on fracture healing sponsored by
the National Academy of Sciences in 1965. It was one of a series of
meetings organized for the heads of clinical departments to educate them
as to the most promising directions for research. A dynamic organizer
named Jim Wray had recently become chairman of the Upstate Medical
Center's department of orthopedic surgery, but Jim's superb skills were
political rather than scientific. Since I was an active researcher and had
just been promoted to associate professor, Jim asked me to go in his
place. I tried to get out of it, because I knew my electrical bones would
get a frosty reception from the big shots if I opened my mouth, but Jim
prevailed. The meeting was mostly what I'd expected, but there were
three bright spots. One was that microcinematic vision. Another was the
chance to get acquainted with the other delegate from my department, a
sharp young orthopedic surgeon named Dave Murray. The third was the
presence of Dr. John J. Pritchard.
A renowned British anatomist who'd added much to our knowledge of
fracture healing, Dr. Pritchard was the meeting's keynote speaker—the
beneficent father-figure who was to evaluate all the papers and sum-
marize everything at the end. Dave and I almost skipped his talk. We
hadn't been impressed with the presentations, and we figured there had
been so few new ideas that Pritchard would have nothing to say. How-
ever, our bus to the Washington airport didn't leave until after Prit-
chard's
luncheon
address,
so
we
stayed. With a tact that seemed
peculiarly English, he reached the same assessment we had, but phrased