S. Jonathon Singer died in
February at age 92. He was a major figure in the biological sciences and a dear
friend of mine.
For seven years, 1957-1964, I enjoyed an especially close
learning and working relationship with Jon. Almost every day I saw his keen
scientific mind at work and experienced the richness of his qualities as a
person.
It began in 1957 in the Chemistry Department at Yale when
I was hired on a temporary basis as a technician. It’s a tale worth retelling
in these worrisome times. A local McCarthy-style campaign had ended my
short-lived career as a junior high school teacher by spreading the word that I
had been an organizer for the Labor Youth League, one of many organizations
labeled as “subversive” by the McCarran “internal security” Board. After being
unemployed for two months, I was hired by Julian Sturtevant, a close faculty
colleague of Jon’s, as an act of personal kindness and a rejection of
McCarthyism (conditional on whether I
could prepare and qualify for Yale’s graduate program in Chemistry). Sparing details, it was Jon who became my
mentor, encouraging me on the difficult journey to qualify, taking me on as a
graduate student, then as a post-doc and collaborator at UC San Diego. It was
with Jon in La Jolla that an idea I got as a graduate student came to fruition
in “Affinity Labeling: a General Method for Labeling the Active Sites of
Antibodies and Enzymes”.
I was a little older than Jon, and the mentoring
relationship evolved into a deep family friendship.
Jon’s contributions to the understanding of fundamental
biological phenomena were many and profound. Early on, while a Fellow with
Linus Pauling, he collaborated in discovering the genetic basis of Sickle Cell
Anemia. The most significant of his
numerous contributions was in developing a model of the cell membrane that
revolutionized previous notions and laid the basis for later discoveries on how
cells function and how they interact. A Retrospective
on Jon, by Russell Doolittle, will appear in the forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science (PNAS).
Over the years, Jon became more and more concerned about
the “human condition”, the dismal state of affairs in our country and the rest
of the world. He was very pessimistic and came to think that the fundamental
difficulty was a genetic limitation of human intelligence, encompassing all
but the rare geniuses. (He made it clear that his notion of genius did not
include himself or others who were just bright and accomplished in various fields.)
So, even though Jon and I shared many values and a
commitment to social justice, we often debated his diagnosis of the underlying
difficulty. I argued that it’s more a matter of an economic system that breeds enormous
inequality and turns victims against each other to the advantage of neo-fascist
demagogues.
I’m sure Jon felt vindicated, though horrified, by Trump’s
rise to power. Surely one’s faith in a better future is being tested extremely.
Still, as I wrote in my last letter to Jon, “I
don’t think that the wonders of human achievement, especially culturally,
belong solely to the occasional genius that randomly appears in our midst. And
there’s certainly now a clear majority, of which you and I are still a part,
who will resist and hopefully turn the tide against Trumpism and
know-nothingism in general.”
With much
love and appreciation, goodbye Jon.
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