Did it work?
Some of the white chickens were born with patches of pigmentation. But to truly prove it, I had to make my experiments blinded and controlled. What I needed was to do these experiments more correctly, not in my basement, and now I’m thinking, “OK, I really need to talk to someone who understands this stuff. So I’m gonna go to the greatest place on the planet, Harvard Medical School, and I’m gonna talk to a Harvard doctor. Now it’s time to take this up a notch. We’re gonna get serious.”
Did you make an appointment?
Oh, no. I didn’t even know where I was going. I’m walking around asking people how to find Harvard Medical School. I had no clue. I finally find it, with all that granite and slab stairs worn from the generations of people coming and going. My endorphins are flying. I go to the front door and the guard would not let me through. I’m not giving up that easy. I went all around the building trying all the doors, but everything’s locked. So I stood by some Dumpsters trying to look inconspicuous until someone came by—this little short guy, bald, with khaki pants and a bunch of keys in his hands. I figured it was the janitor. So he opens the door and I just sort of slip in. He keeps walking, but about halfway down the corridor he turns around and says, “Can I help you, sir?”
“No. I’m looking for a Harvard doctor,” I said.
Now, what I didn’t know was that this was Steven Kuffler, chair of neurobiology. Instead I told him that I was friends with a janitor who lived down the street from my house and that I worked at the school cafeteria washing plates. I’m from the underprivileged class too, I said. He knew I thought he was the janitor. He said, “Why are you here?” I said, “Oh, it’s got to do with nuclear protein and inducing melanin synthesis in albino chickens.” I could see that I was impressing him. He has no idea what DNA is, [I am thinking]. Finally he said, “Well, I think I know someone who can help you.” I remember him bringing me up in the elevator, past all the spaghetti wire, all that neurobiology equipment and circuits—it was so awesome and impressive—right to Josh Sanes, who now runs the brain center at Harvard. He was just a grad student at the time, putting probes in caterpillars and looking at their neurons. I talked to Josh all day. Eventually they invited me back to repeat the experiments correctly. The paper was ultimately published in Nature in 1974. Every now and then the janitor would show up and I was so excited to see him. It was only later that I found out who he was.
So what happened back at the high school?
The teacher gave me a C and everyone else got an A. He didn’t like the way I wrote it, but the grade was changed after I won the state science fair. The night of the science fair, my mother tried to stop me from leaving. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. Barbara was out front honking the horn, waiting to give me a ride. I said, “Ma, I’m going. I don’t care what you say.” This was the first time I rebelled like that. I remember her breaking down in tears. When I arrived, the whole gymnasium was overflowing out the back door. Then they went from the bottom up, fourth grand award, third grand award. And then I was first grand award, and I noticed my mother was in there—she did show up at the end. Then I got the Massachusetts Medical Society Award, and The Boston Globe gave me an award. That was my vindication that I wasn’t stupid.
You got to the Ivy League, and soon you were working with heart transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard. How did that happen?
At the University of Pennsylvania, I was in the University Scholars Program. We could take any classes we liked as undergraduates, so I started taking medical school classes in 1975. It was a wildly exciting time for heart transplant medicine, so I wanted to go to South Africa to work with Christiaan Barnard. I wrote to Barnard, and he said, “Yeah, you can come.” It was fascinating but horrific. Some of the heart transplant patients had run out of their immunosuppressive drugs; they couldn’t breathe. They were in wheelchairs. Their bodies were rejecting the organs and they were dying with their families all around them. Anyway, I came back to Philadelphia with a whole pile of papers coauthored with Barnard.
I spent a couple of years rolling pennies and eating canned spinach and pasta while I tried to understand the universe.
Obviously you didn’t go into surgery. What came next?
By the time I graduated from medical school, heart transplant surgery had become conventional, so I moved to Los Angeles and did something I’ve never told anyone else about: I spent a couple of years rolling pennies and eating canned spinach and pasta while I tried to understand the universe, an effort I felt had reached a dead end.
Dropping everything to spend years thinking about cosmology could be called self-indulgent.
For me it was the equivalent of hiking around Europe—I was hiking through the universe, and I needed the intellectual freedom to just think. I’ll tell you, putting the puzzle together is not trivial, but after two years I had a new theory of the universe.
Your book on that work, called Biocentrism, cowritten with the astronomer Bob Berman, will be out soon. In it you propose that our current theories of the universe will never work unless they account for life and consciousness. Can you explain?
Look at this coffee cup. You say it’s right there, but the truth of the matter is you can’t see that through your brain. Your brain has a bone around it. What is happening is that what you see is reconstructed in your mind. We have these words space and time, but you can’t touch them. They’re not objects, they’re not things, they go forever. Space and time are really tools of animal sense perception, the way we organize and construct information.
You have suggested that reality is determined by the conscious observer. Most physicists view consciousness as an accident.
There was a paper published in Science this February, and what it showed was that if you do an experiment with a photon, put it in the apparatus, that what you do right now actually changes an event that already occurred in the past. Now isn’t that bizarre? That is the same universe that you and I are in. How can the physics in this experiment actually show that if you do something right now it retroactively changes an event that has already happened? You can play your little games with it, but any way you cut the pie, if you observe something it acts as a particle, and if you don’t it acts as a wave. It is not an artifact of the system. Those experiments are real. Get over it.
You’ve said physical laws are exactly balanced for life to exist.
If there were one-billionth of a difference in the mass of the Big Bang, you couldn’t have galaxies. If the gravitational constant were ever-so-slightly different, you couldn’t have stars, including the sun, and you would just have hydrogen. There are 200 parameters like this. We now have people out there talking about an intelligent design, saying “God” is the explanation. But it is really because quantum theory is right: Everything is observer-determined and the past and present are relative only to you, as the observer. It all fits, but the problem is, you then do need to accept what people will not accept: When you turn your back to the moon, it no longer exists.
Despite the cosmic uncertainty, you went on to pursue a most tangible goal.
Considering my small role in the universe, I thought I could best apply myself to trying to treat or even cure diabetes, and possibly other diseases that affect the health and lives of millions. Instead of transplanting whole organs like the heart, I decided to work with cells—from a biocentric viewpoint, the fundamental units of reality and the bedrock of our observer-determined world. The person I approached was Patrick Soon-Shiong, a UCLA professor who was trying to transplant the insulin-producing cells called islets as a treatment for diabetes. The hurdles there were similar to those we faced with heart transplants: overcoming a shortage of tissue and preventing rejection.
