It was, Lewis Wolpert admits, a rather pretentious thing to say. The renowned
biologist and author was at a European scientific meeting with colleagues
when a doctor delegate asked him what he was researching. Gastrulation,
Wolpert replied. The doctor's declaration of ignorance was briskly met with:
“It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation which is truly the
most important time in your life.” The quote was published by a colleague,
printed on posters - one is pinned to the kitchen door in Wolpert's garden
flat in North London - and has trailed him around ever since.
“Yes, it's bit pompous, but we South Africans are not class-ridden like the
English, so we actually say what we think,” Wolpert smiles. “I was just so
irritated at this doctor not knowing what gastrulation was.”
To be fair, without gastrulation you would not exist. Or, if you did, you'd be
as flat as a pancake. Gastrulation is a vital cellular reshuffle in the
early sheet-like embryo; during the reshuffle cells on the surface crawl
into the embryonic interior to form the blueprints for our innards, such as
the guts, liver, heart and skeleton. Gastrulation, which heralds the
beginning of our expansion into three-dimensional creatures with arms and
legs and squidgy bits, is one of the many wonderful, peculiar and amazing
cellular phenomena explored in How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives
of Cells, Wolpert's latest book. It is a clear, straightforward exposition
of life itself, for each of us, he writes, is nothing more than a
co-operative of cells (one guesstimate is that you are comprised of 100
trillion cells - that's 1 followed by 14 zeroes - each roughly a thousandth
of a millimetre across). From these cells come everything: our health, our
sicknesses, our children, our creativity, our emotions, our memories and -
when the cells fail - our deaths. And if you embark on an imaginary journey
inside one you can see why Wolpert calls them “the miracle of evolution”.
If an average cell were a small room - whence its name derives - it would be
the most chaotic room in the world. Its walls would be soft and membranous,
with special holes, protected by guards, for VIP molecules to enter (viruses
and bacteria are barred) and for undesirable molecules, such as sodium, to
be kicked out; inside, the room would be rammed to the rafters with
hyperactive proteins, sugars and fats dancing around nourishing, repairing
and protecting the cell; the proteins would be chopping, folding and
grafting molecules together; right in the middle of the room, inside another
membrane, would be a tiny safe containing your DNA; there would be little
messengers running from the DNA safe to the proteins to tell them what
molecules to conjure up; there would be a power station pumping out the
energy for this frenetic molecular activity.
Wolpert, who is Emeritus Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at
University College London (he retired five years ago), wrote the book
because “it struck me that many of my non-scientific friends haven't got a
clue what cells are about, and I thought that was very bad. They are so
fundamental to our lives that I thought I'd write a book showing how
miraculous cells are. We are, I regret to say, nothing more than a society
of cells. With all the stuff going on with stem cells and cloning, I thought
people really should have some understanding of the nature of life, and the
nature of their lives.”
And with that we break for biscuits and Earl Grey tea, which we carry from the
galley kitchen through a studded leather door into a rather grand, faded
drawing room filled with an eclectic mix of paintings, busts and scientific
artefacts. Wolpert chooses the chaise longue but, disappointingly, sits
upright. Above the mantelpiece hangs an Impressionist-style number; on it
sits a phrenological bust. On another wall is a valuable abstract that is
owned by his stepson by his second marriage, to the late novelist Jill
Neville; a lovely charcoal sketch of her hangs near by. The table beneath is
covered with embryology textbooks; he is currently updating one of his own.
As well as tormenting authors of textbooks, the speed of scientific progress
can challenge moral beliefs. Wolpert thinks that ethical judgments on the
use of embryonic stem cells - these cells, found only in early embryos, are
so-called master cells that can be chemically persuaded to grow into any
type of tissue required, and are touted as the future of medicine - should
be contingent on some basic scientific knowledge of embryo development.
(Interestingly, scientists often substitute the word “embryonic” with the
less emotionally charged “pluripotent”.) The Roman Catholic view that the
fertilised egg is equivalent to a newborn baby or an adult is, he writes,
absurd and without scientific foundation: “For example, the early embryo may
develop into twins at two weeks of age, and so is clearly not already a
human being ... about a quarter of all fertilised embryos die early on in
the mother's womb, and in the UK some 200,000 abortions are performed each
year. Can one really believe that their death is any way similar to the
death of a baby or an adult?”
But can't people base their moral judgments on what they feel, instinctively,
rather than on science? “I know it sounds harsh but no, I'm afraid not,”
Wolpert sighs. “You can't make judgments about early embryos unless you have
some concept about cells and about how the embryo develops. President Bush
had zero knowledge; I'm glad that President Obama has taken a sensible view
about stem cells. The idea that you cannot oppose IVF strongly, in which
thousands of early embryos are killed, but that you can be against the death
of an embryo because you take stem cells from it, is bizarre. It's totally,
logically inconsistent. Just nonsense.”
But, then again, Wolpert is not troubled by religious convictions. Brought up
in the Jewish faith, he shed his convictions as quickly as he acquired his
scientific worldview. Now a vice-president of the British Humanist
Association, he is not a raving atheist in the Richard Dawkins mould;
rather, he cannot find it in himself to believe. The question of belief -
supernatural, religious, superstitious, mystical - was the subject of his
previous book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which argued that
belief stemmed from the human need to link cause with effect (eg, if it
rains it is because we did a rain dance). I tell him that, as a fellow
non-believer, I've often thought that my brain must lack the neural wiring -
the cells? - for religious belief.
“Me too!” he exclaims. “I'm not against religion so long as religious people
don't interfere with things. Religion does a lot for society, and that's one
of the weaknesses of Richard Dawkins's argument: the help and comfort that
religion gives to a lot of people. I don't envy believers, but it would be
quite nice to believe that when one dies one goes to Heaven. Or, in my
case,” he chuckles, “to Hell!” For him, death promises only decomposition.
He will turn 80 in October but the Wolpert co-operative of cells - tall, slim,
looking more mid-sixties thanks to regular cycling, tennis and jogging -
does not look anywhere near ready to bow out, despite an extraordinarily
accomplished, and troubled, life. Brought up in South Africa as an only
child - a younger sister died early in infancy - to a stern Belfast-born
publisher father (later killed in a botched robbery) and a mother who really
longed for a daughter, Wolpert couldn't wait to escape the country and its
divisive politics, which he saw played out every day at home (“I couldn't
stand the way my parents treated the servants”). Thanks to his Communist
Party friends, with whom he used to sell political newspapers in the
townships, he set off to hitchhike across Africa. “I was carrying a letter
from Nelson Mandela introducing me to other militant groups across the
continent. Back then, it was the safest place in the world. I ended up in
Mombasa, met a crocodile hunter, then took an Arab dhow from Mombasa to
al-Mukhalla [on the Yemen coast]. It was a wonderful adventure.” Via a year
in Israel as an engineer, Wolpert ended up at Imperial College London, where
he decided that engineering “wasn't sexy enough”. A friend showed him a
scientific paper on the mechanics of the cell; the result was a new career
as a biologist at King's College London. He bumped into, and married, an old
friend from South Africa. After four children the marriage ended but he
remains on good terms with Betty, a psychologist and film-maker.
Meanwhile, he was making an academic name for himself for his theory, now
widely accepted, that certain molecules act like traffic policemen in the
developing embryo, telling cells where to go. His career was punctuated by
the acquisition of acronyms: an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society), one of
the highest honours in science, in 1980; a CBE in 1990; an FRSL (Fellow of
the Royal Society of Literature) in 1993.
In 1993, he also married Neville, a twice-divorced friend and luminous figure
in 1960s literary London. Wolpert and Neville belonged to a kind of
modern-day Bloomsbury group - a bunch of bohemian intellectuals who
frequented Chelsea and Soho (the couple's parties were legendary, according
to Neville's obituary). The frivolity would soon evaporate: Wolpert
collapsed into depression and, in 1997, Neville was found to have cancer.
She died that year. In Malignant Sadness, Wolpert's exploration of
depression from his own perspective, he revealed that the depression was
worse than watching his wife die. “It's a terrible thing to say,” he
reflects now, “but it's true. I cried for ages when she died, and I mourned
her, but I wasn't suicidal.”
The suicidal thoughts predated Neville's illness. He quickly discovered the
secrecy that surrounds the condition: “I was in hospital and friends would
ask what's wrong with me, and Jill would say, ‘He's very tired'. She hadn't
told anyone I'd been depressed, because of the stigma, and that irritated me
immensely. Why should I be secretive about having depression? I'm very cross
at all those MPs - there must be quite a few of them - who never mention
depression, so the stigma must still be pretty bad.” Wolpert still takes
medication for it and sees his psychiatrist regularly. He is helped greatly
by his partner, Alison, who assists him with his books, and he delights in
his four children and six grandchildren, all teenagers.
Neville had suggested that his father's death may have triggered the
depression: “Absolutely not. The death was quite a long time before my
depression, and they didn't mean to murder him. They tied him up, and he was
old and frail, but there was no intent to murder. To this day I don't know
why I got depressed. I was 65, happily married to Jill, and I was a
professor at the university. I had minor heart problems. There was no reason
for me to go into a depression. Maybe it was a change of medication - but
you can tell yourself any story. Bluntly, I haven't got a clue and, yes, it
does bother me.”
Wolpert says that while he still feels about 17, he recognises that his body
is not; he appeals to the photographer, only half-jokingly, not to make him
look like an ugly old man. He is slower and sometimes forgetful these days.
Still, his experiences are perfect for his next project: a book on ageing.
If Wolpert was offered the chance to live to 200, would he seize it? “I'd
like to live longer to see how the world turns out but 200 might be a bit
too long. Now that I'm retired it's not clear what my purpose in life is. It
sounds sad, my darling, but I'm afraid it's true. It's not that I'm unhappy,
or that I don't enjoy life with my family and Alison, but it's different
when you're bringing up children and doing research. Yes, I'm writing books
but it's not that important. Wouldn't it be more sensible if I died and my
children got the money?”
How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells by Lewis Wolpert (Faber &
Faber, £14.99). To order it for £13.49 inc p&p call 0845
271234 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
