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Questions to the Past That Resonate in the Present

An appropriate place to begin is with Kierkegaard's statement that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward. Appropriate for a centennial symposium, don't you think? Accordingly, I will use the occasion to pose questions to the past that resonate in the present, as someone said in a discussion of the role of history. I tried to do something similar in my presidential address to the SPR (1) when the topic was genetics. It worked then. Perhaps it will again. If we review historical events in genetics just preceding the birth of the American Pediatric Society (Table I), we find that they retain some interest for us today, although genetics was not a word in use then [it was coined by Bateson (2)]. The quarter century preceding the founding of our Society was an exciting time for biologists (Table 1). Darwin and Mendel were at work; Down and Huntington described the diseases we know by their names; Meischer discovered the "nucleoprotein" that would yield DNA; and there was Galton (Darwin's cousin). Galton is remembered for, among many things, an interesting experiment on the efficacy of prayer. He recognized that, every week in the realm, the people most prayed for by the Church of England were the royals; the customary prayer was for a long life. He measured longevity through several generations of royalty and compared it to controls. He showed that the anointed ones did not live longer than their controls! We laugh at this now and yet on the front page of yesterday's paper I read a report of parents who had prayed for their child's health rather than treat her disease. Their child went on to die of meningitis, deprived of the benefits some past members of this Society gave us in the form of treatment for that child's disease. With all our knowledge and opportunity, we are still, at times, irrational people. Many of the developments in genetics (Table 1) appear, with hindsight, to have been dramatic and exciting for their times: knowledge about mitosis, cell division, and meiosis; development of the concept that the chromosome, chromatids, and the "threads" that could be seen at the time were the bearers of inherited factors that determined phenotypes of individuals. When we look back on them, we find these to be brilliant achievements for the times, supposedly unsophisticated by present standards. A better understanding backward could help us to be more humble as we live forward. The social forces and agencies that molded and supported the great investigators of the past are worth knowing. Are their counterparts in place today? Perhaps the Pediatric Investigatorship Program of this Society is one. I hope so. Joseph Goldstein talked about PAIDS (Paralyzed Academic Investigator Disease Syndrome) in his presidential address to ASCI (3). He described the junior professor/investigator who starts out with promise and ultimately fails because he is not prepared to do the science of today. He offered a prescription (training in depth) to avoid PAIDS and he illustrated its efficacy with biographical sketches