For the 65th reunion yearbook of the Princeton Class of 1960

The following will appear in a yearbook to appear in 2025 in a yearbook for the 65th reunion of the Princeton class of 1960.  Who knows if my wife and I will be around in a year to see it.   So here it is.

Lewis Robinson M. D.

Princeton 1960

Harvard 1962 Masters in Chemistry

Penn Med 1966 M. D.

We were limited to 500 words and additional commentary appears after the ***

Without this woman I would be nothing.  This is a picture of wife Martha and me February 2024 atop the 101 Tower in Taiwan 4 months (hopefully) before we celebrate our 60th Wedding Anniversary.

All of us face the same thing in the coming years and you might be interested in how a hard headed scientific type like me was dragged kicking and screaming into the belief of a creator.

It starts with my advisor Paul Schleyer ’52, a great organic chemist, whose formidable presence switched me from preMed to chemistry grad student.  Pete Riley was a fellow advisee and our two remembrances of him can be found here https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/paul-schleyer-1930-2014-a-remembrance/ and here https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/paul-schleyer-1930-2014-r-i-p/.

So in the fall of 1960 I was at Harvard (which Schleyer called Mecca).  I found organic chemistry very intuitive and came up with an idea in ’61 which I sold to R. B. Woodward, a future Nobelist in Chemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns_Woodward.  He allowed me to work on it for a PhD rather than his own ideas.  My lab technique was lousy and I went back to med school at Penn, but the idea was correct according to Joe Landesberg (Rutgers 1960), friend and fellow grad student. Knowing that at one time I was capable of cutting edge world class thinking, however briefly, I became unable to accept statements that made no sense to me regardless of who said them.

I entered Penn Med in ’62 with the most sophisticated education in organic chemistry possible.  Purely by luck, this was exactly the time when molecular biology began to explode, and I’ve found no difficulty in following its chemistry over the past 60+ years.

Back at PU, I was influenced by “The Plague” by Camus, particularly the scene where a child’s death was excruciatingly described as watched by the protagonist and a priest, rubbing my young nose in the problem of how an omnipotent God could allow such a thing to happen.

Princeton and the dirty Bicker didn’t improve my opinion of religion, particularly Christianity, which started in the 3rd grade when an older kid tried to drown me in a toilet because I was Jewish.

As a neurologist I saw many good people undergoing terrible suffering.  But, with the passage of time, molecular biology and biochemistry revealed just how complex the chemical machinery underlying our existence is and how miraculous it is that it works at all.

The idea that a blind watchmaker could produce such machinery by changing one amino acid or one nucleotide at a time became increasingly implausible. https://luysii.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/how-many-proteins-can-be-made-using-the-entire-earth-mass-to-do-so/.  There simply isn’t enough time (or mass) to randomly tinker and produce the molecules that make us up.  So evolution really doesn’t explain the existence of life to me which, whether I like it or not, brings up the likelihood of a creator.

With age comes experience if not wisdom. Despite what I said about Christianity, some of the very finest people I’ve known were raised as Christians:  Taylor, Soden, Larr, Bishop Lee Miller, Willard, Riley, Barks, Cornelius, Cozzarelli, Southwell, Gesner, Stinnett — I miss them all.

***

In this group you will find an Ambassador to a Central American Country, the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for 10 years, the author of a hit broadway musical allowing him to retire before 30, a PhD working at Los Alamos, a Lutheran Bishop, a Chemistry professor at Iowa State, a Psychiatry professor at Penn Med, a high powered banker at Chase who toured with David Rockefeller.

Intimidating no?  For just how intimidating Princeton could be for a highschooler (including me) who knew almost nothing about Princeton please see the following post for what it was like for us in entering Princeton in  1957 — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2023/06/02/advice-for-first-time-high-school-students-entering-the-ivy-league-in-the-fall/

As a practicing clinical neurologist watching patients and their families I couldn’t help, the problem of theodicy was ever present.  Here is where studying molecular biology as it grew up really helped.  For a bit more detail on this please see https://luysii.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/the-solace-of-molecular-biology/.

Molecular biology constantly gives us spectacular demonstrations of the Cartesian dichotomy between flesh and spirit.  For a fairly technical example please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/the-limits-of-chemical-reductionism/

So where do you go having been forced to believe in a creator?  Well you don’t act like the guy on my high school basketball team who crossed himself before every foul shot.  Don’t ask for anything, you have already been given life.  No graven images,  just one creator and all that.

That’s pretty abstract, but that’s the Judaic culture I grew up with.

What about prayer, mysticism etc. etc.?  For me at least, seeing the exquisite chemistry and molecular machines that make us up and how we could be made of such fragile material could be considered a form of prayer (acknowledging the work of the creator).

It does instill a sense of wonder and awe.  One small example: the elegance and improbability of existence of the topoisomerase enzyme, whose structure and mechanism was deciphered by our brilliant classmate Nick Cozzarelli, which grabs DNA, cuts it creating a gap, slides another piece of DNA through the gap and then sews it up again.  Impossible for me to see how it could have arisen by chance.