The Opportunity to Interview Ed Johnson, a Renowned Molecular biologist, Appeared Almost

this little part…

EJ: You’re probably wondering, am I saying that a blind person can’t do science?

RW: Not at all. No. I’m on a mystical thing here. I’m saying we see these very small slices of this spectrum and can be moved by the beauty of them. I mean, the spectrum of reality is vast and we are aware only of this small band in it, but even in this small band there is a tremendous richness.
You would agree, would you not, that a photograph that only has reds, greens and yellows can be so rich and so beautiful that it is amazing. Yet it is only a tiny little slice of something much vaster. Do you see where I’m going? I mean this is a mysterious world that we’re in.

EJ: I really think that when you’re talking about a mystery that excites scientists, philosophers and artists alike, I think the field right now would be consciousness. I mean if there’s one thing that will cause a sense of wonderment with any scientist it’s how the chemicals in the brain can allow me to say this sentence. You know?
Paul Greengard has contributed as much as anybody in this field, rudimentary as it is right now. My own lab has contributed, too, separate from my work with Paul as to how neurons work.
Nevertheless, we’re not even close to beginning to explain how a thought can form, or how one person can make a decision. You’re left to go to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I mean, if everything is chemically determined, that means that the electrons and the chemicals in our brains have to react in a certain way. When two chemicals to come together, in order for the free energy to allow those two chemicals to react, they’re going to do it in one way and only in one way. So it all depends on the state of the electrons, because chemistry is the science of electrons.
But Heisenberg’s great, moving insight was that you can’t tell the position of the electron at any given time because whatever you do to determine where it is, changes it. So there is an uncertainty about exactly where it is going to be. It ultimately comes down to two chemicals reacting that unmeasurable way multiplied over millions and millions of times. That can account for something like free will. How, nobody has the faintest clue.

RW: Just by chance I happened to be reading an excerpt from Teilhard de Chardin yesterday. He talks about the within of things and the without of things. Science deals with the without of things. For science, consciousness is problematic. It’s the within of things.

EJ: It’s problematic for everybody! Not just scientists! If anybody can explain consciousness, by all means, I’m willing to listen!

RW: Well, at the time he wrote his books, I don’t think there was much going on in science in regard to this question.

EJ: It’s still very rudimentary today. But there are people. For example, trying to take photographs of PET scans, Positive Electron Topography scans, of the brain showing different regions thinking at different times when certain questions are asked. Now is that rudimentary, or what?

RW: Well, Chardin said something about depending on the scale at which you look at matter, certain things are apparent. But they are not clear on a different scale. The earth’s continents move around clearly if you’re looking at them in geological time, but for us, they appear to be fixed. The minerals of nature would seem to be inert, but what about the odd element that is radioactive? What the hell is that? Chardin makes an analogy between radioactivity in the mineral world, and consciousness in the world of organic life. I haven’t been able to think very clearly about that, but just on the surface, it has a certain appealing quality to it.

EJ: I agree that it has an appealing quality. The metaphor is that radioactivity is taking physics to its most elementary level. The components of the nucleus of an atom are coming apart, right? You’re talking about getting as small as you can possibly get. You’re out of chemistry and into nuclear physics.

RW: Well, you’ve got limestone, basalt, granite, this rock, that one, sand, and then, all of the sudden here’s this funny mineral that’s doing something really strange! It’s sending out vibrations or something!

EJ: Okay. With consciouness. You’ve got rocks. You’ve got plants. They’re alive. You’ve got snails. They’re alive. Then after a few evolutionary steps, you’ve got people making sentences. So the question is, is there something elementary in those people making sentences in the way there is something elementary in a radioactive element breaking down?
So there is an analogy there that makes a certain amount of sense. We’ve come a lot farther toward explaining how an atom does that than we’ve come with consciousness.

RW: Are you interested yourself, as a scientist, in this question of consciousness?

EJ: Yes, very much so. We’ve taken some beautiful photographs, as a matter of fact, of nerves in action. And what these photographs purport to show is how chemicals from the centers of the nerve cells go way out into nerve processes to do important things out there where they connect with other nerves. So it’s getting at the question of how nerves communicate with each other. We’ve discovered a protein that moves along these nerve processes and it moves along with RNA molecules of a certain type. It carries those RNA molecules and allows things to happen that will reinforce a thought process—a thought process, being ridiculously defined as two nerves making electrical contact with each other!

RW: Are you at all tempted to hypothesize that there may be some fundamental property of matter, quantum matter, that we would have to say is mysteriously alive, if not exactly sentient? That is, do we know all there is to know about matter?

EJ: Right now anything that is alive is mysterious! There is a sense of wonderment. Everybody should appreciate that and think of living things in terms of what makes them tick. I think it’s miraculous. Now I don’t use that word lightly, because, as a scientist, I like to try to explain miracles.

RW: But you were saying earlier there’s the second law of thermodynamics, which is given such weight, but then there is this other thing, life, which is going in the opposite direction.

EJ: The opposite direction. We’re making positive entropy. It’s going the opposite way of the second law of thermodynamics. You can say, statistically, it’s all going to run down in the long-term scheme of things. You can say that. But you wouldn’t have any basis for saying that life and increasing order is not long term, or that it doesn’t run backwards in some sense for a long, long time.

RW: Maybe this would be interesting to you. I consider it mysterious that a certain chord on the piano, a few notes, a shift to a minor chord, even a color affects my feelings. Is that a mysterious thing for you?

EJ: It is a mysterious thing to me. Of course, the analogy extends to being moved by looking at scientific data or hearing scientific data. You can hear scientific data.

RW: What do you mean?

EJ: There are experiments that involve listening to certain sounds. The ticking of a Geiger counter or even musical chords. You can’t listen to individual living cells. That would be an interesting thing to try to do.

RW: Do you ever think that some of the early thinkers, Pythagoras, for instance, who speak of the world as based on the octave, or the idea of the world sound, OM. People have had, at certain times, apparently, in certain states of consciousness, perceptions that we can’t quite quantify, but which may be accounts of something real.

EJ: There’s no question. You know science is a very late development. I guess you can trace modern science back to the Greeks with Aristotelean logic, the development of the concept of zero by the Mayans, stuff like that. But scientific thinking by humans, well, some of the greatest, most moving discoveries came before recorded history of any kind. Certainly people were moved on the emotional level to think about things before there was a logic as a language with which to express them. So the early religions definitely served their purpose for providing a language, but more than that, an emotional context in which to put thinking that really moved you. I can imagine people building Stonehenge and looking at the vernal equinox and the sun shining through and being incredibly moved, and then thinking, what a damn good job I did putting those stones just right with my mathematical calculations to get the sun right there like that![laughs]

RW: One last question. You said that some of your co-workers think you spend too much time on your scientific photography.

EJ: I generally take most of the photographs myself. With the electron microscope, I take every one. I can literally spend twelve hours at the microscope staring endlessly at molecules until I get just the right photographs. Then comes the processing part.
Now with the con-focal microscope I direct the team. It frequently takes two or three people working at the same time to actually get a single photograph. Some people do the preparation. Another gets the slide on there. Another person is looking at the computer screen and adjusting it while I am looking into the scope. Then the processing, in which the photographs are made presentable to my peers—I always do that myself. It’s not that I don’t trust other people to do it, but I generally cannot let those pictures just sit there. They have to look just right.
So I do spend hours and hours and hours. It delays publication. And not only that, but in science, you have to pay for your photographs! With a color page, the journal will charge you three thousand dollars for that! Then with the last pictures for publication I took, there were eleven figures. Nine of them were color photographs. So I paid a fortune to have that thing published, but I just couldn’t let those photos go.

RW: Is there a joy in that?

EJ: Oh, yes. Very much so. And I’m very happy to get feedback. You know, “I read your paper. Those photographs are incredible.” I say, thank you, thank you. I don’t say it out loud, but it’s there.