The 457th Convocation Address: “Unity and Diversity: Lessons from a New Biology” By Susan L. Lindquist First and foremost, congratulations! On behalf of the entire faculty, I salute you. Look around and salute each other! And while we’re at it, let’s salute the families and friends who’ve helped get you here—be it by providing the big bucks that gained you check-in privileges to your classes and checkout privileges at the library, or by offering the small quiet tendernesses that soothed your ravaged spirits in that midnight-before-midterm hour. This is a great day, one you will long remember—and for good reason. You are doing something quite wonderful today, receiving a degree from the University of Chicago. This is no small accomplishment. You’ve gotten an education few can equal, none surpass. And the single best thing about it is . . . your education has just begun. You are here for different reasons. Some aspire to greater depths of philosophical wisdom, others to greater heights of wealth and fame. But you are also here, and not elsewhere, for another reason. This university aims to teach each and every one of you one thing above all else: how to learn, not just how to absorb what others tell you. (No doubt you have had just about enough of that, thank you very much!) This faculty strives to teach you how to find, analyze, dissect, and evaluate the information that’s out there. How to separate the chaff from the grain, discern fool’s gold from the real thing. And when the information that is out there is not enough, how to divine new insights, discover new paths, and create new knowledge. Whatever you have gained in your time here, you will come to treasure this ability to learn, this savvy, above all else. No time to be smug though. Now, more than at any time in human history, we must learn how to learn. I am a molecular biologist, and I can tell you that in just your lifetimes we have learned far more about how life works, how it goes wrong, and how to change it than in the entire preceding history of mankind. Biologists all over the globe are making discoveries that will profoundly change your lives. And virtually all of these discoveries have occurred at great universities like this one. Why are we doing it? Virtually every biologist I know is motivated by two things: first, an unquenchable, inexhaustible curiosity about that greatest of all mysteries, life; and second, a desire at the end of it to have made it better. For us, the intellectual and, yes, the aesthetic rewards have been great. The more we discover about life, the more beautiful it appears. Beautiful beyond our wildest imaginings, a wonder to behold. At the same time we are confronted by a planet increasingly mired in pollution, with multitudes of our fellow beings suffering in the direst poverty, and by loved ones whose lives are cut tragically short or agonized by crippling birth defects or debilitating illness. It’s just beginning, but biologists have started to make a difference. We can produce crop plants with higher yields and with built-in natural insecticides. We aspire to a food and water supply no longer awash in fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. We’re curing some diseases, making some more manageable, and providing timely warnings of others. We’ve even started to discover the bits of genetic code that help shape our personalities—the genes that contribute to memory, aggression, our nurturing response to children, and even—this came out just last week—the desire to cuddle. Here we hope to find treatments for senility, mental retardation, schizophrenia, and autism. Many people find this research frightening. Remember, knowledge itself is neither good nor evil. The desire to attain it, however, is universal and, once attained, it is empowering. I believe passionately in this research, and just as passionately I believe it should be conducted with the advice and consent of an informed public. So, when I get the opportunity to speak to a diverse audience such as this one, my usual practice is to provide a few vignettes of spectacular recent discoveries, hoping to convey the breadth, beauty, and wonder of biology. Whether you approve or disapprove of this new science is less important to me than that you become engaged. I changed my mind about this convocation address when I opened up my newspaper one day this July and read a disturbing story of one demented man’s response to his fellow man. I decided then and there to tell you instead what we biologists have been learning about unity and diversity in mankind. The world is getting smaller. Things happen faster. We are increasingly confronted by collisions between our simplest human qualities and our incomprehensibly diverse cultures. Some collisions delight. Anyone who has sampled the restaurant or music scene in Chicago recently can testify to that. Some collisions cause temporary setbacks that compensate, in retrospect, with a chuckle. In Taiwan, the slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” was unfortunately translated into “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.” Ford Motor Company had a big problem marketing its cars in Brazil when it turned out that Pinto is Brazilian slang for “tiny male genitals.” Chicken-man Frank Perdue’s dour-faced billboard ads with the slogan “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” was transmuted in Mexico to “It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused.” Too often, however, collisions of language, culture, and ideology produce carnage. The biggest population shift of modern times, the conquest of the Americas, eliminated 95 percent of its native peoples, their cultures and languages. In this century, six million Jews were exterminated by Nazis; twenty million Russians of diverse origin were butchered by other Russians; twenty-six million Chinese were murdered in the Cultural Revolution; one-third of the Khmer people disappeared in mass graves in Cambodia; Kosovars, Tutsis, Kurds, Sierra Leonese . . . I needn’t go on. And just a few weeks ago, right here in Chicago, a man demented with racial hatred shot an African-American basketball coach in the back as he walked home with his children and followed through by shooting six Orthodox Jews and two young Asian Americans. Over the past decade in countless laboratories across the globe, scientists have been sequencing DNA, decoding the billions of bits of information that form the genetic code, the blueprint of life. This code determines whether we have leaves and roots or hands and feet, swim in the sea or slither through the soil. Amid an astonishing number of revelations, for me two things have surfaced above all. The first is a principle of unity. All living things on this planet share much of the same code. Whether we share it by God’s design or evolution’s drive is beside the point. We share it. In this decade, some of the greatest recent leaps in medical research have sprung from studies of the simplest organisms. This is because the basic underpinnings of their growth and metabolism are ours. Cells in our bodies transform themselves into cancers because they ignore the self same stop signs that control cell growth in yeast, worms, and fruit flies. When it comes to closely related organisms, well . . . I have to tell you, our code differs from that of chimpanzees by only about 2 percent. But, you well may ask, what about those vastly divergent human DNA patterns we’ve heard so much about in the world of criminology? (Who can forget O. J. Simpson?) Indeed, they do exist. But they derive from junk regions of the code that are free to vary precisely because they don’t do anything. In truth, where it matters, human beings differ from each other hardly at all. I’m not saying you are your brother’s keeper. I’m saying that you practically are your brother. Look around you once again. From my standpoint, the family of man is no cliché. It is an irrefutable fact. That goes against the grain, doesn’t it? It is plain to see that each and every one of you is unique. The fact is, we are exquisitely designed to recognize even very subtle differences between ourselves. It’s a simple survival strategy. It is well you remember, should you chance to meet, which of your neighbors is likely to shake your hand and which to lift your wallet. So let me flip the coin and tell you now about diversity. That diversity that does exist among us is very greatly to be treasured. Strong people defend us against aggressors. Thin people dodge weapons and run for help. Corpulent ones survive plagues and famine. It is good to have among us those that pay the strictest attention to every detail and those that bumble through the details but ponder the larger picture. We need poetic spirits to touch our souls, and we treasure those who can make us laugh. Pigmented skins promote health and well-being under intense tropical suns and may assure survival should the ozone layer go. White skins absorb sufficient light to produce vitamin D in the feeble suns of northern climes and may grant us survival should nuclear clouds darken our skies. The combinatorial diversity of our immune system grants some the capacity to endure an epidemic of typhus, and others Bubonic plague, smallpox, influenza, or pneumonia. It has even become clear that a small fraction of us have natural immunity to that newest and most diabolical scourge known as AIDS. Happily, recent advances in molecular biology now grant hope to larger numbers. But the implication is clear. Who knows what lies ahead? Because of our diversity nothing can wipe us out—unless we do it ourselves. The diversity of this world’s peoples is our single greatest treasure, our richest resource. In this academic setting, it is particularly gratifying to note that the implications of this new research reinforce the most traditional humanistic principles. They cut another facet in the time-polished stones of ethics, politics, and philosophy. You have chosen to study at the University of Chicago because you are hungry for knowledge. Your degrees attest that you have become self-reliant in its acquisition. Take with you now the principles of a University of Chicago education. Cast your net widely in your pursuit of knowledge and include science sometimes among the catch. It will give you some surprise, some delight, and will perhaps help us all find a path to a better world.
Susan L. Lindquist is the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology, the Committees on Developmental Biology and Genetics, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the College.
Summary The 457th convocation was held on Friday, August 27, 1999, in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Hugo F. Sonnenschein, President of the University, presided. A total of 432 degrees were awarded: 34 Bachelor of Arts in the College, 2 Bachelor of Science in the College and the Division of the Physical Sciences, 3 Master of Science in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 33 Master of Arts in the Division of the Humanities, 48 Master of Science in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 84 Master of Arts in the Division of the Social Sciences, 1 Master of Arts in Teaching in the Division of the Social Sciences, 4 Master of Arts in the School of Social Service Administration, 92 Master of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business, 3 International Master of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business, 4 Master of Liberal Arts in the William B. and Catherine V. Graham School of General Studies, 9 Master of Arts in the Divinity School, 1 Master of Divinity in the Divinity School, 1 Master of Public Policy in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, 2 Doctor of Ministry in the Divinity School, 2 Doctor of Law in the Law School, 1 Doctor of Jurisprudence in the Law School, 22 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 15 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Humanities, 19 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 33 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Social Sciences, 7 Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Business, 5 Doctor of Philosophy in the Divinity School, 2 Doctor of Philosophy in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and 3 Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Social Service Administration. Susan L. Lindquist, the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology, the Committees on Developmental Biology and Genetics, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the College, delivered the convocation address, “Unity and Diversity: Lessons from a New Biology.”
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