CELLULAR IMMUNOLOGY 66,41-42 (1982)

An Appreciation of Alwin M. Pappenheimer, Jr.*

LEWIS THOMAS

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center, 1275 York Avenue, New York, New York 10021

Since he migrated off to Boston I have seen Pap only from time to lucky time, but there was a better time, long ago, when I saw him every day in the corridors of what we then called the NYU College of Medicine, later NYU-Bellevue, now NYU Medical Center, a change of name to which I am pretty sure Pap would have objected. As I recall, Pap objected to lots of things and I imagine he still finds, from time to time, even amid the institutional perfection and flawlessness of Harvard, things to object to.

Pap had a powerful influence on a great many younger people, setting in place the very course of the whole scientific careers of many of them, like the ones we have heard speaking this afternoon.

But it needs remarking that he had an equally powerful influence on the people in his own generation, faculty colleagues like myself. Pap Disputatious, Pap can- tankerous, Pap combative, argumentative, resistant, detesting committees yet drawn to them as though by a magnet, he was the best kind of troublemaker that a medical faculty could wish for, especially a faculty that literally felt itself obligated to run the school as did the NYU faculty of that day. Deans and their administrative associates could think their way around individual faculty luminaries from time to time, and get at least a piece of the governance now and then, but none of them were able to learn to think their way around Pap. When the stakes were trivial and the issues minor he was to be found in his laboratory, haranguing anyone within earshot about the centrality in the earth’s biology of diphtheria toxin, but when something came up that concerned the academic quality of the place Pap was at large through the corridors and into the committee rooms, like a roving predator, in full throat, setting things his way-which is to say, on an astonishing number of occasions, setting things right.

This influence of the members of one’s own generation on each other is often underestimated in the annals of academic institutions. I am sometimes asked which faculty member of Harvard had the greatest impact on my choice of a career, and I cannot remember anyone except Albert Coons who was a classmate and roomed next door. Students educate each other; if you have a good student body you are likely to have a good medical school; the faculty reach positions of eminence solely because of the quality of the students they attract, but then it is up to the students

* This paper was presented at the Symposium in Honor of Alwin M. Pappenheimer, Jr., held at New York University Medical Center, on September 26, 1980.

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42 LEWIS THOMAS

to influence each other. I remember a string of legendary NYU classes in the early 194Os, which contained Saul Farber and Jerry Lawrence and Herman Eisen and Marvin Kuschner and heaven knows who else, and I am certain that these people were more decisively affected by each other than by anyone on the faculty at that time, barring, perhaps, Jim Shannon.

Pap and Colin MacLeod were a sort of twin force, and it was a marvelous experience to watch them influencing each other and then setting the tone, making the air right, for all their colleagues.

To define it more sharply, I would say that Pap’s own influence has been some- thing more than his science, elegant and conclusive though his science has always been. It was something else, for which the only term I can summon is moral leadership. That is what Pap is good at.

I knew, long before it happened, that NYU was going to lose Pap sooner or later, and would lose him to Harvard. It was not because he was devoted to Harvard, everyone knew that: Pap was always swept off his intellectual feet by Harvard, and made no bones about it. But it was the day when he told me that he was going to Boston the next day to get his teeth cleaned that I knew we would lose him, one time or another.

For a while I thought it might be Paris. Lwoff and Monod and Jacob were always dropping in on Pap’s laboratory, and I knew that Pap yearned to be a Frenchman from time to time. But one afternoon I was in his office and he was on the phone talking to one of his French colleagues, and I suddenly realized that he was speaking the sort of French that I could understand-not as bad as Elvin Kabat’s French, rather more like the sort of French spoken on state occasions by the Queen of England-and I knew then that Pap could never move to the Pasteur. I expect his French has improved, but I will bet it is still fluent American with a French accent, and I doubt that he could persuade an institute full of Frenchmen into the paths of righteousness with the ease and skill that he could do this at NYU, or even at Harvard where the language is more ambiguous than anywhere else but still a dialect of English.

Offhand, I do not know anyone for whom I have a greater respect than Pap. He had a profound influence on me, as did Colin MacLeod; I do not know exactly what that influence did for my later years but I know it was there, still is. Harvard or not, he was in the NYU tradition, and had a hand in setting that tradition. He was, and is, a scientific gentleman, which is one of the nicest things to say in such circles as are gathered here for this dinner.

Therefore, I raise my glass and ask you all to do the same, in honor of Pap and his achievements, his scientific and academic offspring, his unwillingness to lose an argument, his stubbornness, his puzzled respect for nature, and his long life still ahead, filled with new scientific puzzles and surrounded by his always-flabbergasted and devoted students.