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My father, Simon Sussman, was born on the Lower East Side of New York, the Melting Pot for Eastern European immigrants ... Since I could type, [I] obtained a part time position as a secretary to Dr. Rudolf Schoenheimer, a leading biochemist at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S). This position was supposed to provide an entrée for me into graduate courses, via the backdoor, but I had to agree to take stenography.
—Rosalyn Yalow (1)
On 19 December 1946, Renato Dulbecco and I sailed from Genoa on board the Polish ship, the Sobieski, I headed for St. Louis and he for Bloomington. When the Statue of Liberty became visible against the sky of the port of New York ... I felt as hundreds of thousands of refugees have felt, in the flight from recent as well as earlier persecutions upon arrival in New York Harbor ... . My stay lasted thirty years.
— Rita Levi-Montalcini (2)
THE BIOGRAPHIES OF ROSALYN YALOW and Rita Levi-Montalcini yield prima facie arguments for liberal immigration and visa policies: Old World bigotry led to discovery of radioimmunoassay and nerve growth factor in the United States. Arrivals like those of Yalow’s grandfather from Czarist Russia or Levi-Montalcini from Fascist Italy are small episodes in the story of America’s rise to pre-eminence in science. Other factors played larger roles: the GI Bill of Rights, Shannon’s NIH, public access to higher education (Hunter College for Yalow), private philanthropy (Rockefeller, Hughes), etc. But we’d surely be many notches down in science had our borders been closed to arrivals from abroad.
Twenty years ago, its repute in apogee, the United States accounted for about 40% percent of the total number of reputable scientific papers published in the world; the European Union for 33%, and the Asia-Pacific region for 14% (3)
.
Those days are over: the seats of American power have been usurped by fans of unreason, Bible-thumpers who feel free to preach "creation science," "alternative" medicine, "faith-based" social service, and blatant homophobia. In consequence, the standing of American science has been eroded. By 2004, the EU had moved into the lead with 38% of total scientific papers published world-wide, the United States had slipped to 33%, while the Asia-Pacific region moved up rapidly to become the source of 25% percent of all papers (3)
. It’s hard to see how federal action to prevent flag-burning or gay marriage can address this issue.
Nor is it helpful to disguise bans on scientific exchange under the scoundrel’s cloak of national security. "Scientists Denied U.S. Visa" the headlines scream (4)
, while the president of Intel complains to the Financial Times that:
America is experiencing a profound immigration crisis but it is not about the 11 million illegal immigrants currently exciting the press and politicians in Washington. The real crisis is that the US is closing its doors to immigrants with degrees in science, maths and engineering. (5)
Data on the U.S. workforce in science can be used to make another argument for liberal immigration and visa policies. The 2000 census documents that whereas Asians comprise only 4.1% of the total workforce in the U.S., 14.7% of all U.S. life scientists are Asians! (6)
We can be grateful that, in deference to our war-time alliance with China, the Roosevelt administration in 1943 repealed the racist Chinese Exclusion Act, which had essentially excluded all Asians from the continental United States since 1881.
We have further reason to thank FDR when we examine publications in the life sciences today. In the March Issue of The FASEB Journal, one counts 41 articles (Research Communications and FJ Express) with 312 authors listed, an average of 7.6 per article. Of those authors, 98 (31%) had overtly Asian surnames (Indian, Chinese, Japanese, etc.), split evenly between scientists working in U.S. labs and abroad. That squares with the 15% of Asians in the life sciences workforce in the U.S. (see above).
But, if we want to study trends over time, we can’t rely on our own journal, because it has shifted from chiefly publishing review articles to becoming a journal of original matter. We go to a sister publication. In the March 24, 2006 issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry one counts 65 articles with 399 authors listed, an average of 6.1 authors per article. Of those authors, 188 had Asian surnames (Indian, Chinese, Japanese), with 83 (21%) working in U.S. labs and 105 in labs from abroad (26%). Now let’s compare those data with the years of the American apogee.
The March 25, 1986 issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry contained 76 articles with 260 authors listed, a more modest average of 3.4 per article. Of those authors, 44 (16%) had Asian surnames, again evenly split between Asians working in U.S. labs and from abroad. That’s less than half the number of 2004!
That doubling of Asian contributions to American science between 1986 and 2006 is directly due to liberal visa and immigration policies. A generation before, these had brought Renato Dulbecco to Bloomington to work with Salvador Luria, and led Rita Levi-Montalcini to discover nerve growth factor with Stanley Cohen in St. Louis rather than in Turin.
EUGENICS AND IMMUNOASSAY
Rosalyn Yalow’s evocation of the Lower East Side of New York "the Melting Pot for Eastern European immigrants" reminds one that entry of Eastern European Jews into Anglo-Saxon lands was as much of a political issue at the dawn of the 20th century as Mexican immigration at the dawn of the 21st. In Britain, their exclusion was championed by two leaders of the eugenic movement, Francis Galton and his student Karl Pearson.
In 1925, Karl Pearson, together with Margaret Moul, published an extensive two-part analysis of "The problem of alien immigration into Great Britain, illustrated by an examination of Russian and Polish Jewish children."(7) The paper was the lead article in the Annals of Eugenics published by the Galton Institute (K. Pearson, ed.) By means of a detailed study, carried out before Word War I, of over a thousand Jewish schoolchildren recently arrived in England from Eastern Europe, the authors attacked the problem of whether the intelligence of these immigrants differed from that of the native stock.
The study was a model of biometric detail: Pearson remains a scientist of repute, whose contributions to biostatistics have remained practically untarnished. Not only were the children he studied given the most modern tests of intelligence, but school records were examined, home visits were made, and physical examinations were performed. Control groups were found: English-born Jews and native Gentiles. Elaborate scoring systems were employed to evaluate such variables as size and income of family, rent paid, foci of infection, crowding, ventilation, mouth-breathing versus nose-breathing, "cleanliness," etc.
The authors directed their inquiry to an applied end, in keeping with the overall aims of the eugenics movement:
We hold therefore that the problem of the admission of an alien Jewish population into Great Britain turns essentially on the answer that may be given to the question: Is their average intelligence so markedly superior to that of the native Gentile, that it compensates for their physique and habits certainly not being above (probably a good deal below) the average of those characters here? (7)
Pearson and Moul found that, for all groups examined, there was no correlation between intelligence and any other variable such as cleanliness, mode of breathing, family size or income, foci of infection, height-for-age. Consequently, they were led to this rather somber conclusion:
... the argument of the present paper is that into a crowded country only the superior stocks should be allowed entrance, not the inferior stocks, in the hope—unjustified by any statistical inquiry—that they will rise to the average native level by living in a new atmosphere. The native level is not a product of the atmosphere, but of centuries of racial history, selection, hybridisation and extermination. (7)
Extermination, as in roaches, one is tempted to ask? Be that as it may, the authors failed to note a curious anomaly among their data. All variables considered, there was a striking difference in "intelligence" between Jewish girls and boys, the latter being statistically more intelligent.
Namely, that with the Gentile children we have found only a slight difference between the boys and girls. Hence the intelligence of the Jewish girls being much below that of the Jewish boys, even if the latter equaled that of the Gentile boys, the Jewish girls would fall very seriously behind the Gentile girls. (7)
One must point out the genetic fallacy here. If conclusions from such data were possible, we could with some degree of confidence say that in Eastern Jews, by some unusual genetic aberration, intelligence was sex-linked, whereas in Gentiles this higher faculty was not.
In the event, arguments such as these directed the bulk of immigrants from Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side of New York rather than to Cheapside in London. We therefore have Karl Pearson and his fellow eugenicists to thank for their indirect gift to American science: permitting Rosalyn Yalow with Solomon Berson to develop radioimmunoassay at a Veteran’s Administration Hospital in the Bronx.
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FOOTNOTES
Photo credits: Rosalyn Yalow and Rita Levi-Montalcini printed with permission from http://nobelprize.org; Pearson and Galton printed with permission from http://galton.org.
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org
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