The Incidental Tourist Read online

  After a day talking science at the AFIP (which was about the health of soldiers, not biological warfare or anything like that), the plan was to travel 200 kilometres north to Philadelphia to participate in separate board meetings at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center and the Penn-affiliated Wistar Institute, where I’d worked for seven years earlier in my career. But I didn’t make it to either DC or Philly. As I’d been going out the door that morning, Penny had said, ‘There’s something about a light aircraft hitting a building in New York.’ It sounded like an accident, after all, in 1945, a Mitchell bomber had gone into the Empire State Building. Listening to the National Public Radio Morning Edition during the ten-minute drive to St Jude from our home in midtown Memphis, I heard the words that told us our world had changed: ‘Another plane has crashed into New York’s World Trade Center.’ A second plane. It had to be deliberate!

  Four years later, at the invitation of my former Wistar Institute colleague and long-term Boston University Professor Ann Marshak-Rothstein, I was to give the Sue Kim Hanson Memorial Lecture at the university’s medical school. Sue Kim, a much loved doctoral student in my field of microbiology and immunology was, together with her husband Peter (passionate gardener, Grateful Dead fan and software salesman), 2½-year-old daughter Christine and sixty-three other human beings, on United Airlines flight 157, the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Centre’s Tower 2 on 9/11 in 2001. That’s the video we’ve all seen of the aircraft essentially folding into the building. Writing about it fifteen years later, there is nothing but sadness as I reflect on what happened. Many of her classmates and teachers were still at Boston University when I gave that talk, and the sense of grief was palpable.

  On that fateful day, with the further attack on the Pentagon, then the crash in rural Pennsylvania, all commercial flights were immediately grounded. We couldn’t know it yet, but the United States had embarked on its longest war in history, with many other countries (including Australia) being drawn into the conflict. And, though Osama Bin Laden, the architect of the World Trade Center atrocity was eventually to lose his own life, there can be no doubt that he achieved his goals of destabilising the Middle East and doing massive damage to both civil society and to Western civilization. Billions of dollars have been drained globally from productive activities as democracies diverted resources to enhance airport security, expand the electronic surveillance of citizens and pour money into military activities.

  At first, the US response of degrading the Taliban and Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organisation in Afghanistan seemed carefully targetted and sophisticated. But that soon gave way to the disastrous decision to invade Iraq, then the ill-judged de-Bhaatification process that meant senior civil servants and members of the Iraq military all lost their jobs. As a consequence, the displaced generals started ISIS, ISIL DAESH, or whatever you care to call that horrific movement that has the stated goal of returning the world to the seventh century.

  Playing right into Bin Laden’s domino effect agenda, the US administration ignored General Colin Powell’s warning about the Pottery Barn rule: you break it you own it. President George HW Bush (senior) had taken Powell’s advice in the first Iraq War, but George W Bush (junior) and his powerful Vice President, Richard Cheney, had different motives. A reasonable outcome might have been possible if the Iraq invasion had been surgical, focusing on the removal of Saddam Hussein and the worst of his henchmen, followed by the rapid withdrawal of United States and allied forces. But we now understand that there were mixed motives with, as clearly stated by Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of this folly, the control of the Iraq oilfields as a major part of the equation.

  Of course, it’s easy to be wise in hindsight and, with the current turmoil in the Middle East, it will be quite a while before the history of what has happened over the past fifteen years can be written with any degree of distance and accuracy. In 2001, though, the atmosphere throughout the United States was a mix of shock, fear and anger. Apart from the 1812 war with Britain, when the president’s residence was damaged by fire and had to be painted white, the only major attack on US soil was Pearl Harbor in 1941, and that was on the distant island of Hawaii, not the mainland.

  Located in the nation’s largest city, the World Trade Center site is right in the heart of the US financial system. Wall Street runs close by, and many who died as they plunged to their deaths to escape the burning buildings, or were crushed as the Twin Towers fell, were bankers, stockbrokers, fund managers and the like. Of course, as we learned from the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), Wall Street needs no terrorist initiative to trigger its own collapse and massive damage to society at large, but the GFC is a different story.

  New York, or rather Manhattan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Central Park down to the Twin Towers’ former site, is a place that most senior biomedical scientists know reasonably well. From 1974 on, I’d given research seminars at all the major medical schools and research institutes, and visited many more than once. The format is always the same: the invited visitor spends much of the day meeting with local researchers in 30- to 60-minute slots, with the focus being on discussing what they’re doing. Science is all about communication, and you can learn a lot from these brief encounters that occasionally lead to future collaborations. The lunch break may be spent chatting with graduate students and postdoctorals over pizza and sodas. Alternatively, you may be giving the 12-noon seminar but, more commonly, any ‘named’ lecture is at 5 pm, perhaps preceded by wine and beer (not for a sensible speaker!) and nibbles. The formalities over, there’s a dinner at a decent restaurant with a few faculty members. One or two will likely be friends you’ve known for years.

  Then, as it’s a working week, they’re off home and you’re back to your hotel with an (often) early morning cab to the airport, either LaGuardia or Newark if I was flying to Memphis or, in earlier days at the Wistar Institute, a walk to Penn Station for the one hour or so Amtrak ride to Philadelphia. Every invited seminar subtracts at least two days from a short life, but you sometimes learn important stuff and part of the senior scientist job description is to publicise the findings from their research groups.

  Over the decades, I’d also been to a number of scientific meetings in New York, and long served on a research grant review committee for the US National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Mostly, scientists stay in pretty standard accommodation like the New York Hilton, which, nonetheless, has the great advantage of being very close to one of my all-time favourite places, the Museum of Modern Art. On a couple of occasions we were at the very upmarket Pierre Hotel just off Central Park. The initial Pierre event was when Rolf Zinkernagel, Emil Unanue, Jack Strominger, Don Wylie and I were jointly recognised by the 1995 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Science. This was also the first time I met fellow Australian Barry Marshall, who received the Lasker Clinical Award that year, then (with Perth pathologist Robin Warren) the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

  As anyone who has spent any time in New York knows, it’s a noisy, confident ebullient place. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and the people you talk to know for certain that they’re living in the most interesting city on earth. Boston may be okay for academics and intellectuals but, for native New Yorkers, it’s too far away and, if they have to live in Washington or some other town for their job, they can at least come back frequently to hear the Metropolitan Opera, see an on- or off- Broadway play, and check out the museums.

  Just after 9/11, though, New York was a very different city. Cab drivers talked about leaving permanently and everyone was in a kind of shock. Immigrants were wondering if they’d come to the right place. I know this because I’d accepted an invitation to speak in October 2001 at what looked to be a very interesting meeting at the Rockefeller University. Most of the evenings were free, so we’d decided that we would go together, use up a few frequent flyer miles and catch up on a Broadway play or two. Due to arrive just three weeks after the terrible tragedy, our
initial thought was that the organisers might decide to cancel, but the prevailing spirit was that New York must get back to business. We stayed at a very pleasant midtown hotel and were thus well away from where the World Trade Center had stood. Even so, the Twin Towers had so dominated the lower Manhattan skyline that it was impossible to ignore their absence. There was, though, no possibility that we would make any effort to see the site up-close. Apart from the fact that such a visit would seem intrusive, it was a crime scene, where those tasked with the excavation were still trying to identify human remains.

  The scientific content of the meeting crossed a number of disciplines. What I recall particularly was being intrigued by neuroscientist Richard Axel’s talk about his work with Linda Buck on the olfactory system. They later shared the 2004 Nobel Prize. The mood was serious and perhaps a little more intense than usual, but the focus was on science and on getting on with the job. The events of 9/1l were the first major wake-up call for many of us that the intellectual tradition of the West, based in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, reason and the rise of science, was under major threat. Now we see that ever more clearly with indiscriminate suicide bombings and mass murder events in cities like London, Paris, Boston, Madrid, Brussels and Berlin, all of which are major university and/or government centres. Then the recent, despicable and dangerous deluge of fake news that is so counter to any rational intellectual tradition invokes a sense of deep foreboding in anyone who has been sustained by the view that humanity is capable of moving towards positive outcomes.

  The immediate fear building out of 9/11 was of a second attack. One possibility that’s been discussed a lot is that spent reactor fuel could be combined with conventional explosives to make a ‘dirty bomb’, providing yet another good reason for ensuring that nuclear waste is securely contained. Talking with New York-based scientists in October 2001, a few floated the possibility of, for instance, relocating to one of those small university or college towns that are spread across the United States. So far as I know, none of the leading lights left, at least not because of safety concerns. As always occurs, younger researchers moved on to get more independence, or better jobs, but not from fear. Human beings are both very resilient and protected psychologically by a capacity to forget.

  Watching from their apartments that looked downtown, a few of the locals attending the Rockefeller University meeting had seen the planes hit, then the towers collapse. They were deeply shocked but clearly found some catharsis in talking about it. Others knew (or knew of) some of the victims, who were maybe from their suburban neighbourhood or a northern New Jersey commuter town. Manhattan was quiet, with few tourists, and still smelled of smoke. For the first time ever, when I called-up the Metropolitan Opera I got tickets for that night’s performance – on earlier visits, they were always booked out.

  The following year, in a move that had been planned before 9/11, we went back to Australia where I would spend 75 per cent of my working time at the University of Melbourne. I didn’t visit New York again till I was asked to join the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in 2007, which has its headquarters near to Wall Street. Then I finally walked down to see the massive hole in the ground that had been the World Trade Center. For the first couple of meetings, we were accommodated just around the corner in the Wall Street (it’s actually in Water Street) Holiday Inn Express.

  Melbourne infectious disease physician and researcher Ian Gust, who was chair of the IAVI Scientific Advisory Committee at the time I joined, had been in that hotel when the planes hit on 9/11. They had to evacuate and Gust walked uptown through the chaos and the thick dust, fearing he would choke. Fortunately, he had relatives in New York and was able to stay with them. At later meetings, we abandoned the Holiday Inn and moved across to stay at a hotel in the Seaport area, just under the Brooklyn Bridge. I don’t know if that was Gust’s initiative but, at the end of the day, it was certainly more pleasant to walk away from Wall Street. By 2007, of course, New Yorkers had collectively got their hutzpah back. It remains one of the world’s great cities. But now we all realise that the forces that struck there in 2001 could target any of us, anywhere, at any time.

  CHAPTER 22

  Walled city

  IN TIMES GONE BY, cities built walls to keep their citizens safe from those who were considered to be dangerous outsiders. Walls limit the number of entry points, allowing goods to be taxed and visitors checked as they pass through a controlled gateway. We still build walls of one sort or another, though the construction may be mesh fences topped with razor wire, sea patrols augmented by aerial surveillance and intelligence, or computer software that blocks the theft of private information.

  Prisons and concentration camps have walls to keep people in but, in my lifetime, such barriers have also been erected to prevent the exit of whole populations. Those who are a bit older will think back to the Cold War when, as stated by the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his1946 Sinews of Peace speech (see chapter 19, ‘Up to date in Kansas City’), ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe … and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.’

  Events soon proved the great orator to be right. While, with the help of the Marshall Plan, Western Europe recovered from the devastation of the Second World War and became progressively more prosperous, the dead hand of totalitarianism limited enterprise and freedom in the Eastern countries for more than four decades. Many of the more adventurous seized any opportunity to leave. Nowhere was that more obvious than in the divided city of Berlin where the Western sector (controlled till 1949 by the occupying forces of France, the United States and the United Kingdom) was totally surrounded by the Russian-dominated German Democratic Republic.

  West Berlin was part of the Federal Republic of Germany, which had its capital in Bonn. From 1961, West Berlin was enclosed by a wall, built and heavily guarded by the German Democratic Republic communist government to prevent the defection of its citizens. An earlier attempt to force the withdrawal of the Western powers by blocking road and rail access to West Berlin had been defeated by the 1948–49 Berlin airlift, where supplies for the landlocked city were flown in. The spirit of that time is exemplified by US President John F Kennedy’s 1963 statement ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. The city remained a symbol of Cold War confrontation and that tension persisted right to the end of the Soviet era, with the wall remaining intact for some time after. In the mid 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev began the process of rapprochement, which led to the rapid collapse of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

  Berlin had been the capital of Prussia since 1518, then of Germany following the 1871 unification of some three hundred administrations (defined by heredity and/or the Holy Roman Empire) that was initiated by Frederick the Great (1712–86) and pursued vigorously by Otto von Bismark (1815–98). Fortified and walled in early times, the last remnants of those mediaeval Berlin walls had disappeared by 1900 as the city modernised to become the capital of a nation, then an empire. By the time I first flew into West Berlin in 1979 there was only one Berlin Wall on anyone’s mind.

  My invitation was to speak at a Dahlem conference on microbial pathogenicity (how bugs cause disease) organised by British scientists, bacteriologist Harry Smith, virologist John Skehel and parasitologist Mervyn Turner. Down to earth and sartorially downmarket lab scientists, these men contrasted with the sophisticated Silke Bernhard MD, the elegant organiser of the Dahlem conferences that, driven by her energy and enthusiasm, ran regularly into the 1980s, and beyond. Based on short presentations and a discussion format (rather than on individual research talks) that led to a published workshop proceedings, these were highly structur
ed events that ranged across the physical and biological sciences.

  Entering and exiting the East, as part of a short conference tour to see some of the major landmarks of old Berlin, was an intimidating transit, with the communist border guards using a mirror on a long handle to check under the bus for fleeing citizens. Even so, the overall experience was far from negative as, with few alternative attractions, we had plenty of time to view the magnificent collections of Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern antiquities at the Pergamon Museum. The streetscapes in the East were drab and depressing, but that’s not to say humanity would have had less of a problem with, for instance, climate change if we’d all lived as modestly as the East Germans – their industry was hideously polluted.

  Another vivid image that comes to mind from that 1979 trip to Berlin is of the blackened and abandoned Reichstag building, with the dividing Wall standing immediately behind it. Opened in 1894, it was the home of the German National Parliament until the time of the liberal Weimar Republic (1919–33). Desolate in an unkempt field, gypsies (who were slaughtered in the Nazi era) emphasised their survival as a culture by camping nearby. A colleague who worked for a time in Berlin also told me that a grassed mound somewhere nearby concealed the ruins of the bunker where (as depicted in the 2004 movie Downfall) Hitler saw out his final days. The Nazis left the Reichstag a ruin after it was burned (possibly by them, but they blamed the communists) in 1933, and it was further damaged in 1945 as Russian troops took the city. The Nazi parliament had met nearby in the Kroll Opera House, which was also destroyed at the end of the Second World War.