Telling Tales
Authors: Alan E. Smith
Journal: Molecular Therapy (2003)

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”— Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Apparently, William French Anderson was a bright kid. He read from a young age, and quickly developed a lifelong interest in science. While he was a bit awkward socially and he stuttered, he learned tricks to compensate for these short- comings. He learned very deliberately to be more outgoing, even popular, rising to class president in the seventh grade. Nevertheless, he still enjoyed books more than anything else, and he spent a great deal of time with them alone in his room. As a diversion, he tried sports and became rather good at track. He joined the debate team and did well at that too. He won a scholarship to Harvard University at the age of sixteen years. There, he did more track, studied science, and par- ticipated in extracurricular studies, including the development of a method of arithmetic using Roman numerals that was published in Classical Philology. He won a Fiske scholarship for post-graduate study at Cambridge University, where he met his future wife. He subsequently returned to Harvard Medical School, earned his M.D. degree, and then engaged in post-graduate study with Marshall Nirenberg at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A successful enough start to a career—well above the achievements of the average boy from Tulsa in the middle of the twentieth century—but by no means unique in the world of science. Many scientists are socially inept, but have nevertheless made similar rapid progress—some from far more humble beginnings. So why are we presented with a book devoted to the life of this particu- lar scientist? Readers of Molecular Therapy will know of course. From a very early age (apparently traceable to a particular seminar at Harvard in the winter of 1958), this young man was on a mission. The mission was to do gene therapy and it is described at length in W. French Anderson, Father of Gene Therapy by Bob Burke and Barry Epperson. The foreward to the book goes further, suggesting that the mission was from God. The book cover puts forth the hypothesis that achiev- ing that mission in 1990 places French Anderson alongside George Washington, Guglielmo Marconi, and Thomas Edison. If you read no more than this, you might already find this book distasteful. Good biography requires three key elements: scholarship (or at least good data), objectivity, and good judgment. This book has none of these. Of the areas I know well, the book exaggerates the achievements of Dr. Anderson, often to the point of incredulity. This lack of credibility does not inspire confidence in the descriptions of the remainder of the sub- ject's exploits. Consider the time French Anderson studied in Cambridge, England. In September 1958, he left to study at Trinity College. He had decided by this time that he wished to pursue what we would today call molecular medicine, and he naturally gravitated towards the Cavendish Laboratories. This was where Francis Crick was still working, a mere five years after the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, and where Max Perutz and John Kendrew were work- ing on the three-dimensional structure of proteins. All three were to win Nobel Prizes in 1961, and Anderson, still only aged twenty-one years, deserves credit for being aware of their existence in what was still a new and obscure field at the time. The authors tell us on page 137 that French “sat under the instruction of Francis Crick.” On page 138, regarding the three future prizewinners, we are told it was “under (their) tutelage (that) French learned molecular biology.” I suspect we get nearer the truth on page 137 where we are told that “French studied under Leonard Lerman.” This irritating, implied fame-by-association, is typical of the book, but the authors follow this with an even more extraordinary claim. I quote from page 139: “Based upon data obtained by Lerrnan and French, Crick helped provide evidence the genetic code is organized by triplets.” During the course of this fiftieth anniversary year, many of us have read once more the accounts of the discovery of the structure of DNA and its aftermath. In so doing, I have never once seen reference to this work as in any way contributing to the discovery of the triplet nature of the genetic code. Moving on a decade, we find that Anderson is (page 168) “Nirenberg's right hand man,” and (page 169) for the “first time in history…presenting the monumental research find- ings.” In the spring of 1970, he was “hot on the trail of elu- sive chemical substances,” leading to studies that culminat- ed on 9 May 1970, in a paper on the initiation of protein synthesis published in Nature. Apparently (page187), “the hostility of the competition was immediately borne out. Within weeks.fourteen separate laboratories rushed out ‘quick and dirty’ papers in ‘bioquicky’ journals to try and establish a claim.” Although I can claim to be familiar with the field at that time—I published papers on initiator tRNAs and on initiation codons in eukaryotes in the 16 May 1970 issue of Nature—this is not how I would have described the unfolding of events. I attended the meeting on protein synthesis at Cold Spring Harbor in August of 1970 and stopped by Phil Leder's laboratory at NIH to give a seminar. I met Anderson there and visited his lab. According to the authors, by this time Anderson had “realized a second major finding was critical- ly needed,” (page 187) and published another paper in Nature on 29 August 1970, such that “all other labs were left way behind.” Shortly “thereafter he demonstrated another aspect of his strategy…he immediately provided critical reagents to all his competitors for free.” Readers will be astounded to learn that “such generosity was unheard of.” Apprently, the authors are unaware that making reagents available is a condition of publication in many journals. In the seventies, prior to today's ubiquitous Material Transfer Agreements, it was commonplace. Indeed, another of the reasons I was in the United States that summer was that Ray Gesteland had invited me to his lab to bring samples and to demonstrate our method of making mammalian cell free extracts capable of initiation of protein synthesis in vitro. Of course the book goes on, beyond 1970 and deeper into gene therapy, but perhaps by now you have a sense of its contents. Readers will be tempted to ask where the authors’ information came from and who made the value judgments of the science. The detail given and anecdotal nature of much of the material is such that the authors seem unlikely to have obtained it from the literature. Furthermore, they do not appear qualified to make the scientific judgments of what in some cases is obtuse work from thirty years ago. Did the bulk of the information and commentary come solely from the interviews with the subject of the book that are ref- erenced in the footnotes? A more balanced viewpoint might have been reached had the authors interviewed other con- temporaries. As this book outlines, French Anderson has been a won- derful champion for the field of gene therapy. There is no doubt that the field has moved more quickly due to his prodding of the FDA and the RAC. He started the first jour- nal in the field and the first company, but many feel that his contributions to the underlying science of gene therapy have been no more than average. According to the book, he is a wonderfully caring individual and loving husband. He has achieved much outside of science, including the Gold Medal for his age division in the U.S. National Karate Championships as recently as July 1998. So why this need for personal glorification and accolade of fatherhood (see also www.frenchanderson.org)? I simply do not know, espe- cially given the claim on page 355, that “personal glory is not the motivation.” Whatever the reason, it seems to me that Shakespeare's Malvolio got it wrong. Some apparently achieve greatness by self-promotion. These irritations aside, this is not an uninteresting book. There are vignettes of Americana—early professional life in the Midwest and the development of Tulsa, Oklahoma. There are also vignettes of Anderson's life—the origin of his name, his school days, his somewhat obsessive approach to everything including sports, his many personal quirks (such as compiling graphs of hours spent doing different cate- gories of things, recording days as red, yellow or green depending on his achievements therein), and identifying chemicals by tasting them. Fun stuff, really. The book needs the services of a good editor, for many phrases are repeated distractingly, and there are many trivial mistakes. Forward on page 311 should be foreword; Darwin's College was actually Christ's College; Cambridge University traces its roots to 1208, not 1226; at the time of the Doomsday book in 1086, Cambridge was not an important Roman trading post; the cell shown in the diagram on page 219 is bacterial, not human. On balance, should you or per- haps your departmental library buy this book? In my view, as a history of science or as a contribution to the heritage of Oklahoma, it is simply not accurate or balanced enough to be worthwhile.