Christof Koch - God, Death and Francis Crick

 

It was in the late 1990s and I was course director at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole in Cape Cod, directing a class on how computers can be used to learn about the brain and we're celebrating with a boisterous evening with a big dinner party and a live rock and roll band. And I freely indulged in dancing and drinking. But then I grew restless. I'd read the previous couple of days a book by the German philosopher, Fried Nietzsche. [audience chuckle] It's not funny. [audience laughter] About how modernity had killed God and how we all God's grave diggers and about divine putrefaction. [audience chuckle] And this had reawakened this long simmering conflict I've had between my religious upbringing and my profession as a scientist.

 

So, I wandered off. I left the party and I wandered off through the forest to the beach in Cape Cod. And when I arrived at the beach there was a crescent moon which was partly obscured by the clouds that were being chased across the sky by the wind which it's picked up to storm. And the storm had also driven the whites of the waves towards the land. And it was this desolate empty beach, just a couple of boulders in the background, there were the trees that were swaying, very menacing. And I was quite excited, I went through this extensionless crisis and I shouted out to the sky “Gott wo bis du?” See, God speaks German of course. [audience laughter] 

 

I was shouting for God to reveal himself here. I was trying for many years to desperately believe in him, but I never had a sign of his existence. So, I was debating with him. Well, it was a very one-sided debate. There was a problem. [audience laughter] I was debating with him that to show himself. I needed a booming voice from the sky. I wanted a burning bush, I wanted some sign. And I increased, because I drank a lot, I was very bellicose and was very insistent. [audience laughter] And then suddenly the earth erupted in front of me and there was this bright light that dazzled me. And this very angry form metamorphosed just right in front of me, just materialized. And it was shrieking and yelling, “Get the fuck off this beach.” [audience laughter]

 

So, God had metamorphosed from-- into an angry camper. Was trying to sleep there and I'd awaken him and I hadn't noticed him before. [audience laughter] So, I grew up happy, raised by my parents in the best liberal Catholic tradition where by large science, including evolution by natural selection was accepted as explaining the facts of the world. I was an altar boy, I learned to say the prayers in Latin and I really loved the masses and the Passion and the Requiems of Orlando di Lassos and Verdi and Bach. As a teenager my dad gave me a 5-inch reflected telescope and it's still a very viscerally remember the night when I on the top of my house I calculated actually where the planet Uranus should be in the sky. And I pointed the telescope at the azimuth in the elevation and right there it appeared. 

 

And I remember this incredible feeling of elation I felt. This ordered universe that I found myself in where I can actually compute these things like this blue planet that gently drifted into view. But then over the years I began to reject a lot of the things that the Catholic church told me. See, on the one hand, there were the things my parents and my Jesuit teacher told me. On the other hand, I learned to listen to the beat of a very different drama in lectures and books and in the lab. So, I had this explanation for things in the world for the Sunday and then I had another explanation for the rest of the week. There was a sacred explanation and there was this profane explanation. And on the one hand I was told-- my life was given meaning by putting in the context of this large scale. There's this large creation of God and I'm just a puny part of it. On the other hand, science actually explained actual facts about the real universe I found myself in.

 

And so for many decades I had this profound split of reality. And then I met Francis Crick. So, Francis, I first encountered Francis under an apple tree doing what he loved best, which was talking and discussing about biology. Francis Crick was the physical chemist who discovered the double helical structure of the molecule of heredity DNA discovery for which he was given The Nobel Prize. It was really to him and his guiding intellect that the field of molecular biology looked in their giddy and exuberant race to discover the universal code of life. And when that goal was achieved in the late 60s, he shifted his interest from molecular biology to trying to understand how consciousness arises out of the physical brain.

 

And that's when I encountered him and we grew quite fond and close to each other. We worked together for close to two decades. We brought two dozen papers and we published several books and he dedicated his last book to me. Francis also epitomizes the historical animosity between religion and science. And this really grew legendary in 1961 when Francis resigned very publicly, you can read about it, from Churchill College in Cambridge, England. At the occasion of the Churchill College constructing a chapel on college ground, Francis felt that a new college dedicated to science and mathematics and engineering, there was no place for superstition. 

 

Winston Churchill, in whose name the college had been founded after the war, tried to appease Francis and wrote him a letter pointing out that the financial means for the construction of the chapel would be raised entirely by private means that would be open to people of any faith and that nobody would be forced to attend. Francis replied by return post proposing the construction of a brothel. [audience laughter] A bordel. The construction of the bordel would be financed entirely by private means. It would be open to all men, no matter what their religious conviction, and no man would be forced to attend. [audience laughter] And he actually included a check for down payment. So, this ended the correspondence between the two great men.

 

By the time, I knew Francis, his animosity vis-à-vis religion had become muted. And although he knew I was raised Catholic in a sporadically attended mass, he never probed. I think finally, he was a kind man and he wanted to spare me the embarrassment for groping for an explanation. In particular, as my belief obviously didn't interfere with our quest to understand how the conscious mind arises out of the brain within an entire natural framework. And for emotional reasons, I wasn't ready to give up my faith. I was also afraid-- I was simply afraid that his searing intellect couldn't be matched by anything. I could explain why I believed things. 

 

Many years in our collaboration, when I visited him in San Diego, where he lived, he told me in a very matter of fact tone that his colon cancer, he had a previous bout with colon cancer, probably had returned, and that he was expecting a call from his oncologist later on that day, discussing the results of some tests they had run the previous days. I was actually with him in the study, that's how we worked in the study at home. When the call came confirming that the cancer had returned with a vengeance. And he stared off for a minute or two into space after he put down the phone, and then he returned to our conversation about brains.

 

At lunch, he discussed his diagnosis with his wife, talking about what needs to be done to accommodate him. But for the rest of the day, we worked. That was it. There was no doom and gloom. There was no gnashing of teeth. There was no tears. It impressed me immensely. This stoic-- I mean this living embodiment of this stoic-- of his ancient stoic face, accept what you can change. A couple of months later, when again I visited him, we went, as usually, through his large correspondence pertaining to consciousness and there was a letter from a famous British philosopher confessing to Francis-- it was a personal letter confessing to Francis. He said the philosopher's abject fear when faced with idea of his own mortality. He wrote, “I feel like animal, cornered, absolutely terrified, panicky, unable to think clearly when contemplating my own demise.” 

 

And then I finally brought up the strength to ask him, about that letter, “Francis, how do you feel about your diagnosis?” Studiously avoiding any mentioning of the word death. And again, he was very much down to earth. He said something like, everything that has a beginning must have an end. Those are the facts. I don't like them, but I've accepted them. And I will not take any heroic measures to prolong my life beyond the inevitable. I am resolved to live my life out with intact mind. And so, he did over the next two years as his cancer weakened his body, but never his spirit. We continued to write. We finished my book, and I was just immensely impressed by how he could deal with this. And I, of course, reflected on my own future demise and whether I would be able to have this calmness, this composure, to meet my own end.

 

Suffering from the debilitating effect of chemotherapy, I overheard him one day on the phone talking with somebody who was trying to convince him to sign off on the construction of a bobblehead of him. [audience laughter] Because Francis Crick is a very famous figure, they wanted to construct a bobblehead of him. [audience laughter] At some point, I heard him put down the phone. He walked past me, shuffling past me on the way to the bathroom. When he returned several minutes later to resume the conversation, he just dryly remarked to me in passing, well, now I can truly say this idea made me throw up. [audience laughter] 

 

Finally, he called me to say, “Christof the correction to our paper we're working on turned out to be our last paper. We're going to be delayed. I have to go to the hospital for a couple of days. But don't worry.” In the hospital, he continued to dictate corrections to this paper to his assistant. Two days later, he passed away and his wife Odile told me how on his deathbed he had this hallucinatory conversation with me involving neurons and their connection to consciousness. The scientist, literally to his last breath. Given 40 years age difference, we fell into this very natural father-son relationship and we became very close intellectual companions. And he became my hero for the unflinching way he dealt with mortality and aging. With a view towards the inevitable, he gave me a life’s huge portrait of him of Francis sitting in a wicker chair, gazing out at me with a twinkle in his eyes. Signed for Christof Francis keeping an eye on you. [audience laughter]

 

And so it does today in my office. I've never had another encounter with God, nor do I expect to. For the God I now believe in is much closer to Spinoza's God than the God of Michelangelo's painter or the God of the Old Testament. I'm saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It's like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memory. But I do believe we all have to grow up. It's difficult for many, it's unbearable to the few. But we have to see the world as it really is. And we have to stop thinking in terms of magic. As Francis would have put it, this is a story for grown men, not a consoling tale for children.

 

So, here I am, seven years later. I'm a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I'm practically nothing. And soon I'll cease to be. But the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful and I think that is as it should be. I find myself born into this universe. It's a wonderful place. It's a strange place. It's also a scary and sometimes lonely place. What I try to do every day in my work, I try to discern through its noisy manifestation. I try to discern the people, the dogs, trees, mountains, stars, everything I love. I try to discern the eternal music of the spheres. Thank you very much.