Eric Lander - Why I Teach

 

In January 1989, I got a phone call from a scientific friend at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, asking me if I'd come participate in a meeting that he was organizing on DNA fingerprinting. Now, this was back in the days before DNA fingerprinting was a staple of CSI and Law & Order. In fact, it was before DNA fingerprinting was actually used in the courts in the United States. He wanted to organize a meeting to get some judges, and some lawyers, and some scientists to see if we could anticipate what the problems might be with DNA fingerprinting. So, I'm a human geneticist. I work on the Human Genome Project and human genetic variation. He thought it could be useful to have me around. So, I said, “Sure.” 

 

So, a couple weeks later, I go down to Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, for this meeting. There's the usual talks, and there's some discussion, and then the afternoon coffee break. These two New York lawyers, tall guy with bushy hair, short guy with black straight hair, corner me. They drag me into the side room, they lock the door, they take out these X-ray films and they hold them up to the window and they say, "What do you think?" So, it turns out these X-ray films were evidence in a criminal case in the Bronx. A woman had been stabbed to death and the police suspected the janitor. When they interviewed the janitor, a man named José Castro, they noticed a spot of blood on his watch.

 

So, the police took the blood from the deceased woman and the blood from the watch, and sent it off to a testing laboratory to do this new DNA fingerprint. Let's call the testing lab LifeCodes, because that actually is what its name was. [audience laughter] So, when DNA fingerprinting is done right, you get this beautiful X-ray film with these bands showing different positions in the human DNA, and they differ between people, and you can line them up and see if they match. So, these X-ray films looked absolutely nothing like that. 

 

I'm from Brooklyn. The technical term for what they looked like-- Thank you, thank you. [audience laughter] As you know if you're from Brooklyn, the technical term for what they looked like is schmutz. [audience laughter] They were a mess. They were the sort of things a first-year graduate student might bring you, and you'd say, "Look, don't bother trying to interpret this experiment, just go do it again." Well, you can imagine the lawyers were incredibly excited to hear me say this, because they immediately said, "Will you testify that, and to testify to that in the court?" And I said, "Oh, I need this like a hole in the head. I don't have time to do this, I've got work to do," etc. And so, I said, "No, look, I can't possibly do that." 

 

 So, they pressed, and I resisted. And they pressed, and I resisted. And finally, one of them says, "All right, don't testify, but would you teach us, so we could do a good job?" Now, that got my Achilles heel. Because in addition to being a scientist, I'm a teacher. For 25 years, I've taught the introductory biology course at MIT. I love teaching. And more than that, I firmly believe that no matter what I do in my own scientific career, the most important impact that I can ever have on the world is going to be through my students. So, very, very, very reluctantly, I agreed to teach them. 

 

The plan was this. The judge was going to have a pretrial hearing in the Bronx, about whether this DNA evidence should be admitted into court. So, we'd take a couple of weeks, and we'd talk about the basics of DNA analysis and the protocols and how they could go wrong, and then look at the lab reports and see if they made sense. And then, when the hearing started, they'd send me the transcripts, and we'd look at the transcripts and talk each night about the transcripts, and I'd suggest questions you might ask. 

 

So, all right, the hearing starts in the Bronx. First couple witnesses are academic scientists who come and describe DNA, and DNA fingerprinting, and basic stuff. The first one is actually Rich Roberts, a very good molecular biologist who'd later go on to win a Nobel Prize. Then it started getting interesting. The lab director from LifeCodes took the witness stand. We'd agreed on some questions to ask him. And they asked the questions. We started getting back answers, and it got stranger and stranger. 

 

I'll just tell you one aspect of this case. LifeCodes tested the samples to see the sex of the sources. They took a probe for the Y chromosome. And if you use a probe for the Y chromosome and it's a male sample, you get a single band in just the right place that says, "This is from the Y chromosome." And if it's from a female, you see nothing. So, they tested the samples, and the blood from the deceased woman, nothing. The blood from the watch, nothing. They declared a perfect match. [audience laughter] 

 

bNow, in science, we often like to have this thing called a positive control, something that would tell you that the experiment had actually worked. And they did indeed, over on the right side of this X-ray film, have a lane labeled "control." And if you looked in the lane labeled "control," you saw nothing. [audience chuckles] So, I suggest that we ask the lab director, "Who's the control?" So, they asked him, "Who's the control?" And he said, "We use cervical cancer cells." 

 

Two weeks later, the technician who actually performed the experiments takes the witness stand. I suggest, “Ask them, why are they using cervical cancer cells?” So, they ask him and he says, "Cervical cancer cells? We don't use cervical cancer cells. We use DNA from somebody in the lab. I get DNA from my lab mate, Arthur Eisenberg.” Arthur Eisenberg? So, two weeks later, the lab director is back on the witness stand. I suggest they ask him, "If that's DNA from Arthur Eisenberg, what's up with his Y chromosome?” [audience laughter] Like, “Why isn't there a band there?" So, they ask him. And without missing a beat, he says, "Oh, that's very interesting. Arthur has an unusual genetic condition. He has a short Y chromosome that's missing those sequences." 

 

Eventually, LifeCodes would come to testify that it wasn't actually Arthur Eisenberg at all. It was a woman in the lab named Ellie Mead. And the way they figured this out was they got everybody in the lab and they did DNA fingerprinting on everybody in the lab to figure out who their control had been for the DNA fingerprinting. [audience laughter] So, it was pretty clear these guys were bungling this case. They were clearly making up protocols in the lab, and maybe they were making up things on the witness stand, too, I don't want to say. But I had gotten completely radicalized. At this point, I told the lawyers, "Okay, I'm going to testify." 

 

I flew down to New York, went to the Bronx, to the Bronx Criminal Courthouse on the Grand Concourse on 161st Street in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, to testify in the courtroom of Judge Jerry Sheindlin. As an aside, Judge Sheindlin's wife was also a New York City judge, a family-court judge, Judith Sheindlin, until she stepped down from the bench a few years later to become a judge on television, where you may know her as Judge Judy. But anyway, I digress. 

 

Judge Sheindlin was having the time of his life. He was bragging to all the other judges in the criminal courthouse, "You guys have these drug dealers and rapists and pimps. I have the best scientists in the world testifying in my courtroom." He was in no rush to end this hearing. So, I testified for a solid day, and another day, and another day. By the time I was done, I had testified for six days in this pretrial hearing. And then I called up five other scientific friends and persuaded them to come and testify, too. [audience laughter]

 

This went on for quite a while. By the middle of May, the prosecutor had scheduled a vacation in the Caribbean. And she asked the judge, “Could we get a postponement, a delay in the hearing, so I can go on my vacation in the Caribbean?” The judge, being nice, said, "Okay, fine, we'll take a week off." And she went off to the Caribbean. As it happened, I went to Cold Spring Harbor for another scientific meeting. And there I met Rich Roberts, who had been that first prosecution expert witness. I said, "Rich, did you ever actually look at the evidence?" And Rich said, "No, I was testifying about DNA in general." 

 

So, I grabbed Rich, pulled him into the back room, closed the door, took out copies of those X-ray films, held them up, and I said, "What do you think?" And he agreed it was terrible. So, he came up with a plan. Rich was going to call all the scientists who had testified for the prosecution. I called all the scientists who testified for the defense. We'd meet in a conference room in Manhattan, and we'd all discuss the evidence together. Apparently, this thing isn't typically done [audience laughter] in criminal cases. I heard later it's never been done in criminal cases, but what did I know? 

 

So, we met, we got together, we met, we looked at the evidence. After a day of reviewing all this, the verdict amongst the scientists was unanimous. The evidence really was schmutz. So, we wrote up a statement, everybody signed their name, we sent it off to the judge. Prosecutor gets back from the Caribbean, finds out that all of her witnesses have now switched sides. [audience laughter] I thought she was going to fold there, but she dutifully soldiered on for several more weeks. And finally, 15 weeks after the beginning of this pretrial hearing, both sides rest. 

 

Judge Sheindlin takes a month to write an opinion. And when it comes out, it says, what else could it possibly say? The DNA evidence is not admissible. So, we'd won. We'd won our point, it was settled, it was over. So, what happened? The janitor, José Castro, his case never went to trial. While the DNA evidence was terrible, it turned out there was a mountain of other evidence linking him to the murder. He pled guilty and went to prison. 

 

The US National Academy of Sciences, very concerned by what had come out about DNA fingerprinting from the Castro case, set up a committee to recommend standards for the quality in DNA fingerprinting, which, in fact, has worked and led to the DNA fingerprinting quality we have today. LifeCodes Corporation, terminally embarrassed by their performance in this case, quietly went out of business. And me, I went back to Boston to work on the Human Genome Project in my lab. The genome project was heating up, it was an exciting time, worked on it. But I’d get phone calls. I got phone calls from defense attorneys and prosecutors and judges asking me to come testify in their DNA-fingerprinting cases. 

 

I got a call from Judge Lance Ito in the O.J. Simpson case, asking me to go testify in the O.J. case. To all of this, I said, "No, I've got my work. I've got to focus on that work. I just can't get involved in all of this." But much worse than this, I got letters. I got a handwritten letter from an inmate in a Texas penitentiary saying, "I read about the Castro case. Will you help me? I'm really innocent. Help me." I got letters from prisons in Virginia, prisons in Kansas, from Attica, upstate New York. And there was nothing I could do. I couldn't do anything. I just couldn't possibly get involved. And the truth was, I couldn't tell who was really innocent. So, I took these letters, and I put them in my bottom drawer, and I felt guilty. 

 

But happily, the two lawyers who I taught in the Castro case, they got the letters, too. And they didn't put them in the bottom drawer. They began to investigate them, and they began to find that some of these people were innocent. They started something called the Innocence Project. And the Innocence Project has gone on to lead to the exoneration of nearly 300 people, including 17 people on death row. It's taught us that absolutely certain eyewitness identification can be absolutely wrong. 

 

So, some years after that, these two lawyers, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, called me up and said, “Would I join the board of the Innocence Project?” This time, I didn't hesitate. I immediately said “Yes.” Why do I teach? I teach because I firmly believe that, no matter what I do with my own scientific career, the greatest impact I can possibly have is through my students. Thank you.