Shame (part 1 and 2)

Part 1

Prof. Larry Putnam of Life Sciences Division of the University of California, Berkeley was blunt. “Lots of young researcher on the faculty can feel a certain amount of desperation in their attempts to get tenure. None of them did what you did which was unforgiveable.

“What should I do?” Robert Scott asked himself that question over and over. Finally, he settled on an answer suggested by his colleague Larry Putnam. “Disappear”.

Scott’s wife Lisa was ready to go to work but asked him once again, “Is anything wrong? What is bothering you? You haven’t left to go to your lab. You should tell me if something is amiss. Is it a health issue you are not talking about? What is it? I’m your wife. What is it?”

Robert Scott responded slowly, “No, nothing is wrong just preoccupied with a problem that I haven’t been able to solve but I am working on it.”

Lisa looked puzzled but not surprised. “Are you telling me the truth? Once again you are so private and you know that can drive me nuts. It is like squeezing an empty toothpaste tube.” She shook her head and went out the front door and went off to work.

It is now several weeks since anyone had seen or heard from the Robert Scott. He had been a productive geneticist with a very visible presence on campus. He disappeared from all the people in his life, all of them, his wife, grown son and daughter, friends, colleagues at the University, neighbors even his auto mechanic.

Many people asked themselves who is he really. They questioned whether they knew him at all, the Scott who went into hiding. And remains hidden somewhere. So different from Robert Scott the talented young geneticist-biochemist, dedicated, driven, obsessed, passionate researcher and mentor. He was a super star. In addition, he appeared to be a committed friend, husband, father, and neighbor. He always wore a huge smile and had a great sense of humor. What people did not know, what he kept hidden, is that he was incredibly anxious and spent much time and energy keeping his anxiety in check.

Scott was driven which was also a tool for dealing with his angst. He was studying the origins of life, the processes involved in transcribing (genetic) RNA information into proteins the building blocks of life itself. It was exciting research but also associated with tension and competition with many other scientists. The race was always on to be recognized as first in generating highly visible discoveries. Also, present center stage, was his concerns about where he stood in his chase for tenure. He knew the rules. Publish groundbreaking research and successfully compete for “generous” grant support. The University was a host for those who were well funded but not his benefactor.

That was then but not now. His world came crashing down around him. His promising academic career was over. It was inevitable given the back story of his research publications.

Despite Robert’s hidden fears he could act out the part of a free spirit, happy with himself. His wife knew better. He was a bit of a prankster so when he disappeared many of his faculty colleagues assumed that this was just another prank. For example, he wrote a note, presumably from a coed, addressed to her professor in a lecture class on the history of genetics. It was signed with an imprint in red lipstick and the note was left on the podium of his lecture hall. That professor was notorious as someone who regularly hit on pretty coeds. The note from a non-existent admiring coed ended with, “I wish we could be together, together, alone and so much more.” For the next several weeks the targeted lecturer was distracted as he kept looking around the lecture hall trying to identify the coed who wrote him that note.

If his disappearance wasn’t a prank then where was Robert Scott? He had left a note addressed to his wife, son, and daughter saying that he loved them but couldn’t survive the storm of critical judgments that had surrounded him for what he had done. He had to escape or drown in disgrace. Included in his note he wrote… “have to leave and no doubt you do understand and maybe you too would under my circumstances have done the same, but I don’t know that for sure. I am lost and don’t know how to find peace. Maybe I can and then return to all of you.”

Several nights ago, one of his postgraduate students and collaborators thought he saw Robert outside a sleazy bar on Clark Street. He thought he recognized Robert Scott. The man was wearing a fedora, a Scott trademark. He was with a young woman in tight tights and a T-shirt.

The day before Prof Robert Scott disappeared he was last seen by faculty colleagues sitting silently with his head down, across from his friend Prof. Larry Putnam. It was late in the afternoon on an atypical cold rainy early spring dreary day in Berkeley. The two of them sat across from each other in the atrium café in the Life Sciences Building. The café was nearly empty. Robert suddenly sat up, as if startled from a dream, and whispered, “It is all over, all over and I’m desperate, defeated, ashamed, devastated destroyed. What should I do? Holding back tears he repeated, “What should I do?”

Larry didn’t answer and just stared at Prof. Scott. A long gloomy silence persisted and then Robert Scott pleaded, repeated, “What do you think I should do?”

Finally, Larry answered, “I don’t know but, in the meantime, maybe we should start by getting some coffee from the concession stand.”

Robert got up slowly. “I’ll get coffee and do you want something with it?”

“How about maybe a sweet roll with the over ripe coffee.” Robert turned and shuffled to the back of the atrium. Minutes later he returned, walking, as if in a trance. His hands were shaking and coffee spilled onto the tray he was carrying.

Robert asked again, “What would you do if it was you? Right now, I can’t think straight. I feel very much alone. I keep looking for some support, some sympathy and so I am grateful that you agreed to meet with me, to talk to me<, maybe to understand how what happened happened, and so thanks so very much.”

Larry responded. “OK. Of course, I appreciate what you are going through. Understand? What does that mean? I am not your supporter, and I’m not trying to be sympathetic, and certainly not forgiving. I agreed to meet with you mostly to understand why you did what you did. What tipped you over to do the unthinkable and what you must have understood at some level would shatter your career and how could you not have known that you would be caught. Maybe others can understand what brought you to this place.”

Robert sat silent and then spoke, slowly, almost to himself, “What brought me to this place, this place in hell? You know why what happened happened.”

Robert looked up and his voice was loud and full of emotion. Larry, you know damn well what was going on. There are so many of us in my position when I…”

Larry interrupted, “When you cheated… you’re not someone else. It was your decision, your choice. No one made you do it. Right?

Robert sat up and in a loud voice responded, “No wrong, wrong. I was driven to spruce up my science, make it sparkle. Of course, we both know how hard it is to make it, get tenure… and” …At that moment Williamson, a professor of biochemistry, wandered by, stopped and spoke quietly to Larry and ignored Robert. Williamson knew Robert having served with him on several University committees. Williamson spoke to Larry with his back to Robert and said, “I have a few suggestions on the paper you asked me to review. Nothing big but I think you should consider making some changes but we can talk later, maybe in your office, sometime in the next couple of days?”

Larry thanked Williamson and suggested later in the week maybe in the late morning. Can we settle on a time via email, OK?”

Williamson agreed and then walked away.

Robert commented, “Williamson talked to you as if I didn’t exist which is how everyone here at the U has treated me …guess no surprise, and yet.”

Larry interrupted, “Yes and yet what. Contempt. What did you expect? You did the unthinkable. You made up data and drew all sorts of conclusions based on bullshit. You knew your results would excite geneticists all over. A breakthrough in, your words, our understanding of the basis of life, life. You came up with a solution to the problem of how the genetic information, through the action of its genetic partner RNA, generates the proteins, the basis of living things. Even a child would be impressed with that discovery. You won a big race and were crowned, invited all over, to speak, to be admired. You published made-up crap and published your findings where they would be most visible, in Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and on and on and how could you not have figured that your fraud would be uncovered. What the hell were you thinking? What you were reporting clearly was going to have to be replicated but couldn’t be because it was made-up crap. It didn’t take long did it to discover your findings and conclusions didn’t, couldn’t make sense. How stupid could you be.”

And then your pranks maybe you should also reconsider what they were. You knew that Toni Crawson was also struggling for tenure. He was a competitor of yours. You also knew he was a bit of a snoop. So, you left your notebook open on your desk. The page of notes and formulas for engineering a set of viruses that can be used to cut strands of genetic information was right there easily seen. When you left your office you told him you had to take a leak? Toni did the rest, and saw the phony notes that would lead him down a blind alley. It did and you thought it was pretty funny. It wasn’t. It was a cruel shitty thing to do. Nothing funny about it. So, he struggled and got nowhere and isn’t going to get grant funds or make tenure.

Robert agreed. ” Yes, it was kind of cruel but Crawson was a thief of sorts and wanted to get him caught with his hand in my cookie jar. It wasn’t innocent like the time I published a paper referencing an article that didn’t exist. I thought it was really funny when others published papers referencing an article they never read because it didn’t exist. What symmetry… made up references and findings that didn’t exist.

At this point, Larry was shouting at Robert and anyone still in the atrium café couldn’t miss hearing the raised voices. Larry kept going. “You are so smart but a dumb fucker, a scientist who wasn’t. What should you do? Maybe disappear. Go. Go where no one knows you.”

Robert slipped down in his chair, silent, gasping for breath.

“Larry, you gave me an idea. Disappear. Desperate. Nothing is working. Results, a mess. With those results, no grant, no tenure nothing. Nothing comes to zero. Tenure? Never. I was running scared and am running faster now and I keep hearing my father with my wife’s voice in the background… “Larry, you are a good guy, good-looking, smart but a loser. A loser. That is what I was and am living with, what I experience first thing in the morning. I was desperate and then…

Larry stopped Robert “And then, then you know damn well that loads of others are in the same boat, they struggle trying and more often than not failing to get funded, failing to find that eye-opening discovery, and they don’t cheat. They don’t. They keep working without cheating.

Robert mumbled, You are right. But also remember, there is loads of cheating going on, and more and more of it each year. Each year there are increasing loads of retractions of science articles. What is that about? Sure, some of it is just sloppy science rushed out reported at meetings, and sent off to be reviewed by reviewers who barely review what is reported and then off for publication. No, not just sloppy science but science fiction, fraud is what gets retracted… and…

Larry interrupted Robert, “And you chose to join that club. Look I have to run. Good luck to you. I hope you can get some peace if not immediately sometime in the future. Maybe you should consider taking the time to attempt a total makeover, a remake, one that goes well beyond visiting an upscale men’s clothing store. Remake, redesign… that takes long-term effort and commitment. Got to run.”

Robert continued to sit by himself watching Larry walk towards the atrium exit. He watched someone sweeping the empty atrium. He didn’t get up to leave. Robert just sat there watching nothing in particular.

Shame

(part  2)

Several years have gone by but Robert Scott hadn’t been forgotten. As Scott planned he disappeared leaving his shame behind. Then by chance Putnam met someone who told him about an institution called “The House of Shame” It was a home to the secrets personal stories that individuals told one other person, just one. They were stories about events, experiences in their life that were secrets, the kind never told to anyone including a spouse, children, mentor, a religious guru, occasionally someone sitting in the adjacent on a long plane ride.

Who did Putnam meet? It was the director of plays on the campus of U C Berkeley, someone who was there for two years and then gone. He did not know this ex director very well at all and then only his first name, Berndt. That was an unusual name and therefor easily remembered. Putnam ran into almost over Berndt as he was late for a conference and rushing cross campus. They greeted each other and Berndt said to Putnam, “Hey, if you are interested in what happened to Prof Robert Scot, I can tell you, but only if you like. I’ll be over at the Theatre Department all afternoon, today as well as tomorrow.

Putnam took Berndt’s invitation and so in the late afternoon that same day Putnam arrived at a rehearsal of a play to performed on campus the following week. Berndt waved to Putnam and “Take a seat in the back and enjoy some of the rehearsal and I will join you in about 15 minutes.

Putnam and Berndt sat together in the last row of the theater. The actors had left the stage and son the two of them were alone but nevertheless Berndt talked in a whisper. “”I saw your former colleague Robert Scott leave a warehouse that used to be a storage site for farm equipment. I recognized him instantly. I walked up to him and he recognized me also. He seemed tense, flustered. I said “Good to see you and hope you could go on with your life.”

At first Robert stood silent. I asked him, “Are you alright. Do you want to sit down. Can I get you something, a glass of water…and then jokingly said a new life.” Scott didn’t laugh but instead said something that surprised, shocked me. He said, I am not sure but I think just now it seems like when I left this building I did feel I might be starting a new life.” He then told me of his experience in the building he called The House of Shame. Maybe he felt the pressure to tell me what he just experienced and I simple listened….simply listened is the gist of what he had to say. It turns out that the The House of Shame is more of a mysterious institution rather than a building. What he told me went on inside that building was I thought but amazing, other world like, and yet very simple and human. People were paired up with random people in a room that was like a padded small sound proof studio. The object of their meeting was telling secrets that only they knew and were things that were seen as so shameful, awful, so that it could not be shared with anyone….until someone agreed to leap and reveal all to a total stranger who listened but did not respond in  any way to what was revealed to them. In turn the partner did the same. Once again secrets were revealed to a listener who judged nothing, didn’t evaluate what was being told…except to ask for a clarification. That is it.

Turns out that simply telling someone else their secret was a huge heavy weight memory left behind. Just being heard is what lightened a life held back by secrets. That is it. The guy that runs The House of Shame is someone I knew who ran improv sessions in Brooklyn New York and I guess what he was offering clients was someone who would listen to them.

Wouldn’t you agree? Amazing.

At this point some actors returned on stage and Berndt told Putnam “Have to go. Something to think about. Something as simple is sharing life secrets with one other person can alter a life, maybe.