The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

Chapter IVCarol Eisman

arol Eisman, Ph. D., a Professor of Biochemistry at Westport University, friend, colleague, and later co-researcher to Ruth Payne, played no direct role in the course of the trial, but Carol was a key figure in what followed afterward. She had spent her childhood in Brooklyn, New York, received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from City College, her doctorate from New York University. During her childhood, Carol had been plagued by three major obstacles to social interactions with others. The first was a medical condition. She had asthma and allergic reactions, especially to wheat, alcohol, and cigarette smoke. Furthermore, any fabric that was not 100% cotton brought her severe discomfort. When other children of her age played together in the street, and later, when other girls were dating, Carol was forced to restrict her activities, mostly remaining home, in the library, or later, in the lab. The second obstacle to Carols social interactions was a growing disparity between the opinions and beliefs of her mothers family and those that she developed as her education progressed. It was a cultural gap between home and world that would never be bridged. In contrast to the influence of the cosmopolitan and intellectual climate that attracted Carols developing consciousness, her mothers cultural roots were in the Deep South. Carol viewed the conceptions of her mother and, especially, those of her grandmother, Grandma Ginny, as narrow and ignorant. Ginny Waldin was a matriarch who ushered four of her five children, including Carols mother, Felicity Ann, into a fundamentalist religion and promulgated a worldview that opposed science and opposed many aspects of Carols developing social conscience. Furthermore, Carol had no other family. George Oliver Eisman was the only member of his family to emigrate from Russia. He had met Felicity Ann on a business trip and, after they were married, he brought his lovely teenaged wife to New Yorkafter anonymous death threats made it became obvious that a Jew could expect troubles in Mississippi. It was the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. When Carol was eleven years old, her sister Cecilia was eight, and Felicity Ann was twenty-nine, George Eisman suddenly died of a heart attack. With her father gone, his family behind the Iron Curtain, and with her mothers ignorance and racism, Carol was culturally misplaced. The third obstacle to happy social interaction was Felicity Anns conviction that it was her moral obligation to point out to others whatever errors or faults she found in them. It was a loathsome trait that caused much distress. No one, with the possible exception of Grandma Ginny, was spared. From earliest childhood, Carol had borne the greatest brunt of her mothers character criticism. So relentlessly did Felicity Ann disparage her daughter before others, that it drove a wedge between Carol and anyone with whom her mother had contact. It lasted until Carol was an adult well into her own career. So, by the time she was in high school, Carol no longer brought her friends to her home. Furthermore, Felicity Anns redneck roots had not provided her with training in the ways of polite society. Not only was tearing others apart a driving force in her life, and a major source of her social pleasures, but she did it with a crassness that alienated her from reasonable people, as much as it alienated her victims from one another. Carol recognized that gossip and criticism of others is, to some degree, a common human attribute. She noted that Tolstoy described well the character assassinations that were standard fare among members of the sophisticated Russian upper class who ostracized Anna Karenina. But Felicity Ann carried it to an obsessive extreme. Such people pose a greater danger than is often recognized (as Ruths sister, Donna, became aware, through her work as a social worker). The loss of Carols father meant the loss of what had been the primary buffer between Carol and Felicity Anns continual barrage of criticism. Two years into her mothers widowhood, a car out of control on a quiet Brooklyn street killed Cecelia. Despite the difference in their ages, the two girls had been close as children. Her sisters death severed all but one of Carols close ties to family members. Felicity Ann was not the mother Carol needed, nor was Carol the daughter her mother would have wanted. She wished her

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

mother could have such a daughter, the daughter Cecelia might have been, one who did not argue, who would go to church once in a while, at least, and who would dress more presentably. Much of Felicity Anns criticisms of her remaining child concerned Carols physical appearance. Because of her allergic reactions to most fabrics, Carols wardrobe consisted almost entirely of jeans, sweatshirts, tee shirts, and lab coats. In the sad and lonely atmosphere of her home life after Cecelia died, Carol became a bookworm. Perhaps it was the lack of a respected authority figure, on the one hand, and her cultural isolation, on the other, that led her to relate so completely to a world beyond the intellectual squalor of her immediate surroundings. Maybe it was because of her own emotional and physical pain, that it seemed obvious to her that ones aim should be to reduce suffering. It had become an article of faith. She was shocked and saddened as she learned how few people think in those terms. For a long time, Carol had tried to reach her mother by engaging her in endless, futile arguments in which Carol tried to challenge Felicity Anns prejudices. These discussions may have been a critical factor moving Carol toward lasting positions on social and political issues. As early as in her teens, she came to value reason and logic and to accept necessary implicationsin other words, she came to value reality; which, to her, meant science. At fourteen, she had discovered the irrationality of the racism of her Southern relatives in the writings of Frederick Douglass. Racism, she decided, was both cruel and incorrect. Douglass alone was all that was needed to disprove the contention of Grandma Ginny that blacks were not quite human. Her grandmother, who had met her second husband at a KKK meeting during its wave of popularity in the early 1960s, had been very much a presence in Carols early life during the familys lengthy annual visits. As the schism between Carol and her family widened, her experiences at City College helped her to understand the political events to which Grandma Ginny and her children would always be blind. As Carol pondered the political situation, she concluded that rationality had to be tied to values, as she realized that certain cruelties that she abhorred were rational by the standards, values, and criteria of others. On the other hand, she could not deny that depending on where a person starts, rationality produces different effects, thereby bringing the question back to basic goals and values. Toward the end of the 20th Century, it had seemed to Carol even before thousands of people were cremated at their desks during the destruction of the New York City twin towers that the democracy of her country was spiraling downward. A college course with Alfred Macleen Smith, a famous liberal sociologist, strongly influenced Carols perception of society. Smith had measured barbarism as the degree of income disparity between rich and poor. He noted the downward progression from Franklin Roosevelts conception of a cap on riches and a hefty inheritance tax, to reducing taxes on the rich and eliminating the inheritance tax. Roosevelt wanted to cap yearly income at $25,000, which in 1999 would be about $150,000. But such socialist ideas were drowned in a sea of corporate propaganda. Carol wondered if the possibility of fairness was lost forever. She vaguely recalled that her father had been a Democrat, but Grandma Ginny was fiercely Republican. From psychology courses, Carol had also learned that it was not the magnitude of reward, but the timing by which rewards are administered that has the greater influence on action. Psychologist B.F. Skinner demonstrated it repeatedly for several species, and Pamela Cushing, in her book about psychotherapy, Patient, Beware!, had described attempts to apply that information to practical use in family situations. Carol saw greed and the ever-present impulse toward retribution as obstacles to its success. Psychology wasnt Carols field, but it seemed depressingly clear to her that human beings would cling to their conveniences and would resist sharing no matter how destitute were others. Her fears, it seemed, were being realized as, even before the World Trade Center destruction, conditions in the country and in the world were further degraded by fear, unemployment, and crime. A person holding such views might have become a political activist, as had Ruths sister, Donna. But Carol, despite her political opinions and despite her fear for and concern about the events of the world, took refuge in science. If there was hope of relieving human suffering, it would come from true understanding of the nature of things especially, the biological understanding of human nature. The joint research with Ruth would shield both of them from direct involvement in public events, something that became increasingly important as fear of terrorism brought elimination of many of the freedoms of expression that Americans had formerly enjoyed. Criticism of government policy was risky. Together, the

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

two major themes of Carols early life her increased cultural segregation from most of her relatives and her socially inhibiting need to avoid or to neutralize the effects of allergens dominated her childhood and continued to influence strongly the rest of her life. Carol was in college when she read The Second Sex by the French writer, Simone de Beauvoir. It was ironical that Beauvoir, who was not a scientist herself, influenced Carol to think hard about her choice and to choose work over marriage. Although she never regretted not being married herself, she never quite understood its attraction for others, until she later actually experienced Love Two, induced artificially for the purpose of scientific observation. But Carols lasting love was science, and she developed strong views about it early in life. From one of her favorite professors, Sid Shapiro, she learned that good scientific ideas are usually simple, or at least simplifying, and they are useful to the degree that speaker and listener or writer and reader concretize with commonly observable procedures. But, Professor Shapiro warned, scientific research that offends the reigning morality is all too frequently avoided even at the expense of true scientific advance. Although many have tried to put an impenetrable barrier between science and politics, it is not always possible. Science, he said, has the dual function of solving specific practical problems and expanding fundamental knowledge. The two are distinguishable, although not mutually exclusive, and one often gets in the way of the other. It was a lesson that influenced some of Carols most important decisions later in life.

espite her asthma and her allergies, in her youth Carol had made good use of the city. Mostly by herself, she traveled the subways to the various universities, visited museums, attended concerts, plays, and dance recitals. But even as Carol learned about the academic world of science, literature and art, she remained profoundly ignorant about other social worlds. The conditions of her life that had permitted her to obtain direct experience were, on the one hand, Felicity Anns intolerable world of tightly bounded prejudice, and, on the other hand, a new external and theoretical world of political events, complex reasoning and artistic sensitivity. But Carols vulnerability to severe allergic reactions from a wide range of substances, most particularly to wheat, demanded constant concern with protecting herself from attack. Her severe reactions to such normally toxic substances as alcohol or tobacco smoke proved a barrier to many social activities in which she might otherwise have participated. However, despite her handicaps, once she gained freedom from family and neighborhood, Carol was not entirely isolated. She always had one or two friends who were important to her, but there was a limit, a philosophical limit, to their closeness. Usually, Carol did not engage them on issues surrounding their differences between their views and hers, but, as well as she could, she squeezed herself into their world. It was like Ruth and Peter. They interacted in the regions behind the walls of their differences. Usually it was some form of science denial, as she called it. Science denial which went by a myriad of names such as religion, mysticism, superstition, spiritualism meant the thousands of minor ways that people try to leap mentally over the barriers to what they envisioned as fulfillment, immortality, heaven, or Meaning To Life. It saddened her that Ruth Payne with whom she had become acquainted only in her thirties, had to be the first and only woman in whom no such leap out of reality would occur. She felt that, with most others, their comfort in their impossible beliefs was only on the surface. Beneath, there probably was doubt probably greater in some, less in others. Carol did not understand why she wasnt like them. It was just that she couldnt accept their denial of what to her was reality. The doubts in her were too powerful to permit that superficial layer of what philosopher Daniel Dennett called skyhooking. It meant reaching up to beyond the natural world to get better answers to the major questions. It meant assuming that the noise was a ghost, not a burglar. Although Dennett was a philosopher, and Carol had learned to become very suspicious of what philosophers had to say, aside from Bacon and Descartes, of course, she had enjoyed Dennetts marvelous range of subjects all beaming finally in on finding greatest comfort in the closest knowledge of the real probabilities and in acting accordingly in self-protection. She did not understand why others did not see the danger in unfounded belief, and why she, Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and some of the people at Skeptic Magazine, the Amazing Randi, and, in a

A Scientist Looks at Romantic Love and Calls It Limerence:

sense, Peter Singer, can and must live without skyhooks, while all around us are others whose denial of reality creates cruelty and danger. The tie that held Carol and Ruth together was their common assumption that the answer had to lie in the very nature of humans. They could even accept the likelihood that there could be found something discernibly different in their DNA. The aims of science in addition to any other aims, such as comprehension of nonliving nature or anything in the universe had to include scientific selfsearching. And, Carol thought, when scientists find the physiological mechanism for some obstructive human trait, such as the gene (or the whatever) that caused the psychopathic absence of compassion, then it might be possible to find the opposite gene (or whatever) to alter the nature of the human mind or motives to fit a criterion that nature had not adopted, but that we, the species, would select to meet a goal upon which all could agreesuch as a true concern for the welfare of all sentient creatures. She did not guess about what it might be, either physiologically or experientially. In other words, that which Carol and Ruth sought was not as far from social activism as it might have seemed. In the sanctuary of the laboratory, their consciously felt aim was closer to the marchers down Pennsylvania Avenue calling for civil rights than to that of the fellow in the lab down the hall although they understood that all science is to be encouraged and admired, because no one can forecast what will follow from knowing more about something that we as yet know little about. Carol and Ruth had each accepted the doctrine that it is basic research, research aimed at uncovering new knowledge independently of how probable its findings might impact human experience, not the search for answers to the practical problems what is called applied research wherein lies the greatest hope for achieving the most human of aims. Ironically, new basic knowledge is ultimately the most widely applicable. Although, for all the reasons mentioned, Carols life was mainly spent in solitude, it was never dull and never boring. She knew, on the basis of their writing, that people existed with whom she might have enjoyed close personal relationships, or at least compatible philosophies; but Westport University, the only job she could find under the glass ceiling, was relatively small, insular, and definitely not first-rate. Ironically, the fact that Westport U had no geniuses looking over their shoulders afforded its faculty a certain freedom that might not have existed at Harvard. Neither other faculty, nor administrators, nor students ever gave Carol and Ruth the trouble they might have had if others understood the socially revolutionary nature of their work and their aims. Even aside from Carols philosophical differences with those around her, and her physical condition, was, when she let it show, what appeared to others a certain psychological quirkiness that dampened interactions with others. There was, on the physical side, not eating in the faculty dining room because she could not trust the food; but there was also being too busy to want to leave the lab anyway. And there was also wanting to avoid the pain of listening to others sound off on topics in which she had no interest or on which she held strongly divergent views. She almost always remained silent whenever circumstances demanded interactions with other faculty. Even if she tried not to show it, others seemed to sense something about her that they did not like, or maybe, feared. Later, when she and Ruth ate together, each bringing her own food and drink, they went outside, when the weather was suitable, or they ate in the lab or in one of their offices. Carol and Ruth had recognized each others value at their first meeting. They were alike in love of science, in rejection of absolutism, concern about fairness, and, because of their sex and despite their talents, they both held academic positions at other than first rate schools. But they were increasingly grateful to have academic jobs as employment opportunities for many college-educated people dried up. That their work together would culminate in important discoveries seemed unlikely, but it was what they had to do, what they felt most like doing. The particular field in which Carol settled, biochemistry, had been initially sparked by wanting to learn more about ingestible substances, particularly certain plants and insects that produce allergic reactions. Her interest in science was cemented when, a few months before he died, her father had presented her with her first microscope. She always felt that he would have understood her and that, had he lived, he would have prevented the emotional abuse that Felicity Ann had inflicted on her daughter. Carol was content to remain single and independent. When Ruth told her about the obsessive nature of Love Two, Carol recoiled at the idea of a condition that would fill her mind with other than scientific

The Collected Works of Dorothy Tennov

matters. Except for Ruth and a very few others, Carol took people in small doses and was always eager to get back to the lab and computer. Years earlier, there had been one short-lived experience of living with a man. She had felt imprisoned. She had liked him very much, but she didnt like him that much. He was always there, intermingled with everything that happened. It didnt give her time to think independently. The experience mainly taught her how much she valued her solitude. Whatever the virtues of marriage and she conceded that for most people as well as for continuation of the species they might be enormous marriage was clearly not for her. For unknown reasons, she had never tumbled into the state of Love Two, which might have made her want marriage, at least temporarily. Furthermore, based on her limited experience and on the observation of the marriages of family members and friends, the only satisfactory marriage that Carol could imagine was one in which she and her husband lived and worked in almost entirely separate quarters, with some kind of passageway to permit communication. She envisioned it in detail. The house would have to be large with two separate wings. The entrance and reception area would be in the middle. Looking at the house from the front, Carols wing would be on the left. There, she would have everything she needed computers, telephones, kitchen, offices, laboratory, bedroom, dining room it was complete. On the other side, the right wing of the building, the man would have similar facilities suited to whatever his interests were. But even given the possibility of such accommodations, never, until late in life, Carol could find the person with whom she wanted to share even such an ideal existence. There would have been no purpose to it. Carol knew that almost everybody else in the world would find her ideas repulsive, and that a large portion of the unmarried adult population walked around longing to find someone. Well, that was not Carol, who assumed that if an explanation were to be found, that it would lie in her neurophysiology and biochemistry. Although their respective fields of anthropology and biochemistry may have appeared dissimilar to the unaided eye, Carol and Ruths ability to exchange ideas became so important to them both that they usually lunched together several times a week. Through those meetings, the groundwork was laid for their joint scientific effort. Throughout the years of their tenure at Westport University, the two womens lives ran on generally different courses. They seldom met outside the office and lab and almost never visited each others homes. For one thing, Peters presence put a damper on their favorite topics of conversation. But mostly, it was that much of Ruths time was filled with her work plus husband and child, and Carols time was taken up with the delicious isolation in which she read and wrote, carrying on extensive electronic correspondence with distant colleagues. Carol was the only person that Ruth told about what really happened that year when Ruth was a few thousand miles away from Peter, to whom she was still not married. But she couldnt tell everything, because there were things she did not know.