The Humanities and Scientific Advancements

There are two common denominators of the three scientists featured in this image. First, Anthony Fauci, Harold Varmus, and J. Michael Bishop spent decades of their lives devoted to searching for elusive causes and treatment of disease. Fauci worked on HIV among other illnesses, and Varmus and Bishop on cancer (the pair won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for their discovery that genes for cancer lie within our own cells).

The second similarity among these men is their educational background. Although they of course ultimately took up biology and medicine, each had undergraduate specialties in the humanities – Fauci double-majored in Classics and Premed, Varmus studied English literature, and Bishop fell in love with history before finally focusing on a chemistry undergraduate degree. Their Renaissance backgound was not incidental to their successful work. Fauci has stated that his career “was the perfect melding of both his aspirations” in the humanities and science. At the banquet to celebrate his reception of the Nobel Prize, Varmus drew from his humanities background in a speech that compared the slaying of the monster Grendel from the Old English poem _Beowulf_ to the attempt to destroy cancer.

The background illustration for this post is from the original Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” You might see an elusive and monstrous face lurking in the landscape if you use your imagination; the image parallels the poem’s plot of men who engage on a search to find an illusive and mysterious beast called the Snark. The quest to seek out new knowledge about the nefarious causes of illness is the benchmark of medical research. It has benefited from the lateral-thinking and creativity inculcated by studies in the humanities, as shown by the lives of Fauci, Varmus, and Bishop.