Foundations in Cancer Research The Turns of Life and Science

Jan Svoboda    Institute of Molecular Genetics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Vídeňská 1083, 142 20 Prague 4, Czech Republic

I To Write or Not to Write?

Since I received the invitation from George Klein to write my recollections, I have been postponing my final decision for 12 years. Several factors influenced my hesitation. I did not feel old enough to undertake such an enterprise, but unfortunately I had been learning about departures, either physical or mental, of my colleagues who were younger than me. The biological clock is ticking in everybody, and the longer the distance from past events, the worse their memory is kept.

In fact, I am going to write about a nonexistent country, Czechoslovakia, which was dissolved at the beginning of 1993, in the absence of any referendum, and which gave rise to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. However, strong ties among intellectuals of both newly established twin countries (who, according to my knowledge, would have preferred to stay together) remained viable and even formalized into joint scientific societies.

Encountering Western colleagues, we often discussed the unpredictable turns of the fate of this country, which at first glance appeared to be fatal for its culture and science. However, this was finally modified and regulated by our national sense of humor, heresy, and free thinking, traditions deeply rooted in our culture. I realized that despite the fact that some of the escapes from and solutions to absurd situations look strange to straightforward Anglo-American thinking, they bemused and sometimes even attracted the listeners. This aspect represents an additional excuse for writing further pages.

II Boys and Resurrection of Czechoslovakia

Being a boy after the end of Second World War was a great privilege for several reasons. At the age of about 10 years, I was not deeply marked by the Nazi occupation like my older mates, who were expelled from the universities and in many cases sent to forced labor. The first 3 years after the liberation of the country in 1945 were extraordinarily fruitful and inspiring. There was general enthusiasm and willingness to catch up again with the civilized world. There was a plurality of views, a richness of information from both the East and West, and many opportunities to learn about and love nature—being a boy scout—or to try to understand human thinking by joining discussion clubs or the academic YMCA. To me it has been highly attractive to collect natural objects and to try to learn about their origin or function. I loved amphibians and to some degree also snakes (as viper) that I bred at home. These years formed my generation, which later had to live, for such long years, out of this crop of these seasons.

However, disaster was looming and fell in February 1948 as a communist coup d'état. Boys at the lyceum were not affected directly, but the freshly released high-school graduates who in spring tried to enter university often reappeared with pale faces, commenting on their nonadmission simply: “La politique.”

However, for younger boys, the situation also became more difficult. Good teachers started to make far less comments and some of them invited selected students to their homes to discuss history and other topics freely. Having reached the last year of the lyceum, I learnt that I would not be recommended to enter any university. Being educated in the spirit of liberalism by my father and inclined to comment on what was going on, I finally faced real trouble. Several factors had been involved, but the most peculiar one stemmed from my friendship with one of my classmates. He had become seriously ill, and I taught him what he missed at school, for free of course, just on a friendly basis. By such occasion, I was also commenting critically public affairs. When he recovered, he converted to orthodox communism and became a leading person of the Party at school. Evaluating me, he postulated that although I was a good human being, I was an enemy of the working class. Such is, sometimes, the end of an open mind.

Again, the opportunity to study fortunately came about in 1951, when the political pressure was decreasing. Finally, I got notice that there was a chance for me to enroll, not in the humanities or at the highly desirable medical faculty, but with two provisions. The first was to get excellent notes in all subjects, which was against my mind and nature, so that I had to strongly force myself to comply with this unpleasant goal. The second condition was easier and involved labor work at the so-called Constructions of Youth, which included just digging and digging, however with a beautiful view of the hills of central Slovakia.

III University

Finally, I safely matriculated at the Faculty of Science of Charles University that offered my particular choices. In those days, biology was taken as a preferential subject, thanks to Lysenkoism, which for ideological reasons was implemented as the leading genetic teaching. However, in contrast to the humanities and social sciences, professors who did not fit with the forced ideological views were not removed but silenced. They were—even by their mere presence—a reminder that there was a wealth of genetic knowledge based on the Mendelian laws. I should add that in secondhand bookshops, one could still find books dealing in detail with classical genetics, and these became the source of solid information to any one wanting to pay attention to them.

From the beginning, I should have been interested in cytology, which, unfortunately, was viewed only as a morphological discipline. I got essential training in methods of plant anatomy; but in those days, there was almost no way to grow and influence living plant cells. Therefore, I requested and succeeded to get volunteer training in animal tissue culture in the laboratory of cell metabolism created by Dr. Keilová at the Academy of Sciences. This laboratory was interested in the study of possibly differing metabolic requirements between tumor and normal cells. I easily fell in love with tissue culturing and acquired my first experimental experience with the characterization of the growth properties and morphology of tumor cells. A great stimulus for my activity was represented by the arrival of a highly motivated, but to some degree eccentric, Ph.D....