John Gearhart Interview (page: 2 / 8) Stem Cell Research	Print Interview

Were there any books you read when you were young that meant a lot to you?

John Gearhart: We had an English teacher at Gerard by the name of Caswell MacGregor, who gave us a very classic English kind of literature and vocabulary, as part of our academic foundation. We were exposed to a lot of the English literature you would expect to see coming out of Eton or Rugby, this really hard-lined, institutional, all-male kinds of literature. I remember some of these things having an impact.

Was there any particular book that influenced you?

John Gearhart: No, I can't say there was any particular book. I think it was that whole genre of stories of male interactions and life in these kinds of institutions. At that time I wasn't into reading. My real reading didn't begin until I was actually a post-doc years later, so I had a lot of making up to do, going back and reading a lot of the classic things. I'm an intense reader now. I read everything. I don't do TV. Whenever I have time, I read a lot of books.

What about that post-doc period, were there books that were particularly meaningful?

John Gearhart: Oh yes. Milan Kundera's books, H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain. Everything interested me to be honest.

Arrowsmith was very important, Sinclair Lewis's book. This was a very important book because Arrowsmith paints a very good picture of being in science and medicine. It is one of the very few books in fiction that really makes a very positive presentation of what it's like to be in medicine or science.

If you look at the scientists in literature, it is always very negative. It's -- you know, manipulating, always mucking around where they shouldn't. You know that kind of thing, the Frankenstein portrayal. I mean, this is what scientists were about. But Arrowsmith I really, really appreciated and I still do, and I urge my students. Now that we are now on this cutting edge of reproductive technologies and clonings and stem cells -- which are all thrown together now -- I find myself before groups trying to talk about the scientist and the responsibilities of a scientist in our society.
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The perception of the scientist has been so negative for such a long time, and it still continues to be when you see someone saying we should be cloning humans, and the stuff that's going on in in vitro fertilization clinics and things. You get people saying, "Wow! What are these people about?"

So I am very responsive now to arguing for the role of the scientist and what it should be, to bring credible and accurate information to the public, to be very candid about the social implications of our work, to be involved in the whole process of policy determination.

When did you first become interested in science?

John Gearhart: Probably when I was completing high school. I came from a farm family. Science interested me, the ability to manipulate science in a way that we could benefit from. I was very interested in crops, believe it or not. This was something of great interest to me, trying to provide healthier, faster-growing crops.

Where was the family farm?

John Gearhart: It was in Western Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Mountains. I was there for a fairly brief time before I was placed in the orphanage.

A lot of kids would have felt a sense of lowered expectations in that environment, but it seems like you've always had high expectations about what you could achieve.

John Gearhart: Yes, but when I left there I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I know I didn't want to go back to Western Pennsylvania, a very depressed area. I mean, it was a -- but I really didn't -- and I sort of went along on this -- what I was saying is that the people in this group that I went with, there was 25 or 30 of them; they all went to college, so the thing to do was to go to college. And, I remember the counselor at the time saying, you know, essentially "You are not going to amount to anything." I mean, it was very -- a very hard kind of an institution. You know, "Why waste your money on college."
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So he could tell that I was sort of a mediocre kind of a student. No real, you know expectations of anything. So I went to college and then did extremely well there because I had -- I mean, I had never had a glass of alcohol in my life. I had never had any association with females. These things we were taught were not good things, to be honest with you. I mean, it is bizarre but this was our teaching. And so I went through the first year or couple years of college just with the same kind of regimen that I had, and did extremely well. I thought college was a piece of cake. And then the third year I found these other things and you know, plunk! I mean, for quite a while I was in a tizzy and then came out the other end of this fine.
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Other things meaning alcohol?

John Gearhart: The alcohol and the women. Yeah, that is right. Many of my fellow students from Gerard found these things earlier than I did and they didn't survive college. They couldn't make up. They have these GPAs you are supposed to keep up, so many of them floundered and had a problem. I was fortunate that I had a base first before these things struck. Then in college I just fell in love with genetics. I was enthralled with genetics.

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