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William J. “Jack” Schull (1922–2017): Gentleman, Scientist

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.ajhg.2017.07.003

1537-6605

Kenneth M. Weiss,

Carcinogens and Genotoxicity Assessment

I can hardly write a disinterested memoir of Jack Schull. Like many others, I owe the nature of my career, and whatever successes I’ve had, to him. Still, perhaps heartfelt paeans need some motivation to ring true. Yet, although I can (and will) mention a few things about him, I fear that doing so risks being like today’s citation counts, which mistake a person’s list for a person’s worth. To me, the thing for which he is most widely respected, admired, and perhaps envied is simply being Jack. Born in 1922 in a sleepy Missouri town along the Mississippi River, William Jackson Schull attended Marquette University in Milwaukee until he joined the military service for World War II. He returned to finish his zoology major in 1946 and then went on to obtain his PhD, also in zoology, from Ohio State University. He then took the opportunity of a research position with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to study the effects of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the early post-war years, among other things, Jack carried out a landmark comprehensive study of inbreeding in Japan (if most mutations were recessive, as was then thought, inbreeding would generate at-risk homozygotes). For decades thereafter, while a faculty member in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Michigan and later at the University of Texas at Houston, he was involved in follow-up biomedical and genetic studies of those who had survived the bombings. The objective was to ascertain the health effects in later life of the survivors’ radiation exposures and to identify any heritable defects that might arise in their children. With increasing amounts of exposure even in peacetime in the industrialized world—such as from atomic test fallout, the rise of nuclear power plants, and clinical X-rays and radiotherapy—the epidemiology of exposure to a known mutagen was considered quite important; the war only made the issues seem more urgent, and poignant. Jack was an excellent, systematic epidemiologist, but he was not just a science grind: humanity in its best sense was his calling. He developed a deep and lasting affiliation with Japan and Japanese culture and paid particular attention to the experience of Japanese Catholics, all of which he recalled in a typically lyrical way in his 1990 Harvard Press memoir Song among the Ruins. Along with Jim Neel, with whom he collaborated for decades at the University of Michigan (and in Japan), Jack was a founding member of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) itself and The Journal. For that, and his presidency in 1970, a fine drawing of Jack made the October 2013 cover. The Neel-Schull dynamic duo powered the University of Michigan’s Department of Human Genetics until about 1972, when Jack was offered a chance to be an alpha male (but never a bully) on his own, with the founding of his Center for Demographic and Population Genetics (CDPG), as part of the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston. Over the following decades, his major research projects concerned Mexican-American health along the Texas Rio Grande border and high-altitude adaptation in South America. In 2000, Jack founded the Schull Institute in Houston to address the health-care needs of vulnerable populations, and his collected papers are documented in the Texas Archival Resources Online. Jack built a prominent career. But of his accomplishments, a list doesn’t capture the gist. For example, note the D in CDPG: Jack’s interest was in the role of genes but wrapped in actual people and their life histories. To found the CDPG, he attracted a remarkable set of core faculty—Masatoshi Nei, Ranajit Chakraborty, Bob Ferrell, Wen-Hsiung Li, and even lucky me—who all went on to direct their own departments, received endowed chairs from their respective universities, and/or became members of national honor foundations or societies. The CDPG was also a highway for a stellar stream of visitors from around the world over the years, especially from India and Japan. I dare not list them lest I make errors of omission, but I will mention that one of our first graduate students was Aravinda Chakravarty, a recent president of ASHG. I was too young to have had a direct appreciation for another noteworthy Schull fact: Jack’s career began right after a very nasty war with Japan. Its justification is still debated, but the war ended with the nuclear incineration or flaying of countless thousands of Japanese people, most of whom had no direct role in the war but who had already suffered material and, worse, personal loss during that time. Yet, from his early post-war work on the bomb survivors (and other topics) in Japan, Jack quickly became a friend rather than a conqueror. Typically for him, the Japanese were never just study subjects; they were people, individuals, and importantly, a culture. Jack retained many dear and lifelong friends in Japan, including the many who visited the CDPG, for which he earned high honors in Japan. Jack’s success was possible because, for many of us, he helped set up projects and opportunities on which we could build our careers. So what? Lots of leaders during that time also helped people. But Jack was different. One day not long after I arrived as a new assistant professor at CDPG, Jack called a few of us into his office. He explained that he wanted to propose a research project to look at genealogies (something he, though not I, was quite experienced with) to try to understand the degree to which cancer might be familial. In typical Schullian fashion, he had scoped out the Mexican-American border city of Laredo, TX. As a mainly Catholic city of about 100,000, vital events in Laredo over two centuries had been well documented by the Catholic Church in terms of birth, marriage, and death records. Jack’s proposed project would assemble the genealogies from these and other records of the entire history of Laredo, computerize them by using newly capable technologies, and search for statistical patterns of cancer risk in families (marker-based mapping was not then available). This was my first contact with working up a grant proposal, and of course as a junior faculty member I couldn’t demur being involved, although genealogies and cancer were subjects I knew nothing about. Jack matter-of-factly presented his ideas for collecting and analyzing the records on this exhaustive scale. Among other things, we would have to write our own database-management program, given that nothing like that was commercially available then. As a dutiful cog, I was happy enough to go along and learn. Then, without changing tone at all, Jack looked at me and said, “Ken, I think you should be the principle investigator.” Never had such an important trust been placed on so naive a person as I! But that was Jack through and through—and, by the way, we did get funded (those were easier days). This experience was typical of Jack and shows why the fond feelings people—many people—have for him are in large part due to the fact that he didn’t try to take over their ideas, squeeze credit for himself out of their work, retain control of projects at the cost of his juniors, or try to keep them in his shadow. But then, if he was not an alpha baboon, how did Jack become so prominent for so many decades? Though like his peers, he published many noteworthy papers and books, I think the answer lies basically, or even simply, in his being a fundamentally good person, one who could see beyond the shadow of his own ego, if indeed he bothered much even to look at that shadow. In my experience, part of his magical influence was (despite occasional grumbling sotto voce) a roseate outlook that made Eos wan by comparison. He was the antithesis of an inveterate martinet who always dictated ex cathedra by denigrating as specious any views others might expostulate. Yes, I know I’ve just dropped a few big words here, but that’s because another thing about Jack that has become rare in today’s harried and specialized academic world is his breadth of interests and depth of scholarship. Although he could out-vocabularize any of us—or maybe all of us put together—Jack didn’t need applause or attention to do good in this world. Erudite but without pretension (though he privately knew that you didn’t know the words he used), he had a casual working vocabulary even longer than the frantically juiced-up publication lists of modern CVs. Jack did science in style. Jack and his CDPG were about research, and that required funding. In the “how times have changed” department, believe it or not, the University of Texas at that time forbad putting faculty salary on grant applications. Apparently, they had the strange notion that they were paying us to work for them and not the NIH. At that time, the “business model” we hear so often touted these days referred to business, certainly not academia, which was, properly, its antithesis. And in the nostalgia department, I’ll add a relevant observation here. For those who wonder whether Jack had vision or anticipated future developments in cogent ways, without the kind of immediate mega-citation payback, take a look at chapter 17,“Genetics and Epidemiology,” in Human Heredity, a book co-authored by Jack and Jim Neel and published by the University of Chicago in 1954. This book was widely and properly recognized as laying a foundation for the belief, now so commonplace as to be taken for granted, that genetics just might have relevant things to say about complex, including late-onset, diseases. Their chapter’s last section is titled “The possible complexity of epidemiological genetics” and presents the many reasons such diseases might be influenced by genetic variation and yet not be “genetic” in the classical Mendelian causative sense. After showing the example of the complexity of breast cancer risk in particular mouse strains and crosses, the section concludes, “The difficulties inherent in demonstrating unequivocally a similar situation in man, should such a situation exist, are apparent.” This was written more than 60 years ago, rather before today’s acclaim-claiming hoopla over genome-wide association studies. Even that long ago, the problems of complexity were apparent, at least to some. Eventually, like the other core faculty, I left CDPG when it became time to try my own wings in a leadership position. Yet, though a CDPG “deserter,” I continued to work with Jack (at his initiation), even on a book-length review of radiation effects, for the United Nations Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), with which Jack had worked for many years. He needn’t have asked for my collaboration because I had never been part of the work in Japan nor of the radiation research community. But that, again, was Jack and the trust he put in others. In 1988, Jack and I were in Vienna to present our lengthy assessment to UNSCEAR, including our estimate of the cancer risks of occupational exposures to radiation workers. We had put a lot of effort into that report, but it was politically inconvenient for France, which had many workers in radiation-related fields and didn’t like the cost of the safe-exposure limits we suggested. After the report failed to be accepted for that reason, without a watering-down revision, Jack and I retired to an anteroom to digest the result. Jack, fuming, paced the room like a caged lion, but in his uniquely refined way, he did so with a glass of single malt in his hand. Ah, that was Jack! These are some of my reflections about Jack. However, I don’t know the extent to which I or the many he influenced are adequate reflections of Jack, of what he wanted for us. I wonder how many people in genetics these days, obsessed with getting ahead by assembling countable items, even know who he was, even though his past was their prologue. It’s a challenge, and we whom he influenced directly can only hope we did our best to live up to his standard. If we haven’t, well … let’s change the subject! If those who did not know him were to look back at his very long career, it is not clear what specific facts, papers, tick-box items, or achievements they would focus on, or even find relevant to the future. Today’s attention-hungry world dares not give more than scant strategized recognition, much less serious credit, to our forebears. Jack did not write a Watson-Crick-like discovery paper. What he did, in a quiet, unassuming, and hence persuasive way, was to broaden the perspective on human genetics from genes to people and genotypes to populations. These contributions were widely recognized and influential at the time. Maybe he spoiled things for those who, like me, spent their early careers under his influence, because he led us to hold a rather high level of, shall we say, circumspection about the quick and grandiose claims in the field that its pressures make it be today. For these reasons, I think that like most of his contemporaries, who also strode as giants on the new stage of human genetics, Jack’s influence in the future will be implicit, such that his work will be specifically remembered mainly by historians. In our impatient time, the past is ignored if not denigrated. So be it: we must all accept our musty fate. I think Jack would not have minded (very much). A cosmopolitan world traveler and eminently social being, Jack lived for his interactions with others. Though intellectual and sophisticated, Jack could be equally happy in a small isolated drafty church, an ornate cathedral, or a medieval monastic library. He was, in his time, his own man, and fortunately those times were financially forgiving in terms of his career and those of others like me. As Jack scribbled in the copy of Song that he gave to me, “I do hope you will enjoy this, but I suspect you need no conversion either to the joys of travel nor the fun of research.” Jack may have used words without limit, but I cannot match them in this sketch of the impact of his long and well-lived life. However, I’m moved to close by musing upon how much of Jack’s refined, generous, open, and thoughtful nature we owed, over the years, to the quiet influence of Victoria (“Vicki” under casual circumstances), Jack’s late wife and companion. I knew from early on who was in charge: right after my dissertation defense, Jack, who was on my committee, asked whether I’d like to go have a celebratory drink somewhere in Ann Arbor (note: I had only one!). We were enjoying a fine chat—until the restaurant’s phone rang. Then, as perhaps now, Victoria was calling him home.