Science and culture: Using fiction to make the case for basic research.

What possesses a respected, retired scientist to take on the agonizing task of writing a novel and fighting to get it published? Author Joram Piatigorsky, an emeritus scientist from the National Institute of Health’s National Eye Institute, says quite simply that he had something important to say. Piatigorsky’s novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes (1), centers on a scientist who runs into trouble in an America of the near future that has ever-tightening budgets and a public impatience with basic research. It does not end well for him. And yes, as Piatigorsky discovered in real life and as his fictional protagonist discovers, jellyfish do have eyes. “Jellyfish have magnificent eyes,” Piatigorsky says. “It depends on the species. They have lenses, corneas, retinas.” It’s not, however, clear what exactly they can see. The best guess is a blurred image, he says, and no one really knows what they might do with that information. Investigating the eyes’ function, despite the lack of any practical aim, speaks to the value of basic research. Piatigorsky comes from an extraordinary family. He is the son of Gregor Piatigorsky, a famed Russian-born cellist. His mother, Jacqueline, was a chess and tennis champion and the daughter of Edouard Alphonse de Rothschild, of the French banking family. “I came from a family of arts and literature,” Piatigorsky says. “Humanities in general is in my blood.” Piatigorsky earned a doctorate in biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1967, and began a research career centered on the molecular biology of the eye. He went on to found the Laboratory of Molecular and Developmental Biology at the National Institutes of Health Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Piatigorsky’s novel tells how Ricado Sztein, whose research tracks Piatigorsky’s, gets in trouble when he departs from work that clearly has the potential to cure a human disease (Fuch’s dystrophy, a corneal disease that can lead to blindness), in favor of studying the vision of jellyfish. Sztein takes several life-altering field trips to the marine station La Parguera in Puerto Rico to collect specimens. Because Sztein, through a series of bureaucratic errors, mistakenly uses public funds for trips that have nothing to do with his grant funding, he faces criminal charges. In realworld America, having to repay the money or perhaps face a fine is generally the worst that can happen. In Piatigorsky’s fictional account, Sztein faces a trial and possible imprisonment. Like many, Piatigorsky found the process of writing and getting a book published In Jellyfish Have Eyes, Joram Piatigorsky uses fiction to vigorously defend the value of basic research. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/ILeysen.