Part IV, Robert Rosen: Autobiographical Reminiscences

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

Again, picking up where I left off: "Autobiographical Reminiscences" by
Robert Rosen, copyright Judith Rosen
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                          Continued...

"Now, let me turn to some other matters which merit reporting. As Rashevsky
pointed out to me all those years ago, I'm not in the game alone. If I have
made myself the scientist, the biologist, I originally aspired to be, I
cannot take the entire credit, though I must entirely assume any blame. I
have received much assistance and support from the communities to which I
have necessarily belonged, including that of some very great minds. This in
turn leads me to talk a bit about the scientific community itself, such as
it is, and about the institutions which are supposed to house and support
them.

I have naturally regarded the University as my natureal habitat, and my
interests and capabilites of sufficient breadth so that I could fit in
smoothly, and to mutual advantage, almost anywhere. All this seems to be
becoming less and less true as time goes on. Nevertheless, I have had the
benefit of participating in at least three extraordinary communities,
organized around extraordinary personalities. The first of them, of course,
was the Committee on Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago,
created and maintained by Rashevsky. All told, I spent about a decade in
this community, first as a student, then as a Research Associate, then as
Assistant Professor. For me, the Committee stopped existing when Rashevsky
was driven out of it. For a long time now, it has not existed in any form at
all.

I was fortunate to find for a while another congenial habitat, in the
complex of activities which nucleated around the Center for Theoretical
Biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.The personality here
was that of James F. Danielli. That lasted another decade, until Danielli
was driven out, and the Center abolished. At Buffalo, I also had the
opportunity to create and administer a graduate program in what was called
"Biomathematics," although I have always disliked that word (much as I have
also disliked being nicknamed "Bob", incidentally, which nearly everyone who
has ever known me uses, and which my parents and older relatives lengthened
to an even more ignominious version; "Bobby"... In my opinion, "Robert" has
much more poetry to it). I look back with some pride in this program, since
it was the best of its kind in North America; best becasue it was the most
cohesive, the most comprehensive, and at the same time the most
individualized. So I will take a moment to describe it.

The program was open to anyone, in any of the dozen or so participating
Departments, who wanted to work in the area; anything from population
dynamics to biochemical control. There was a core curriculum, which everyone
was expected to take, and which consisted of those concepts I felt basic to
any specialization. That curriculum consisted of five courses, of which I
taught four myself, organized around the concept of "stability". The basic
course was about dynamical systems; mostly what was then called qualitative
theory of systems of first-order differential equations. The second course,
built specifically on the first, dealt with (mostly linear) input-output
analysis, control theory, and optimal controls. The third was about
discrete-time systems, in those days primarily automata theory, regarded as
a paraphrase of continuous-time dynamics to discrete situations. The fourth
was concerned with spatially extended systems, described by partial
differential equations. The fifth, which was in fact never taught because I
find the subject uncongenial, was supposed to deal with stochastics. My
expositions were built around many examples, as many as possible taken from
biological situations, and the emphasis was on making the underlying
unifying patterns as conspicuous as I could.

When a student enrolled in the program, I would organize an individual
curriculum most consonant with his or her interests. If the student had no
interests, I would put him on a reading program of broad scope, until one
emerged. Then, and only then, an appropriate curriculum would, so to speak,
organize itself around that interest.

I began this program around 1967. At that time, there were almost no
coherent text materials I could rely on. So I conceived the idea of turning
my course notes into text-books, a digression which I viewed as innocent
public service. The notes for the first course were published by Wiley in
1970, under the title "Dynamical System Theory in Biology". The ideas and
viewpoints expressed therein have become utterly commonplace today but it
was then met with such virulent hostility, especially on the biological
side, that I cancelled my plans for the remaining volumes, and vowed never
to waste my time on exposition again. What expository work I have done since
then has been confined to editing (e.g. a three-volume series, "Foundations
of Mathematical Biology" for Academic Press, and the biannual series
"Progress in Theoretical Biology", of which seven volumes ultimately
appeared.) One of the main thrusts of the latter series was to acquaint
English-speaking scientists with the work being done in Eastern Europe and
the Far East.

Indeed, the Center itself was always the core of an extensive publication
program of its own. The offices of the "Journal of Theoretical Biology" were
located there since Danielli had founded it in 1962, and served as its
Editor in Chief until his death over a decade later. I remained connected
through this time with the "Bulletin on Mathematical Biology", which
Rashevsky had founded, and then later, when I got to know Richard Bellman,
with his "Mathematical Biosciences". I was also heavily involved with
Danielli's authoritative "International Review of Cytology" in those Buffalo
years. For various reasons, I have dissociated myself from many of these
editorial activities, as these publications, and the policies they now
implement, have become less and less congenial to me.

But for a while, Buffalo was paradise. It was at the Center, for instance,
that I came to know people like von Bertalanffy, and many others who came
through for longer or shorter periods of residence. The Center was
destroyed, however, in 1975, in a brutal upwelling of resentments,
jealousies, and low parochial politics. But I am sure we all have our
academic horror stories to tell. Nevertheless, I continue to regard what
happened then as a tragedy for both the field and for innovative university
research in general, and it certainly bespoke a catastrophe for SUNYAB, from
which it has never recovered.

At the moment, and indeed for at least a decade past, there has been no
coherent, broadly-based graduate program in this area anywhere in North
America. The field seems to prosper, not because of new cohorts of students
trained in the area, but by the accretion and immigration of people trained
in other areas. Many of these people are technically very adept, but it
seems to me that they are producing little in the way of new ideas; what
appears in the journals now is primarily the reworking of old ideas, often
dating back thirty years or more. Reading them is a dreary exercise, and
that is one of the main reasons I have disaffiliated myself, both from the
journals which publish them, and from the organizations these journals
represent. How can I endorse, for instance, the present editorial policy of
the "Journal of Theoretical Biology", when its current co-editor publicly
derides the whole endeavor as "trivial", and at best an exercise in
combinatorics?

I left Buffalo in 1975, with the closing of the Center, and took up an
appointment as "Killam Professor" (so named because it was funded in memory
of Isaac Walton Killam) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This was like a five year Sabbatical, which released me for that duration
from the strictures of academic politics, and left me free during that time
to continue pursuit of my Imperative in good company. I shall always be
grateful to Dalhousie for the haven it provided, even though circumstances
are much different today from what they were then.

In general, I believe that under presently prevailing circumstances, the
best thing I can do, for myself, and for my field, is to pursue my
Imperative in my own way, and continue to report. I feel I am  [ats this was
being written, in the early 1990's]  much closer to my ultimate goals than I
have ever been, and that I can only get stronger as I advance. As I said at
the outset, I am not by nature a proselytizer; but my reports are out there,
for others to make of it what they will.

If, as I believe, my scientific work comprises a single unity, then that
unity reflects the mandates of the underlying unified problem with which I
have been concerned. I have tried to listen only to what that problem tells
me, and to follow its exigencies. That is the key to how I perceive science
itself, and why I have never allowed anyone to tell me how science in
general, and Biology in particular, "ought" to be done. Only the problem
itself can do that.

If nothing else, I hope to have shown that mathematics and life are not
opposites. Most Biologists, I dare say, believe that where mathematics is,
there life cannot be, and vice versa. Most (pure) mathematicians, for quite
different reasons, feel the same way. But I rather believe that the corpus
of mathematics is the ony other thing which shares the organic qualities of
life, and provides the only hope for articulating these qualities in a
coherent way. But that way is quite different from what has hithero seemed
to suffice for the rocks in this world.

Quite early in my professional life, a colleague said to me in exasperation,
"The trouble with you, Rosen, is that you keep trying to answer questions
nobody wants to ask." This is doubtless true. But I have no option in this;
and in any event, the questions themselves are real, and will not go away by
virtue of not being addressed. This attitude, I know, has estranged me from
many of my colleagues in the scientific enterprise, and has put me far from
today's "main stream". But sooner or later, if I am at all correct, that
"stream" will flow my way. In the meantime, I must continue to do what the
problem demands of me; as I see it now, it consists of finding a
(relational) model, an essence, all of whose material realizations must be
counted as alive. I think I have indeed found at least one cush model; the
trick now is to find the objective grounds by which such an assertion can be
demonstrated."


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CONTINUED******************************************************
Editorial note on this section: While my father always thought it was a
shame that people were so opposed to even considering that the "machine
metaphor" and the tradition it represented could be wrong, he didn't give a
damn. The reason is (and the thing that his exasperated colleague hadn't
realized was ) that one person WAS, indeed, asking: Robert Rosen himself,
wanted to know the answers. That was enough.  In "reporting" his answers via
books and papers, others could partake of them as well, and he didn't really
care whether those others agreed with him or not. By the time someone was
reading (and getting upset over) something he had written, he had already
moved on to where the problem was leading him next.
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/