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A hundred years of curiosity [MIT Tech Review]
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Any facet of Josef Eisinger’s remarkably wide-ranging century of life would be enough to shape the entire identity of another person.
If you were to ask how his experience has intersected with history, for example, he might tell you about escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror in his native Austria by fleeing to Britain by himself as a teenager, or about the years he spent being shuffled between internment camps in Canada before he’d even graduated from high school.
If you were to ask about his professional accomplishments, he might tell you about his journey from physicist to molecular biologist to historian, or about being awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, or about how his research into lead poisoning sparked the creation of new federal policy.
And if you asked him what has brought him joy, he might volunteer information about his kids and grandkids, his lifelong love of painting, or how playing music gave him his ticket out of the internment camps and helped him meet his wife.
“I’m always surprised that people have such a hard time finding something that really excites them, because I never had that problem,” he says, sitting on a couch in front of a wall full of his paintings at home in Manhattan’s West Village. “My problem is too many things.”
By the time Eisinger was in his early 20s, he had already been a farmworker, dishwasher, lumberjack, gold prospector, and soldier.
Even after he studied physics, first at the University of Toronto for his undergraduate and master’s degrees and later at MIT for his PhD, his path didn’t become any simpler. He spent 32 years at Bell Labs, switching from pure physics to molecular biology along the way; taught for more than a decade at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; and then retired and began writing books of history, most notably two volumes about Einstein.
But to understand where Eisinger ended up, it helps to start with where he came from.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Eisinger describes his childhood as tranquil. He fondly remembers helping out in his father’s shop, which sold imported sponges and other toiletry items; taking hikes in the nearby countryside with his Boy Scout troop; and riding around town on the bicycle that he was given at his bar mitzvah. But that all changed in March of 1938 with the Anschluss, the German Reich’s annexation of Austria, and the Nazi takeover that followed.
Eisinger made it out of Austria thanks to the Kindertransport program. He traveled to England by train and ferry as a 15-year-old without his family, carrying only the belongings he could fit in one small suitcase. “I recall lengthy discussions regarding the selection of items that would be most useful to me in the Great Unknown,” he wrote later in his memoir. Among the possessions that made the cut were the riding boots his father had worn in World War I and a wooden “mushroom” used for darning socks, a skill his mother had him practice before departing.
“I’m always surprised that people have such a hard time finding something that really excites them, because I never had that problem,” he says, sitting on a couch in front of a wall full of his paintings at home in Manhattan’s West Village. “My problem is too many things.”
Once he arrived, his status as a refugee meant he had to find any job he could. He already spoke English but had to adjust to the local dialect to work on a Yorkshire farm that raised a variety of crops and livestock. Then he landed a job as a dishwasher at the Brighton hotel where his sister, Lesley, was working as a receptionist.
Entries from Eisinger’s teenage diary reveal the difficulty of those early experiences navigating the world on his own, as well as hints of the resilience and optimism that would come to characterize his approach to life. In between entries describing feeling broke, bored, and lonely, there’s one from New Year’s Eve 1939, when he was living at the farm:
“To-night is New Year’s Eve and while it will hardly be as nice as former ones, I am very determined as I begin 1940, and where there is a will, there is a way,” he wrote. “But I must always have a goal, for if one accepts things as they are and does not strive on, this whole life is without a sense of purpose.”
That attitude served him well when life took another unexpected turn shortly thereafter. In the spring of 1940, the imminent fall of France heightened British suspicion of all “enemy aliens” between the ages of 16 and 60, who the government feared might be Nazi spies—never mind that some of them were refugees in England precisely because of Nazi aggression back home.
Not long after Eisinger’s 16th birthday, two policemen showed up at the hotel where he worked. Thinking they were bringing him to the station to fill out routine paperwork related to his legal status, he left a sink full of dirty dishes and headed off with them—only to find out he was being sent to live in an internment camp.
The first of these camps was at a racecourse in Brighton, where internees slept on cotton pallets stuffed with hay. The next was an unfinished development in the suburbs of Liverpool where the scant rations—a single slice of white bread per day—left Eisinger experiencing real hunger for the first time in his life. The third, on the Isle of Man, meant living in a seaside hotel that had been seized by the government and was surrounded by barbed wire.
In spite of the often harsh conditions, Eisinger felt a measure of relief at escaping the “drudgery” of his former jobs and, for the first time since leaving home, being around boys his age who shared similar backgrounds. Perhaps the friendships forged in the camps were one reason why, when he and some of the others were loaded onto a ship and sent off to Canada, they felt more excited at the prospect of a new adventure than anything else.
Life in Canada’s camps further solidified Eisinger’s surprisingly upbeat attitude. Though internment was far from cushy—those years meant being further separated from his family and imposed restrictions on his freedom—he looks back at that time with a positivity bordering on nostalgia.
Part of that comes from feeling lucky to have escaped a worse fate in a Nazi concentration camp, but another part arises from the sense of camaraderie he experienced and the joy of having time to learn from his fellow Jewish refugees in the internment camps’ informal schools.
Though internees still had to work (Eisinger became a carpenter and lumberjack, helping to build camp housing and facilities and felling trees for firewood using a double-edged axe), they also had plenty of leisure and study time. After the menial labor he undertook in the UK pre-internment, that felt like a gift. Besides, the food rations in Canada were generous, and internees could order “luxuries” like chocolate or cigarettes with the money they earned from working in the camp. Eisinger’s most memorable purchase, though, was a book: a pocket-size dictionary that he still keeps in his library.
The internment camp also sparked his interest in physics, through the influence of his scientifically inclined friend Walter Kohn (who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his contributions to theoretical chemistry).
“This was at a time when Nazism and democracy were involved in the deadliest struggle with each other,” Eisinger says, speaking with a clear voice that still contains hints of an Austrian accent even after all these decades of living elsewhere. While others might have found comfort in religion during those perilous times, Eisinger made sense of the world by turning to the scientific method. “I was always an agnostic, as far as religion is concerned,” he says. “I came to the conclusion that you can’t believe anything like doctrines and religions—you have to have evidence. And physics is really all based on evidence.”
Kohn and Eisinger ended up getting their ticket out of the Canadian internment camps in the form of sponsorship by the Mendels, a Jewish family who had escaped from Berlin and agreed to let the boys come live with them in Toronto. Eisinger attributes this lucky break to the fact that he and Kohn had recently bought themselves recorders to play together: “The Mendels heard about us and said, ‘If they like music, they must be all right,’” he recalls with an amused glint in his eye.
That was only the first great gift his love of music gave him. The second was his wife, Styra Avins, a Juilliard-trained musician and musicologist whom he met when they were both playing cello in the Greenwich Village Symphony Orchestra many years later. (He asked for her tutelage in what became “the most expensive cello lessons” ever, Avins jokes, noting that those lessons are what catapulted him from a simple one-bedroom bachelor pad into life with two kids, two houses, two dogs, and two cats in the span of a few years.)
After leaving the internment camps, Eisinger went on to study physics at the University of Toronto, took a break to join the Canadian army to do his part to combat Nazism, and then returned to finish his studies. Along the way, he undertook a variety of unusual summer jobs, from working for a geophysicist who was prospecting for gold in the Canadian bush to “tracking the meanderings of the magnetic North Pole” for the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa. After graduating in 1948, he talked his way onto a ship crossing the Atlantic to reunite for the first time since the Anschluss with his parents, who were then in Palestine after fleeing from Austria. (Eventually they would relocate to Toronto.)
Upon his return to North America, Eisinger began his PhD at MIT. “Nuclear physics was king, and many of the professors at MIT had come back from the Manhattan Project—the place was full of famous physicists,” he says. “That was the birth of nuclear physics, really. So it was only natural that my PhD thesis was on the structure of the nucleus.”
In those days, Eisinger says, students couldn’t just go out and buy the lab equipment they needed to conduct experiments, so one of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to build whatever one needed using the machine shop and glassblowing equipment on campus. He spent two years constructing and testing the eight-foot-long vacuum system he needed for his research using tips and tricks that had been handed down from one generation of students to the next. When it was finally up and running, it took him only a few days of shooting atoms through the apparatus to gather all the data he needed. With that data, he was able to defend his thesis, which focused on determining the quantum states of protons and neutrons and how they interacted with one another.
The experimental data he gathered for his PhD was later used by the physicist Aage Bohr in his own Nobel Prize–winning research. It was just one piece of research by Eisinger that would become widely cited by others—he published more than 150 articles in academic journals over the course of his career.
Much of that work, which covered everything from the structure of antimony nuclei to the damage that radiation causes in DNA molecules, was conducted during his 32-year tenure at Bell Labs, where Eisinger felt lucky that “funds for research seemed inexhaustible.” It was during that time that his focus began to shift from pure physics to using the tools of physics, like emission spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance, to study “biological systems on the molecular level.”
“I was never just an artist, or just a scientist, or just a lumberjack. I wanted to pursue all of them, to try everything.”
That shift was inspired partly by the waves made by the discovery of the helical structure of DNA, the importance of which drew many physicists to molecular biology at that time. Excited by the possibilities, Eisinger ended up cofounding, alongside two of his colleagues, Bell Labs’ Molecular Biophysics Research Department. The president of the company greenlighted the project because “DNA is the most effective and efficient way of storing information known,” as Avins puts it, making it “something useful for the information industry to think about.” Shortly thereafter, Eisinger won his first Guggenheim, to go to Europe and study molecular biology further.
Bob Dale, a visiting senior research fellow in molecular biophysics at King’s College London who worked with Eisinger as a postdoc at Bell Labs, describes him as having an “intuitive and rigorous approach” to solving scientific problems. “I can honestly say that I never worked with, or even met in passing … a physicist (or, for that matter, a scientist of any kind) with a deeper understanding and, even more importantly, intuition than that with which [Eisinger] was blessed,” Dale says.
Perhaps Eisinger’s research with the most far-reaching impact was a method he helped develop for detecting the abundance of certain fluorescent molecules in the blood of people exposed to lead, using a beam of ultraviolet light to excite the electrons of these molecules so that they would emit light. Requiring just a drop of blood, that method became the basis for an instrument called the hematofluorometer, for which Eisinger and his colleagues were awarded a patent. It made testing people for lead exposure much quicker and cheaper.
Their data helped prove that essentially “the whole population was lead poisoned, mostly through a lead-containing additive that was added to gasoline,” he explains. “It was unnecessary and stupid, but it made a lot of money for Exxon.”
Their work attracted the attention of the government, and Eisinger and his research partners were invited to Washington, DC, to present their results. Despite pushback from the powerful oil and gas lobby, their research ultimately resulted in the phaseout of lead-based paints and leaded gasoline, which was completed in 1995.
Eisinger took his second Guggenheim fellowship to study the history of lead poisoning in Europe. He researched monks who used leaden kettles when following an ancient Roman recipe for a syrup used to preserve and sweeten wine, not realizing that they were inadvertently poisoning everyone who drank it. He eventually left Bell Labs in 1986 to become a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where he lectured on biophysics and occasionally the history of medicine. That’s where he stayed until his retirement in 1998.
Eisinger’s home tells the story of his journey from physicist to molecular biologist to historian and showcases his lifelong love of painting and music.
His love for learning about the world around him was far too strong to be squashed by the official end of employment, though, and Eisinger kept writing, this time for a popular rather than a scientific audience. He assisted his wife, Avins, by translating some of the letters of Johannes Brahms for her book on the composer (“who Josef had every reason to consider his rival,” she quips, given how much of her life was focused on the project) and went on to write two books about Albert Einstein and two more about his own life.
Despite the obvious physics connection, Eisinger says his interest in Einstein actually traces back to the Mendels, the family that sponsored his exit from the internment camps: A Mendel forebear was Einstein’s onetime girlfriend. “He had quite an eye for women,” Eisinger says with a wry smile, displaying a sense of humor that shines through whether he’s recounting tales of visiting a strip club with future Nobel Prize winners or describing the strange and sometimes horrifying moments in history he has lived through.
If there’s been one throughline in Eisinger’s life, it’s the attitude with which he approached the things he was interested in, even if those things had little in common.
“He’s very single-minded in what he’s doing. And he’s done a lot. But you cannot categorize him with one or two stories,” says Avins, who describes his “innumerable” professional pivots as a contrast to the career paths of colleagues who pursued just one scientific question their whole lives. “There are many, many facets to him, and that’s befitting someone with an active intellect and active curiosity.”
When asked to reflect on their decades of life together, she reminisces about his days in the “elite” group of pure science (as opposed to applied science) researchers at Bell Labs, compliments the translation efforts he contributed to her book on Brahms, praises his deep love for and great taste in music, and describes him as a “terrific father” who took “great joy in family outings, hikes, and cooking for the family.”
More than anything, though, she points to his “integrity, and ability to love.” In spite of all his professional accomplishments, Eisinger is inclined to agree with her about what’s been most important in his life. When asked what he’s proudest of, he answers simply, “I have two children and two grandchildren.”
The pride he feels for his family, and for the entire life he’s built outside of work, is palpable as he speaks. When there’s a lag in the conversation, he goes to pull out Avins’s book on Brahms to highlight her expertise (“He’s very supportive of my career,” she confirms later), or indicates her instruments and talks about her musical talent. He points out the ceiling beams and shares a story about the carpentry work he did to make the West Village town house the charming, homey place it is today. He gestures at the lovely back garden; pulls out a watercolor picture he painted in Tuscany; mentions his daughter-in-law.
He is, in short, a man who has not lost the power to be delighted by the things and people that surround him, even after a hundred years of life on this planet.
“All these parts that we’re talking about are interconnected,” he says. “I was never just an artist, or just a scientist, or just a lumberjack. I wanted to pursue all of them, to try everything.” As he sits in his living room full of books he’s written, art he’s made, pictures of his kids, and his wife’s piano, it’s clear he’s not stopped enjoying it all.