Interview: Dr. Carl Djerassi

Oh Dr. Djerassi you ruminator you...I'm very excited about this 'science in fiction' genre; it really is a great way to spoon feed the general population its daily dose of science.

Dr. Carl Djerassi spent 50 years revolutionizing the world through chemistry — from developing the first oral contraceptive pill to producing a harmless method for insect control. In recent years, however, this National Medal of Science winner has traded test tubes for pen and paper as a fiction writer. Now the author of five novels and seven plays (one of which, Taboos, opens in New York this fall), Djerassi deals with the elusive role of science in fiction, as well as the moral dilemmas inherent in the discipline. Boldtype's Chelsea Bauch recently spoke to Djerassi about cross-disciplinary prejudice, professional rivalry, and the benefits of intellectual smuggling.

Boldtype: How has your experience as a chemist affected your work as a writer, and vice versa?

Carl Djerassi: I decided to turn to literary writing only in my mid 60s — at the same time as I decided to start slowly closing my laboratory. My writing had no effect on my chemistry. But the reverse is quite another matter, especially if you broaden "chemistry" to encompass "science." Initially, I was very motivated to bridge the ever widening gulf between the natural sciences and the rest of society by turning into an intellectual smuggler — to smuggle important information about scientific culture, scientific behavior, and scientific concepts into the minds of individuals who are afraid or even unwilling to learn about them on their own — and to do all that in the guise of fiction and, more recently, also through the theatre. Hence, being a scientific insider in a very tribal culture obviously helped me in picking themes and plots, as well as being able to present them in a realistic and plausible manner.

BT: How do your colleagues in each field perceive your crossover work?

CD: That's a very mixed bag, because for each of them I am an outsider. In chemistry, there are several groups. The majority — consisting of people whose last book of fiction was probably the obligatory Austen or Dickens novel in high school — think that I am wasting my time rather than still doing chemistry. The rest consist of those who really like it for telling the facts as they are; people who are jealous that I achieved some modest success in an area as different as my preceding 50 years of chemistry; and people who worry that I am washing dirty lab coats in public.

Among the literati, and especially theatre people, there is some admiration, but more frequently a concern that scientists, who already seem to be taking over the world in their eyes, are now even trespassing on their turf. It has led to a fair number of ad hominem critiques that had nothing to do with the actual quality of my writing. To them, in spite of five published novels ands seven plays, I am still a chemist who does some writing, rather than a writer who once was a chemist.

BT: Can you explain the "science-in-fiction" genre and tell us how it came about?

CD: The gulf between the sciences and the other cultural worlds of the humanities and social sciences is increasingly widening, yet scientists themselves spend preciously little time attempting to communicate with these other cultures. To a large extent, this is due to our obsession with peer approval and the recognition that our own tribe offers few incentives to communicate with a broader public that will do nothing for our professional reputation. Rather late in life, I decided to do something about illuminating the scientist's culture to a broader audience, and to do it through the rarely practiced genre of "science-in-fiction" — not to be confused with science fiction. For me, a novel can only be anointed as "science-in-fiction" if all the science or idiosyncratic behavior of scientists described in it is plausible, if not actually factual. None of these restrictions applies to science fiction. By no means am I suggesting that the scientific flights of fantasy in science fiction are inappropriate. But if one actually wants to use fiction to smuggle scientific facts into the consciousness of a scientifically illiterate public — and I do think that such smuggling is intellectually and socially beneficial — then it is crucial that the facts behind that science be described correctly.

BT: Has it achieved what you intended, and where do you see the genre going from here?

CD: It has definitely achieved my aim, and I see more and more books of this nature starting to appear. But from a personal standpoint, it has been crucially important, because it has become a form of autopsychoanalysis — writing about the tribal behavior of scientists and realizing that I am describing myself.

BT: Are there any current scientific discoveries you think are ripe for novelization?

CD: There always will be. Every question answered and every field explored simply leads to others, which makes prophesy useless. Listing some specific examples simply displays the respondent's personal bias.

BT: Much of your work features an ethical or moral dilemma — what do you see as being the biggest philosophical quandaries of the future?

CD: "Philosophical quandaries" is too pretentious a term for someone like myself, who really has no formal training in philosophy and thus would simply sound ponderous if I attempted to answer it. An intellectual quandary which does concern me as an educator and as a thinking and curious person is the ever increasing tendency in higher education — and hence in subsequent life — toward intellectual monogamy (learning more and more about ever narrower fields), rather than intellectual polygamy (showing at least some competence in more and more diverse fields). My innate curiosity has always caused me to aspire toward the latter.