The Price of Altruism (25 page)

There could have been worse job opportunities. “The IBM company,” the Annual Report of 1961 declared,

Gross revenue from domestic operations alone amounted to $1,694,295,547, an increase of more than $250 million from the previous year. His “unfortunate
No Easy Way
,” George wrote to his editor, Dick Winslow, at Doubleday, would need to be put aside for now. Almost four years after that fateful interview with Piore, George was joining IBM.
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A few months after he had become an “official IBMer,”
Science
wrote back rejecting his papers. The hymen theory was way too speculative, and a damning report had slammed “Fallacies” to the ground. “This crotchety, verbose diatribe has no place in a scientific journal,” an anonymous reviewer had written. George was “merely a biased reader of other people’s papers.”
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The last thing he needed was another blow. His shoulder had been dislocated on a recent climb (his friends called him “kinetic”) and again a few months later, swimming in rough surf. It was the old injury, compounded by the polio, and it would need to be taken care of. Recovering at home from the operation in the fall of 1962, he was gloomy. The
Science
report was a humiliating rebuke, a slap in the face from the professional to the impudent amateur. He hadn’t seen his girls in more than five years. Joan was out of the picture. A Tatiana whom he had met in the public library was in and then out again. He was almost forty. He had yet to make his mark. He was starting to wonder about the merits of free will.

As always the only fixture in his life, Alice, came to his side. “You will succeed in a big way before you know it,” she wrote to him, trying to be encouraging. She had her own troubles. There was a Mr. Aramachi, thank God, renting the southeast room, and a Mr. Ishida in the southwest. But then there were the “bird haters” from the municipality who plastered signs across the park forbidding feeding them. “The birds are starving to death fast in this city of plenty,” she wrote to George, despondent. A diminutive octogenarian, she was already well known to the authorities. Municipal fines and court subpoenas had failed to stop her. Intransigent, at war with all the cruelty and lack of mercy in the world, Alice was sneaking pigeons to her home to mend and feed them before releasing them in Central Park.
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Back at IBM George had worked a bit on CAD but quickly lost interest entirely. It was hard for him to get excited about a brainchild he felt had now been stolen from him in broad daylight. The New Product Line, on the other hand, was doing a market survey concerning programmed instruction, and George figured he could help with that. After all, it had to do with Skinner.

They had been friends, but George’s sympathy had soured; in a “market requirements memorandum” he came down hard on his former pal. Falsely analogizing from pigeons and dogs to humans, Skinner had presented a simplified and therefore skewed theory of learning.
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To him learning was a simple stimulus-response (S-R) pattern, and any intervening steps should be analyzed into the basic S-R components. But what if learning in humans really looked more like this: S-A-B-C-D-E-F-R, and what if A-B-C-D-E-F could not be collapsed into either stimulus or response? George was certain that this was the case: Perception (A), attention (B), understanding (C), belief or acceptance (D), memorization (E), recall (F), and performance (G) were distinguishable components of learning, and reinforcement worked differently on each of them. Skinner’s notion that reinforcement led to learning was simple-minded and misleading. If teaching machines for programmed employee instruction were to work, one would need a better understanding of how reinforcement affects each of the components of learning. One would need to know what was innate in man, and what could be acquired. There were many layers lurking beneath the mystery of behavior. Free will was more complicated than Skinner thought.
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In fact George already had ideas on the matter. So much so, he wrote to Winslow at Doubleday, that he was thinking of writing a book. With
No Easy Way
not yet dead and buried, he had risen again like a phoenix from the sand and turned, as was his pattern, to a new project. “The Reformation of Psychology” seemed too colorless a title, but he would come up with something better, he was sure. The main thing was to explain how all the current theories in psychology were unsupported by masses of current data. Such theories still abounded because a replacement had not yet been formulated. Reviewing animal and human data relating to brain function and anatomy, introspection, learning, motivation, memory, love, and the nature-nurture controversy, George’s book would provide the missing context. Here he could include the rejected papers on the fallacies of random neural networks and the function of the hymen, as well as his thoughts about everything from where memory resides in the brain to how mathematicians can be useful to psychology. He had left the Village now, he told Winslow, and was living in (and hating) Poughkeepsie. But the IBM job gave him a good salary and an enormous amount of freedom, and, given the thumbs-up, he could set to work on the book right away.
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The more covetous he grew of his liberty at IBM, the more his coworkers became suspicious. Who was this George Price: A journalist? A scientist? An inventor? A quack? And why was he often working from home? Some suspected that he might be trying to steal IBM secrets for further articles in
Life
or in
Fortune
, or maybe even an “intelligence machine” of his own. Others wondered why he was working on a book about psychology when he had been contracted to work on the development of a new computer. Believing in his abilities, his boss, Fred Brooks, was doing his best to cover for him. It wasn’t easy. Brooks’s own secretary forced George to buy stationery supplies with his own money. On one of the rare occasions that he had come in to the office, someone mentioned that there would soon be a public announcement of the new System/360 computer. “What’s the 360?” George asked. “I never remember these machine numbers, you know.” The people in the office shot incredulous glances at one another: George was working for the man who was in charge of the entire project.
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He didn’t mind. He was after one big breakthrough and would do what it took to make it. “Many of the most imaginative and important inventions,” he had written in an old article for
THINK
, “have been made by outsiders not employed in the field concerned, who have followed their own schedules and worked according to their own plan.” This became his motto.
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There were two fields where he felt he might make important strides. The first was a new type of mathematical optimization system, the second a neurophysiological coding scheme to explain color vision. Neither of these had any direct connection to work at IBM, but off beat as always, George went around trying to convince the people in Research and Development that they might bring the company glory.

The optimization system stemmed from work he had been doing on the development of procedures for solving linear problems with variables limited to 0 and 1. The objective had been to develop rapid methods for finding nearly optimal solutions of multiple-activity, multiple-factor situations—a computer programming problem. But it soon became obvious to George that the really interesting implication had nothing to do with the “register problem” in computer programming but rather with economic cycles. What he had found was that the 0, 1 restriction resulted in models that were much more helpful than the usual linear models for understanding the behavior of price and profit-based economic systems. Immediately he wrote to the eminent MIT professor Paul Samuelson. Without having intended it, George had found himself with a skeletal model of a profit-based economic system in which complex phenomena became surprisingly transparent.
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“In order to show you that I am not as ignorant in economics as you may think,” he explained to Samuelson in a long letter, he should know that during his one year at Harvard in 1940 he had been in the same class as Bob Solow, and that later in 1947 Andy Papandreou had used his Winthrop House digs for tutorials. “Finally, most impressive of all, when I was about thirteen the Chairman of the Department of Economics and Social Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told me I was talented…. I met with him at a meeting of some organization to which we both belonged (no, not the Communist Party), and talked with him about his paper for a while, at the close of which he remarked: ‘You ought to go into economics. You’re good at it.’ (Instead I went into chemistry. I wasn’t good at it.)”
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It was classic George: trying to ingratiate himself by means of an original idea mixed in with some oddball humor. Samuelson was impressed. George’s profitability algorithm sounded “interesting and novel.” Still, there was a vast literature on business cycle dynamics that he would do well to look at. Picking up on the curious mixture of George’s originality and somewhat autistic penchant for reinventing the wheel, he wrote: ‘I am sure that much of what you are doing would interest economists, particularly if it could be related to earlier work.”
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Meanwhile the second “breakthrough” was increasingly grabbing his attention. Again it started off related to IBM work: a memo on “Approaches to Object Recognition for Complex Graphic Images.” Soon, however, it had shifted in another direction, with George trying to crack the basic mysteries of animal vision. How precisely did the neural wiring in the eye work to produce a picture of the world? Delving into the literature with abandon, he had read all he could get his hands on relating to retinal microanatomy and electrophysiology. He was working on two papers he planned to send to
Science
—“Structure and Function in the Invaginated Synapses of Retinal Receptor Cells” and “Cone Pigments and Spectrophotometry Artifacts”—when the insight finally hit him. “I think I may at last have the key missing piece in the puzzle,” he wrote to his boss, Fred Brooks, the computer man: It was the glial cells, nonneurons in the nervous system, and George had discovered their role in vision.

He had “neglected everybody, including my kids.” Annamarie and Kathleen were teenagers; he hadn’t seen them for almost ten years. The price had been steep, there was no doubt about it. But could he have done it? Could it all have been worthwhile? Could the difficult road from chemistry to economics to writing to computers finally have led him to glory? It was “a discovery of major importance,” he thought, as original as it was bold. Finally, he had found his piece of truth. “Very optimistic,” he confided to a friend. “Think it will make a big difference in my situation in the world.”
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It was not to be. Like the big ESP experiment with John Scarne and the Argentine, Ricardo Musso; the amazing Design Machine; the vital
No Easy Way
; and like his economics-rattling optimization models—the eye “discovery” just fizzled away. The Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine Sir John Eccles, to whom George had sent his paper, replied politely that it was “remarkable” but that he himself could not follow. “Your physical treatment of this important problem,” he wrote, “is beyond my mediocre attainments.”
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Meanwhile George’s thyroid was acting up again, and he was contemplating an operation. There was a fine surgeon at Memorial, but he decided to go with Don Ferguson in Chicago instead. Ferguson had overseen a thyroidectomy on his own wife, who had recovered completely. He was known to be conservative. He was an old friend.

Only when George was in his hospital gown at Billings did Ferguson tell him that he always did a radical neck dissection when he found thyroid cancer. There was no need to worry, though. The surgery would leave no more that “a slight deformity.” Too cowardly to change his decision now, George gave his okay and went under his friend’s knife. It was February 1966.
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Back in New York following the operation, he wrote to Ferguson that he was “recovering well.” He couldn’t quite yet do mathematics (“that will be the sign of true recovery”) but he was on his way. He was very grateful “for all your kindness to me—for the flowers, the radio, the phone call to my mother, the books, the music lessons, the hospitality at your home, and the beautiful stitching.”
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Into the summer and through to the fall, the recovery had begun to reverse itself. He was doing physical therapy at the NYU Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, but he could hardly move his right arm. What’s worse, much of the right side of his neck and face and shoulder were completely without sensation. He was contemplating a nerve graft but was told by an expert that no one ever obtained significant motor recovery through a graft of ten centimeters, even if an autograft were used. He had stopped going out, stopped dating women, hadn’t been to the theater for months. Then, in January 1967, Ferguson wrote a startled letter to say how shocked he had been by yesterday’s package in the mail: With only a note to say who it was from, there in the box were George’s ice-skates.
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