John M. Opitz, M.D. Oral History

Interview with John Opitz, M.D. (University of Iowa '59) conducted on November 21, 2016. This oral history is one in a series of interviews conducted by the Office of Alumni Affairs and the Eccles Health Sciences Library to document the history of the University of Utah School of Medicine.

John Opitz 21 November 2016 *Interviewee was allowed to make changes to the transcript so the recording and transcript may not match* TODAY IS NOVEMBER 21ST, 2016. AND THIS IS THE START OF AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. JOHN OPITZ. THIS IS HEIDI GREENBERG, AND I AM THE INTERVIEWER TODAY. HG: Dr. Opitz, why don’t you tell us about where you were born and how you came to go to medical school. JO: I was born two years after Hitler came to power. In 1935, Hitler was elected, not once but three times in 1933. And northern Germany, in Hamburg, where my family had resided for a couple of generations, having previously lived on the Baltic Coast. The Slavic name Opitz, which I’ve been told means “monkey” in old Slavonic, and was appropriate for an evolutionist. Supposedly came out of Prague in the 1200s. Settled first in Silesia, Mecklenburg [Pobum 1:09], then the Baltic Coast, [Rubiesvald 1:13] in the 1500s, thereabouts. And settled in Rostock, which was a previous Hanseatic [unclear 1:24] city in northern Germany. No significant ancestors, except for one [Kolaru 1:32] ancestor. We cannot claim descent. The man left no legitimate offspring. And that was the great poet, the so-called father of the German language, Martin, MA-R-T-I-N, Opitz, who was a Silesian from Bützow, one of, I think, eight kids from three marriages of his dad, who was a truly gifted genius. Spoke at least a dozen languages and became an expert in old languages, Gothic, for example. Was the poet laureate by the emperor. Was ennobled. And died of the plague in Danzig, having been – depending on whose lord he served – either Catholic or Protestant or Catholic or Protestant, as was the time in those days. Well educated in Heidelberg, you know, the place that’s in the east. And so the family, huge Opitz family, half Bohemian, half of them German. It’s sort of a cult out of Martin Opitz, whose image is still engraved in my house together with a facsimile edition, 100 years after his death. So early days of Luther that we’re talking about. 1 John Opitz 21 November 2016 My pater or grandfather Opitz had taken into his head, in the last semester of high school, to run away to high sea. He had been raised on high sea on his father’s sailing ships. There were two or three of them that plied the coffee, tea trade between Brazil and northern Germany. And my grandfather grew up on board. He went around the world two or three times and came home, last stop Cape Town, South Africa, where my wife is from, and was an [Ostershake 3:59], which he revered. And it sat on top of his bookshelf throughout the war. And if I had been a good boy every now and then, he took it down and let me hold it. So therefore, we still have an [Ostershake ?] in our house. My father did the same thing: ran away from high school last semester of high school to high sea. He didn’t get any further than the south coast of England. Torquay. Torquay was apparently a town in which many, many north German merchants were educated for overseas trade. And so my father learned the export-import trade, banking. Served for a while in my grandfather’s bank, which was the charter bank of India, China, and Australia. And then had his first overseas assignment in 1929 to Singapore and points east, to Indonesia, Japan, and then finally Hong Kong, and [Teen Seen 5:20] in the [Quan Tung ?] Peninsula in China, which was under [Creaside 5:27] German administration. So my father and mother were married in [Teen Seen ?]. But they returned to Germany in order to evade the difficult question of what kind of a citizen was I going to be, my mother having lived five years in the United States, being entitled to American citizenship; my father entitled to British citizenship. But since they had both German passports, they decided to return to Germany, which they came to regret bitterly. My father continued in this trade until an accident in Belgrade in 1941, during a trade negotiation, injured him, broke his skull so that spinal fluid ran out of his ears, out of his nose. 2 John Opitz 21 November 2016 And then his tuberculosis spread to the meninges. And 13 years after Ambassador van Papen brought him back from Belgrade he died of tuberculous meningitis, when I was five years old, and then spent a long time in the tuberculosis sanitorium, where I did not learn to read. In fact, I had not schooling at all. The Catholic nuns there, who cared for us, just simply card for us. I understand they had a death rate from tuberculosis even higher than we kids did. And I survived and then came back to live with my grandfather in Hamburg in 1942. HG: With your mother at that point? JO: No. She stayed in Nuremburg, where my father had his last job as an export manager for the Baltic countries and the Balkan countries for MAN Machines, Augsburg-Nürnberg. At the location, you still see a big truck on the highway with an MAN design. So that company is still in business, still making trains and trucks and high-energy motor vehicles. So there’s not a complete [unclear 8:04]. In those days, you had no health insurance, no pension, no nothing. So when he died, we were left essentially penniless. My mother had to work and take care of me during long overtimes. And so she stayed in Nuremberg. I bunked with my grandfather during the war, the destruction of Hamburg, during the Second World War. So books, at that time, were an extreme rarity to be treasured. And when I came out of the tuberculosis sanitorium and I couldn’t read, and I wanted to read desperately, my grandfather said to me, “Here is a good book. You learn to read from it.” And I did. I don’t know how the hell I did it. HG: Wow. You taught yourself. JO: I taught myself. And as a matter of fact, that turned up not too long ago. But my grandfather – some decades ago, when my grandfather died in Cambridge, in England, having relocated to England after the war – and my aunt brought the book. And so I was able to retrieve 3 John Opitz 21 November 2016 it this weekend. It is George [Rebus 9:37], Textbook of World History, volume 1. So there are two of them, huge volumes. And not a single illustration in it. So it took some effort. HG: This is not an easy book to read. JO: No. It took some effort for me. But I learned it. And the place that is marked is also the origin of my middle name, which my father must have gotten out of that book, namely the famous story around the year 100 in the Roman Empire of Marius and Sulla, the aristocratic senator versus the peasant proletarian, revolutionary senator Marius, who then became a tyrant. So let’s hope that Trump won’t repeat that – HG: Right. We’re hoping for that. JO: – that history. So that’s the origin of my interest in history. HG: So that’s history of the world from 1888. JO: It was published in 1888. And so it covered world history, beginning with the first book of Moses [laughs]. HG: Oh my goodness. Wow. Not only did you learn to read but you got a very long history [laughs]. JO: And so then I came to America then in 1950. The only books I brought with me was not this book, this was in my grandfather’s estate in England, but the big picture book of Wilhelm Busch. That may not be a concept for you, but all German children are raised on Struwwelpeter, untidy or slovenly Peter, which was translated by Mark Twain, and very well translated I must say by Mark Twain. And the other book on which they are raised are Wilhelm Busch, and particularly the story of Max and Moritz, the two little mischief-making brothers, which are a concept to every single German, perhaps not the recent immigrant Syrians or Turks but certainly the German – and the fairy tales of [Howf 12:21] and of Grimm. 4 John Opitz 21 November 2016 HG: Grimm’s fairy tales. JO: Grimm’s fairy tales are known to everybody. But those of [Howf ?] are not. So [Howf’s ?] fairy tales are more fantastic, much, much longer. They covered the Middle East. And they get you enamored with Islam and the Middle East and the caravans and the trade and the adventures and the wars and the ghosts and so on. Illustrated by [Root Kuza Misha Ills 12:56]. HG: That’s beautiful. JO: Beautiful, beautiful books. Now, this is a facsimile that I acquired later on, but I hope that this very gifted lady illustrator survived the Second World War. And everybody knows the fairy tales out of Grimm. Hansel and Gretel and so on and so forth. Illustrated by the same lady. Also, there’s an emphasis on the near east. So that’s how I came to America with those three books: Wilhelm Busch and Grimm and [Howf ?]. HG: And you came here – were you with your mother at that point? JO: Yes. HG: Because she had an American citizenship. JO: She did not officially. She was one day short of citizenship. So what happened to her after the war ended – Nuremberg hadn’t even been occupied yet – she made her way over the rubble and the destruction of the city to the American headquarters, where she was warmly welcomed as a former Chicago citizen, and having worked for five years during the Depression at Saks Fifth Avenue. And then became the chief interpreter for the war crimes tribunal. And so those five years, since 1945, she worked for the American occupation troops as interpreter, and then moved into the civilian government. HG: What languages did she speak? JO: She spoke only – well, she spoke some Mandarin, having lived in [Teen Seen ?] for 5 John Opitz 21 November 2016 several years, and English, and German. And so her American experience came in very, very handy. And it was not until 1947, ’48, thereabouts, that I rejoined my mother in Nuremberg. And then, because of her privileged position with the occupation troops and good recommendations from the high commissioner, John J. McCloy, and her bosses, the commanding officers of Nuremberg, and the folks who ran the war crimes tribunal, we got early immigration privileges. Spent some time on Ellis Island. And then, my mother had two sisters in this country, one in Los Angeles and one in Iowa City. The one in Iowa City was married to Hans [Goebel 16:01], who had been a graduate of the [St. Tonos 16:04] Conservatory in Leipzig and was a – not a cantor but a string instrumentalist, so violin, viola, cello, cello and chamber music. So in Iowa City, he was the professor of cello and chamber music and the music department. So soon after, I got – we landed in Iowa City, he asked me, “Well, what do you want to learn? What do you want to become as a musician? Do you want to learn the piano or do you want to learn the cello?” And when I told him I didn’t want to learn either, that I wanted to become a biologist, he was terribly upset. And he said, “Well, I suppose I can fix that, too.” And the zoology department and the music department, then, across the Iowa River, were just a half an alley apart from each other. So after his music lessons, one afternoon in March of 1951, my uncle took me over to see his neighbor, Professor [Vichy 17:19], in zoology. And professor [Vichy ?] came out of a very distinguished school of developmental biologists and geneticists at University of Munich, having gotten his PhD in 1914. And the first question that Dr. [Vichy ?] asked me, in German [unclear 17:42], when I entered his office was, “And what is the biogenetic fundamental law?” And I said I didn’t know. HG: Wow. That’s a hard question. 6 John Opitz 21 November 2016 JO: I just felt – complete ignoramus, 15-year-old boy. HG: Did you speak English at this time or just German? JO: Just German at the time, but learning rapidly English. Because my uncle and my aunt, also, would only speak English to me, which was good. Because I then entered high school, second semester, 10th grade, 11th, 12th. So I was two and a half years in high school in Iowa City at that time. And right on the spot hired me as an animal caretaker and as a lab technician. So that’s where I learned my basic zoology. And then the drive was on for me to “succeed.” Nobody ever else having really succeeded much in the family, either maternal or paternal family. And so from then on out, until I was done with training, I read only technical books in biology, development, embryology, endocrinology, genetics, and so on. But it was not until I began my work at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, up until now, so the last 50 years, that I began to collect books in my field of developmental biology and genetics. First, to just simply inform myself, to educate myself, and so on. And then also the development biology from, let’s say 1874 until 1918, was almost exclusively a German occupation. Francis Balfour was briefly – the brother of Prime Minister Balfour – was briefly active in England before he killed himself in a mountain climbing accident. There were a couple of French development biologists, who mostly did teratology, malformations in animals. And 99 percent of that specialty, developmental biology, was a German craft at that time, until the end of the First World War, when it then became American. And so it was the products of that school, and it was only just one school, namely, the school of Johannes [Bulla 20:59] in Berlin, who was born in 1801, died prematurely in 1857, and has many students, one of whom, Richard [Haplich 21:10], ended up as the chair in Munich, and my mentor, [Emil Vichy ?]. And I have a picture of 7 John Opitz 21 November 2016 him here someplace. I’ll show it to you in a second. And he came out of that school in 1914, just as the war started. So he was one of the last to come out of that school. But that school then produced two Nobel Prize winners also, Spemann and von Frisch, the man who did the language of the bees, came out of that school. And another great geneticist, Curt Stern, who then came to the United States and was also mentored by Thomas Hunt Morgan, the Nobel Prize winner in genetics, and hence was doubly educated in anti-German, violently, virulently anti-German sentiments, wanting to have nothing to do with German developmental biology, Thomas Hunt Morgan variety of genetics, which was mostly fruit fly genetics and so on. So the library, which is, I would say, 90 percent [unclear 22:40], then consists mostly of the books of the history and of the science of developmental biology, mostly of Germany, also of France, and Francis Balfour of Britain, and then Huxley. Not so much Darwin. I can’t stand the man’s prose. And I have avoided getting originals of Darwin. And Darwin didn’t illustrate. Of course, Huxley was a good illustrator. Poor craftsman but a good illustrator. He was a popular educator. And Huxley knew the value of a good illustration. And Sir Richard Owen, also, who coined the concept of homology, also was a very good illustrator. And so these books then were not just informative. They were not just beautiful. Some of them are quite expensive, like Mendel’s original paper. But they grow on you as living beings, as persons. They all have got a feel to them and a smell to them. HG: Yes. I was going to say smell. JO: And a texture to them and a history to them and a personal connection to them. And they represent an ideal of beauty in distilling essences out of life and out of the becoming of life and out of death, also, at the end of life. And so that these basically are psychologically extremely fundamental pieces of my education. I never had a childhood. I had no brothers and sisters. I 8 John Opitz 21 November 2016 lived during – in Hamburg during the destruction of that town. So while, fortunately, we never got hit, all the neighbors around us were hit. And then, when I came to this country, maybe from day ten, I arrived in Iowa City, I worked. Work, work, work. Got through college in two years and four semesters. HG: Did you go to – let’s see. Was it University of Iowa? JO: Iowa. Iowa City. And when Dr. [Vichy ?] then retired or was retired, in 1955, the question arose – I wanted to become a PhD graduate student with Dr. [Vichy ?], in zoology. The question then arose, “Well, with Dr. [Vichy ?] gone, now what are you going to do?” And my mother then worked as a secretary in the department of pediatrics. So she said, “Of course, you’ll go into medicine.” And my undergraduate advisor [Jerry Caldwell 25:56] was a very good embryologist, [frog 26:00] embryologist, said, “Well, of course, you’ll go to medical school.” I did not want to go to medical school, so help me. HG: And why not? Was it that you didn’t want to treat patients? JO: No. That wasn’t it. My mind was set on animals. I had compassion for people, yes, but a far greater affinity, psychologic affinity for animals. One of the very first animals that Dr. [Vichy ?] gave me to care for was a little beast called Molly. And Molly was a hooded rat, a [visitor 26:48], so one of those white [jobs ?] with a black face and black stripe down the middle of the back. And Molly became my particular friend. And whenever I came into the rat room, she whistled at me, and she wanted me to come and play with her and tickle her. And there was a wonderful article in the – of either Science or Nature, which had a wonderful image on the front. In any rate – HG: “The Ticklishness in the Rat.” Oh [laughs]. 9 John Opitz JO: 21 November 2016 The hooded rat likes to be tickled. And the minute I would open her cage, she would flop herself on her belly, would put up her foot, and wanted to be tickled. And she would follow me around and she would climb up my pants legs and wanting to be tickled. So that establishes a personal bond, you know, with the animal. And then, when she came to deliver – and I cleaned out her cage once week. Nevertheless, I felt sort of bad about having to clean out her nest also. She would put her babies in my hand while I cleaned out her cage. And I tried to arrange a little nest for her and put in some feathers I’d brought and some wool that I brought. She never used up one of them. She made her own nest, which was better than anything. So that contact with animals humanizes a person. HG: Yes. It does. JO: And it’s probably the reason why so many lonely old people have a pet. You see the homeless people with their little mutt trotting along the streets, begging. And the companion, cats and dogs, of the old people. So there is this affinity with the animals, which drew me on. So the first year of medical school was absolute hell. It was an agony. I didn’t understand the stuff. I didn’t want to understand the stuff. Now, anatomy I enjoyed. Histology I enjoyed. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful science, with all of the various stains. And I’d learn to stain differentially in Dr. [Vichy’s ?] lab. So I knew all of the stains, the hematoxylin, the [eosence 29:43], the malachite green, et cetera, et cetera, nile blue sulfate. So there I didn’t learn anything new in histology. But it was not until the flu epidemic, around Christmastime the next year, ’55-’56 – HG: So it would’ve been your second year in medical school. JO: Second year in medical school – that I ended up being this old caretaker of a ward, in any event, the women’s internal medicine ward. In that, I discovered some sort of an aptitude for 10 John Opitz 21 November 2016 caring for human beings on my, which I never knew I had before then, and which made me appreciate a little better the need to get on with the academics. And so having been – I think the 92nd out of a class of 100 in the first year, I ended up the second out of a class of 96 remaining in the first year. And so I grew into the doctoring. HG: You came to enjoy it. JO: Sort of. HG: Sort of [laughs]. You understood – JO: I understood. And I understood the need for caring. And it’s not just for patients but caring for everything in a greater scheme of things. But from then on out, basically the next 50 years, I did doctoring. And basically, deep down, as a pediatric geneticist, basically deep down, I always wanted to return to zoology. And now I am. So I’m out of the clinic, and I’m out of the classroom. I can finally enjoy all of these books that I’ve accumulated, reread them, understand them now much better than I ever have before, and to be able to place them properly in a historical perspective as to what they were trying to prove, what they actually did accomplish scholarly-wise and discovery-wise in their time, in their era, in their culture, in their cultural convention of expression and so on. And so, for example, Virchow, growing up and living and functioning in a militaristic Prussian state, spoke of the human body as – the organs in a human body as a state, as a state. The individual organs very frequently in a battle with each other. The king liver killing the rest of the body. The king heart, basically. The king of [Hanover 33:10], et cetera, et cetera, and so on. So these cultural contexts are, given that basically I never experienced them while I was in Germany – came to be very important. I never fell prey to them because after I learned what the true history had been, of Germany, by Germany, during the Second World War, I didn’t want 11 John Opitz 21 November 2016 to have anything to do with that culture. My mother, who should have known better than anybody what the history of the Second World War, from the German side, was all about, was a Holocaust denier. Her phrase, her expression, when we ended up in Iowa City, was [speaks in German]. You didn’t learn any Yiddish, did you? HG: I did not. JO: “All lies and calumnies inflicted by the Allies upon the long suffering, terribly suffering German people. And then the American occupation troops, they robbed me,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the grieving, you know, which probably was a leftover of the loss of her husband after only a few years of marriage, having a son without a father, et cetera, et cetera. To some extent it’s psychologically understandable. But when I then came to Iowa City, I made an extraordinary discovery, mainly that the most distinguished, the most important faculty members of the school of medicine and the humanities, whom I got [unclear 35:12] of my uncle’s contacts in the university, they were all immigrant German Jews. So in medicine, Steindler was the founder of orthopedics in Iowa. His nephew Hans [Eirandhoff 35:28] was the founder of thoracic surgery in Iowa. Doctors [Blody ?] and [Burien 35:35], chairs of ophthalmology, were Viennese Jews. Dr. George [Mosef ?], from whom I took Reformation history was a German Jew. Hans [Bergman 35:52], theological positivist from Vienna, was a Jew. Et cetera. So many of the humanists, including Dr. [Zefran 36:04] in neurosurgery, who had been a classmate of my uncle in Berlin, was a German Jew. So they took my reeducation in hand, gently but definitely. And was given my reading assignments. And they I took a total 20-year break from Germany. I spoke with my mother only in English, wrote to her only in English. And then, when I got more and more and more into the field of developmental biology and I needed the language desperately, because all of the primary 12 John Opitz 21 November 2016 writings were in German and so on, the language came back. And then, as I laid out in my acceptance speech for this award, two things happened, namely, that one of my colleagues in Germany, Professor [Spranger 37:15], who will be here during the awarding, who had been trained in Kiev, became a good friend and introduced me, then, to many Germany colleagues, which gave me opportunities to return to Germany, to teach in Germany, and to do so in German, and to write in German, and above all, to edit German manuscripts. In order to fulfill an important job, namely – after the Second World War, all German genetics was thrown out as evil. Look what they did, concentration camps and so on and so forth. And the evil Nazi doctors and so on. So they throw the baby out with the bathwater. And whatever good the Germans had accomplished, and there was lots of it, especially in medical genetics, before the war, before Hitler and so on, got thrown out also. So it fell on me as one of two people to sort of reeducate Germany as to the legitimate heritage they had to speak at a table of medical geneticists, international table of medical geneticists. And that was initially through the [speaks in German], which is now The European Journal of Pediatrics. I was North American editor. And then, through The American Journal of Medical Genetics, which I founded, and editing many, many German manuscripts, that is to say, manuscripts that came from German authors trying to write in English, which was a tricky business. And then I met, just about the same time, in the late ’60s, Arnold [Moltosky 39:21], of former east Prussia, who ended up in Hamburg before immigration. He was the last person to get out of Germany on that ship – I forget the name of the ship – which wandered around the seas for years on end, not finding admission in England or in Belgium or in Spain or in Cuba or the United States, then sent back to Germany, then sent back to the United States. I’ll think of the name of the ship in a second. In any event, Arnold [Moltosky ?] and his family were on that ship. 13 John Opitz 21 November 2016 He ended up at the University of Chicago as an internist, hematologist, and then as chair of human genetics at the University of Washington, Seattle. And he began collaborating with a student of Hans [Nachtseim 40:26], former professor of genetics in Berlin, to translate his textbook of general human genetics into English, to update it, to add things to it, and so on and so forth. Finally, I said to him, “Arnold, how could you?” And he then taught me a very important lesson, namely, you have to make a distinction in principle between the people and their government, their leadership so to speak. They are not always, in fact rarely, on the same wavelength. The German widows of the First World War, they just simply wanted a chicken in every pot and wanted to be left alone, and they wanted their adolescent boys to grow up and not be drafted into the damn Army again, as they all were then again. And so Hitler got elected, not once but three times, overwhelmingly by the women’s vote, for obvious reasons, because there were no men around anymore after the First World War. Millions of them were slaughtered on the battlefields in France, Belgium, and in Russia. And so Arnold said, “You have to make that distinction and rely on bringing out the best in the people, not in anything that runs the outfit now at the moment, but in the individual accomplishments of the people.” And Arnold [Moltosky ?] is living at the age of 96. Now has developed dementia and is not coming to the office anymore. HG: And where is he? JO: In Seattle. He was chairman in – oh, I would say for maybe 40 years or something like – wonderful man, whose office was far more cluttered and untidy than mine is. HG: [laughs] Yours is very organized. JO: So at least I know where I can find stuff in this disorder. HG: That’s all that matters [laughs]. 14 John Opitz JO: 21 November 2016 Arnold said, “If one day I don’t come home for supper, they’ll find me buried under all these papers and books in my office.” Wonderful, wonderful friend. And a very wise man. Good man. And the revised textbook of [Fogel 43:01] and [Moltosky ?] is now, I think, in the fourth edition 50 years later and is the standard textbook of human genetics in the field. And that is such an important lesson, you know, to be gotten out of the value of books and through books that make human connections. And then, with the human connections, trying to attain some variety of mutualism, collaboration, to try and get the science for a little bit during our lifetime. So that’s basically where I stand nowadays. And it’s in gratitude to this university for 20 years of support here from the department of pediatrics, especially Professor Clark, that I’m leaving my library, donating my library, our library, Susan and my library to the University of Utah, Spencer S. Eccles Library, in the hopes that we’ll somehow get this appraisal problem settled. Ken Sanders here in town has told me and the lawyers, he and Tom have told me that the appraisal may cost as much as 23, 25 thousand bucks. And we haven’t got that money so that’s got to come from someplace. But in any event, from my end of the line, I think we’re legally settled to transfer the library. Now, there are apparently many, many more technicalities involved than I realized, like insurance. Where are you going to store the extremely valuable things like Mendel’s paper and so on and so forth. But Melissa has told me that that’s all taken care of and that they’re apparently building additional little shelves and facilities and space and dedicating space for that. So one book I’ve taken over there already is volume 1 of the Dutch revision of [Hazelius ?]. So since your library has a [Hazelius ?], the original of [Hazelius ?] – and so it might be nice to exhibit the two of them, the two versions side by side because the Dutch [Urhava 45:40] and 15 John Opitz 21 November 2016 [Albenus ?] spare no expense, through many, many subscribers, to have all of [Hazelius’s ?] woodcuts reengraved for much greater detail than you can do on a cut to correct lots of mistakes, to add things that [Hazelius ?] had overlooked, particularly in the [Venus 46:04] system and the muscular tendons and insertions and the beginnings of the [Venus ?] system and the lymphatic system and so on. And so it’s a beautiful, beautiful book. But it needs somebody who can read Latin. But then the original [Hazelius ?] is in Latin also. And that was before and after he became a physician to the emperor, Charles V. HG: What is your favorite piece in your library? What do you love the most? JO: Well, I would probably have to say it would be Mendel, as unprepossessing a piece of writing as that is. It is the impact of the contents. Line for line, word for word, letter for letter, that paper has had greater influence on biology than all other events coming before. After all, genetics now has become the center of medicine. And I discovered something in there that nobody else had ever noticed before. And I’ve got two translations that I’ve worked on here. Everybody’s always reproached Mendel, “So why the hell didn’t you call it – didn’t you invent a word for the gene? Because the concept of the gene is quite obvious. I mean, it is semi-explicit in everything that you did and everything that you wrote about.” Except he had the convention for brevity’s sake and I think for didactic reasons to refer to the homozygous state of a gene or of [aleas 48:08] not by double letters, by lowercase, lower a, capital A, capital A, but as only one letter, namely a lowercase a and a capital A. The implication being so clear from what he said that you have to read it as a double. And then, towards the end of his paper, he said, “And then the independent assortment and the segregation of these form-giving elements” – that’s his word for a gene – “[speaks in German] the form giving elements.” That’s clear, totally unambiguous about this. 16 John Opitz 21 November 2016 So I’m working with a British biochemical geneticist, human biochemical geneticist, I think at St. Bart’s in London, who wrote a wonderful biography, indirect biography of Mendel saying, “What if Darwin had actually received Mendel’s paper and read it?” Which is not a foolish question. No. Mendel sent out something of 40 reprints. That was all that the printers, you know, made from this, probably all he thought that would ever be read. But that was obviously during Darwin’s times. Mendel had read already the third edition of The Origin of Species in German. Knew the book very well. Did not take a stand on it, which was a theologically prudent thing to do in those days, especially by an Augustinian, so-called teachers of the church. But Darwin didn’t know German. He said, “It’s such a terrible language. If ever I need something to put me to sleep at night, I try to read a paragraph in German and that’ll do the trick every time.” Because his cousin Galton should have been able to appreciate the mathematical implications of the – of Mendel’s mathematics. Mendel was also not a mathematics teacher but a physics teacher but with very advanced mathematical knowledge. He had been trained, as a matter of fact, in combinatorial mathematics. It’s the first time that course was taught in the world anywhere, in Vienna, in the 1860s, when Mendel was at the University of Vienna. And Mendel’s copy of the textbook on combinatorics – I have a copy of it at home. And that is very advanced combinatorics, to the point where my friend Charlie [Cauterman 51:30], from the University of Wisconsin, where I spent some time, 18 years, did appreciate and have to struggle with in order to understand. So Mendel was a mathematically very sophisticated person, teacher, investigator. And when it became obvious – suddenly it must have hit him, like a 2x4 between the eyes that the segregation of Aa plus – that is, big A, little a, big A, big A, two big A, little a, two little a, little a, that ratio – big A, big A, lowercase a, big case A, and so on and so forth – fell out 17 John Opitz 21 November 2016 once he actually counted the seeds – and he counted hundreds of them as the expansion of the binomial, A plus B to the second power, A squared plus two A B plus B squared. And it is that transition which made this not just a horticultural exercise and observation but a science – firstclass science, independent verifiability. And it took Bateson and [Kerns 52:57] and de Vries and [unclear 52:59] only a year, less than a year to verify all this. And they have hundreds and hundreds of different – but there are many of those books that I love and because they’ve taught me a whole lot, because they’re beautifully illustrated, because they have a very close connection to the person who wrote it. So for example, I recently finished a historical exercise. I think it’s been published on [Ouveery 53:36]. [Ouveery ?] was the genius who concluded, oh, therefore – the genes must be on the chromosome. That’s the one. HG: And this was a paper that you wrote. JO: It just came out fairly recently in our journal. HG: “To commemorate the centenary of his death, in contributions to the [Sutton-Ovary 54:13] Hypothesis. JO: And by sheer coincidence, the last catalog, old books catalog that I received at home yet, from a German antiquarian had [Ouveery’s ?] monograph in it, on the segregation of cell lines to produce, if any, the anatomy of the sea urchin, which is a beast which just fits into the – so here’s the anatomy of the early sea urchin development, which just fits into the focal lens. Here we go. That monograph that we were able to get had these, and over the next two pages also, illustrations in them of the early embryogenesis of [askaris 55:23], the sea urchin [unclear]. HG: And these are his illustrations? JO: These are his own illustrations, which he drew by hand. There is the highest level not just 18 John Opitz 21 November 2016 of craftsmanship but artistry and of beauty and their accuracy at the same time. And now, that’s in four colors, which means there are four lithographic plates, one for each color made. And the last time I was in Germany to award the so-called Opitz Award to Anita Rauch at Nuremberg – and Dr. Rauch will be coming to the award ceremony also. She took me to Solnhofen. Solnhofen is where Archaeopteryx was discovered. And Solnhofen also is the source of those limestone slabs on which lithographs were made. So lithography was invented in Solnhofen. And huge, huge quarries where, to this day, they find many, many, many fossils. HG: They’re beautiful. JO: So it is that kind of artistry. In other words, the essence of truth as it speaks to you in many different voices is beauty. HG: Yeah. The detail is amazing. JO: The truth is beautiful. Now, it can also be ugly. HG: You’re right. JO: It can also be very ugly. But it is basically beauty that has spoken to me. And the intactness of the coming-into-intactness of organisms having lived in a completely bombed out town, Hamburg, which was not an intact city by any means of the word. And how an intact, beautiful newborn baby comes into being. And having seen so many, many, many people destroyed during and after the Second World War, never to actually recover a manageable or a decent human life afterwards. There were several of the German Jewish immigrants in Iowa City, for example, who never unpacked their suitcases, never put curtains on their walls. Sat on their packing boxes to eat their abendbrot, their evening bread. But went to all of the concerts. I knew them all very well. And just lived for the beauty of music to survive until the days – these days also shall pass. 19 John Opitz HG: 21 November 2016 So tell me about when you were – as you were collecting your books where did you – did people give them to you? Did you pursue a lot of them? JO: Oh, the collection itself is pack-ratted together form many different sources. Professor [Biedeman 58:58], after whom the [Biedeman-Beckva ?] syndrome is named, he was a good friend of mine. When he was getting into his ninth decade of life, he said, “Oh, hell. I’m going to be mighty crowded in my coffin with all these damn books. I won’t use them anymore.” So he gave me many, many of his books. I bought I would say maybe 60 percent of them, secondhand bookshops – whenever I was at my daughter in Massachusetts, we’d go to old bookshops. And Lynn Margulis, who wrote this wonderful textbook here, died the other day. Drowned in a swimming pool – swimming pond behind her house. It’s like Thoreau drowning in Walden Pond. And went into the nearest old bookstore and here were her books. And I bought quite a few of them because she introduced the concept of symbiogenesis into western biology, having originated in Russia with Russian scientists and then German scientists and then completely forgotten again. Namely that cells are put together from several different origins, prokaryotes and microscopic organisms, [hands 1:00:27], for example, our mitochondria have a separate genome, so on and so forth. And so by sheer luck, I’ve run, in old bookstores, across some of these great, great treasures, and some of the things I use on a daily basis. And so what other – Dr. [Vichy ?]. I went back to visit Iowa City, oh, I would say maybe now 20 years or so ago, and one of the chairs in the auditorium in the zoology building is named after me. So I sat in my chair for one second. And then they had built a new edition to the old zoology building, where I had worked for ten years. And it was the old animal caretaker, the same man with whom I had worked in the 1950s, and said, “You know, John, some of Dr. [Vichy’s ?] books I saved. And I put them in this hallow space between the two walls of the old 20 John Opitz 21 November 2016 zoology building and the new biology building.” And he opened the door. He had the keys to it. And there were all of Dr. [Vichy’s ?] books. And so I inherited those. I paid for the shipping and I paid for Dr. [Biedeman’s ?] books to be shipped here. And the rest of them, then, antiquarian acquisitions. I was offered, once, Mendel’s reprint as a reprint. I couldn’t afford it. And then, a week later, it was offered to me again but as part of a bound book and much, much cheaper. And then I jumped at the chance because that was the only known circulating copy in the world at that time and took us two or three years to pay that off. But it was worth it. Especially this town here, with its treasure of human genetics and genetic research, to have Mendel’s original paper here I think is highly appropriate. And I feel very good, very happy about it. And the rest will all get sorted out with the bureaucrats that – HG: [laughs] Make it complicated. JO: – the Danish founder of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard – Soren Kierkegaard complained about the damn Lutheran church as to what he could write and what he could not write in his philosophy books and his philosophy books as he was teaching the students at the University of Copenhagen. And he said, “It feels like being trampled to death every day by 10,000 geese [unclear 1:03:36] creatures.” And so he packed up and left Denmark and never came back. Moved to Berlin, where it was much, much more liberal since the days of Bismarck and freedom of press and so on. But those geese, I’m going to cook them all one of these days. HG: [laughs] So tell me – let’s talk a little bit about your time here at the University of Utah. You came here from – JO: Montana. 21 John Opitz 21 November 2016 HG: Montana. Okay. And what brought you here? JO: Dr. Clark. I had been running the Montana genetics service center, that was mostly a huge web of field clinics throughout Montana. I’d finally persuaded the legislature to fund this in perpetuity as an extension of the Newborn Screening Act of Montana. And so that seemed to be fairly stable. I seemed to be fairly well established there, except the time was coming when Emma was growing up and we had to make some sort of a decision to place her in an educationally more advantaged environment, a place with a university, in any event, a place where she had a choice where to go and where not to go. And then, at the very same time that Dr. Clark was being hired here as chairman, and I think Dr. [Kerry 1:05:22] was involved in the selection process, he happened to ask, offhand, Dr. Clark one day, “Well, what about if you could get John Opitz here?” And Dr. Clark and I had had time together in Iowa City. So he knew me and he knew what I was all about. And he said, “Oh” – and I quote John [Kerry ?] – “That would be quite a coup.” Unquote. And so that’s how I was hired. And so initially I functioned here as a third-hand clinical geneticist, medical geneticist in the clinic. And then, towards the end, the last ten years or so, I was teaching in graduate school, the graduate students in genetic counseling, their development biology course, which they didn’t like and they complained bitterly about because it talked about evolution. And what genetic counselor needs to know about evolution? What genetic counselor and what physician does not know – need to know about evolution? And how the bugs out there are outpacing us much, much, much faster than we can hatch out new antibiotics and new defenses and new antiserum against the bugs. Now the cystic fibrosis patients that we’ve worked so hard to salvage and to save and to give them a decent life for about 40, 50, 60 years, their about maximum with their bad lungs and so on, they’re all being wiped out by a newly discovered form of nontuberculous 22 John Opitz 21 November 2016 tuberculosis bug, which is causing abscesses in their lungs and killing them with pulmonary disease. That’s a brand-new epidemic among cystic fibrosis patients. And the bugs have had a very good try at wiping me out the times. The tuberculosis bug, that didn’t work so well. And then twice in recent years I’ve had a terrible sepsis staphylococcus aureus sepsis. And there it was the antibiotics that saved me. The second time around, I had sixmonth long intravenous antibiotics. But I know there somewhere in my marrow and in my bones, they’re just waiting, you know. HG: They’re waiting it out. JO: They’ll have another chance at me. And the next time, I’m just going to give up. After all, they were here before we were, millions and billions of years before we were. And so it’s been an interesting time here. And I’m very grateful that it has [unclear 1:08:23] time here. It’s not been easy, but then, nothing in life is easy. So I’m not complaining. And I’ve been privileged to learn a huge amount of biology in the clinic and from the patients and from the little kids and from the families. I was saying to my wife – we were driving off to the airport yesterday – about four generations celebrating something [unclear 1:08:57] one of the local universities. And I said to my wife, “Hell, I’ve had five generations living in one exam room.” Great great grandmother, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s so nice to have five generations in one room. You can do wonderful analysis of family resemblance. I mean, great grandma is sitting right there. I’ve never once ever seen a great, great grandpa. The men all died long before the women. And the women, of course, are also the gatekeepers of the lore. Which of the embarrassing things – a great great grandfather who was a polygamist, et cetera – shall not be passed on to the great grandchildren, and which of the things – the great heroism of great grandpa or grandpa during the First World War, Second World War, and so on, shall be remembered, et cetera, et cetera. 23 John Opitz 21 November 2016 So at the award ceremony, there will be a wonderful gentleman, Halvorsen, the candy bomber of Berlin. HG: Oh, yes. Yes. JO: 96 years old. Still living and kicking. So that’s wonderful. Now, for the first time in my lifetime, I’m beginning to see men living as old as women. So it’s that single X chromosome rather than the Y chromosome. HG: That’s what makes us strong? JO: That’s what makes the women stronger with those two X chromosomes. HG: Yeah. I have two daughters. So that’s good. [both laugh] JO: I’ve got four daughters, and they’re all tough. HG: Yes. Is this your youngest, this daughter? JO: That is my youngest. HG: And she’s in Massachusetts, right? JO: She’s in Massachusetts. That’s a photo that was taken at Hampshire College, where she graduated in neurosciences. But then she developed a rather debilitating neuropathy, a peripheral nerve disease, which has made her quasi handicapped. So she’s taking a year off. Now she’s 25. She just had her 25th birthday – a year off to earn some money and to pull her act back together before she enters graduate school. That’s Emma. HG: Yes. And what does she want to study? What does she want to do? JO: She’s basically into speech and verbal recognition and the neural circuitry of speech. So Emma and I have had the same argument that Darwin and Spencer had in the 1850s, 1860s. Which comes first, speech or song? And my answer always has been song. And Herbert 24 John Opitz 21 November 2016 Spencer’s answer always was song. Darwin staunchly said, “No, no, no, no. Speech came first.” After you all [unclear 1:12:17] the little kid. Don’t slobber the milk all over my new dress. HG: [laughs] JO: And so on and so forth. I think firmly that song came first, that mamas sang to their babies, very much probably in a similar singsong in which the babies perceived their mother’s heartbeat when they were still in the uterus, and a somewhat stronger heartbeat now that the babies are nursing. And that’s probably the selective reason why the left breast is always larger than the right breast because babies nurse longer on the left breast, so that the left breast is fuller. And so the mothers first sing to their babies. And then they say, “Well, did you see that stinking magpie out there on the fence? That’s the reason why Darwin is shrieking. Darwin is a parakeet. That’s why Darwin is shrieking at the magpie.” “Yes, mama.” So that means that the kid already has to learn to speak. But to prove that [unclear 1:13:34] genetically is going to be tricky. Nevertheless, they’re making great progress now in connecting the vocal machinery in your brain stem with the sensory motor frontal cortex, which then gives voice to expression, to words, syllables, and so on. Which is, from a developmental standpoint, extremely flexible. So it’s now been concluded that every newborn baby has the capacity to learn all languages, given that they live long enough with the language to learn it, including Han Chinese and so on. So it’ll be interesting where she takes it and what she gets out of it. But in any event, it’s a nice topic of dialogue. And right next to her is actually a picture I took of the front cover of Science. Dogs need to look you in the eyes and listen to your voice for a certain period every day in order to be nice dogs. HG: Really? 25 John Opitz JO: 21 November 2016 So that was the front cover of Science to illustrate that point. That’s exactly what Molly looks like, our dog Molly. Good beast. HG: And you also have chinchillas, right, as well? JO: I used to. HG: You used to. JO: Yeah. And some of these books are a little bit chinchilla chewed. HG: [laughs] They liked the books, too. JO: They loved the books, too, especially – I had one of [unclear 1:15:25]. In any event, some of my books are a bit chinchilla chewed. HG: [laughs] It adds character to them. JO: It does. [unclear 1:15:46] used to hide in the books, but I could always hear him. He would run back there, and scratching and scratching and digging and chewing and so on. But to catch them, that was quite a – HG: [laughs] JO: My wife had to catch him because I wasn’t quick enough anymore after my stroke to catch them. And then he died of renal failure and seizures so that was sort of sad. But we also have a conure, not a parakeet. And his name is Darwin. HG: [laughs] How did that come about? [laughs] If that’s not your favorite? JO: And Darwin lays eggs. He has never hatched anything out of them. And when I blow them out, they’re duds. There’s only a tiny bit of yolk inside. So he’s either a hermaphrodite or else a semi ovariectomized female. So he still makes the eggs. He still lays the eggs. He then becomes fiercely protective of his clutch of eggs. And we have to really trick him to get him out of his house and to get rid of the eggs at the time. And then he settles down again. And so this 26 John Opitz 21 November 2016 year, he’s already laid ten eggs. But he keeps a sharp eye on the magpies sitting on the fence, that come and eat the cat food and the dog food outside, out of the cat and dog food bowls. HG: Right. Those magpies. I’m convinced that those birds can understand me [laughs]. JO: Oh, yeah. HG: They are smart. JO: No question about it. They are very smart. They were able to close the front door. And then they shooshed the cats away. And then he quick grabbed the food, take it up to the fence. And then they teach their kids how to do it. So these little goslings are sitting on a bench and mama feeds them little kibbles at a time. And they’re smart, intelligent birds. I love to see them here on campus. As a young boy, I used to climb the blue spruce trees in my neighborhood in the hopes to find, like [Rossini Lagazaladra 1:18:12], to find [unclear] magpie nest. Never did. The only thing I ever found was Coca-Cola bottlecaps. HG: Those smart birds. Yes. We lived out in the country. And we had a lot of magpies. But we also had a very smart cat that would chase them. And he would always come home and he had – they had pecked the top of his head. But that meant he got close. JO: Ziggy also – but Ziggy has such bad vision. He’s an albino [unclear 1:18:47], so a chocolate point albino. And boy, the second he goes outside, the magpies are after him. So he has these little red holes, you know, where they got after him. And once, they even sliced his ear, his left ear. But, since that time, he mostly checks the outside carefully. He mostly listens to the magpies because they caw when they settle down. And then he ventures outside, but he just goes around the corner by the drainpipe, and then he pees and poops, and then he comes back inside. HG: [laughs] He doesn’t want to spend too much time out there. 27 John Opitz 21 November 2016 Well this has been so great to talk to you and learn about your library and your time that you spent here and your life. And I could probably stay all day [laughs] so it’s very interesting. Is there anything else you want to add to our conversation? JO: Not at the moment. It’ll probably come out in bits and pieces as we go on in this process. And I don’t know exactly what is going to happen when, but apparently, the library ladies are going to move a display case over to the USTAR building to display Mendel’s report card, Darwin’s letter to Captain [Bowerbrook 1:20:11] about his barrel full of barnacles. Oh, and the [Hazelius ?], volume 1 of the Dutch [Hazelius ?] already, and that’s a start. So the rest will sort itself out, I hope. HG: It will. It has to, right? Well, we can – if you want to give any more information or if you want to have another conversation, I’m up for that, so you let me know as we go through this. JO: I will, Heidi. And the same for you. If there’s some essential points that we overlooked, then you can come back to me. I don’t know if you’re going to make a transcript or whatever. HG: We do. JO: So if you do, then I can maybe paste in a page or something or a paragraph or an additional comment about this, that, and the other thing. HG: So what we do is we’ll do a transcript, and then I have you edit it to make sure that we translated it correctly. JO: From what? Germerican? HG: [laughs] JO: Into English? HG: Germerican. Yeah [laughs]. That’s about right. 28 John Opitz 21 November 2016 Well, thank you, again, so much. END OF INTERVIEW ©Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah 29