Why? He wanted "to create something in honor of my mother." Well, don't we all? Except in this case, Dr. Greengard never even knew Pearl Meister existed until he was 20 years old. His mother died giving birth to him, and when he was just 13 months old, his father remarried. "I don't have a single photograph of my mother," Dr. Greengard says. "When I married, my wife, Ursula, put a picture of a woman we thought was Pearl Meister above our mantelpiece. Ten years later," he says, "we discovered this was someone else's mother."
So Dr. Greengard, (a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, remember) gave away $400,000 to create a new $50,000 science prize in part to honor a woman he can't remember because "Since there's not a shred of physical evidence that my mother ever existed, I wanted to do something to make her less abstract."
How do we make sense of such powerful, irrational longing?
"Certainly, biology is not everything," states Marquardt. Adoption, for example, is a wonderful form of parenthood that protects children when natural parents fail them. Biology is not everything, but the question we now increasingly face is: Is biology anything at all?
Can we make any room in our highly technocratic, rational celebrations of market values and adult choices for the longing of children to know and be loved by the man and woman whose bodies made them?
Elizabeth Marquardt isn't certain. But she does know one thing. "Our societies," she writes, "will either answer these questions democratically and as a result of intellectually and morally serious reflection and public debate, or we will find, very soon, that these questions have already been answered for us."
(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2006@yahoo.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2006 MAGGIE GALLAGHER