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Robert Pollack: "As soon as the notion
of the unknowable as distinct from
the unknown placed itself before me,
the shock changed both my career and
the way I see the world."
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obert Pollack likens the working habits of a
rabbi to that of a scientist trying to prevent dis-
ease. The two, he explains, see the natural
world in similar ways and agree that the world
can be best understood through the study of texts.
For the rabbi, it's the Torah, and for the scientist, the
text is the human genome. They also would agree that
their understanding of these texts is incomplete.
A distinguished
ge:
molecular biologist
with a serious interest
in Judaism, Pollack is
a scholar engaged at
the junction of science
and religion. He sug-
gests how the two
fields can inform and
enhance each other's
visions of the world.
His new book, The
Faith of Biology & The
Biology of Faith
(Columbia University
Press; $19.95), is based on a series of three lectures he gave
last fall at Columbia University, where he is a professor of
biological sciences, lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for
Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and director of the
Center for the Study of Science and Religion.
Pollack writes gracefully and is able to make science,
molecular biology in particular, accessible to the layman.
His approach is original and provocative as he brings emo-
tions and religious experience to scientific discourse.
He comes to this perspective primarily from a path of
science, which he has followed since his days as a physics
major at Columbia, where he graduated in 1961. He
received his Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis. Since the
mid-1990s, he has become more involved in Judaism and
increasingly observant.
"I am not a representative of religion as such, nor of sci-
ence as such," Pollack writes in the book's introduction.
This is a slim book of big ideas. He ponders the challenge
of finding meaning and purpose in life, when scientific data
show that our species is neither unique nor permanent.
Pollack accepts both the data of the science he has
embraced for a lifetime and his emotional belief in God,
or the unknowable, which he prizes as a gift of his free
will. It is this free will that Pollack sees as affirmation that
life has meaning.
Pollack uses the word "unknowable" at times in place of
the word God.
"This book is about the boundary of the knowable and
the unknowable," he writes. "Science works at the bound-
ary of the known and the unknown, a different place
entirely. The unknowable as a notion does not come easily
to the scientifically minded. Dealing with it is a project
full of paradox, requiring that one talk about the unutter-
able and anatomize the unmeasurable.
"I chose to work at this new boundary; nevertheless,
because I have the habits of thought of a scientist. As soon
I
as the notion of the unknowable as distinct from the
unknown placed itself before me, the shock changed both
my career and the way I see the world."
In an interesting analogy, he draws connections between
the sudden insight in science "through which we see clear-
ly to a corner of what had been unknown" and revelation
in religion.
He also writes about the consequence of the loss of free
will in sickness, about the ethical ramifications of genetic
medicine and the findings of Jewish law. Throughout, he
writes candidly about his own thoughts and practice.
Interviewed in his Manhattan apartment near the
Columbia campus, the professor speaks with intensity,
clarity and a down-to-earth quality. When asked what's
most radical about his book, he points to his refutation of
a long-held misunderstanding — the Greek notion that
mental states are ineffable, existing independently of the
physical body.
"We know now that memory and the unconscious are
parts of the body," he says. "Religious experience is a body