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Everybody has parents
LIFELINE Kennedy Shortridge Kennedy Shortridge is chair professor of microbiology at The University of Hong Kong with a special interest in the origin of pandemic human influenza viruses. This has led him to study animals as a source of these viruses, fortuitously providing the opportunity for wide and varied cultural interaction and travel. He is a Prince Mahidol Awardee. Who was your most influential teacher, and why? My father, a man of steadfast integrity. Which event has had most effect on your work, and why? Seeing the milieu in the early 1980s of humans and domestic animals in villages in southern China, which favour the interspecies transmission of influenza viruses. What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor? Despite the great advances made in medicine, loneliness is the number one disease in the world today; care and compassion are as important now as they ever were. How do you relax? Listening to music, hill walking, and restoration of antiques. What is your greatest regret? Luckily, “I did it my way”. What is the greatest love of your life? Being able to enjoy good food and wine in the company of loved ones. How would you like to die? Optimistically. What is your favourite book? Books by David Lodge; so true to life and a good laugh to boot. What is your favourite building, and why? The old house in which I live in the SAR; it is a shelter in a fast paced, ever changing city. What is your greatest fear? An influenza pandemic of the scale of the one of 1918–19. What are you currently reading? Beyond the Veil by Ranee, privately published in Sri Lanka by the author. What is your worst habit? Sometimes letting work take precedence over people.
328
Everybody has parents “
hey fuck you up, your mum and dad”.This famous line, the first of Philip Larkin’s ‘This be the verse’, is explained over the course of the poem: “They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had,/And add some extra, just for you.” I’ve been thinking about parents recently—owing to a comment my sister made while we queued for tickets on the London Underground. “You are just like dad”, she said, shaking her head, “so impatient”. It’s a hot issue in genetics at the moment: do we inherit behavourial traits (aspects of our so-called characters) from our parents? Or is human character learned, and dependent on environment? The logic cuts both ways. If I can inherit brown eyes from my father, why can’t I inherit, say, his impatience? But the logical implication—that there might be a gene ‘for’ impatience—seems absurd. It’s likely to be a configuration of genes; or a subtle interplay between biology and environment. In other words, it’s the age-old nature/nurture debate, dressed in a brand-new paradigm. Maybe Marxists have got it right: character is a myth, a bourgeois fallacy. It’s certainly a handy way of ignoring the whole debate. Whatever I may have inherited from them, my mum and dad haven’t fucked me up in the slightest. Even in my midtwenties, they seem more often to bail me out (financially or otherwise). I think a lack of parents—a reality for some—would have been harder to cope with. Everybody has parents, said Wittgenstein; meaning that everyone has origin. But not everybody does have parents—at least, not while they are growing up. Even though these people are as likely as anyone to turn out fine, I can’t help feeling lucky to have had a father and a mother in my lifetime. Not least because my mother saved my foreskin. Let me explain. As a small boy, an overzealous young doctor was keen to circumcise me. I will spare you the reasons, but suffice to say they were
T
medical. My mother, a former nurse, put her foot down. Eventually, the doctor capitulated. And my foreskin was saved. Not that having a foreskin is preferable per se. In Genesis, circumcision is a vital part of Man’s covenant with the Holy Father, and it still has a place in Judaism. This place, however, is contested—at least, if Seinfeld is anything to go by. Seinfeld, a hilariously ascerbic US sitcom, covers the lives of four Jewish New Yorkers. One episode focused on the differing attitudes towards circumcision. “It’s a valuable ancient tradition”, said Jerry. “It’s nothing but a barbaric ritual”, countered Kramer. It was from another Jewish North American that I learned what a schmuck was; somewhere in Saul Bellow’s gargantuan novel The Adventures of Augie March, the word comes up with its leg-crossing etymology: it is the piece of skin left over after a circumcision. Foreskins have been much on my mind. Having recently moved to Finchley, north London—a bagel’s throw from Golders Green—I am something of a marooned gentile. But, then, it is difficult to live in any area of London and not feel like a marooned something. In Brixton (Afro-Caribbean) I was a marooned white boy. In Notting Hill (trust-fund Wunderkind) I was a marooned plebeian. At least now my exile has taken on profounder resonance. Yet I am still dissatisfied. Like so many people nowadays, my flimsy beliefs amount to a vaguely Christianised agnosticism. The English philosopher Roger Scruton explained in The New Yorker why he was giving his young son a religious upbringing: at least then he could become the kind of interesting person who had lost his faith, rather than somebody who never had any in the first place. Scruton’s got a point. But that’s not what my upbringing was like. Frankly, I blame my parents. Daniel Davies
THE LANCET • Vol 355 • January 22, 2000
328
Everybody has parents “
hey fuck you up, your mum and dad”.This famous line, the first of Philip Larkin’s ‘This be the verse’, is explained over the course of the poem: “They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had,/And add some extra, just for you.” I’ve been thinking about parents recently—owing to a comment my sister made while we queued for tickets on the London Underground. “You are just like dad”, she said, shaking her head, “so impatient”. It’s a hot issue in genetics at the moment: do we inherit behavourial traits (aspects of our so-called characters) from our parents? Or is human character learned, and dependent on environment? The logic cuts both ways. If I can inherit brown eyes from my father, why can’t I inherit, say, his impatience? But the logical implication—that there might be a gene ‘for’ impatience—seems absurd. It’s likely to be a configuration of genes; or a subtle interplay between biology and environment. In other words, it’s the age-old nature/nurture debate, dressed in a brand-new paradigm. Maybe Marxists have got it right: character is a myth, a bourgeois fallacy. It’s certainly a handy way of ignoring the whole debate. Whatever I may have inherited from them, my mum and dad haven’t fucked me up in the slightest. Even in my midtwenties, they seem more often to bail me out (financially or otherwise). I think a lack of parents—a reality for some—would have been harder to cope with. Everybody has parents, said Wittgenstein; meaning that everyone has origin. But not everybody does have parents—at least, not while they are growing up. Even though these people are as likely as anyone to turn out fine, I can’t help feeling lucky to have had a father and a mother in my lifetime. Not least because my mother saved my foreskin. Let me explain. As a small boy, an overzealous young doctor was keen to circumcise me. I will spare you the reasons, but suffice to say they were
T
medical. My mother, a former nurse, put her foot down. Eventually, the doctor capitulated. And my foreskin was saved. Not that having a foreskin is preferable per se. In Genesis, circumcision is a vital part of Man’s covenant with the Holy Father, and it still has a place in Judaism. This place, however, is contested—at least, if Seinfeld is anything to go by. Seinfeld, a hilariously ascerbic US sitcom, covers the lives of four Jewish New Yorkers. One episode focused on the differing attitudes towards circumcision. “It’s a valuable ancient tradition”, said Jerry. “It’s nothing but a barbaric ritual”, countered Kramer. It was from another Jewish North American that I learned what a schmuck was; somewhere in Saul Bellow’s gargantuan novel The Adventures of Augie March, the word comes up with its leg-crossing etymology: it is the piece of skin left over after a circumcision. Foreskins have been much on my mind. Having recently moved to Finchley, north London—a bagel’s throw from Golders Green—I am something of a marooned gentile. But, then, it is difficult to live in any area of London and not feel like a marooned something. In Brixton (Afro-Caribbean) I was a marooned white boy. In Notting Hill (trust-fund Wunderkind) I was a marooned plebeian. At least now my exile has taken on profounder resonance. Yet I am still dissatisfied. Like so many people nowadays, my flimsy beliefs amount to a vaguely Christianised agnosticism. The English philosopher Roger Scruton explained in The New Yorker why he was giving his young son a religious upbringing: at least then he could become the kind of interesting person who had lost his faith, rather than somebody who never had any in the first place. Scruton’s got a point. But that’s not what my upbringing was like. Frankly, I blame my parents. Daniel Davies
THE LANCET • Vol 355 • January 22, 2000