INTERVIEW

ETIENNE-EMILE BAULIEU

*
"I've not dedicated my life to abortion," declares the French physician,
endocrinologist, and the discoverer of the contragestive pill. "But two hundred
thousand women die in bungled abortions. And RU 486 can save them"

"I saw a lot of botched abortions when I was an intern. Abortion was illegal in
France until 1966, but if a woman was in danger of bleeding to death, she could
be brought to the hospital for a surgical scrape. I have horrible memories of
those days." French M.D. and biochemist Etienne-Emile Baulieu sat on the medical
committee that recommended legalization of abortion in France. More important,
he is the discoverer of RU 486, the abortion pill. Today, more than a third of
France's abortions are done chemically with RU 486. When this safe and
inexpensive antihormone reaches the world market, it will make abortion
available to millions of women who today have no access to family planning.

A pioneer in research on hormone receptors and brain function, Baulieu struggled
for 20 years to develop an abortion pill. When drug manufacturers were too
frightened to investigate the idea, Baulieu used his position as a consultant to
Roussel-Uclaf, a $1.7 billion-a-year French pharmaceutical company, to nurture
promising leads. When RU 486 was synthesized and its abortifacient properties
accidentally discovered by Roussel chemists in 1980, Baulieu mounted an even
fiercer campaign to get the drug onto the market. He succeeded in 1988. The
strings Baulieu pulled in maneuvering RU 486 through the top levels of French
government provide a plot worthy of Inspector Maigret. The cast of characters
ranges from Sophia Loren, Baulieu's longtime friend and former mistress, to
heads of the world's largest drug companies. Baulieu is plotting a similar coup
for introducing RU 486 into the United States. "I love competition," he says,
"and I like to keep score."

Baulieu claims he didn't even know what birth control was until Gregory
Pincus, father of the contraceptive pill, recruited him in the early Sixties as
a likely successor. Pincus spotted in Baulieu the traits that had made his own
career so successful: the intellectual agility of a firstrate researcher plus a
political flair. Still in his twenties, Baulieu had already isolated a
water-soluble steroid from the adrenal glands of patients suffering from adrenal
cancer. This surprising discovery cast a new light on how hormones are
transformed and transmitted in the body. Appointed professor of chemistry at
the University of Reims in 1956, Baulieu still kept his lab in Paris. The
research there led to his 1970 isolation of the uterine progesterone receptor.
Secreted by the corpus luteum, the outer lining of the ovulated egg,
progesterone prepares the uterine wall for implantation should an egg be
fertilized. Without continued progesterone secretion, the uterus cannot carry a
pregnancy to term. Once the progesterone receptor was discovered, the next step
in fertility control was to engineer an antiprogesterone that blocks the uterine
response to progesterone.

Roussel chemist Georges Teutsch synthesized Roussel-Uclaf 38486RU 486-in 1980
while looking for new ways to make analogs of cortisone. Baulieu shouted,
"Eureka!" while Roussel's Catholic executives looked on in dismay. Baulieu went
through years of arduous lab testing and intense political jousting. But just
before the French government approved RU 486 and it was on the verge of
production, Baulieu was dumbfounded to learn that Roussel had abruptly yanked
the drug off the assembly line. Roussel is controlled by the German
pharmaceutical company Hoechst A.G., and Hoechst's predecessor company was I. G.
Farben, manufacturer of gas used in Nazi concentration camps. When
antiabortionists started comparing RU 486 to Farben's death-camp gas, the firm's
president halted production,

Shortly after hearing the news, Baulieu flew to Rio de Janeiro, where the World
Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics was meeting. Waving a petition signed by
1,000 doctors, he denounced Roussel's decision as "morally scandalous." The
French government owns about a third of Roussel, and by law it can withdraw a
patent from a company refusing to use it in the public interest. Two days after
Baulieu's press conference, the minister of health, calling RU 486 "the moral
property of women, not just the property of the drug company," ordered Roussel
to put it back on the market. Roussel's policy since has been to release RU 486
to countries whose ministries of health request it, and Baulieu is confident the
pill will soon be widely available not only in abortion clinics but also in
doctors' offices, where abortion will be a decision between a woman and her
physician.

Baulieu lives with the style of an artist, although a friend says it most nearly
resembles that of P.T Barnum. Induction into the French Academy of Sciences
usually involves the ceremonial presentation of a sword. Instead, Baulieu's
friends Jean Tinguely and Nikki de Saint-Phalle handed him a sculpture made by
welding Baulieu's academic sword onto a chicken' rotisserie. Baulieu works at a
long table overflowing with papers, puppets, and masks. The walls are lined
with art and bookshelves including the works of Pasteur and the 35 volumes of
his bound publications. These papers document the invention of molecular
endocrinology, a field Baulieu helped create in the Fifties when he started
making his discoveries.

Thomas Bass interviewed Baulieu at his lab at Bicetre Hospital. This former
madhouse and prison outside Paris is somber with espaliered trees and four
centuries of ghosts. His office overlooks the hospital's family planning
clinic, and as Bass discovered from an informal survey, most of the women
threading their way through the courtyard were on their way to RU 486induced
abortions-now safer and more private thanks to Baulieu's championship of women's
rights.

Omni: Why do you call the birth control pill "the most important invention of
the twentieth century?"

Baulieu: By divorcing sexuality from reproduction, the Pill has revolutionized
human behavior. For the first time in history it's possible to have sexual
relations without worrying about pregnancy. The Pill also demonstrated the
ability of science to transform our lives. It's the forerunner to other
chemicals, good or bad, that will alter brain function and behavior. The Pill
has been elevated to mythic status. Among many thousands of drugs, it alone is
called "the Pill." But I'm astonished to see the same thing happening With RU
486.

People ascribe to it either too much good or too much evil. It's either the
work of angels or the devil. In truth, science has finally developed a drug for
ending pregnancy, something that women have yearned for for thousands of years.
I was on Italian television recently when the interview was interrupted with
news of a Sicilian woman who had died from drinking an infusion of parsley,
which is toxic in high doses; she was trying to induce an abortion. Even in
Europe, there are still cases like this.

At last we have a safe way to interrupt gestation. But radical feminists are
mistaken if they think they can take the pill under any circumstances without
supervision of doctors or nurses. "Women are free at last!" they say. But this
isn't true. I'm a supporter of women's liberation, and I think RU 486 is going
to aid the cause. But I'm also a doctor concerned about the health of my
patients. Five out of a thousand women have extrauterine (ectopic) pregnancies.
RU 486 will not abort these pregnancies, which, if left untreated, are fatal. To
demedicalize abortion by removing doctors from the process-it's insane! This is
not a miracle pill, it's merely an instance of medical progress.

Omni: You've said the birth control pill "failed." What do you mean?

Baulieu: Out of the almost one billion women in the world of child-bearing age,
fifty million, a mere five percent, take the Pill. The Pill has failed in the
sense that something that is so effective and generally so well tolerated is
used by such a small percentage of women. People grow tired of taking it month
after month. Perhaps the minor side effects are one reason why women start and
stop.

Omni: Is RU 486 going to be less of a "failure" than the Pill?

Baulieu: Because the Pill, condom, diaphragm, and every other means of
contraception are imperfect, RU 486, unfortunately, will be widely used. I
oppose sterilization because it's generally irreversible. I support
reproductive freedom to the end of one's reproductive life. So RU 486 will
remain the pill of the occasion.

Omni: Your father's family was Jewish. Have you suffered anti-Semitism?

Baulieu: In school, when I still used the family name of Blum, I was called
"dirty Jew" and things like that. As a young Communist, I saw anti-Semitism in
the Party. Between school and the Party came the anti-Semitism of Hitler's
Germany. When my mother, who raised us without religion, moved us to Grenoble
during the war, we changed our name to Baulieu and managed to survive. The
bourgeoisie in France, especially the upper echelons of the medical profession,
has always had a strong vein of anti-Semitism. Whenever I confront these
people, I call myself a Jew, even though I'm not, just to annoy them.

Omni: Does having Jewish roots have anything to do with your discovery of RU
486?

Baulieu: Nothing to do with it. Fundamentalist Jews are indistinguishable from
right-wing Protestants, Catholics, or Moslems. They're all fanatic moralists
bent on limiting people's freedoms. It's easier to work on abortion and
contraception if one is part of the political left, where liberty and freedom of
choice have always been important issues. My early interest in women's rights,
other than my mother's influence, probably developed in the auberges de
jeunesse, the leftist youth groups that were among the precursors to the
revolution of May '68. But I didn't start researching fertility control until
I'd already had three children.

Omni: How were you involved in the Resistance?

Baulieu: In 1942 after I'd changed my name and gotten in trouble with the
Gestapo for breaking windows in the militia, I joined the Francs-Tireurs et
Partisans Francais, which were the irregular forces controlled by the
Communists. But I wasn't a Communist then, just a fifteen-year-old kid. We got
weapons from parachute drops. After the liberation of Annecy in 1944, 1 joined
a battalion sent to the Alpine front. It was there I decided to become a
doctor. Still wearing my uniform and the blue beret of a mountain infantryman,
I came back on leave to take medical school exams.

Omni: Was the birth control movement active in France?

Baulieu: All forms of contraception had been outlawed in 1920, when the country
was desperate to repopulate itself after the war. There was the famous case of
a woman in Vichy who had her head chopped off for performing abortions.
Diaphragms, spermicides, the Pill-all were illegal, except for condoms, which
were tolerated only as a way of preventing prostitutes from spreading venereal
disease. Everybody ignored these laws. But no one in France was sociologically
prepared for contraception until Mitterrand, the presidential challenger, made
it an election issue in 1965.

I'd been presenting my ideas on antihormones to the high research and
development committee at Roussel. In a Catholic, rather conservative company,
the directors had been opposed to working on sex hormones. But chemists down
below were doing their own work, and they came up with eleven substituted
molecules, just the type of structures I had suggested on the basis of our work
with other antihormones (such as antiestrogens).

Omni: Why did you have trouble coming to the United States?

Baulieu: I wanted to visit Seymour Lieberman's lab at Columbia University. He
was doing first-class work on steroid hormones. But the U.S. government denied
me a visa to visit him because I'd been a Communist. It didn't matter that I'd
broken with the Party after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. You have to
remember, too, the strict morality of the French Communist Party, which was like
a religion, The PCF was absolutely opposed to contraception and abortion. They
held an internal trial to drum out of their ranks a very good gynecologist, Jean
Dalsace, who'd introduced the diaphragm into France.

But after Kennedy was elected President, I got a visa right away. I went to
work with Lieberman and met Gregory Pincus. I'd actually shaken his hand once
before but was put off by his royal air. It was like shaking hands with God. I
was initially disappointed that Pincus, although a very good scientist, was
doing more politics than science. I didn't realize then that he was making a
revolution. When he invited me to give a talk at his endocrinological lab, I
didn't go because of the Pill, which I knew little about. I went because he was
famous and might be able to help my career. He flew me down to Puerto Rico to
visit the laboratory where the Pill was being developed. It was not
reproductive biology but the mechanism of hormone activity that interested me.
I wanted to look at sex steroids from the biochemical viewpoint.

Omni: How did he convince you to work on contraceptives?

Baulieu: I was a thirty-five-year-old lab scientist, and you can't be a practic
ing physician while you're trying to do research at the highest level. But
research on contraception wasn't only molecules and cells: It was applicable to
people's lives. Very few scientists engaged in this kind of work in a serious
way. Everyone has an ideological position on contraception, but reproductive
biology is still largely unexplored terrain. I was also influenced by the
problem-then taken seriously in the U.S.-of overpopulation in developing
countries. Pincus also arranged for me to sit on a World Health Organization
committee. As a result, I met demographers, gynecologists, social scientists,
and others who would enlarge my vision and make me more inclined to contribute
to fertility control. And he was right. I became a defender of the cause.

Omni: Do you think overpopulation is a serious threat?

Baulieu: The world's population will double sometime in the twenty-first
century-from five to ten billion people. There will be twice as many Moslems,
while the populations of Europe and North America will remain the same. RU 486
and other methods of birth control will be essential for maintaining a stable
population. Without birth control, there will be no social or technological
progress. It is also a woman's right to decide how many children she wants.

Omni: Did Pincus help your career in other ways?

Baulieu: I was seduced by Pincus's way of thinking. Work on sex steroids would
involve me in an interesting social activity, which I lost when I left the
Communist Party. It was a way for me as a research scientist to get back in
touch, indirectly, with medicine. Thanks to him and Lieberman I was invited to
give a presentation on estrogen receptors in the rat endometrium at the Ford
Foundation in 1965. The Ford people were stupefied. I was expanding work done
earlier by University of Chicago chemist Elwood Jensen, who discovered the
estrogen receptor. To me it was obvious that Jensen's approach was the way of
the future. Hormones travel through the blood to cells that respond to
them-uterine, pituitary cells, whatever. The receptor is the specific locus
where the hormone hits the cell and tells it what to do. This is the likely
place to intervene. I was applying to hormone research what pharmacologists had
been saying-but not doing-for fifty years.

I told the Ford Foundation I'd work on sex hormones and their receptors but
didn't promise to discover a new pill. They were nice and clever enough to give
me money enough to last for ten years. And so we discovered the progesterone
receptor in the uterus and the androgen receptor in the prostate. We introduced
the concept that endocrinology involves changes both in hormones and receptor
concentrations. For example: At the beginning of a woman's cycle she secretes
mostly estrogen; in the second part, progesterone as well. Estrogen triggers
ovulation, but it also induces the synthesis of the progesterone
receptor-"primes" it. This is an important finding from my lab.

We also showed that progesterone deactivates, or "down regulates," its own
receptor before the onset of menstruation. These mechanisms apply to all
hormones.

Omni: Could understanding these mechanisms lead to the development of a new form
of birth control?

Baulieu: A steroid that binds to the progesterone receptor could provoke this
down regulation, or deactivation of the receptor. Theoretically a very good
contraceptive, it would have to be given to a woman exactly at mid-cycle. What
is mid-cycle? Even regular cycles are always to some extent irregular.
Nonetheless, some people in England and Stockholm are experimenting with RU 486
as a mid-cycle contraceptive. One would take antiprogesterone very early, just
after ovulation, so that the endometrium is unable to implant a fertilized egg.

Omni: What happened after you discovered the progesterone receptor?

Baulieu: Roussel and other drug companies pulled out all the molecules in their
drawers to look for antagonists to progesterone. But we hit a dead end, so I
played some more with the idea of receptor regulation. [Arpad Istvan] Csapo's
work in St. Louis-was the first to prove progesterone is indispensable in women.

That work made me confident that an antiprogesterone would be effective in
blocking pregnancy, And it's very important in science to be confident.

Omni: What happened after Georges Teutsch synthesized RU 486?

Baulieu: Teutsch and his group had originally been looking for cortisol analogs,
which earn drug companies much more money than sex hormone drugs. Work on
progestins was not officially programmed, so RU 486 was tested first as an
antiglucocorticosteroid and only secondarily as an antiprogesterone. I was
really keen on having a drug that induced menses, as well as an abortifacient.
So the next step was to test it in animals and then humans.

It was sent out for toxicological studies in monkeys, who were given a hundred
milligrams per kilo every day for a month. An enormous dose. Three monkeys got
sick and had to be killed. The toxicological people at Roussel who received the
report told me nothing. But one day at a committee meeting, somebody said to
me, "By the way, your compound is dead." Which meant it was too toxic for human
use.

I looked at the studies and found RU 486 doing exactly what an anticortisol drug
should do: blocking cortisone activity and inducing extreme weakness,
hypotension, metabolic disorders. "This is beautiful," I said. "The compound
is working in vivo!" So I rescued RU 486 from oblivion. The first human tests
were performed in Geneva. People were initially afraid that what happened to
the monkeys would happen to the women. They didn't understand that one small
dose given for the regulation of progesterone is completely different from using
the drug as an anticorticosteroid for many successive days at high doses. My
overall strategy has been to work in the public eye. If the facts are good,
people buy them. The studies done are convincing for any scientist of good
faith anywhere. More than sixty-five thousand women in France have taken the
abortion pill. We're up to one thousand a week, and each week there are more
than before. One third of the abortions in France are now done with RU 486, and
we're still on the curve.

Omni: Will all abortions ultimately be done with RU 486?

Baulieu: I don't think so. Some women won't like it. With a surgical abortion,
you close your eyes and put yourself in the hands of the doctor. RU 486
involves a more active approach. You take the pill yourself, and the process
lasts longer, since you have to wait 48 hours before the bleeding starts [the
pill is followed by a small dose of synthetic prostaglandin].

Omni: Will the drug be used differently in different cultures?

Baulieu: The best way to use RU 486 anywhere is to have women who've missed
their periods go as soon as possible to a specialized center for the induction
of menses, coritragestion, or whatever you want to call it. Many women who miss
their periods wait another month before doing anything. But they shouldn't.
French law says you have to have an abortion within the first three months. I
think that's a good time to fix the limit.

Omni: Will there be more abortions because of RU 486?

Baulieu: Not more but simpler, safer, more private abortions. When it comes to
fertility control, I've always said, "The earlier, the better." Suspension of
ovulation and contraceptives are better than treating the problem later. But
even in an ideal world, you'll still have abortions. RU 486 will never become
the method replacing contraceptives, although this is a theoretical possibility.
Without birth control a woman with a normal sexual life will be pregnant two or
three times a year. She sees her period is late, oops, she takes RU 486. This
is not what I'm recommending now. Maybe in twenty years.

Omni: If it's safe, why not use it two or three times a year?

Baulieu: Women want real freedom, not just words. To tell them, "Don't bother
with precautions. You can do anything you want. If you have an accident, RU
486 is here, so it's all right"-this is playing with people. We don't know the
long-term effects of repeated interruption with RU 486. I want the knowledge
brought by progressive experience. There are certain cases where RU 486 might
become the sole method of contraception. Take the forty-year-old woman living
alone who doesn't use birth control pills because they're bad for her health, or
a young woman who doesn't have a sex life except occasionally, and then
something happens. In these cases RU 486 could be very useful. Out of the 1.6
million abortions performed every year in the U.S., more than a quarter are
teenagers.

Omni: Could RU 486 be used as a once-a-month or postcoital birth control pill?

Baulieu: It could be used once or several days a month as a contraceptive in the
classical sense of the word, that is, to block ovulation during the first part
of the cycle. It would be an estrogen-free contraceptive functioning like the
Pill. It might function better than the Pill, because estrogen is what gives
the Pill its harmful side effects. But who's going to develop this new method?
It's easier and less costly for drug companies to play with what they already
know about. But RU 486 is active as a contraceptive in monkeys; we've suspended
ovulation for six months with a single injection.

It could also be used occasionally-not each month-as a postcoital contraceptive,
a day-after pill. In case of sexual exposure at midcycle, it can be taken late
in the luteal [second] phase to induce abortion. It works ninety-six percent of
the time. But that's not efficient enough to use each month.

Omni: After your big fight with Roussel, are you still working with the company?

Baulieu: Edouard Sakiz has been a friend of mine for 30 years. I introduced him
to Jean-Claude Roussel in 1965, who hired him as head of a lab, a position
relatively low down the line. Sakiz climbed up to become president, and we are
still real friends, which is quite an achievement. We had breakfast together
yesterday in the Roussel dining room. I'm still consulting for the company. RU
486 is ultimately going to be released around the world. but yesterday morning
we discussed the U.S. strategy, which we agree on. First, we're going to make a
study-political, social, economic-which will probably conclude the wind is
blowing in our favor. Scientists are clearly for RU 486, and even the
Republican Party is going to change its mind. The women's movement is even
stronger since the Webster decision from the Supreme Court. Secondly, Sakiz has
decided that Roussel will not hide behind its finger, as we say in French.
Roussel will go ahead in America by itself. This will be difficult, since
Hoechst, the parent company, is not ready to do it, nor does Hoechst have
expertise in the field of obstetrics. So Roussel has to find partners. These
can be other companies, but I predict big companies won't touch it. So that
leaves smaller ones. Another possibility is venture capital. We've had at
least ten serious offers to create new companies, and a couple are extremely
interesting. The third possibility is to ally ourselves with nonprofit groups
who already have a network of centers that could deliver the pill. I am
suggesting that Roussel, venture capitalists, and Planned Parenthood form a
coalition to create a single-product company.

Omni: What other hormones are you currently investigating?

Baulieu: One discovery concerns the interaction of steroid receptors with
something called heat shock protein. If you heat up cells, they shut down most
functions but synthesize specific heat-resistant proteins. These molecules are
conserved over evolutionary history. You find them in every organism from
bacteria to humans. We've cloned such a protein and are studying its
involvement in steroid receptors.

We're working on other steroid interactions at the gene level. These hormones
stop or start the synthesis of many proteins, so there are many systems to
study. We've also discovered that the brain makes neurosteroids that affect
some neurotransmitter function. We're studying the effects of hormones on
aggressive behavior. We're also looking at aging of the brain, multiple
sclerosis, and other degenerative diseases.

This research is at a very primitive stage, but I hope to develop general
systems that apply across species.

Omni: You once said your character was predestined by your genes. Why?

Baulieu: My father, who died when I was three, was a scientist and doctor in
Strasbourg who specialized in diabetes. He was the first in Europe to treat
patients with insulin. This cross between science and medicine is a hybrid: One
is neither a pure researcher nor a typical physician. I put them together
naturally, like my father, which is why I say in jest that my choice of careers
was genetically determined. My mother wanted me to become a Polytechnician,
with a beautiful uniform [the Ecole Polytechnique is France's military
engineering school]. There was nothing pushing me in that direction. My mother
was an exceptional woman, strong willed, beautiful. She was an international
lawyer before giving up her career to marry my father at age thirty-two. She
was a very good pianist and had a degree in English from the Sorbonne. She
adored England and admired the early British feminists.

Omni: Are you a feminist?

Baulieu: Yes. As the poet Louis Aragon said, "Woman is the future of man." I'm
for absolute equality before the law, but I love difference, and the simplest
difference we know is between men and women. Women's reproductive capacity gives
them a lot of special problems. Their brains are different; everything about
them is different. But the rights of men and women should be the same. Women's
liberation will go forward, but we have to keep pushing. We're going to see more
women doctors, scientists, heads of state. But I don't think women will ever
play tennis better than men.

Omni: What is the significance of the rise of religious fanaticism and
right-wing pressure groups?

Baulieu: Obviously these endanger the movement. But I have tremendous
confidence in the power of women. Women will always win in the end because they
make the children. The caress at the beginning of life is a determinant factor.
Men will never overcome the bond between mother and child.

Omni: Are you ambitious?

Baulieu: To be a scientist is to be ambitious, otherwise one doesn't do it. But
I'm talking about ambition in the American sense. I want to make discoveries,
advance the field. In France, to be ambitious is to yearn for power and money.
You have to be an idiot if you think science will reward this kind of ambition.
It may be contradictory to the practice of science, but nonetheless, scientists,
like painters, writers, and politicians, succumb to the desire for fame. We
still want to be known for what we have done.

A serious problem of modern civilization is people's ignorance of science. They
don't understand it and are afraid of it. Nobody cares about the lives of
scientists. The scientific enterprise is depersonalized. Science is the science
of nobody. It's the science of robots, computers, and men in white coats. It
produces miracles, but no one understands how. You can read a newspaper and
read about Dr. Smith's discovery of a new drug for treating AIDS. And what will
you remember? Not the name of Dr. Smith. It's exactly the opposite for an
artist like Andy Warhol. You can easily forget the subject of his paintings,
but you won't forget his name,

Omni: Aren't you more famous than most scientists?

Baulieu: I was a scientist like all the others, known among my peers for a few
small discoveries, until some accidental circumstances led me into an area where
science and society encounter each other. The same thing happened to my
colleague, Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of the AIDS virus. All of a sudden, a
man in a white coat was mixed up with sex and drugs and homosexuals. But this
rarely happens, and even without this direct bearing on social problems, I would
still like scientists to be better known-even if I can't personally complain.

I'm not a nineteenth-century moralist, saying that science works only for the
good of humankind. But I do believe science is the most important element in
the evolution of modern life. When I descended into the grottoes at Lascaux to
see the prehistoric cave paintings, I had a revelation. These superb images
felt entirely modern, and to my amazement I realized that over the centuries man
hasn't changed at all artistically. But scientifically, thanks to the
interaction of our brains with nature, we've changed a great deal.

Omni: We hear you've finished a book. Is it going to be like James Watson's
Double Helix?

Baulieu: I'm not as talented as Watson. My book includes a pedestrian
explanation of how RU 486 works, the nature of its discovery, and a little bit
about my life. I want it to be sold in supermarkets and bought by women out
doing their shopping. One chapter will be a kind of user's manual.

Omni: Have you ever thought about writing a novel?

Baulieu: It's an idiotic dream. In that domain I'd be too ambitious. It's
Flaubert or nothing. It'd be better for me to try to make one or two small
discoveries in biology.