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 Robert Pollack owes a lot to his family doctor-not the least of which is his life.
Readers of Pollack's second book, The Missing Moment (Houghton Mifflin), learn that the unnamed doctor prescribed the antibiotic erythromycin that broke the fever of what turned out to be pneumonia, pulling the author back from hallucinations of "whirling colors . . . [and] a small voice saying that this was bad but was unable to do much about it." Had it happened 50 years earlier when such a drug didn't exist, Pollack says, "I would have died."
The doctor is, consequently, also owed-in part, anyway-the inspiration for this thought-provoking book. His life saved, Pollack, a professor of molecular biology at Columbia and a former dean of the College, began looking back at his brush with death. What he saw he used to shape the work that became The Missing Moment.
"In my fifties, pneumonia took from me the one article of faith necessary to a career in biomedical research: that although science may not yet be able to explain everything worth knowing about, in due course it will be able to."
The experience of his mortality revealed to Pollack that the finite clock (also referred to in the text as internal time) governing his life on Earth is out of sync with the infinite clock (external time) governing his life in science. It then raised the questions at the heart of The Missing Moment: "Why was the inevitability of death shoved aside when it was so clearly on everyone's mind, and what would science look like if it were able to admit this limitation, accept mortality, and focus on how best to make all our mortal lives last longer?"
The book is a reasoned appeal to all scientists, and particularly to biologists like himself, "to place human needs ahead of other considerations and to be sensitive to the facts of life and death that unite us all."
It is also a work deeply informed by Pollack's extensive reading of Freud and by his research into current models of the mind. This helps to explain the book's subtitle, How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science, if not its title, to those who through his first book, Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA, know Pollack only as a biologist.
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