FOREWORD

“OPEN SECRETS” (“AUFGEDECKTE GEHEIMNISSE”)

by Carl Djerassi

Settling down to read a new novel and encountering a foreword immediately engenders wariness in a reader. Forewords are generally the mark of the academic needing to explain why the book was written in the first place, who then proceeds to do so with a sprinkling of caveats, erudite allusions or shameless promotion. So why do I venture on such a slippery slope? Because I was an academic for half a century whose fiction writing career only started around my sixtieth birthday—too late for a leopard to change his spots. Furthermore, my “science-in-fiction “(not to be confused with science fiction) carries with it the baggage of didactic motivation, which I would be foolish to deny in spite of the obvious risks associated with such an admission.

With this caveat lector of the “Herr Professor Doktor” out of the way, let me, as simple “Herr Autor” explain why I have chosen to combine the last two volumes—“Menachems Same” and “NO”—in one volume under the title “Aufgedeckte Geheimnisse” as the yin to the yang of the first volume, “Stammesgeheimnisse,” that contained the first two volumes of my tetralogy, “Cantors Dilemma” and “Das Bourbaki Gambit.”

The first explanation is quite simple. As the original German editions of all four novels became out of print, their didactic value proved to be ever more timely as testified by the fact that the English versions are being reprinted continuously and foreign translations are being added almost every year. But what exactly is that value?

Initially, I conceived of my tetralogy of “science-in-fiction” novels as a means of smuggling in the guise of fiction some important aspects of the culture and idiosyncratic behavior of scientist into the minds of an ascientific or even antiscientific public—in other words to describe how we scientists behave rather than just reporting what we do. The reception, notably in the USA, of “Cantors Dilemma” and “Das Bourbaki Gambit” however showed that equally fitting readers are scientists themselves—be they students or established practitioners—because most scientists are simply not aware of the cultural idiosyncrasies of their own tribal behavior. These two novels are now used in a variety of courses as recommended reading or even textbooks. But while “Cantor” and “Bourbaki” focused exclusively on the academic universe, I wanted to throw a wider net in the final two volumes by capturing also some of the behavioral pattern of industrial researchers as well as of scientists operating in a geopolitical arena. Most importantly, in “Menachems Same” and in “NO” I found myself returning over and over to a scientific theme that has interested me for decades, namely human reproduction.

That interest started some fifty years ago when I participated as a ”hard” chemical scientist in the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive. Over the past thirty years, I pursued that interest as a “softer” scientist when much of my teaching, reading and writing centered on social implications and on the recognition of the impending separation of sex and fertilization—a topic of enormous practical and ethical concerns. In “Menachems Same” I described the discovery in Belgium in 1991 of ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection, meaning injection of a single sperm directly into the egg)—arguably the most important invention in the burgeoning field of in vitro fertilization. I became convinced that this method, originally developed for the treatment of male infertility, would be used in the future by fertile couples and that its biggest impact may well be felt by women. Support for this assumption is provided by the observation that while the first ICSI baby is only 11years old, somewhere between 50,000- 100,000 ICSI babies have already been born. While the novel illustrates the practical aspects of ICSI, I chose another genre—“science-in-theatre”—as the vehicle to explore the enormous ethical implications of ICSI. These are covered in a play, “Unbefleckt,” through the same characters that populate the novel “Menachems Same.”

The other issue in human reproduction that has concerned me in my thinking and writing is the absence of a “Pill for Men” and my increasing pessimism that such a male contraceptive will be developed at all, considering that a future scenario of storage of ones eggs and sperm, coupled with sterilization, may in the not too distant future make contraception superfluous. Yet the “Pill for Men” has already arrived in the form of Viagra with its focus on sexual performance rather than fertility control. In my final novel, “NO,” I address that issue and other approaches to the treatment of male impotence in a realistic context in the guise of a typical “biotech” company—so common in my personal geographical area of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Finally, not unlike C. P. Snow—the British scientist/author responsible for coining the phrase “Two Cultures”—I chose “NO” as the vehicle to bring all of the characters from the earlier volumes of my tetralogy together in a form of human closure in which the why, how and what of scientific research is summarized. In other words, my earlier “Stammesgeheimnisse” and now my “Aufgedeckte Geheimnisse” represent efforts on my part to try bridging the two-cultures gap. But eventually secrets need to be told. Much of my life I used to be a keeper of secrets and now I have turned into a teller.

Carl Djerassi

San Francisco 2004