A Magician in New Balance Sneakers
The following is a eulogy I wrote for the funeral of my grandfather, Gary Felsenfeld z”l, who passed away on May 1st, 2024. He was a very special person, and I was very fond of him.
Imagine, if you are able, that you are a child of maybe five or six. You are standing on a stepstool in a laboratory to peer up over the top of a lab bench, a forest of glassware and instruments surrounding you. A kindly old man in a knit sweater and worn New Balance sneakers is holding a small test tube in his hand, containing a quantity of chicken blood. He has a twinkle in his eye that suggests he is about to let you in on a secret. Into the test tube he adds a few chemicals from the mysterious bottles on the shelf over the bench. The tube goes into a machine, which the old man says is called a centrifuge, and he explains that it is simply a machine that spins things around very quickly, just like the machine that dries out your wet bathing suit after you’ve finished swimming at the Y. Your mind wanders a little, and you look out the window at the sun shining over the NIH campus, and when you look back, the man is holding the tube in front of you again, with a little smile on his face.
The tube is now mostly filled with a clear liquid, but there’s a white substance sitting in the bottom. At first glance it looks like some kind of powder, but when you look more closely, you can make out gossamer threads as fine as smoke, so fine you have to strain to see them at all. My grandpa Gary, zichrono l’vracha, did indeed have a secret to share: that these threads are a very special molecule called DNA. He tells you that DNA is a set of instructions that makes the chicken into a chicken, and that you have your own DNA and it makes you into you, and that you and the chicken and every fish and plant and mushroom and bug and bacterium have it too, and it makes them them, and that we are all united as living creatures. It is sometimes said that the scientific enterprise takes the magic out of the world, but in that moment, you look at the old man like he is a wizard.
I had only ever attended one of my grandfather’s many lectures, but I believe that his most profound teaching is that the world is, for all its chaos and complexity, quite knowable. Today it seems as though the truth is obscured beneath an ever growing cloud of narrischkeit, but I believe that grandpa Gary’s teaching — his torah — is more praiseworthy than ever: that our understanding and appreciation of the world can be improved with a little effort and cleverness, that that understanding deserves to be defended with great moral courage and deep compassion, and that, above all, the world demands to be explored with the most ardent zeal.
The electrochemical reactions of grandpa Gary’s own body may have gone to equilibrium, but as he might remind us: life’s reaction is a cascade, each intermediary forming new and unique products, like his great-granddaughter and his second great-grandchild-to-be [n.b.: my sister’s child], who, even as I speak, gathers the strength to bring their special gifts into the world. As a father and as the Professor’s Grandson, I tell you that with each and every generation, the products of that grand process increase in beauty and complexity in a joyous convulsion, seemingly against the march of entropy itself.
With a twinkle in his eye, grandpa Gary both drank thirstily and poured generously from the cup of life’s wisdom all of his days: whether in the lab, or in his travels, or in a museum, or in the garden, but especially with his family. By his shining example he helped us all to love life more completely, and I am so impossibly proud to be his grandson; his memory is already a blessing.
The day after the funeral, I went with my brothers, my sister, several of my cousins, and their partners — along with my wife, and our infant daughter — to the National Museum of Natural History.
We all agreed that grandpa would have liked that very much.
Addendum: The next paragraph was to follow the third, but I didn’t include it because I thought it would make the eulogy too long. I had the chance, at my mother’s prompting, to tell this story at the shiva. I was glad to share it then, as I’m glad to share it now.
Fast forward maybe ten years, and you’re on a road trip through the American southwest with grandpa Gary and grandma Naomi. You’ve stopped at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, where you’re watching a park ranger give a lecture in front of a wall of real dinosaur fossils. The park ranger is talking about the fossils, but he says that nobody really knows how old they are, or why the dinosaurs aren’t around any more, or why dinosaurs declined and mammals rose, or how humans arose from the great apes. The twinkle in the old wizard’s eye has a different aspect to it now, and after the lecture you watch him take the park ranger aside and tell him, quite gently, that he is entitled to his personal opinion, but that he is wearing a National Park Service uniform. As such, he represents the government of the United States. The wizard states that he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and assures the park ranger that the position of the government and of the scientific community is quite clear on the question of the age of the earth, the nature of heredity, and the origin of humanity. He further offers to send the park ranger him some information and invites the park ranger to make up his own mind. You look at the wizard like he is carved, as a colossus, into the wall of a canyon.
If you’d like to read more about my grandpa Gary, his high school newspaper published a lovely interview with him just a few weeks before he died.
He who learns in order to teach, it is granted to him to study and to teach; But he who learns in order to practice, it is granted to him to learn and to teach and to practice. — Pirkei Avot 4:5
