Dr David Baltimore speaks at Wits University

President Mbeki posthumously awarded Eddie Roux (1903-1966), botanist, activist, author and teacher, a great South African, with the Order of Ikhamanga in Silver on 21 September 2007: ‘For excellent contribution to the struggle for a non-racial, non-sexist, just and democratic South Africa under trying apartheid conditions’ the citation read.

In our motivation for the award, Kader Asmal and I wrote that for most of us outside of the science community who remember Roux, it is for his remarkable book Time Longer Than Rope. [Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa 2nd Ed, Madison, 1964, p.v.]

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked about Roux, banned by an unforgiving Justice Minister John Vorster for once belonging to the South African Communist Party, that he was ‘a worthy addition to the long list of victims of bigotry from Socrates to the present day.’ [Preface to Eddie & Win Roux, Rebel Pity: The life of Eddie Roux, London, 1970].

Roux was a man of many gifts, a polymath South African who brought extraordinary energy and unfailingly consistent devotion to progressive activism unthinkable for someone of his heritage at the time, to education in formal and non-formal settings including night-classes for illiterate workers and, of course, he was always in search of answers to the puzzles of his discipline, botanical science. Although he never thought of himself as an Afrikaner, he was proud of many aspects of his cultural heritage and enjoyed the Afrikaans language.

I also wrote about Roux the scientist, the rationalist and his unyielding commitment to scientific truth. He was one of our greatest botanists who ended his career with a path breaking study of weeds and grass. [Grass, A Story of Frankelwald, Oxford, 1966]. The Germiston born Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner recalled in his book My Life In Science one of his profoundly influential teachers as ‘a very great man called Edward Roux … who taught me botany. He taught it as a living subject.’[Sydney Brenner, My Life in Science, London, 2001, p.9].

Roux once addressed a gathering of first year students at the University of the Witwatersrand on the subject of evolution: ‘It is amazing that it be thought necessary before an audience of university students to defend the theory of evolution. If there are some of you who have not yet assimilated the modern view of man’s place in nature which places him a little lower than the angels and a little higher than the beasts, then I must blame your teachers at high school who have been too afraid of the school inspectors or the dominees on the school boards to teach what every student in this modern world is entitled to know.’ [‘Evolution’, unpublished paper, WITS Senate Archives, no date, p.1.]

A founding member of the Communist Youth League, Roux reacted furiously to the pseudo-science of Trofim Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s court scientist. Of peasant background, he became Stalin’s infamous agronomist who single-handedly set back Soviet biology and genetics by decades. Lysenko promised Stalin great harvests because he argued that organisms could pass on characteristics acquired or learnt in their lifetime on to their offspring. He said he could teach spring wheat to behave like winter wheat, a triumph of nurture over nature, which of course was absolute and lowly rubbish.

Health Minister Tsabalala-Msimang was trained at one of those Soviet institutions heavily influenced by Lysenkoism. Perhaps this is why she does not appear to understand how the genetics of retroviral co-evolution works. One of the world’s most influential virologists Nobel Laureate David Baltimore was the lead signatory to the 2006 letter requesting President Mbeki to dismiss Tsabalala-Msimang for her scientific ignorance and incompetence.

Baltimore, who first established the genetics of HIV, is giving the Nelson Mandela Science Lecture on the subject Why Viruses Continue to Threaten our Lives at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Great Hall, fittingly in the same location of Eddie Roux’s lecture to students, on 5 October 2007 at noon. ‘What is a virus?’ Baltimore asks: ‘Why is it such a special kind of life? Do viruses ever do anything good for us, or are they just there to cause disease? But most important, will we ever have a vaccine against HIV? These are questions about which we have much information and they will be discussed in the Nelson Mandela Science Lecture.’ The lecture is open to the public.