In my first semester in graduate school, I had an advanced general  psychology course taught by a young professor named Terry Barrett. Dr. Barrett  was an experimental psychologist and ex-wrestler, and the first assignment he gave us was to write a 3-page paper on the “mind-body problem.”

When my paper came back graded, I received my first and only “F” in  graduate school. The big “F” on the first page was followed by the two words reserved for students who professors either had a bone to pick or wanted to sleep with: “See me.” Knowing it wasn’t going to be the latter, I was worried (I would have worried either way, come to think of it), but I promptly went to his office, whereupon I not only got a loud lecture, but at one point Dr. Barrett grabbed the front of my shirt, lifted me off the ground with one hand, shoved me up against the  bookcase, and told me never, ever to do what I had done in that paper. The crime I had committed, he told me, was to think for myself. He wasn’t interested at all in what I had to say, but only whether or not I was capable of regurgitating (his word)  what he told us in lecture. I smoked a pipe in those days (almost everyone was  smoking something), and he added, with my slight 110 pound frame suspended from his fist: “Take your pipe and shove it up your  ass.”

I was not particularly upset by all of this. Growing up in my family, I was  accustomed to dramatic displays. Besides, I had gone through an undergraduate  program with so much thinking for myself that I don’t think I came away having  learned much. While I didn’t welcome regurgitation, I did like the idea of actually  learning something, which is what Barrett was trying to get across. So, 35 years later, thanks Terry, because the end result was that in two years at Murray State I learned more than in the following three years in my doctoral program and in my previous four years of undergraduate training.

What made me think of this story was the post I wrote in my last blog last about my view that genetic research is where we are most likely going to find a cure for autism.  Critics of that view point out that although billions have been spent so far on genetic research, most studies fail to produce anything significant, and that only genes with very minor effects have been uncovered. They see genetic research as “grasping at straws” and believe that environmental influences such as lifestyle and chemical exposures provide “plentiful evidence” for the causation of disease.

The debate between genetics and environment is an old one, and most  believe that diseases are typically caused by a combination of the two. The problem is one of both causality and duality. Are the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave reality? The fact is that the shadows would not exist without the sun and the figures blocking the sun, so as many philosophers have pointed out, they cannot be meaningfully separated. If you accept that somehow environment and heredity are indeed separate, then it is not necessarily the case that one thing causes the other, but instead causality may well be a two-way street. It is the interplay between the two that creates the end result.

From this perspective, all the research we do, whether on genetic contributions or environmental ones, is important, in that when put together we will most likely find the ways that all of these factors interact leading us down the road to diseases such as autism.

While I no longer smoke a pipe, I did save my first graduate school paper.  I even re-used it a few years later in my doctoral program, where perhaps ill-advisedly one was permitted to think, and expanded it to about 20 pages. I got an  A+ on that one.