Oliver Sacks on how an unconventional childhood shaped his love of science
The British neurologist explored the depths of human consciousness, blending philosophy with medicine
This summer, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, Eleanor Wachtel presents 10 of her favourite episodes chosen from the show's archive.
*This episode originally aired Nov. 11, 2001.
British author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was one of a kind, infused with enthusiasm and compassion. Known for his bestselling case studies The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings and An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks' writing explored the depths of human consciousness, blending philosophy with medicine. His 1973 book, Awakenings, was adapted for the screen starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, while a new opera inspired by the book premiered in St. Louis in 2022.
Born in 1933 to physician parents, Sacks grew up in London, though he was temporarily evacuated during the Second World War to a boarding school, where he, his brother and the other children suffered abuse. As a child, Sacks fell in love with chemistry and science, which he said provided a sense of order and control in what seemed a terrifying and unpredictable world. He studied medicine at Oxford University before moving to California in the early 1960s and later, New York City.
Eleanor Wachtel spoke to Sacks four times over the course of his career, including in 2001 about his book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Oliver Sacks died in 2015. He was 82 years old.
A childhood home in London
"It seemed like a sort of magical house to me, although it might have seemed a large awkward Edwardian house to anyone else. Both my parents were physicians, and they had their office in the house. There was a library, which I loved, which was full of books and also games, and a tiny mysterious cupboard under the stairs which no one else was small enough to get into and which I used to imagine was the entrance to another world and a great loft, a great attic.
I think I sometimes felt that the patients were intrusive, and that it was our house and not fully ours.- Oliver Sacks
"I wasn't allowed into the surgery, although I was fascinated by it. I would occasionally see a strange violet light coming from under the door because the ultraviolet light was being used and I occasionally got a glimpse of these strange instruments. My mother was a surgeon and an obstetrician and I would see all sorts of strange and disconcerting instruments. Later, I think I sometimes felt that the patients were intrusive, and that it was our house and not fully ours.
"I came back to London in 1943. I was ten years old, and almost immediately I fell in love with chemistry and science. I think that science seemed to promise a realm of clarity, order, control and predictability infinitely far from what I was then seeing, the capricious and dangerous and terrifying world of people."
The divinity of science and nature
"I became very doubtful, too early, of a personal God. I don't know what my parents actually believed, but in practice this was a fairly orthodox household. I think there were some lovely lyrical rituals. I used to love to watch my mother lighting the Sabbath lights on Friday afternoon. The Sabbath is welcomed as a bride and I somehow imagined the Sabbath, the peace of God, as a cosmic event. The peace of God settling on different star systems all over the universe.
"But when I was sent away — which in a way broke some of the trust and the bond between my parents and myself — it went along with turning against the ultimate parental figure up in the sky. From that time, I have never had any sense of a personal God.
I think that science seemed to promise a realm of clarity, order, control and predictability.- Oliver Sacks
"When I came back to London, I met my uncle Dave, who manufactured incandescent bulbs with tungsten filaments. I visited him and his factory and laboratories, and he probably enjoyed the eagerness of his little nephew. My uncle's enthusiasm for chemistry and metallurgy and mineralogy was immense and it got strongly into me. He also had a great interest in the history of chemistry and in the biographies of chemists, and so science was presented to me as being a human endeavour, as having a very human face. I thought of my uncle as a sort of 18th-century figure and this made me want to do 18th-century chemistry.
"I have possibly never had any sense of an agency, a personal God, a paternal God or a law-giving God in the sky. On the other hand, I'm very conscious of coming from a Jewish culture and from a culture, I think, of curiosity and questioning, which is partly Jewish. The idea of the law is very central in Jewish religion and sometimes takes on an almost mystical form. Nature, for me somehow, becomes equated with the law. And specifically with the periodic table, this wonderful organization of the elements which entranced me as a child and still does."
The end of his love for chemistry — and boyhood
"All of us at some point get to where the heightened mysterious magical world of childhood gets fainter and how the freshness and glory sort of vanish, and the light of the common day. Doing science at school partly destroyed my interest in science, in chemistry, because what had been private and secret and playful and adventurous, became fixed and competitive and public and prosaic. It wasn't a holy thing anymore.
"The human and the biological world were beginning to excite and distract me more. Then there was a great hunger for the personal, although maybe indirectly this partly took the form of a hunger for music. I had to have music, especially Mozart but music called to me and made me want to howl and there was a sort of beauty and wonder, quite different from the sort of scientific mathematical one. The physical science wasn't enough.
"There was also a message, in a way, from my parents, 'Well, OK, you're 14, you're a big boy now. You're going to be a medical student, you're going to follow the family business.' Which ultimately I did.
"Another thing was that the chemistry I loved was descriptive, naturalistic, 19th-century chemistry. It was very sensuous for me. It was the colours and the textures and the smells and all the transformations. Although I love numbers, chemistry also seems to be becoming too mathematical and almost a part of physics and quantum theory. I'm basically a naturalist at heart."
Oliver Sacks's comments have edited for length and clarity.
