A Life in Sociology

Abstract

There has lately been a slew of movies-biopics-that depict the lives of immensely talented individuals-the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, the cryptographer and computing pioneer Alan Turing, the physicist extraordinaire Stephen Hawking, and the southern-born novelist Thomas Wolfe, among others. As I think about my life and accomplishments, I know full well that they are way out of my league. All the same, I offer the following autobiographical account. FAMILY ORIGINSMy first and most important teachers were Sylvia, Julius, and Michael Hauser. Sylvia, my mother, had high standards, and she constantly feared I would drop out of school and never return. Her fears were justified. I grew to share them, so I stayed in school decade after decade. My mother also encouraged me to read the work of the young Christopher Jencks and Richard Easterlin. She had exceptionally good taste. My father, Julius Hauser, taught me how to look at the world from the outside in, and what and who not to believe. He encouraged me to read the muckrakers-Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair-and from dinner-table conversations, I learned how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) really worked.My older brother, Mike, whose career encompassed both experimental high-energy particle physics and observational astrophysics, taught me that someone was always smarter, tougher, faster, harder-working, and thinner than me, and he set an example of a life in science that few can equal.My memories of childhood are few, fragmentary, and, often, unhappy. I often broke lamps or other items when my family visited the homes of relatives. Bigger kids stole or broke my balsawood gliders. I wore bifocals by the time I was seven. I transitioned from being the skinny kid who always was last picked to play touch football or basketball to the chubby kid who was always last picked. On the bright side, my brother and I built a Christmas tree of tinker toys when our parents refused to buy one, and Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry was a favorite place to visit.Two male role models dominated the family horizon. Dad was an ABD in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago and moved the family from Chicago to Washington, DC, in 1949 because he had no opportunity for advancement in the FDA's Chicago branch office. He became the house expert on regulatory law within the FDA. In that role, he wrote the first draft of the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which required proof of efficacy and safety, required disclosure of side effects, and concurrently introduced the first legislation mandating informed consent of participants in clinical trials. According to the Harvard political scientist and historian Daniel Carpenter, he was also responsible for the contemporary design of clinical drug trials.Dad's brother was the sociologist, demographer, and social statistician Philip M. Hauser, whose career wandered freely and frequently between federal service and a professorship at the University of Chic...

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Modern Russian society in the context of anthroposocietal approach

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