Einstein's Letter to the Dean: Welcome to America!

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and daughter Margaret being sworn in as U.S. citizens on January 1, 1940. Image courtesy of Keystone/ France via Getty images. Currier McEwen (1902–2003), Dean, New York University School of Medicine (1937–1955; photo circa 1954). Courtesy of private collection. More than 4 million Syrian refugees have been forced to flee the country, and the conflict shows no signs of abating…. The United States has a long history of helping the world's most vulnerable people, but we have also faltered when faced with difficult decisions to allow refugees into the country. —To the President: from 72 Members of Congress, September 11, 2015 (1) We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way [to] postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas. —Breckinridge Long, Immigrant Visa Section, U.S. State Department, 1939–1944 (2) Prof. Ehrmann has received a teaching fellowship for 1 year (from September 1939) at New York University. However, this doesn't satisfy the consul in England, who requires an academic position of two years …Go immediately to Dean Mr. Currier McEwen of this University [Medical School] and give him this letter. —Albert Einstein, August 10, 1939 (3) This fall, the news has been all about borders. On one hand, Médedns Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) won a well-deserved Lasker award for their response to the Ebola virus (4); on the other hand, Hungary erected a border-wide barbed wire fence to prevent tattered Syrian refugees from tracking north. Transgressors were treated to pepper spray. Not to be outdone, American demagogues demanded a 30-foot high barrier across our southern border to deter Mexicans immigration and a somewhat lower barrier on our northern border to exclude the riffraff from Canada (5). After early easement by Germany, borders closed across Europe to leave the bulk of Syrian refugees camped in unplowed fields in Serbia. Hunger, thirst, and dysentery were rife among the huddled masses yearning to breathe free further north. Those who managed to breach the Hungarian border were packed into buses destined for “reception” camps that promised “freedom” and a shower. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, claimed that he was protecting European civilization. Slovakia would only admit Christian refugees, not the Muslims of Syria or Afghanistan. At a Czech railway station, officials detained refugees to scrawl identification numbers on their forearms with felt-tipped pens (6). Promises of “freedom” after a shower, racial quotas, and indelible numbers on the forearm seemed like flashbacks to the Hitler years. Newsreels of the worst episode in Central European history were resurrected on iPads and laptops in 2015. It is no wonder that memories of the Holocaust prompted members of Congress to remind an American president that our country had “faltered when faced with difficult decisions to allow refugees into the country.” (1) “Falter” seems a tad mild in retrospect. Immigration policies set by a nativist U.S. Department of State in the late 1930s gave assurance that 90% of the quota slots allotted for immigrants from countries ruled by Hitler and Mussolini would remain unfilled. It has been estimated that had those visa-less refugees receive consular approval, an additional 190,000 could have escaped the teeming shores of Europe—or those showers at Auschwitz (7). Alas, the Director of the Immigrant Visa Section at the Department of State, Breckinridge Long (1881–1985), wasn't lifting any lamps beside the golden door. Long and company worked out a simple solution to limit immigration of refugees (mainly Jewish): paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. A paperwork fence would protect our borders! Long had ordered consular officials in Europe “to postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas” (2). One assumes that Long's previous experience as ambassador to Mussolini's Italy had guided his policies. In 1933, he had praised the Fascist regime in terms that Ezra Pound could not have bettered: “Italy today is the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formation of the Constitution 150 years ago today” (8). Breckinridge Long and his paperwork fence set the stage for an urgent letter by Albert Einstein to Dean Currier McEwen dated August 10, 1939 (3). Einstein worried that Professor Rudolf Ehrmann, who had been Einstein's personal doctor in Berlin, would be swept up in a Nazi roundup. The doctor had already been forced to put “Israel” before “Rudolf” on his official papers (9). However, between Ehrmann and a visa to America was the paper fence of Breckinridge Long. Although the doctor had already gained a year-long lecture appointment at New York University, the U.S. consul dragged his legs and demanded written assurance that Ehrmann received a full-time 2-year appointment at the school. The date of the letter (August 10, 1939) is telling; it was 8 days after the famous Einstein/Szilard letter to President Roosevelt explaining that it had “become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which… extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed” (10). Four weeks later, Hitler invaded Poland, and the Second World War began. Ehrmann was not your average family doctor; he had left his mark on medical science: physiologists remember his bioassay on adrenalin (based on dilation of the amphibian pupil). Gastroenterologists know his work on pancreatic function and gastric acid secretion, and rheumatologists of my generation recognize his name in the Ehrmann-Sneddon form of livedo reticularis (11–13). Ehrmann had risen to the rank of Professor of Internal Medicine at the University Hospital of Berlin, leading his home town of Altenstädt to name him as one of the 50 most illustrious Germans (9); however, in August of 1939, there he was: a 60 year-old man huddled on the teeming shores of Heimat, with Gestapo in the wings. Einstein received an urgent appeal from Ehrmann's son Rolf, who himself had escaped from Germany the year before. In that note, Ehrmann asked Einstein to write directly to Washington, an effort that the physicist knew to be completely fruitless “as I know from previous experience.” Einstein suggested a more receptive ear than that of Breckinridge Long: “We must try to get Prof. E. a fellowship for 2 years at NYU. Please go at once to the Dean of that University, Mr. Currier McEwen (sic), and give him the enclosed letter. If he is away, ask for his address or find out if someone else can make such an important decision in his stead. Tell him that a 2-year contract is required by the consul. Tell him, too, that if the University is so inclined, we have a good prospect of having his salary for the second year guaranteed by an immigration organization.” (3) McEwen responded immediately. It may have been August, but the appropriate letters went back and forth rapidly, and by the time war had begun, Ehrmann was on his way to the United States. By October, he had taken his place as a Clinical Professor of Medicine (gastroenterology) at the NYU School of Medicine and as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital (9). He went on to establish a clinical practice, centered at Beth Israel Hospital, and published a half a dozen articles in English before retirement. On a sad note, in 1955, when Einstein was terminally ill at Princeton, NJ, USA, Ehrmann rushed down to be by his side (14). McEwen's almost reflex action was among a series of humanitarian gestures that served him and his University well. Rockefeller-trained, Currier McEwen was a distinguished rheumatologist before the term was even invented. He had been a founder and president of the American Rheumatism Association (now the American College of Rheumatology) and made important contributions to the treatment of rheumatic fever (15). As dean of the NYU School of Medicine from 1937 to 1955, he presided over at least 20 life-saving appointments to German/Austrian medical scientists (3). Among these were the radiologist Rudolph Bucky, the biochemist Ephraim Racker, and Nobel laureate Otto Loewi. Loewi's story is almost an echo of Ehrmann's (16). Otto Loewi, Professor of Pharmacology at Graz, had won the Nobel Prize in 1926 for his discovery of acetylcholine, (a.k.a. Vaguststoff). No matter how high the honor, when the Nazis seized Austria in 1938, he was awakened from his sleep by a dozen young storm troopers armed with guns who hustled him off to jail. Loewi owed his rapid release from prison and a temporary refugee status in London to the coholder of his 1936 Prize, Sir Henry Dale. However, with no job and no money, Loewi had been forced to instruct the Swedish bank in Stockholm to transfer the Nobel Prize money to a prescribed Nazi-controlled bank. Once safe in England, Loewi asked his colleague, Walter B. Cannon (yes, the “Wisdom of the Body” Cannon), to lobby for a position at Harvard University. However, by 1940, an influx of the great and near-great of European scientists to Harvard had made President Conant reluctant to offer a faculty position to other immigrants, even to a Nobel laureate. Cannon found another solution. He persuaded Homer Smith, Professor of Physiology at the NYU School of Medicine, to offer Loewi a full-time professorship in pharmacology; Smith had been a research fellow in Cannon's laboratory from 1925 to 1926. Dean McEwen chimed in, funding was obtained, and Loewi had arrived for work in 1940. When Cannon visited him in New York, Loewi expressed his heartfelt “admiration for American freedom and the generous attitude of the American people for refugee scholars” (17). When Otto Loewi gave a pharmacology lecture to medical students on his frog-heart experiments in 1952, his faculty colleague Rudolf Ehrmann was sitting in the front row (personal recollection). Loewi was the first of 3 Nobel laureates to have worked at the NYU School of Medicine; each was foreign-born. Severo Ochoa (recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1959 for work on RNA polymerase) arrived as a refugee from Loyalist Spain in 1942, and Baruj Benacerraf (recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1980 for immunogenetics) arrived in 1956 after years in Paris and the American boondocks. Nowadays, their students fill the halls of academe and the laboratories at Woods Hole where Loewi, Ochoa, and Benacerraf established a yearly beachhead at the Marine Biologic Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA, USA). It is where Loewi told students that “a drug is a substance which, when injected into an animal, produces a paper” (personal recollection). A recent study by the Vilcek Foundation (Fig. 1) found that of the 277 Nobel Prizes awarded to scientists working in the United States from 1901 to 2014, 35% were to the foreign-born (18). However, the foundation argues that this was not always the case. Almost 75% of those Nobel Prizes were only awarded after the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Celler) Act was passed in 1965, which eliminated discriminatory national origin quotas and increased employment-based green cards. This permitted a dramatic increase of the Asian population in America from less than 1 million in 1960 to more than 17 million in 2010, or approximately 5 % of the U.S. population (19). Science got more than its share: of those 72 post-1965 Nobel laureates, 13 were Asian-Americans; that is 17% of U.S. laureates, and three times the percentage of Asians in America. Biologists will recognize Har Gobind Khorana (Nobel Prize recipient in 1968 for the genetic code) and Roger Tsien (Nobel Prize recipient in 2008 for the green fluorescent protein) (20). Foreign-born American Nobel laureates before and after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 relaxed quota restrictions. Image courtesy of the Vilcek Foundation. Asian-Americans and those who come to the United States for pre- and postdoctoral studies in hopes for a green card are a human resource in science that has been indispensable to the success of the enterprise. This issue of The FASEB Journal is an example of the international contributions to the field of science. There are 27 articles in this issue, of which 11 are from the United States—a proportion that has held steady for a decade. Those articles list a total of 69 authors, 35 of which have Asian surnames. Any quick survey of other biomedical journals will confirm this ratio. Without this influx of immigrant postdoctorates, biomedical science would be poor. Signing the Hart-Celler Act on October 3, 1965 at Ellis Island, President Lyndon Johnson promised that, from that day onward, we would welcome immigrants “because of what they are and not because of the land from which they sprung.” So now, let's welcome to America some of those ragged refugees from the shores of Syria, Lesbos, and Turkey. It would honor the promise of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!“ (21)

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