PART ONE
Logic and Proportion
I.
BOTH PRODIGY AND RENEGADE, LEONARD Pickard came of age at the very point in history when the Greatest Generation broke with their sons and daughters over Vietnam. Raised Southern Baptist1 in the North Atlanta suburbs, Pickard was born two months after the end of World War II into Georgia’s white-bread middle class.
“Suits on Sunday, no alcohol, learned to handle rifles at nine,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “Read endlessly. Azaleas, rhododendrons, lightning, fireflies. Many happy moments as a small boy observing paramecia under my great-grandfather’s microscope. Visiting scientists from all over the world stayed with us. Much conversation.”
He maintained that his father practiced corporate law and his biochemist mom took her doctorate from Columbia. She was a fungal disease specialist with the fledgling Centers for Disease Control, he said.
Public records imply a trickier and less romantic history, listing the elder William Pickard as a Southern Bell telephone switchman who worked his way through Oglethorpe University.
“He was a small-college All-American when they still wore leather helmets,” Pickard recalled. “Boxed his way through law school as ‘Kid Curly’.”
William Pickard took his law degree in 1949, gaining admission to the Bar in 1951. By then, Leonard’s mother Audrey Pickard had already divorced his father. Leonard never learned why.
“Audrey as a young woman was one of the southern belles with whom Gable danced at the opening of Gone with the Wind at the Loews Theater on Peachtree Street in, what, 1939?” said Pickard.
Audrey moved out of state and remarried three more times, working variously between husbands as a secretary, typist, cashier, and clerk. She outlived them all, but had no place in Leonard’s upbringing.
“I received my healthy biology from Audrey whom I barely knew, but mind and spirit came from Lucille,” said Pickard.
It was his stepmother, Lucille Georg Pickard, a University of Michigan biologist, who preached the gospel of science. She went to work for the early CDC at the end of World War II. At the time, the federal public health agency was little more than a collection of Quonset huts located adjacent to Emory University.
“Until CDC put in negative-pressure rooms to contain infectious diseases (air locks aimed only inward, not outward), I had free range,” recalled Pickard. “I visited all the labs. The tanks where snails infected with schistosomiasis were raised, certain fishes and animals for leishmaniasis, and all the hosts for the world’s great infectious killers.”
Honored frequently over a thirty-year career for her insights into the biology of fungi, Dr. Lucille Georg kept her maiden name and her feminist identity. She was eight years older than her husband, and the dominant presence in the Pickard household.
“As a distinguished researcher with Public Health, she had a red diplomatic passport. My father tagged along when Lucille attended international conferences,” said Pickard.
They traveled often to Europe in the grand old style, via luxury liner.
“Once my father brought home a complete espresso machine from Stockholm ‘with all the fixins,’ as he would say. But then he’d shake his head with each cup and add, ‘It just doesn’t taste the same.’
“I did ask Lucille in later years why she married him,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Because he’s so full of life.’ Sometimes they’d dance together, write poems. They loved each other greatly.”
An early and outspoken champion of STEM2 education in the public schools, Lucille Pickard’s most important apprentice was her stepson.
“My stepmother was, and has been always, very much the primary woman figure in my life,” said Pickard. “I spent most of my time with her, listened to her, learned from her. She was immensely gracious, and very much a lady.”
A PhD trained in mycology at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Lucille Georg Pickard explained the finer points of high culture to Leonard as well as the rudiments of the scientific method. She made him a reader. He devoured books about the Manhattan Project, biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein.
“I remember the day Einstein died, and where I was standing,” he said with hushed reverence. “It was 1955. April, wasn’t it?”3
Lucille took him to the symphony, opera, concerts, museums, libraries, and her laboratory at CDC, which was well-stocked with biologic ephemera and a huge collection of prepared slides.
“She brought home irradiated fruit flies and showed me how to check for mutants; colorful agar slants of spores, molds and fungi; live samples of human placenta; and exotic glassware for measuring the number of red blood cells from a pin prick.”
When other moms were teaching table manners, Lucille taught Leonard how to tie silk knots in a matchbox using hemostats, mimicking the method med students use to practice suturing. On balmy summer afternoons while other youngsters waded into the woods in search of blackberries and crawdads, Leonard took Lucille’s hand and learned to see the outdoors through a naturalist’s eyes.
“Memories, some of my earliest, as a small boy hunting chestnuts with her by streams, and being told of the plant and animal kingdoms and that humans were animals made of cells. I learned my first scientific mouthful at her feet: ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,’ which means ‘the new life mimics the old life’ . . . ”
Lucille knew the Latin for wildflowers and chipmunks, mushrooms and songbirds. She gathered bog water, petals, feathers, and bark for closer scrutiny beneath the lens of her grandfather’s ancient Carl Zeiss microscope, giving Leonard a glimpse into an unseen world.
“Lucille was friends with the world’s great mycologists,” recalled Pickard. “Her colleagues at CDC often came by the house, so that I was blessed with those influences. Researchers from around the world would stay; once, an entire
