Hi. Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to have us our guest today

Leon Cass, who talked for decades at the University of Chicago and has written

insightfully and incisively on topics ranging from medicine, science, and

science to the Bible, the Greeks and America and many other things. and So you were gotten an MD at the University of Chicago, we're studying for your PhD in

biochemistry at Harvard, and you didn't end up becoming a full-time MD, PhD, a doctor

and researcher. what happened?

Well, actually it was during...

Well, the really beginning was summer of 64, my wife Amy and I are taking a trip out west

camping and we're listening on the radio somewhere in Kansas and we heard about the murderer

of the three civil rights workers,

Schwerner, Goodman, Cheney, and we just said to ourselves

we we have to get involved in this activity and promised the next summer we would do some work in the South.

And we've been involved in political things much before that?

Sympathizers.

I was a young man of the sensible left, particularly interested in race relations and integration.

And in fact, I've been a member of the NAAACP when I was in college at the age of 16.

So this is an old story. And the following summer Amy and I went to Mississippi

with the Medical Committee for Human Rights ostensibly to use medical issues as a means of organizing rural black community in Holmes County.

What we wound up doing was trying to get people to register to vote, lived with a black family, went to meetings

of what became the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

It was an eye-opening experience, and it was life-changing in an unexpected way,

because when I returned back to the laboratory at Harvard where I was studying,

...