Like almost every other day at a few minutes after noon, I walked into the bright sun carrying my tray from the lunchroom. Squinting (I wore no glasses of any kind in 1980 and 1981), I looked to see if there was room at any of the tables near the bushes where hummingbirds entertained diners in the heat of those early fall afternoons. There was an opening next to Roth T. (Toby) Gross and, without asking permission to join her or the other fellows at the table, I sat down.
I knew quite well Gardner Lindzey’s rules for eating lunch. I took the dishes and glass off my tray and placed them on the table. I put the tray on the ledge of the wall in front of the hummingbirds’ bushes. I said hello to everyone at the table and my greeting was returned. However, Toby was in the middle of a sentence and I had interrupted her. She went on and soon said something about “ … research on endorphins …” My expression must have reflected a huge “Huh?,” because seeing my face from the corner of her eye she stopped.
“Have you heard of endorphins, Rich?” Toby asked.
“Um, do they have anything to do with endomorphs, with one of the body types that William Sheldon studied?”
“No,” she smiled. I was completely off track. “Endorphins are brain chemicals, they are naturally occurring opiates,” she explained. There is new research some of my colleagues in the medical school are doing exploring how people’s behaviors can be a basis of the production of these chemicals, for instance, at times of stress or during challenging tasks. You should read this work. Your seminar was about human plasticity. This work is relevant.”
Wednesday Night Seminars were a mainstay of Fellows’ years in the 1980s, and my seminar occurred about a week before this fateful lunch. In the seminar, I discussed my research exploring how, across childhood and adolescence, people’s characteristics of physical and behavioral individuality were a source of their own development. I had explained that, by affecting others in different ways as a consequence of their characteristics of individuality, people elicited differential feedback to themselves; this feedback provided a basis of their continued individually distinct development. I gave examples of such “circular functions” in development by reference to my then ongoing research on physical attractiveness and temperament. I explained also that through such processes individuals could manifest plasticity in their development — that is, they could change in systematic ways across the first two decades of life and, by inference, across the life span.
After my talk, Toby had told me that she liked it very much. She said that she was pleased to discover that I was studying adolescent development. She told me about her efforts to launch a new specialty in pediatric training at Stanford Medical School, on adolescent medicine. She said that she wanted the medical students she was training to understand the importance of behavior and its development on adolescent health. We had a lot of common interests, she concluded, and said she would be excited to spend time together during our fellowship year talking about our work. I eagerly agreed to this idea and, as I was to demonstrate by my subsequent encounter with the topic of endorphin research, I knew I could learn a great deal from her.
Toby was a generous mentor. She introduced me to some of her Stanford colleagues and one, in particular, Iris Litt, has been a friend and colleague since my fellowship year. In addition, Toby suggested papers for me to read and, when I hit a roadblock because of my lack of background in biology in general or neurochemistry in particular, she took the time to instruct me.
I don’t think that my reports to her of the work in adolescent development research in general, or about evidence for plasticity in adolescent development more specifically, were as useful to her as was her information for me. Nevertheless, she remained a committed colleague and friend, and did not seem to tire hearing about my burgeoning ideas about evidence for plasticity across all levels of organization within the ecology of human development, from the biological, through the psychological, and to the cultural and historical. Rather than advising me to stay with what I knew best, my specialty area within developmental psychology, she encouraged me to expand my intellectual horizons, to delve deeply and systematically into the literatures of other sciences.
Toby was a senior and eminent colleague. I was in my early thirties and, in truth, wondered almost every day if I belonged at the Center, if I really merited being a CASBS Fellow. However, her faith in and encouragement of me was motivation enough for me to enact what she suggested – to use my year at the Center to go beyond my scholarly comfort zone and read, think, talk with other Fellows about, and even try to write about areas of scholarship I never anticipated engaging when I arrived in Palo Alto.
In 1984 Cambridge University Press published the book that derived from the path of scholarship Toby placed me on, On the nature of human plasticity. In the preface to the book, I wrote:
…much of the work on this book was done while I was a 1980-1981 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences…Many of my co-Fellows provided stimulation and generous amounts of their time in order to facilitate my work on this book: Herbert Abrams, Arthur S. Goldberger, Philip C. Kendall, Louis Lasagna, Gardner Lindzey, Dale T. Miller, and most especially Ruth T. (Toby) Gross. It was Toby Gross who first prompted me to read and think about many of the topics represented in this book. In fact, if it were not for her stimulation, guidance, wisdom, and friendship, this book would not be a reality. I will always be appreciative.
I remain deeply grateful to Toby. To me, she was the exemplar of a Center Fellow, the embodiment of the Center spirit, and an instantiation of the opportunity for creativity and productivity that the Center uniquely provides. In the now more than a third-century after my year at the Center, I am still exploring the nature of human plasticity. It has been the key concept framing my career. I am still capitalizing, then, on one serendipitous lunch conversation and on the mentorship given to me by a singular scholarly figure in my life.
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