MY ABILITY CANNOT EXCEL MY GENES

My first son was born in my first year at graduate school. Right before he was born, summer vacation started and I began work at the food service center of a big dormitory on campus. All day I was busy washing dishes, and at night I helped my wife take care of the newborn baby. In the fall I was busy again with my studies, so that rearing the baby became mostly my wife's job.

My second son was born in my last year at graduate school. This time I was not as busy as in the earlier years, so I helped my wife more than before. But after I got my degree, I had to stand on my own feet, so I had to devote myself full time to research. As a result I did not have enough time to help take care of my children.

With their mother's good care, however, our children grew everyday. Even when I got nowhere with my research, my children were growing. So when I was making no progress in my research, I was making progress with my children. Those were the most productive days of my life.

Now one of my children is in college, the other is in high school, and I am in the middle of my career. Our first son is able to take care of himself living far away from home, while the our second son is becoming more and more independent. My research is progressing from year to year. So my life is proceeding steadily and my family is in a stable condition.

At this stage of my life there is one thing I regret: I regret that I did not have more children. After I had the two children, I gave up having more because I wanted to concentrate on my work. I thought that rearing another child would take too much time and therefore would allow me to produce fewer research papers than I wished.

Now I ask myself, how many papers might a child be worth? Would I be more satisfied with another 20 papers than with another child? As I am not a genius, I now think that even 40 papers more would not be as valuable as another child. To produce a child, Mother Nature uses resources which have accumulated for hundreds of millions of years. To produce research papers, however, I use abilities which have been acquired for only 30 years. Moreover, that additional child, and along with his or her offspring, might write more than 100 papers in the future if they wanted to.

Besides regretting that I did not have more children, I regret that I did not spend more time with my children. I read only a few books to them and I did not play much with them. This was because I wanted to save time for research. Now I realize that I was not clever enough.

My human ability cannot excel my genes. I think I should read many books to my grandchildren and play with them often when I become a grandfather.