Family history
Now, if that wasn’t enough, at the same time – this is the same year within three months – we had a party at my house. I would go out albacore fishing, I love to fish, so I brought back all these fish. I called my wife; we had usually big parties, 35-40 people, and everybody comes to these parties. When you try to get people to come for a party, three months ahead of time is not enough. But if you have fresh albacore and you give people half an hour to show up, everybody shows up, everybody is showing up at three. We loved having these parties.
My mother was at the party and she goes like this: “your cousin, who is a newspaper guy in New York, found this book that just came out on your family”. I said: “my family is also your family”. Well, it turns out it was my father’s side of the family she was talking about. Now, she has like a full Sicilian background and always had got kidded about being Mafia, like all the thugs were on the Sicilian side. It turns out not to be true, even though her father and her sisters were all bootleggers, ran numbers, and she used to go up to Lucky Luciano’s place; but very sweet people. My mother was saying: “sure, we got a dynamite truck going up to Lucky”. As a teenage girl, she had that sort of love of adventure. You get a lot of this stuff from your mother. Part of this is just a love of adventure and thrill and she’s got a lot of it. But at any rate, this book was about my father’s side of the family. She said: “check this out”. And I said: “mom, let’s wait until the end of the party”. But she was so excited because, I could tell, she had that devilish look in her eyes that she was going to get even. And she did it.
Because the book was about my grandfather, a direct grandfather from the 1600s, and it is the first case of a son murdering a mother – matricide – in the American colonies; within the white colonies, this was the first case. And I say: “that’s cute”. It is like one of those stories where your great-great-grandfather was a horse thief. But this was the first murder. And she does: “read that”. I get to the end and find that one of my cousins is Lizzie Borden. We all know Lizzie Borden. But to all of us, on this side of the family, Fallon is an adopted name, we were adopted by Irish farmers. Our real name is Cornell and we are Cornells. All the Cornells are in contact with each other and we all think that Lizzie Borden was not guilty, so she is not one of the murderers. But there are other people between there that I mentioned in the book. There are too many murderers in the past. On the same side was Ezra Cornell. He started the Cornell University, so we figured that the two kind of cancel each other out, he and Lizzie, at least for that century. But since then, in the past few years, my two cousins, who are genealogists and great researchers in this stuff, found four lines on my father’s side and all of them are loaded with murderers. The interesting thing is they are either murderers, or ministers, very holy. There are no regular people, the “let’s go and have a beer” kind of guys. There are either in church or they are out with a gun somewhere. It is a weird family. It all wrapped around the same issues of the orbital cortex; some go this way, the other go the other way. We have not only that, but we also have a direct line to some of the worst kings of England, which many of you have. It is not about that we have them, but that we have had too many in our family. That happened at the same time. All this stuff was happening within a few months of each other. I was laughing, but I was also saying: “what the hell is going on?”
About two years later, we were finishing up and I had to get five million dollars together for a stem cell company. It was adult stem cells for chronic stroke and Parkinson. We found – I say we, but my students found and I took the credit for it. I do not know a principal investigator who have discovered anything, but I had really good students. A guy picked up the technology and we raised 5-6 million dollars and get it going. I didn’t care about this other stuff. When we were working on schizophrenia and Alzheimer, I wasn’t thinking about this psychopath stuff at all, seriously. Because it was just a stupid thing, like the theory is wrong. It turns out the theory is not wrong.