The Mysterious Commonplace traces the arc of a scientific life shaped by curiosity, perseverance, and a willingness to follow ideas wherever they lead — even when they lead to controversy. Growing up in New York City, DeLisi’s early encounters with the natural world and the world of ideas set him on a winding path through City College, NYU, Yale, Los Alamos, and ultimately the National Institutes of Health, where a pivotal moment in the mid-1980s would change the course of modern biomedical science.
As Director of Health and Environmental Research at the Department of Energy, DeLisi proposed and championed what would become the Human Genome Project — an initiative greeted with fierce skepticism, institutional resistance, and charges of hubris. This is the inside story of how that idea survived and was transformed into policy: the political maneuvering, the budget battles, the scientific debates, and the extraordinary global collaboration that ultimately prevailed.
But the Human Genome Project is only one chapter in a larger story. DeLisi’s memoir is equally concerned with the life of science as it is actually lived — the mentors whose generosity proved decisive, the colleagues whose brilliance was humbling, the students whose growth became a source of deep fulfillment. It is also a frank account of setbacks and personal tragedy, and of how failure, rightly understood, teaches what success cannot.
In his later career, as Dean of Engineering at Boston University, DeLisi turned his attention to questions that extend well beyond the genome: the ethics of biotechnology, the crisis in American science education, and the urgent challenge of climate change — where, characteristically, he saw genomic science as an underutilized tool.
Threaded throughout is a meditation on what science really is: not a collection of discoveries, but a way of living — demanding, communal, and, at its best, deeply human.
