Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  Wald, George Brooklyn-born (1906) and New York educated (Ph.D. Columbia University), he joined the Harvard faculty in 1935, becoming Professor of Biology in 1948. There he focused on the role of vitamin A in vision for which research he shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

  Wakefield, Lee Vassar College undergraduate who met JDW on the S.S. Georgic on its 1953 late-summer voyage from Southampton to New York.

  Watson, Elizabeth (“Betty”) Sister of Jim (b. 1930) who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1949. In 1951, she spent almost two years in Copenhagen and was in Cambridge during the months surrounding the discovery of the double helix.

  Watson, James Born in Chicago (1928), educated at the University of Chicago and Indiana University (Ph.D. 1950). After spending a postdoctoral year in Copenhagen, he transferred in October 1951 to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. There he met Francis Crick and together they found the double helix on February 28, 1953.

  Weigle, Jean Jacques Swiss physicist-turned-phage-biologist (b. 1901) whose family wealth let him spend six months of each year at Caltech with Max Delbrück’s group and six months at the University of Geneva, where earlier he had been chairman of its physics department. An experienced alpinist, he climbed with Alfred Tissières.

  Wilkins, Maurice New Zealand–born (1916), he was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and studied for his Ph.D. (1940) at the University of Birmingham under J. T. Randall’s supervision. After wartime research on uranium isotopes, he moved into biophysics first at St. Andrew’s University and then at King’s College London as a member of the newly formed Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit. Using DNA made in Switzerland, he and a student, Raymond Gosling, obtained an X-ray photo in 1950 of crystalline (“A” form) DNA.

  Williams, Robley American electron microscopist (b. 1908) who joined Wendell Stanley’s Virus Laboratory in Berkeley in 1950.

  Wyman, Jeffries American biophysicist (b. 1901) of many Harvard connections, who became Scientific Attaché at the American Embassy in Paris in 1951.

  Ycas, Martynas American biochemist (b. 1917). Worked for the Quartermaster Corps Laboratory, and then joined Syracuse

  Editor’s Note

  The marginal notation indicates a moment in the narrative which corresponds to a letter among the ones collected in the appendix, “George Gamow Memorabilia.”

  Prologue

  INITIALLY, WHEN I went back to Cambridge, no one would act as if I had been away. My breakfast over The Times at The Whim in Trinity Street would be the same—bacon, eggs, and toast. Only my hesitancy over the price would reveal that I then lived elsewhere. But when I returned in mid-September 1986, of my past only the buildings remained. The college porters no longer knew my face, and I had to identify myself to explain why I was in Clare College’s garden along the Cam at a time when visitors who can read know they are trespassing.

  I was back in Cambridge to look over a scientist whom I might want to recruit to my lab in the States. We were to meet with his research group for dinner at a French restaurant near Magdalene Bridge. I had time to spare and walked back over Clare Bridge through King’s, listened to a trace of Evensong, and then was in Free School Lane and into the entrance of what was once the legendary Cavendish Laboratory. Much of modern physics had been discovered within its walls in the first third of the twentieth century, and it was there that I had come as a young American in the early 1950s.

  Now the site had new inhabitants, the Department of Applied Biology—only a vague name in my memory and whose duties I had not a trace of recollection. The 6 p.m. bells at St Mary’s Church had already rung, and I feared that the door would be bolted. But it was not, and I scampered up the stairs of the 1930s Austin Wing to the first-floor corridor where Francis Crick and I had shared an office. No plaque marked the birthplace of the double helix, and I opened the door expecting to find our former room deserted. Instead there, where Jerry Donohue and Peter Pauling once made four of us, was a solitary research student. He was using calipers to measure the dimensions of a sample of potatoes. Politeness cautioned me not to ask him why he had chosen this thesis topic. Instead I explained the abruptness of my interruption by telling him I had once also worked in this room and was curious how it was now used. By his response I realized he had no idea of who I was nor the intellectual frenzy that once dominated this utilitarian brick-walled space. The manners that Cambridge so long ago instilled in me did not let me reveal my identity, and quickly I was down the stairs and off to “The Golden Helix,” the house where Francis and his wife, Odile, lived before their departure for California.

  I walked to Market Street, into Sydney Street and then along Bridge Street on to Portugal Place. There, behind a narrow strip of pavement, were Nos. 19 and 20, the pair of Victorian row (terrace) houses in which the Cricks had lived for more than a quarter of a century. Originally they owned only No. 19, but after the fame that came with the double helix, they bought up the adjacent house to the south. That gave them the extra space for a yearly string of au-pair girls to look after their young daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline, whose youthful presence lightened the gravity of Francis’s search for the genetic code. The houses were several hundred feet from the Moss Bros. shop, where, long ago, I had rented the formal clothes needed for college feasts.

  As I looked down into the windows of the darkened basement dining room, I thought back on past pleasures from countless evenings of Odile’s good food and Francis’s spirited gossip about mutual Cambridge friends. Now, however, The Golden Helix and the tiny triangular garden in its front were ghostly quiet. Some years before Francis and Odile had begun to live more in southern California, at La Jolla with its Salk Institute, than in Cambridge, to which they returned only for the summer. First their cottage outside Cambridge was sold, and, then, just two weeks previously, The Golden Helix itself went to a Cambridge scientist returning from several years at Stanford University. With no one around, I continued to stare at the meter-long metal helix that Francis had attached at first-floor level. Seeing it, first-time visitors were reassured that they had found the right pair of houses.

  I could only feel sad, not because the intellectual era that Francis had dominated was over but because Cambridge seemed not to care. I knew long, long ago that my time there was up, but for Francis to feel similarly was much harder to accept. Conceivably over 25 years at Cambridge was bound to yield boredom and the warmth and blue skies of California must have added to other reasons for moving. But would this path have been so inevitable if the university had not been so immersed in its history that its institutions were always more important to it than its inhabitants. Only the towering Glaswegian chemist Lord Todd could assert his godliness and get away with it.

  Francis was too much like a fast bowler from the West Indies—batting members of the team did not stand a chance. With him in the room, you could never have a moment of relief from a succession of quickly thrown ideas. Even as he reached 60, he just would not show his age. It was not on the cards for him to retire physically—much less intellectually—at 65, and making him the master of his college would have been a grave misuse of his talents. Something had to move and it was not Cambridge.

  Cambridge (England): April 1953

  ALTHOUGH MY HAIR was properly long and my accent toned to suggest almost an English origin, Odile Crick told me I had still far to go before I would look right walking along Cambridge’s King’s Parade, much less looking purposefully indolent in one of its college gardens. My appearance would not have mattered if I were the same as a month ago—an unkempt slender figure who said what I thought as opposed to what good manners required. But now that Francis Crick and I had given the world the double helix, Cambridge in its own quiet way was bound to ask what we looked like. The time had come to acquire at least one set of clothes that would go well with Francis’s Edwardian elegance. I was not trusted to act alone and Odile accompanied me to the men’s clothing shop across from the chapel of
John’s (the College). My ill-fitting American tweed jacket was thrown out and replaced by a blue blazer and associated gray trousers. They would much better express my new status as the co-winner of a very great scientific jackpot.

  The DNA molecule we had found two months before—in March 1953—was far more beautiful than we ever anticipated. With the two polynucleotide chains held together by adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine base pairs, DNA had the complementary structure needed for the gene to be exactly copied during chromosome replication. When 1953 started, finding out what genes look like and how they replicate were two of the three big unsolved problems in genetics. Seemingly coming from nowhere, Francis and I had now grasped both. At times I virtually had to pinch myself to prove that I was not in the middle of a wonderful dream. But I was not, and so the possibility existed of a grand slam in which Francis and I also worked out how genes provide the information to make proteins.

  By the flip of a coin, our names in the original manuscript had the order Watson-Crick instead of Crick-Watson. So several Cambridge wags now could refer to our DNA model as the WC structure. They suspected that our golden helix would be found tainted and destined for dumping down the water-closet drain.

  I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules. There I learned from a mid-thirtyish English physicist called Maurice Wilkins that DNA, if properly prepared, diffracts X-rays as if it were a highly organized crystal. The odds were thus good that DNA molecules (genes) themselves have highly regular structures that conceivably could be worked out over the next several years. Briefly I considered asking Wilkins if he would let me join his London lab at King’s College on the Strand, but my attempts to talk with him after his lecture elicited no enthusiastic response and I dropped the idea.

  Instead, through the intervention of Salvador Luria, my Ph.D. supervisor at Indiana University, I was taken on five months later at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to work with an English chemist, John Kendrew. He was helping the Austrian-born chemist Max Perutz lead a small research group supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC) called the “Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems.” Started in 1947, its scientists used X-ray methods to work on the three-dimensional structures of the oxygen-carrying proteins hemoglobin and myoglobin. In going to join the group, I hoped to expand the attention of the unit to DNA, so that they would let me work on it, instead of a protein, once I had learned X-ray diffraction techniques.

  My crystallographic career, however, would have likely soon aborted if Francis Crick had not been in the lab. From the moment I arrived, he treated me as if I was a much younger brother in need of help. Then 35 years old, Francis was effectively unknown outside Cambridge, having joined the unit only two years before. Already Francis’s penchant for theory had made him a powerful addition to the team’s protein-solving efforts. His first major success came soon after I arrived, when that October he helped work out the theory for diffraction from helical objects. Even so, Francis could not anticipate a long-term future within the unit, because the week before he had badly upset the head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, by arguing that he, not Bragg, first saw a potential new way of analyzing protein X-ray diffraction patterns. To say the least, Bragg did not like the implication that he had pinched a younger colleague’s idea. In fact, on that ill-fated Saturday morning, Francis realized that neither his nor Bragg’s precise approaches were that good and that only isomorphous replacement methods held out real hope.

  Cavendish Laboratory group photo, spring 1952. In the center of the first row is Sir Lawrence Bragg; JDW is second row, sixth from left, next to Hugh Huxley and Francis Crick.

  That fall of 1951 we had no reason to hope that we would be more than minor players in DNA research. The experimentalists at King’s College London—Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin—were set to provide the definitive evidence for choosing one DNA model over another. But over the next year, their personalities clashed badly, and Maurice found himself driven away from X-ray analysis of DNA. Soon Rosalind had all the cards needed to solve the structure, provided she co-opted the model-building approach that Francis and I so passionately argued for. Here her greatest mistake was being put off by Francis’s strong personality that she thought masked a bumptious overextended intellect.

  Even less predictable was the inexplicable chemical botch that Linus Pauling, then universally perceived as the world’s best chemist, made with his ill-conceived triple-stranded DNA helix. Late in 1952, we had become apprehensive when Linus’s son, Peter, who had newly arrived in the unit to be a research student with John Kendrew, told us that “Pop” was working on DNA. Only 18 months before Linus had humiliated the Cambridge group with his α-helical fold for proteins. We breathed much, much easier in February 1953 when we read a manuscript from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and saw that Pauling’s DNA model was way off the mark.

  Quickly I raced into London to alert the King’s group that Pauling’s new helix was a botch and we should expect him quickly to devise a better model. Rosalind, however, thought I was being unnecessarily hysterical, telling me in no uncertain terms that DNA was not helical. Afterwards, in the safety of his office, Maurice—bristling with anger at having been shackled now for almost two years by Rosalind’s intransigence—let loose the, until then, closely guarded King’s secret that DNA existed in a paracrystalline (B) form as well as a crystalline (A) form. In his mind the cross-shaped B-diffraction pattern, shown on the X-ray he then impulsively took out of a drawer for me to see, had to arise from helical symmetry.

  Almost perversely, it was Linus Pauling’s entry into the DNA game that made it possible for Francis and me to find the double helix. In November 1951, before it was clear that Pauling was out to get the DNA prize, Francis and I had been told by Sir Lawrence Bragg that DNA was off limits to the Cambridge unit because it belonged to the workers at King’s. Even 14 months later, bad memories still existed of our awkward first attempts to build DNA models. But we then quickly gave up trying to guess the DNA structure and even passed details of the molds needed to build models to Maurice Wilkins. By now appraised of the B-form’s existence, Bragg wanted Francis and me to have another go at building models. He hoped that our efforts—possibly coordinated with those in London—would generate the right answer before Pauling recovered his senses.

  No one then could have anticipated that in less than a month Francis and I alone would have found the answer and one so perfect that the experimental evidence in its favor from King’s almost seemed an unnecessary accompaniment to a graceful composition put together in heaven. Our writing of the tiny manuscript for Nature that would announce the double helix seemed even then an historic occasion. My sister Elizabeth, who had followed me to Europe two years before, did the typing, with Odile Crick using her artistic talents to draw the intertwined, base-paired, polynucleotide chains. Together with two experimental manuscripts from the warring King’s groups of Wilkins and Franklin, it was dispatched to Nature’s editor by Bragg on April 2 and published only slightly more than three weeks later on April 25.

  Our most unanticipated success was a big relief to Betty, my sister, and Odile. My proclivity for super dreams had clearly long worried Betty, who feared that I would never adapt successfully to the world of ordinary people. Odile, on the other hand, no longer had to worry about having to leave Cambridge. Bragg could not force Francis to leave the lab after he had helped give England the double helix. And, even though it was then ordained that the Cricks go for a year to Brooklyn, Odile would not have to consider the awful fate of staying on.

  Dinners with the Cricks at their house in Portugal Place became even more spirited occasions after our success, with Odile often bantering me about my better prospects of getting the perfect girlfriend. Before the double helix, it was easy to meet the foreign gi
rls who were in Cambridge to learn English. But I sensed it would be much better to try and get to know the undergraduate English girls at Girton or Newnham—at least I might understand what they said. But no one I knew then had any real contacts at these women’s colleges. The correct tack for me might have been to seek out an attractive tennis player. But Francis, though his father played at Wimbledon, had long ago given up outdoor sports and neither he nor Odile knew any girl, blond or otherwise, who hit the ball hard. Happily by the time of our discovery, and on my own initiative, I thought I might have located the girlfriend appropriate for my new fame.

  The previous August, in the Italian Alps, I had met a good-looking English girl called Sheila Griffiths, who was living with a mountaineering family. As luck would have it, we started talking only two days before I was due to depart, one of which she spent ascending Monte Disgrázia that loomed above the tiny village of Chiarregio. Born in Wales, Sheila was in Italy to improve her Italian in return for looking after two children and hoped to go to Rome when the summer ended. She came from a mining heritage and her father, Jim Griffiths, was a Labour Member of Parliament. She had several more weeks in the mountains and worried about keeping busy if bad weather settled in. So I lent her my copy of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point and, when briefly in Milan, bought copies of The Economist and New Statesman to post on to her.

  During the fall I kept hoping to hear from her, having given her my Clare College address when we parted because then she did not know where she would be living in Rome. Just before we found the double helix, however, she sent me a letter from the Dolomites where she was learning to ski with her two charges. At Easter she was coming permanently back to England and enclosed the telephone number of her family’s home in Putney. Before we parted in Italy, I had told her that DNA had to be at the heart of life. Now, in April 1953, this was no longer a conjecture: the double helix would soon be a, if not the, fact of life.