Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  To keep the evening alive, we went on to explore the large unoccupied shingled house next to Seven Winds, which could be entered through an unlocked kitchen window at the rear. Its owner, for tax reasons, did not seriously try to rent it and used it instead to store surplus furniture unneeded in his even-larger summer house on the other side of Falmouth. Near twilight I had earlier broken into it several times. Again this evening the kitchen window remained unlocked. Not ready to end the fog-filled after-midnight, Ellen showed no hesitation in also climbing over the window ledge, with my warning her not to disturb the kitchen utensils. Displacing them might later alert the owners to the fact that their house was not secure. Downstairs we were unnecessarily nervous in front of the large windows that looked over the water, but upstairs as we moved hand-in-hand from one bedroom to another we were beyond observation. Only when again in the comfort of a large downstairs sofa did we move from hand-holding to embracing.

  Unfortunately, my alcoholic haze lifted enough to realize that my incredible good fortune of finding Ellen not only pretty but willing was occurring less than 10 hours before I was scheduled to drive to New Hampshire for a weekend at the Mayrs’ newly purchased farm. Now I would have given everything for my farm visit to be postponed. My momentary physical hesitation gave Ellen the time to express her fears that we were going beyond her point of no return. And, in turn, I awkwardly revealed my long-hoped yearnings for marriage to the daughter of a Harvard professor. The time to climb back over the kitchen sink had come and, after rearranging the sofa cushions, we went out into the just-breaking dawn and back to her car. Then she was gone, perhaps irretrievably. Only the alcohol in my blood kept me from immediately regretting I had rejected an immediate gem for one that might never be mine.

  Woods Hole, New Hampshire, and Cambridge (Mass.): August 1954

  WHEN I AWOKE, Friday morning was half over, and the half-empty physiology labs revealed that I was far from alone in missing breakfast. Those there were working only halfheartedly, and I sensed that the past evening had been an unqualified success by mixing groups that before never saw reason to come together. Over coffee Eve reassured me that it was the best party she had been to since her student life of Hungary, and she saw no reason why I had to be blackballed by George Wald from a subsequent appointment to Harvard.

  The thought that I could use my talents as an impresario, if my career as a scientist began to falter, filled my head as I drove away from Woods Hole towards New Hampshire. After stopping for a late lunch at Harvard with Paul and Helga Doty, I was back on the road to the Mayrs’ farm. There I found Ernst and Gretel tickled pink with their good fortune in having a country place for weekend escapes and the summer solitude that would facilitate Ernst’s future writings on evolution. First, however, the farm had to be brought to the clean simplicity expected from their Bavarian origins. Painting the farmhouse red fell into Ernst’s domain. Soon after my arrival, I offered my assistance. Smiling firmly, he refused, letting me know that I would have a full-time painting job the next day. I was thus free for Christa and her sister Susie to lead me around their largely forested acres that included a small pond for which I had been forewarned to bring a swimming suit.

  Over dinner we bantered whether Ernst had enough clout to get me a Harvard offer. I slept well that night, sensing that Christa seemed as keen as her parents to have me part of their social scene. The next day I was a house painter until early afternoon, when, using the excuse of bird-searching, Christa and I hiked in the direction of a small mountain that loomed over the horizon. Only the next day did we go swimming in the pond, which was small enough for us to touch naturally when treading water in front of Ernst and Gretel, who soon came down to gossip.

  Then we were all off to Cambridge from which I reached Woods Hole two hours later. Geo Gamow was to be there for several more days but already his moment had passed. All attention was on Franz Moewus, the German geneticist, then in Woods Hole. At last he had been definitively caught faking experimental results. Serious allegations against Moewus had first emerged 15 years before, when Av Mitchison’s uncle, J. B. S. Haldane, published a brief note saying that Moewus’s experimental results did not show the random variations expected from Mendelian-type genetic crosses. In reply, Moewus countered that he must have subconsciously selected for publication the crosses that best approximate to the statistically expected Mendelian values. There was also the question that the volume of experiences reported seemed far in excess of what one scientist and his wife, given their relatively modest academic appointment, could have carried out. On the other hand, if correct, Moewus’s work on the genetics of the molecules underlying sexuality in the green alga Chlamydomonas had to be judged among the most significant genetic feats ever carried out.

  The most straightforward way to rule out potential fraud is for an independent investigator to repeat the claim. This was why Moewus had been asked to help teach the Marine Biological Lab’s botany course. In that capacity, others could be given his strains of algae and several crucial experiments repeated. But when hitches invariably developed Moewus put the blame on his fellow scientists not knowing how to culture his algal cells correctly. Then Moewus personally did a crucial experiment in front of several MBL observers, who later concluded that he likely used cyanide to make key cells immobile. In spite of all this, Moewus had just given a prestigious Friday Night Lecture repeating claims that could not be reproduced.

  Most keen to find Moewus honest was Tracy Sonneborn, who had championed his work since the mid-1940s. The week before Tracy had come from Indiana and was in low spirits over lunch with me, Ruth Sager, and Boris and Harriet Ephrussi. In our eyes Moewus had irretrievably blown his last opportunity to prove his innocence. Tracy could only wonder how he had been hoodwinked for so long, even years after Moewus’s immediate German colleagues had lost faith in him and seen that his academic position at Heidelberg ceased. They still felt so strongly that a German scientist got up after Moewus’s Friday lecture and bluntly stated that the results Moewus reported were not believed by those German scientists who knew him best.

  I also had reason to be depressed by the outcome because five years before I had written a long-term paper for Tracy on the importance of Moewus’s claims. Instead, I was now basking in the notoriety accompanying my appearance in the August issue of Vogue. On the same page with Richard Burton, I was described as having “the bemused look of an English poet.” Francis Crick pointed out my previous publicity-averse posture but did not seem too upset. After all, none of his friends in England would ever see the issue. It was quickly spotted in Bar Harbor, however, by my girlfriend of my last Indiana University year. She used the occasion to write me that she was marrying a banker and moving to a small town in New Hampshire. The warm tone of her letter made me feel good because I felt badly about the awkward way I had backed out of her life.

  As the summer visitors to MBL increasingly returned to their academic homes, I began to look forward to the phage meeting that was to be held during the last days of August at Cold Spring Harbor. Francis accompanied me there because the occasion would expose him to ways in which phages might be used to explore how DNA functions as the gene. The meeting’s high point was Sydney Brenner—a substitute for Seymour Benzer, who was in Amsterdam—explaining the elegant genetic trick Seymour had used to map phage mutations at very high resolution. Afterwards, Francis went north to the annual Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids and Proteins. I wasn’t invited but did not mind because I was keen to return to the Mayrs’ farm now that Christa’s summer job had ended, and she would be there for the week before Labor Day.

  “A scientist with the bemused look of a British poet”; JDW aged 26 in Vogue magazine, August 1954

  Sydney came with me to New Hampshire. On our way, we stopped in New Haven where my Aunt Betty saw that we were well-breakfasted before going on to Cambridge. There we used a key, given by the Ephrussis, to get into a flat on Trowbridge Street that was being renovated for Boris’s arrival at H
arvard. We found the flat in shambles, but we managed to sleep well before workmen burst in early the following morning. A torrential rain was coming down and howling winds told us that we were being hit by the big hurricane Carol that my aunt had forewarned us about. Never having been in one before, we carefully ventured into the warm, windy rain searching out a coffee shop for breakfast. Afterwards, I snaked the car around fallen branches and the occasional uprooted tree to find that Paul Doty’s lab had lost its electricity. With no experiments possible, we talked science waiting for the storm to move on. By early afternoon the winds were no longer ferocious, and we drove over virtually traffic-free roads to the Mayrs’ farm.

  The next day, to let Christa meet Francis again, we drove some 60 miles north to the New Hampton School site of the Gordon Conference. On the way, in the tiny town of New Boston, we stumbled upon the Gravity Research Foundation—the bizarre brainchild of a wealthy investment adviser, Roger Babson, whose fame came from predicting the stock-market crash of 1929. In the foundation’s nineteenth-century offices, we learned about Babson’s obsession with the force of gravity that he held responsible for the childhood death of his eldest sister while swimming. Now he wanted to use his fortune to find ways to insulate humans from the harmful effects of gravity and towards that end sponsored an annual $1000 prize for the best 1500-word essay on ways to find new alloys that would reduce the strength of gravity. That this hope went against every serious physicist’s idea of the nature of gravity did not faze Babson. He had even chosen New Boston as the site of his institute to avoid it being destroyed if an atomic bomb hit the Boston-area site of his Babson Business Institute.

  We had to chuckle when reading its various pamphlets that had kooky titles such as Varicose Veins and Gravity and Trucking Costs and Gravity. Our arrival in New Hampton found us still in high spirits as we spotted Francis talking to a group of largely chemists displeased that the double helix had been discovered without their participation. In fact, behind his back several scoffed openly about using physical force to keep Francis in check. In contrast, Christa was charmed by Francis’s conversational onslaught and so reported to her family when we arrived back for supper.

  After dinner back at the farm, I found Christa not anxious to sleep and after a long walk down and back the country road beside their house, we started kissing in the darkened hall outside her room. When she finally went through the door, I was intensely relieved and fell asleep quickly. The next day we were quietly a couple and she accepted my invitation to come down to Woods Hole the next weekend for a chamber-music festival in nearby Coonenessett.

  The Cape Cod she saw on her arrival was much changed from that she had seen in mid-summer. All the grass had turned brown, killed by the salt spray of Hurricane Carol. Large overturned yachts littered the inner shore of Penzance Point, and all the MBL ultracentrifuges had been put out of action by the several feet of salt water that had poured into its basements from Eel Pond. Moreover, MBL was now in double jeopardy from a new hurricane coming up the coast that might hit Woods Hole the next day. The thought of it dominated the early preconcert supper at Andrew and Eve’s cottage where Christa spent two nights of her visit. The cottage had just been brought back into order after the onslaught of Carol, and they did not anticipate another round of soaked belongings. That evening I also found Christa in slight retreat from the open affection of our last night at her parents’ farm. The next day brought strong winds but not the mighty flooding waters of Carol, and Saturday night’s opera by Gluck came off untouched. By Sunday afternoon Christa was again unrestrainedly sociable and highly enthusiastic about the Dvořák piano quintet that culminated the music festival.

  Back in Cambridge the following day, Sydney Brenner joined us from New Haven where he had spent the week with friends he had made on his ocean crossing. All the Mayrs were on hand to see us start our journey across to the West Coast, which Sydney would visit for a month before going back to England and then to his family, who were by then in South Africa. At our parting it wasn’t possible for me to kiss Christa good-bye, and there was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach as I had my last glance of her through the car window.

  Northern Indiana and Pasadena: September 1954

  AS SYDNEY BRENNER and I drove as fast as possible across the flat dreariness of northern Ohio towards Indiana in late August 1954, I increasingly thought of my parents. For the last year Mother had been preoccupied with her own mother’s failing health. At 93, it was not surprising that senility had enveloped Nana. But Mother increasingly found it difficult to cope with her incoherent rage and for almost a year she had been in a nursing home an hour away. So it came as a relief when I learnt on our arrival that Nana had just died and was to be buried the next morning. Not only had there been the emotional strain of the frequent nursing-home visits, but Nana’s yearlong bills already had exhausted my parents’ limited financial resources. Fortunately I was spending less than my salary and was able to cover the funeral costs.

  The following day at the cemetery, and afterwards at their home, I shared memories of Nana with her Gleason-descended relatives. They lived in Michigan City near the land that Michael Gleason farmed after his arrival from Ireland at the time of the Great Famine. They were Mother’s only relatives as her father had left Scotland alone and later was to die from a runaway horse accident on Christmas Eve when she was only seven.

  At home that evening, I finally admitted to my parents my love for Christa. They quickly sensed that waiting until she finished college three years hence would not be easy. It was much easier to talk about my sister Betty giving birth in Japan to a healthy son named Timothy. His pictures already dominated the small family living room. Not wanting to go to bed too early, Sydney and I walked along the country road connecting our house with the nearby Indiana Dunes State Park. After only a few minutes, we were noticed by a patrol-car policeman suspicious of citizens outside their cars after dark. Sydney delighted in telling them that walking at night is taken for granted in England.

  Two days later, fully rested, we set off for Pasadena, soon stopping off at the University of Illinois to let Sydney meet Salva Luria. After two hours of science over lunch with his lab group, we were back on cornsided highways, feeling hot and sticky all the way to mid-Missouri. The 700 flat Kansas miles the next day left us zombie-like by the time we reached Colorado Springs, then somnolently filled with retired tourists who no longer had school-age children to look after. With Pike’s Peak definitely no Matterhorn, we failed to be excited by the Rockies until we passed Gunnison. Then roadside signs told us that we were on the Million Dollar Highway and about to enter the “Switzerland” of America. We feared a local hoax but quickly found ourselves among spectacular jagged red sandstone peaks and the flaming fall-yellow colors of the aspens that dominated the foliage of the lower slopes. The high point of the day, however, was the charming 1890s towns of Silverton and Ouray. They still preserved feelings of the short-lived boom times that generated million-dollar silver yields.

  After an overnight stay in Cortez, we drove on to see the massive, flat-topped buttes of Monument Valley, located where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah all touch each other. Expecting almost impassable roads, we had stocked ourselves with much food and water but encountered no problems as we later drove past isolated groups of Navajo Indians. Ahead of schedule, we detoured up to the Grand Canyon that unexpectedly left us with neutral impressions. Perhaps it was because we were scenery-saturated or the canyon was so wide that the only way to get a true feeling for what it is like would have been to walk down to the bottom. But we wanted soon to be in Pasadena, so we were beyond Prescott at nightfall and by three the next afternoon, after a hot, unexciting desert drive, at Caltech.

  First we went to the Athenaeum to find a room for Sydney, who planned a weeklong stay before going up to Berkeley to see Gunther Stent. My bags were also deposited there because Leslie and Alice Orgel were still living in my Del Mar Street flat and would continue t
o do so until they moved to Chicago at the New Year. Nervously, I made the brief walk to the Biology Building hoping to find a note from Christa. Initially my stomach sank when no such letter was apparent among the junk mail accumulated during my three-month absence. Suddenly I realized that the envelope bearing the imprint of the Gravity Research Foundation was, in fact, from Christa. Immeasurably relieved, I sought out Leslie to tell him that Sydney was at the Athenaeum. Never exuding praise for pedantic science, Leslie greeted me with genuine enthusiasm, stating he had been completely bored over the summer—it had had no redeeming feature of any sort. With Alice across Los Angeles that evening practicing medicine, Sydney, Leslie, and I were soon having supper along Colorado Avenue where we were not held back by the nonalcoholic limitations of the Athenaeum.

  The next day Sydney was keen to learn about science while I drove to Colorado Avenue to find a haberdasher to make the first RNA Tie Club tie. Among my real mail was a letter from Geo Gamow containing a life-size paper pattern of his proposed design. With it in hand, I had no difficulty in finding a men’s shop that promised to make ties for only $4 each, and the first one might be ready in a week.

  Only a day and a half of undiluted Caltech science passed before Sydney’s brain became exposed to more facts than he could politely handle. To get his courage up for one more day of American earnestness, we took Thursday afternoon off to experience Forest Lawn, the gaudy cemetery that Evelyn Waugh celebrated through The Loved One, his novelistic account of burial practices in Los Angeles. Alas, there was little for us to experience. Its unrestrained statuary—some sculpted to embrace the sale of final-destination plots and others to reflect calls from the Creator—in no way made up for our smarting eyes. The enveloping yellow smog cut off even the nearest mountains.