Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  Christmas Eve was my mother’s fifty-fifth birthday, and for supper we had the oyster stew that always marked the occasion. With my grandmother Nana now dead and my sister Betty married and in Japan, the evening was muted. My parents knew that I was apprehensive about my forthcoming talk and whether or not Christa was yet ready for marriage. Before our Christmas meal, dominated by turkey with dressing and cranberry sauce, Dad and I took off for a brisk walk to Lake Michigan, hoping to get a respectable scorecard for our Christmas bird census. That Christmas day, however, the birds were sparse and only the sounds of juncos, chickadees, song sparrows, and the occasional cardinal caused us temporarily to halt our determined movements against the frigid winds coming off the lake.

  Two days later in Boston, the Mayrs met my plane and took me to their Washington Avenue flat. The following night they hosted a small dinner party for Boris and Harriet Ephrussi, who next day were going down to New York before taking the boat back to France. Boris was his usual frank self in assessing their several-month stay among the Harvard biologists. The corn geneticist, Paul Mangelsdorf, was about to retire and Boris had wondered whether he was being looked over as his potential successor. Complicating this expectation was the question of whether Paul Levine, then teaching genetics, would be promoted to tenure despite his, up to then, unexceptional research on Drosophila. Boris, however, did not feel he would aid his own cause by telling Harvard that it might profit if Paul went elsewhere.

  The next day the Mayrs were keen to see their New Hampshire farm in winter white, and we drove up for a day visit, knowing that the heat of its wooden stove would eventually warm up the kitchen. Soon after our arrival, Christa and I made a long circular walk that gave us the isolation that I had so long anticipated. As soon as we were out of sight, Christa and I started kissing and later hugging, lying on the powdered snow. When we arrived back to a now-warmed up kitchen, I sensed I had been too bold on the snow, and regretted it. Two days later, when finally again alone on a bus taking us to the Szent-Györgyis’ Hungarian New Year’s Eve party, we talked about everything except ourselves. Even at the stroke of midnight, when we had finished Albert’s lovingly cooked suckling pig, Christa only wanted to hold hands with me. But on the way back to Boston, she expressed eagerness to come down a week from then from Swarthmore to Washington. There I would be spending my last weekend East with Alex and Jane Rich.

  With Christa about to return to college, I moved into Dana Palmer House, the splendid Federal residence where Harvard puts up official visitors. As soon as I signed the guest register, Paul Doty leafed back to the page where Winston Churchill’s signature stood out. Then he pointed to the names of persons whose stays there meant they were destined for Harvard offers. At lunch the next noon at the Faculty Club, I rose to the challenge of the horse-meat steak that had remained on the menu now 10 years after the end of the war with Germany and Japan.

  For the next several days I was paraded through the offices of most of the Biology faculty, staying in good form almost until the time of my 5 p.m. talk. Increasingly anxious over whether I was going to spout more than hot air, I spoke in a low voice that only occasionally made it to the back of the lecture hall. Happily, the senior biology professors heard all my words because, aware of the wretched acoustics, they invariably sat in the front rows. The lecture hall was a bad afterthought of a 1934 building that the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation funded to promote important research in biology. Depression-gripped Harvard failed its donors’ expectations to put more of its own monies towards the building, leaving the entire north wing unfinished.

  That molecules were still an unimportant feature of the Harvard biology scene made my job-seeking task easier. Virtually none of the faculty had the background to know whether my thoughts about RNA made sense. Only the several true chemists in the audience had the training to spot way-out nonsense. But neither Konrad Block or Frank Westheimer, both newly recruited from the University of Chicago, embarrassed me through questions that implied that my Caltech efforts of the past four months were totally speculative. So I could truly relax during the well-mannered, slightly boring dinner that followed in the Faculty Club. There the possibility of my wanting to leave Caltech was never brought up. I slept well that night with the Dotys reassuring me over breakfast that my talk was sensational.

  The train got me to Washington the day before Christa was to arrive, giving me time to let off my romantic misgivings to Jane and Alex Rich at their small rented house near the Chesapeake Canal. Jane said that Christa and I would enjoy Georgetown and, after I met her train, we had a Wisconsin Avenue coffee-shop lunch. There we talked about her increasing yearning for a junior year at the University of Munich, where she could become fluent in her parents’ native language. She did not want to follow in the footsteps of her mother’s early life. The early twenties for Ernst had been one of romantic adventure, collecting birds in the Solomon Islands off New Guinea, whereas Gretel’s equivalent years involved caring for two infant daughters in a foreign land on a depression-level, museum-curator’s salary. With each new sentence I feared Christa would blurt out that we should cool our romance, not seeing each other again until after her European experience. But at the end of lunch she clearly expressed a wish to see me abroad. Particularly, she wanted to see if the old Cambridge was overwhelmingly more beautiful than its New World equivalent.

  By the time the Cabin John trolley had let us off near the Riches’ house, Geo Gamow had already arrived. For the previous two weeks, he had been lecturing in Florida, and later taking in more sun at St. Augustine. Now he and Alex were mulling over the long article they were writing on the “Coding aspects of information from nucleic acids to proteins.” It was to appear as a solicited review and, although speculative, most of their arguments were original and unlikely to be criticized by a reviewer. Already half-finished, it contained many of the conjectures from the Woods Hole coding week as well as analyses made possible by more recently published amino acid sequences. There was no doubt that Geo’s diamond code was now dead as was any part of the triangular code that could be precisely formulated.

  Moreover, the fact that closely related forms of insulin—from the cow, pig, and human—differed from each other by only single amino acid replacements had to rule out any overlapping code in which single base pairs in DNA helped determine more than single amino acids. Unpleasant as this conclusion was to Geo, it was supported by the data coming from the Los Alamos Maniac computer. It was telling Geo that the still-limited number of observed amino acid neighbors was that expected from a completely random distribution of amino acids in polypeptides. Very likely each amino acid was determined by its own set of non-overlapping bases, all specific permutations of the four bases A, G, T, and C taken three at a time (e.g. AAA, AAG, AAC, etc.).

  The conversation over dinner turned much less serious. We were all curious to know what Crick was now up to. John Kendrew had written me in November that I was badly needed at the Cavendish to keep Francis in order. If his intellect could be focused on RNA, he might have less time for orations. Now, John reported, Francis consumed whole days talking furiously about the secrets of life and how he would become famous by writing bestsellers. Clearly he was still annoyed by my decision last year to keep the double helix off the BBC. Apparently Francis now talked of a broad Reith-like radio series on “the meaning of life.”

  That evening we all went on to a party given by Dick Roberts, a physicist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Although he had done important neutron experiments that helped start the atomic-bomb project, he arrived for the 1948 Cold Spring Harbor Phage Course with golf clubs and bag in his car’s trunk. Moreover, he became interested in extrasensory perception, giving an evening seminar attempting to show that he could guess the faces of unturned playing cards. Tonight, on home turf, he was less loony and wanted to use isotopes to study the metabolic stability of DNA and RNA. As expected, Geo tried to bring life to the party through his card magic, but it fell a
bit flat as too many of the guests had experienced it before. Those not in the know assumed that Christa and I were a real couple, but the hollow feeling in my stomach told me otherwise. One other fetching face might have made the evening semi-passable, but this was an occasion when alcohol, not beauty, was the tool to overcome academic frustrations.

  As I put Christa on the train back to Swarthmore, she promised to write as soon as she got gossip from her parents about Harvard’s reaction to me. The next afternoon I gave a lecture at NIH before a set of impassive, question-less biochemists and the following day was on the plane back to Los Angeles. In boarding it I regretted not arranging that day to go out to Foxcroft, the posh girls’ boarding school located in the Middle-bury horse country to the west of Washington. There Margot Schutt, the evasive Vassar girl who held my eyes on the boat back from England, was now teaching history. In reaction to Foxcroft’s reputed horsiness, I guessed she might be in need of some human warmth.

  Pasadena and Berkeley: February–March 1955

  BACK IN PASADENA I had to face up to the loss of Leslie and Alice Orgel. At the new year, Leslie moved on from Linus Pauling’s group to be at the University of Chicago with Robert Mulliken, whose theoretical ideas about chemical bonds were in the ascendancy. I was effectively left with no one to speak unreservedly to about matters of the heart and also, with only one exception, Don Caspar, about RNA.

  Don had just arrived from Yale formally to be a postdoctoral fellow with Max Delbrück. For his Ph.D. thesis, Don had used X-ray diffraction techniques to establish the hole in the center of long, thin, pencil-shaped, RNA-containing tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). He was keen to do further X-ray diffraction studies on plant viruses, but found the Caltech crystallographic facilities not up to the task. Together we began using the Spinco analytical centrifuge belonging to the plant physiologists. With this instrument we could measure the size of TMV RNA molecules that Norman Simmons from the University of California at Los Angeles was preparing for me. When purified, this RNA might give much better diffraction patterns than those used the year before by Alex Rich and me. Don was always around for an evening meal because he had no local girlfriend and our conversations were more fact-laden than relaxing. Usually we avoided Athenaeum suppers and became regulars at a Van de Kamp restaurant, east of Caltech.

  My morale was not helped by seeing the just-released Japanese film Gates of Hell, about a samurai warrior going insane through his love of a married woman. Everyone in the departing audience looked emotionally stretched as we walked towards our cars in the blowing rain, and I was relieved that I need not return to the ghostly blah of an Athenaeum room. Instead I headed towards my small, reclaimed flat that the Orgels had occupied since my departure last June for Woods Hole. Gracing it now was an engraving done in 1840 of an Oxford college chapel from Victor and Tess Rothschild that served as their seasonal holiday card this year. Also comforting me was Geo Gamow’s recent special-delivery message to Alex and Jane Rich, noting that he “highly approved of Jim’s juvenile girl in tow.”

  Only several more days went by before twin sources of anxiety temporarily abated. A letter from Christa finally arrived, letting my stomach no longer seem to press against my legs. In it, she wrote that a Harvard appointment prospect looked excellent though the Biology Department would take several months to act. Ernst was working to convince his department that I was at heart a biologist, not a biochemist, and to that end kept referring to my deep interest in birds. No matter what they decided, however, I knew I was getting nowhere in Pasadena and should leave before Caltech came to the same conclusion. Already in the mid-fall I had written the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Washington to see if they could provide me senior fellowship funds to let me work with Francis again. Happily they said this might be possible, and I was soon sending them a formal proposal that would give me a yearly salary equivalent to that Caltech then provided.

  George Beadle knew that my girlfriend situation was driving me bananas and took my decision to leave with a regretful smile. Beets, nonetheless, kept encouraging me to fall for some local girl, and for a brief January moment I had hopes that a pretty small brunette from a Kansas academic family might be fun to be with. But our dinner date never got animated, and soon she was regularly having coffee with a young physicist. The only social events that had chances of coming alive for me involved academic visitors. Much fun came when I drove with Denys Wilkinson, the Cambridge nuclear physicist and avid birdwatcher, across the Mexican border into Baja California, whose coastline below Tijuana sparkled bright blue. Early in the afternoon, sensing we might be close to the ocean, we stopped below Ensenada near the small adobe-filled village of San Simon and hiked westwards to the coast. Unfortunately the tide was out with most shorebirds too far away. The following morning, we panicked when my car’s battery did not turn over. We were forced to walk several miles for help from two Mexican farm laborers just able to push our car fast enough to start the battery. Immensely relieved—Denys was expected that night for a Pasadena faculty supper—we recklessly risked axles and tires going fast over the 100 rutted-gravel miles that lay before the paved roads that would finally get us back to Caltech.

  At the end of January, Geo Gamow descended again on Caltech. His efforts to get Quartermaster Corps money for RNA Tie Club meetings had collapsed, but now he thought that the NSF might fund a small elite RNA and Protein Synthesis meeting in Boston in mid-June. I helped him prepare a list of names that he could send on to Washington. While the Caltech biologists at first welcomed Geo’s latest visit, the departure after four days of his large frame was a relief even to Don and me. Some four quarts of liquor store whisky were consumed, not counting those drunk at Stuart Harrison’s Saturday-night dinner party.

  When I discussed the Robert Oppenheimer affair with Geo earlier that day, I felt let down when I learnt that Geo felt Edward Teller had the right to say what he believed about Oppenheimer. But Geo thought that Teller behaved badly in hogging credit for the hydrogen bomb when the key intellectual trick came from the Polish-born mathematician Stan Ulam. When I protested that Oppenheimer had not been fairly treated, all Geo could reply was that politics was dirty and nothing could be done differently. Late Saturday night, while I was driving him back to the Athenaeum, Geo’s arrogance had gone, and he told me that life had its difficult transitions. He did not mention his marital troubles with Rho, but there was little doubt they were bothering him.

  On the way to Santa Monica, where I drove Geo for a Rand Corporation conference on interplanetary travel, we talked about why viruses—such as tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and poliomyelitis virus—contained RNA and no DNA. Did this mean RNA also functioned as a master genetic molecule capable of exact self-replication? If so, were there two forms of RNA or could one molecule be both the gene and the template for protein synthesis? This might be why RNA from TMV and the ribosomal particle sites of protein synthesis gave identical X-ray diffraction diagrams. In the car, Geo’s happily still Scotch-free responses were much to the point, again revealing the super mind that so early in his life catapulted him into the ranks of the very best physicists.

  From Santa Monica, it was less than a half-hour drive to the University of California LA lab of Norman Simon, from whose lab I got a new RNA preparation. Initially I got overexcited when its high negative birefringence implied bases oriented strongly perpendicular to the putative helical axis. The X-ray patterns these fibers generated, however, showed no better orientation than those Alex Rich obtained the year before. Increasingly I wanted to find out what TMV RNA molecules looked like in the electron microscope. Last November, while in Berkeley, my attempts with Robley Williams to look at TMV RNA had revealed only fibrous contaminants present in the city tap water. By using distilled water as well as much better RNA, future answers might be there to get.

  Before driving up again to the verdant Berkeley campus, I had a brief anxiety attack over a letter from George Wald. Over the holidays he had told me that he would write when someth
ing happened at Harvard, and so I hesitated to open his letter. But its purpose was only to ask me a simple question about DNA to which was appended the sentence “the affair Watson is going well and be patient.” The next afternoon, the Physics Department auditorium was jammed for Dick Feynman’s report of a recent East Coast meeting on the many, too many fundamental particles being discovered. Their inherent complexity made our RNA paradoxes mere children’s games as opposed to the adult dilemmas that so frustrated Dick, who wanted a grand scheme for nuclear forces like that accomplished for the atom in 1926.

  At Berkeley, Don Caspar and I were to give a joint seminar on TMV for which Wendell Stanley would pay us $50. Instead of barreling straight up Highway 99, we cut west to Taft and got caught in a speed trap for doing 65 miles per hour in the middle of nowhere. The unexpected beauty that came with crossing the Gabilan Mountain range into the Pinnacles National Monument happily made the stupid fine worthwhile. The next four days of Berkeley spring, punctuated by gentle English-like rain showers, kept me in high spirits despite our failure again to see genuine RNA fibers in the Virus Lab’s electron microscope. On the way back, I felt confident enough of my driving to risk the precipitous voids below the coast highway that we followed after spending the night at Big Sur.