Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  Four days into June I set off for Chicago, where 72 hours later I let out my co-driver, a biology graduate student, at his parents’ house in a North Shore suburb. Then, after a relaxing birdwatching week with my parents, I spent a more intellectual week talking genetics at Cold Spring Harbor before driving on to Harvard. For my first night there, I stayed with the Mayrs in their flat on Washington Avenue. Christa had already left for Europe, initially to wander with a girlfriend through France and then give herself time to become semi-fluent in German before starting her university studies. So Ernst gave me the Fribourg address of her uncle, with whom she would be staying by mid-July, and where I might meet her after I attended a Nucleic Acids meeting in France.

  By early afternoon, I was on my way for an overnight visit to Woods Hole where Geo Gamow was spending the summer alone in a small house on the Eel Pond. It let him escape from his nightmarish marital problems with Rho and gave him peace of mind to work on a new book on cosmology as well as more RNA Tie Club antics. Martynas Ycas had already been down from Boston to discuss their scheme for tentatively assigning amino acids to the 64 three-base permutations of A, G, C, and U. Earlier in the year, they had used the nucleotide base and the amino acid compositions of tobacco mosaic and turnip yellow viruses to look for a correlation between the proportions of the 20 different amino acids and those of the four RNA bases. Just recently Martynas had obtained from Berkeley the corresponding compositional data for tomato bushy stunt virus. It seemed to back codon assignments they had made earlier.

  As soon as I entered Geo’s cottage, he offered me a Scotch to go with the large glass he was already imbibing. But knowing that both of us were going after dinner to a party at the Walds’, I deferred drinking until I went nearby to Andrew and Eve Szent-Györgyi’s house for supper and local gossip. When we moved on to George Wald’s house, Geo was already threatening to limerick-dominate an occasion that George assumed would be for his Brooklyn jokes, best told when his wife was in the kitchen. Geo went through more whisky, but ample beer satisfied the other guests, almost all having returned from the previous summer, and more often than not connected to the physiology course George would again be instructing and where Geo would be a guest lecturer. Near midnight, most certainly Frances and even George were not sorry to force us out.

  When I left the party I did not want to be alone for long in my alcoholic haze and persuaded a cheerful, well-proportioned Columbia University student to drive with me to Nobska Beach and its white sands, on which we silently parked. She was both eager for the affection that I had not bestowed last summer and much too nice for me instantly to make clear that something that made no sense last summer made even less sense now. Fortunately she knew that I was flying to London only 36 hours later, which gave me the excuse to start up my car before embarrassing apologies were necessary. For a moment I panicked when the wheels of my car spun in the sand, and I feared that a rescue mission would have to be mounted to push my car back on the road. Then the back wheels gripped better and soon we were in front of the house in which she had rented a room for the summer. She was not at all put out by my passion fizzling and wanted a last big hug to say good-bye. I saw no reason to disappoint her in this.

  Cambridge (England): July 1955

  MY BRAIN REVVED up the moment I was back in old Cambridge in June 1955. The non-hysterical pace of a Caltech oblivious to conversational subtleties was now out of my psyche, replaced by the buzz of Francis Crick holding court within his Cavendish domain. After my first lunch back at the Eagle with Francis, he took me to see Nevill Mott, the clever, now solid-state, physicist from Bristol, chosen the year before to replace Sir Lawrence Bragg as the Cavendish Professor. Until recently, and for almost a year, Mott had erroneously believed that Francis’s surname was the middle-class sounding Watson-Crick.

  Francis wanted the pleasure of showing Mott his American partner, again to share the first-floor office in the Austin wing where the double helix was discovered. With the pleasantries over, Francis explained how our room was to be jam-packed with visiting scientists, the result of the growing attention accorded to the work of the Medical Research Council (MRC) unit. Precious little free space would be available for the RNA models that we intended to focus on over the next several months. Mott, however, knew better than to rise to Francis’s bait by asking how much more space we needed. He knew that we were aware that he wished the biologically oriented MRC unit to vacate its Cavendish site. As soon as possible, Mott wanted the Cavendish completely back to physics and hopefully the preeminent role that it had when first led by J. J. Thomson and then by Ernest Rutherford. But he knew that no satisfactory university space was currently free for the unit to move to and so was resigned to seeing biologists within his province for one or two more years.

  My arrival had been preceded several days earlier by that of Alex Rich. He came bearing samples of synthetic RNA molecules made in New York by Severo Ochoa and Marianne Grunberg-Manago. Soon after learning of their discovery, Alex persuaded Ochoa to send a sample of his enzymatically synthesized RNA to his National Institutes of Health (NIH) lab. But the X-ray diagrams obtained generated only marginally acceptable pictures. Very likely the synthetic RNA had a structure identical to that which Alex and I had found at Caltech 18 months earlier. But Alex was not 100 percent sure and saw the availability of the much more powerful, rotating anode X-ray equipment at the Cavendish as a perfect excuse for a short visit to Cambridge. By coming, he told his NIH boss he would have a good chance at last of solving RN A’s structure.

  Several weeks before, there had been a brief RNA fling in the London papers when they published news from Berkeley that Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams had reconstituted infectious tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) particles by mixing together purified TMV protein and TMV RNA, neither of which they found infectious by themselves. Aided by University of California publicists, their finding was being touted as a great step toward the eventual artificial creation of life. To vet this hysteria, The Times called Francis, who took delight in being quoted that he had been anticipating the successful reconstitution of a virus from its protein and nucleic acid components. It was not a step toward the creation of life but, if reported otherwise, would not have generated the press excitement that Berkeley wanted.

  For several days after my arrival, I stayed with John and Elizabeth Kendrew in their little Peterhouse-owned house, 12 Tennis Court Road. John was upbeat about myoglobin—the oxygen-carrying muscle protein—and the effective help that earlier he had gotten from the Midwestern American postdoc, Bob Parrish, and now from the even more determined, Los Angeles–originating Howard Dintzsis. The long fallow period marked by failures to crystallize horse myoglobin happily vanished when John turned the year before to whales and seals as myoglobin sources. Now he and Dintzsis were searching for suitable heavy metals to exploit Max Perutz’s 1953 breakthrough that isomorphous replacement techniques should reveal the three-dimensional arrangements of the atoms in proteins.

  John was now keen for more serious Alpine walking—like we had done in the Gran Paradiso, north of Turin, in the summer of 1952. For a new adventure, we settled on the first week of August immediately after a meeting on “Les Macromolecules des Vivants” that I was to attend at Pallanza (Verbania) on Lake Maggiore, north of Milan. Francis, not me, was initially asked to speak at this non-mainstream gathering, the proposed program for which held out little hope for intellectual enlightenment. At first Francis smelled a practical joke perpetuated by Italian friends of mine and so needed reassurance that the gathering was for real, and might help put Italian biology firmly on the DNA track. But with Alex Rich on the Cambridge, Mass., scene, Francis saw no point in taking off a week for an affair where the food and scenery, not the science, was to be the main attraction. He could back out easier if I took his place on the program, and I readily accepted his offer. Being there, I would have reason for crossing Switzerland into Germany to see Christa Mayr.

  From Clare College’s head tu
tor I got permission to occupy, until the fall term started, a garret room in the Old Court adjacent to the Cam. Out of its late-seventeenth-century windows, I could look over the classical features of Clare to the splendors of King’s College Chapel. That my bed was granite-hard, that no washbasin was nearby, and my bed-maker was uncommunicative were irrelevant. Only some three minutes were needed to reach Trinity Street, buy The Times, and nip into The Whim for breakfast. Later I could stroll up King’s Parade, pass the Senate House, and only two minutes later walk through the gated passageway of the Cavendish Laboratory.

  Technically I was again a research student coming back to complete a Ph.D. thesis not finished because my draft board dictated my return to the States. Through this dodge I could live in Clare with the small university bench fees paid out of National Science Foundation funds that Harvard was passing on to Max Perutz to cover my research costs at the Cavendish. The remaining $875 was sent to Caltech for a large set of Pauling-Corey space-filling atomic models. When they arrived, Francis and I could have a fresh start in assessing options for RNA’s structure. Until then we planned to complete our unfinished theoretical article on plant-virus structure, contrasting the helical symmetry of TMV with the probable cubic symmetry of spherical viruses such as turnip yellow mosaic virus (TYMV) and tomato bushy stunt virus (TBSV). In it, we would emphasize the structural consequences of the viral protein shells being constructed from smaller protein building blocks. Soon we would be joined by Don Caspar, who had just obtained funds that would let him be for a year at the Cavendish before taking up a research position at Yale. Here in Cambridge his objective was to use the unit’s powerful X-ray equipment to establish unambiguously the cubic symmetry of the protein shell of TBSV.

  I had hoped to dine with Hugh Huxley often, but his experiments never seemed to generate free evenings for socializing. Now back from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for almost a year, he was very excited by the sliding-filament model of muscle contraction implied by his MIT electron-microscope results. With his Ph.D. finished, he had the total independence that came from his recent appointment to the MRC unit’s staff. Upon Hugh’s return, John Kendrew initially hoped that Peter Pauling would become so intrigued by Hugh’s new discovery that he would change his research direction away from myoglobin and take up muscle research. Peter, however, made no such move and after my return to the unit, John was resigned to Peter’s research, if not his emotional ups and downs, continuing to be much of his own life.

  Giving Peter an important part of the myoglobin project was never in the cards, for John could not risk being dependent on his progress. He could never be certain that Peter would actually be in Cambridge, and even when seen coming and going from his Peterhouse rooms, Peter’s attention was not necessarily directed to science. When I arrived, Peter was on the continent taking his brother’s large, open, touring car to Stuttgart for an engine overhaul by the Mercedes factory. When so fixed, its prodigious petrol consumption might decrease to the point where Peter could actually afford impressing selective Girton and Newnham girls with conspicuous rides through the streets of Cambridge.

  The broad Pauling grin on Peter’s face that marked his re-entrance into my life several days later was only momentary. His girlfriend situation was also not great. With his old girl flame, Mariette Robertson, now in Paris, he had found it too easy to resume their past Pasadena closeness. But liking Mariette a lot was not keeping Peter from wanting to get equally near to several other full-bodied girls attracted by the Pauling magnetism. Having too many girls to choose from, however, was not the cause of his current discontent. The thorn in his heart was fear that he had made a gigantic mistake in letting Nina, the petite, blond au-pair girl of the Perutzes, slip out of his life and irreversibly return to her native Denmark.

  The Pauling charm was also not simplifying the life of Peter’s younger sister, Linda, who was now using Cambridge as her base for the year in Europe that had started in the fall. At Reed College in Oregon, she had been a close item with Wendell Stanley, Jr., whose father’s Nobel Prize and prominence at Berkeley somewhat tempered her parents’ concern that their daughter needed to grow up more before getting too emotionally involved. By graduation time, however, Linda foresaw more excitement in a European year on her own than from early marriage to a potential science graduate student. Happily, her parents proved more than agreeable to the necessary financing.

  All went well with Linda’s new life until the spring and her growing relationship with her fellow young American, Jonathan Mirsky, then attracted to King’s College for postgraduate studies in Chinese culture and history. He was the son of the protein biochemist Alfred Mirsky, then a prominent fixture at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. To Linda’s surprise, if not shock, Linus and Ava Helen had reacted badly to their daughter’s letter informing them of Jonathan’s and her plans for a late spring trip to Spain. To Linda, her parents’ objection came straight out of the blue, because they had never before criticized young couples for knowing each other well before marriage. Particularly galling was the fact that her parents personally knew Jonathan’s parents. The Mirskys had spent several years at Caltech in the late 1930s, to allow Alfred to bring Linus into contact with the lore as well as the facts of prewar protein chemistry.

  Linda could only smell anti-Semitism from two prominent California members of the National Council of Christians and Jews. So outraged, she made her growing Cambridge circle aware of her parents’ hypocrisy. But those in the know about Alfred Mirsky were not convinced. More likely, Linus and Ava Helen did not want their daughter involved with the son of a pretentious scientist, whose ego was inflated far beyond his accomplishments. Mirsky, in the years just before the finding of the double helix, had fought an ungracious losing battle against his colleague Oswald Avery’s claim that DNA, not protein, carried genetic information.

  The trip to Spain became a matter of honor for Linda. It went ahead as scheduled, though from its start the pair worried that they risked running out of money unless their pesetas were watched. As they drove even deeper into Spain, their shoestring living, far from further cementing them together, was instead aggravating differing emotional needs. Full disaster, however, struck only near the trip’s end when they were involved in an accident near the French border that seriously damaged their rental car. Lacking the funds to make the needed repairs, they sent cries of help to England, not wishing to test the response they might hear from Linus and Ava Helen. Luckily, Victor Rothschild rescued them by sending money to get their car back on the road.

  By the time Linda somewhat sheepishly crept back into Cambridge, she badly needed a jumpstart. To begin with, she both needed a place to sleep and some form of work to fill her days. Most certainly she did not want to be further beholden to her parents, whose price might very well be her return to California by the summer’s end. If only her college years had provided genuine job qualifications instead of manicuring her for eventual marriage to a thinking, probably self-centered, professional man.

  Several days later at supper with Francis and Odile Crick, I finally came face to face with her. Cheerfully blond and attractively upright, Linda was not at all hesitant to look you in the eye and say what she thought. First temporarily, and probably now for the summer, she was occupying the front basement room in the next-door house just added to The Golden Helix, the Cricks’ home in Portugal Place. With its own entrance, it was a perfect room for an au-pair girl to come and go unobtrusively when not needed to help care for the Cricks’ young daughters, Jacqueline and Gabrielle. Odile temporarily was without an au pair and Linda, not unhappily, was assuming this role. But she wondered how to let her mother know that she was now the domestic chattel of the man who helped deny her father the double helix. But with Alex and soon Jane Rich as fellow housemates, Linda knew her immediate days, though boyfriendless, would not be lonely.

  Later that week I dined with Victor and Tess Rothschild at their imposing home of monastery origin on the Cam a
cross from St. John’s College. They held court at Merton Hall, the name reflecting long-term ownership of the land not by John’s but by Merton College, Oxford. When I arrived, a male servant told me they were still preoccupied with personal business, which gave me the chance of a long talk with their daughter, Emma, whose inquisitive smile belied her seven years. As she showed me about the grounds, I found Emma up to adult babble and regretted when her parents, apologizing for making me wait so long, signaled for her to go to her room.

  Over the main course, I brought up Rosalind Franklin’s apprehension, learned when I was at her lab the week before, that the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) was looking skeptically on her request for a new X-ray diffractometer. Without it, her research on TMV could not proceed at a pace commensurate with the talents of her new collaborators—an able research student called Ken Holmes and a mathematically powerful South African, Aaron Klug, who was eager to move into biology from his dreary Ph.D. thesis on how molten steel solidifies. Although Victor’s role as chairman of the ARC was more honorary than active, he had the ear of its chief administrator, Sir William Slater, and had already been apprised of the additional monies Rosalind needed. Apparently her request would fare better if she made alliances with one of Britain’s more senior plant virologists, a step that would waste everyone’s time. If necessary, Rosalind was up to this bureaucratic nonsense. On the bad side, no action was likely to be taken until the August holidays were over, but Victor gave me the impression he would quietly be on Rosalind’s side.