Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  That night Guido Pontecorvo called from his nearby summer home in St. Luc just up the valley north of Zinal. He would join us the next day when we again planned to go up to Cabane du Mountet (2886 meters). From there, with a friend, Ponte was to climb the relatively uncomplicated Lo Besso, in contrast to the major challenges of the Zinalrothorn that Alfred and Michael wanted to ascend. Over supper, Ponte tried to persuade me to do the simpler Besso ascent, but I feared that he was not strong enough to get me out of potential difficulty. At dawn, Alfred, Michael, and I went back down the rocks onto ice and were soon on the massive Glacier de Mountet that climbs steeply up almost 900 meters to the narrow snow-covered ridge leading to the solid rock pinnacle of the Zinalrothorn. Serious crevices were absent, and without too much strain I virtually reached the ridge before confessing that the final ascent would be too much for me. Alfred and Michael continued upwards out of my view while I turned back no longer terrified by the prospect of what lay ahead. As I came down, the sky quickly filled with dark clouds that increasingly hid the Zinalrothorn and Ober Gabelhorn from my view. Back at the hut, I suspected that the uncertain weather would cause Alfred and Michael to turn back. So I was not surprised when in less than an hour they also appeared. That they had not conquered the Zinalrothorn made me feel less dejected by my loss of nerve. Later I accepted the fact that the real Alps were never for me.

  The break from the good weather was prophesied to be long-lasting, and we went down to the flatness of the Rhone Valley and the main line trains running through it. I went east to change to a carriage destined for Basel where I spent the night. The next morning I was on a train going 50 miles north to Freiburg and the relatives’ home where I hoped to find Christa. Easily I found the house of Dr. Frederick Simon at Burgunderstrasse 20 and then nervously awaited seeing Christa opening the front door. She, however, was away on a trip and not expected back for two nights. In broken German, I thankfully accepted the offer of a free bed for the nights ahead. After then unsuccessfully using my limited ability to read scientific German to try to converse with her relatives, I retreated to the Penguin version of Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford. Many of its passages made me laugh uncontrollably, and I was totally relaxed when Christa finally walked in the door and unexpectedly found me. Immediately I sensed her eagerness to be with me soon in London and Cambridge and then to go north into Scotland, where I had been invited to spend a September week with Av Mitchison’s parents, Dick and Naomi. The next day Christa and I joined her relatives for a long and relaxed walk through the Black Forest and then I was off by train back to Switzerland.

  With Christa again on my immediate horizon, I was first disappointed and then mildly relieved when, in Geneva, Jean Weigle gave me his “bad” news that the McMichaels were not on hand. Seeing Ann before I knew whether Christa and I would truly pair in Scotland might make me say what I would later regret.

  Cambridge (England) and Scotland: September 1955

  THE LONG VAC was almost over and the tourists were beginning to thin out when I arrived back in Cambridge. The deep-green college quads no longer reverberated from students shouting across to each other, and the coming month would be perfect for contemplation without interruptions. Francis Crick, however, was not in deep thought but happily agitated when I bounded up the Cavendish stairs into our office. Uncharacteristically in before me, he was fiddling with a polypeptide-chain model that I had never seen before. Animatedly Francis explained that it was a model for polyglycine II that an X-ray diffraction article in the latest issue of Nature had propelled him and Alex Rich to concoct over the weekend.

  They had come up with a stereochemically elegant proposal in which the parallel polyglycine chains, with threefold helical twists, are held together by intrachain hydrogen bonds between the amino and carbonyl oxygens of their peptide bonds. By itself, their solution of the polyglycine II structure was no big thing. It was its implication for the much more important collagen structure that now made Francis and Alex jump with joy. Linus Pauling, five years before, had not gotten collagen right nor had Francis while bored a year ago in Brooklyn. But through their new polyglycine II opening, they might unambiguously nail down the correct structure before the London King’s College collagen team put on thinking caps.

  Over lunch in the Eagle, Francis shared his recent unexpected letter from my fellow American, Henry Wallace. He had been Vice President during Franklin Roosevelt’s third term after serving in his cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture. By now he was generally perceived as a communist sympathizer as he had run for President against Harry S Truman and Thomas Dewey, in 1948, under a Progressive Party banner. But before Wallace got into politics he had been a successful breeder of hybrid corn, and it was as a plant geneticist that he had written Francis about potential applications of the double helix for the plant-breeding world. Unfortunately, we then saw none.

  That day I also learned that John and Elizabeth Kendrew’s marriage was on the rocks and most likely irretrievably over. The situation was a ghastly mess with Hugh Huxley somehow involved. With that news, I instantly understood John’s uncharacteristic bolting in the midst of our mountain walk in August. The matter was just coming to a head when John left Cambridge to join me in Italy. Apparently, upon reaching Saas Fee he learned that Elizabeth had already cleared out her possessions from their house in Tennis Court Road.

  That Hugh was in Elizabeth’s picture was not a total shock to Odile Crick and me. Three years before there was a big costume party at Roughton House on Adams Road that neither Francis nor John wanted to attend. But their wives thought it would be “the party of the year,” so Odile and Elizabeth dressed up for Hugh and me. Odile and I stayed nearly to its end and coming back across Garret Hostel Bridge came upon Hugh and Elizabeth in embrace looking down the Cam. Too much alcohol might have caused this indiscretion, and in any case Hugh was soon off for his two-year Commonwealth Fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  The marriage was Elizabeth’s second, with her first husband killed when the Cruiser Dorset was sunk early in World War II by the Japanese. John was the best man at their marriage before he too went off to war serving in the Middle and Far East as an aide to Lord Mountbatten. In Cairo, he told me he had fallen deeply in love with a Jewish girl whose family stopped their romance because he was not of their faith. When the war ended, he looked up Elizabeth and they found themselves falling in love and in 1948 married. Initially they lived in Blackheath, just south of Greenwich, to let Elizabeth become medically qualified in London. Even before their 1950 move to Cambridge, John had fallen out of love and did not want to have children that would trap him irreversibly with someone he no longer loved. But he felt responsible for Elizabeth, and also had to worry that he might lose his Fellowship because the then Master of his college, Peterhouse, strongly disapproved of divorce. Until this week, I had no inkling of their troubled life together. But Hugh Huxley’s knowledge of their unhappiness dated back to a visit four years earlier to John’s art-historian mother, who had long lived in Florence. After the Roughton party, he became Elizabeth’s confidant, having already fallen in love with her petite English beauty and intelligence. Elizabeth, though responsive to Hugh’s feelings, was still strongly bound to John, and Hugh, unwilling to precipitate a break-up, was glad to remove himself for his two-year Fellowship at MIT.

  Elizabeth still remained partly in love with John, though angry at their situation, and hoped against hope that their marriage would reignite. At one stage, she had threatened to leave John and stayed only when he promised things would be different. But their uninteracting lives remained the same. Independently, Hugh, having returned from MIT, and seeing the unhappy situation unchanged, was also in emotional agony, unwilling to intervene yet unable to put aside his love for Elizabeth. He now wanted out of Cambridge again, and hoped then to feel free to get on with his own life, whatever it involved. Unaware of this, Elizabeth had finally decided to make the break. Rumors were now about that Hugh was moving to
University College London.

  With John’s mind not easily focused on science, Peter Pauling saw no harm in soon absenting himself to the continent to bring back to Cambridge his brother’s Mercedes roadster. Before going off, Peter had driven Don Caspar to the hour-away Agricultural Experimentation Station in Rothamsted. They had made this trip in a second of his brother’s cars, a speedy Porsche that also with time would be shipped to Honolulu. Like the Mercedes, it was in Peter’s care. At Rothamsted, Don would get crystals of tomato bushy stunt virus from its plant virologist, Frank Bawden. In 1938, J. D. Bernal had first used X-rays in Cambridge to look at this virus, realizing that its very large size made it then a virtually impossible objective for the X-ray crystallographer. Now Don thought otherwise, and towards this end had just come to Cambridge, arriving on the day that grouse shooting started in Scotland.

  By then, I was jittery, anticipating Christa Mayr’s impending appearance by train and Channel crossing from Germany. The morning she was to come I went down to London and made my way to Victoria Station long in advance of her arrival. After hugging her on the platform, I led her around Piccadilly Circus and down to Trafalgar Square before taking the tube to Liverpool Street Station for the train up to Cambridge. The bowler hats of the “City” commuters together with the coal-gas smells from the fires of the early fall made me feel as if we were almost part of a pre-war movie.

  With women officially forbidden to be in Clare overnight, Christa spent her Cambridge nights at The Green Door, the attic apartment in Thompson Lane where the Cricks first lived in Cambridge. It was currently let by Ann Cullis, Max Perutz’s efficient, good-looking technician, whose cheerful personality made her fun to talk with at coffee and tea times. Quickly she put Christa at ease by offering us supper after we saw the highlights of the colleges along the banks of the Cam. After peeking in my austere Clare attic room, Christa and I slowly wandered through its Fellows’ Garden before going back across the Cam to Trinity and looking up to the overwhelming presence of Wren’s great late-seventeenth-century library.

  The following morning, Christa got her first view of the Cavendish Lab and Francis at work, and we stayed until morning coffee, hoping in vain that Alex would arrive earlier than usual. After a pub lunch, we acquired a punt and pulled ourselves under the Clare Bridge and up past Magdalene College, happy that the river traffic jams and gawking midsummer tourists were gone until the next year. Over supper at The Golden Helix, Francis pressed Christa as to whether she had come close to falling out of the punt, trapped by holding on to our punt pole stuck in the mud. The next afternoon I rented a bike for Christa so that we could pedal to the north, first following the course of the Cam where the May race “bumps” occur. After passing a lock that lets the Cam drop six feet, we were soon at the Bridge Hotel at Clayhythe for tea. Afterwards, we cycled on to Waterbeach, where a fighter bomber from the nearby American airbase flew low above us, and the temporarily darkened sky and attendant chill over the flat fen farm scene made us relieved that we had brought along sweaters.

  Up early the next morning for going into London for a sightseeing flurry, we met Leslie and Alice Orgel for quick, pre-theatre supper. They were just back in England after the Chicago months of their American stay. With Leslie now a Cambridge lecturer in theoretical chemistry, they had moved into a commodious flat carved out of the attic of a large stucco-faced house off Trumpington Road, just beyond Scroop Terrace. We all went to see Claire Bloom and John Gielgud perform in King Lear in a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre.

  The next day I rented from Marshall’s Garage on Hills Road a tiny Morris Minor that somehow was to get us to and from Scotland for our stay with the Mitchisons. Initially the left-hand driving made me quite nervous, but after 30 minutes on the road my only worry was coming out of roundabouts heading in the right direction. We were free to take any road that took our fancy, so the next morning we drove due north 20 miles to Ely and its great medieval cathedral that was just beyond the limits of our past day’s biking ambitions. More fen farm views dominated our drive to Wisbech, and soon we were in Lincolnshire, going along flat roads close to the North Sea. The late afternoon had us heading westwards to get around the long estuary of the Humber and up possibly to York. With my legs cramped by too many hours in our tiny car, we quit driving at dusk and, after failing to get a room in a halfway decent town center hotel, found ourselves signing the register at a small hotel on the outskirts of Scunthorpe. Its smoky bar was already filled with boisterous, Saturday-night revelers, whose drunken cries led us to eat quickly in the adjoining dining room. Without testing the outside air, we went soon to our plainly furnished double-bedded room.

  With being together no longer a dream but an immediate reality and glazed tired from the day of left-side driving, I became nervous about the moments ahead. After several long fumbles that almost ended in disaster, we soon fell soundly asleep. The awkwardness of our first night in bed never surfaced during the next-day’s drive that first took us through York and across the bare moors of Yorkshire and Northumberland. Two hours’ passage through the lowlands of Scotland brought us to a small Edinburgh hotel in time for its Sunday night high tea that had aspects of an American bacon-and-eggs breakfast. Then to my acute unease, my first night of fumbles was followed by a second night that was not much better. Only on our third night did our bodies finally move together. We were at the tiny Cluanie Inn on the road that would pass Eilean Down Castle on the way to the Kyle of Lochalsh and the ferry to Skye.

  Reaching Skye had long been an ambition of mine since my mother’s father was of the MacKinnon clan, most of whose members originated from the southern part of the island. Three years before, when Mother came to see me, we had set off from Fort William on the lower road to the Isles but stopped far short at Glenfinnan when torrential rains did not stop. Now the weather was also rainy but not enough to keep Christa and me from looking up at the jagged peaks of the Cuillin Hills or comparing the flat hills known as Macleod’s Tables to the mesas of Utah and Arizona. I kept alert for the name MacKinnon on road signs and increasingly spotted it when we drove through Sleat in Skye’s gentler southeast. There we came across a large upended truck against which our Morris Minor seemed toylike.

  After a night at a Portree B&B, we retraced our path to Fort William and drove south to Oban, where by happenstance we saw the openings of the Highland Games. We continued down the Argyll coast to the tiny fishing village of Carradale, on the eastern shore of the Mull of Kintyre, across from the lovely mountainous island of Arran in the Firth of Clyde. Here was the Scottish home of Av Mitchison’s parents, Dick and Naomi (Nou). As a London barrister, Dick had quarters in the Middle Temple and as a Labour MP needed largely to be in London. But for the Edinburgh-born Nou, then almost 60, Carradale House and the Highland Panel at which she represented Argyll had been the main foci of her life for almost 20 years. In Scotland, she was close to the soil, her cattle, and the problems of her half-owned fishing vessel as well as the occasional poacher who stole salmon from the river that ran through their estate.

  The Mitchison land, with its house, farm buildings, and pastures looking down to a sheltered small bay to the south, had been acquired in the mid-1930s to give Nou a Scottish home to complement her Haldane blood that had long been a prominent feature of Scotland’s intellectual and commercial life. Born in 1897, Nou had married Dick in the middle of World War I, which he luckily survived, winning the Croix de Guerre. During the 1920s their children—Denny, Murdoch, Lois, Av, and Val—were born, in that order, and raised in a house along the River Thames at Chiswick when not up at Carradale for holidays and the summer. Carradale House, built in turreted Gothic style more than a hundred years before, had its large drawing room and dining room on the south sea-facing side separated by a hall whose large front door went down to grass that bordered a walled garden to the west.

  On Skye with Christa in early September 1955; our rented Morris Minor dwarfed by an upended truck

  Besides the main family bed
rooms, Carradale House had sleeping space for various grandchildren as well as guests who came up from England for the major holidays and summer stays. By late September when we visited, almost all the visitors were gone except for Murdoch and his wife, Rowy, still present because their two children, Neil and Sally, were too young for formal school. I half-expected Av to be there, but he was back in Edinburgh, where both he and Murdoch did their research in its university’s Zoology Department. But on hand was Av’s close Oxford friend, the Magdalen College mathematician Victor Guggenheim, escaping from the emotional complexities of less-talented colleagues. On our walks up surrounding hills, he and Christa hit it off well, leaving me largely next to Murdoch who was never at a loss for a new observation to explain. Back in the house and over dinner, the talk was dominated by politics and how the Tories were nullifying the actions of the postwar Labour government.

  Carradale House in Kintyre, home of Naomi and Dick Mitchison

  At Carradale House, Nou had the time to ferociously type out one book manuscript after another. Often she did so to purge from her mind emotional demons that, unchecked, might destabilize the narrow line demarcating her role as lady of the manor from the tractor-driving woman of the soil. Already in the mid-1920s, she and Dick had abandoned the emotional restraints that most persons born to their privileges did not know how to live without. Their behavior, in part, was a reaction to the trench slaughters along the Somme that took away so many dear friends of their idyllic pre–World War I years when her scientist brother, Jack (J. B. S. Haldane), and Dick were up at Oxford. Then the still-adolescent and succulently shaped Nou wrote plays or composed pantomimes for them to act in, together with their close friends Julian and Aldous Huxley. Nou proposed to the latter, without success, to have as her lover. Almost blind in one eye, Aldous never saw the trenches across the Channel and after the war remained close to Nou and Jack, whose provocative 1924 Daedalus essay about where biology was going became the essence of his schoolmate’s 1928 Point Counter Point. By then Nou herself was also widely acclaimed as a writer with her 1923 The Conquered, which was set in historical times and let her examine the complex bonds of friendship and comradeship. Later Dick and Nou were more into social than political causes, helping to bring the Birth Control Research Committee into existence in 1927. To Nou, who called it domestic prostitution, the conventional notion of marriage (then and now) was profoundly wrong.