Genes, Girls, and Gamow
Page 28
Early in September 1966, I went to a NATO-sponsored meeting on the Greek Island of Spetsai, a two-hour boat ride from Piraeus, the port of Athens. Francis, with Odile and his two daughters, boated over from Italy, where he was keeping his newly bought motor cruiser. Largely in control, Francis nonetheless had several anxious moments docking in the harbor of the large white resort hotel. Earlier, using Nobel Prize monies, he was temporarily part owner with the wealthy molecular biologist, Gianpiero DiMayorca, of a large sailboat in Naples. Seeing him once at its helm, Jacques Monod later commented this was the only occasion where he’d ever seen Francis in a modest mood.
At the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, June 1963: (from left to right) Francis Crick, Alex Rich, George Gamow, JDW, and Melvin Calvin
Harvard University Press then wanted to publish “Honest Jim,” its editor, Tom Wilson, liking it greatly when he read it the day after I finished the last chapter. In the fall of 1966, he sent copies of the manuscript and release forms to the principals mentioned in the story. Although Francis and Maurice Wilkins were annoyed by what I’d written, and had so informed the Press’s President Pusey, we hoped they would later accept the public’s need to know how the double helix was found. We felt more confident about going ahead when we got the Foreword from Sir Lawrence Bragg. The previous March, when I showed Bragg the manuscript in London, I had surprised him when I asked whether he would consider writing the Foreword. The year before that March meeting, not knowing I was already at the task, Bragg wrote me that I should tell my side of the story. Notwithstanding Bragg’s very positive Foreword, Harvard University Press was told in May 1967 by President Pusey to reject the manuscript. By then, Tom Wilson did not mind because he had decided for personal reasons to move to New York as a Senior Editor at Atheneum Publishers. In February 1968, they published the book as The Double Helix.
Nasrine’s Persian beauty did not long grace Harvard’s Biological Laboratories. Given her long weekend absences, I was not too surprised when in early March 1967 she revealed she was soon to be married to a Swiss chemist, then working in New York in his family’s business office. But I did not expect her then to ask me to give her away in the church ceremony already scheduled in May at Harvard Memorial Church. Apparently her father, for reasons that she did not explain, would then be detained in Tehran. Later, I learned that he had been the lawyer of the former Premier Mossadeq, long a bitter enemy of the Shah.
Not long before the mid-May wedding, on my way to Turkey for lectures again under Ford Foundation patronage, I stopped off in Geneva and popped into the antique shop of the woman in whose home Nasrine had lived before coming to Harvard. She offered me a Coke and I told her in English that I was soon to give Nasrine away. Not understanding what this phrase meant in English, she replied she understood my decision for people from the Middle East are not our type. After I clarified my remarks, she reversed course and said how pleased she was that Nasrine was marrying into one of Geneva’s most illustrious families, one that supplied fragrances worldwide for the perfume industry.
On the evening before the wedding, the bridegroom’s father hosted a small dinner for the bridal party at Locke-Ober, Boston’s best restaurant on Winter Place. At dessert, he posed for me the most important question of the evening. Was the fair Nasrine a good chemist? Without faltering, I replied that without that attribute Nasrine would not have a place at Harvard. At the wedding reception, held in the dignified Copley Plaza Hotel, messages were read from friends unable to attend. Everyone laughed when one was from a woman I’d met in Geneva. After expressing her wishes for much future happiness to Pierre Yves and Nasrine, she added “let’s hope that Jim Watson finds a wife as beautiful as Nasrine.” Afterwards, I drove the French-speaking girl with whom Nasrine had shared a flat back to its location on Massachusetts Avenue towards Central Square. There she told me that I was not the only person of note that had visited to collect Nasrine for quiet dinners. Soon after she had arrived from Europe, the junior senator from Massachusetts had phoned her in my lab to renew the conversation he had started some months before in the Firmenich home on Lake Geneva.
JDW and Nasrine Chahidzadeh on her wedding day, May 1967
But by then I had already found the needed beautiful girl. The blue eyes and full cheeks of the Radcliffe sophomore called Elizabeth Lewis were making me greatly anticipate the several afternoons each week she helped me with secretarial matters. Although she was to go off to Montana for a summer job, I had hopes of her returning to the lab in the fall. Before she left for a few days at her home in Providence, she eagerly accepted my last-minute invitation to a faculty cocktail party that I felt would be dull without her. We drove afterwards in my MG into Boston for a movie and walked together slowly about the Radcliffe Yard. I hesitated to hold her hand then, but realized she might like me more than a little when her postcard came from Montana.
During the fall of 1967 I found Liz even more captivating and introduced her to my father with whom we increasingly had early evening meals at the Hotel Continental basement restaurant. Our first real date was for the Christmas Party in our newly formed Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In its big basement party room, Paul Doty spotted us and afterwards told me that I had found a peach of a girl. Soon we were holding hands. Wanting to do so no longer in private, I found myself late in March 1968 awaiting Liz’s arrival at San Diego Airport. The Harvard spring vacation week was about to happen, and I had been at the Salk Institute for several days at a meeting bringing together cancer researchers and journalists. One reporter chose to interview me, noting that I was nervously holding a can of Coke as I talked about my new position as Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This new job did not require me to leave Harvard but would give me the opportunity to have a second lab where I could start work on tumor viruses. What the New York Times reporter did not know was that two days later I was getting married.
Besides Liz and her parents, the only person who knew what I was up to was a highly literate polymath from London, Jacob Bronowski, and his secretary, Silvia. I wanted to get married quickly and simply, and with Silvia’s help found just the right cleric, Reverend Forshaw of La Jolla’s Congregational Church. He would marry us at an evening ceremony, at 9 p.m. on March 28. Early that afternoon, I took Liz from her plane to a clinic where we were certified free from venereal disease and later we drove 15 miles north for a marriage license. Then we went to the Valencia Hotel, where later we were to spend the night, and had supper at the Whaler’s Bar. We then drove to the Bronowskis’ strikingly modern oceanside home, where we were photographed many times, and finally to the church to meet the Reverend Forshaw. He suggested a not-very-religious ceremony, and we agreed. I, noting books by Bertrand Russell on his bookshelf, suspected he had officiated over many such ceremonies in the past.
With my bride, March 28, 1968
Ten minutes later we were married with Jacob my best man. Then we made the two-minute walk to the Valencia Hotel where we had arranged at the last minute a reception for my friends at the Salk Institute, among them Leslie and Alice Orgel who had moved there permanently from England. Leslie refused to believe I was married, thinking the occasion was a practical joke and Liz a professional model hired to fool him. The next morning I sent to Paul Doty a postcard on which I wrote “19 year old now mine.” He had been right in thinking that in Liz at long last I had the appropriate girl.
Now, more than thirty years later, she remains very much a sweet peach.
George Gamow Memorabilia
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
frontispiece, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page:
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives this page: Cavendish Laboratory Archives
this page: Nature Publishing Group
this page: Seymour Benzer; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives
this page: Norton Zinder; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives
this page,
this page, this page: courtesy of Christa Menzel
this page: courtesy of Derek Burke
this page, this page: California Institute of Technology Archives
this page, this page, this page: courtesy of Alex Rich
this page, this page: courtesy of Igor Gamow
this page: National Library of Medicine, Bethesda: Institute for the History of Medicine
this page: John Engstead; Vogue magazine, Condé Nast Publications
this page: courtesy of Emma Rothschild
this page: courtesy of Erwin Chargaff
this page–this page: courtesy of Francis Crick
this page: Eleanor and Clyde Moore, 2001 (www.photosbyeleanor.com) this page, this page: West of Scotland Press Agency
this page, this page: courtesy of Don Caspar
this page: Francis di Gennaro; University of Maryland at Baltimore this page: Melanie Jackson Agency—Feynman Estate
this page: Rick Stafford; Harvard University News Office
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Chicago, James D. Watson studied at the University of Chicago (B.S.) and Indiana University (Ph.D.) before going to Europe in fall 1951. After a year in Denmark, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he met Francis Crick. For their 1953 discovery of the double helix they, with Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1956, he became attached to the Biological Laboratories of Harvard University, where he remained a member of the faculty until 1976. In 1968 he also began serving as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, and shifted its research focus to the study of cancer. Since 1994, he has been its president. Between 1988 and 1992, he was associated with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), helping to establish the Human Genome Project. His seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene was published in 1965. He later helped to write The Molecular Biology of the Cell (1983) and Recombinant DNA: A Short Course (1983). He is also the author of a previous memoir, The Double Helix.