Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James D. Watson

  With its corridor walls seemingly unpainted for at least a decade, the Biolabs’ only sparkle came from the two enormous bronze rhinoceros that flanked the main entranceway. They had been sculpted by a talented friend of President Lowell's, who also designed the friezes of wild animals that ran above the courtyard. The vision of biology these figures conveyed meshed well with the mission of Harvard's nearby Department of Geographical Exploration, its building still topped by the radio antenna once used to keep in touch with members out beyond the fringes of Western civilization. But that department no longer existed. Rumor had it that President Lowell had been horrified to learn that several of its members were homosexuals. So its handsome one-story brick edifice was now the center of Harvard's Far Eastern studies, where the savvy John King Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer held sway.

  Even closer to the Biolabs along Divinity Avenue was the Semitic Museum, donated by the banker Jacob Schiff at the end of World War I to encourage the study of ancient Jewish culture. But now most of its facilities were occupied by the Bob Bowie- and Henry Kissinger-led Harvard Center for International Affairs (HCIA), whose acronym encoded the identity of its secret government funder, which had an interest in training Harvard's students as the possible future leaders of the free world.

  On the far side of the elm-lined grassy courtyard in front of the Biolabs stood what once had been the principal dormitory of the Harvard Divinity School. Ralph Waldo Emerson was said to have lived there early in the nineteenth century. But such historical facts mattered little to James Conant, under whose presidency the Divinity School's long minor role in Protestant theological training had withered almost to extinction. Just before my arrival, religion at Harvard was given a new lease on life through the appointment of Nathan Marsh Pusey as its next president. Born in Iowa in 1907, Pusey had studied classics as a Harvard undergraduate and had obtained his Ph.D. there at the age of thirty. After teaching at Lawrence, Scripps, and Wesleyan colleges, he returned to Wisconsin as president of Lawrence College in 1944. There he was to achieve postwar renown by speaking out against his state's junior senator, Joseph McCarthy. In choosing him as James Conant's successor, the five members of the Harvard Corporation saw themselves reaffirming the importance of a strong moral overtone in higher education. They were not unduly concerned that Pusey did not have the intellectual distinction to be a member of its faculty. Later they were to silently realize that his writings never sparkled and that his addresses to both students and faculty were occasions of neither enlightenment nor inspiration. And when they inevitably built a library in his memory, it was a below-ground structure intended to store archives.

  To Pusey's credit, he accepted the Corporation's advice to appoint a first-class dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Whether he knew that in McGeorge Bundy he was choosing someone who would outclass him on virtually any occasion they were together, we will never know. A Boston blueblood by birth, Bundy came to Harvard via Groton and a brilliant undergraduate career at Yale. At Harvard he was initially one of the elite junior members of the Society of Fellows, later joining the Government Department and securing tenure by the time he became Harvard's most important dean. All appointments to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be administered by him, and it was he who would choose the ad hoc committees whose deliberations he and President Pusey invariably attended.

  It is highly unlikely that Bundy had any role in Pusey's ill-fated decision, made in his second year as president, to deny the request of a Jewish student to be married in Harvard's imposing Memorial Church, built in the 1920s in memory of the American fallen of the First World War. In so doing, Pusey aroused the wrath of his faculty. A prominent delegation came to his office to tell him that Harvard's church should be open to those of all faiths, not restricted to Christians. It was a grievance rooted in history. Many years before, Jews had been effectively blackballed from faculty positions. Those faculty who had come to the president's office were determined that such bigotry as had stained Harvard's past would not corrupt its present. Sensing a fight that would effectively destroy the moral authority for which he was appointed, Pusey reversed his edict and the incident soon faded from view.

  For Harvard's president, however, it was deeply wounding to be told that his initial response, which he regarded a reaffirmation of his institution's long Protestant heritage, was an expression of anti-Semitism.

  From that moment on, Pusey never again saw his faculty as allies and became socially isolated from them during his remaining eighteen years as president. For friendship, he and his wife, Anne, would turn to the governing boards. They became summer residents of Seal Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, close to the home of David Rockefeller, soon to become chairman of Harvard's Board of Overseers. Both leaders felt similarly about the importance of religion, with Rockefeller making a major gift to strengthen the faculty of the Divinity School.

  My decision to leave Caltech for Harvard was facilitated by a growing friendship with the chemist Paul Doty, whose laboratory in Gibbs Lab was just across Divinity Avenue from the Biolabs. Paul, trained initially as a physical chemist and then a polymer chemist, began physical-chemical studies of DNA only after moving to Harvard in 1948. Eight years older than I, he had just become a full professor when I arrived at Harvard. Fortunately for me, he was one of a handful of key faculty to whom McGeorge Bundy regularly turned for advice. So while many Harvard biologists remained uncertain as to whether I belonged in their department or in chemistry, Bundy, through Paul, knew I was a true biologist and hoped I'd help make the biology department into one comparable in stature to the ones in chemistry and physics.

  Reassuring me that my academic life would not be totally at the whim of old-fashioned biologists was the recent formation of the Committee for Higher Degrees in Biochemistry, whose members were to be drawn from suitable individuals in the Biology and Chemistry departments. As a member from Biology, I would help choose the first class of graduate students and advise on appropriate courses for their first year. My first research student, Bob Risebrough, had been admitted as a Biology Department graduate student. As an undergraduate at Cornell, his main focus had been ornithology. Now he was excited by DNA, and his best introduction to it, I decided, might be to do a thesis on the properties of phage 9×174, then reported to be much smaller than any other known phage. Its DNA molecules might be correspondingly smaller, thus perfectly suited to Paul Doty's physical chemistry instrumentation. Later I put my first biochemistry graduate student, Julian Fleischman, to work on the task of establishing the sizes of the DNA molecules in the much bigger T2 phage. Conceivably each T2 particle contained several DNA molecules held together end to end by protein linkers. Studying them might provide a good model for how DNA is arranged in the chromosomes of higher cells.

  When Paul Doty ominously told me that promotions to tenure were often decided based on teaching evaluations, I realized I couldn't give the old-fashioned biologists a reason to suggest I might be better suited to a pure research institution or medical school. My attention focused sharply in my first months on my teaching assignments. Invariably worried that I would not have enough material memorized to occupy the next instructional hour, I meticulously outlined all my coming lectures. By doing so, I could offer my virus course students, largely advanced undergraduates, copies of the outlines, thereby relieving them of the need to take notes. Few students, however, availed themselves of this opportunity, continuing to be so sophomor-ically absorbed in note taking that their faces never revealed whether they were following my arguments. Fortunately, not too many stumbled in the hourlong midterm exam. And remembering the long-term benefits that had accrued to me at Indiana University from writing term papers on personally intriguing research topics, I asked them to write ten to fifteen pages on something in the course that particularly caught their fancy.

  Initially I hoped to effect my social integration into the Harvard scene by living in one of the large undergraduate residence halls. Called houses, their creati
on realized President Lowell's wish to establish between Harvard Yard and the Charles River replicas of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges. As such, they would have young unmarried “tutors” living in specially designed suites. I asked my departmental chairman, Frank Carpenter, about the possibility, and he advised I try Leverett House, where the master was the embryolo-gist Leigh Hoadley. Though he had long given up even a pretense of being a scientist, I saw no reason to assume Leigh would prove equally useless as a house master. All too soon, however, I discovered that the “bunny hutch,” as Leverett House was then known, was never a first choice for undergraduates and that its so-called high table was the antithesis of what I had known in Cambridge. We ate the same uninspired food as the undergraduates, and conversation followed the lead of Master Hoadley, incapable of either levity or deep thought.

  The ersatz high table might have mattered less if I had been provided with adequate living quarters. But my so-called suite did not look out on the Charles, its only view being to the opaque bathroom window of the master's apartment. My psyche was not helped by Hoadley's later admission that he might have given me accommodations more appropriate for a dog. I saw no reason to immediately let him know when I moved to a one-room flat carved out of a large house on nearby Francis Avenue. My first lab assistant, Celia Gilbert, daughter of the radical journalist I. F. Stone, had told me that her father's friend Helen Land had a vacancy nearby. It was one of several such small flats that I later realized were rented mainly to individuals with leftist connections. As I moved in, the journalist-to-be Jonathan Mirsky was moving out of the same building. His apartment was later occupied by a government graduate student, Jim Thomson, whom I would later meet when he became a member of the National Security Council.

  In coming to Harvard still unmarried, I was more than conscious of goings-on at the once quite separate women's college, Radcliffe. Its residence halls were less than a mile away, and after the war classes at both colleges became entirely coeducational. Only the undergraduate Lamont Library remained out of bounds for women. How to go about meeting Radcliffe girls was not obvious, as their occasional mixers, then called jolly-ups, never seemed to bring forth the ones you would want to be seen with. Luckily, the geneticist Jack Schultz had a daughter, Jill, whom I had known earlier in Cold Spring Harbor, and who was now a Radcliffe senior living in a small wooden house off campus on Massachusetts Avenue. Soon I was to meet several of her housemates and gradually acquired the confidence to show up unannounced for after-dinner coffee.

  Eating by myself in the faculty club was never an event to be anticipated and so I always greatly welcomed invitations to dine with the Dotys, now living less than a thousand feet from Paul's lab in a huge mansard-roofed house on Kirkland Place. Equally important in maintaining my morale were dinners at Wally and Celia Gilbert's equally proximate flat. We had met the year before at Cambridge University, where Wally had gone from Harvard as a young theoretical physicist. Knowing that they soon would be going back to Harvard upon completion of Wally's Cambridge Ph.D., I offered Celia, who had been an English major at Smith, a job at my lab starting in the fall. With Celia about, even routine lab manipulations became moments of conversational mischief. But after only four Biolab months, she was struck with mononucleosis. Her illness ended her tenure in my lab and, perhaps as a small consolation, the anxiety she suffered when called upon to dilute phage solutions by factors as big as a million.

  Subtle conversational moments returned in March when Alfred Tissières, with his Bentley, arrived from Cambridge. Soon finding himself a room in a house off Brattle Street, he took on the task of finding a lab technician to replace Celia. Happily, Kathy Coit, whose parents were now housing Alfred, expressed interest in joining us. Finding her not only intelligent but also an enthusiastic rock climber, Alfred persuaded her to become our factotum. Though this was her first exposure to science, Kathy's cheerful common sense soon made her indispensable to our day-to-day lab progress.

  Covering Alfred's salary was a grant that I had obtained from the National Science Foundation to study the ribosomes of bacteria. Those funds also allowed us to buy a preparative Spinco ultracentrifuge needed to spin them away from other bacterial components. A more expensive analytic Spinco that could measure how fast ribosomes sedimented was needed, too, but my grant wouldn't stretch that far. Luckily, we had one at our disposal thanks to the protein chemist John Edsall on the floor above.

  Most evenings I would be back in the lab, having already spent the daylight hours there. After hours, we were required to sign the night watchman's sign-in book. There was no good reason for its existence except catching an errant husband in a lie concerning his whereabouts of an evening. One night I entered and was pleased to find it had gone missing, with no untoward consequences for the building's proper function. More frustrating was the bolting of the departmental library when the dour librarian went home. Though faculty members had keys, graduate students didn't and could not search out journal references in the evenings or on weekends. My continued pestering for the department to pay students to guard the entrance finally led to that reform for the common good.

  Harvesting tobacco mosaic virus in 1958. From left to right: Julian Fleischman, Kathy Coit, John Mendelson, and Chuck Kurland

  Nathan Pusey regularly opened Harvard's stately President's House to his faculty and their spouses for Sunday afternoon tea and cakes. Paul Doty urged me to sample such an occasion, and I semiawkwardly presented myself at the front door when my fall term lectures were nearing their end. Led by a maid into the main drawing room, where I introduced myself to the Puseys, I soon was passed along to talk with the late-thirtyish Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl and his equally youthful wife, Brita. A prize catch in Pusey's efforts to resurrect the Divinity School, Stendahl had a strong, angular, slightly distorted face that struck me as that of a troubled minister in an Ingmar Bergman film. Liking his reasoned openness to the complexities of human life, I nevertheless could not even affect interest in the Evangelist Matthew, about whom he had just completed a scholarly tome. Later, when Anne Pusey moved to be near me, I felt much more at ease talking about my Chicago education and how fortunate I felt to be part of the Harvard scene. Simultaneously I tried to overhear what our president was saying to others. Later, as I walked out onto Quincy Street, I wondered whether any conversational gambit could possibly elicit from him an animated response.

  Later during the monthly meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I was no more successful at discerning the feelings that occupied what he considered to be his soul. We always turned to Bundy for hints of what was coming next. Pusey seemed to come to life only when presenting honorary M.A.'s to those newly tenured faculty whose actual degrees had been conferred elsewhere. Through this gesture of sanctification, Harvard saw itself as ensuring that all faculty felt equally valued.

  My social life at Harvard still left much to be desired. I had flown to London just before Christmas, and then for the New Year had gone by train up to the home of Dick and Naomi Mitchison on the Mull of Kintyre in the Scottish Highlands. My first visit to their Carradale House had been five years before, when I was invited by their youngest son, Avrion, then doing his Ph.D. thesis in Oxford on the immunolog-ical response. Av's mother was a distinguished writer of leftist persuasion, so I could again count on being part of an intellectual house party that featured long walks over boggy moors, heated conversations much more about politics than science, and hearty but never inspiring food. Still, I knew it would be much more fun than going back to the small home in the Indiana sand dunes to which my parents had moved after my sister's graduation from the University of Chicago. I would later regret not having been a more dutiful son when my mother, only fifty-seven, died of a sudden heart attack not long after the holidays. She never had the pleasure of visiting Harvard to see me as a member of its faculty. When I went home for her funeral, I could see my father was unlikely ever to recover entirely from her unexpected death.

  At the end of Ju
ly, I was happy to be able to bring my father along to the Isle of Skye, where I was to be the best man at Av Mitchison's wedding to Lorna Martin. It was my first chance to meet Av's intellectually powerful research supervisor, Peter Medawar. He came up from London with his strong-willed wife, Jean, and fetching bright daughter, Caroline, then intending to escape from much unwanted parental dating advice by going up to Cambridge. In the middle of the reception, I had no difficulty in spiriting Caroline away for a long car ride through the wild beauty of Skye, remaining absent long enough for Peter and Jean to grow worried that Caroline and I might have found each other perfect. But she had other plans for the next few weeks. And after putting my father on a plane back to Chicago, I anticipated intersecting in Tuscany with a Radcliffe girl I knew from the off-campus house on Massachusetts Avenue, who was traveling in Europe. Several letters from the prior locales on her itinerary gave me to believe that she would greet me warmly when our paths finally crossed in Assisi. But as we looked up at the Giotto frescos on the walls of its fifteenth-century basilica, I sensed that her affections were already subscribed; I later learned she was smitten with a young classics instructor.