Even before I went off to Europe, momentum was building for the appointment of a super geneticist to the biology faculty. Bagging such a star had been on Harvard's agenda since the late 1940s, when an offer failed to lure Tracy Sonneborn away from Indiana. Now the introductory course was being taught by Paul Levine, whose recent promotion to a tenured position had been a dicey matter. In so proposing him, the senior biology faculty had to emphasize his highly praised teaching, since his middling research on Drosophila was far from noteworthy. Given Bundy's known determination to prevent his out-of-date biology faculty from perpetuating their inherent mediocrity, the promotion had hints of a compromise between him and Pusey The letter from University Hall to the Biology Department stated that Levine's appointment was conditional upon the department's next tenured slot being reserved for a geneticist whose research was world-class. Initially I feared that they might somehow find a candidate who, though clever, did not yet feel it necessary to think in terms of the double helix. Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong.
The subsequent departmental committee made the Purdue University phage geneticist Seymour Benzer, already my close friend, number one on their list. Decisive was the maize geneticist Paul Mangelsdorf's highly positive reaction to Benzer's recent talk before the International Congress of Genetics in Toronto. Within days of Seymour's coming to Harvard to talk about his fine-structure genetic map of the r2 gene of phage T4, my senior biology colleagues voted unanimously for his appointment. Seymour, of course, had been earlier apprised of the department's intentions. Paul Doty and I both told him that it was virtually impossible for any properly constituted ad hoc committee not to back his addition to the Harvard faculty.
Alfred Tissières was now Bentley-less. In July he was to marry in Colorado the equally strong-willed Virginia Wachob, a girl of Scottish descent from Denver, whom he first met at Caltech during a year away from King's. Supporting both a wife and a Bentley, which soon might need a major engine overhaul, would not be possible given that Alfred's Harvard salary was slightly lower than mine. The Bentley now belonged to a much more handsomely rewarded law school professor.
With the assembling of the ad hoc committee taking longer than expected, it was early February 1958 before Seymour had his formal offer and an invitation back to Harvard to meet with Bundy Then he wanted reassurance that DNA-based biological thinking would have the continued strong support of the administration. To my distress, Seymour didn't immediately accept, implying worry at having greater teaching responsibilities than at Purdue. And so it was a great relief when Bundy happily called me early the next week with news that Seymour's letter of acceptance was on his desk.
Going off soon thereafter to the University of Illinois, as its George D. Miller Visiting Lecturer in Bacteriology, I could finally rest assured that the days of backward thinking in Harvard's Biology Department were numbered. My visit was arranged by Salva Luria, who by then had been a professor at Urbana for more than five years. My lectures on macromolecular replication and cell growth were a preview of ones I wanted to deliver later to Harvard undergraduates. Over the three weeks of my visit, I enjoyed much stimulation from the Urbana science scene. Especially enjoyable was talking with the diminutive, manic Sol Spiegelman, then also focusing much of his research on ribosomes.
Flying back to Boston on an intellectual high, I came back down to earth at Harvard with a thud. Seymour Benzer now claimed a heart condition that forced him to reverse his decision to come. Staying in Purdue, with its almost nonexistent teaching responsibilities, would be much less taxing, and he had to think of his health. The disappointment might have been unbearable if Av Mitchison had not happened to be in residence for the spring term, giving an advanced course on immunology. To my delight, he and his new wife, Lorna, together with Alfred Tissières and I, were temporarily occupying the Dotys’ big house on Kirkland Place while the Dotys spent Paul's long-overdue sabbatical in the other Cambridge. Parked next to my MG TF beneath the Dotys’ main bedroom was Alfred's consolatory sleek new Alfa Romeo sedan.
Had it not been for Doty's occasional flights back to oversee his ever-growing lab group, my direct line to McGeorge Bundy would have been cut off when I most needed it. With virtually no warning, I learned that an ad hoc committee soon would assemble to consider simultaneously the promotions from assistant professor to tenured associate professorship of Edward O. Wilson and myself. That I was to be considered a year prematurely was not at all the original intent of the Biology Department. Their concern primarily was Wilson, whom they needed to promote to keep him from accepting the same terms from Stanford. After undergraduate education as a naturalist in his home state of Alabama, Ed had moved north to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. Proving his brilliance during his initial studies on ants and their behavior, he became a junior fellow, then considered the best stepping-stone to an eventual permanent position on the faculty. Since my arrival, we seldom had reason to speak: I was a midwesterner, he a southern boy; he was par excellence a naturalist, while I knew nothing about ants, having by then lost all my earlier interest in animal behavior. But the vast museums of Harvard's past glory were not to vanish, and it appeared that Wilson might very well have the intelligence and drive needed to move Harvard's evolutionary tradition into the future.
Since my research achievements were already internationally noted and no one could say that I had either shirked or botched my teaching responsibilities, Paul Doty felt that fairness dictated that the Biology Department now also make up its mind as to whether it wanted me as a permanent member. Bundy happily agreed and unilaterally informed the Biology Department that he and Mr. Pusey wished to consider my appointment as well as that of Ed Wilson. With Wilson's offer from Stanford needing an answer soon, an ad hoc committee was formed even before a department vote, just before my thirtieth birthday on April 6. Through one of its members, the highly perceptive Rockefeller Foundation science executive Warren Weaver, Paul quickly learned that the verdict was thumbs up for both of us. By then Bundy had already told the Biology Department that he had President Pusey's permission to promote me as well as Wilson. So Frank Carpenter assembled his senior biology professors the next day to see whether they would concur with the ad hoc committee's decision.
I was more than worried that one too many of those dinosaurs would vote against me. In fact, a majority of them did, opting to postpone for one year the decision on my promotion. This I heard from Ernst Mayr, who wisely didn't identify those against me, and I couldn't contain my outrage. Retreating to the Doty house before I used the F-word in front of too many biology graduate students, I agitatedly awaited dinner with Paul and the Berkeley zoologist Dan Mazia. Over dinner Dan tried to console me by saying that at Berkeley they never would have tried to stave off what was so obviously inevitable. Paul Doty, trying to rescue his dinner party from the pall hanging over it, reassured me that the game was not over until it was over. McGeorge Bundy's power would be badly eroded if he let one of his second-rate departments defy him. Paul counseled me to try to refrain, at least for the time being, from further vulgar diatribes against my biology colleagues.
The subsequent weekend was inevitably tense, as I waited to see the color of the smoke emerging from University Hall. To my great relief, Bundy did play hardball, telling Frank Carpenter that no more tenured appointments or discretionary funds at the dean's disposal would go biology's way until they promoted me. Quickly those professors who only several days earlier were strongly opposed to me now implied they had acted too hastily. Upon further reflection they could now enthusiastically accept the ad hoc committee's recommendation.
Relieved not to have to consider offering myself to the Chemistry Department, I couldn't find it in me to gloat. But it was hard not to appreciate Seymour Benzer's later comment that the imbroglio attending my promotion made him even more certain that he had done the right thing turning down Harvard. Life was too short to share a department with so many prima donnas whose meager accomplishments scarcely justified e
ven the status of has-been. Still, I did not regret moving to Harvard. More and more I was learning that the quality of your students matters much more than that of your faculty colleagues. In that regard Harvard couldn't be faulted.
Remembered Lessons
1. Bring your research into your lectures
In the fall of 1956, there was simply not enough known about DNA to organize a whole course around it. So I opted to talk about DNA in the context of a course on viruses, wherein I could compare the elegant experiments of the phage group with the old-fashioned approaches of plant and animal virologists. Graduate students self-selected according to their attraction to my molecular messages. Reading through their term papers, I could also spot those who zoomed in on important issues and did not waste pages of type on observations of no consequence.
2. Challenge your students’ abilities to move beyond facts
Asking bright students to merely regurgitate the facts or ideas of others does not prepare them for the world outside classrooms. So my exams increasingly featured questions that assessed the plausibility of hypothetical headlines from the New York Times or Nature. For example, should they believe claims that a virus had been found that multiplied outside cells in a medium solely composed of the small-molecule precursors to DNA, RNA, and protein? Any student answering yes would have missed the essence of my course and so been advised not to choose a scientific career. Happily, no students failed to answer correctly.
3. Have your students master subjects outside your expertise
The best way to prepare your students for the independence they all want is by seeing that they are exposed to peripheral disciplines and to the technologies needed to move from the present to the future. During the late 1950s when we aimed to discover how information encoded within DNA molecules is expressed in cells, the answers had to be sought at the molecular level. So it was a no-brainer that I should have my prospective students acquire strong backgrounds in chemistry to complement my strengths as a biologist. During their first graduate year I made sure that they took rigorous courses in physical and organic chemistry. They might later use only a small fraction of this expertise, but they would never feel unqualified for experimentation at the molecular level.
4. Never let your students see themselves
as research assistants
It makes sense to have your students pursuing thesis objectives that genuinely interest you. At the same time you should take care that they never see themselves as working primarily for your professional advancement. Students function best when they can be assured of enjoying most of the credit for their efforts. After they came into my lab, generally only a month or two would pass before I backed away from their daily progress. I then let them work at their own pace and come into my office when they had results, either positive or negative, that I should be aware of. You know that they have become truly independent when they give thoughtful seminars before their lab peers. Novice speakers can profit from taking their licks when their conclusions go beyond what is justified by their data. Nothing banishes illogical conclusions from one's brain like the need to present them to others. Later I made it a point that my name never be included with theirs on research papers emerging from their experiments.
5. Hire spunky lab helpers
As an untenured scientist, most of your nonsleeping hours are spent in lab-related activities. Those working with me were effectively my surrogate family, with whom I would eat many meals and go to the beach or go skiing. So when hiring assistants to help with more routine lab management, I wanted to surround myself with faces that laughed at the right times and whose inherent positive outlook would be a calming influence when our experiments went nowhere. The best to have around were unmarried people of my own age; not yet saddled with family responsibilities, they were therefore not obliged to keep strictly regular hours. They could be called on for help in the evening hours or on weekends when we wanted our answers fast. In return, I treated them more as friends than as employees and didn't expect them to hang around when there was nothing particular to do.
6. Academic institutions do not easily change themselves
Most academic battles involve space or faculty appointments and promotions. All too often, academic life is a zero-sum game, with an equivalent loser for every winner. Sadly, most academic department heads and deans do not display long-term consistency, often maintaining their own academic power by giving to a professor what he or she was denied the year before. Before I went to Harvard, Leo Szilard told me that it moved only lethargically, an assessment based no doubt on his never having been asked to join its Physics Department. But he was also familiar with academia's general love of orthodoxy and warned that I should be realistic about how much change I could expect to see in a place as fossilized as Harvard's Biology Department. His pessimism would have been dead on had it not been for McGeorge Bundy's determination to see through a radical upgrade of biology at Harvard. University leaders with such strong convictions are rare.
8. MANNERS DEPLOYED FOR ACADEMIC ZING
UPON the return of the Dotys from England, I needed a new place to live and luckily stumbled upon a vacant one-bedroom flat on the thousand-foot-long Appian Way, less than a five-minute walk from Harvard Square. Appian Way runs between Garden and Brattle Streets and is bordered on its northern side by Radcliffe Yard, where once virtually all of Radcliffe's classes were taught by Harvard professors. But with the disappearance of separate classes for women, the former classroom space in the Yard's Longfellow Hall was now used by the School of Education. Soon after my moving onto Appian Way, the Education School was to expand across it, in the process tearing down all its modest wooden homes except for number 10—the mid-nineteenth-century house, long owned by the Noon family, in which I occupied second-floor quarters. I regularly wrote out my bimonthly checks to Theodore W Noon, who had been at Harvard at the turn of the century and an instructor at Lawrenceville before the first Great War. Long retired from teaching, he was nearing eighty, and would eventually live to almost a hundred.
I was pleased to be told that among former 10 Appian Way tenants were the writers Owen Wister and Sean O'Faolain. The building's ancient central heating system was less charming. In winter I routinely needed an electric blanket to sleep. My flat's Spartan features were made for inexpensive furniture I bought from the Door Store on Massachusetts Avenue on the way to Central Square. Soon to complement its simplicity was a big-planked New Hampshire harvest table that I found in an antiques store near Falmouth on Cape Cod. I hoped its inherent elegance would inspire some Radcliffe girls to test their cooking talents in my tiny kitchen.
By early fall I had lost all hope that the astute geneticist Guido Pon-tecorvo would move from Glasgow to fill the senior geneticist's slot turned down by Seymour Benzer. Six months before, the ad hoc committee called to look over Benzer had also judged Ponte's accomplishments worthy of a major offer, a conclusion simultaneously reached by the electors of the soon-to-open chair of genetics at Cambridge. But Ponte had strong attachments to Glasgow, where his colleagues had solidly stood by him during the difficulties that followed his physicist brother Bruno's sudden flight to Moscow just before he was to be charged with treason for passing atomic bomb secrets to Soviet agents. Ponte, in turn, stood by his friends by refusing to go to either Cambridge.
That fall, knowing that I would be teaching undergraduates in the spring, I gave a graduate-level course on the biochemistry of cancer. During my previous winter weeks at the University of Illinois, I learned that uncontrolled cell growth should be the province of the biologist as well as the medic. There the biochemist Van Potter, from the University of Wisconsin, gave an evening colloquium on cancer, making me aware that at any given time most adult animal cells are not undergoing cell division. To duplicate their chromosomes and divide, these cells must receive molecular signals that initiate chains of events culminating in the production of enzymes involved in DNA synthesis. In contrast, cancer cells very likely do not requ
ire external signals to enter into cycles of growth and replication. Future searches for such intrinsic mitosis-inducing signals would quite likely involve the already long-known tumor viruses. Upon infecting so-called non-permissive normal cells, they do not initiate rounds of viral multiplication but rather transform the healthy cells into their cancerous equivalents. The Shope papilloma virus, already known for more than two decades to induce warts on rabbit skin, particularly intrigued me. Only a few genes were likely to be found along its tiny DNA molecules, made up of a mere five thousand or so base pairs.
Over the past summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, I had met the biochemist Seymour Cohen, then very upbeat about his lab's recent discovery that T2 phage DNA contains genes that code for enzymes involved in DNA synthesis. Initially I did not attach the proper importance to Cohen's finding, but I abruptly changed my mind several months later when preparing a lecture on Shope papilloma tumor virus. Then I found myself asking whether its chromosomes, like those of T2, also code for one or more proteins that trigger DNA synthesis. Since at any given moment the vast majority of adult cells do not contain the large complement of enzymes necessary to make DNA, conceivably all DNA animal viruses had genes whose function was to activate synthesis of these enzymes. Even more important, these genes, if somehow integrated into cellular chromosomes, might make the respective cells cancerous. I was in a virtually manic state as I presented these thoughts to my class. At last I understood the essence of a tumor virus. Over the following days, however, I realized that my excitement did not infect those about me. Only those who come up with the seductively simple ideas initially get hysterical about them. Everyone else demands experimental proof before joining the conga line.
I was still high on my theory by the time of a Sunday cocktail party given early in 1959 by David Samuels, the British-Israeli chemist who had recently arrived at Harvard as a senior postdoc under the bio-organic chemist Frank Westheimer. David was in line to be a British lord, like his father and his grandfather, the first Viscount Samuels, an influential early backer of a Jewish state in the holy land. Now he was still saddened over the death of his cousin Rosalind Franklin from ovarian cancer the past April. They had seen each other often during their school years. But after he chose Oxford and she Cambridge for their education as chemists, their paths less often crossed. It was only now that I realized that Rosalind had come from no modest background. Had she wished, she easily could have moved into the world of moneyed society that David now so obviously enjoyed when not applying himself as a serious chemist.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 14
