Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James D. Watson

  At the Gordon Conference, we learned that Sydney Brenner would soon be going to Caltech to do experiments with Matt Meselson that might independently prove the existence of messenger RNA. In April, Francois Jacob came to Cambridge to talk with Sydney and Francis Crick and persuaded them too that ribosomes by themselves did not carry genetic instructions for ordering amino acids in protein synthesis. To confirm the hunch, Sydney soon proposed to Meselson that his ultracentrifuge tricks should let them see new T4 mRNA molecules bound to ribosomes made prior to phage infection. By late July, Sydney triumphantly returned to Cambridge with his prediction confirmed. Only later, when Sydney told us about his Caltech results, did he learn the details of Bob Risebrough's independent demonstration of mRNA.

  That summer of 1960, the lab was graced with several lively Rad-cliffe students who wanted technician jobs so they could stay around Harvard Square for the summer. Particularly fun to have about was the fetching Franny Beer, the red-haired daughter of the equally red-haired Sam Beer, Harvard's resident expert in American politics. I first knew Franny from my Biology 2 lectures, in which she regularly sat smiling in one of the front rows. Spotting her soon after in the Biolabs, I learned that she was very fond of dogs and keen to be a vet. We both revealed ourselves to each other as loyal Democrats, but at first I couldn't share her enthusiasm for John Kennedy. I still hated his father, Joe, for his past German sympathies. Earlier, in June, Franny and I had watched the Harvard commencement to see her hero march by as an overseer. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, I was then still rooting for Adlai Stevenson to again be the Democratic candidate. Franny followed her father's hopes that John Kennedy, a much stronger potential nominee, would prevail at the convention. That fall Franny, who was mad about rock and roll, brought me to a late gathering of undergraduate rock fans. I was never so out of place, realizing that I should best cherish Franny as a surrogate kid sister.

  Wally Gilbert in my lab, summer 1960

  In the fall, Diana de Vegh was no longer available for Henri IV lunches. John Kennedy's now active campaign for the presidency had put her previous year's studies to be an Arabist into proper perspective. Now she was doing campaign work elsewhere. But into the lab came the Radcliffe senior Nina Gordon, doing an undergraduate project and seeing that I got invited often to her Radcliffe house, where I could feed my hopes of finding a suitable blonde. Increasingly the presidential campaign dominated emotions at Harvard, and I went to watch the debates between Kennedy and Nixon on Alfred and Virginia Tissières's TV set in their big apartment on Sparks Street. They had lived in those spacious early-twentieth-century rooms since their marriage two summers before, and the same apartment would soon be occupied by Matt Meselson and his very new wife, Katherine. Matt and Katherine had met over the summer in Colorado at the Aspen Music Festival, where Katherine was studying the flute.

  By early September I was very much a Kennedy partisan, hating Nixon even more and excited that so many Harvard professors were working as Kennedy advisors. Following the public opinion polls with increasing apprehension, I followed the election night cliffhanger with Alfred and Virginia. The Dotys then were part of an older Harvard group close to the Kennedy campaign. Too tired to stay up till Kennedy's victory was ensured, I took comfort in knowing that my mother had long worked for the Democratic political machine, which would not let Kennedy lose in Illinois.

  The weeks that followed Kennedy's victory were in no sense anticlimactic. The main question in the air was who from Harvard would be called to be part of the new administration. Arthur Schlesinger's departure to help Kennedy as a speechwriter was virtually taken for granted. Everyone was equally pleased by the selection of John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India and Edwin Reischauer as ambassador to Japan. Most excitement came from McGeorge Bundy's nomination as the president's national security advisor with West Wing offices. For his chief deputy Bundy further raided the Harvard faculty, picking his friend the economist Carl Kaysen.

  Before taking office, Kennedy saw fit to resign from Harvard's Board of Overseers, promising to attend its January meeting just prior to his inauguration. For several weeks I anticipated having him listen to me speak, since I had been asked with Frank Westheimer to brief the overseers about new opportunities for research in molecular biology and biochemistry. But our president-elect did not get to Harvard that day, having more pressing matters to attend to. The occasion, however, gave me my last opportunity to speak to McGeorge Bundy as dean. He had raised my curiosity in the weeks before by asking me to come and see him. So I half dreamed that I also might be asked to move to Washington. At the last moment, however, his aide Verna Johnson phoned me to cancel the appointment. Taking me aside at the overseers’ meeting, Bundy wanted to personally tell me the good news that I was being promoted to full professor as of July 1. He then mischievously added that no higher academic accolade could ever come my way.

  Remembered Lessons

  1. Teaching can make your mind move on to big problems

  Eminent researchers who revel in trivial or nonexistent teaching loads may be availing themselves of a luxury no thinker can well afford. When I'm not challenged by an immediate need to make sense of incompatible observations, my mind too often runs slowly. A very strong incentive for coming to grips fast with unexplainable experiments is the need to lecture about them. For this the best audiences are advanced undergraduates or graduate students, who know enough to have reactions that may spark a flash of insight. In the early 1970s, when lecturing about DNA duplication in such a fog of uncertainty, I suddenly saw why viral DNA molecules have redundant ends that become linked during their replication processes. The idea that this was a device to copy their ends was too pretty to be wrong.

  2. Lectures should not be unidimensionally serious

  It is no fun to either give or listen to hourlong talks that provide nonstop flows of dry facts or even ideas. Presentations of all kinds should alternate easy-to-understand and familiar material with the messages that are more difficult to assimilate. At Harvard I tried to put a human face on experiments, adding asides about personalities and letting my listeners put themselves in the place of the experimenter, as eventually they would need to do.

  3. Give your students the straight dope

  In my Biology 2 lectures in the early 1960s, I regularly gave one titled “Against Embryology,” since its main point was that multicellular organisms were best put on the back burner until we understood the basic nature of life by studying single-celled bacteria. The early sixties were not a propitious time, for example, to go to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole to study sea urchins. Those who went instead to Cold Spring Harbor to pursue genes within bacteria would have much brighter futures. This was not a message that most of my fellow biology professors agreed with, and many of them thought it inappropriate for me to announce it to my students. But to sugar-coat science that is going nowhere ill prepares students for their futures.

  4. Encourage undergraduate research experience

  If one or more lab benches were free, I automatically accepted bright undergraduates keen to do research under my supervision. Often they were undecided between medical and graduate school and benefited from seeing the differences between scientific and clinical challenges. Being part of a research group, moreover, let them see that personalities often are as important as brains in pushing forward the scientific frontier. It is also true that a certain kind of aptitude is required to do successful research. You frequently spot individuals in labs whose first-rate talents may never come out through exams. They come alive only when they are challenged with “new unknowns” as opposed to “old knowns.”

  5. Focus departmental seminars on new science

  The quality of a scientific department is generally revealed by its weekly seminars. Star scientists likely will travel only when they see themselves benefiting from being away from their home base. Seminars that fail to attract broad student audiences will likely bore the largely faculty-constituted audiences, t
here only for reasons of department loyalty. It's best to invite speakers from emerging disciplines not yet established on your campus. Choosing too many speakers from friends of senior faculty risks giving your students no more than what they already have. Younger faculty members, for the most part, should be in charge of arranging and hosting potentially exciting speakers. They have more time and incentive to do this job well, as they anticipate meeting minds that could enrich their future intellectual lives.

  6. Join the editorial board of a new journal

  Editorial boards of preexisting journals seldom change fast enough to accommodate new scientific disciplines. A new discipline creates a new discourse and requires a new journal. Editors rooted in the past may not know how to assess the importance of new science, or even whom to approach as a referee. Only six years passed between the finding of the double helix and the founding of the Journal of Molecular Biology. At first I was hesitant to join its editorial board and spend the time looking for the wheat among the chaff. But when the protein crystallographer John Kendrew became its chief editor, I knew the JMB would attract high-quality papers. In return for executing the responsibility to see that important new ideas got out as soon as possible, I was also among the first to benefit from knowing about them.

  7. Immediately write up big discoveries

  We made a bad mistake in not immediately publishing our lab's February 1960 discovery of T2 messenger RNA. At the time Wally and I wanted the story filled out a bit more by the simultaneous demonstration of E. coli messenger RNA. But the latter task proved much trickier than initially expected. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Sydney Brenner and Francois Jacob came independently to the concept of messenger RNA in late April, with Sydney soon proving its existence through experiments with Matt Meselson at Caltech. Though we published simultaneously, Sydney let it be known that I had delayed their publication, leading others to believe our Harvard experiments were derivative of theirs. In fact, they predated them by four months.

  8. Travel makes your science stronger

  No matter how prestigious your own institution, at any given moment the real action in your specialty is likely happening elsewhere. Living in Boston does not mean that you need not continuously monitor the action in other scientific hot spots such as Stanford, Caltech, or La Jolla. Turning down invitations to speak before their audiences works against your future. By moving out of your own turf, you are likely to spot clever graduate students and postdocs who might enhance your own environment. Learning first about clever brains through their publications likely means that someone else has already recruited them. Naturally, there is a point beyond which traveling becomes counterproductive. Whenever possible, you should not cancel lectures for key undergraduate courses. But when you don't have any to give, much time should be spent seeing high-level science done elsewhere.

  9. MANNERS NOTICED AS A DISPENSABLE WHITE HOUSE ADVISER

  I WAS to wait eight months before the Kennedy administration let me know, in September 1961, that my talents might be of use to them. After we had lunched at the long head table of the Faculty Club, Harvard's physical chemist, George Kistiakowsky, motioned me aside to ask whether I would like to assist the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in evaluating our nation's biological warfare (BW) capabilities. Curious ever since the end of World War II as to what BW weapons we might have developed, I indicated my availability whenever PSAC wanted me. Now some three years old, PSAC had been created by President Eisenhower as a response to the shock of Sputnik's moving the Soviets into space ahead of us. After James Killian, then president of MIT, George had served as its second leader, reflecting Ike's respect for his acumen at applying science to military purposes. At Los Alamos, his long experience with explosives was used in the fabrication of the first nuclear weapons.

  PSAC was now headed by Jerome Wiesner of MIT's big Electronics Lab, who at the war's end was also at Los Alamos. Most of its members were physicists and chemists, reflecting a major preoccupation with nuclear weapons and missiles. George was still a member, as was Paul Doty, who was hopeful that with JFK as president we might be able to slow down, if not stop, the testing of ever bigger hydrogen bombs. Soon I filled out several White House forms for an FBI background check necessary to get me a top-secret security clearance. Only at that level of authorization could I get into Fort Detrick, the nation's big, rambling biological warfare complex, twenty-five miles to the north of the D.C. line in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Paul Doty (left) with Jerry Weisner (right) and the president who gave them hope

  That fall Wally Gilbert was increasingly in the Biolabs, coming over from the Physics Department, where he still had serious teaching responsibilities. The messenger RNA concept was on everyone's mind, with the previous June's Cold Spring Harbor symposium dominated by its implications. Seeing newly made mRNA molecules functioning in the E. coli cell-free systems made Alfred Tissières wonder whether RNA molecules containing only single bases might also stimulate protein synthesis. But to his disappointment, the polyadenylic acid, or poly A (AAA…), from Paul Doty's lab had no apparent template capabilities. Alfred then put synthetic RNA out of his mind until he came along with Wally and me to hear Marshall Nierenberg's electrifying announcement at the Biological Congress in Moscow in August that polyuridylic acid, or poly U (UUU …), coded for polyphenylalanine. Later poly A was also revealed to have template capabilities coding for polylysine. Its mRNA-like activity had been missed by Alfred, who had the misfortune of being given aggregated poly A incapable of binding to ribosomes.

  Upon his return from Moscow, Wally moved into Alfred's former office lab to study interactions between poly U and ribosomes. Over the coming year, Alfred was to spend periods in Paris and Cambridge waiting for his new lab to be completed in Geneva. Several nights before the Tissières were to depart, they joined me and Franny Beer, again my summer technician, for an elegant private supper at the American Academy's new embassy-like home, Brandegee, southwest of Boston. Franny and I drove out in my MG, which I planned to let her borrow while I was away for the coming six weeks. After Moscow, I was to go on to Cambodia, where my sister's husband, Bob Myers, was our CIA station chief, and then to Japan, where Masayasu Nomura would give me an insider's tour of the country.

  That summer Franny was my daily sounding board about my new Radcliffe friends, the striking blond twins Sophia and Thalassa Hencken. Living in a large, comfortable house in posh Chestnut Hill, they existed in the perpetual shadow of their mother, a garden expert with her own TV show. Though seemingly destined to marry a Social Register type, Thalassa had just discovered a handsome young Pakistani engineer who possessed more panache than was usually dealt out to the suitors of future members of Boston's Vincent Club. Sophia, the less flamboyant of the two, had a boyfriend from New Orleans who, though not appropriate for the Brookline Country Club, did a skillful rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The twins’ mother was planning a big party for their twenty-first birthday, to be held in their home in mid-October. I had hoped that my multiple letters and postcards from the Royal Hotel in Katmandu would secure me an invitation to be at either Sophia's or Thalassa's side for the big night. Alas, that did not come to pass, although I was invited and Franny graciously came as my date. At the party, the twins were somewhat upstaged by the elegantly tall sophomore Ann Douglas Watson, no relation, whose obvious social and intellectual superiority over the males her age made me wonder hopefully whether the promise of not having to change her name afforded me any advantage as a suitor. But the real catch at the party, all too clear to Mrs. Hencken, was Desmond FitzGerald, the future Knight of Glin, then over from Ireland to study art history at the Fogg Museum.

  Soon after, the twins had Desmond invite me to a Saturday night party that he gave at his Massachusetts Avenue flat with Dorothy Dean. Her regal black-draped form often graced the lunch scenes at University Restaurant or Hayes-Bickford's and even more the largely gay evening crowds at Club Casablanca be
neath the Brattle Theatre. In talking first to Thalassa, who professed ignorance about most of the other guests, I found my ear tuning into the opinionated, laughing voice of Abby Rockefeller, the youngest of the guests and the eldest daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller. Instead of going on to college, Abby was studying the cello in Boston, living at a friend's home north of Harvard Square. So with my windowless MG now entrusted for the winter to Miss McCartney's Brattle Square garage, the next afternoon I walked up Brattle Street to the Churchill family residence to continue our spirited conversation of the night before. Over tea we concurred that no more than pennies would ever trickle down from the haves to the have-nots.

  By then my security clearance had materialized, and I was soon making regular flights to Washington as part of PSAC's new Limited War Panel. Its recent creation was PSAC's response to the ever growing American involvement in Vietnam. With the use of nuclear weapons ruled out ever since Eisenhower had decided not to so rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, it was unclear how to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Viet Cong. No one on Bundy's staff thought a massive deployment of ground troops was the answer. Whenever their southern borders were truly threatened, the Chinese could supply more bodies as cannon fodder than any American president dared contemplate matching. Use of highly lethal chemical and biological agents was also a Rubicon the government had no wish to cross. So the army's chemical and biological warfare units were considering deployment of “incapacitating agents” that would put enemy soldiers out of action only temporarily. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara apparently liked this idea, and PSAC's task was to give JFK an independent appraisal of their possible military feasibility.