Late the next morning the laureates in science gave their formal Nobel addresses. Francis, Maurice, and I were allotted thirty minutes each. It was not an occasion for questions from our audience of mostly fellow scientists. At seven-thirty that evening, I went alone to the palace for a second royal reception at which protocol had again somehow failed to place me beside a princess. This time I was between the wife of the Swedish prime minister and Sibylla, the wife of the Crown Prince Gustav Adolf, who had died in a 1947 airplane crash when his daughters, the princesses, were still young girls. I found it easier to converse with the prime minister's wife than with Sibylla, whose native language was German. Sibylla ate practically nothing, perhaps imagining her still comely figure metamorphosing into the stereotypical one for royal consorts of the past century
The transcript of my Nobel speech
Before lunch the next day at the American ambassador's residence, I was taken to the Wallenberg's family Enskilda Bank to exchange my advance check of 85,739 kroner for one denominated in dollars, approximately $16,500. Earlier at Nobel House, I had been given a bronze copy of my gold Nobel Medal that I could safely leave lying about my desk. There had been past thefts of the gold originals, and I was urged to keep it in a bank vault. Seemingly hundreds of photos from the past days’ festivities were then shown so that I could order copies of the ones I wished. Immediately my eye alighted on one of Francis and Princess Désirée, sitting across from me at the Nobel banquet.
Ambassador J. Graham Parsons greeted me graciously, giving no sign of the hawkish inclinations that had reputedly caused his recent banishment from the Washington corridors of Southeast Asia decision making. Also welcoming us was our embassy's number two man, Thomas Enders, whom I asked if he was related to John Enders, the Harvard Medical School's polio specialist who had won the Nobel eight years earlier. In fact, this Enders was the Nobel laureate's nephew, happily no longer living behind the Iron Curtain as a junior diplomat in Poland.
Nobel Week concluded traditionally on Saint Lucia's Day. Like all the laureates, I was awakened by a girl in a white robe and a crown of flaming candles, singing the Neapolitan hymn that long ago became virtually synonymous with this Swedish winter festival. With our father departing that afternoon for a week in France, Betty and I again put on formal finery for the Luciaball of the Medicinska Föreningen. At dinner reindeer was served as the main course. Afterward our party moved on to a much smaller private affair that let me banter long with Ellen Huldt, a pretty dark-haired medical student, with whom I then arranged to have dinner the next night.
Before getting into a taxi to fetch Ellen, I penned a letter to President Pusey, telling him of my visit that afternoon to the Royal Palace to see Princess Christina. With my diplomatic escort, Kai Falkman, I entered one of its private reception rooms to find her with her mother, Sibylla. Over tea and cakes, I related how much I enjoyed teaching the lively students of Harvard and Radcliffe and assured the mother that her daughter would greatly enjoy a year at Radcliffe. After returning home I sent back to Sweden several copies of Harvard's newspaper, the Crimson, to let Christina have a feel for Harvard undergraduate life.
As Nobel week ended, I was to depart for a visit to West Berlin arranged by the State Department, where my lecture before its scientists was to be yet another reafflrmation of the United States’ unswerving commitment to those peoples trapped by the Cold War. Before flying there via Hamburg, I spent my last night in Sweden with John Steinbeck and his wife at the studio home of their friend the artist Bo Beskow. Liking Ballet School, one of his semifigurative blue paintings, I found its price to be within my somewhat improved means and arranged for it to be sent to Harvard. It long hung on the wall of the Biological Labs library.
In Berlin, I stayed for three nights at the guesthouse of the Freie Universität, a postwar creation sited among the buildings that once housed many of Germany's best scientists before Hitler. Until the Nazis came to power, Leo Szilard and Erwin Schrödinger had lectured on quantum theory there, with the voice of Einstein always figuring prominently in any discussion. Now of the past giants, only the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Otto Warburg remained.
Soon to greet me was Kaky Gilbert, who the year before her Radcliffe graduation had assisted Alfred Tissières and me with experiments on messenger RNA. As a student at the Freie Universität, she would be showing me West Berlin. Unfortunately, she could not get permission to join me on my half day's visit to East Berlin, where I was surprised by the extraordinary Hellenic and Assyrian collections of the vast Pergamon Museum. Kaky did, however, accompany me to lunch at the residence of the head of the American mission in West Berlin. There I met the Prussian-acting Otto Warburg, whose legendary contribution to enzymology made him the most talked-about biochemist of our time. Though half Jewish, Warburg's longtime interest in cancer had led Hitler, always paranoid about contracting it, to let him continue working in Berlin throughout the war. He told me that my Harvard colleague George Wald was much too interested in philosophy, in contrast to his total lack of interest in it. Later, when Kaky and I dined at what proved an all too typical German restaurant, I was again in throat agony. So we did not stay out long, going back to Dahlem on the underground train running out to West Berlin's southwestern suburbs.
My next stop was Cologne, where Max and Manny Delbrück were spending the year helping its university establish an antiauthoritarian, American-style department in genetics. Though I could barely whisper, my throat again unbearably sore, Max nevertheless insisted upon my giving a scheduled speech, to the distress of many in the audience who surmised my discomfort. Fortunately, by the time I reached Geneva, my voice had returned, allowing me to go out to CERN, the big physics laboratory then led by Max's friend from Copenhagen days Vicky Weisskopf. Much of our talk was about Leo Szilard, who had just flown back from Geneva to New York. Szilard wanted Vicky and John to set up a CERN-like multinationally funded European molecular biology lab after the model of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Ideally Leo wanted the new lab to be in Geneva, but he would accept one on the Riviera. It would create an alternative intellectual home for him were the United States to tack right politically in response to even greater Soviet military threats.
Alfred and Virginia Tissières had by then arrived from Paris to spend the holidays with their family in Lausanne. I went up to ski with them just before Christmas at Verbier, the new ski resort in Valais that Alfred's brother Rudolph had helped develop. Soon to arrive were my new friends from Stockholm, Helen Friberg and Kai Falkman, who planned to be there through the New Year. By then, however, I would be with the Mitchison family at their home in Scotland. Though London was covered by snow, green grass still surrounded the airport near Campbeltown where my small British European Airways puddle jumper landed on New Year's Eve morning. From there I was driven some twenty miles to their remote Carradale home, arriving very weary from the journey. After three days of brisk highland walks, I flew back to the States via Iceland.
Back at Harvard I found on my desk a letter from President Pusey acknowledging my letter about Princess Christina, which he had passed on to Radcliffe's president, Mary Bunting. Appropriate application forms were dispatched to Sweden, and Christina promptly filled them out and asked her school, L'École Francaise, to send her academic records. News that she might be coming to Radcliffe first broke in the Boston Globe in mid-March, with an official announcement coming from the Royal Palace in early April. A day later, the Crimson asked about my role in her admission, and my attempt at humor badly backfired. To my embarrassment, the next day I read the words, “I didn't encourage her to come any more than I would encourage any pretty girl.” I could only hope that that day's edition never got to Stockholm. In any case, I had further reason to believe I had made the right choice in moving to Harvard. Princesses don't go to Caltech.
Remembered Lessons
1. Buy, don't rent, a suit of tails
Though you may believe you will have no further occasion to wear a suit of cloth
es befitting an orchestra conductor, winning a Nobel Prize is too singular an occasion for a hired suit of clothes. Furthermore, if your career stays at a high level, you may be invited to a subsequent Nobel week when one of your proteges wins. And keeping the outfit in your closet long after the festivities are over will serve to remind you what shape you once were.
2. Don't sign petitions that want your celebrity
The moment your prize is announced, you are seen as fair game for petitioners of worthy causes in need of well-known signatories. In lending your name to such appeals, you often find yourself outside your expertise and expressing an opinion no more meaningful than, say, that of the average accountant. You trivialize your Nobel Prize and make future uses of your name less effective. Much better is to do real good as opposed to symbolic good.
3. Make the most of the year following
announcement of your prize
You have a lifetime ahead of you for being a past prize winner but only a yearlong window during which you are the celebrated scientist of the moment. While everybody respects Nobel laureates, this year's winner is always the most sought-after dinner guest. In Stockholm this year's honoree is treated like a movie star by the general population, who will ask even an otherwise obscure chemist for an autograph. As with the Miss America pageant, the announcement of the next winner will decisively mark the end of your reign as this year's science star.
4. Don't anticipate a flirtatious Santa Lucia girl
Much fuss is made after your arrival for Nobel Week about the pretty girl who will wake you up on Santa Lucia Day and sing the traditional song. Alas, she will not be alone, and very possibly she will be accompanied by one or more photographers expecting you to smile as you hear the Neopolitan tune that only sun-deprived Swedes could mistake for a carol. The moment her singing stops, she will be off to another laureate's room, leaving you several hours more of darkness to endure before the winter sun peeks above the horizon.
5. Expect to put on weight after Stockholm
Masses of invitations will come to you during your inevitable bout of post-Stockholm withdrawal syndrome. You may find yourself banqueting as a second profession, accepting invitations to places it never would have occurred to you to go before. I still remember well an excellent dinner in Houston at its once classy Doctors’ Club, before the Texas oil capital put itself on the map of high-powered biomedicai research. I remember glaring foolishly at a giant ice sculpture on the table, knowing it would not long honor my existence. When your hosts embarrassingly overstate your importance, it's easier to accept second helpings than to keep up conversation.
6. Avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners
All too often some well-intentioned person gathers together Nobel laureates to enhance an event promoting his or her university or city. The host does so convinced that these special guests will exude genius and incandescent or at least brilliantly eccentric personalities. The fact is that many years pass between the awarding of a prize and the work it acknowledges, so even recently awarded Nobelists have likely seen better days. The honorarium, no matter how hefty, will not compensate you for the realization that you probably look and act as old and tired as the other laureates, whose conversation is boring you perhaps as much as yours is boring them. The best way to remain lively is to restrict your professional contact to young, not yet famous colleagues. Though they likely will beat you at tennis, they will also keep your brain moving.
7. Spend your prize money on a home
A flashy car that costs more than it's worth is bound to give even your best friends reason to believe demi-celebrity has gone to your head and corrupted your values. Show them that the somewhat richer are not so different and you are still one of them. A bigger home will only put you in the same league as your university president, whom no one can reasonably envy.
11. MANNERS DEMANDED BY ACADEMIC INEPTITUDE
FROM the moment of my Nobel Prize, I took comfort in expecting a larger than ordinary annual salary raise. Over the past two years, I had twice received an annual increase of $1,000, so when I opened the small envelope coming on July 2 from University Hall I expected to see a $2,000 increase. Instead, the historian Franklin Ford, Bundy's successor as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, informed me that for my first time at Harvard I was to receive no raise at all. Instantly I went ballistic and let all my immediate friends know my outrage. Was an administrative blunder to blame for Harvard's failure to acknowledge the windfall of prestige that I had provided or did President Pusey want to send a message that celebrities had no place on his faculty and should consider going elsewhere?
Venting my wrath to student friends who wrote for the Crimson would be fun but likely to backfire and generate the official reply that Harvard never could adequately reward all the important ways the faculty enrich the academic milieu. Instead I talked to Harvard's best chemist, Bob Woodward, who was himself bound to receive the Nobel Prize soon. Attempting to calm me down, he told me he thought Harvard's failure to reward me reflected bad judgment on the part of our mediocre president as opposed to a deliberate insult. Bob offered to write Franklin Ford that if he were similarly treated, he would feel equally upset toward those who led Harvard. Later, Franklin Ford called me to his office to say that no insult had been intended—rather, priority had been given to rewarding other professors whose salaries were particularly low. The following year my salary went up by $2,000. My Spartan existence at 10 Appian Way, then as before, had allowed me routinely to spend less than I was earning. I thought about money only when I wanted to acquire for the walls of my apartment a painting or drawing beyond my means. Still, I would have been $1,000 poorer before taxes every subsequent year had I not spoken up about my displeasure.
The letters that bookended the year I got a Nobel Prize but no raise from Harvard
More crucial to my morale than salary was how the science in my lab was going. Here I had cause for pleasure in the quality of my latest batch of graduate students—John Richardson, Ray Gesteland, Mario Capecchi, and Gary Gussin. With messenger RNA discovered, they knew how to proceed on their own. Underlying many of their successes was increasing use of phage RNA chains as templates for protein synthesis. To start us off, Ray Gesteland worked with Helga Doty to determine the molecular character of the RNA phage R17, whose RNA component of only some three thousand molecules most likely coded for only three to five different protein products.
The key surprise of the summer of 1963 was finding that RNA phages start their multiplication cycle through attachment to sex-specific thin filaments (or pili) coming off the surfaces of male E. coli bacteria. Such filaments are absent from female E. coli cells, explaining the until then mysterious fact that RNA phages grow only on male bacteria. Doing the electromicroscopy was Elizabeth Crawford, a summer visitor from Glasgow, with her molecular virologist husband, Lionel. Soon after their arrival, the three of us went up to the White Mountains, where we unintentionally aroused the ire of a nest-guarding goshawk that repeatedly dive-bombed us as we came down from a not undemanding walk up to the four-thousand-foot Carter's Dome.
Just before Labor Day, I flew to Geneva on my way to lecture at a NATO-sponsored molecular biology summer school at Ravello, Italy, across the bay from Naples. Among the other lecturers were to be Paul Doty, Fritz Lipmann, Jacques Monod, and Max Perutz. My high-ceilinged room in the Villa Cimbrone would have been perfect but for the nightly ravages of mosquitoes. Good fortune gave me as one of the sixty students the young German protein chemist Klaus Weber, then experimenting on the enzyme ß-galactosidase for his Ph.D. at Freiburg. Klaus had come to Ravello to broaden his knowledge of nucleic acids and by the two-week program's end he'd accepted my invitation to come the following year to work on RNA phages in my Harvard lab.
At completion of the summer session, Leo Szilard flew down from Geneva to help lead further discussions about establishing in Europe a meeting and course site similar to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. In Europe
primarily to promote his latest scheme for preventing the nuclear annihilation of the planet, Leo came to Ravello on his way to a Pugwash disarmament meeting in Dubrovnik. Among those also briefly staying at the Villa Cimbrone were Ole Maaloe from Denmark, Sydney Brenner and John Kendrew from Cambridge, Ephraim Katchalski from Israel, and Jeffries Wyman, now living in Rome. By the end of the two-day meeting, widespread support existed for forming a European Laboratory of Fundamental Biology as well as a European Molecular Biology Organization of some one hundred to two hundred leading European biologists.
In a Rome art gallery on my way back, I lacked the courage to buy an almost affordable surrealist painting by an artist then unknown to me, Victor Brauner. During the following days, however, I acquired a small Paul Klee drawing from Gallery Moos, located below Jean Weigle's Geneva flat, and several André Derain drawings from Galerie Maeght in Paris. A week later, Princess Christina saw my new works of art at a small Sunday afternoon party I gave to help introduce her to Harvard life. Accompanying her was Antonia Johnson, the daughter of a leading Swedish industrial and shipping family, also to spend the coming year in the Radcliffe quad. To make the occasion more friendly, I invited some of my students, particularly those doing undergraduate research. But forty-five minutes later, when Christina and Antonia went off to another welcoming occasion, I remained unsure whether we would have reason to greet each other with more than a nod in passing during the year ahead. Neither Christina's nor Antonia's course choices were likely to bring them to a Harvard science building. On the other hand, Christina was likely to be friendly with my Radcliffe friend and future tutee Nancy Haven Doe, who had gone to the Spence School. She came from the New York social scene, which Radcliffe's first princess was bound to sample.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 20
