After lunch, Goodwillie drove back to New York City while I followed Charlie to the sixty-acre estate that sloped down to the eastern shore of Cold Spring Harbor. Before the war, much of it was still farmland, but that afternoon only several empty chicken coops spoke of that history. For the past thirty-five years the main house had been a large whitewashed brick Georgian structure built in 1936, and in it Charlie and Marie had raised their five children. Below the house, halfway down the sloping bluff, was a large saltwater swimming pond, which the children when young used to enter raucously, I was told, via a long steel slide. But the children were now grown and, furthermore, recipients of generous trusts, leaving Charlie free to dispose of his estate without detriment to them.
I sensed Charlie wanted us to do real science on his lands, and so to be straight with him I had to confess, nervously, that dividing our research facilities into two sites was not realistic. Instead I saw the best use of his land and buildings as a high-powered conference center similar to that of the CIBA Foundation on Portland Place in central London. Toward that end, the high-ceilinged, seven-bay garage could easily be transformed into a perfect meeting room for thirty to forty people. That night, Liz and I went to sleep not at all sure that the gift of the Robertson estate was what we now needed. Spending time to raise monies for conferences on Banbury Lane would divert us from raising funds to expand our cancer research programs.
To our relief, Charlie took less than a day to reach a decision that far exceeded our most optimistic hopes. Late the next morning, we learned that he had decided it made no sense to give his estate to an institution surviving hand to mouth. He would soon have Eugene Goodwillie draw up documents establishing an $8 million endowment to support research on the lab grounds. In return, we would accept the gift of his estate, which he would separately endow with $1.5 million. It should generate funds covering the annual operating costs of his estate, including a large annuity to be paid to Lloyd Harbor in lieu of taxes. The estate would come with a covenant to the Nature Conservancy, preventing any changes to the building and lands except for the building of a new residence to complement the visitors’ rooms in the main house.
The remainder of the day we walked about in a virtual daze, half worrying that becoming rich would destroy the Lab's unique way of doing science. But we soon returned to our senses and accepted the generous offer. Even with the forthcoming Robertson monies, we had more expenses than funds to cover them. Many key Lab buildings remained habitable only during the summer, and fixing them up for year-round use could easily occupy the rest of the decade.
Robertson House in the 1970s
Over the past six months, we had used accumulated profits from symposium book sales to winterize and totally renovate Cold Spring Harbor's original Firehouse. After buying it in 1930 for $50, the Lab had rented a barge to bring the building across the inner harbor to a site next to Davenport Lab, where it was subdivided into three apartments for summer use. Handling the badly needed renovation in 1972 was a local builder, Jack Richards, who had joined the Lab staff the year before to oversee construction of the James Lab Annex. Large picture windows, to rival those of Osterhout and the James Annex, were installed, creating views on the inner harbor from each of the three apartments, converting them from utilitarian to spectacular. Richard Roberts, the English chemist soon to move from Harvard, bringing the Lab expertise in nucleic acid chemistry, would occupy the topfloor apartment with his wife and two children. Below him would be Ulf Pettersson and his family, leaving behind a cramped apartment in a barn on Ridge Road. The basement flat would house Klaus Weber and his wife, Mary Osborn, soon to come down from Harvard to learn how to work on proteins of animal cells grown in culture.
Klaus Weber had risen rapidly at Harvard since joining me as a postdoc in the spring of 1965 to do protein chemistry on RNA phages. Recently promoted to full professor, he did not yet have the research facilities that normally go with the rank. All his previous research triumphs had come from using microbial systems, but he foresaw a bigger future for himself in moving on to animal cells and their related viruses. To learn how to grow and use them, he had just been granted a sabbatical leave for a year's work at Cold Spring Harbor. Going back to Harvard afterward would make sense only if they could provide space specifically outfitted for work with animal viruses. Toward that purpose, in the spring of 1972,1 helped prepare a big application to the National Cancer Institute for funds to construct an extension to the Harvard Biological Laboratories. Mark Ptashne would potentially join Klaus in the new space. He too was keen to work on cancer-causing retroviruses since taking the tumor virus workshop the previous summer (1971). The idea was spreading: MIT was thinking of proposing to use “war on cancer” funds to create a similar facility by converting a former candy factory virtually adjacent to its main campus.
Next on the facilities agenda of Cold Spring Harbor was the winterization of Blackford Hall, courtesy of LIBA's amazingly fast $250,000 fund drive. Unfortunately, Jack Richards found it painful to work with Harold Buttrick, the well-connected New York architect that a LIBA supporter had chosen for the project. A direct descendant of Stanford White, Buttrick thought himself of higher caste than the builders there to take orders. After the project ended, I quietly made Ed Pulling aware that Buttrick and Jack had irreconcilable differences.
During mid-July, Liz and I were briefly in England so I could take part in a forthcoming hourlong BBC Horizon program on DNA. Our second son, Duncan, was only five months old and so I initially did not want to participate. But Francis, normally allergic to TV exposure, was keen on the project. So for several days we were filmed walking through key Cambridge colleges or standing next to the bar at the Eagle, the pub where twenty years before we'd regularly eaten lunch, and where Francis had first brazenly announced our having discovered the secret of life. An unusual ingredient ofthat interlude was the constant presence of the producer's girlfriend Eva. Several years before, she had been crowned Miss World, and she still retained global dimensions. Sadly, though, she may have paid dearly for a picture-perfect figure, regurgitating meals, as Liz accidentally observed her doing in the washroom of the restaurant one evening.
That summer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory published Experiments in Molecular Genetics, a much expanded version of material taught by Jeffrey Miller two years before in our annual bacterial genetics course. Its intellectual sparkle and visual elegance would likely lead to its wide adoption and thus real money for the Lab. It was a bargain—maybe too much of one: more than 450 pages for only $11.95. Like Jeffrey and all our other authors, I also then wrote gratis for the Lab. At roughly the same time, I was about to finish two long introductory chapters for the Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses. When first conceived, it was to be a short book. But it steadily grew to more than 750 pages in thirteen chapters, written by twenty-two authors who included David Baltimore and Howard Temin, who were to share the 1975 Nobel Prize for their research on retroviruses. Also writing much of the book was Joe Sambrook, whose great talents as a scientist I found equaled by his ability to produce succinct, readable prose as well as edit the lesser sentences of others, myself included. He refused, however, to share credit as one of the editors. The book spine later showed only the name of my former Harvard postdoc, John Tooze, then in central London helping Michael Stoker run the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory bordering on Lincoln's Inn Fields.
The Lab's next book was the small volume Biohazards, drawn from the proceedings of a meeting held in January 1973 at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, California. Its three days of discussions were organized to codify lab procedures appropriate for working with tumor viruses. No consensus emerged, however, among the one hundred attendees as to what precautions, if any, should be taken.
Helping to organize the meeting as well as to edit the book was our recently appointed staff member Bob Pollack, continuing research on SV40-transformed cells that he began at New York University Medical School. Originally a physicist, Bob
had anxieties like those of Charlie Thomas about the safety of tumor virus research. I sometimes shared those worries, and as a precaution discontinued positive air pressure in our James virus labs. Positive air pressure was widely used in microbiology, a relatively higher pressure in the room preventing microbial contaminants in the outside air from entering. By the time of the meeting we had put these rooms under negative pressure, with their air venting through HEPA niters to keep viruses from escaping into the outside air.
Of increasing concern to me then was the possible doubling in size of the fifty-slip Whaler's Cove Marina on the eastern shore of the inner harbor. As it was, it posed no real aesthetic threat to the tran-quility of our waterfront. But it had been purchased two years earlier by Arthur Knutson, principal owner of the larger marina operations in nearby Huntington Harbor, who shortly thereafter proposed to use the adjacent Captain White House to expand the local yacht club. This would turn Cold Spring Harbor into a very busy port indeed. Though neighbors had legally challenged Knutson's proposal, we were advised they were likely to lose. If our harbor was to be saved, the Lab somehow had to buy the marina.
Our able administrative director, Bill Udry, recruited Jerome Ambro, supervisor of the Town of Huntington, to help us. His intervention was critical since the town of Cold Spring Harbor did not exist as a legal entity—the eastern shore of the inner harbor was actually a part of Huntington. Bill and Jerry came to lunch at Osterhout, where we looked out on the marina while enjoying Liz's poached oysters. I was never privy to how Ambro subsequently persuaded Arthur Knutson to sell us the Whaler's Cove site. It was too bad, I thought, the Lab did not have means then also to buy the sea captain's handsome house.
The Board of Trustees approved the purchase early in June, just a week after the Robertson Research Fund formally came into existence. But their concordance was not as routine as expected. Arguing against the acquisition was our nearby neighbor Walter Page. Long an important Lab friend and a trustee during John Cairns's first years as director, Walter had left the board when the Morgan Bank sent him to London for several years to run their European operations. Upon his return, we asked him to rejoin the Board, but he begged off, citing his growing Morgan responsibilities. But when Charlie Robertson became our benefactor, Walter knew he had to come back to make sure our new riches would not be squandered. Spending $300,000 to buy a marina was not Walter's idea of a prudent first expenditure. I, however, believed that not to make the purchase was surely to waste perhaps our only chance to forever preserve the inner harbor's pristine state. An ideal setting for science is not a matter of purely utilitarian considerations. Sensing our fellow trustees swaying in Walter's direction, however, I threw a Hail Mary pass, threatening to resign if the marina was not purchased. After I made my announcement, I left the James seminar room and walked back to Osterhout Cottage, about a minute away.
There Liz was entertaining Marilyn Zinder, whose husband, Norton, was attending the Trustees meeting. I announced my abrupt move, and we nervously waited some forty-five minutes until Bentley Glass came in to say that the trustees had just voted to purchase Whaler's Cove. I walked back with him to the meeting, rather sheepish at having got my way by reason of blackmail. I would never again challenge Walter, against whom one public victory was one too many. As Cold Spring Harbor's most respected resident and an old friend of the Lab, he should have been informed well in advance of the meeting of how strongly I felt. Harvard duties that spring, however, had kept Liz and me largely in Cambridge. There we were comfortably ensconced in a Harvard-owned Kirkland Place house, less than three hundred feet from Paul Doty's much bigger mansard-roofed mansion. It had become our Cambridge residence in the fall of 1971, giving us plenty of space in which to prepare for the impending birth of our son Duncan early in 1972.
I no longer had John Cairns to help me bat around the pros and cons of impending Lab decisions. In early March, he returned to England to take the directorship of Mill Hill Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. The previous four years, his position at Cold Spring Harbor had been happily stabilized and paid for by an American Cancer Society professorship. Soon after getting it, John threw a big wrench into the science of Arthur Kornberg by finding an E. coli mutant able to live without his famous enzyme DNA polymerase. Its existence soon led to several successive searches for alternative DNA polymerases. Without John's genetic approach, the inherent complexity of DNA replication would have remained unknown much longer.
The Cairns family's departure opened up the possibility of my family occupying Airslie, the large rambling wooden structure that had housed the Lab's directors for almost thirty years. Built in 1806 for Major William Jones, Airslie had come into the Lab's possession upon the wartime dissolution of the late Henry deForest's large estate to the immediate north along Bungtown Road. Before Liz and the children and I moved in, however, we undertook a badly needed massive renovation. The Lab had previously never had funds for anything except the occasional fresh coat of paint and, once, a new roof. Cold winter winds blew through Airslie during all the years of Demerec's and Cairns's occupancy.
An initial plan drawn up by a New York architect seemed wrong at first sight. He would have given Airslie a formal Federal style appropriate for rich New England merchants. Somehow we had to find an imaginative designer to give the place its own character. Luckily I had just read that the celebrated Yale architect Charles Moore was doing a low-cost housing project in nearby Huntington Station. The year before, staying in the “honeymoon suite” of Sea Ranch, the resort he created above San Francisco, Liz and I had much admired the daring of its multiple sloping roofs. I arranged for Moore's next visit to Long Island to include a brief visit with us. A week later, Liz and I were observing up close his playful mind reimagining Airslie.
Luckily Moore's plan was within the Lab's fiscal reach. Less than a month passed before we saw his final scheme while he was up at Harvard lecturing to architecture students. We were immediately taken with the way he opened up the front of the house into a three-story hall, giving Airslie for the first time a large central staircase. On our next visit down to Cold Spring Harbor I shared the plan with the trustees, a little apprehensive imagining what they might make of the bold way Moore created large, open spaces from tight, smaller rooms. In particular, I worried what our new chairman and nearby neighbor, Bob Olney, would think. Happily, Bob approved, provided the local preservation society didn't object. On their subsequent visit, the society's president declared that Airslie lacked any design features worth preserving. His only concern was with saving some ancient panes of glass. Though it was rather impractical, we resolved to keep the small 150-year-old glass pieces that ran along both sides of the front door. And so early in the fall of 1973, when Airslie was no longer needed for overflow summer housing, the fourteen-month project started. The final cost of just under $200,000 seemed embarrassingly extravagant for housing the director. Once we moved in, we realized that Moore's unique design gave Liz and me a way of life usually enjoyed only by the very wealthy. But it occurred to me that one day this would help us lure my successor; contrary to stereotype, most scientists are far from indifferent to the finer things in life.
The following year, Robertson Research Fund money let us readapt Jones Laboratory into a year-round neurobiology facility. Charles Moore and his highly talented young coworker Bill Grover imaginatively placed the four specialized neurobiology modules as freestanding aluminum-covered boxes accented by boldly colored wooden strips. Charles Robertson and his new wife, Jane, came to its dedication ceremonies. Earlier in the summer, the Robertsons had invited all the speakers at the June symposium on the synapse for a late afternoon party. It marked our gracious host's last year in the home he had so lovingly occupied for almost forty years. By then he had given up plans to build a modest summer home next door to our proposed conference center, accepting that his and Jane's future would be mainly spent in Florida at his large waterfront estate in Delray Beach.
Even before
Airslie was gutted and the electricity turned off, Liz and I wondered whether it soon might be our year-round home. How long Harvard would continue to let me be away so much was not yet settied.
Living in two places, moreover, would become less practical once Rufus reached kindergarten age. Early in 1973-74 I informed Harvard that I might move out of Kirkland Place when my spring term responsibilities ended. Many of its furnishings would go to Airslie and others to the house we had just bought on Martha's Vineyard.
I had wanted a summer home on the Seven Gates Farm on Martha's Vineyard since becoming aware more than a decade before of its thousand-acre vastness, on which corn was still grown. I knew several of the farm's civilized summer denizens very well, including our Cold Spring Harbor neighbor Amyas Ames, former chairman of Lincoln Center, who had presided over LIBA in the last year of Milislav Demerec's directorship. Owning one of its only thirty houses, however, seemed beyond my means until late August, when a Vineyard Haven real estate agent took us to a simple early-nineteenth-century farmhouse just put up for sale by a man about to retire to low-tax New Hampshire. Were we to sell the house on Brown Street in Cambridge, bought using my Nobel Prize monies, we could just cover the purchase price. The idea became irresistible once we imagined ourselves basking in the shade of the two magnificent American elms overhanging the wide farmhouse lawn. Equally important, only five miles away was Ed and Lucy Pulling's West Chop beachfront summerhouse.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 30
