AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Also encouraging me to aim high was my not-too-distant cousin Orson Welles, whose grandmother was a Watson. Though we never met, he also had an Illinois background and after being effectively orphaned was partly raised by my father's uncle, the celebrated Chicago artist Dudley Crafts Watson. Always turned out with much panache, including a pince-nez, Dudley relished telling his nephew's family of Orson's triumphs, which began when he was a child actor in the Todd School. Orson's daring was what appealed to me most, from his famous War of the Worlds radio hoax to his groundbreaking feature Citizen Kane. A scientist's hero need not be a microbiologist, let alone a baseball player.

  2. MANNERS LEARNED WHILE AN UNDERGRADUATE

  I WENT to my first college classes at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1943. By starting in the summer and continuing in residence during subsequent summers, I had a good chance of obtaining my degree before I could be called into military service when I turned eighteen. Initially I had no choice about the courses I took—one-year surveys in the physical sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences were the intellectual blue plate special for all freshmen. There were even more prosaic requirements in math and English (reading, writing, and criticism). The survey requisites were a reaction against the free elective curricula that had come to dominate American colleges in the early twentieth century, particularly following the popularization of this system at Harvard by its then president, Charles Eliot.

  At the time, the College of the University of Chicago saw as its clear purpose to perpetuate the common ideas and ideals that held together Western civilization. To do so President Robert Hutchins required the college to uphold before students “the habitual vision of greatness.” When I matriculated, Hutchins was forty-four. He had become president fourteen years before in 1929 at the age of thirty. He had earlier served as secretary of the Yale Corporation at the age of twenty-four, under James Rowland Angeli, who had come from the University of Chicago to be Yale's president. Upon obtaining his law degree, Hutchins began teaching law and through his personal magnetism and confident intellect quickly dominated the Yale law faculty, soon becoming its youngest dean ever. He remained only a year in this prestigious position before being chosen as the sixth president of the University of Chicago.

  An impulse to reform the chaotic state of American undergraduate education actually predated Hutchins's arrival in the form of a faculty report recommending that all students take a common set of introductory survey courses during their freshman and sophomore years. Afterward they would take elective courses in their fields of concentration. When he launched this program in 1931, Hutchins grafted onto it two much more radical ideas. The first was the replacement of conventional textbooks with readings from the great books of Western civilization starting with Plato and going through Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Equally revolutionary was Hutchins's plan to accept students after only two years of high school. This idea was implemented experimentally beginning in 1937, largely with students in the University High School and taught mainly in the high school's classrooms. By 1942, however, a close vote of the war-depleted faculty realized Hutchins's bold alternative to the conventional bachelor's degree.

  It was into this essentially untried educational environment that I entered each day via a roughly thirty-minute streetcar commute for a three-cent student fare. My best course was Social Science I (American Political Institutions), then taught very ably by Robert Keohane. There was no deep metaphysics on which to get hung up, and I went with pleasure to the main reading room of Harper Library to find primary historical documents such as the Federalist Papers or the Dred Scott decision. The book that influenced me most, however, was Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon Parrington. It was the first to push me above the canned versions of American history, emphasizing names, dates, maps, and tables to reckon with economic and religious determinism. Much more clearly than before, I appreciated the ideological differences between the Democrats and Republicans and their respective alternatives for coping with the Great Depression, which now only a major war, it seemed, could bring to an end.

  Inserting the great books into the science surveys was from the start a controversial idea totally opposed by the science faculty, who considered teaching the history before the facts of science a lunacy of mad medievalists. My introduction to physical science survey, taught by the biologist Tom Hall, was a hodgepodge of these two approaches. Much of the time I couldn't tell what was required of me, and my self-esteem fell when I received a B on my exam at the end of the summer term. Fortunately, only the results of the comprehensive exam taken at the end of the full year's work would appear on my official record. But I got a B on that too.

  The evaluation system at the college was then unique. Hutchins had nothing but contempt for the custom of courses being continually punctuated by exams requiring modest recall of textbook readings or lecture notes. At Chicago a special board of examiners, not the individual course instructors, was responsible for the exams. No advantage could come of buttering up the instructor or religious note taking in lectures. Your attention could focus on intellectual arguments while you were in class, not afterward in preparation for an exam. Unfortunately, some of the exams felt more like rarefied IQ tests than honest attempts at evaluating knowledge of the syllabus.

  As a commuting student, I entered only marginally into the social life of Hutchins's college, about half of whose students lived in dorm rooms set aside for them. Ida Noyes Hall, originally the social and athletic center for women, became the meeting point for my younger cohort, many of whom, despite relative youth, relaxed by playing endless hands of bridge there. Our athletics also centered on Noyes Hall, where the gymnasium was used for intramural games as well as academic competitions with teams from the private high schools, such as Chicago Latin, the University High School's traditional competitors. I routinely went to all its home court games but more obsessively followed the college team, which in 1943-44 played its last season in the Big Ten. Chicago's compulsory survey courses were ultimately unmanageable for Big Ten-quality athletes, and allowances were not going to be made for students recruited solely for their athletic ability. Our final year was a humiliation until the Chicago Five were vastly strengthened by the arrival on campus of several men from the navy for war-related learning. I became transfixed during our last game of the season, against the perennial powerhouse Ohio State. Chicago kept it tied until almost the end, allowing a tiny crowd of fans to head off to bed knowing they had almost witnessed a miracle.

  On the west side of Stagg Field were the original football stands, underneath which handball and squash courts had been placed. I naturally gravitated to handball, in which sheer strength counted for little. Several courts north of where I usually played, there was a locked door with a No Trespassing sign, from which one inferred that war research was being conducted on the other side. I wondered whether it was an extension of the top-secret physics project that had recently brought to Chicago my physicist uncle, William Weldon Watson, who had come with his family from New Haven, where he was a professor at Yale. Though Bill was very discreet, I got the impression that they were trying to develop a superweapon ahead of the Germans.

  A real plus of the college's evaluation system was that you could take your comprehensive exams as soon as you felt prepared. No requirements existed for attending classes or writing term papers. And the tuition was the same even if you registered for more than the normal course load. Because of the war, all the second years of physical sciences courses were crammed into the spring 1944 quarter. Once again I eked out a B on the final exam. I used the following summer quarter to cram down the one-year-long Biological Science Survey, which, happily, was not weighted down by the great-books historical approach. With my interest in birds drawing me toward a career in biology, I was disappointed when I got yet another B on the comprehensive exam that August.

  My progress toward a concentration in science did not reflect any dislike of the second-year surveys in
the humanities or social sciences. In fact, both these classes left lasting memories of inspired teaching. Of all my instructors, the Trinity College-trained Irish classicist David Greene would bring me closest to Hutchins's idea of great teaching. Particularly moving was Greene's Humanities II lecture on the grand inquisitor of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and the choice between freedom and the security offered by adherence to religious authority. I was also captivated by my Social Science II lectures, interspersed with discussion sessions led by the German-born refugee from Nazism Christian Mackauer. With his Continental background he was much at home pitting Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism against R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. It was a compelling new outlook on my father's Protestant heritage.

  In my first departmental science class, Botany 101, I was several years younger than the other students. The basics of plant anatomy and physiology were little more than an exercise in short-term memory. But the laboratory sessions were a horror since they demanded sketching what I saw under the microscope. My inability to draw, much less do so neatly, depressingly ensured that my final grade would be another B. Zoology 101, taught by the termite specialist Alfred Emerson, went much better: less drawing, and many trips to the Field Museum to look at its extensive collection of reptiles, birds, and mammals.

  I remained all through my college years a fervent ornithologist, especially during the spring and fall migrations, when I frequently went by myself, sometimes extending the reach of public transportation by hitchhiking, to prime birding areas. The birds that fascinated me the most were the shorebirds, ranging from the tiny sandpipers to the much larger curlews. I was always on the lookout for the very rare red Wilson and northern phalaropes that Dad had seen when he was a boy. So I was tremendously thrilled when one day in early May, in a marsh on the west shore of Lake Calumet, I spotted three northern phalaropes spinning in the shallow water.

  In the spring of 1945, I took the intellectually challenging physiology course taught by the clever Ralph Gerard, whose recent book, Unresting Cells, was one of our texts. The class was given in Abbott Hall, which was next to Billings Hospital and was the headquarters of the biochemistry and physiology departments. No longer did lab work depend on drawing. Instead we did actual experiments on frogs whose consciousness had been destroyed by the quick insertion of a sharpened metal rod into their brains. On other afternoons, teaching assistants did demonstrations on anesthetized dogs that had been brought down from the animal room on the top floor of Abbott. In summer months when the windows were open, the sounds of barking dogs reached the walks below, upsetting those who believed experimenting on animals to be morally irresponsible. In contrast I, like almost everyone I knew, saw no alternative to animal experimentation if we were to advance science and medicine.

  The spring term was emotionally overshadowed by the death of Franklin Roosevelt on April 12 and the end of the war in Europe less than a month later. Hutchins saw V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe, as an occasion for a major statement and assembled the student body on the morning of May 8 in Rockefeller Chapel. Like many of my friends, my thoughts were of dismantling forever the German military machine that had inflicted on humanity two catastrophic world wars. Hutchins, however, majestically warned against lawless revenge that would go against the ideals for the sake of which we had entered the war. Given the day, the speech was an extraordinarily brave gesture that made me ashamed of my having espoused Henry Morganthau's proposal to reduce Germany to a nonindustrialized, pastoral country.

  Academically this was my best term, the first one in which I received two As—one in physiology, the other in my first advanced divisional course, Botany 234, Physiographic Ecology. This latter course, taught by Charles Olmstead, was a walkover devoted to elucidating differences in plant life as a function of the environment. I spent that summer on a tiny island just off Door County, the long thin peninsula that separates Wisconsin's Green Bay from northern Lake Michigan. With Japanese power in full retreat and the war likely to end soon, there was no longer reason to hurry my education with summer schooling. I opted for a camp counselor position that would bring me into real northern wilderness, away from the oppressively humid heat of most Chicago summers. Though I was underqualified, being neither a strong swimmer nor an experienced boatman, the proprietor was sorely in need of staff, and I became the camp's first “nature” counselor.

  Despite being so out of place, I enjoyed most days, slipping away whenever possible into the dense tangle of spruce and fir trees that surrounded the campgrounds. I could walk the perimeter of the island in less than a half hour, ever hopeful that a rare shorebird would fly by. One day this wish was royally granted when three majestic Hudsonian curlews flew within twenty feet of my observation spot. In mid-August the radio brought news of the first atom bombs having been dropped on Japan and the immediate end of the war; it was proof of the superweapon concept, which had brought my uncle Bill to the University of Chicago and its Ryerson Physical Laboratory. Later I eagerly read the Chicago Tribune's detailed account of the University of Chicago's key contribution, the first sustained nuclear reaction produced by man; it had been accomplished in the atomic pile constructed by physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, underneath the west football stands where I played handball.

  Upon returning to school for the fall 1945 quarter, I decided to risk losing my scholarship aid by taking more difficult courses. Almost all my choices were quantitative, as I simultaneously took calculus, chemistry, and physics. Balancing chemical equations was only mildly painful, and I received two As and a B. But I was much less at home with calculus, getting a B in differential calculus and then a C in the next quarter's integral calculus. So I took no further math to give more attention to my physics course. Though the instructor, Mario Iona, took a seemingly perverse pleasure in penalizing us for wrong guesses on his multiple-choice physics quizzes, I hit my stride by the spring term and pulled my grade up to an A.

  All through the year I was taking Oil (Observation, Interpretation, and Integration), the most philosophically oriented of all the surveys and the last required course I needed for my degree. Again I had good fortune regarding the instructor: Joseph Schwab, whose languorous southern tone could never hide his disdain for crap answers to precise Socratic questioning in my Humanities I class. Now that I had learned to anticipate his line of interrogation, I quite often enjoyed and even looked forward to his Swift Hall classes, particularly after getting past medieval thought and on to that of the Renaissance and Francis Bacon's distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning. Even more appealing were the masterfully clear writings of the late-nineteenth-century Harvard logician C. S. Peirce. In the end, however, I was brought back to reality by my B on the final comprehensive. The message was clear that I should avoid further philosophical inquiry.

  By dropping the last quarter of math, I had time to audit lectures on physiological genetics by Sewall Wright, the university's best-known biologist. Besides being one of the world's most accomplished population geneticists and a leader in evolutionary thought, Wright also did much to advance biology toward understanding what genes do at the biochemical level. I had by then independently become focused on the gene through a reading that winter of Erwin Schrödinger's thin book What Is Life? Because Schrödinger, the inventor of quantum wave mechanics and a 1933 Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had seen the importance of writing about biology, What Is Life? was featured in the Sunday book section of the Chicago Sun-Times. The next morning I checked it out of the biology library. Schrödinger elegantly laid out how genes were the most important feature of life, since they maintained its continuity by carrying hereditary information from one generation to the next. As birds had bound me to life sciences, Schrödinger's exaltation of the gene would lead me to a life of studying genetics.

  At the June 1946 commencement, Robert Hutchins elegantly warned of the doom of Western civilization unless university graduates led the world toward a mo
ral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution that contrasted with today's postwar “get all you can” ethos. I was struck by our president's tone that morning—not that of the metaphysician but that of the preacher's son—as he fervidly admonished us that only by coming to see our fellows as the children of God would we stop seeing them as rivals. He further warned us that unless we esteem ourselves as more than animals we are doomed to act like them, and the laws of the jungle will prevail. Most unexpected were his statements that we can practice Aristotelian ethics only with the support and inspiration of religious faith, that the brotherhood of men must rest on the fatherhood of God, and that cats and dogs are more attractive than most humans.

  Excited by his forceful rhetoric but uneasy about its sentiments, my parents and my sister, who had just completed her first year at the college, walked across Woodlawn Avenue to the reception at Ida Noyes Hall. There Hutchins recognized Dad as we passed through the receiving line, and briefly chatted with him about their student days at Oberlin. Afterward Dad recounted how Bob had then been a rebel and had been part of a group that secretly smoked cigarettes.