AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  THE DOUBLE HELIX, the story of how Francis and I found the structure of DNA, was published in February 1968—fifteen years after the discovery. That the tale's many unexpected twists should be revealed to the general public was long on my mind, but how to write them up did not crystallize until a spring 1962 dinner in New York City. There Francis and I were being honored with the Research Corporation Prize. Francis could not be there since he was in Seattle delivering three long-scheduled public lectures at the University of Washington. Abby Rockefeller invited me to spend the night at her parents’ home, where I admired her father's large Derain fauve painting of the Thames and beheld her family's porcelain with less appreciation. I walked from East Sixty-fifth Street to the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, then the venue of many such ceremonial affairs. On the dais I was next to Columbia University's literary polymath Jacques Barzun, known to me since my adolescence through his regular appearances on the CBS radio network.

  Stimulated by Barzun's conversation, I used my after-dinner acceptance speech to tell the story of our discovery as a very human drama also featuring Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Erwin Chargaff, and Linus Pauling. My unexpected candor elicited much laughter and was later praised for allowing the audience to feel like insiders in one of science's big moments. Feeling jubilant as I walked back along Lexington Avenue to the Rockefeller home, I saw in my future the writing of what Truman Capote would later call the “nonfiction novel.” But since I was scheduled almost immediately to return to England to my mini-sabbatical at Churchill College, Cambridge, I could not see starting to write until my return to Harvard.

  Abby Rockefeller

  With Cynthia Johnson in Radcliffe Yard

  Wally Gilbert and I ride the rhino outside the Harvard Biolabs with Barbara Riddle and blue-eyed Pat Collinge.

  In London I initially hoped to use my half of the Research Corporation Prize to commission Francis Bacon to paint Francis Crick; I had recently seen one of Bacon's small portraits in Geneva, and it long lingered in my mind. But the Marlborough Gallery let me know that the Irish-born Bacon painted only close acquaintances. The fact that Francis and Odile had spotted the artist the previous summer in Tangier would not suffice. An hour later, I walked out onto Albemarle Street the contented possessor of one of nine copies of Henry Moore's bronze Head of a Warrior.

  The first chapter of what later came to be called The Double Helix was written in Albert and Marta Szent-Györgyi's house on Cape Cod. The summer was coming to an end and my Radcliffe summer assistant, Pat Collinge, was about to join her Harvard boyfriend, Jake, at work on a novel farther out on the Cape. Since the start of summer, Pat's blue eyes and urchin dress made her seem the perfect muse to draw out of me the first pages of my DNA story without apparent effort. Happily, she agreed to be driven down to the Cape in my open MG TF to spend a morning as my typist at Woods Hole before going on to Wellfleet. But I had writer's block for several hours before the words came to me: “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.” More than half the first chapter was typed out before her boyfriend showed up, leaving me wistfully contemplating how I would finish the rest of the chapter without the encouragement of her blue eyes. It wasn't so easy, and only once back at Harvard would I finish the final paragraphs, whereupon my secretary typed out a complete first chapter.

  Events connected to my fall Nobel Prize conspired with the school year to keep me from writing any more until the following summer. It was then I spotted the engagingly pretty Radcliffe senior Cynthia Johnson, eating lunch under the big elm tree in front of the Biolabs. She was with our department's best-looking assistant professor, John Dowling, under whom she was doing summer research in George Wald's vision lab. The next day I joined them for lunch and soon afterward was playing tennis with Cynthia on the Radcliffe courts. Too soon I learned that she had a steady boyfriend, Malcolm MacKay, who, having just graduated from Princeton, was in Europe before starting Harvard Law School in the fall. Until that time, however, we took day trips together, once to the beach at Nahant, where, scarily, I first noticed that ceremonial overeating had given me a slight belly, the first fat I'd ever observed in my midsection. Later, on Martha's Vineyard, I stayed several weekends at Cynthia's family home in Edgartown, learning not only that her artist mother had drawn the Duke and Duchess of Windsor but that her grandmother was a close friend of Emily Post, whose book on manners precipitated the decline of the WASP ascendancy in America. Thinking that my being a writer as well as a laureate might offer romance enough to dislodge Malcolm from Cynthia's heart, I spent the last two weeks of August writing two more chapters. But when the fall came and Cynthia brought Malcolm to my flat for my approval, I knew I could not compete with his sailboats.

  By then my free moments were devoted to completing six short chapters on the replication of living molecules for a book to emerge in time for my forthcoming January lectures to talented high school students in Australia. George Gamow had lectured to this Sydney summer school the year before and highly recommended it as an excuse for being in the warm sun during January. I likewise looked forward to avoiding the East Coast doldrums over the Christmas/New Year holidays and so accepted the necessity of writing up simplified versions of my Biology 2 lectures.

  One muggy August evening, on the plain wooden desk of my Appian Way flat, I wrote out, “It is very easy to consider man unique among living organisms. Great civilizations have developed and changed our world's environments in ways inconceivable for any other form of life. There has thus always been a tendency to think that something special differentiates man from everything else. These beliefs often find expression in man's religions that try to give an origin to our existence and in so doing to provide workable rules for conducting our lives. Just as every human life begins at a fixed time, it was natural to think that man did not always exist but that there was a moment of creation perhaps occurring at the same time for man and all other forms of life. These views, however, were first seriously questioned just over 100 years ago when Darwin and Wallace proposed their theories of evolution based on selection of the most fit.”

  The remainder of this introductory chapter came easily over the next several days, leaving me confident of getting the remaining five pieces done by the end of October. In that case, the book would be ready at the start of the Australian summer school. But pressing tasks for the President's Science Advisory Committee let me send off only three chapters (“Introduction,” “A Chemist's View of the Living Cell,” “The Concept of Template Surfaces”). Later John F. Kennedy's death in Dallas and my father's stroke soon after kept me from writing up the last three lectures. To my relief, my father's weakness on one side was not permanent, and by the time I took him down to Washington to be with my sister over the winter, he could walk to and from Harvard Square using a cane.

  Despite a brief stopover in Fiji, I felt and looked haggard when I arrived in Sydney just after New Year's. The short brown beard that I had grown in September while lecturing in Ravello led a Sydney newspaper article to describe me as “haunted and Mephistophelean” and “as introverted as his host the physicist Harry Messel was extroverted.” It went on to characterize me as difficult to entertain, a portrayal reflecting several dinner parties given for me by senior academics, not one graced by the face of a pretty girl. In desperation I suggested an evening of nightclubbing only to find that in prudish Sydney chorus girls still danced fully clothed.

  My life improved dramatically when a reporter for the Mirror arranged for me to be led around the Paddington art scene by the young painter and critic Robert Hughes. In the Rudy Komen Gallery, I bought the large blue painting Kings Cross Woman by the former boxer Robert Dickerson and a de Kooning-like green-faced woman by the equally talented Jon Molvig. Then we popped into the Kellman Gallery, where I acquired a life-size wooden man from the Sepie River peoples of Papua New Guinea. Its painted Dubuffet-like face later sat across from me at my Biolabs desk. At last in high spirits, I looked forward to a second day of gallery ho
pping, but Hughes pulled out, making me suspect that women did not make him tick, a notion since copiously disproved.

  Even before my arrival back at Harvard, I feared my Australian lectures and their written versions were for college, not high school, students and that audiences would get lost. My three completed chapters, I decided, would work better as the start of a little college-level text on how DNA provides the information that enables cellular existence. A chance meeting at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square led me to learn that MIT's molecular biologist, Cyrus Levinthal, was advising the new science textbook company W. A. Benjamin. The firm was eager to expand its initial physics and chemistry list to encompass biochemistry and molecular biology. Less than a week later, its main editor, the young Canadian Neil Patterson, came to my office to make me a Benjamin author, as he had earlier the über-physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

  Soon after, I was in W. A. Benjamin's grubby New York City offices, above a bowling alley on Upper Broadway. My discomfort abated when I was told they would soon move to 2 Park Avenue, below Grand Central Station. Liking the way in which Neil Patterson sought out books by clever young scientists, I signed a contract that gave me a $1,000 advance for a 125-page book to be completed late in the year. In addition, I was offered options to buy five thousand shares of Benjamin stock; there seemed reason to hope the stock price would rise as new books rolled out. By then I had given my prospective book the title The Molecular Biology of the Gene (MBG). I was first tempted to call it This Is Life, a titular rejoinder to Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? On reflection, however, that would have been promising more than I could deliver.

  In writing my new chapters, I used boldface sentences to summarize the main idea conveyed by paragraphs below it (e.g., “Molecules are restrictively sticky;” “Enzymes cannot be used to order amino acids in proteins;” “Template interactions are based on weak bonds over short distances”). I hit upon “concept heads” as a teaching device when writing the chapter “A Chemist's Look at the Living Cell” before going off to Australia. They naturally emerged from lists of ideas I prepared in outlining what topics each chapter should include. Almost from the start I saw the need to expand upon my Australian chapters, coming up with snappy concept heads such as “The 25-year loneliness of the protein crystallographer.”

  In the right-hand corner of my office, the Sepie River wood carving I bought shortly after winning the Nobel Prize supervises my labors.

  Equally important to the final readability of MBG was the artwork done by the young Keith Roberts, about to begin his university studies. Early in 1964, Keith had come from England to work as a temporary lab technician prior to reading botany at Cambridge. When I happened to ask his opinion of my first draft chapters, he revealed that he had almost chosen to study art over science, and volunteered to do the necessary illustrations. As my manuscript steadily grew in length, Keith's preoccupation with drawing became full-time, and he continued to draw for me after commencing his freshman year.

  At that time, Benjamin was using two-color printing and professional artists. Here I was lucky to have the New York painter Bill Prokus help me transfer Keith's artistic ideas into fixed artwork. Bill then had a studio on Twenty-third Street in Chelsea, where in addition to his own work he did commercial artwork for Benjamin. To speed Bill along, I began coming down regularly to New York City and staying at the Plaza, where the inside rooms never cost more than $20. Even so, Bob Worth, the steel heir who was Benjamin's financial officer, called on me to stop such visits, having read an unfavorable opinion of my then almost finished manuscript. Neil Patterson had sent it to the cell biologist Bob Allen at Dartmouth, who found it unsuitable for his students. Fortunately, Neil prevailed over Bob, and I did not have to stay at the dingy Chelsea Hotel, sited across from Bill Prokus's studio.

  All my chapter drafts were greatly improved in editing done by the Radcliffe senior Dolly Garter. She had taken George Wald's first-year general-education biology course and so was exposed to the DNA way of thinking. That she was an English major interested in writing was a big plus, and she was able to change many a turgid phrase into freer-flowing language. My challenge became getting the chapters to the point that Dolly could understand them without recourse to Keith's illustrations, often not yet done. If Dolly could follow the words alone, I figured less bright students would not have difficulty with my arguments suitably illustrated. Dolly worked right through the fall of 1964 revising chapters as I wrote them. By then I had expanded MBG's scope, adding the chapters “The Importance of Weak Chemical Interactions” and “Coupled Reactions and Group Transfers” for students coming from biology with weaker backgrounds in chemistry. Together with many later chapters, they needed constant rewriting to keep pace with the latest scientific advances. The countless revisions of the initial galley proofs led to most of MBG being completely reset. Even in page proofs I made many more changes than my publishers wanted, and they threatened to dock me with the charges involved. In the end, they never did so, realizing the value on balance of an up-to-the-minute book.

  A wisp of pale, fragile flesh, the Brooklyn-born Dolly belonged to the circle of Harvard's literary magazine The Advocate. So I had her read the first chapters of my memoir about finding the double helix. The book's original title was Honest Jim, since Alfred Tissières earlier had reminded me that Maurice Wilkins's collaborator, Willy Seeds, had cynically addressed me as “Honest Jim” when in August 1955 he met Alfred and me by chance on a path in the Alps. Now, Honest Jim was my way to face head-on the controversial question prompting Seeds's cynicism, over whether Francis and I had improperly used confidential King's College data in working out the structure of DNA. I had in mind the way Joseph Conrad used Lord Jim to pose the basic question as to its hero's character.

  Dolly's enthusiasm for Honest Jim's first chapters encouraged me to get back to writing once the essential features of MBG were in place. By the time she and her boyfriend, a math major and fellow Brooklynite called Danny, graduated in June, Dolly had read half of Honest Jim. From her new publishing job with Van Nostrand in Princeton, she later wrote telling me that the Harvard Advocate would like to publish its opening chapters. Though the life of a scientist, in her opinion, was of necessity dull, the Advocate's readership would benefit from reading about my exhilarating experiences.

  At the time I had hopes that Houghton Mifflin would publish Honest Jim. The year before on a May evening I'd driven out to Beverly, to the elegant large square wooden house of Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, whose husband Giorgio's expertise was the history of science. We had met earlier through Dorothy's younger relative the Radcliffe graduate Ella Clark. Over dinner I enjoyed talking to the novelist Alberto Moravia's much younger wife, Dacia Maraini, who had just published a sexually charged novel of her own. In leaving, I gave several early chapters of Honest Jim to Dorothy. Soon she wrote me a flattering note saying that when my manuscript was more complete, I should show it to Houghton Mifflin.

  As the spring 1965 term ended, I flew off to Germany to deliver three lectures. The first was in Munich, where I shared my first suckling pig in a large beer hall with the biochemist Feodor Lynen. Then his country's most accomplished biochemist, he went to the States at least twice a year to keep up as an enzymologist. Later that year, he would be receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with my Harvard colleague Konrad Bloch, for discovering how cholesterol is made in cells. I next traveled north, first to Würzburg and then to Göttingen, where the chemist Manfred Eigen's fast-reaction chemistry would, in three years, also earn a Nobel. Just a year older than I, Manfred was boyishly enthusiastic about an amazing range of nonchemi-cal activities, especially the piano. At his home he assembled a small chamber orchestra to accompany him as he raced through a Mozart concerto with only occasional mistakes.

  My main purpose in going to Europe was a June conference, “The Principles of Biomolecular Organization,” at the CIBA House in London. It was effectively a follow-up to the
“Nature of Viruses” meeting there nine years before. Just before the meeting, J. D. Bernal, the head of the Birkbeck College lab where Rosalind Franklin had moved after leaving King's, suffered a mild stroke that made his delivery of the opening remarks painful for those who had long known him as “Sage.” No trace of a halting brain appeared in his later published piece stating that life is in no sense a metaphysical entity but a precisely patterned structure right down to the atomic level. Feodor Lynen was also in the audience and both of us were intrigued by the last talk, “The Minimum Size of Cells,” by Yale's Harold Morowitz. Here he focused on the smallest free-living cells, organisms such as PPLO and mycoplasma, whose genomes likely contained fewer than a million base pairs.

  I left central London after the meeting to visit Av and Lorna Mitchi-son on the Ridgeway, near the grounds of the Mill Hill Laboratory of the Medical Research Council. A number of family friends were there, the youngest being the intelligent and statuesque Susie Reeder, about to receive her university degree at Sussex and soon to commence a postgraduate degree program in criminology at Cambridge. The next evening we had dinner at Rule's Restaurant, just below Covent Garden. It was just a few minutes’ walk away from the Aldwych Theatre, where we saw Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, with Ian Holm and Vivian Merchant, then Pinter's wife. Afterward, I walked Susie across Waterloo Bridge, where she caught a train to her mother's home in Putney.

  A month later Susie was to be in the States on her way to a month-long holiday near Denver, where she planned to visit her British boyfriend. She seemed eager to stop off in Cold Spring Harbor, where in mid-July I would be staying at the home of the lab's director, John Cairns. In the end she came only for a day, letting me admire her swimsuited form on the raft off the lab's beach. Ensuring that the occasion's memory would not be one to cherish was the continuous presence of the Cairnses’ German police dog, who nearly bit me on the leg before being dispatched. Early in September, on her way back to England, Susie stopped off in Boston long enough to let me take her to supper at the Union Oyster House after I'd ruefully observed her lack of attention to the art on the walls of my Appian Way flat.