AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Two weeks before, W A. Benjamin had held a party at Woods Hole to mark the appearance of the first copies of The Molecular Biology of the Gene. Many from my Harvard lab came down for the event, as did my dad, whom Neil Patterson kindly spent much time talking to. Earlier in the day, I had driven down with a pretty Radcliffe senior with short blond hair called Joshie Pashler, who also had something to celebrate in the recent discovery of her first RNA phage R17 mutant. Over the summer, I let Joshie read newly completed Honest Jim chapters, hoping each would make her want to read the next one. Like my previous intelligent and pretty assistants, Joshie had a steady Harvard boyfriend, though I noted by way of small comfort that she was a good deal sharper than he was.

  Also at the W A. Benjamin party was Keith Roberts, back for much of the summer. His first months up at Cambridge had not been what he anticipated. To start with, his longtime girlfriend from Norwich, Jenny, had taken up with “a more mature, better-looking man.” And his Cambridge digs, while cheap, were grim—one small room without the typical fireplace. Moreover, he found life at his college dull, with everything closing down at 11:30 P.M. and a gown required while dining in St. John's five nights a week. As modest distractions, he took out subscriptions to the Arts Society, the Humanists, and the Marxist Society. He also had the pleasure of hearing Francis lecture to the Humanists on the topic “Is Vitalism Dead?” with a fiery delivery that put off those not sharing the view that religion is a mistake. Lately things were looking up, however, as Jenny had come back to Keith before the academic year ended and was with him at the Woods Hole party. Without Keith's artwork, my text would not have sold almost twenty thousand copies the first year and even more the second, generating yearly royalty income soon equal to my Harvard salary.

  During the coming academic year, I planned to be on sabbatical in Alfred Tissières's lab in Geneva, with half of my Harvard salary supplemented by a Guggenheim Fellowship. As the time to leave approached, though, I realized the first half of sabbatical time would be better spent finishing Honest Jim in Cambridge. There I could probe Francis's memory of key moments in our adventure. Before flying across the Atlantic, I sent my half-complete manuscript to Dorothy de Santillana to share with her Houghton Mifflin colleagues. Several weeks passed before I got a response from their chief editor, Paul Brooks, over a Friday lunch at his Boston club. In his opinion, the language was too strong and likely to lead to libel suits. But since he was not expert on such matters, he had arranged for me to visit Hale and Doer, the prestigious downtown Boston firm to which they had sent my chapters. Several days later, I again crossed the Charles River to go over several pages of comments by a Boston blueblood, improbably named Conrad Diesenhofer, on how my use of certain words would create trouble. I went back to Harvard suspecting that Houghton Mifflin's risk aversion could not allow them beyond the jeopardy that might attend issuing further editions of Roger Tory Peterson's bird guides.

  In Cambridge, Sydney Brenner had arranged for me to have an absent fellow's digs at King's, overlooking the big green lawn that fronted Clare College. Once a chapter was finished, I took it to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) for typing by Francis's young secretary. That I was writing up the story as a solo effort, not a joint project, at times seemed to annoy Francis. But on other occasions, he easily recalled key events that had already vanished from my memory. Later I showed my resulting efforts to Susie Reeder, whose postgraduate criminology studies were centered in a nineteenth-century house on West Road, close to where Lawrence and Alice Bragg had lived when I first arrived in Cambridge. On several evenings Susie and I drove to restaurants outside Cambridge using a rented MG sedan that also took me to and from the LMB.

  During my last ten days in Cambridge, my father stayed nearby at the Royal Cambridge Hotel on Scroope Terrace, coming from central France, where he had been on holiday. Just before Christmas he flew back across the Atlantic to be with my sister in Washington. Simultaneously, I went up to Scotland to be at Dick and Naomi Mitchison's large house at Carradale. By then I had almost finished Honest Jim, having only two chapters to go. In Naomi's study, under one of her Wyndham Lewis drawings, I wrote out the next-to-last chapter. Once the New Year had been celebrated, I flew back to Harvard, where I needed only a day to compose the last chapter. The final sentence, “I was twenty-five and too old to be unusual,” had been long in my mind.

  The next day I spotted Ernst Mayr at the Faculty Club and told him that I had just finished my account of how the double helix was found. Then a syndic of Harvard University Press (HUP), Ernst quickly phoned Tom Wilson, the press's director, to inform him of my manuscript. The next morning, Tom came to my office and took away the manuscript for an overnight read, knowing I was returning soon to London. Excitedly he called the next morning to say he wanted the press to publish Honest Jim. With my permission, he would send copies to referees on the Harvard faculty, who helped decide which books the press should publish.

  When I arrived in London, I immediately phoned my old friend Peter Pauling to suggest he bring along for a fun lunch the highly intelligent, suede-jacketed Louise Johnson. She, like Peter, was working on her Ph.D. at the Royal Institution, then presided over by Sir Lawrence Bragg. A month before, I had met Louise at a biophysics meeting at Queen Elizabeth College, learning that she worked on the structure of lysozyme with David Phillips. To my delight, Peter at the last moment got her and the equally young crystallographer Tony North to join us at Wheeler's Restaurant on Dover Street. Showing them my manuscript, I told them its novel-like construction necessarily led me in the opening chapters to portray Sir Lawrence in an unflattering way. I confessed now hesitating to show it to Sir Lawrence even though, more than a year before, he had suggested that I write my side of how the double helix was found. He had been worried at the time that Francis was getting too much of the credit for our big breakthrough. How to have him read my manuscript without infuriating him was a problem that stumped all of us until Tony's sudden brainstorm. Why not invite Sir Lawrence to write the book's foreword? By so doing, both he and I would come out on top.

  I could not make that request of Sir Lawrence until March, after the conclusion of my six-week tour of East Africa, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The trip was arranged at the last moment by Charlie Wyzanski, who, as a trustee, had recently been there looking at the foundation's African operations. The East African offices were in Nairobi, and I flew there in a BOAC VC-10, first class, as senior Ford Foundation staff traveled. Sitting next to me was a woman who asked to see the Honest Jim manuscript that I had by my side. This she read in two hours, telling me she could not put it down. After going on to give three lectures at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Frank Sutton, the former Harvard junior fellow, joined me on a trip to see how foundation monies directed toward wildlife conservation were being used. First we stopped at Queen Elizabeth Park, on Lake Edward, above which the Mountain of the Moon rose into the clouds. Later, we were surrounded by hippos and crocodiles, while an old-fashioned, African Queen-like boat took us to the base of Murchison Falls, over which the White Nile cascades down.

  Also staying at the Makerere Faculty Club was the Oxford-educated writer V. S. Naipaul, who, over several breakfasts, showed no interest in the fact that I too was generating English prose. Around the swimming pool, stand-offish in a quite different way, was the petite, well-shaped daughter of Donald Soper, the prominent English Methodist. Caroline betrayed no desire to learn from Honest Jim how Cambridge science moved. She was only there babysitting her sister's children while her Cambridge brother-in-law gave physiology lectures to Makerere students. They followed their Cambridge equivalents in wearing academic gowns in their dining hall, a custom I honored on several evenings, to my discomfort.

  Upon the conclusion of my African lectures, which also took me to Tanzania, Sudan, and Ethiopia, I made Geneva my main base until my sabbatical ended in late May. From there I went twice to London, the first time to give Sir Lawrence my manuscript and tell him that Harvar
d University Press wanted to publish it. On my second visit to his Royal Institution top-floor flat, I waited nervously outside until upon entering he put me at ease, saying that by writing the foreword he could not sue me for libel. Later I learned that his initial reaction to my manuscript was, as feared, one of white-hot anger but that his wife, Alice, had cooled him down. Immediately I had Tom Wilson officially inform Bragg about HUP's publication plans. Within a month, Bragg delivered his crisp, elegant foreword saying I wrote with a Pepys-like frankness. Feeling that I had a book that I could now publish, I sent the manuscript to Francis asking for comments about its accuracy.

  I also gave Honest Jim to my friend of many years Janet Stewart, then an editor at André Deutsch, to see whether they would like to consider it for British publication. Janet and I had first met in Cambridge when she was up at Girton College. Now married to the barrister Ben Whitaker, she had been in publishing in New York before returning to England as an editor with Deutsch. She and her husband lived on Chester Row and over dinner I gave them news of Bragg's foreword. Several days later I went to Deutsch's offices on Great Russell Street, where Janet introduced me to her Hungarian-born boss and uncomfortably looked on as he offered me a £250 advance. I politely replied I would pass his offer on to Harvard University Press director Tom Wilson. Later I told Tom to find a British publisher who understood that scientists are not indifferent to money.

  Tom's choice proved also to be Hungarian, the portly, astute George Weidenfeld, said to be an inspiration for Kingsley Amis's novel One Fat Englishman. His publishing house, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, had recently gained notoriety by publishing Lolita, which had cost Nigel Nicolson his seat in the House of Commons (though it apparently did not interfere with Weidenfeld's being created a life peer in 1976). Tom sent Honest Jim to George in time to let him read it before I passed through London in mid-July on my way to a scientific meeting in Greece. Then Weidenfeld and Nicolson had offices above Bond Street. George himself lived in an Eaton Square flat whose high ceilings let him optimally display his large canvases, which soon included a Francis Bacon. Wasting few words, George offered me a $10,000 advance, half payable upon signing his contract, the other upon my book's publication. Immediately I accepted, asking him to send the contract to Tom Wilson to see that its terms were compatible with those in the contract I was about to sign with HUP.

  By then Francis had let me know he did not like the title Honest Jim, its implication to him being that I alone was hawking the gospel truth. That one would hardly make such an assumption buying a used car from “Honest Francis,” or even from “Honest Jesus,” did not budge him. So I changed the title to Base Pairs, aware that this pun by itself might lead to a libel suit caused by a jacket cover with Francis and me and of Maurice and Rosalind staring at each other à la Kind Hearts and Coronets. Though Tom Wilson wanted me to use my third choice, The Double Helix, he went along with Base Pairs on the title page of an only mildly revised manuscript sent to Francis, Maurice, John Kendrew, and Peter Pauling, together with forms to sign saying they had no objections to HUP's publishing my manuscript.

  We should have realized that neither Francis nor Maurice would see any advantage in giving permission to publish material that they felt not only failed to serve the public interest but also harmed them. Too soon their response came through a high-powered attorney, who wrote President Pusey of his clients’ contention that they were libeled by my manuscript. They employed the same lawyer that Jacqueline Kennedy had unsuccessfully used to block publication of The Death of a President, William Manchester's book on her husband's assassination. Both Tom Wilson and I noted that this New York hired gun was careful not to specify that he considered my book libelous. Nevertheless, we feared that President Pusey would feel himself involved in something untoward, and Tom later unilaterally decided that HUP would move ahead only with the Harvard president's approval.

  I also should have realized that Peter Pauling would feel a filial duty to send my manuscript to his father. After reading it, Linus fired off an angry letter to Tom Wilson calling Base Pairs “a disgraceful example of malevolence and egocentricity” He wrote demanding that I remove the lines “Linus's screwy chemistry” and “Linus looking like an ass.” These were phrases I knew good taste would lead me to delete before the manuscript went to the printer. But since they were true, I was loath to remove them before absolutely necessary. In a similar vein, I never should have sent out a manuscript saying that Francis had never been a member of any college because he was thought to pinch other people's ideas. By this I only intended to convey the reason why King's, to their great loss, had not made Francis a fellow despite his unquestioned brilliance.

  Already Tom Wilson had assigned his editor Joyce Leibowitz the task of working with me to make the manuscript less objectionable to the story's principals, at the same time preserving its aim to tell what really happened. Joyce had the wit to see that my story would benefit from an epilogue saying that my descriptions of Rosalind Franklin did not do justice to her scientific accomplishments while at King's. Also helping me was the bright literature major Libby Aldrich, who, like Dolly Garter, had taken George Wald's natural science biology course. Libby then was writing her senior thesis on Sylvia Plath, whom I remembered scurrying along King's Parade in Cambridge in the mid-1950s.

  Soon after receiving the Base Pairs manuscript, John Kendrew took it to J. D. Bernal, who wrote him saying, “I could not put it down…. Considered as a novel of the history of science as it should be written, it is unequaled. It is as exciting as Martin Arrowsmith.” While asserting his opinion that I was unfair to the contributions of Rosalind Franklin and noting that I did not even mention the work of Sven Furberg, both from Bernal's lab, he offered the following comment: “Watson and Crick did a magnificent job, but in the process were forced to make enormous mistakes which they had the skill to correct in time. The whole thing is a disgraceful exposé of the stupidity of great scientists’ discoveries. My verdict would be the lines of Hilaire Belloc:

  And is it True? It is not True.

  And if it were it wouldn't do.”

  I was also encouraged by a letter from the Hungarian-born imrau-nologist George Klein. During his late fall visit to Harvard Medical School, my father prepared Sunday lunch at 10½ Appian Way for the three of us. George left with a copy of Base Pairs to read on the plane back to Stockholm. From the Karolinska Institutet he sent a letter saying that I had written “an unparalleled description of the excitements, the frustration, the greatness, and the smallness of creative research students…. You should expect a hostile backlash from most scientists; you should not try to soften your book, have it printed as it is or not at all.”

  Over three winter months, I continually made minor changes to correct misstatements of fact or personal intent, particularly as enlightened by Francis and Sir Lawrence Bragg. Again using Honest Jim as the title, I worried that Francis and Maurice's objections would lead Sir Lawrence to withdraw his foreword, and I wrote to him that I would understand if he saw fit to do so. On April 19 he replied that he would be very sorry if it came to that, but that he also wished to state categorically that his contribution was contingent on my making certain changes, in particular, one correcting my misstatement that Perutz and Kendrew told him they would leave Cavendish if Crick was fired. In conclusion, he “wished the book every success.” At the same time, John Maddox, the editor of Nature, found nothing libelous in the newest Honest Jim. In fact, he believed it to be much less dodgy than earlier reported to him: “In other words, I would like to see it published.” But when that occurs, he said, “you will have to barricade yourself in for six months or so.”

  Both Maurice and Francis continued to oppose Honest Jim in every way possible. Ina letter, Maurice reminded me of having written when I sent him my first draft, “You might think you have reason to shoot me.” Now Maurice worried that “his letter would make me want to shoot him.” In it he suggested that I abandon any thought of publishing my book inta
ct but instead have its science passages incorporated in the forthcoming book of historian Robert Olby on the double helix.

  Contributions emerging from tape recordings of himself, Francis, Erwin Chargaff, and Pauling were also expected to appear in Olby's book.

  Francis's five-page letter of April 13 started out saying that the new version was a little better but his basic objections were the same: “Your book is not good history;” “You did not document your assertions (with appropriate references)… displaying the history of science as gossip;” “Your view of the history of science is found in the lower class of women's magazines;” “If instead considered as autobiography, it is misleading and in bad taste;” “The fact a man is well known does not excuse his friends from respecting his privacy while he is alive;” “The only exception should be when private matters are of direct public concern like with Mrs. Simpson and King Edward;” “Your book is vulgar popularization which is indefensible.” On the next-to-last page, Francis raised the stakes. A psychiatrist to whom he gave the manuscript reportedly said, “The book could only be made by a man who hates women.” Another shrink concluded that I loved my sister to excess, “a fact much discussed by your friends while you were working in Cambridge, but so far they have refrained from writing about.” On the last page, Francis noted copies of his letter were being sent to, among others, Bragg, Pauling, and Pusey