AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Before coming down to New York, I had not consulted with anyone about the likelihood of Harvard's allowing me to hold two academic positions simultaneously. So immediately upon returning to Cambridge, I contacted Paul Doty, who had assumed his role as first chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. After receiving positive concurrence from its members, he wrote to Franklin Ford on November 22 proposing that I serve as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for a five-year interval. During this time, I would continue my current Harvard teaching and committee responsibilities while being in Cold Spring Harbor for three days every two weeks on average. Only five days passed before Ford wrote with his approval, noting that he would have to pass my request on to the Harvard Corporation for official endorsement. I so wrote Bentley, who in turn asked other board members for a formal endorsement of my selection as director. On February 1,1968, my new responsibilities began.

  My decision to take on Cold Spring Harbor's troubles was in no small part sentimental. When I was there I was home. To me it was science at its best, where finding deep truths mattered more than personal advancement. Never had I known anyone to pull rank there or to get above himself. I could not contemplate the thought of its demise. As director, moreover, I could test my 1958 hypothesis that the cancerous potential of DNA tumor viruses is owing to the presence in their genomes of genes encoding enzymes that turn on DNA synthesis. It was too good an idea not to have a high chance of being correct, but because of space and funding limitations it had no chance of being tested at Harvard.

  The sad underutilization of lab space at Cold Spring Harbor could prove a blessing. Its scientific direction could be changed fast without the unpleasantness of alienating excellent scientists already there who were oriented in the old way. To move swiftly into molecular biology, MIT in the mid-1950s had effectively fired its entire Biology Department, a move that generated much bitterness. This would not be necessary at Cold Spring Harbor.

  On Sunday, February 4,1 made my first public appearance as director. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Long Island Biological Association, whose membership initially was drawn from the owners of the great estates that had once dominated much of the landscape of the North Shore. Though the twenty years since the war had seen many big estates subdivided, there still remained, within a several-mile radius around the lab, the opulent homes of many of Harvard's most loyal and generous Wall Street benefactors. Thus, I thought, my Harvard professorship could prove as relevant as my Nobel Prize in mobilizing the local gentry behind our new cancer research objectives. Equally important was the high esteem in which John Cairns and his family were held by the Cold Spring Harbor community. That afternoon I publicly announced my hope that John would remain as a lab scientist and continue to live in Airslie, the large wooden manor house built for Major William Jones in 1806. Long part of the Henry deForest estate just to the north of the lab, it became the director's home in 1942. Being single and planning to be on site at most six to eight days a month, I did not need its many rooms. Before the association meeting started, I requested the even older Osterhout Cottage as my own residence. Alfred and Jill Hershey had lived there for several years before building a largely glass-walled house on land west of the lab.

  At that time, my father was avoiding the winter cold in an old-fashioned resort on the west coast of Florida below Sarasota. This was his fifth winter there, the first having followed the mild stroke in November 1963. Once the awful shock of my mother's sudden death in 1957 had passed, Dad's broad, warm smile helped him make new friends among kindred souls, who valued books and Rooseveltian ideals. In particular, he met several quiet intellectuals associated with the experimental New College, on the grounds of the once expansive Ringling estate outside Sarasota. Two years before, he'd been proud to attend a lecture I gave to its students. The college's focus on the great books of Western civilization reminded me fondly of my University of Chicago years. His last Florida visit, however, had gone less well, as Dad's long-dormant stomach ulcer again opened up. Fortunately, it soon healed, and he felt confident enough to spend several spring weeks on a cruise to the Mediterranean before passing much of the summer on Martha's Vineyard in Edgartown's quaint Harbor View Hotel.

  Still, he was only in middling health when he left my sister's Washington home after Christmas to again take up residence in Florida the year I became director. The persistent bad cough he'd developed over the holidays wouldn't abate in the Southland's warmth. But his Sara-sota physician reassured my sister, Betty, several times over the phone that Dad did not have a virulent pneumonia. He was otherwise in good spirits, particularly when two Atlantic Monthly issues serializing The Double Helix appeared without generating a firestorm of criticism. He was also proud that his New College friends got a kick out of seeing me on the Merv Griffin Show.

  Then, without warning, my sister called late one afternoon to report that Dad's persistent cough was never to go away. It was caused by an inoperable lung cancer, and the prognosis was that Dad had but a few months left. The two packs of Camels that he had smoked every day since college had finally caught up with him. Betty had gotten the grim news while I was en route to Cambridge from New York City after the lunch marking the publication date of The Double Helix. I was at my office when she finally reached me that afternoon. Then with me was the very pretty Elizabeth Lewis, the Radcliffe junior who on many afternoons assisted my secretary, Libby Aldrich's sister-in-law, Susie. Liz's appearance in the Biolabs several times a week to file reprints or to help me assemble successive drafts of The Double Helix invariably made me feel good. Conversely, I always felt lonely when she retreated back into her student life.

  When she first came to Harvard, Liz thought about majoring in math, a subject that she had much enjoyed as a student at the Lincoln School in Providence, where her father, Robert Vickery Lewis, of Welsh and Yankee antecedents, practiced medicine. After his college years at Brown, he studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife, the nurse Edith Mae Belle Irey, of Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch heritage. Being at a small Quaker school in no way prepared Liz for the Harvard math concentration, and she switched to physical science as a possible route to medical school.

  At my cousin Alices wedding to James Houston in 1967; I am to the right of the bride, and next to me are Betty's husband, Bob Myers; my sister, Betty; my father; and William Weldon Watson.

  Our first effective date was unplanned, she coming with me at the last moment for an early pre-supper get-together at Carl and Anne Cori's home off Brattle Street. Afterward we drove along the Charles River to Boston, where we saw an English movie at the Exeter Theatre. Her exams were finished, and she was about to depart for a summer job in Montana at a resort ranch above Yellowstone Park. It had seemed a long summer when in early August a brief note from her made me realize just how keenly I had been anticipating her return to my office in the fall. Just after she got back to Radcliffe, we ran into each other on Brattle Street near Sage's Market, which coincidence gave me my second chance to drive with her into Boston. After lunch on Newbury Street, we went into Bonwit Teller, the elegant shop spread over the several spacious floors of what had been a gracious city mansion.

  Over the fall months, she had increasingly continued to forgo evening meals at Moors Hall to join my father and me for supper at the Hotel Continental. Upon his return from Martha's Vineyard in August, Dad had chosen to move into the hotel, leaving his apartment at 101/2 Appian Way. It would save him the trouble of shopping, preparing meals, and tidying up. At the time I did not let on to Dad how my affection for Liz had increased over the past eighteen months. I knew he would worry that at nineteen she was likely to reserve her true affection for someone much closer to her own age.

  As soon as I put down Betty's call, I asked Liz to stay with me for supper at the Continental. I did not want to be alone. It would be our first dinner together by ourselves. Afterward she did not go back to her dorm, telling me she di
d not want me to be alone that evening any more than I did. The next afternoon she left my office early to go grocery shopping on Brattle Street, planning to cook dinner that evening on the antique stove in my Appian Way flat. She had brought school-books to read after dinner in the unheated alcove off the main room. The next night, when again we went together to Carl and Anne Cori's home for dinner, Anne knew she no longer had to find single girls to sit next to me.

  Early the following morning, I left Liz to fly to Sarasota to collect a now very apprehensive Dad and bring him by plane to my sister's home in Washington. In 1964, after resigning from the CIA, her husband, Bob Myers, founded The Washingtonian magazine with his University of Chicago roommate Laughlin Phillips. Bob was its first publisher and Laughlin the editor. Just recently, Bob had become publisher of the New Republic, but too late for Dad, long a faithful reader, to take anything but a brief pleasure from seeing his son-in-law help run his favorite magazine of liberal politics.

  Upon my return to Cambridge, I found myself all too soon scheduled to leave Liz again for the annual American Cancer Society (ACS) get-together of scientists and science journalists, this time being held in La Jolla, to the north of San Diego. Out of this meeting, it was hoped, would emerge optimistic press coverage to kick-start the ACS annual fund drive. Several months before, I'd eagerly accepted the invitation to attend, believing the meeting would help me focus on how to start up tumor virus research at Cold Spring Harbor. As it was to be held just before Harvard's weeklong spring break, there was also the possibility of Liz's joining me there after the conference.

  To appear as a couple on a trip without causing a scandal, however, it would be necessary for us to marry immediately after Liz's arrival in California. Happily, she had no qualms, instantly accepting my proposal that we effectively elope. We decided not to let anyone know except for her parents in Providence. In the end, the only other person at Harvard in on our plan was my secretary. She found out when Liz came in saying this would be her last day of work. Susie said that Dr. Watson would be much disappointed. Liz replied that, in fact, he wouldn't be disappointed at all.

  Before flying west I called Sylvia Bailey, the English-born secretary of Jacob Bronowski, the English polymath hired by the Salk Institute upon Leo Szilard's death, for advice about how Liz and I could best get wed in California. To my surprise, she called back the next day, saying that it would be faster to arrange a church ceremony than a civil ceremony before a justice of the peace. If I gave her the go-ahead, she would contact her friend the Reverend Forshaw, whose Mission-style church was in the center of La Jolla. In turn, Liz went with her mother back to Bonwit Teller's, this time no longer just looking but ready to bring home several outfits appropriate to the occasion and the many photographs we would take to send to relatives and friends by way of announcement.

  At the ACS science writers’ gathering, I spoke at length to Bob Rein-hold, a former Crimson editor, now writing about science for the New York Times. In the article he soon wrote about my plans to turn Cold Spring Harbor toward cancer research, he remarked on the nervous way I held my can of Coke, having no way of knowing that this was no garden-variety tic but the anxious anticipation of my wedding the next evening. My nervousness disappeared as soon as Liz came off the plane. Her smile would always make me feel good. Shortly, we drove north of La Jolla to get a marriage license that would permit us at 9:00 P.M. on March 28 to be wed in the La Jolla Congregational Church. That I was not a churchgoer was of no concern to Reverend Forshaw, whose library prominently displayed one of Bertrand Russell's thicker tomes.

  Upon our return to the La Valencia Hotel, we had an early supper at its Whaler's Bar before going on to Jacob and Rita Bronowski's one-story glass house in La Jolla Farms near the Salk Institute. Its stylish ambience was much better suited to wedding photos after sunset than was the church. Afterward, Liz met my small circle of La Jolla friends, who came to the La Valencia for a surprise party without knowing its purpose. We spent our first night as a married couple in one of the rooms looking out on the Pacific Ocean.

  Liz and I on our wedding day, March 28,1968, in La Jolla, California

  The next morning we telephoned my sister to tell her and Dad the news and to let them know that we would stop off in Washington on our way back to Harvard. I went to find postcards to let friends such as Seymour Benzer and Paul Doty know that “a nineteen-year-old was now mine.” After a leisurely lunch, we drove east to see the desert plants blooming around Borrego Springs. We spent the night at Casa del Zora before driving through the Anza Desert to the Imperial Valley and from there to the village of San Felipe, some seventy miles south of the Mexican border. There we spent two nights in a hotel catering to fishermen, taking care not to get sunburned while spending much of Sunday swimming in the already warm waters of the Gulf of California.

  Unknown to us was Lyndon Johnson's sudden decision to make a major address to the nation that evening. Only after we were back on the U.S. side of the border, driving across southern Arizona, did we learn that the night before, Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection. We hoped he would get us out of the quagmire in Southeast Asia before his term ended, but it seemed a vain hope. Though Johnson then presented the Tet offensive as a big setback for the Viet Cong, he had to believe otherwise, else he would not be stepping down.

  By nightfall we were outside Tucson. The next day we admired thousands of tall cacti on an early morning walk in the Saguaro National Park. Dropping off our rented Ford Mustang at the airport, we caught the plane for Washington. Spring was in full bloom, allowing everyone at Betty's house, next to Glover Archibald Park, to half ignore Dad's awful prognosis as Liz and I shared the details of our wedding and the days afterward. Unexpectedly on hand was a photographer sent by McGraw-Hill's new magazine Scientific Research. Its forte was fast-breaking stories about scientists as well as science itself. Word that I had just married was already about, and they wanted a picture of Liz and me. The resulting photos revealed Liz a photographer's dream, and we were to be seen together on the cover of the April 29 issue.

  The next morning we drove north for four hours to Cold Spring Harbor to see our eventual home. From Washington, I had let John Cairns know of our impending day trip, and the Lab arranged a special welcome dinner prepared by Francoise Spahr. Her husband, Pierre-Francois, was over from Geneva for six months to work with my former Harvard student Ray Gesteland, whom John Cairns had recruited to the lab staff a year earlier. But by the time we gathered in the main room of the big Victorian house at the Lab's entryway, the news of our marriage was eclipsed by horrid events elsewhere. In Memphis, an unknown assassin had just killed Martin Luther King Jr. Before driving off to Providence the next afternoon, Liz and I were interviewed separately by a reporter from Long Island's leading newspaper, Newsday. To her dismay, he wound up suggesting in the article about us that her Radcliffe education would effectively lead her to a life of darning my socks.

  Liz and I graced the cover of Scientific Research on April 29,1968.

  At Liz's home, I met her father, a physician, whom I discovered to be, like my father, a keen reader and skeptic. In this important way, Liz and I had similar upbringings. Though her parents sent her to Central Baptist Church, its chief attraction to them was the music—Providence's best. That evening, my eyes kept drifting to the TV set and its images of the widespread race riots in the wake of the King assassination. The assailant was still unknown.

  The next morning, April 6, was my fortieth birthday, and were it not for Liz by my side I would have been feeling sadly old. We pushed on toward Cambridge just before noon to give Liz time for a Saturday afternoon of housewares shopping in Harvard Square. Her first big purchase was an ironing board that I carried back from Dixon's Hardware. Later enriching our Appian Way flat was a second silver candlestick, a gift from the Society of Fellows to complement the one given to me upon my becoming a senior fellow. Another early purchase was a big cookbook by Julia Child, a local resident, which Liz bou
ght upon the suggestion of the woman at the Radcliffe registrar's office who recorded the change of Liz's name from Lewis to Watson. Its recipes proved much more satisfying to Liz to master than those in her organic chemistry class. Inevitably my days as a beanpole were soon to end.

  The Newsday article, April 6,1968

  As soon as Liz had taken her final exams, we made the five-hour drive down to Cold Spring Harbor, where the Lab had rented a house on Shore Road to let Dad live with us over the summer. He had been hospitalized several times while with Betty but now was pain-free enough to move in and out of our rented four-door Dodge. The new car spared Liz having to master jump-starting my MG TE The day after we arrived, another multicourse meal, this time featuring lobster américaine, was cooked by Francoise. While eating it, we were horrified to learn that Robert Kennedy had just been shot dead in Los Angeles. I had pinned my hopes on him to win the Democratic nomination for president. Not since World War II had daily life been so frequently overshadowed by such a string of woeful events.

  Nancy and Brook Hopkins began coming over to our Shore Road home to keep Dad company. Nancy was down for the summer with more than a dozen graduate students from MIT and Harvard, all focused on phage λ, working together in the vacant lab space underneath that of AI Hershey. Also about were Max and Manny Delbrück, back for Max's fourth consecutive year of teaching a course in the Animal House on the photosensitivity of the mold Phycorny ces. Instantly I sensed their approval of Liz, and relief that I no longer would suffer from chronic restlessness. Over July, Dad's condition worsened to require a twenty-four-hour home nurse. The chemotherapy he was receiving from the Lab's local doctor, Reese Alsop, was mainly palliative. By month's end, however, the pain proved too great to treat at home, and he was admitted to Huntington Hospital before being settled in a nearby nursing home. He would pass only a night there before pneumonia mercifully ended his agony.