AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  2. Delegate as much authority as possible

  Administrators, like scientists, do their jobs best when left alone to do them, freed of the irksome impression of simply carrying out someone else's will. My growing avoidance of micromanagement left me always available to give advice about matters that were not obvious. On learning how my staff wanted to proceed, I generally gave them a go-ahead. Few mistakes were made that closer oversight might have avoided.

  3. Institutions are either moving forwardor they are moving backward

  There is no downtime in the management of high-powered science. New ideas or techniques need to be quickly exploited before scientists elsewhere do experiments that your people could have done first. Success automatically creates the need for new personnel and facilities that often require new buildings. If you are not ever agile in moving forward, the consequences will go beyond losing credit for the next breakthrough; top staff will move elsewhere to get the resources and support required to maintain their own leadership roles in their respective disciplines. As in sports, last year's championship doesn't count at the end of this season. Therefore, never be or expect other scientists to be sentimental about institutions. Going down with the ship is nuts.

  4. Always buy adjacent property that comes up for sale

  An institution's growth inevitably demands expanding the size of its campus. Therefore, never hesitate to buy land abutting yours even if there is no immediate use for it. Though the seller will charge you a premium knowing that land is worth more to someone with an adjacent lot than it is to a third party, your bargaining power is still greater than it will be when space is a dire need. It pays to overpay a little now rather than wait till your neighbor has you over a barrel.

  5. Attractive buildings project institutional strength

  Sometimes it seems money could be saved by building facilities that are less extravagant, with cheaper materials and unknown architects. This, however, is bad for business in the long term. Donors to Harvard never need fear that a building with their name on it will one day be sold off to stanch a hemorrhaging negative cash flow. Less than sturdy structures give out messages that their institution's life may be equally short. In contrast, solid, stylish buildings give donors the confidence that their descendants will one day bask in reflected glory. The lure of permanence inspires generosity.

  6. Have wealthy neighbors

  Research grants, no matter how much overhead they cover, are never enough to meet immediate needs. Unlike universities that can depend upon rich alumni, research institutions must have rich neighbors nearby who are inclined to take pride in local accomplishments. Typically their enthusiasm will be proportional to the research effort's potential to alleviate human misery. Nothing attracts money like the quest for a cure for a terrible disease.

  7. Be a friend to your trustees

  Entering worlds where your trustees relax—joining their clubs or vacationing where they go with their families in the summer, for instance—is a good way to put relations on a social footing. Seeing you as more friend than suppliant will incline them to go the extra distance for you in a pinch.

  8. All take and no give will disenchant your benefactors

  Philanthropy is a two-way street. The kindness of individuals donating to your cause should be acknowledged with a reciprocal gift to theirs. This by no means implies matching their generosity—it's the thought that counts. Since coming to Cold Spring Harbor, I have always made at least modest gifts to my trustees’ other charities. By my so doing, they know I value the other activities that also give purpose to their lives. Equally important is being generous to your own institution. Why should others help if you don't also show you consider the cause worthy of some of your own discretionary income? It never hurts when those who decide your salary see you bite the bullet to give some of it back.

  9. Never appear upset when other people denyyou their money

  Philanthropists are like others in not wishing to be taken for granted. Your institution is but one of many with its hand out. Soon after I became director, I approached the Bell Labs for sponsorship. My intermediary was a key scientist there who personally knew the value of our summer courses. When he called to say no money was coming our way, I expressed rude anger. Within minutes, I knew what a fool I had been to scotch any chance of our being shown some love in the future.

  10. Avoid being photographed

  You may raise the money but your success in the end totally depends upon those whose work you host, so it is their visibility, not yours, that matters. If they are not presentable, you are in deep trouble. Photos that put their names to their faces help them move more effectively in the outside world. They may not consider themselves photogenic, but they will enjoy the pride their spouses and especially their mothers will take in seeing them. Most important, keep your face out of your in-house publication unless you can be pictured beside a recognizable celebrity, such as Muhammad Ali or Lance Armstrong. Some of their glamour will momentarily rub off on you.

  11. Never dye your hair or use collagen

  A dye job works only if your hair is not noticeably thinning. It's impossible to seem as genuine as you must with a wan pate showing through a scattering of coal-black hairs. Of course, the impression of youthful vitality men sometimes cultivate with reddish dyes is even more disastrous. You wind up looking like Strom Thurmond. Gray hair and wrinkles at fifty bespeak dependability. Contrary to our present national ethos, it's better to act younger than you look, rather than the reverse. Harvard's Pusey had a wrinkleless face that reinforced the impression of a life devoid of pain or pleasure.

  12. Make necessary decisions before you have to

  Success more often comes from being first to take action than from being cleverer than your competitors. When it's the right thing to do, do it fast. If you wait too long, someone else is bound to propose it first and you will find yourself following someone else's agenda. In such circumstances, those taking orders from you will have reasonable cause to wonder why you are getting the top salary.

  EPILOGUE

  THIRTY years on, it would please me to report that the state of science at Harvard had righted itself in a manner befitting the world's richest and most influential university. The relatively short reign of Larry Summers as its twenty-seventh president, however, suggests that Harvard is once again headed in the wrong direction. Nothing may have distinguished Summers's time in office like the leaving of it, but his proposals for the future of science—which have yet to be modified by his successor—figured more critically in his vexed relations with the faculty than any clumsy words that marked his ultimate undoing. That the catalyst should have been his uttering an unpopular, though by no means unfounded, hypothesis only compounds the sorrows that any thinking person must feel contemplating the future of free inquiry at Harvard.

  Despite Larry Summers's professed desire to move science onto Harvard's front burner, as his vision became clear many leading scientists on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) were increasingly worried. Prominent among the uneasy was Tom Maniatis, who came back from Caltech in 1981 to become Professor of Molecular Biology. In his time at Harvard, Maniatis had been at the forefront of work in gene isolation and cloning, as well as a significant player in the biotechnology industry. And so it was notable when in the spring of 2003, he went to Massachusetts Hall to voice his concerns about Summers's plan to make Harvard the engine of a “second Silicon Valley,” whose center would be a vast new campus of biology and medicine on Harvard-owned land across the Charles River in Allsten. The Allsten vision was to be dominated by “translational research”—a term denoting science highly directed toward immediate application and, one might add, marketing. Tom was no stranger to the development of medical advances from cutting-edge science. He had, after all, founded with Mark Ptashne the successful biotech firm Genetics Institute and his lab had recently undertaken work on ALS. If anyone could appreciate a scientific utopia, it was he. In Tom's mind, however, Summers's pla
ns would further weaken the already feeble heart of Harvard's historically distinguished pure biology programs still located in laboratories along Divinity Avenue to the immediate north of Harvard Yard.

  Maniatis had barely begun to voice his opinions when Summers, oblivious to his visitor's distress, seized control of the conversation, using the remainder of the appointed hour to expound on his grand vision of how Harvard should move forward. He asked a purely rhetorical question: Should the president of Harvard be guided by the views of the perennial winners in the research game at Harvard or by the losers? By “the winners,” Summers meant the Medical School, whose clinical studies had in recent decades brought the university its lion's share of awards and patents; “the losers” were the practitioners of basic science at FAS, which despite employing illustrious figures like Tom had lagged behind its rivals, most notably and proximately MIT. Summers would afterward inform a close aide that his meeting with Maniatis had gone extremely well; Tom meanwhile had walked out of Massachusetts Hall seething and more apprehensive than ever about the future of science at Harvard.

  Only two years later Summers's inability to get outside his own head landed him in fatally hot water. It reached the boiling point following his appearance at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research on women in science, which was held in Cambridge in mid-January 2005. There he suggested that the relatively small number of women in tenured positions in the physical sciences might in part be attributable to a lower frequency among women as compared to men of innate potential for doing science at the highest level. Aware that many women would not take kindly to these words, he was careful to leave open the alternative explanation that in the past many talented women had been strongly discouraged by their teachers from ever trying to master top-level mathematics and sciences.

  Summers's remarks might have gone unnoticed outside the meeting were it not for the presence of my former student, now a professor of biology at MIT, Nancy Hopkins. Over the past decade she had worked tirelessly and effectively to improve the working conditions of women scientists there. Before Nancy's highly visible efforts, the salaries and space assignments of women at MIT were notably unequal to those of their male counterparts. But Nancy did not challenge Summers at the meeting. Instead she instantly bolted from the room, later saying Summers's words made her sick, and soon appeared on national TV attacking him and setting off a firestorm of feminist anger.

  It did Nancy Hopkins no particular credit as a scientist to admit that the mere hypothesis that there might be genetic differences between male and female brains—and therefore differences in the distribution of one form of cognitive potential—made her sick. Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated. To my regret, Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times for being candid about what might well be a fact of evolution that academia will have to live with. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist voiced a word in Summers's defense; I suspect the majority were fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness. If I were still a member of the faculty, the number of tenured scientists standing visibly behind the president in this matter would have literally doubled. But that would not have been enough to put out the flames. Apparently desperate, Summers soon contritely proposed a $50 million kitty to recruit more women to Harvard's senior science faculty.

  The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers's dismissal late last February as Harvard's president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of disregard for the social niceties that ordinarily permit human beings to work together for a common good. While academia almost expects its younger members to be brash and full of themselves, these qualities are most unbecoming in more seasoned members of the society, and generally fatal in leaders. Reading up on a topic the night before and then appearing at conferences with the bravado to suggest that one knows more than those who have spent their careers thinking about the issues at hand is no way for a president to act. Summers's non-age-adjusted IQ, moreover, at age fifty-one is likely 5 to 10 points lower than when he was a twenty-year-old Wunderkind. Harvard's longstanding mandatory retirement age of fifty-five for academics was never a matter of arbitrary ageism but a recognition born of experience that as academics age they live more by old ideas and less by new ones. Summers, still acting as if he were the brightest person in the room, was bound to offend people who knew better.

  It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social ineptitude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist—the very cards that endowed him with great quantitative intelligence may also have disabled the normal faculties for reading human faces and voices. The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger's syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral “disabilities.” Like exceptional math aptitude, Asperger's occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. The reason why must remain a mystery until further research shows how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.

  If Summers's tactlessness does, in fact, have a genetic basis, much of the anger toward him should rightly yield to sympathy. No longer can his upbringing be blamed for failing to instill in him the graces of the civilized individual. In any case, all discussion should stop as to whether his dismissal was unduly precipitous—it was in all likelihood overdue. Whether those prominent individuals who promoted his candidacy should hang their heads in shame, however, is less obvious.

  Summers's departure has to be seen as the first of many necessary Steps to reclaim for Harvard its once legitimate claim to primacy in science, at least relative to MIT. Toward that end, Tom Maniatis, having come to Cold Spring Harbor to receive its honorary degree in April 2006, prevailed upon me to agree to meet with Derek Bok, the former president, whom the Harvard Corporation had called to serve again until a new leader could be found. A time was soon set up for me and Derek to get together at what had been the home of many Harvard presidents before Bok, the grand Georgian structure on Quincy Street across from the Faculty Club, now called Loeb House.

  The day before my 10:00 A.M. appointment, Liz and I drove up to Cambridge to see Tom and his multitalented Long Island-born partner, Rachel von Roeschlaub. After an hour of tennis at the famous Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, we drove in tandem to dinner at the Charles Hotel, where Liz and I were to stay the night. Before the food came, Tom described the brutal cuts in funding recently dealt out to Harvard's science departments when Summers had launched a massive hiring campaign in translational life sciences and committed large pots of cash to develop Allsten.

  Derek's initial reaction to my furrowed face must have been the same as mine to his graying hairs. Neither of us could pass for middle-aged. Twenty-eight years had elapsed since we were last face to face at the June 1978 commencement ceremonies, on which occasion I was delighted to be receiving an honorary D.Sc. A photo from that day shows Derek at forty-eight and me at fifty, each happy with himself, with a few more good years left to advance the causes of Harvard (in his case) and of scientific research (in mine). Neither of us could then have suspected that nearly thirty years later we might yet have cause to meet in the service of both.

  Knowing that a petitioner's allotted hour always passes quickly, I went straight to my main message: It was wrongheaded to build a huge Allsten biology complex to compensate for the lack of greatness increasingly enveloping the biology labs along Divinity Avenue. Most likely, I argued, it was the B+ level of most of Harvard's life sciences, bot
h in Cambridge and across the vast medical complex, that would gravitate to the brochure-perfect new campus, resulting in very little bang for the vast bucks that would be spent. This, I insisted, is not how great institutions are built.

  With Derek Bok at Harvard commencement ceremony, June 1978

  I went on to tell Derek that he and the Harvard Corporation should ask why MIT's life sciences now so completely outclass Harvard's. Past stinginess of Harvard deans played a big role in a problem that indiscriminate lavishness could not now fix. For far too long, University Hall had witlessly acted as if Harvard did not have to spend its own money to keep a place in the top league of science. The leadership assumed that Harvard's golden name would naturally move the federal government to fund not only the university's research but also the creation of new facilities required to stay at the cutting edge. But brand names count for very little in science. And so, foolishly, Harvard sat back on its heels for about two decades while MIT smoothly integrated the privately funded Whitehead Institute into its biology operations and, under the never shy Eric Lander, created a huge DNA sequencing facility. Thus MIT became a major player in the Human Genome Project, the intellectual driveshaft for much of today's most exciting biology and medicine.

  Only belatedly had Harvard tried to enter the Genome Age by committing itself, as the twenty-first century began, to becoming strong in systems biology, a discipline so sprawling and unwieldy as to merit comparison to Enron's limitless expansions before its collapse into nothingness. In turn, the large MIT Center for Genome Research, thanks to the generosity of the California-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, was able to metamorphose in 2003 into an even more ambitious incarnation, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Its sleek Cambridge Center edifice across from MIT's Koch Biology Building would have looked as much at home in the Boston financial district. By diverting funds that might have been spent along Divinity Avenue, Harvard under Summers bought a say in how and by whom the Broad's massive genomic resources would be utilized. Within its doors, however, Harvard Yard seems light-years away.