AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Through such lavish commitments to joint ventures the pain of being shortchanged continued to be felt along Divinity Avenue. Still much rued was the failure in 2001 of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to lure the clever Roderick MacKinnon, then in his late forties, away from Rockefeller. Longtime Harvard stalwart and X-ray structure whiz Steve Harrison, who was convinced that MacKinnon's crystallo-graphic studies on ion channels would earn him a Nobel Prize (he would indeed share the 2003 award in Chemistry), felt likewise certain that with the right inducement MacKinnon would return to Harvard, where he'd had a lab at the medical school before leaving for Rockefeller. The package offered to him by then-dean Jeremy Knowles, however, was not remotely competitive with Rockefeller's commitment. Upon seeing the dean's letter, in fact, MacKinnon's wife wondered whether a mistake had been made in locating the decimal point. Depressed at Knowles's failure to think realistically big, Steve himself developed a case of wanderlust and spied a much brighter future for himself at Harvard Medical School. He wasted little time moving his highly productive X-ray crystallographic research group across the Charles.

  Several years before these events, a dinner party at Mark and Lucy Ptashne's spectacularly renovated huge house on Sparks Street had reunited me and Jeremy, whom I first knew when he was one of Oxford's stars in chemistry. Given his background, I had assumed he would use his new powers as Harvard's number two to brighten the future of science there. So I was slack-jawed as Jeremy told the assembled scientists and their spouses of the forthcoming boon to their work in the form of $1 million for supplies and equipment he would soon disburse among all the science departments. I blurted out that such a pittance would scarcely cover a small fraction of the scientists working at Cold Spring Harbor, adding that the miserly way Oxford was being run toward insignificance was no way for Harvard to keep pace with MIT. The stunned silence made me realize that no one had ever before witnessed such brazen disrespect for University Hall. Back at the Charles Hotel, I went to bed imagining Jeremy moving through a Max Beerbohm short story.

  At this writing, University Hall is still under temporary stewardship. Larry Summers's firing of the East Asian studies scholar Bill Kirby as dean was not only the last straw of the Summers presidency; it also paralyzed Harvard administratively. But making new faculty appointments is not something that can wait—a short hiatus from hiring could do years of damage. Derek correctly understood that the job must be filled at once but also that the next president had the right to choose the next dean. So just prior to our appointment, Derek asked Jeremy to return temporarily to the helm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

  We now know that the eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust will be the next president of Harvard. Who should the next dean be? Clearly it must be someone of commanding intellect and deep knowledge of the Harvard scene. But even if he or she also possesses Henry Rosovsky's uncanny sense of knowing when not to say no, this person will be taking on a role now too large for one individual. For the sake of excellence in all areas of inquiry, Harvard should divide the responsibility into three more manageable groupings—science, humanities, and social sciences. Each should be led by a distinguished academic with substantial powers of the purse. Only the capacity to judge and pay market rates can assure a better than 50-50 chance that the first-choice candidates of the respective ad hoc committees will accept a Harvard offer.

  To be certain of success overall, Harvard salaries must once again be much higher than those of serious competitors. To get stars, you must offer star salaries. The best of academia no longer will come to Harvard because it is Harvard. No one goes into scientific research to get rich, but one doesn't undertake it to evade the comforts of life. Living close enough to Harvard Yard to enjoy its ambiance and diversions is now beyond the means of new Harvard appointees with families unless the faculty salary is matched by another of the same magnitude. Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth—provided that it abandon the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allsten expansion, at present envisioned to cover the area of twenty-five football stadiums.

  Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time. Such minds inevitably draw their like, and the rest takes care of itself. The dividends of such greatness, however, go beyond what is to be gained by winning the next scientific race. They extend to the enrichment of the student body by giving them a broader appreciation of intellectual values.

  Harvard's new president will need to see paramount among her goals the seeking of potential greatness for its undergraduates through equipping them with the best ideas of the past, honest assessments of the world today, and realistic expectations about the future. This was Robert Hutchins's vision for the University of Chicago when in 1929, at age thirty-one, he became its president. His charismatic impact reached its apogee in the 1940s as great books and ideas became the mainstays of undergraduate education along the Midway. Though his successors, pressed to maintain a viable inflow of new undergraduates, saw the need for partial retreat from the purity of his vision, those educated in the primacy of great thoughts never doubted that they were the chosen people.

  Even now, mention of the University of Chicago to educational leaders not directly exposed to Hutchins or to his immediate successors elicits wistful admissions that Hutchins largely had it right when he branded much of American higher education as a prolonged mismatch of triviality and ignorance. During our meeting Derek allowed that despite the failure of Hutchins's ideas to take hold at any other major American university, his was the only past American university presidency that educators still actively talk about. While the Ivy League turns out graduates who for the remainder of their lives seek out one another, the University of Chicago still strives to see its graduates leave with lifetime-long ideas and a passion to see the world as it is. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought and The Brothers Karamazov had much more impact on my life than any of my University of Chicago classmates.

  At their best, universities promote outside their walls the spirit and values that enable the proper conduct of their work within those walls. Going to the College of the University of Chicago completed my conversion to a life devoted to discovery of the natural world for its own sake, the impulse first stirred by looking for birds with my father. Yet whatever great advance in knowledge a university may bring us, it will fail in its ultimate mission if it allows concerns such as self-marketing and customer satisfaction—concerns of the service institutions that most universities are fast becoming—to overtake the pure good of pursuing truth. And this is particularly important to science, in which the race, though it may be to the swift, is never over.

  Before leaving Derek's temporary office I remarked that the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to better prove its hypotheses, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the A's, T's, G's, and C's of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes whose malfunctions are likely to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if
we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

  The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so. Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of goodwill may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “fifteen years” meant Summers's then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

  Upon returning to the Yard, however, I was not sure that even ten years would pass.

  Cast of Characters

  With Swedish pro Carl Wermee at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York

  George Beadle(1903-1989)—After heading the Biology Division at Caltech from 1946, in 1961 he became the president of the University of Chicago, so serving until he was sixty-five. Then, as director of the Institute for Biomedical Research of the American Medical Association, he resumed research on the origins of modern corn. In 1982 he moved with his wife, Muriel, a writer, to a retirement village in Pomona, California.

  Seymour Benzer(b. 1921)—In 1976, he moved from Purdue to Caltech, where he exchanged phage for Drosophila, using it to effectively probe the genetic basis of behavior and neurodegeneration.

  Derek Bok(b. 1930)—After retiring as Harvard president in 1991, he remained highly involved with higher education, writing six books on the topic: Our Underachieving Colleges (2005), Universities in the Marketplace (2003), The Shape of the River (1998), Universities and the Future of America (1990), Higher Learning (1986), and Beyond the Ivory Tower (1982). His recent research focuses on the U.S. government's approach to domestic problems, about which he has written two books, The State of the Nation (1997) and The Trouble with Government (2001). Following the resignation of Larry Summers, Derek returned in July 2006 to Harvard to serve as acting president for one year.

  Sir (William) Lawrence Bragg(1890-1971)—He left his post as director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1954 to head the Royal Institution in London, which his father, William Henry Bragg, had directed between 1930 and 1942.

  Sydney Brenner(b. 1927)—Upon the retirement of Max Perutz, he became head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, serving until 1986. By then he was devising methodologies for studying the human genome, early on seeing the importance of making DNA copies of cellular messenger RNA molecules. Increasingly he worked outside the United Kingdom, at the Scripps Research Institute in La lolla, California, at the Molecular Sciences Institute that he founded in Berkeley, and in Singapore as a biotechnology adviser to its government. In the United Kingdom, he and his wife, May, maintain their primary residence in the town of Ely, to the north of Cambridge.

  Jacob (Bruno) Bronowski(1908-1974)—One of the early research fellows of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he later spent two years (1971-1972) filming the justly famous BBC series The Ascent of Man, which traced the history of science and mankind from prehistoric times and which aired just shortly before his tragically premature death from heart failure.

  McGeorge Bundy(1919-1996)—In 1966 he left the Lyndon Johnson White House to direct the Ford Corporation in New York for twelve years. During the following ten years he taught history at New York University, subsequently becoming a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation, where he chaired its Committee on Reducing Nuclear Dangers.

  Dick Burgess(b. 1942)—Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Geneva, Switzerland, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is currently the James D. Watson Professor of Oncology.

  John Cairns(b. 1922)—After leaving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1972, he headed the Mill Hill Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund outside London until 1980. He then recrossed the Atlantic to join the Harvard School of Public Health. Upon his retirement in 1991, he and his wife, Elfie, moved back to the United Kingdom, living outside Oxford.

  Mario Capecchi(b. 1937)—After finishing his Ph.D. work, he stayed on at Harvard as assistant and then associate professor of biochemistry until 1973, when he moved to the University of Utah, where he has remained since. There he has pioneered gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem cells.

  Erwin Chargaff(1905-2002)—More a writer than a scientist in the later part of his career, he published several books, including the autobiographical Hera-clitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature. He remained on the Columbia faculty until his retirement in 1974.

  Seymour Cohen(b. 1917)—In 1971, he left the University of Pennsylvania for the University of Colorado in Denver, where he was a professor in the School of Medicine until 1976. He then moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, from which he retired in 1985.

  Francis Crick(1916-2004)—At the age of sixty-one, he moved to the Salk Institute to pursue a new career as a neurobiologist, eventually to study the nature of consciousness with Caltech's Christof Koch. The already much valued biography, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Atlas Books/ Harper Collins), by English scientist/writer Matt Ridley, appeared in mid-2006.

  Manny Delbrück(1917-1998)—She continued to live at Caltech until her death from breast cancer.

  Max Delbrück(1906-1981)—After 1957, his research turned to problems in sensory physiology, which he studied using the mold Phycomyces, until his death from multiple myeloma. In 1969, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria for their work on bacteriophage.

  Milislav Demerec(1895-1966)—Following his retirement at age sixty-five as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1960, he continued work on Salmonella genetics at Brookhaven National Laboratory until 1965.

  August (Gus) Doermann(1918-1991)—After conducting research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he worked at Rochester and Vanderbilt before becoming professor of genetics at the University of Washington in 1964. His retirement years after 1982 were spent in the Canadian Yukon.

  Paul Doty(b. 1920)—In his later career, he became increasingly involved in issues of international security, founding in 1973 what is now the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John E Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

  Renato Dulbecco(b. 1914)—After leaving Indiana University for Caltech in 1949, he began research on animal viruses, eventually to focus on tumor viruses as a founding member of the Salk Institute. His lab's finding that DNA tumor viruses cause cancer by inserting their genes into host cell DNA led to his sharing the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Later he became one of the earliest proponents of the Human Genome Project, saying that until the human genome was known we would not have the knowledge to beat cancer.

  Julian Fleischman(b. 1933)—After finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1960, he went on to postdoctoral training at Stanford University and several other institutions. In 1963 he coauthored a paper proposing a detailed structure for the antibody molecule. He later joined the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he continues to study antibody structure, synthesis, and diversity.

  Rosalind Franklin(1920-19
58)—After moving to Birkbeck College in the spring of 1953, she worked on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus until her tragically premature death from ovarian cancer in 1958. Her life is the subject of Brenda Maddox's much acclaimed biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.

  Carleton Gajdusek(b. 1923)—He spent the majority of his career at the National Institutes of Health and received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the infectious nature and epidemiology of the prion disease kuru, which he studied in a population of South Fore people in the highlands of New Guinea beginning in the mid-1950s.

  George (Geo) Gamow(1904-1968)—After a twenty-two-year career as professor of physics at George Washington University, he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1956, where he worked until his death.

  Ray Gesteland(b. 1938)—After spending his postdoctoral years in Geneva with Alfred Tissières, he came in 1967 to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he served as assistant director. In 1978 he moved to the University of Utah, where he is now vice president for research.