The next day I had lunch with Jeffries Wyman, then the scientific attaché of the American Embassy in Paris, whom I had met the year before outside Paris with the Paulings. Jeffries, a Bostonian, much preferred Europe over Boston, particularly after his first wife, a Cabot, died and a second marriage to an equally proper Forbes went quickly sour. We discussed what my future life in Pasadena might be like, and I said it would probably bore me. In contrast, he thought I might enjoy the more mannered Harvard, even though he never had fitted well into its Department of Biology, which was never quite first rank. Afterwards he wrote to his former colleague, George Wald, that I might be suitable for Harvard. As lunch went on I began to feel awfully sick, and soon was in bed with a fever of 104°F. For a brief while I feared I might be dying of polio picked up from the spumone I had eaten at the Como train station. But a day later I was out of bed, took the train to Zurich, and at the airport bought a watch for my mother. Then I flew to London and went up to Cambridge, apprehensive about the fate of our letter.
Francis and Odile Crick by then were already on the Atlantic on their way to Brooklyn. Earlier Francis had gotten our letter and was initially very pleased, writing immediately to Linus his acceptance. But there was a problem. Bragg had also been asked to speak after the meeting and how would they divide up the story? So Francis went up and saw the Professor. Bragg naturally was very depressed and went to see Perutz. As everyone in the lab knew about the letter, Max had to let on that it was a forgery. In response Bragg said, “Tell Crick!” Max, however, didn’t have the heart to do it, and a week later Bragg said, “Send him up to me!” So Francis bounded up to the floor above where Bragg told him the truth. Francis rose well to the awkward occasion and immediately sent the fake letter to Pauling. Afterwards Peter wrote me saying that his father had recently deducted £5 from his allowance because of the letter to Crick. Then Linus wrote, “The letter caused me no end of trouble, because upon reading it I was convinced I had written it. But I recognized a grammatical error that I never make.” Since then, every time I produce a split infinitive, I think of Linus.
None of the wives liked what we had done, and Elizabeth Kendrew curtly told me we had gone far beyond the bounds of decent behavior. At first we defensively said that they had not been subjected to one hundred renditions of the DNA lecture. The fun, however, was over and soon we felt guilty, and I worried what it would be like when I saw Francis. On my last afternoon in Cambridge, I had my final looks at Clare and the Chapel and Gibbs Building of King’s. The long vac was over and by late afternoon the tourists were gone, and I was almost alone as I walked along the banks that I had first seen just two years before. The Wren Library of Trinity remained as overpowering as ever, and I felt somehow destined to return. Dining later by myself at the Arts Theatre, the next morning I took the train up to London to spend my last night in England at the Charing Cross Hotel before getting the boat train to Southampton.
After checking in, I almost instinctively began walking down the Strand toward King’s. But bumping into Maurice Wilkins would at best be awkward, so I changed course towards Soho and then into Mayfair, where the fancier women of the night walked their leashed dogs to dispel any ambiguity as to whom they were there for. The nights then were no longer short and innocent English girls, still in their almost shapeless light frocks, looked cold as they tried to act as if the fragile English summer was still about. The evening was still early when I went back to the immense late-Victorian room that I was to have for the night. At least for the moment, my English life was over.
New Haven, Northern Indiana, and Pasadena: September 1953
MY RETURN TO the States in August 1953 was on S.S. Georgic, an old Cunard liner that in the summer was a cheap hotel for students on their way to and from Europe. The slow voyage took a week and happily provided much opportunity to drink bouillon on the decks with two “proper” Vassar College girls, fresh from their year away at Edinburgh University. I never let on exactly who I was, and I hinted only mildly that I had made a major discovery. It was as if we were Americans of the Henry James variety, to whom manners were the essence. As we approached New York, the girls increasingly turned their attentions towards three British students with the right-sounding names of Colin, Derek, and Malcolm, all headed toward studies at Ivy League schools. Obviously not yet in their social league, I considered whether instead of having RNA for my future, I should try to be a Republican and aim for the higher reaches of the Foreign Service.
The day before we were to dock, such thoughts stopped when I got a radio message from Avrion Mitchison telling me where I might meet him in New York. He was then in the States for two years on a Commonwealth Fellowship that followed his Oxford Zoology education. Originally we had met through his older brother, Murdoch, also a zoologist, who first introduced us at a Trinity feast in Cambridge. Av was interested in broadening his talents beyond the immunological orientation of his Ph.D. thesis and later took up my suggestion that he spend a year at Indiana University with the geneticist Tracy Sonneborn. But a year of Bloomington was enough, and from there he wrote me that, as in Oxford, the nicest girls were married. Like me, he found the Hoosier coeds good-looking but, at least to him, a bit inaccessible. So Av was moving on to the Jackson Lab at Bar Harbor in Maine to resume work on mice and the systems they provide for understanding immunology.
With friends on the deck of the Georgic, August 1953: Lee Wakefield is in the center, Margot Schutt is on the far right.
After my bags came off the boat and I gave the taxi driver my destination, he implied that it must be a whorehouse. Ten minutes later, I was deposited at a seedy hotel just off Washington Square. With Av then was Tony Richardson, soon to be the noted stage and movie director. They had just driven through much of the States, going to every blue movie and avant-garde play they could find. Av and his sister, Val, had become friends of Tony in Oxford, from where he had moved to work at the Lime Grove Television Studio in West London. This was to be the only time we ever met. We disagreed about Henry James’s The Awkward Age that he then had in his hands.
That afternoon Av and I left Tony, who was about to return to England, and drove in Av’s beat-up car to New Haven to be with my father’s physicist brother, Bill Watson, and his wife, Betty. Before my going to Europe, Betty, embarrassed by my bad dress and lack of tact, had quietly ejected me when I unexpectedly walked into a New York hotel suite where my cousin Ruth and fellow students from Smith College had gathered, all bound for Paris and Geneva. Now, three years later, many of my American words had turned into their English equivalents, and with DNA under my belt I was no longer regarded as a poor relation. When we talked after the visit, Av could not understand why I had been so hesitant in exposing him to Yale’s way of life.
In Cambridge, Mass., after spending a night near Central Square, I nervously sought out Christa Mayr by going to her family’s new home in part of a large early twentieth-century house near the Radcliffe Yard. But we found only her mother, Gretel, as Christa was with her father in Harvard Square. An hour later, we caught up with Ernst at the Cambridge Trust Company across from the Harvard Yard, and the conversation easily turned to the great eccentricity of Av’s brilliant uncle, J. B. S. Haldane, whose fame as a geneticist mattered much more to Ernst than his long-time membership of the British Communist Party. Christa, to my distress, was off shopping in anticipation of Swarthmore College, where she was soon to start her first year. Soon after I was at South Station to board the train that was to take me back to the Midwest and my parents’ home outside of Chicago.
When met by my mother, taking a day off from her job in the Admissions Office of the University of Chicago, I hid my frustration over not seeing Christa in Boston. Instead we talked about my sister Betty, who would be married in several days, and of the failing health of Nana, my maternal grandmother. She had recently failed mentally to the point that the local nursing home no longer wished to care for her. Later I took several long walks in the Indiana Dunes State Park, scra
mbling up the large mounds of sand that I had wandered over many times as a keen adolescent birdwatcher. Less than a mile away was the modest wooden home where my parents now lived after selling their small bungalow in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Mother and Dad had long wanted to live outside Chicago but had the means to do so only after my sister and I had finished at the University of Chicago. At last they were living among friends who shared their liking of the rolling green fields of northwestern Indiana.
After being home for almost a week, my parents drove me to Midway Airport for the long flight to Los Angeles. Under my arm was the red-and-green display model of the double helix, leading a stewardess to think I was an artist. So I felt pleasantly important until dirty yellow smog enveloped the plane as it descended over the mountains above San Bernardino to enter the Los Angeles basin. The acrid stench, which greeted me as I left the plane and rode through the palm tree–lined streets into central Los Angeles, grew even viler as the taxi ascended the Pasadena Freeway. In Pasadena, we turned off towards the Caltech campus, sited just north of the San Marino mansions through which much of the old wealth of LA had chosen to display itself.
In a few minutes we were at Caltech, my immediate destination being the Athenaeum, Caltech’s imposing faculty club. I and many of the meeting participants, including Sir Lawrence and Lady Bragg, were to be housed there, and I entered knowing I would soon be among friends. Instantly I saw John Kendrew waiting for someone familiar to join him for supper in the tall, almost baronial dining room, dominated by a painting of Caltech’s founders, including their Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Robert Millikan. John, now away from Cambridge for more than a month, was curious about how Francis had learned that the Pauling letter from Stockholm was a fake. Not knowing how Francis would greet us, we were relieved that the X-ray crystallographer David Harker came into the dining room with him. They had traveled together from Brooklyn, where David’s lab had a million dollars to solve the structure of the small protein ribonuclease.
By then John and I were just finishing our dessert and soon excused ourselves for an evening walk through the carefully manicured Caltech campus, whose classical Spanish-styled buildings gave off the aura of ancient origins. In fact, its serene charm was the product of a frenetic post–World War I building program that had transformed Caltech from a provincial technical school into a world-class university for science in less than two decades. It was the mighty telescope, built upon nearby Mount Wilson to utilize the crystal-clear air of Los Angeles, that first gave Caltech a national visibility, and by capturing Robert Millikan from the University of Chicago to be its first president, it seemed natural for Albert Einstein to make several visits. Eminence in biology followed when the famed geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan was recruited from Columbia just before the Depression took over. Even rich Californians worried then. But Caltech was far too good to be fiscally threatened for long, and after the end of World War II its upward momentum resumed. Although it had only 800 undergraduates then, it was in the same league as its much-older sister institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, familiarly called MIT.
Pasadena Protein Conference (September 21–25, 1953)
One of the major reasons for Caltech’s ever-growing fame was Linus Pauling. A native of Oregon, and one of Caltech’s first doctoral students, Linus used a Guggenheim Fellowship to go to Europe just as quantum mechanics came into existence. By then he was married to Ava Helen Miller, a fellow student from Oregon. Upon their return to Caltech, Linus quickly used the quantum thinking to revolutionize the world’s idea on the nature of the chemical bond, publishing a seminal book under this name in 1939. Now, in effect, the Pauling family was Caltech’s royalty. Much gossiped about and envied, few couples knew them intimately enough to know when they were expected to speak as opposed to listen. Linus and Ava Helen’s inherent social hesitancy was unexpected, given the broad smile invariably displayed by Linus as he lectured about science to his fellow scientists or went into the outside world to dazzle the general public. With time, one realized that the Pauling charm was never expected to be returned in kind. And differences in opinion, no matter how lighthearted, were not easily taken.
First living modestly near Caltech, Linus’s position since 1937 as head of the Chemistry Division gave them the means to move their four children to a large tetrahedral-angled, one-story home in the foothills. From there he drove to and from Caltech in an open Riley convertible that he had brought back from Oxford, where he was the Eastman Professor at Balliol in 1947–8. Linus had first become serious about biology in the mid-1930s when he began worrying about the nature of the chemical bonds holding antigens and their respective antibodies together. And just after the war, he was the first to realize that the disease of red blood cells called sickle-cell anemia had its origin in a molecular defect of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells used to transport oxygen through blood vessels. But it was his 1951 proposal of the α-helix as the basic fold for the polypeptide chain that was to give Linus his greatest impact on biology. The meeting that we were about to attend had been organized in part to let Linus again display its deep beauty. I’m also sure that for several months Linus looked forward to showing off his new model for DNA. But now, to the obvious pain of Ava Helen, the DNA story was for Francis and me to relate.
At the meeting, Linus made a big point of DNA’s guanine–cytosine base pair being held together by three hydrogen bonds, one more than Francis and I proposed in our original Nature paper. Then, not knowing the exact guanine structure, we thought the third bond might be much weaker than the other two and so left it out. Later experiments that demonstrated the high thermal stability of GC-rich DNA samples proved that Linus’s chemical intuition was again right on course.
Linus Pauling (left) and George Beadle at Caltech, late 1953
All in all, this was a useful scientific gathering, even though most of the talks merely rehashed familiar facts and concepts. The participant most genuinely excited about what the next few months might bring was Max Perutz. Over the summer he had learnt of a Dutch result that might let him crack the phase problem, which was then preventing him and John Kendrew from solving, respectively, the hemoglobin and myoglobin structures. To my relief, Francis seemed not that put off by our practical joke, making sensible remarks on numerous occasions. On the other hand, he was clearly off the manic high that had been such a characteristic of his life in the previous several months.
He and Max Delbrück argued the first evening whether the two strands of the double helix could untwiddle fast enough to let them separate. Soon a $5 bet was made with the Caltech chemist Vernon Schoe-maker to hold the money in escrow until the matter was settled. Francis and I then saw no way to distort the individual helically folded DNA chains so as to let them lie side by side as Max wanted. But until there was a rigorous X-ray proof for the double helix, Max was not likely to concede and the money seemed destined to remain in Vernon’s pocket for a long time.
Late the second afternoon, Linus and Ava Helen held a garden party in their home at the end of Sierra Madre Boulevard. Unfortunately it was a week too late for their daughter, Linda, to be there. Now aged 20, and 18 months younger than her brother Peter, she was back at Reed College starting her senior year. Four years before, when I first came to Caltech for summer research, Linda was at a late-night party given in a foothills house then shared by several postdocs at Caltech. Her glamorous blond personality stood out and, to my disappointment, she disappeared before I could get close. Later Peter told me that Linus and Ava Helen wanted Linda to grow up unsaddled by the conventional middle-class beliefs that kept most children from developing into interesting personalities.
With Linda away, I did not have high expectations for this Pauling party. There were almost no women associated with Caltech and most meeting attendees were there without wives. By then I had already met Pauling’s postdoc, Alex Rich, three years my senior, who came to the party with his wife, Jane. Jane had been raised in Ca
mbridge, Mass., where Alex had met her when he was at medical school at Harvard. Seven generations of Jane’s family, the Kings, had gone to Harvard, and she had no trouble in sensing that I must be going through culture shock in giving up the real Cambridge for a southern California where money matters more than words or ideas.
Because the smog was still ferocious, we could not enjoy the view of the mountains above us and, to pass the time, Jane and I started telling John Kendrew how American politics operated. After the wife of Lee Dubridge, the physicist president of Caltech, joined us, I exaggeratedly said that American politicians were all corrupt and lousy—a natural remark for someone who grew up in Mayor Kelly’s Chicago. She looked pained and said, “But don’t you respect President Eisenhower?” Instantly I replied, “No.” Little did I know that Lee Dubridge had been part of the delegation of senior Republicans who had gone the year before to Eisenhower asking him to challenge Ohio’s Senator Taft for the Republican nomination as President. Unclear then was which of us was the more gauche, she for the question or I for the answer.
Pasadena, Northern Indiana, and the East Coast: October 1953–January 1954
WHEN THE PASADENA meeting on protein structure finished at the end of September, the full horror of being in Pasadena hit me. Not knowing how to drive a car, much less owning one, I was effectively confined to the girlless Caltech campus and had to continue living at the faculty club, the Athenaeum. Although the bacon and eggs were faultless, the Los Angeles Times was not the best way to start a smog-filled day, with its pages seeing hidden communists behind the thoughts of any liberal Democrat. Each day, when breakfast ended, I became part of Max Delbrück’s ground-floor phage group in the 1930s-style Kerckhoff Biology Building. Two years previously I would have thought this to be the best of all possible worlds. Then phages were it and I would have died for them. But now I had a desk in a room assigned to several of Max’s graduate students, both working on, at best, dull topics. In particular, Gordon Sato was doing kinetic experiments to learn more about how the amino acid tryptophane helps phage T4 attach to E. coli. There was no way to imagine this problem, even when solved, as ever being more than a further addition to academic trivia.
Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 6