Genes, Girls, and Gamow

by James D. Watson

  I found myself that week in a no-win situation as I tried to fit into Christa’s student life, not helped by the cold raining darkness that enveloped us at most times. I was put off by the bar and student-dominated Schwabing district in which she lived and where I stayed in a worn-out pension for impoverished visitors. Although cranes were up everywhere helping to rebuild Munich at a prodigious pace, much of the center felt as if it had been bomb-shocked. Satisfied living like her largely penniless German equivalents, Christa was more than content with the student food, while I could not hide my need for water to help swallow it down. Mistakenly, then, I tried to bring her to expensive restaurants that she felt she was not appropriately dressed for. All this would not have mattered if I had felt more at ease when we were truly alone. Then my jitters made me less than I wanted to be. Not helping these moments were Christa’s fears of the past weeks that her heart was beating irregularly. To her displeasure, I wanted her to see a specialist to find out whether there was anything more than the “nervous Mayr heart” that had bothered her father in his stressful early university days.

  As we walked through the Alte Pinakothek, Munich’s grand art museum, I kept hoping that Christa would share her feelings about its paintings, particularly those from Italy with serene Madonna faces. But she gravitated towards the big Kandinsky oils whose asymmetrical curves I found jarring and not conducive to bringing couples together. At an evening concert featuring Bach and Mozart as well as Carl Orff, we smiled but all too soon went back out into the cold evening damp and my stomach was tight as we got ourselves back to Schwabing. On my last Munich morning we went into the city center to find a tourist-oriented shop from which I could post Christmas presents back to my parents and sister. Christa here took charge and picked out some Bavarian wicker baskets. Not much more than a quick kiss of her cheek sufficed for the moment I boarded the bus to the plane back to London. A weather-induced two-hour airport delay then accentuated my unease, which continued until the clouds broke away to reveal the lights of southern England. Soon I would be back in a country where I could feel at home.

  When I finally got back to the Cavendish, a most disturbing letter was waiting on my desk. Dated November 8, 1955, it was from George Gamow, writing from the house in Bethesda that he soon was to sell. His decision to divorce Rho, and suffer its awful financial consequences, was now made. The letter opened innocently with a request for the Pasadena haberdasher’s address so that he could order more RNA ties. Geo then asked what I thought about “Rundle’s paper” and whether I thought he should be made an “honorable member” or whether it might be best to disband our club. My intestine already in spasms, I feared the worst of my scientific bad dreams had come true. Somehow the RNA structure had been solved by a chemist I didn’t even know was in the race. To my despair, Rundle’s model was apparently not boring, it explained a fact that I had never got to grips with—that all known proteins inexplicably are made up of 3N amino acids (9, 9, 21, 30, 39, 126, and also 135 in tobacco mosaic virus). Reporting that he was considering returning to cosmology, Geo ended “Oh gosh!”

  Totally disconsolate by being knocked out of the ring, I waited a morose hour before Alex Rich uncharacteristically showed up in the lab before Francis Crick did. Seemingly equally discombobulated, Alex revealed that he, too, had received a letter from Geo that almost casually ended with mention of Rundle’s home run. In fact, Alex earlier had news of the big breakthrough in a letter to Jane and him from Max Delbrück. Surprisingly neither letter explained what Rundle’s brainstorm was. To learn what this clever inorganic chemist at Iowa State University had come up with, Max told Alex to get the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Hoping against hope that one of Cambridge’s chemists might be paying for this prestigious journal to come by air mail, Francis and Alex hopped from one true chemist’s office to another, only to find older issues that came by boat.

  By then resigned to searching for another scientific goal, I became curious why none of the crystallographers back in Alex’s lab at the National Institute of Health (NIH) had copied the Rundle article and sent it to us. Was it because they were too zombie-like in their shock? Alex had wondered likewise and finally had the courage to phone his lab. There he was put through to Jack Dunitz, who had the chemical know-how to set matters straight. Sensing that Jack was evasive, Alex could not keep Francis, standing next to him, from soon grabbing the phone. By then, both had smelled a hoax, and the mumble jumble coming back confirmed that our Cavendish group had been the victims of Gamow’s latest practical joke.

  Feeling as if coming off a hammer blow, I went that night to the Michaelmas term feast at Peterhouse, my engraved invitation saying “Doctors (Ph.D.s from Cambridge or Oxford) wear scarlet (robes),” indicating that the occasion was a “white-tie” affair. John Kendrew, fearing that I could not master such fancy dress, warned others that I might appear inappropriately. But with Francis also on the guest list, I went around to Portugal Place beforehand for Odile to check me over. With Peterhouse long proud of its High Table cuisine, I expected to be floored by its many courses, each with its special wine. The evening, however, proved—at least for me—less ebullient than the more understated black-tie feast at Christ’s to which Hugh Huxley had invited me earlier.

  Hugh was no longer embarrassed by the emotional triangle that he saw himself almost unfairly sucked into. It came as a relief to him, therefore, that the news of the Kendrews’ irreversible separation had become semi-public. Those of us in the know felt that this mismatched couple were bound to part. The fact that John treated many college functions as more important than being at his Tennis Court Road home had to mean that his mind usually went in directions other than towards his wife. It was widely thought unfair that Hugh felt he had no choice but to move elsewhere. But whether he himself still wanted to be part of the Cambridge scene, was a question no one thought he yet wanted to be asked.

  In the basement X-ray room, Don Caspar was finalizing his last experiments before writing up for Nature his evidence of fivefold symmetry in spherical plant viruses. While I was in Germany, he temporarily had awful fears that he might have accidentally exposed himself to a nasty, if not fatal, encounter with the high-intensity X-ray beam emitted from the powerful Cavendish rotating anode X-ray generator. Late at night, too tired to notice, Don neglected to put the appropriate heavy lead shielding between himself and the X-ray beam. All too soon realizing his mistake, he spent the next several days wretchedly scared of developing signs of incurable radiation-induced skin ulcers. Fortunately not even momentary redness appeared on his hands, and after a week Don was back taking X-ray pictures.

  Much less terrifying was the verbal fight that he recently had had with Rosalind Franklin. When she came up to Cambridge for a day’s visit, Don learned that Rosalind was collecting crystals of turnip yellow mosaic virus to put herself in competition with him. To him, this was a low blow because she and her research group had more good things to do with tobacco mosaic virus than time to achieve them. To my surprise I, not Francis, was left that afternoon to arbitrate between them. Using diplomatic charm that I never before possessed, I seemingly convinced Rosalind of the unfairness of her climbing up Don’s back. Badly needing a strong drink after she had gone, I took Jane to the Bath Hotel bar to let her watch me calm down over two whiskies.

  Soon after, I saw Victor Rothschild, who had sent me a recent message about Rosalind behaving like a hornet. The Agricultural Research Council (ARC) had just turned down her request for more funds, and, in reply, she face-to-face blew her stack at Sir William Slater, the ARC’s director, implying he was not competent to judge her request. She had a point because he had been goose-like in suggesting that she travel 400 miles up to Aberdeen to use a totally inappropriate X-ray source that the ARC had given one of its grantees. I pleaded with Victor that Rosalind’s sometimes awkward manner was more than compensated for by the importance of her research, as well as her intelligence and tenacity to succeed. I could not u
nderstand why Victor was now backing good form over brains in terms of the ways the ARC should use its resources. A year later, however, Rosalind was able to buy the needed diffractometer using American money from the NIH that Don helped her obtain.

  Meanwhile, a diverting card from Linda Pauling let me know that she was up to her romantic ambiguities. In a letter to Odile Crick, she took pride in her ironing of eight shirts at the same time while complaining her parents were still beastly to her, with Ava Helen having higher expectations for her daughter than domestic duties. To me she cheerfully penned, “Comedy proceeding with hero and heroine playing parts well; latter pleased with her performance—hero charming—a great success but obviously not perfectly at ease with such a part. The talent is there, however, and just needs to be developed. At times heroine feels need of moral support but is coming through all right.”

  I still remained uneasy over my Munich visit but Christa reassuringly wrote that she would be joining me at Dick and Nou Mitchison’s Scottish home over the New Year holiday. By then Alex Rich, having successfully turned a six-week into a six-month visit, knew that he had to be back at NIH. For the most part he and Francis were still entrapped modeling collagen in preparation for revealing their hands at a meeting with their King’s London competitors some 10 days hence. RNA, however, was what Alex had come to Cambridge to throw fresh light on, and with the “Rundle hoax” still in our consciousness, we made one last effort, in early December, to ask what its X-ray pattern told us. Here, data from Severo Ochoa’s synthetic RNA-like molecules dominated our thinking. We could stop worrying whether branches came off the 2’-hydroxyl groups because one enzyme would not be able to make two such different bonds. And very definitely the sugar phosphate backbone of RNA had to be on the outside of a helical molecule. The absence of strong equatorial X-ray reflections ruled out a structure in which the heavy phosphate groups were part of a dense central core.

  Alex and I now saw the basic RNA configuration as that of a single-stranded helix, very similar in dimension to that of the single DNA chains in the double helix. What until now we hadn’t appreciated was how close the chains interpenetrated each other. Now half-believing we finally had the right answer, Alex and I drafted a manuscript to be vetted by Francis when we got his intellect temporarily off collagen.

  To take my mind off our likely boring answer for RNA, I began playing squash on the Clare courts. Although I could beat Hugh Huxley, Leslie Orgel could humiliate me by skillfully flicking his wrists to put most of his shots out of my reach. Light relief came from Geo Gamow sending me a copy of his letter to Cornelius Rhodes, the boss of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York. In it, Geo replied to Rhodes’s criticism that he had not mentioned in his recent Scientific American article that some of the DNA used for the X-ray analysis had come from an Englishman working in his institute. The finding of the double helix, not isolating DNA, was what mattered, Geo said.

  With the Michaelmas term ended, there was a rash of parties—one a farewell party for Jane at Francis and Odile’s. She preferred to risk awful seasickness on the S.S. America rather than anxious flying over the Atlantic. “Doctors wore scarlet” at the very alcoholic Blythe Feast at Clare to which Michael Stoker invited me. Wearing tails by then almost seemed natural. On one side of me was Boris Ord, the Head of the King’s College Choir School, talking about his pre-adolescent boys’ miraculous soprano voices. A week later I saw him and his charges when Jane and I went to the chapel for Schütz’s Christmas Story. The weather had turned almost balmy, and we sat in our pews not minding that the chapel’s vast space was not heated.

  By then John Kendrew’s plans to be in New York over the holidays had fallen apart, and I agreed to go walking with him over Christmas in the Lake District, just south of the Scottish border. From there, Christa, John, and I would go on to the Mitchisons’ at Carradale. The arrival of a “Merry Christmas” postcard from Christa gave me the address in Westfalen to which I could write her about when and where she should join us. But whether Linda could greet us at Carradale was unclear. Av had not yet given her the word to come, seemingly not wanting to raise the issue by being ambiguous about where he would himself spend Christmas. Going to Carradale, however, had become a matter of pride to Linda. As his au-pair girl, she wanted more than vicariously to enjoy the privileges that go with being a Mitchison.

  English Lake District and Scotland: December 1955–January 1956

  ALTHOUGH THE ENGLISH Lake District is famous for its rain as well as its natural beauty, I did not know how heavy the odds are for getting soaked cold over Christmas. John Kendrew was taking me to the wettest place in England, with an excess of 130 inches of rainfall each year, some four times more than keeps the Cambridge colleges’ lawns so breathtakingly green. The truck-filled Great North Road (A1) took us to the east of Leeds, before we cut west across the valleys of green and rock of the Yorkshire dales. On the way up, rain fell only intermittently, and I kept hoping that the clouds would part once we reached our Victorian-era hotel. But when we did arrive it was pouring buckets, and just getting out of the car so wetted my trousers that they remained damp through our evening meal in a barely warmed dining room more attuned to August days. In the summer, of course, it would be filled with light-hearted hikers or Wordsworth enthusiasts eager to see his Dove Cottage home in nearby Grasmere.

  John knew well what we might endure and had brought along some heavy oilskin slickers, but they were not made to protect lower trousers or hiking boots. Initially our objective was to get to the top of the 3162-foot Scafell Pike, but even the bracken-surrounded lower paths were mushily unpleasant. And when they turned into steep, constantly crumbling scree, I questioned our sanity, knowing that all the other hotel guests were immersed in books inherently more satisfying than climbing towards objectives we were not likely to see through the blowing cold rain. Later, the Christmas roast beef fortified with red wine in no way compensated for BBC forecasts of more heavy rain coming off the Irish Sea over the next several days. No matter our increasing precautions, all our future ventures out into the blasting rain led to boots and clothes so soaked that there would be no chance, even in front of fireplaces, of their drying out before the next morning’s return to the unmitigated hell of walking to get even wetter.

  Christa’s boat train was to get her into Victoria Station in time for her to catch the night train to Glasgow. Best for us would be for her to leave the train just before the Scottish border. I so telegraphed, hoping my message would reach her in time. Later, not sure whether she might have gone on to Glasgow, I happily found her awaiting us at the Carlisle station café. Exhausted by two nights of virtually no sleep, she nodded off as John drove across the hills of Galloway and through the gray-stoned grim of Glasgow. Only along the west shore of Loch Lomond did she come to life and talk about Christmas with her father’s brother in Westfalen. Stopping for lunch before crossing the high moors on the way to Loch Fyne and the long ride along it, Christa seemed more eager to talk to John than me. But what so clearly upset her eluded me. Finally we were across the Crinan Canal with 15 sheep-dominated miles of driving finally bringing us to a large forestry plantation. From there we gently descended into Carradale.

  Our entry that day to Carradale House was into the back through the larder into the kitchen, where afternoon tea was being prepared. Beyond the dining room, the large fireplace-dominated drawing room was filled with family and guests sprawled over chairs and couches reading books and newspapers. I soon spotted Linda, clearly happy to have me on hand for needed confidence-sharing. Having met Christa earlier in Cambridge, she volunteered to take her upstairs to where she would be sleeping while I sought out Nou Mitchison to learn the room in which I was to stay. Later, in the north-facing study filled with Wyndham Lewis drawings, Linda told me that she was not there because of Av’s invitation. Instead his older brother, Murdoch, and his wife came to her rescue by asking her to be their guest for the holidays. Already here for several days, Av, with Linda tempo
rarily no longer his charge, nonetheless remained elliptical about his needs. In contrast, his youngest sibling, Val, now had the security of being married well to someone intelligent as well as affable.

  By catching Mark Arnold Foster, the labor correspondent for The Guardian, Val no longer felt it necessary verbally to put me in my proper place. Instead, she was almost affectionate, seeing that the world—at least tonight—was not going my way. After Christa had placed her bags in her room and had come down for some tea and scones, there was no hint from her eyes or in choosing where to sit that she was a close part of my life. Then, after the teapots were back in the kitchen and the main room now unoccupied with family and guests off in other places, she no longer avoided my face and blurted out what she had to say—that she was not at all in love with me and knew her mind and needs well enough to know that she would always feel this way. As hard as she tried over the past year, she found it impossible to convert her liking for me into the deep love needed to share her life completely with another person. Forcefully said, these were not off-the-cuff remarks but came as if repeated over and over in her mind ever since leaving Munich.

  There was no opening for me to argue back. It was her feelings, not mine, that now mattered. Desperately that hour I wanted to believe that she would see things differently when she had had a good night’s sleep. Deep down, however, I knew that in a more voiceless manner I had received the same message in Munich, but had not listened. Over dinner, Christa, not wanting to seem what she was not, conspicuously chose company at the other end of the long table.