Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James D. Watson

  Upon my return to fall classes, my seemingly improved social skills encouraged a close friend and his girlfriend to set me up on my first real college date. Dominating the college social scene during my junior and senior years were two girls who were almost always seen together: Rosemary Raymond and Irene (Reno) Lyons. Rosy was the more smashing, often spotted driving about in her parents’ new, Raymond Loewy-designed, ultramodern Studebaker. But Reno was also clearly fun, and I did not believe she would go out with me. She agreed, however, and we went to a Saturday night party in a campus dorm, from which we went on to have a snack at the Tropical Hut on Fifty-seventh Street, where my awkwardness abated only somewhat.

  “Jimbo” Watson, eighteen years old and at ease

  That was not only my first college date but also my last. The pursuit of happiness thereafter was mainly taken up with improving my tennis skills on the courts under Stagg Field with Howard Holtzer, my only real competition in zoology. Though he was five years older than me, I could occasionally beat him with cross-court forehand shots. At that time I was just filling out several applications for graduate school, with Caltech as my first choice. Not only was its Biology Department heavily into genetics, but its world-famous chemist, Linus Pauling, was also interested in biology at the molecular level. I also applied to the Biology Department at Harvard for no good reason except that Harvard was Harvard. Indiana University was a sleeper that I applied to on the advice of my undergraduate advisor. I was told they had several outstanding younger geneticists, though their names then meant nothing to me. I did know, however, that the great geneticist Hermann J. Muller had just arrived there. He became a celebrity that October when it was announced he had won the 1946 Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1926 that X-rays cause mutations.

  As early April approached, I began to worry about the fate of my applications. And so it was a considerable relief when I did receive an acceptance letter from Fernandus Payne, the dean of Indiana University's graduate school. In addition to a $900 annual stipend, all tuition fees were waived. I was warned, however, that if I expected my main interest to continue to be birds, I should choose a different place. So my future was already secure when I received Caltech's rejection letter, which hurt but didn't surprise me. They had no way of knowing that I had become more interested in studying genetics than birds. They also expected their students to do well in math. Last to arrive was a letter from Harvard offering acceptance but no financial aid for tuition or living costs. I was in no sense disappointed, as there was no one on its faculty truly interested in the gene.

  During my last quarter, I registered for the simpler of the two departmental organic chemistry courses, the one for pre-meds as opposed to future scientists. The course material was not much of a challenge, and the professor gave us the option of counting only the top three out of four required exams toward our final grade. After getting As on the first three tests, it seemed perfectly reasonable to skip the final two and a half weeks of lectures. In this way, I graduated from Chicago never having studied ring-shaped, aromatic carbon compounds. My grades for my two other spring courses, which included Vertebrate Embryology and a statistics-oriented psychology course, were also Äs, as in fact were all my grades the final year. I ascribed my success in the final laps primarily to lack of competition, since better science students tended toward the more rigorous programs of physics and chemistry.

  Indiana University made its position perfectly clear.

  Just before the June 1947 commencement, at which I would receive a B.S. degree, I learned that I had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. I had long coveted the honor but never thought I could pull off enough Äs in science to pull up the rest of my only-slightly-above-average grades. Most thrilled were my parents, who had devoted so much of their meager salaries to my schooling. Never once did they even hint that I was shirking my responsibilities in preferring books and birds over making money.

  Over my last summer at home, I spent more and more time at Wolf Lake observing shorebirds. There I found hundreds of black-bellied plovers as well as dozens of the golden plovers, whose long migration over oceans had so thrilled me when I read about them as a child. Piping plovers still nested on the sandy shores and intermingled with the many more semipalmate plovers that arrived soon after the fall migration started in early August. I would watch the shorebird flocks scurrying along the beach, trying to think through the evolutionary pressures that had created such social animals, which invariably flocked together instead of going their solitary ways. Whether any general principles governing the social behavior of birds even existed, no one then knew. Deep down I was relieved that Indiana's warning would not allow me to stake my future on the pursuit of an objective that might prove a phantom. In contrast, what needed to be found out about genes was relatively clear. They obviously existed, but how did they work? Knowing by graduation where I wanted to go intellectually was the real achievement of my college years.

  Remembered Lessons

  1. College is for learning how to think

  Whether on a scholarship or paying full fare, college costs too much time and money if you don't use it to learn how to think. In Joseph Schwab's Humanities I class, knowing what Socrates was reputed to have said mattered much less than confronting whether the reasoning he used to reach his conclusions was watertight. Day after day we were pushed into classroom fights where we boxed with our brains instead of our fists. Syllogisms, in which two premises predicate unassailable conclusions, dominated our classroom hours, with the exact meaning of words being of paramount importance. Failure to spot faulty premises all too easily led to classroom answers that ran against common sense. Back in high school, I was challenged by a friend who had what he thought was incontrovertible proof of the existence of God.

  Going back home, I felt stupidly unable to fight back against his word war, even while suspecting that he was pulling a fast one that I was too dumb to spot. Later when we both went to the University of Chicago, he came up against much better practitioners of semantics and logic. Soon Bill sheepishly confessed to me that syllogisms no longer led him to God, and freed from thinking about sin, he developed a new preoccupation with girls—and more girls.

  2. Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important

  than learning “what” (a fact)

  World Almanac facts, such as the relative heights of mountains or the names of British kings, got you nowhere at Hutchins's college. The essence of its educational mission was the propagation and dissection of ideas, not the teaching of facts often best left to trade schools. Why the Roman Empire had risen and fallen was much more important than the birth date of Julius Caesar. And why the great European cathedrals were built mattered much more than their relative sizes. Equally unimportant were the details about the French Revolution when contrasted to the philosophical ideas of its eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose emphasis on reason as opposed to theological revelation greatly accelerated the development of modern science. Likewise, details of Linnean taxonomy paled in significance to the idea of biological evolution, whereby all life-forms have a common ancestor. Better simply to know which books hold details you will need than to overload your neurons with facts that later will never need to be retrieved.

  3. New ideas usually need new facts

  Though facts are inherently less satisfying than the conclusions drawn from them, their importance cannot be denied. Darwin's abandonment of the Bible's description of the origin of life came out of the observations that he made as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle. During its three-year mission of charting poorly known stretches of the western coastline of South America, Darwin spent much time ashore observing and collecting the fauna, flora, and fossils. He noticed among other things that species found in mountainous temperate regions were more similar to those found in nearby tropical regions than they were to species from temperate regions on other continents. Likewise, many South American fossils appeared more related to living South American equivalents than to fossils fou
nd, say, in Europe. Crucial to his own acceptance of the origin of species by natural selection was his visit to the Galapagos Archipelago, where each island had its own unique species of finches. Effectively isolated from interbreeding with finches of neighboring islands, each species evolved its own unique coloration and beak shape. Sometimes a new idea can flow from old facts rearranged, but more typically it comes when new things previously unknown and unaccountable for under the old theory are introduced.

  4. Think like your teachers

  Learning to think should also make your life easier. During my first university years, I crammed far too much for exams, trying to be on top of all the topics given even semiprominence in my syllabi or texts. It would have been much better to focus on questions my teachers were certain to ask, which I could discern if I paid attention to their main take-home lessons. Trying to put myself into my instructor's head became much easier when I began to concentrate on subjects of personal interest, and I proved a whiz while a senior at mastering the ideas of ecological animal geography.

  5. Pursue courses where you get top grades

  After you've satisfied requirements, choose courses that naturally interest you, not ones someone else thinks you should care about. Then give these courses your all. If your grades in classes you like are not largely As, you have likely not yet found your intellectual calling. As a corollary: if you do take courses that prove to be no fun, don't get upset by less than stellar grades.

  6. Seek out bright as opposed to popular friends

  Though big-time sports were gone, the University of Chicago still had fraternities that acted as dining and housing centers for students with social aspirations after the war ended. Only one such meal in a house on University Avenue made it obvious to all that I'd better plan to continue dining at the Hutchinson Commons with several undergraduate science oddballs who, like me, could not generate polite words of no purpose. There we could frequently look across its long refectory tables and see Enrico Fermi talking with his graduate students and postdocs. The great Italian-born physicist had elected to be there instead of dining with fellow physics professors in the more stuffy Quadrangle Club. In my senior year, I began moving among zoology department graduate students. With them small talk came easily. I didn't feel like an oddball, as I did among students of other aspirations who were soon to move off into worlds of which I had no interest in ever becoming a part.

  7. Have teachers who like you intellectually

  Long after I left Chicago, a gathering of its New York alumni brought me into contact with a classmate whom I remembered best for his devotion to bridge games. Cheerfully he told me how, given my social awkwardness, none of my classmates thought I would amount to much. Happily it was my teachers’ opinion, not my classmates', that mattered. After fun classes I liked to stay on to ask questions, and in this way I became well known to them. Because of my enthusiasm, during my senior year the animal behaviorist Clyde Allee invited me to join the weekly meeting of his students at his nearby Hyde Park house. He not only gave me an A but also wrote a compelling recommendation for my application to graduate school. The most effective endorsements are cultivated well before application time. So it was with the human geneticist Herluf Strandskov, who would also praise my keen interest in biology. You don't have to win them all: the impervious embryologist Paul Weiss was ever annoyed at my failure to take notes during his lectures while still getting A's in his exams. I had the sense not to ask him for a recommendation.

  8. Narrow down your intellectual (career) objectives while still in college

  The University of Chicago was virtually an officers’ training school for intellectuals, and its Zoology Department had no rival in range elsewhere in the United States. Though initially excited by virtually all aspects of biology, by late in my junior year I found myself keenly interested in the gene. If I had not figured out my focus so early, I very likely would have gone to a school such as Cornell or Berkeley that had great programs in biology but not in genetics. In such circumstances I might have grown bored with my thesis research and been obliged to wait until after my Ph.D. was completed, some three or four years, before experiencing true intellectual excitement. And by then I would have left the most thrilling problem of all—the DNA structure—for others to solve.

  3. MANNERS PICKED UP IN GRADUATE SCHOOL

  INDIANA University (IU), at Bloomington in Monroe County, to which I went in September 1947 to become a scientist was waking up from a genteel past that made it still more redolent of a southern state university than the other earnestly progressive Big Ten partners such as Wisconsin and Michigan. Presiding over the emergence of IU as an institution where learning and research were to be as important as weekends of fraternity- and sorority-led fun was Herman B. Wells. He became president in 1937, when he was only thirty-five. Short and heavyset, the Indiana-born small-town boy had prodigious energy and visions of greatness for his university, until then the academic runt of the Big Ten.

  During its more than thirty-year slumber since 1910, President William L. Bryan had not presided over the construction of even one major new dormitory. So Wells moved quickly to shake things up, recruiting new faculty and using Depression-fighting federal funds to build important new facilities, including a grand four-thousand-seat student auditorium. For science faculty recruiting, Wells tapped Fernandus Payne, who until then had been badly underutilized by the graduate school. A Hoosier born and bred, Payne, like almost all the senior faculty, had gone east to earn his Ph.D., which was awarded in 1909 by Columbia University, where Drosophila, the tiny fruit fly, had just been introduced into the laboratory of T. H. Morgan. Payne had the bad luck to return to Indiana just before Morgan and his students Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges began their seminal experiments, mapping genes to fixed locations along the Drosophila chromosomes.

  Though never a major player in genetics, Payne knew where the action was. He made offers to major talents not yet adequately discovered or recognized by major institutions. From Goucher, the women's college in Baltimore, he recruited the respected cytologist Ralph Cle-land in 1938 for the Botany Department. A year later he brought to the Zoology Department the extraordinary protozoologist Tracy Sonneborn from Johns Hopkins. Then late in 1943, the bacteriology department acquired the Italian-born Salvador Luria, initially trained as an M.D. but by then exploring the genetics of viruses. Even more spectacular was Payne's ability in 1946 to persuade the already world-famous Drosophila geneticist Hermann J. Muller to join ITJ's ranks.

  In appointing Sonneborn and Luria, Payne took no notice of the Jewish heritage that had kept Sonneborn from a tenured appointment at Johns Hopkins and Luria from an invitation to join the faculty at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, where he had been given a temporary position upon his arrival as a wartime refugee. Müller, then working with Sewall Wright, the most accomplished of American geneticists, suffered from a double whammy. Not only was he Jewish, but his departure from Texas to Moscow in the early 1930s had indelibly marked him as an unemployable leftist. Upon his return to the States in 1940, only by the intervention of his friend H. H. Plough could he secure a temporary position at Amherst. He had asked many other friends for help, but no major research university made him an offer, even though Müller had by then turned totally against the Soviet government. So it was with great relief that Müller accepted the IU professorship. Soon Indiana would have even greater reason to be pleased when Muller was given the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

  To get to Bloomington I took the Monon, the railroad most identified with Indiana's past and one whose original tracks went past the Gleason farm near La Porte where my grandmother was raised. Along these tracks Nana saw Lincoln's funeral train as it slowly crisscrossed the Midwest toward Springfield, Illinois, where the president was buried. I had signed up to live and eat at the Rogers Center, a postwar utilitarian dormitory complex located a mile east of the campus center. Its two-story buildings were of necessity buil
t too quickly to have the permanent elegance that comes with Indiana limestone. My $900 fellowship would more than cover room and board fees, leaving me enough for the occasional movie and meal out.

  Herman J. Muller, 1941

  Some twenty thousand students were then enrolled at IU. All Indiana high school graduates were entitled to enroll there or at rival Purdue, the engineering and agriculture-oriented university a hundred miles north. The state saw its obligation to offer everyone who wanted one a good education. But each year half the freshman class did not go on to be sophomores. Poor grades were behind most dropouts, but a significant number of girls transferred to other schools because of their failure to be accepted by a suitable sorority.

  The aged zoology and botany laboratories that dated from the 1880s were in no way adequate for IU's new genetics thrust. Ralph Cleland, upon his 1938 move to the Botany Department, however, had to make do. Tracy Sonneborn had the better fortune a year later of being given space in the relatively new chemistry building. Salvador Luria, coming in 1943, found his new Microbiology Department lab sited in the attic of the early-twentieth-century Kirkwood Hall, originally designed for physics and chemistry, though by then foreign languages and nutrition were taught on lower floors. Hermann J. Muller's lab was hastily created in 1946 in the basement of the equally out-of-date psychology building. As a first-year graduate student, I was given a desk on the top floor of the zoology building, whose original elevator was still operated by pulling ropes to go up and down.

  On the first floor of the zoology building were the offices of Alfred Kinsey, much esteemed for his studies on gall wasps, and until recently the teacher of the undergraduate course on evolution. By 1947, however, his focus had turned exclusively to human sexuality, then a daring topic for any university, particularly one almost in the South. Fortunately, Kinsey's recently published book summarizing his findings was so heavily statistical as to be more likely purgative than prurient. In fact, subsequent criticism that Kinsey seemed ignorant of the emotional aspects of sex later led his Institute of Human Sexuality to accumulate a highly restricted library of erotica. This backfired when some books later purchased in France were seized by U.S. Customs and, despite much pleading by Herman Wells, never released for their scholarly aims.