In the meanwhile, I became increasingly immersed in Biology Department politics. Carroll Williams was no longer chairman, having been succeeded by the into-Harvard-born behavioral biologist Don Griffin, who specialized in bat navigation. After being a Harvard junior fellow, he quickly rose in the academic ranks at Cornell before being called back in 1956. Don had natural affinities with Harvard's organismal biologists, so it was not anticipated that his first major goal as chairman would be to reduce the power of Harvard's separately funded biology museums, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Harvard Herbarium. Until this landmark turnabout, tenured museum scientists not only chose future museum curators but also had a say as to appointments to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
Back in June 1963, the tenured faculty, following Don's lead, voted that only professors supported by FAS monies would have automatic voting rights. At the same time, they opened up the possibility of key museum members having three-year terms on the Committee of Permanent Professors if so approved by two-thirds of the FAS-funded faculty. In this way, widely respected museum scientists such as the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr would retain voting rights. Carroll Williams, who still held much political power in the department, later tried hard to have the decision reversed. If the museum deadbeats were removed from the department scene, Carroll would no longer be seen as a neutral party in the tension between old-fashioned organismal biologists and the new group of molecular biologists. Instead he would be perceived as the leader of a conservative biology caucus openly determined to stop DNA-centered work from ever dominating Harvard's biology. It remained unclear whether Carroll would prevail until the fall of 1963, when a letter came from Franklin Ford reaffirming the opinion that only faculty paid by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences should vote on their respective department appointments.
These sensible voting qualifications, however, did not adequately guarantee first-rate appointments to the biology faculty. At least one-third of the Biological Laboratories remained unchanged since its construction thirty years earlier. Particularly out of date were its teaching labs, library, animal quarters, and machine shops. Moreover, the practice of relying on the senior faculty's government grants to renovate the out-of-date labs of incoming junior faculty put the latter cohort in a servile role. New funding would have to materialize from the Faculty of Arts and Science, not just from federal grants, if Harvard was to hold its own with Stanford, Caltech, MIT, and Rockefeller. Keith Porter, Paul Levine, and I prepared a report on facilities, which Don Griffin passed on to Franklin Ford. In it we outlined three possible scenarios for action. The first proposed extensive remodeling of the Biolabs; the second, a new five-story wing to the east; and the third, a ten-story building whose site demanded demolition of the historic brick Divinity School residence hall on Divinity Avenue, to the front of the Biological Laboratories.
A message soon came back from University Hall that no monies existed for construction of new Biology Department facilities. Any expansion of the biology faculty would have to occur within the preexisting confines of the Biological Laboratories. This rebuff had an unexpected positive consequence. Administrative approval would be fastest for scientists already in situ, whose space requirements could be met by relatively inexpensive renovations of existing labs. Thus promoting Wally Gilbert to tenure was to prove much easier than we'd guessed the year before.
Wally still had a heavy physics teaching load and was supervising the Ph.D. theses of several graduate students. Only after the August 1961 Moscow Biochemistry Congress did Wally use most of his free time for experimentation in molecular biology. He first demonstrated that single poly U molecules serve as templates for several ribosomes simultaneously. Then he revealed the presence of transfer RNA molecules at the carboxyl ends of growing polypeptide chains. Currently he was showing that the attachment of streptomycin to ribosomes causes misreading of the genetic code. Even with these demonstrations of extraordinary talents as an experimentalist, I feared great difficulty getting him appointed to the biology faculty. In their eyes, Wally and I were too similar in our semiobjectionable objectives.
Luckily, Paul Doty soon orchestrated an arrangement to give Wally tenure, not as a member of the Biology Department but as a member of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Biophysics. Toward this end I wrote to Arthur Solomon, the long-reigning head of biophysics at Harvard, that Wally was in the same league, intellectually and experimentally, as Seymour Benzer or Sydney Brenner. Franklin Ford soon guaranteed funds to back the new tenured biophysics slot, and Wally's promotion breezed through the ad hoc committee early in April 1964.
The approval process for Wally occurred when I was in Paris to lecture at an April meeting marking the fiftieth anniversary of the French Biochemical Society. There, for the first time, I announced evidence for the existence of two ribosomal sites that specifically bind transfer RNA. One site I called A in view of its function to bind incoming amino acid transfer molecules in the presence of messenger RNA codons. The second site I called P since it holds the growing polypeptide chains to the ribosomes. In ways yet to be determined, growing polypeptide chains immediately moved from A sites to P sites after each new round of peptide bond formation. Toward the end of my lecture, I emphasized that we also expected to find along mRNA molecules signals for starting and stopping polypeptide synthesis. Our failure so far to find them may have reflected the fact that current cell-free systems for protein synthesis used only synthetic RNAs as templates. These contain no signals. Synthetic molecules likely worked as good templates only through mistakes in codon reading. Fearing afterward that my talk would be perceived as speculative, I was hugely relieved when Francois Jacob, never one for idle praise, called my lecture one of the best he had ever heard.
I was at the time very proud to be a senior fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows. The main task of the eight senior fellows each year was to choose a similar number of junior fellows whose terms ran three years. We were also expected to dine each Monday with the junior fellows in the society's wood-paneled quarters in Eliot House. The society's reputation for exemplary minds was still deserved. The evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman were both selected in 1962.
It was much more fun, I found, to sit next to junior fellows rather than senior fellows; utterly painful was getting caught beside either the acerbic but shy critic Harry Levin or the overly polite classicist Herbert Bloch. And though the philosopher Willard V. O. Quine may have been the brightest of all, his voice came alive only when talking about maps. One such evening per year would have been enough for me. Dinners became more agreeably animated after the economist Wassily Leontief took over as chairman in July 1964 and brought about the appointment as senior fellow of Boston's senior judge, the gossipy Charles Wyzanski, whose interests—intellectual as well as social— went far beyond the Harvard scene.
The historian Crane Brinton still presided over the society when I suggested inviting Princess Christina to one of our Monday night dinners. Soon I got the message that her royal presence might distract from its intellectual purposes. We had recently run into each other at the usually jammed coffee shop across from Widener Library. Antonia Johnson was with her, so the three of us shared a booth for lunch.
Much of our conversation centered on Antonia's current boyfriend in Philadelphia, who was doing biophysics research at the University of Pennsylvania. Several weeks later, I met Christina again at a waltz evening at the Parker House Hotel, where she discovered that I did not belong on a dance floor. I was the unlikely escort of the full-bodied blond bombshell Sheldon Ogilvy, whose college education in New York City had recently gone astray. Somehow she was on the guest list for this minor monthly Boston society dance. Exuding the happy insouciance of a Truman Capote heroine, Sheldon sipped Brandy Alexanders when we sat together at the Club Casablanca beneath the Brattle Theatre.
Early in May, Christina and I were both at a Saturday night dance in Locust Valley, on Long Isl
and's Gold Coast. It marked the twenty-first birthday of Deming Pratt, Nancy Doe's Radcliffe roommate. A marriage bond once connected Deming's branch of the oil-rich Pratt family to the royal Bernadottes of Sweden. Nancy told me I was to come, so I arranged to stay that night at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, only a fifteen-minute drive to the east. The scotch and soda I consumed over a pre-dance supper at the Piping Rock Club gave me the courage to once again subject Christina to my lack of rhythm. Much of the evening I gossiped with the Texas department store heiress Wendy Marcus and her escort, a New York Times Latin America correspondent. Leaving after most guests had already departed, I absentmind-edly drove off without turning on the headlights. Immediately I was pulled over by a local police officer, who mercifully only told me to stay on the shoulder until my head cleared. The times then were much more foolishly forgiving than today of intoxication behind the wheel. Later I shuddered at the thought of the publicity that would have ensued had the policeman been more hard-nosed and done his duty to haul me in.
The arrival of summer left Sheldon Ogilvy no reason to remain in Cambridge and she became ensconced at 336 Riverside Drive in New York City. Though no relation of the advertising whiz David Ogilvy, she got hired as the receptionist at Ogilvy and Mather's offices on Madison Avenue. I popped in to see her when I came down late in July for the 1964 International Biochemical Congress at the Hilton Hotel. Francis Crick was there to give one of the congress's keynote speeches. In my talk, I slipped in a slide showing a photo from the Nobel Prize dinner of Francis apparently peering inappropriately at Princess Désirée. Later, to make amends, I introduced Francis to Sheldon at a lighthearted dinner at the piano bar restaurant on the roof of the St. Regis. The next day Francis telephoned her at work to get her address and phone number for his next trip to the States. I only learned this in early December, when Sheldon wrote telling me that she would be having lunch with Francis again on his way back to England, and that she first felt a bit odd in accepting his attention and then a bit odd about being so scrupulous, given that the three of us had had so much fun together at the St. Regis.
No longer a receptionist, Sheldon was on to teaching foxtrots to what she called “little WASP girls” in Westchester so they would look presentable when they suddenly blossomed into debutantes. In her note, she expressed regret at backing out with virtually no notice from an October weekend with me at Cold Spring Harbor. The previous night's activities, she explained, had left her too black and blue to appear in public. Discretion kept me from asking for details. Less athletically, she was immersed in Virginia Woolf and wanted my help to win readmission to Barnard and dispel the cloud hanging over her since her abrupt withdrawal. Although I could see that her cause would benefit from a supportive letter, it was not all clear to me what I could credibly write.
Over the fall of 1964, a growing faculty consensus, strongly encouraged by Franklin Ford, emerged for placing the long-running undergraduate concentration in biochemical sciences under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Higher Degrees in Biochemistry. Most biochemical science majors historically aimed for medical school, and many members of its Board of Tutors, correspondingly, had medical school affiliations. In 1958, the microbiologist Alvin Pappenheimer came to Harvard from New York University Medical School to become the board's head tutor, replacing the veteran John Edsall. Now Pap wanted to resign since he had just been appointed master of Dunster House.
The proposed merger would allow the junior faculty members to rotate in and out of the head tutor position without the dean's having to create a tenure slot for each new appointee.
To win support from those who wanted a separate biochemistry department created immediately, Franklin Ford gave permission to start a search for a senior biochemist or molecular biologist, a boon to these disciplines. Equally important, he and President Pusey promised a new science building to be sited between the Converse Memorial Lab and the Biological Laboratories. The official formation of the new Committee on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) was announced at the February 1965 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Its new chairman was to be John Edsall, signifying to all a seriousness of commitment.
Widespread enthusiasm then existed for bringing the Canadian-trained M.D. David Hubel, who was associate professor of neurophysiology at Harvard's Medical School, to the Biology Department with tenure. Current experiments by Hubel and his Swedish-born collaborator Torsten Wiesel were radically advancing knowledge of how the visual cortex is organized. To allow their collaboration to continue, Don Griffin proposed giving Wiesel an appointment as a senior research associate in biology. Especially impressed by their accomplishments was Francis Crick, who now used his role as a nonresident fellow of the Salk Institute to meet frequently with Hubel and Wiesel in La Jolla. Attracting Hubel and Wiesel would be a massive step forward for the Biolabs, stamping it indelibly as a place of high-level biology. Speculation already existed that they were bound to receive a joint Nobel Prize. Common sense thus dictated that Wiesel also be offered a tenured position. But we were told that the dean could not now create a new tenured slot for him, especially since he was said to have no interest in teaching undergraduates.
I soon had an opportunity to become better acquainted with Hubel and Wiesel through a late winter visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The occasion for coming to the San Diego region was a three-day gathering on the role of genes in the immune response, held at Warner Hot Springs near Palomar Mountain and its big telescope. There Norbert Hilschmann from Lyman Craig's lab at Rockefeller University put up a slide showing amino acid sequences from antibody-like Bence-Jones proteins found in victims of multiple myeloma. He took care not to let this slide stay on the screen long enough for its data to be copied down by his rival at Rockefeller, Gerry Edelman, then also in the audience. Enraged by this act of bad form, Max Delbrück rose and denounced Hilschmann. But those of us who knew Gerry well could see Hilschmann was in a no-win situation.
In deciding at the last moment to extend my California visit for an additional week, I would be violating a long-standing Arts and Sciences rule that during term the president and fellows must approve all visits of more than a week away from Harvard. But I was not scheduled for lectures during the time in question, and asking at the last moment for approval might delay my departure to Warner Hot Springs. So I decided simply to tell Don Griffin that I was to be away for some two weeks. The thought never occurred to me that he would see the need to tell Franklin Ford. But this he did, and I only learned of it at the Salk Institute in the middle of watching Hubel and Wiesel in action. They were among the first to know of my instant rage when I got a phone call from Don telling me that President Pusey wanted me immediately to return to Harvard. I was being treated like an AWOL soldier. Deeply upset, I told Don that while Pusey might get satisfaction from humiliating me, he was giving Hubel reason to wonder why he should consider giving up Harvard Medical School, where he could travel as he saw fit, to move to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and be governed by rules more befitting teenagers than serious scientists. Don phoned the next morning telling me I could stay. Until then, only the compound curse “F Harvard and f Pusey” went through my brain, and I vocalized it openly many times as the day turned to night.
Upon my return to Harvard, Paul Doty gave me the dope that Kenneth Galbraith had also had a run-in with Pusey over traveling during term. Denied a request to spend a winter without teaching commitments skiing in Gstaad, Ken obtained a doctor's note that the break was medically necessary to prevent undue stress on his circulatory system. Not wanting to risk a fight that Ken might make public, Pusey caved in. The Harvard Corporation was still embarrassed about almost having blackballed Ken after World War II for supposed left-wing economics. I feared the line Pusey had taken with me was his way of reasserting authority over his faculty. Needless to say, I was apprehensive on receiving Franklin Ford's July 1 note concerning my salary for the coming year. To my relief, I got a $1,000 increase.
Thre
e months earlier, I had been even more gratified to read another letter from Ford stating that Mr. Pusey and the Corporation wanted to reconsider aspects of policies concerning travel and salaries. They wanted the matter studied over the next year by a faculty committee whose work would be highly confidential. Would I consider chairing the committee, despite my plan to be away for much of the next year? I felt immensely vindicated and phoned Paul Doty. To my surprise, he did not seem happily surprised at the Corporation's turnabout. It was only several hours later, on my way to Paul's house, that I looked again at Ford's letter and suddenly noted it was dated April 1, 1965. Meeting his friend Dorothy Zinberg at the gate, I saw clearly that we were victims of the same hoax. I should have known that Harvard never would have changed course so dramatically, but I couldn't for the life of me work out how Paul had obtained the University Hall stationery.
At no time did my run-in with President Pusey make me want to leave Harvard. Nowhere else was I likely to get such a caliber of graduate students. Their latest triumphs involved besting two labs at Rockefeller University in understanding key features of protein synthesis. For more than a year, Norton Zinder's Rockefeller group and my RNA phage group had raced each other to find out how so-called nonsense bacterial suppressor strains misread mutant chain-terminating signals to generate biologically active polypeptide chains. By late spring Gary Gussin and Mario Capecchi wrote up for publication in Science that mutant tRNA molecules read “nonsense” signals as “sense” signals, thus winning the race.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 21