By then the war had directly affected the lives of Harvard's graduate students in science. No longer could they automatically defer military service. If their draft number went against them, they soon might be off to Vietnam. To avoid that potential fate, several first-year graduate students joined me in Cold Spring Harbor for the summer of ‘69. There they might get deferments on the basis of involvement in cancer research. Two students stayed over the next two years helping Joe Sam-brook get his SV40 work off to a fast start. To further make the Lab a force in tumor viruses, Joe and Lionel Crawford from London organized a two-week workshop in August that attracted, among others, Arnie Levine, Chuck Sherr, and Alex van der Eb. They all later became leaders in tumor virus research. The workshop's core was a small tumor virus meeting with some eighty participants.
Later that month, Jacques Monod led a big contingent from the Institut Pasteur to our meeting on the lactose operon. From that event was to emerge the first Cold Spring Harbor monograph, an enduring volume of work with its chapters edited by Jon Beckwith and my former student David (Zip) Zipser. (Soon after, Zip left a new tenured position at Columbia for Cold Spring Harbor to set up a bacterial genetic group in space below Al Hershey's lab.) During the meeting, we used our new flat-bottomed boat to take Jacques out into the chop of Long Island Sound. He wanted me to speed up, but I wouldn't. Unbeknownst to the visitors, Liz was three months pregnant with our first child.
That summer, the Welsh-born Julian Davies was at the Lab doing research on yeast protein synthesis. Julian was rejoicing in his recent move to the University of Wisconsin, where he no longer had to listen to his former Harvard Medical School department chairman Bernie Davis bemoaning his left-wing faculty members. One day during the summer, Julian passed around the Lab notices for a demonstration protesting the investiture in Caernarfon of Charles Windsor as Prince of Wales. His summer assistant, the daughter of our local village police chief, saw the flyers and told her father of the planned action.
Given the tenor of the times, Chief McKensie would take no chance of a student demonstration getting out of control. At the exact time Prince Charles was to be anointed, he appeared, halting the unauthorized march along Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's main thoroughfare. To my relief, Chief McKensie had no comparably reliable intelligence concerning the marijuana freely available at many Lab gatherings that summer. Getting a whiff of it myself at Jones Lab's first summer party, I took care to forgo further such gatherings. It was better not to know of things I was now officially obliged to stop.
Even before Joe Sambrook's arrival, I knew the success of his tumor virus group would require constructing new lab facilities to supplement the space he was to have in the James Lab. Initially I thought $60,000 would cover the costs of an annex on its south side. So Liz and I flew down to Long Island from Cambridge to seek this sum from the pharmaceutical heir Carlton Palmer, whose grand Tudor-style home was on nearby Center Island. At the end of the Sunday lunch, hosted by our neighbor, the Lab trustee and lymphoma expert Bayard Clark-son, I was told that I would have to find fifty-nine more donors. The Lab still badly needed an angel, as I soon thereafter told a reporter for the Long Islander, the local Huntington weekly founded by Walt Whitman. To my delight, the resulting article generated a call to me from the former Pfizer executive John Davenport, who had a summer home near Lido Beach on the South Shore. While still with Pfizer, he had run an RNA tumor virus effort and liked what I proposed to do at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon he and Ed Pulling joined Liz and me for a home-cooked lunch at Osterhout, after which I gave John a tour of the science then going on at Cold Spring Harbor. Less than a week passed before Davenport took me to lunch at the University Club in New York City, where he told me that he was transferring $100,000 worth of Pfizer shares to the Lab. Though our new building's costs had risen to $200,000, I had by then raised the rest. Construction would start as soon as the winter snows melted.
Almost all the next academic year, Liz and I lived in Cold Spring Harbor, much enjoying views of the inner harbor through the big eastern-facing windows of our new white cedar house. After flying to Florence for the November 1969 meeting on RNA polymerase, we drove to Venice and from there traveled by train to a big resort hotel on Lake Constance. There a meeting was held to further advance Leo Szilard's scheme for a European molecular biology research and teaching institution. From nearby Zurich we flew to London, going up to Cambridge so Francis and Liz could meet. The Double Helix no longer upset him since he realized that it enhanced, not diminished, his reputation. Back in Cold Spring Harbor for the holidays, we eagerly awaited the arrival of Rufus Robert Watson in late February 1970.
In May, Nathan Pusey announced that after eighteen years as Harvard's president he would be stepping down in June of the following year. No one was surprised. His handling of the occupation of University Hall, while perfectly legal, had been hugely unwise, dividing the faculty into two angry camps that had no hope of being reconciled unless he went away. He would, in due course, move to New York City to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After raising piles of cash that let Harvard expand in many directions, he was now to have the far easier task of giving it away. Paul Doty and I could not help but note that his only obvious failure at fund-raising was in not finding a major donor for the proposed building to house his new Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
In the summer of 1970, for the first time in its history Cold Spring Harbor did not play host to visitors conducting research of their own choosing. No free space remained to house them or let them carry on meaningful research. Instead we used our resources to start a new course on the molecular biology and genetics of yeast. It would allow scientists interested in the essence of eukaryotic cells to learn the powers of yeast genetics. In the fall, we used a $30,000 donation from Manny Delbrück to begin renovating the derelict wooden Wawepex lab into a dormitory for sixteen summer students. Its beds would let us start a summer neurobiology course program. A new grant of almost $500,000 from the Sloan Foundation was used in part to cover the costs of renovating the top floor of the 1912 Animal House into lab and lecture space for neurobiology.
With the completion of the James Annex in January 1971, our tumor virus group came into its own. No longer did we have to play second fiddle to equivalent endeavors at the Salk Institute. Working now with Joe Sambrook were the Caltech-trained Phil Sharp and Ulf Pettersson from Uppsala, who brought to us adenovirus tumor research. Both came as super postdocs and soon became bona fide members of the James Lab staff. To support their independent activities as well as new cancer research efforts in space to be vacated by Al Hershey's impending retirement, Joe wrote up a big grant proposal to expand our NCI funding to $1 million per year. Later, site visitors gave it top priority, allowing our Cancer Center to come into existence as of January 1,1972.
Even larger sums for research would soon become available. Richard Nixon had just enthusiastically signed the National Cancer Act in response to recommendations by the philanthropist Mary Lasker's Citizens’ Committee for the Conquest of Cancer. Boldly it was proclaimed that if we can send men to the moon, we should be able to cure cancer. Though I did not believe there was sound logic in relating the two feats, I felt strongly that bigger infusions of federal monies were needed to let tumor virus systems point us toward the mutant genes that were known to cause cancer. So I spoke before the Citizens’ Cancer Committee at one of its first meetings in the summer of 1970.
Under the “Conquest of Cancer” legislation, the president appointed not only the NCI director but also members of a new National Cancer Advisory Board, among which I was included for a two-year term to begin in March 1972. Before that, I had been advising NCI as a member of its Cancer Center Study Section. Directing the NCI then was the bureaucrat Carl Merrill, mindlessly generating a complex flow chart for the cure of cancer modeled after Admiral Rickover's successful Polaris missile program. The one such planning session that I attended in Washington accomplished
nothing. I was hoping my forthcoming National Cancer Advisory Board meetings would do more good. The several other pure scientists on the board also appreciated nonsense for what it was. Its clinical oncologists, however, wanted to create more comprehensive cancer centers. But such centers, already operating in New York City, Buffalo, and Houston, had shown no capacity to cure most adult cancers; I saw no reason for more of them other than to create more good-looking places to die. Only inspired science, not public relations, could lead to the knowledge that might let us finally cure most cancers. A real role lay ahead for our lab.
Ulf Pettersson in the lab at Cold Spring Harbor, December 1971
Joe Sambrook at CSHL in 1973
Jane Flint, Terri Grodzicker, Phil Sharp, and Joe Sambrook at CSHL in 1973
Remembered Lessons
1. Accept leadership challenges before
your academic career peaks
By forty, I was the right age to begin directing a major research institution. My ever-increasing focus on cancer was best fulfilled by presiding over seasoned professionals, as opposed to graduate students and beginning postdocs. So I consciously made the decision not to run a research group at Cold Spring Harbor. This allowed me to focus my efforts first on recruiting scientists who cared as much as I did about the biology of cancer, then on finding the funding they needed to make their ideas work.
2. Run a benevolent dictatorship
I was appointed to provide a vision for Cold Spring Harbor's future, not to persuade existing staff members to share it. A research institution cannot ultimately be a democracy. Still, a wise autocrat takes the trouble to sell his program. I never made appointments without seeking informal counsel among relevant scientists already at Cold Spring Harbor. And in time, most new appointments arose from their sponsorship by scientists already there. To my knowledge, I never appointed anyone not wanted by others on our staff.
3. Manage your scientists like a baseball team
Sports and top-quality research have much in common. The best stars of each are young, not middle-aged, though occasionally someone older than forty can still be a formidable force either across the net or at the blackboard. No one can long remain a science manager unless constantly on the prowl for talented rookies able to move the game to the next level. Research institutions that let the average age of their staff creep up inevitably become dull places. Lowering your average age by constructing new buildings to create more space, however, is not the way to go. If the older buildings are not exuding vitality, they become mere financial drains. Equally important, good managers see the need to retire scientists who are no longer hitting home runs. Only individuals who continually reinvent themselves through new ways of thinking should enter middle age still part of your staff.
4. Don't make midseason trades
Once you have hired a scientist, give him or her an honest chance to hit the ball over the fence. Grand slams usually come only after a player has put in three to five seasons. Treating your players according to who's got the hot hand from one week to the next only drives down overall self-confidence. Consistency and steadfastness are the way to get the best out of your players. In this regard, handling the science of others is radically different from doing your own. As a scientist, you can profit from frequent quick course changes until the right path becomes clear.
5. Only ask for advice that you will later accept
Don't second-guess advice you've sought from a colleague whom you highly respect. If a smart friend advises you to hire one of his or her best students or postdocs, consider it a lucky break and just do it. Conversely, never ask advice from someone with an outlook on science alien to your own; people they recommend will share their values, not yours.
6. Use your endowment to support science,
not for long-term salary support
Generally, a bare minimum of any research institution's funds should go to salaries for older scientists. Under normal funding circumstances, those who have remained successful invariably get adequate research grants to cover themselves and then some. Revenue generated by the endowment is best used to support scientists at the beginning of their careers, when their grant support usually is not adequate to their research needs. Science is not a welfare state: feeding the young until they can feed themselves serves the greater good, while failing to cull the herd does not.
7. Promote key scientists faster than they expect
By promoting your best performers rapidly, you necessarily reduce money that might be given to those whose work no one would miss. Be generous with those you value: a salary increase below the rate of inflation is the universal sign to start looking elsewhere.
8. Schedule as few appointments as possible
When a scientist pops into your office or calls to schedule a meeting, learn then and there what he or she wants. You can avoid wasting your time and theirs by immediately saying yes to their request for a piece of equipment or a salary slot they legitimately need to move forward with their jobs. Even if so acting means promising money you don't yet have, do it. Your purposes will be served if their worries exclusively concern getting their work done, not currying favor with you. Any scientist on the scene knew clearly where he or she stood with me; I backed everyone I wanted to stick around.
9. Don't be shy about showing displeasure
When someone working for you says something stupid or in other ways makes your blood boil, express your anger immediately. Don't go about silently seething, letting only your spouse know you are upset. That is bad for your health and really not fair to those whose behavior has offended you. They very likely already fear they are in deep shit, and would naturally want to respond to your criticism sooner rather than later. When things are left to fester, the festering takes on a life of its own, sowing unproductive distrust. The fault might even be yours. If so, apologize as fast as you flared up. Being an ass occasionally is forgivable; being unable to admit it is not.
10. Walk the grounds
Your staff will seldom come to your office to tell you of impending bad news. Only when the bough breaks do you learn the awful truth. To stay ahead, it's best to make walking the grounds a part of every day. This allows you to meet those lower on the lab's totem pole and acknowledge their existence with a smile or word of praise. Equally important is to pop in on labs in the evening or on weekends. Those populated only during weekday daylight hours are likely going nowhere, while scientists at their benches on Saturday afternoons are seldom there killing time.
15. MANNERS MAINTAINED WHEN RELUCTANTLY LEAVING HARVARD
DURING my initial years as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I was never the Lab's primary fund-raiser. As president of the Long Island Biological Association (LIBA), Edward Pulling saw this as his role. Living scarcely more than a mile away, he frequently popped over to give potentially generous neighbors tours of the Lab. Early in 1972, Ed and his fellow LIBA directors committed themselves to raising $250,000 over the coming year. With it, the Lab would winterize Blackford Hall as our year-round dining hall, construct a second annex to James Lab for cell culture facilities, and buy a handsome Victorian house on Bungtown Road, on the way to the sand spit, for post-doc housing. Ed believed professional fund-raising help would be a waste of time and money. His acquaintances wanted only his reassurance that their money would be put to good use. My job was to be on hand when Ed had a hot prospect.
Ed was on to someone big when he saw the need to track down Liz and me on a brief late June holiday north of San Francisco. From a phone booth in Inverness on the way to Point Reyes, I confirmed that we would be there the next Wednesday when he brought Charles S. Robertson to tour the Lab. Charlie's wife had recently died, and he was looking for an institution to which to donate his estate, some ten minutes away on Banbury Lane in Lloyd Harbor. Excitedly Ed told me that some years before, the Robertsons had made the largest gift to date in the history of Princeton University: $35 million. Their wealth came from Marie's family, the Hartfords, whose
one A&P grocery store in lower Manhattan spawned in just two generations some fourteen thousand more across the United States and Canada. At the start of World War II, they were the fifth wealthiest family in the United States. Charlie and Marie's gift to Princeton had been announced as anonymous, but when rumors arose that the CIA was behind the new Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, they had to go public lest the gift be tainted.
With Edward Pulling at the annual meeting of the Long Island Biological Association, December 1976
Joining Charlie on his visit was his long-valued New York legal counsel, Eugene Goodwillie. After Marie's sudden death, Goodwillie told Charlie to quickly establish a legal residence in Florida. In this way, his estate would not be socked with punitive New York inheritance taxes. By the same logic, it was best for Charlie not to hang on to the Long Island estate, to which he felt such deep sentimental attachment. Its land had once belonged to his mother's Sammis family, and his marrying into great wealth allowed him to reclaim it. To keep the land forever intact, rather than subdivided into two-acre building plots, Charlie resolved to give it to a nonprofit institution. To be settled today was whether Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the worthiest beneficiary of the Banbury Lane property.
Charlie Robertson with me and Liz at CSH, September 1974
The visit started off well, with Charlie sensing the frenetic pace of the James Lab tumor virus effort as well as the boldness of the picture-window offices and seminar room of the James Annex. My grand office alone spoke of how the Lab was again on an upward course. Before lunch, I walked the sixty-seven-year-old Charlie and even older Eugene Goodwillie up to the Page Motel to introduce them to our living history in the persons of Max and Manny Delbrück. Delbrück had just arrived from Pasadena for a three-week Phycomyces workshop. Then, rather imprudently, I led my not-so-nimble guests down the steep one-hundred-foot path to Bungtown Road. Neither visitor stumbled, though they were only half smiling when we safely reached Osterhout Cottage. There they joined Ed Pulling for a lunch that Liz had taken great pains to prepare. She ate virtually nothing as she jumped up and down serving several courses that started with consommé Bellevue topped with horseradish-flavored whipped cream.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 29