Time, Love , Memory

by Jonathan Weiner

  a new synthesis: For a time-capsule overview of the controversy, see Arthur L. Caplan, ed., The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). For a glimpse of the controversy today, see S. Pinker and S. J. Gould, “Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books (October 9, 1997): 55–7.

  10 “There is grandeur”: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859; Facsimile ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 490.

  11 “To compare the speed”: John Maddox, “Valediction from an Old Hand,” Nature 378 (1995): 521–3.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE WHITE-EYED FLY

  1 “Those who love wisdom”: Heraclitus, Frag. 3. Quoted in J. T. Fraser, Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (New York: George Braziller, 1975), 3.

  “but what is really happening”: S. Benzer, personal communication.

  He found Democritus: Robert Burton tells this story in “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” the preface to his Anatomy of Melancholy (Michigan State University Press, 1965 [1621]), 8. Democritus’s heroic but doomed effort inspired Burton to write his book, he says: “to revive again, prosecute, and finish in this treatise.”

  2 delivered a young goat: Quoted in Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 21.

  Some of the symbols: Carl G. Liungman, Dictionary of Symbols (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 1991).

  “What a wonderful thing”: Quoted in François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 20.

  3 “A devil, a born devil”: W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, in The Comedies and Tragedies of William Shakespeare, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1944), 51.

  “instance of hereditary mind”: Darwin, Metaphysics, 21.

  Galton later closed his copy: Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, 3d ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1909 [1908]), 288.

  Gregor Mendel: Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist, Stephen Finn, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  4 climbed Mount Fuji: Aspaturian interviews, 143–4.

  “A gentleman of considerable position”: Quoted in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1872]), 34.

  5 “We seem to inherit”: Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), 7.

  Mendel’s paper might: Among many accounts of the birth of genetics, I relied on A. H. Sturtevant, A History of Genetics (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). For an account that sets these events in a wide historical context, see Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982). For a clear and colorful historical overview, see John A. Moore, “Science as a Way of Knowing—Genetics,” American Zoologist 26 (1986): 583–747.

  6 In the fall of 1907: The literature on Morgan’s Fly Room is rich. My chief sources were Sturtevant, History of Genetics; Garland E. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Elof Axel Carlson, The Gene: A Critical History (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1966); E. A. Carlson, “The Drosophila Group: The Transition from the Mendelian Unit to the Individual Gene,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, no. 1 (1974): 31–48; and Nils Roll-Hansen, “Drosophila Genetics: A Reductionist Research Program,” Journal of the History of Biology 11, no. 1 (1978): 159–210.

  breed animals in the dark: Fernandus Payne, “Forty-nine Generations in the Dark,” Biological Bulletin 18 (1910): 188–90.

  7 tin cans: Curt Stern, “The Continuity of Genetics,” Daedalus 99, no. 4 (1970): 882–907.

  student cafeteria: Ian Shine and Sylvia Wrobel, Thomas Hunt Morgan: Pioneer of Genetics (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 72. A lighter biography than Allen’s, but full of Morgan family and laboratory stories.

  in the shape of a trident: For a detailed account of this episode, see Kohler, Lords, 39–43.

  “There’s two years’ work wasted”: R. G. Harrison, “Embryology and Its Relations,” Science 85 (1937): 369–74.

  8 “how is the white-eyed fly?”: A Morgan family legend. The story gets the chronology wrong (the baby was born months before the white-eyed fly), but it does capture the feeling of the Morgans’ annus mirabilis. The detail of the jar next to the bed comes from Shine and Wrobel, Morgan, 66.

  Morgan paired the white-eyed fly: T. H. Morgan, “Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophila,” Science 32 (1910): 120–2; T. H. Morgan, “The Origin of Five Mutations in Eye Color in Drosophila and Their Modes of Inheritance,” Science (1911) 33: 534–7; T. H. Morgan, “Genesis of the White-eyed Mutant,” Journal of Heredity 33 (1942): 91–2.

  9 “wild over chromosomes”: Quoted in Allen, Morgan, 131.

  “Tell it straight”: S. Benzer, personal communication.

  10 “follows the same scheme”: Quoted in A. H. Sturtevant, “Thomas Hunt Morgan,” Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences USA 33 (1959): 283–325.

  Now Morgan experimented: See A. H. Sturtevant, “The Linear Arrangement of Six Sex-linked Factors in Drosophila, as Shown by Their Mode of Association,” Journal of Experimental Zoology 14 (1913): 43–59; J. F. Crow, “A Diamond Anniversary: The First Chromosome Map,” Genetics 118 (1988): 1–3.

  11 the idea of his life: Sturtevant tells the story in his History of Genetics and in his paper “Linear Arrangement.”

  12 inherited both white and vermilion: They could tell this by further breeding experiments. In the current jargon, they had to “progeny test” each fly.

  13 “I had quite a lot”: Garland E. Allen, unpublished interview with A. H. Sturtevant, July 24, 1965, p. 28, Caltech Archives.

  “one of the most”: Quoted in Shine and Wrobel, Morgan, 92.

  CHAPTER THREE: WHAT IS LIFE?

  1 “With all his amateurish”: Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990 [1925]), 316.

  “He was a revolutionary”: Quoted in Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann, The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986), 25.

  2 “I remember the ‘awe-full’ moment”: Stern, “Continuity of Genetics,” 899.

  “You had to keep working on it”: Allen, interview with Sturtevant, 18.

  to help unite biology: T. H. Morgan, “The Relation of Biology to Physics,” Science 65 (1927): 213–20.

  something of the general: For more of the Morgan family tree, see Sturtevant, “Thomas Hunt Morgan.”

  3 Nobel address: J. H. Morgan, “The Relation of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine,” Scientific Monthly 41 (1935): 5–18. Morgan presented his Nobel lecture in Stockholm on June 4, 1934.

  “What are genes?”: Ibid., 7–8.

  Bensonhurst: I drew here on interviews with Benzer and members of his family, and on Aspaturian’s interviews.

  4 “He had worn the threadbare top-coat”: Lewis, Arrowsmith, 11.

  “tyrannical honesty”: Ibid., 119.

  “I make many”: Ibid., 301.

  “never ventured on original experiments”: Ibid., 17.

  “that dead-black spider-web script”: Ibid., 297.

  short, high-strung, nervous: For a sketch of Muller’s personality, see T. Mohr, “Hermann J. Muller, 1890–1967,” Journal of Heredity 63 (1972): 132–4.

  “The rest of us”: Allen, interview with Sturtevant, 26.

  5 bombarding the flies: H. J. Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene,” Science 66 (1927): 84–7; H. J. Muller, “The Production of Mutations by X-rays,” Proceedings of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences 14 (1928): 714–26.

  Max Delbrück: Besides interviews with some of Delbrück’s friends, colleagues, and family members, my chief sour
ces included the biography by Ernst Peter Fischer and Carol Lipson, Thinking About Science: Max Delbrück and the Origins of Molecular Biology (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988). I also drew on the memoirs in John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, et al., eds., Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology, 1966), and on a colorful series of interviews with Delbrück conducted by Carolyn Harding in 1979 as part of Caltech’s in-house oral history project.

  “Forbidding-looking papers”: Ibid., 63.

  6 the label of a fly bottle: I took this example from Ralph J. Greenspan, Fly Pushing: The Theory and Practice of Drosophila Genetics (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1997), 7–11.

  7 “a small boy announces his presence”: M. Delbrück and M. B. Delbrück, “Bacterial Viruses and Sex,” Scientific American 179 (1948): 49.

  elegantly simple experiments: Probably the best and certainly the liveliest history of the birth of molecular biology is Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). For others, see Robert C. Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974); G. S. Stent and R. Calendar, Molecular Genetics: An Introductory Narrative (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1978); and Cairns et al., Phage.

  “They must come together”: Morgan, “Relation of Biology to Physics,” 216.

  A key discovery: O. T. Avery, C. M. Macleod, et al., “Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III, “Journal of Experimental Medicine 79 (1944): 137–58.

  “He just didn’t feel”: Allen, interview with Sturtevant, 26.

  a secret wartime project: My account is based on my own interviews with Benzer, and Aspaturian’s. Of several book-length histories of the early days of electronics, I have found only one that tells the story of Benzer’s contribution; see Michael Eckert and Helmut Schubert, Crystals, Electrons, Transistors: From Scholar’s Study to Industrial Research, Thomas Hughes, trans. (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1989), 146–8.

  8 “The electron!”: See, e.g., Crease and Mann, Second Creation, 22.

  passed him a book: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? And Mind and Matter (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1967 [1944]). Schrödinger was apparently unaware of Herman Muller’s prophetic lectures and essays on the same subject. See H. Muller, “Physics in the Attack on the Fundamental Problems of Genetics,” Scientific Monthly 44 (1936): 210–14. See also E. A. Carlson, “An Unacknowledged Founding of Molecular Biology: H. J. Muller’s Contribution to Gene Theory, 1910–1936,” Journal of the History of Biology 4 (1971): 149–70.

  9 “We seem to arrive”: Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 87.

  “But please”: Ibid., 91

  10 “almost absolute”: Ibid., 32–3.

  Admiralty Headquarters: Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 15–18. Gunther Stent, another young physicist who converted, describes the romance of reading What Is Life? in André Lwoff and Agnes Ullmann, eds., Origins of Molecular Biology: A Tribute to Jacques Monod (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 232. The influence of the book and that of physicists themselves became part of the legend of molecular biology. The mantle and authority of physics helped establish the new science. See Evelyn Fox Keller, “Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology: A History of Cognitive and Political Synergy,” Journal of the History of Biology 23 (1990): 389–409.

  “from the moment”: James D. Watson, “Growing Up in the Phage Group,” in Cairns et al., Phage, 239.

  “I work on viruses”: I reconstructed this scene using my interviews with Benzer, and Aspaturian’s.

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE FINGER OF THE ANGEL

  1 “I study myself”: Michel de Montaigne, “Of Experience.” The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, George B. Ives, trans. (New York: Heritage Press, 1946 [1580–1595]), vol. 2, 1465.

  “pretty and witty”: Judson, Eighth Day, 340.

  2 “He used to really”: Aspaturian interviews, 79.

  a small number of signs: Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 65–6.

  writing a report: J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–8.

  “suffered from periodic fears”: Francis Crick, “The Double Helix: A Personal View,” Nature (1974): 766–71.

  3 call itself molecular biology: But the name had been suggested years before; see Warren Weaver, “Molecular Biology: Origin of the Term,” Science 170 (1970): 581–2.

  Benzer hit on a plan: He was building on a suggestion presented by G. Pontecorvo in “Genetic Formulation of Gene Structure and Gene Action,” Advances in Enzymology 13 (1952): 121–49.

  4 A few of Morgan’s Raiders: This was Pontecorvo’s argument, for example.

  5 Benzer’s plan: For a few of his own accounts of the experiment, see S. Benzer, “The Structure of a Genetic Region in Bacteriophage,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 41 (1955): 344–54; S. Benzer, “Genetic Fine Structure,” Harvey Lectures 56 (1960): 1–21; S. Benzer, “The Fine Structure of the Gene,” Scientific American (January 1962): 2–15; and S. Benzer, “Adventures in the rII Region,” in Cairns et al., Phage, 157–65. Gunther Stent devotes a chapter of his history of molecular biology to Benzer’s experiment: “Genetic Fine Structure,” in Molecular Genetics, 375–412. My account draws on Aspaturian’s interviews, and on my own interviews with Benzer and other molecular biologists who watched the rII experiment unfold.

  6 “Delusions of grandeur”: Benzer, “Adventures,” 162.

  “You must have drunk”: Aspaturian interviews, 101.

  “One can … perform”: Benzer, “The Fine Structure of the Gene,” 2.

  “There was no way”: Judson, Eighth Day, 274.

  “Then his research wiped out”: Lewis, Arrowsmith, 330.

  7 the Kapitza Club: Aspaturian interviews, 135.

  The discovery of the neutron: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 165.

  a single yes or no: Walter Gratzer, ed., A Literary Companion to Science (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 171.

  Hershey Heaven: Galton envied Mendel and Darwin for finding a kind of Hershey Heaven. In his memoir he notes that they had each turned the world upside down while “never or hardly ever” leaving their homes. Galton, Memories, 308. Today many molecular biologists dream of Hershey Heaven; see Robert Pollack, “A Crisis in Scientific Morale,” Nature 385 (1997): 673–4.

  8 a retrospective volume: James A. Peters, ed., Classic Papers in Genetics, Prentice-Hall Biological Science Series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959).

  9 happened to mention the word: Aspaturian interviews, 152.

  10 began collecting typographical errors: Benzer, “Genetic Fine Structure,” 2–3.

  11 loved Benzer’s tricks: Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (New York: Bantam Books, 1986 [1985]), 59–63. James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 349–51.

  “finding one man in China”: Ibid., 350.

  Crick and Sydney Brenner: Crick devotes a chapter of his memoir to this work: “Triplets,” in Crick, Mad Pursuit, 122–36.

  a meeting in India: Aspaturian interviews, 115.

  In Paris: For eloquent accounts of this work, see François Jacob, The Statue Within, F. Philip, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1988); and F. Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, Betty E. Spillmann, trans. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  Jewish legend: Talmud Bavli, Niddah 30b.

  12 an atomic force microscope: Erik Stokstad, “DNA on the Big Screen,” Science 275 (1997): 1882.

  13 a flock of sheep: I. Wilmut et al., “Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells,” Nature 385 (1997): 810–13.

  “Every day, at lunch”: Jacob,
Statue, 261.

  CHAPTER FIVE: A NEW STUDY, AND A DARK CORNER

  1 “Psychology was to him”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973 [1907]), 231. Quoted in Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 33.

  “It is still”: Rhodes, Atomic Bomb, 11.

  “the borderline between”: Crick, Mad Pursuit, 17.

  2 “the hubris of the physicist”: Ibid., 13.

  “Don’t worry, Ducky”: Ibid., 9.

  there was nothing left: See, e.g., Gunther S. Stent, “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was,” Science 160 (1968): 390–5.

  “that’s my cousin Seymour!”: Aspaturian interviews, 154.

  “He wanted my wife”: Ibid., 132.

  After the memoir was published: James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York: Atheneum, 1968). Gunther S. Stent has edited a critical edition containing commentaries, reviews, and reprints of some of the original scientific papers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980).

  3 “I confess”: Crick, Mad Pursuit, 145.

  The Double Helix replaced Arrowsmith: See, e.g., the Watson portrait in E. O. Wilson’s memoir Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), 224: “Watson was a boy’s hero of the natural sciences, the fast young gun who rode into town.”

  Crick told one historian: Judson, Eighth Day, 193.

  “SCIENTISTS ARE HUMAN”: Crick, Mad Pursuit, 83.

  behavior of single cells: Fischer and Lipson tell the story in Thinking About Biology, 234–45. See also E. Cerdá-Olmedo and E. D. Lipson, eds., Phycomyces (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1987); R. K. Clayton and M. Delbrück, “Purple Bacteria,” Scientific American 185, no. 11 (1951): 68–72; and M. Delbrück, “Primary Transduction Mechanisms in Sensory Physiology and the Search for Suitable Experimental Systems,” Israel Journal of Medical Science 1 (1965): 1363–65.