AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  7. MANNERS PRACTICED AS AN UNTENURED PROFESSOR

  THE HARVARD to which I moved in the fall of 1956 thought of itself as the best university in the United States. Most certainly it was the oldest, and with its endowment the largest of any university's, it saw no reason not to have the most distinguished faculty of any institution on the planet. Before any tenure appointment, a group of eminent experts in the field were assembled to advise the president as to how the proposed candidate ranked among peers worldwide. The use of such ad hoc committees dated from the administration of James Conant, a distinguished organic chemist and only the second scientist ever to lead Harvard. Taking over from Lawrence Lowell in 1933, he presided for twenty years, resigning in 1953 to serve as U.S. high commissioner and later ambassador to Germany. Deeply involved in the military-related science that helped the United States win World War II, he seized upon the improvements in the nation's scientific capability to raise the bar correspondingly at Harvard's mathematics, physics, and chemistry departments.

  The Harvard biology faculty contained several world-class scientists, in particular the vision biochemist George Wald and the evolution authority Ernst Mayr. But too many of its faculty had pedestrian outlooks incommensurate with the quality of most Harvard students. All too typical was the Biology Department's uninspired introductory course. It abounded in dull facts for its largely premedicai enrollees to memorize. One year its abject dreariness provoked the studentwritten “Confidential Guide” to suggest that one of its instructors might do well to shoot himself.

  Unlike Caltech, where genetics was the dominant biological discipline, Harvard's department, then chaired by the pedantic amber insect specialist Frank Carpenter, did not treat one field of biology as any more important than another. Together with his forlorn assistant, the former Rhodes scholar Orin Sandusky, Carpenter lumberingly oversaw the department's day-to-day activities in the massive five-story Biological Laboratories. It was built in the early 1930s in brick textile factory style, much of the money for its construction coming from the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose members wanted the benefaction to promote research as opposed to teaching. The nonexistence of a Biolabs lecture hall big enough for large biology classes was thus not a mistake but a matter of principle.

  By the time the construction of the Biolabs started in 1932, the Depression had arrived and funds to outfit the north wing never materialized. Twenty-five years later, this wing's long empty factorylike floors suggested themselves to me as more than sufficient space for DNA-based biology to thrive at Harvard if the university was so inclined. Equally important to this objective, many senior faculty members were on the verge of retiring. Their large square corner offices, connecting to secretarial areas, themselves big enough for professors in less prestigious institutions, would soon be free. No lunchroom existed within the Biolabs either, and at noon the notables set off for the Georgian-style Faculty Club on Quincy Street. There they invariably lunched by themselves around the same rectangular table just inside the main dining room. Administrative minutiae, not ideas, dominated most conversations, with food chosen from a menu featuring horse steak, a proud holdover from wartime's austerity. Off the main dining room and usually entered by its own outside entrance was a separate room for women guests. Then there were effectively no women on Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

  With its corridor walls seemingly unpainted for at least a decade, the Biolabs’ only sparkle came from the two enormous bronze rhinoceros that flanked the main entranceway. They had been sculpted by a talented friend of President Lowell's, who also designed the friezes of wild animals that ran above the courtyard. The vision of biology these figures conveyed meshed well with the mission of Harvard's nearby Department of Geographical Exploration, its building still topped by the radio antenna once used to keep in touch with members out beyond the fringes of Western civilization. But that department no longer existed. Rumor had it that President Lowell had been horrified to learn that several of its members were homosexuals. So its handsome one-story brick edifice was now the center of Harvard's Far Eastern studies, where the savvy John King Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer held sway.

  Even closer to the Biolabs along Divinity Avenue was the Semitic Museum, donated by the banker Jacob Schiff at the end of World War I to encourage the study of ancient Jewish culture. But now most of its facilities were occupied by the Bob Bowie- and Henry Kissinger-led Harvard Center for International Affairs (HCIA), whose acronym encoded the identity of its secret government funder, which had an interest in training Harvard's students as the possible future leaders of the free world.

  On the far side of the elm-lined grassy courtyard in front of the Biolabs stood what once had been the principal dormitory of the Harvard Divinity School. Ralph Waldo Emerson was said to have lived there early in the nineteenth century. But such historical facts mattered little to James Conant, under whose presidency the Divinity School's long minor role in Protestant theological training had withered almost to extinction. Just before my arrival, religion at Harvard was given a new lease on life through the appointment of Nathan Marsh Pusey as its next president. Born in Iowa in 1907, Pusey had studied classics as a Harvard undergraduate and had obtained his Ph.D. there at the age of thirty. After teaching at Lawrence, Scripps, and Wesleyan colleges, he returned to Wisconsin as president of Lawrence College in 1944. There he was to achieve postwar renown by speaking out against his state's junior senator, Joseph McCarthy. In choosing him as James Conant's successor, the five members of the Harvard Corporation saw themselves reaffirming the importance of a strong moral overtone in higher education. They were not unduly concerned that Pusey did not have the intellectual distinction to be a member of its faculty. Later they were to silently realize that his writings never sparkled and that his addresses to both students and faculty were occasions of neither enlightenment nor inspiration. And when they inevitably built a library in his memory, it was a below-ground structure intended to store archives.

  To Pusey's credit, he accepted the Corporation's advice to appoint a first-class dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Whether he knew that in McGeorge Bundy he was choosing someone who would outclass him on virtually any occasion they were together, we will never know. A Boston blueblood by birth, Bundy came to Harvard via Groton and a brilliant undergraduate career at Yale. At Harvard he was initially one of the elite junior members of the Society of Fellows, later joining the Government Department and securing tenure by the time he became Harvard's most important dean. All appointments to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be administered by him, and it was he who would choose the ad hoc committees whose deliberations he and President Pusey invariably attended.

  It is highly unlikely that Bundy had any role in Pusey's ill-fated decision, made in his second year as president, to deny the request of a Jewish student to be married in Harvard's imposing Memorial Church, built in the 1920s in memory of the American fallen of the First World War. In so doing, Pusey aroused the wrath of his faculty. A prominent delegation came to his office to tell him that Harvard's church should be open to those of all faiths, not restricted to Christians. It was a grievance rooted in history. Many years before, Jews had been effectively blackballed from faculty positions. Those faculty who had come to the president's office were determined that such bigotry as had stained Harvard's past would not corrupt its present. Sensing a fight that would effectively destroy the moral authority for which he was appointed, Pusey reversed his edict and the incident soon faded from view.

  For Harvard's president, however, it was deeply wounding to be told that his initial response, which he regarded a reaffirmation of his institution's long Protestant heritage, was an expression of anti-Semitism.

  From that moment on, Pusey never again saw his faculty as allies and became socially isolated from them during his remaining eighteen years as president. For friendship, he and his wife, Anne, would turn to the governing boards. They became summer residents of Se
al Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, close to the home of David Rockefeller, soon to become chairman of Harvard's Board of Overseers. Both leaders felt similarly about the importance of religion, with Rockefeller making a major gift to strengthen the faculty of the Divinity School.

  My decision to leave Caltech for Harvard was facilitated by a growing friendship with the chemist Paul Doty, whose laboratory in Gibbs Lab was just across Divinity Avenue from the Biolabs. Paul, trained initially as a physical chemist and then a polymer chemist, began physical-chemical studies of DNA only after moving to Harvard in 1948. Eight years older than I, he had just become a full professor when I arrived at Harvard. Fortunately for me, he was one of a handful of key faculty to whom McGeorge Bundy regularly turned for advice. So while many Harvard biologists remained uncertain as to whether I belonged in their department or in chemistry, Bundy, through Paul, knew I was a true biologist and hoped I'd help make the biology department into one comparable in stature to the ones in chemistry and physics.

  Reassuring me that my academic life would not be totally at the whim of old-fashioned biologists was the recent formation of the Committee for Higher Degrees in Biochemistry, whose members were to be drawn from suitable individuals in the Biology and Chemistry departments. As a member from Biology, I would help choose the first class of graduate students and advise on appropriate courses for their first year. My first research student, Bob Risebrough, had been admitted as a Biology Department graduate student. As an undergraduate at Cornell, his main focus had been ornithology. Now he was excited by DNA, and his best introduction to it, I decided, might be to do a thesis on the properties of phage 9×174, then reported to be much smaller than any other known phage. Its DNA molecules might be correspondingly smaller, thus perfectly suited to Paul Doty's physical chemistry instrumentation. Later I put my first biochemistry graduate student, Julian Fleischman, to work on the task of establishing the sizes of the DNA molecules in the much bigger T2 phage. Conceivably each T2 particle contained several DNA molecules held together end to end by protein linkers. Studying them might provide a good model for how DNA is arranged in the chromosomes of higher cells.

  When Paul Doty ominously told me that promotions to tenure were often decided based on teaching evaluations, I realized I couldn't give the old-fashioned biologists a reason to suggest I might be better suited to a pure research institution or medical school. My attention focused sharply in my first months on my teaching assignments. Invariably worried that I would not have enough material memorized to occupy the next instructional hour, I meticulously outlined all my coming lectures. By doing so, I could offer my virus course students, largely advanced undergraduates, copies of the outlines, thereby relieving them of the need to take notes. Few students, however, availed themselves of this opportunity, continuing to be so sophomor-ically absorbed in note taking that their faces never revealed whether they were following my arguments. Fortunately, not too many stumbled in the hourlong midterm exam. And remembering the long-term benefits that had accrued to me at Indiana University from writing term papers on personally intriguing research topics, I asked them to write ten to fifteen pages on something in the course that particularly caught their fancy.

  Initially I hoped to effect my social integration into the Harvard scene by living in one of the large undergraduate residence halls. Called houses, their creation realized President Lowell's wish to establish between Harvard Yard and the Charles River replicas of the Cambridge and Oxford colleges. As such, they would have young unmarried “tutors” living in specially designed suites. I asked my departmental chairman, Frank Carpenter, about the possibility, and he advised I try Leverett House, where the master was the embryolo-gist Leigh Hoadley. Though he had long given up even a pretense of being a scientist, I saw no reason to assume Leigh would prove equally useless as a house master. All too soon, however, I discovered that the “bunny hutch,” as Leverett House was then known, was never a first choice for undergraduates and that its so-called high table was the antithesis of what I had known in Cambridge. We ate the same uninspired food as the undergraduates, and conversation followed the lead of Master Hoadley, incapable of either levity or deep thought.

  The ersatz high table might have mattered less if I had been provided with adequate living quarters. But my so-called suite did not look out on the Charles, its only view being to the opaque bathroom window of the master's apartment. My psyche was not helped by Hoadley's later admission that he might have given me accommodations more appropriate for a dog. I saw no reason to immediately let him know when I moved to a one-room flat carved out of a large house on nearby Francis Avenue. My first lab assistant, Celia Gilbert, daughter of the radical journalist I. F. Stone, had told me that her father's friend Helen Land had a vacancy nearby. It was one of several such small flats that I later realized were rented mainly to individuals with leftist connections. As I moved in, the journalist-to-be Jonathan Mirsky was moving out of the same building. His apartment was later occupied by a government graduate student, Jim Thomson, whom I would later meet when he became a member of the National Security Council.

  In coming to Harvard still unmarried, I was more than conscious of goings-on at the once quite separate women's college, Radcliffe. Its residence halls were less than a mile away, and after the war classes at both colleges became entirely coeducational. Only the undergraduate Lamont Library remained out of bounds for women. How to go about meeting Radcliffe girls was not obvious, as their occasional mixers, then called jolly-ups, never seemed to bring forth the ones you would want to be seen with. Luckily, the geneticist Jack Schultz had a daughter, Jill, whom I had known earlier in Cold Spring Harbor, and who was now a Radcliffe senior living in a small wooden house off campus on Massachusetts Avenue. Soon I was to meet several of her housemates and gradually acquired the confidence to show up unannounced for after-dinner coffee.

  Eating by myself in the faculty club was never an event to be anticipated and so I always greatly welcomed invitations to dine with the Dotys, now living less than a thousand feet from Paul's lab in a huge mansard-roofed house on Kirkland Place. Equally important in maintaining my morale were dinners at Wally and Celia Gilbert's equally proximate flat. We had met the year before at Cambridge University, where Wally had gone from Harvard as a young theoretical physicist. Knowing that they soon would be going back to Harvard upon completion of Wally's Cambridge Ph.D., I offered Celia, who had been an English major at Smith, a job at my lab starting in the fall. With Celia about, even routine lab manipulations became moments of conversational mischief. But after only four Biolab months, she was struck with mononucleosis. Her illness ended her tenure in my lab and, perhaps as a small consolation, the anxiety she suffered when called upon to dilute phage solutions by factors as big as a million.

  Subtle conversational moments returned in March when Alfred Tissières, with his Bentley, arrived from Cambridge. Soon finding himself a room in a house off Brattle Street, he took on the task of finding a lab technician to replace Celia. Happily, Kathy Coit, whose parents were now housing Alfred, expressed interest in joining us. Finding her not only intelligent but also an enthusiastic rock climber, Alfred persuaded her to become our factotum. Though this was her first exposure to science, Kathy's cheerful common sense soon made her indispensable to our day-to-day lab progress.

  Covering Alfred's salary was a grant that I had obtained from the National Science Foundation to study the ribosomes of bacteria. Those funds also allowed us to buy a preparative Spinco ultracentrifuge needed to spin them away from other bacterial components. A more expensive analytic Spinco that could measure how fast ribosomes sedimented was needed, too, but my grant wouldn't stretch that far. Luckily, we had one at our disposal thanks to the protein chemist John Edsall on the floor above.

  Most evenings I would be back in the lab, having already spent the daylight hours there. After hours, we were required to sign the night watchman's sign-in book. There was no good reason for its existence except catching an er
rant husband in a lie concerning his whereabouts of an evening. One night I entered and was pleased to find it had gone missing, with no untoward consequences for the building's proper function. More frustrating was the bolting of the departmental library when the dour librarian went home. Though faculty members had keys, graduate students didn't and could not search out journal references in the evenings or on weekends. My continued pestering for the department to pay students to guard the entrance finally led to that reform for the common good.