AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Harvesting tobacco mosaic virus in 1958. From left to right: Julian Fleischman, Kathy Coit, John Mendelson, and Chuck Kurland

  Nathan Pusey regularly opened Harvard's stately President's House to his faculty and their spouses for Sunday afternoon tea and cakes. Paul Doty urged me to sample such an occasion, and I semiawkwardly presented myself at the front door when my fall term lectures were nearing their end. Led by a maid into the main drawing room, where I introduced myself to the Puseys, I soon was passed along to talk with the late-thirtyish Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl and his equally youthful wife, Brita. A prize catch in Pusey's efforts to resurrect the Divinity School, Stendahl had a strong, angular, slightly distorted face that struck me as that of a troubled minister in an Ingmar Bergman film. Liking his reasoned openness to the complexities of human life, I nevertheless could not even affect interest in the Evangelist Matthew, about whom he had just completed a scholarly tome. Later, when Anne Pusey moved to be near me, I felt much more at ease talking about my Chicago education and how fortunate I felt to be part of the Harvard scene. Simultaneously I tried to overhear what our president was saying to others. Later, as I walked out onto Quincy Street, I wondered whether any conversational gambit could possibly elicit from him an animated response.

  Later during the monthly meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I was no more successful at discerning the feelings that occupied what he considered to be his soul. We always turned to Bundy for hints of what was coming next. Pusey seemed to come to life only when presenting honorary M.A.'s to those newly tenured faculty whose actual degrees had been conferred elsewhere. Through this gesture of sanctification, Harvard saw itself as ensuring that all faculty felt equally valued.

  My social life at Harvard still left much to be desired. I had flown to London just before Christmas, and then for the New Year had gone by train up to the home of Dick and Naomi Mitchison on the Mull of Kintyre in the Scottish Highlands. My first visit to their Carradale House had been five years before, when I was invited by their youngest son, Avrion, then doing his Ph.D. thesis in Oxford on the immunolog-ical response. Av's mother was a distinguished writer of leftist persuasion, so I could again count on being part of an intellectual house party that featured long walks over boggy moors, heated conversations much more about politics than science, and hearty but never inspiring food. Still, I knew it would be much more fun than going back to the small home in the Indiana sand dunes to which my parents had moved after my sister's graduation from the University of Chicago. I would later regret not having been a more dutiful son when my mother, only fifty-seven, died of a sudden heart attack not long after the holidays. She never had the pleasure of visiting Harvard to see me as a member of its faculty. When I went home for her funeral, I could see my father was unlikely ever to recover entirely from her unexpected death.

  At the end of July, I was happy to be able to bring my father along to the Isle of Skye, where I was to be the best man at Av Mitchison's wedding to Lorna Martin. It was my first chance to meet Av's intellectually powerful research supervisor, Peter Medawar. He came up from London with his strong-willed wife, Jean, and fetching bright daughter, Caroline, then intending to escape from much unwanted parental dating advice by going up to Cambridge. In the middle of the reception, I had no difficulty in spiriting Caroline away for a long car ride through the wild beauty of Skye, remaining absent long enough for Peter and Jean to grow worried that Caroline and I might have found each other perfect. But she had other plans for the next few weeks. And after putting my father on a plane back to Chicago, I anticipated intersecting in Tuscany with a Radcliffe girl I knew from the off-campus house on Massachusetts Avenue, who was traveling in Europe. Several letters from the prior locales on her itinerary gave me to believe that she would greet me warmly when our paths finally crossed in Assisi. But as we looked up at the Giotto frescos on the walls of its fifteenth-century basilica, I sensed that her affections were already subscribed; I later learned she was smitten with a young classics instructor.

  Even before I went off to Europe, momentum was building for the appointment of a super geneticist to the biology faculty. Bagging such a star had been on Harvard's agenda since the late 1940s, when an offer failed to lure Tracy Sonneborn away from Indiana. Now the introductory course was being taught by Paul Levine, whose recent promotion to a tenured position had been a dicey matter. In so proposing him, the senior biology faculty had to emphasize his highly praised teaching, since his middling research on Drosophila was far from noteworthy. Given Bundy's known determination to prevent his out-of-date biology faculty from perpetuating their inherent mediocrity, the promotion had hints of a compromise between him and Pusey The letter from University Hall to the Biology Department stated that Levine's appointment was conditional upon the department's next tenured slot being reserved for a geneticist whose research was world-class. Initially I feared that they might somehow find a candidate who, though clever, did not yet feel it necessary to think in terms of the double helix. Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong.

  The subsequent departmental committee made the Purdue University phage geneticist Seymour Benzer, already my close friend, number one on their list. Decisive was the maize geneticist Paul Mangelsdorf's highly positive reaction to Benzer's recent talk before the International Congress of Genetics in Toronto. Within days of Seymour's coming to Harvard to talk about his fine-structure genetic map of the r2 gene of phage T4, my senior biology colleagues voted unanimously for his appointment. Seymour, of course, had been earlier apprised of the department's intentions. Paul Doty and I both told him that it was virtually impossible for any properly constituted ad hoc committee not to back his addition to the Harvard faculty.

  Alfred Tissières was now Bentley-less. In July he was to marry in Colorado the equally strong-willed Virginia Wachob, a girl of Scottish descent from Denver, whom he first met at Caltech during a year away from King's. Supporting both a wife and a Bentley, which soon might need a major engine overhaul, would not be possible given that Alfred's Harvard salary was slightly lower than mine. The Bentley now belonged to a much more handsomely rewarded law school professor.

  With the assembling of the ad hoc committee taking longer than expected, it was early February 1958 before Seymour had his formal offer and an invitation back to Harvard to meet with Bundy Then he wanted reassurance that DNA-based biological thinking would have the continued strong support of the administration. To my distress, Seymour didn't immediately accept, implying worry at having greater teaching responsibilities than at Purdue. And so it was a great relief when Bundy happily called me early the next week with news that Seymour's letter of acceptance was on his desk.

  Going off soon thereafter to the University of Illinois, as its George D. Miller Visiting Lecturer in Bacteriology, I could finally rest assured that the days of backward thinking in Harvard's Biology Department were numbered. My visit was arranged by Salva Luria, who by then had been a professor at Urbana for more than five years. My lectures on macromolecular replication and cell growth were a preview of ones I wanted to deliver later to Harvard undergraduates. Over the three weeks of my visit, I enjoyed much stimulation from the Urbana science scene. Especially enjoyable was talking with the diminutive, manic Sol Spiegelman, then also focusing much of his research on ribosomes.

  Flying back to Boston on an intellectual high, I came back down to earth at Harvard with a thud. Seymour Benzer now claimed a heart condition that forced him to reverse his decision to come. Staying in Purdue, with its almost nonexistent teaching responsibilities, would be much less taxing, and he had to think of his health. The disappointment might have been unbearable if Av Mitchison had not happened to be in residence for the spring term, giving an advanced course on immunology. To my delight, he and his new wife, Lorna, together with Alfred Tissières and I, were temporarily occupying the Dotys’ big house on Kirkland Place while the Dotys spent Paul's long-overdue sabbatical in the other Cambridge. Parked next to my MG TF ben
eath the Dotys’ main bedroom was Alfred's consolatory sleek new Alfa Romeo sedan.

  Had it not been for Doty's occasional flights back to oversee his ever-growing lab group, my direct line to McGeorge Bundy would have been cut off when I most needed it. With virtually no warning, I learned that an ad hoc committee soon would assemble to consider simultaneously the promotions from assistant professor to tenured associate professorship of Edward O. Wilson and myself. That I was to be considered a year prematurely was not at all the original intent of the Biology Department. Their concern primarily was Wilson, whom they needed to promote to keep him from accepting the same terms from Stanford. After undergraduate education as a naturalist in his home state of Alabama, Ed had moved north to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. Proving his brilliance during his initial studies on ants and their behavior, he became a junior fellow, then considered the best stepping-stone to an eventual permanent position on the faculty. Since my arrival, we seldom had reason to speak: I was a midwesterner, he a southern boy; he was par excellence a naturalist, while I knew nothing about ants, having by then lost all my earlier interest in animal behavior. But the vast museums of Harvard's past glory were not to vanish, and it appeared that Wilson might very well have the intelligence and drive needed to move Harvard's evolutionary tradition into the future.

  Since my research achievements were already internationally noted and no one could say that I had either shirked or botched my teaching responsibilities, Paul Doty felt that fairness dictated that the Biology Department now also make up its mind as to whether it wanted me as a permanent member. Bundy happily agreed and unilaterally informed the Biology Department that he and Mr. Pusey wished to consider my appointment as well as that of Ed Wilson. With Wilson's offer from Stanford needing an answer soon, an ad hoc committee was formed even before a department vote, just before my thirtieth birthday on April 6. Through one of its members, the highly perceptive Rockefeller Foundation science executive Warren Weaver, Paul quickly learned that the verdict was thumbs up for both of us. By then Bundy had already told the Biology Department that he had President Pusey's permission to promote me as well as Wilson. So Frank Carpenter assembled his senior biology professors the next day to see whether they would concur with the ad hoc committee's decision.

  I was more than worried that one too many of those dinosaurs would vote against me. In fact, a majority of them did, opting to postpone for one year the decision on my promotion. This I heard from Ernst Mayr, who wisely didn't identify those against me, and I couldn't contain my outrage. Retreating to the Doty house before I used the F-word in front of too many biology graduate students, I agitatedly awaited dinner with Paul and the Berkeley zoologist Dan Mazia. Over dinner Dan tried to console me by saying that at Berkeley they never would have tried to stave off what was so obviously inevitable. Paul Doty, trying to rescue his dinner party from the pall hanging over it, reassured me that the game was not over until it was over. McGeorge Bundy's power would be badly eroded if he let one of his second-rate departments defy him. Paul counseled me to try to refrain, at least for the time being, from further vulgar diatribes against my biology colleagues.

  The subsequent weekend was inevitably tense, as I waited to see the color of the smoke emerging from University Hall. To my great relief, Bundy did play hardball, telling Frank Carpenter that no more tenured appointments or discretionary funds at the dean's disposal would go biology's way until they promoted me. Quickly those professors who only several days earlier were strongly opposed to me now implied they had acted too hastily. Upon further reflection they could now enthusiastically accept the ad hoc committee's recommendation.

  Relieved not to have to consider offering myself to the Chemistry Department, I couldn't find it in me to gloat. But it was hard not to appreciate Seymour Benzer's later comment that the imbroglio attending my promotion made him even more certain that he had done the right thing turning down Harvard. Life was too short to share a department with so many prima donnas whose meager accomplishments scarcely justified even the status of has-been. Still, I did not regret moving to Harvard. More and more I was learning that the quality of your students matters much more than that of your faculty colleagues. In that regard Harvard couldn't be faulted.

  Remembered Lessons

  1. Bring your research into your lectures

  In the fall of 1956, there was simply not enough known about DNA to organize a whole course around it. So I opted to talk about DNA in the context of a course on viruses, wherein I could compare the elegant experiments of the phage group with the old-fashioned approaches of plant and animal virologists. Graduate students self-selected according to their attraction to my molecular messages. Reading through their term papers, I could also spot those who zoomed in on important issues and did not waste pages of type on observations of no consequence.

  2. Challenge your students’ abilities to move beyond facts

  Asking bright students to merely regurgitate the facts or ideas of others does not prepare them for the world outside classrooms. So my exams increasingly featured questions that assessed the plausibility of hypothetical headlines from the New York Times or Nature. For example, should they believe claims that a virus had been found that multiplied outside cells in a medium solely composed of the small-molecule precursors to DNA, RNA, and protein? Any student answering yes would have missed the essence of my course and so been advised not to choose a scientific career. Happily, no students failed to answer correctly.

  3. Have your students master subjects outside your expertise

  The best way to prepare your students for the independence they all want is by seeing that they are exposed to peripheral disciplines and to the technologies needed to move from the present to the future. During the late 1950s when we aimed to discover how information encoded within DNA molecules is expressed in cells, the answers had to be sought at the molecular level. So it was a no-brainer that I should have my prospective students acquire strong backgrounds in chemistry to complement my strengths as a biologist. During their first graduate year I made sure that they took rigorous courses in physical and organic chemistry. They might later use only a small fraction of this expertise, but they would never feel unqualified for experimentation at the molecular level.

  4. Never let your students see themselvesas research assistants

  It makes sense to have your students pursuing thesis objectives that genuinely interest you. At the same time you should take care that they never see themselves as working primarily for your professional advancement. Students function best when they can be assured of enjoying most of the credit for their efforts. After they came into my lab, generally only a month or two would pass before I backed away from their daily progress. I then let them work at their own pace and come into my office when they had results, either positive or negative, that I should be aware of. You know that they have become truly independent when they give thoughtful seminars before their lab peers. Novice speakers can profit from taking their licks when their conclusions go beyond what is justified by their data. Nothing banishes illogical conclusions from one's brain like the need to present them to others. Later I made it a point that my name never be included with theirs on research papers emerging from their experiments.

  5. Hire spunky lab helpers

  As an untenured scientist, most of your nonsleeping hours are spent in lab-related activities. Those working with me were effectively my surrogate family, with whom I would eat many meals and go to the beach or go skiing. So when hiring assistants to help with more routine lab management, I wanted to surround myself with faces that laughed at the right times and whose inherent positive outlook would be a calming influence when our experiments went nowhere. The best to have around were unmarried people of my own age; not yet saddled with family responsibilities, they were therefore not obliged to keep strictly regular hours. They could be called on for help in the evening hours or on weekends when we wanted our answers fast. In return, I treated them more as friends than
as employees and didn't expect them to hang around when there was nothing particular to do.

  6. Academic institutions do not easily change themselves

  Most academic battles involve space or faculty appointments and promotions. All too often, academic life is a zero-sum game, with an equivalent loser for every winner. Sadly, most academic department heads and deans do not display long-term consistency, often maintaining their own academic power by giving to a professor what he or she was denied the year before. Before I went to Harvard, Leo Szilard told me that it moved only lethargically, an assessment based no doubt on his never having been asked to join its Physics Department. But he was also familiar with academia's general love of orthodoxy and warned that I should be realistic about how much change I could expect to see in a place as fossilized as Harvard's Biology Department. His pessimism would have been dead on had it not been for McGeorge Bundy's determination to see through a radical upgrade of biology at Harvard. University leaders with such strong convictions are rare.