by James Watson
I left San Diego not at all tempted to move to its perfect climate. Instead I was keen to return to Harvard in anticipation of the impending visit of Peter, Jean, and Caroline Medawar. Three years had passed since we were all together on Skye and in the meanwhile Caroline had almost finished her Cambridge education. Peter was to give that year's Prather Lectures in the Biology Department. After the last of his three lectures was delivered, I made the mistake of inviting Caroline to go skiing in Vermont. Her awkwardness as a beginner was compounded by the seemingly fearless downhill glide of a young Radcliffe student I had also asked along. In a sulk at being outclassed by a girl who also had brains, Caroline went off to join her parents in New York, leaving me to realize once again that you shouldn't pay simultaneous attention to two girls. Fortunately, a major conceptual breakthrough was soon to emerge from my lab. Late in 1959, as an editor of the newly founded Journal of Molecular Biology, I received a manuscript from Urbana by Masayasu Nomura, Ben Hall, and Sol Spiegelman on T2 RNA. My initial reading immediately led me to doubt its central conclusion, that the T2 RNA sedimented as if it were a special form of the small ribosomal subunit. Believing the experimental facts should be known widely, even if they were possibly wrongly interpreted, I accepted the manuscript for publication. Soon afterward I suggested to Bob Risebrough, just back from more than a year on the Indian Ocean, that he repeat the experiments done at Urbana in the hope that we might at long last see the RNA templates for protein synthesis. It had long mystified me why Bob had so precipitously vamoosed to sea. Now I took comfort in learning that it was not from my lab and its experiments that he had fled but from an entanglement with a married woman. Hoping this mess was now behind him, Bob wanted to get back in the game.
In the Harvard Biolabs
Within six weeks, Bob cut to the heart of the T2 RNA's special nature. Using sucrose gradients containing high (10”2M) levels of Mg++ ions, all the T2 RNA was seen to have bound to the 70S ribosome complex of the big and small ribosomal subunits. In contrast, when Bob followed sucrose gradients containing lower (io”4M) Mg++ levels, the T2 RNA sedimented as free RNA and not as part of either the smaller or larger ribosomal subunits. Excitedly we realized that ribosomal RNA never orders amino acids during protein synthesis. Instead their respective ribosomes are nonspecific “factories” in which the T2 RNA templates order amino acids during protein synthesis. That such messenger RNA had not been seen before reflected the fact that, in most cells, much more ribosomal RNA is made than messenger RNA. But following infection of bacteria by T2-like phages, all host-specific RNA synthesis stops. All the RNA molecules synthesized during phage infection are made on T2 DNA templates.
A week later I flew down to New York City, trying without success to resume my friendship with Caroline Medawar, who was spending the weekend with her parents at Rockefeller University. Over the same weekend I visited Leo Szilard, at this time a patient at Memorial Hospital. Just before Christmas the awful news had reached me that Leo had bladder cancer and that diagnosis might have come too late. Fortunately, by the time I saw him he had taken charge of his radiation therapy and was soon to emerge totally cured. He immediately wanted to gossip about my recent visit to San Diego, while I wanted to talk about our big T2 RNA breakthrough. He said he would take my idea seriously only when messenger RNA molecules were shown to exist in uninfected as well as phage-infected cells. I told him this was to be our next research objective. A young French biochemist from the Institut Pasteur, Francois Gros, was to come to Harvard for the summer to search for messenger RNA in uninfected E. coli cells.
My main goal soon became persuading Matt Meselson to accept Harvard's offer, not Jonas Salk's. His visit to look us over came during a week of fortuitously perfect April weather, a seduction in itself compared with Pasadena smog. Matt, unlike Benzer, quickly said yes to Harvard, telling Paul Doty and me that he would arrive as soon as appropriate research space could be renovated. Mel Cohn, in contrast, opted for the Salk Institute, and Aaron Moscona, to my never hidden delight, decided to remain in Chicago. Also to Harvard's long-term benefit was the acceptance of Keith Porter. In contrast, John Torrey's decision to leave England meant that botany at Harvard would likely continue intellectually vapid.
During that time, Celia Gilbert often invited me for vodka-dominated meals at which one of Wally's young colleagues, the theoretician Sheldon Glashow, was often present. Wally was then twenty-eight years old and had been an assistant professor of physics for two years. Surprisingly, he now found himself more excited by our T2 RNA experiments than by his own attempts at high-level physics. Eagerly he was soon to drive up with Alfred Tissières, Francois Gros, and me to the 1960 Gordon Conference on Nucleic Acids in New Hampshire, afterward assisting Francois in his summer pursuit of a T2-like RNA in uninfected bacterial cells. Most conveniently, Francois and his wife, Francoise, also a scientist, were living in the tiny 10^ Appian Way flat that my father had moved into two years before upon his early retirement from his job in Chicago. Dad was off on a lengthy tour of Europe, having enjoyed a similar trip the year before. To my delight these trips showed that he could now be on his own for long periods, coping with if never quite moving beyond the loss of my mother.
At the Gordon Conference, we learned that Sydney Brenner would soon be going to Caltech to do experiments with Matt Meselson that might independently prove the existence of messenger RNA. In April, Francois Jacob came to Cambridge to talk with Sydney and Francis Crick and persuaded them too that ribosomes by themselves did not carry genetic instructions for ordering amino acids in protein synthesis. To confirm the hunch, Sydney soon proposed to Meselson that his ultracentrifuge tricks should let them see new T4 mRNA molecules bound to ribosomes made prior to phage infection. By late July, Sydney triumphantly returned to Cambridge with his prediction confirmed. Only later, when Sydney told us about his Caltech results, did he learn the details of Bob Risebrough's independent demonstration of mRNA.
That summer of 1960, the lab was graced with several lively Rad-cliffe students who wanted technician jobs so they could stay around Harvard Square for the summer. Particularly fun to have about was the fetching Franny Beer, the red-haired daughter of the equally red-haired Sam Beer, Harvard's resident expert in American politics. I first knew Franny from my Biology 2 lectures, in which she regularly sat smiling in one of the front rows. Spotting her soon after in the Biolabs, I learned that she was very fond of dogs and keen to be a vet. We both revealed ourselves to each other as loyal Democrats, but at first I couldn't share her enthusiasm for John Kennedy. I still hated his father, Joe, for his past German sympathies. Earlier, in June, Franny and I had watched the Harvard commencement to see her hero march by as an overseer. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, I was then still rooting for Adlai Stevenson to again be the Democratic candidate. Franny followed her father's hopes that John Kennedy, a much stronger potential nominee, would prevail at the convention. That fall Franny, who was mad about rock and roll, brought me to a late gathering of undergraduate rock fans. I was never so out of place, realizing that I should best cherish Franny as a surrogate kid sister.
Wally Gilbert in my lab, summer 1960
In the fall, Diana de Vegh was no longer available for Henri IV lunches. John Kennedy's now active campaign for the presidency had put her previous year's studies to be an Arabist into proper perspective. Now she was doing campaign work elsewhere. But into the lab came the Radcliffe senior Nina Gordon, doing an undergraduate project and seeing that I got invited often to her Radcliffe house, where I could feed my hopes of finding a suitable blonde. Increasingly the presidential campaign dominated emotions at Harvard, and I went to watch the debates between Kennedy and Nixon on Alfred and Virginia Tissières's TV set in their big apartment on Sparks Street. They had lived in those spacious early-twentieth-century rooms since their marriage two summers before, and the same apartment would soon be occupied by Matt Meselson and his very new wife, Katherine. Matt and Katherine had met over the summer in Colorado at the Aspen Music F
estival, where Katherine was studying the flute.
By early September I was very much a Kennedy partisan, hating Nixon even more and excited that so many Harvard professors were working as Kennedy advisors. Following the public opinion polls with increasing apprehension, I followed the election night cliffhanger with Alfred and Virginia. The Dotys then were part of an older Harvard group close to the Kennedy campaign. Too tired to stay up till Kennedy's victory was ensured, I took comfort in knowing that my mother had long worked for the Democratic political machine, which would not let Kennedy lose in Illinois.
The weeks that followed Kennedy's victory were in no sense anticlimactic. The main question in the air was who from Harvard would be called to be part of the new administration. Arthur Schlesinger's departure to help Kennedy as a speechwriter was virtually taken for granted. Everyone was equally pleased by the selection of John Kenneth Galbraith as ambassador to India and Edwin Reischauer as ambassador to Japan. Most excitement came from McGeorge Bundy's nomination as the president's national security advisor with West Wing offices. For his chief deputy Bundy further raided the Harvard faculty, picking his friend the economist Carl Kaysen.
Before taking office, Kennedy saw fit to resign from Harvard's Board of Overseers, promising to attend its January meeting just prior to his inauguration. For several weeks I anticipated having him listen to me speak, since I had been asked with Frank Westheimer to brief the overseers about new opportunities for research in molecular biology and biochemistry. But our president-elect did not get to Harvard that day, having more pressing matters to attend to. The occasion, however, gave me my last opportunity to speak to McGeorge Bundy as dean. He had raised my curiosity in the weeks before by asking me to come and see him. So I half dreamed that I also might be asked to move to Washington. At the last moment, however, his aide Verna Johnson phoned me to cancel the appointment. Taking me aside at the overseers’ meeting, Bundy wanted to personally tell me the good news that I was being promoted to full professor as of July 1. He then mischievously added that no higher academic accolade could ever come my way.
Remembered Lessons
1. Teaching can make your mind move on to big problems
Eminent researchers who revel in trivial or nonexistent teaching loads may be availing themselves of a luxury no thinker can well afford. When I'm not challenged by an immediate need to make sense of incompatible observations, my mind too often runs slowly. A very strong incentive for coming to grips fast with unexplainable experiments is the need to lecture about them. For this the best audiences are advanced undergraduates or graduate students, who know enough to have reactions that may spark a flash of insight. In the early 1970s, when lecturing about DNA duplication in such a fog of uncertainty, I suddenly saw why viral DNA molecules have redundant ends that become linked during their replication processes. The idea that this was a device to copy their ends was too pretty to be wrong.
2. Lectures should not be unidimensionally serious
It is no fun to either give or listen to hourlong talks that provide nonstop flows of dry facts or even ideas. Presentations of all kinds should alternate easy-to-understand and familiar material with the messages that are more difficult to assimilate. At Harvard I tried to put a human face on experiments, adding asides about personalities and letting my listeners put themselves in the place of the experimenter, as eventually they would need to do.
3. Give your students the straight dope
In my Biology 2 lectures in the early 1960s, I regularly gave one titled “Against Embryology,” since its main point was that multicellular organisms were best put on the back burner until we understood the basic nature of life by studying single-celled bacteria. The early sixties were not a propitious time, for example, to go to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole to study sea urchins. Those who went instead to Cold Spring Harbor to pursue genes within bacteria would have much brighter futures. This was not a message that most of my fellow biology professors agreed with, and many of them thought it inappropriate for me to announce it to my students. But to sugar-coat science that is going nowhere ill prepares students for their futures.
4. Encourage undergraduate research experience
If one or more lab benches were free, I automatically accepted bright undergraduates keen to do research under my supervision. Often they were undecided between medical and graduate school and benefited from seeing the differences between scientific and clinical challenges. Being part of a research group, moreover, let them see that personalities often are as important as brains in pushing forward the scientific frontier. It is also true that a certain kind of aptitude is required to do successful research. You frequently spot individuals in labs whose first-rate talents may never come out through exams. They come alive only when they are challenged with “new unknowns” as opposed to “old knowns.”
5. Focus departmental seminars on new science
The quality of a scientific department is generally revealed by its weekly seminars. Star scientists likely will travel only when they see themselves benefiting from being away from their home base. Seminars that fail to attract broad student audiences will likely bore the largely faculty-constituted audiences, there only for reasons of department loyalty. It's best to invite speakers from emerging disciplines not yet established on your campus. Choosing too many speakers from friends of senior faculty risks giving your students no more than what they already have. Younger faculty members, for the most part, should be in charge of arranging and hosting potentially exciting speakers. They have more time and incentive to do this job well, as they anticipate meeting minds that could enrich their future intellectual lives.
6. Join the editorial board of a new journal
Editorial boards of preexisting journals seldom change fast enough to accommodate new scientific disciplines. A new discipline creates a new discourse and requires a new journal. Editors rooted in the past may not know how to assess the importance of new science, or even whom to approach as a referee. Only six years passed between the finding of the double helix and the founding of the Journal of Molecular Biology. At first I was hesitant to join its editorial board and spend the time looking for the wheat among the chaff. But when the protein crystallographer John Kendrew became its chief editor, I knew the JMB would attract high-quality papers. In return for executing the responsibility to see that important new ideas got out as soon as possible, I was also among the first to benefit from knowing about them.
7. Immediately write up big discoveries
We made a bad mistake in not immediately publishing our lab's February 1960 discovery of T2 messenger RNA. At the time Wally and I wanted the story filled out a bit more by the simultaneous demonstration of E. coli messenger RNA. But the latter task proved much trickier than initially expected. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Sydney Brenner and Francois Jacob came independently to the concept of messenger RNA in late April, with Sydney soon proving its existence through experiments with Matt Meselson at Caltech. Though we published simultaneously, Sydney let it be known that I had delayed their publication, leading others to believe our Harvard experiments were derivative of theirs. In fact, they predated them by four months.
8. Travel makes your science stronger
No matter how prestigious your own institution, at any given moment the real action in your specialty is likely happening elsewhere. Living in Boston does not mean that you need not continuously monitor the action in other scientific hot spots such as Stanford, Caltech, or La Jolla. Turning down invitations to speak before their audiences works against your future. By moving out of your own turf, you are likely to spot clever graduate students and postdocs who might enhance your own environment. Learning first about clever brains through their publications likely means that someone else has already recruited them. Naturally, there is a point beyond which traveling becomes counterproductive. Whenever possible, you should not cancel lectures for key undergraduate courses. But when you don't have any to give, much time should be
spent seeing high-level science done elsewhere.
9. MANNERS NOTICED AS A DISPENSABLE WHITE HOUSE ADVISER
I WAS to wait eight months before the Kennedy administration let me know, in September 1961, that my talents might be of use to them. After we had lunched at the long head table of the Faculty Club, Harvard's physical chemist, George Kistiakowsky, motioned me aside to ask whether I would like to assist the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in evaluating our nation's biological warfare (BW) capabilities. Curious ever since the end of World War II as to what BW weapons we might have developed, I indicated my availability whenever PSAC wanted me. Now some three years old, PSAC had been created by President Eisenhower as a response to the shock of Sputnik's moving the Soviets into space ahead of us. After James Killian, then president of MIT, George had served as its second leader, reflecting Ike's respect for his acumen at applying science to military purposes. At Los Alamos, his long experience with explosives was used in the fabrication of the first nuclear weapons.