AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  PSAC was now headed by Jerome Wiesner of MIT's big Electronics Lab, who at the war's end was also at Los Alamos. Most of its members were physicists and chemists, reflecting a major preoccupation with nuclear weapons and missiles. George was still a member, as was Paul Doty, who was hopeful that with JFK as president we might be able to slow down, if not stop, the testing of ever bigger hydrogen bombs. Soon I filled out several White House forms for an FBI background check necessary to get me a top-secret security clearance. Only at that level of authorization could I get into Fort Detrick, the nation's big, rambling biological warfare complex, twenty-five miles to the north of the D.C. line in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Paul Doty (left) with Jerry Weisner (right) and the president who gave them hope

  That fall Wally Gilbert was increasingly in the Biolabs, coming over from the Physics Department, where he still had serious teaching responsibilities. The messenger RNA concept was on everyone's mind, with the previous June's Cold Spring Harbor symposium dominated by its implications. Seeing newly made mRNA molecules functioning in the E. coli cell-free systems made Alfred Tissières wonder whether RNA molecules containing only single bases might also stimulate protein synthesis. But to his disappointment, the polyadenylic acid, or poly A (AAA…), from Paul Doty's lab had no apparent template capabilities. Alfred then put synthetic RNA out of his mind until he came along with Wally and me to hear Marshall Nierenberg's electrifying announcement at the Biological Congress in Moscow in August that polyuridylic acid, or poly U (UUU …), coded for polyphenylalanine. Later poly A was also revealed to have template capabilities coding for polylysine. Its mRNA-like activity had been missed by Alfred, who had the misfortune of being given aggregated poly A incapable of binding to ribosomes.

  Upon his return from Moscow, Wally moved into Alfred's former office lab to study interactions between poly U and ribosomes. Over the coming year, Alfred was to spend periods in Paris and Cambridge waiting for his new lab to be completed in Geneva. Several nights before the Tissières were to depart, they joined me and Franny Beer, again my summer technician, for an elegant private supper at the American Academy's new embassy-like home, Brandegee, southwest of Boston. Franny and I drove out in my MG, which I planned to let her borrow while I was away for the coming six weeks. After Moscow, I was to go on to Cambodia, where my sister's husband, Bob Myers, was our CIA station chief, and then to Japan, where Masayasu Nomura would give me an insider's tour of the country.

  That summer Franny was my daily sounding board about my new Radcliffe friends, the striking blond twins Sophia and Thalassa Hencken. Living in a large, comfortable house in posh Chestnut Hill, they existed in the perpetual shadow of their mother, a garden expert with her own TV show. Though seemingly destined to marry a Social Register type, Thalassa had just discovered a handsome young Pakistani engineer who possessed more panache than was usually dealt out to the suitors of future members of Boston's Vincent Club. Sophia, the less flamboyant of the two, had a boyfriend from New Orleans who, though not appropriate for the Brookline Country Club, did a skillful rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan.

  The twins’ mother was planning a big party for their twenty-first birthday, to be held in their home in mid-October. I had hoped that my multiple letters and postcards from the Royal Hotel in Katmandu would secure me an invitation to be at either Sophia's or Thalassa's side for the big night. Alas, that did not come to pass, although I was invited and Franny graciously came as my date. At the party, the twins were somewhat upstaged by the elegantly tall sophomore Ann Douglas Watson, no relation, whose obvious social and intellectual superiority over the males her age made me wonder hopefully whether the promise of not having to change her name afforded me any advantage as a suitor. But the real catch at the party, all too clear to Mrs. Hencken, was Desmond FitzGerald, the future Knight of Glin, then over from Ireland to study art history at the Fogg Museum.

  Soon after, the twins had Desmond invite me to a Saturday night party that he gave at his Massachusetts Avenue flat with Dorothy Dean. Her regal black-draped form often graced the lunch scenes at University Restaurant or Hayes-Bickford's and even more the largely gay evening crowds at Club Casablanca beneath the Brattle Theatre. In talking first to Thalassa, who professed ignorance about most of the other guests, I found my ear tuning into the opinionated, laughing voice of Abby Rockefeller, the youngest of the guests and the eldest daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller. Instead of going on to college, Abby was studying the cello in Boston, living at a friend's home north of Harvard Square. So with my windowless MG now entrusted for the winter to Miss McCartney's Brattle Square garage, the next afternoon I walked up Brattle Street to the Churchill family residence to continue our spirited conversation of the night before. Over tea we concurred that no more than pennies would ever trickle down from the haves to the have-nots.

  By then my security clearance had materialized, and I was soon making regular flights to Washington as part of PSAC's new Limited War Panel. Its recent creation was PSAC's response to the ever growing American involvement in Vietnam. With the use of nuclear weapons ruled out ever since Eisenhower had decided not to so rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, it was unclear how to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Viet Cong. No one on Bundy's staff thought a massive deployment of ground troops was the answer. Whenever their southern borders were truly threatened, the Chinese could supply more bodies as cannon fodder than any American president dared contemplate matching. Use of highly lethal chemical and biological agents was also a Rubicon the government had no wish to cross. So the army's chemical and biological warfare units were considering deployment of “incapacitating agents” that would put enemy soldiers out of action only temporarily. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara apparently liked this idea, and PSAC's task was to give JFK an independent appraisal of their possible military feasibility.

  The first new chemical agent I was to hear about was in fact a killer—but only of plants. Agent Orange was on the agenda of my first visit to the Executive Office Building, where the southeast side of the third floor, once occupied by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, now contained PSAC's offices. Speaking to the full Limited War Panel, a Green Beret officer explained how spraying this herbicide along roadsides had cut down Viet Cong ambushes. Were his presentation a seminar, I would have questioned his lack of statistical analysis. But as a mere consultant, I thought it prudent to stay quiet at my first briefing by military officers. Later Vince McRae, PSAC's deputy handling limited war matters, let me know he never challenged the competence of officers during military briefings. This was for their superiors to do if they felt so inclined. PSAC's effectiveness on military matters depended upon the Department of Defense seeing the committee as a potential ally for bending the president to their will. Whether Agent Orange reduced ambushes was for the army alone to judge. PSAC's place was to judge whether the chemical's use posed any negative health consequences for the military personnel involved in herbicide spraying. But here again we were assured that such defoliants were no danger to humans.

  My conversation with Vince allowed me to find out where my glamorous Radcliffe friend Diana de Vegh was working in the White House. Soon learning that her office was on the floor above, I bounded up the stairs to find her in conversation with her boss, Marcus Raskin, a junior staff member of McGeorge Bundy's National Security Council. Earlier employed by the liberal Democratic congressman Bob Kastenmeier from Wisconsin, Marc was now the Security Council's token left-winger. Having Raskin around, Bundy believed, might afford him more than one type of option for handling a potentially tricky foreign policy dilemma. Much later I learned that Marc's earlier candor about Cuba had by then already put him out of the loop of important decision making. Diana, however, showed no awareness of her office's irrelevance to national security, elated by a helicopter ride over to the Pentagon earlier that day. As she already had plans for the evening, we agreed to have dinner on my next trip to Washington.

  Also then a consu
ltant to PSAC was my Harvard colleague E. J. Corey. A first-rate organic chemist, E.J. was to focus on chemical agents, while I handled biological ones. He would go to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to check up on the Chemical Corps, and I would be calling at Fort Detrick to get the inside skinny on our biological warfare programs. When E.J. and I later put together a report that had the potential to reach JFK, we used E.J.'s ultrasecure safe in the Converse Memorial Laboratory office to store the top-secret materials. Early on, we were briefed on corresponding Soviet efforts. We saw photos, most likely predating Gary Powers's U2 overflights, showing grid lines inter-pretable as Soviet biological and chemical weapon testing sites. By then the Soviets clearly had the capabilities to deploy deadly organic phosphate nerve toxins in the United States on a mass scale. But would they ever do so if they thought we might respond with a nuclear blast? Moreover, would any serious military establishment take the chance that a shift in wind direction might cause a cloud of nerve gas to drift over friends rather than the target?

  Much more urgently in need of serious PSAC review was the Chemical Corps’ incapacitant BZ, about which the corps was very enthusiastic. Volunteers exposed to it temporarily became zombie-like without apparent long-term consequences. Might this agent win battles without killing enemy soldiers? But in conditions of extreme heat, would individuals so drugged become fatally dehydrated? Even more worrisome, volunteers exposed to BZ initially experienced delusions reminiscent of those caused by LSD. So neither E.J. nor I saw BZ as a wise measure to neutralize the Viet Cong.

  The evening before my first visit to biological warfare headquarters in Fort Detrick, I stopped over in Washington for the deferred supper with Diana de Vegh. We dined at the red-leather-upholstered Jockey Club in the Fairfax Hotel near Dupont Circle. It was the place for top executives and politicians to see or be seen, and nobodies were hard to find there during the dinner hours. Diana apparently expected less to see than to be seen, because she did not wear her glasses, without which faces farther away than mine were all a blur. Already part of the Georgetown “New Frontier” crowd, she avoided talk about JFK, focusing on her recent weekend with Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and his wife, Phyllis.

  A power of a very different sort greeted me when I first arrived at the officers’ club of Fort Detrick. I was met by the civilian scientific director, the Texas-bred Riley Housewright. Long attached to the biological warfare effort, he had joined the army upon finishing his wartime bacteriology Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Over lunch Riley told me he viewed his Detrick program as a distasteful national necessity. Afterward, we toured the huge Detrick complex escorted by several army personnel. After being shown a large variety of bomb devices intended to aerosolize biological agents, I was put in protective clothing and taken into a large factory-like building with huge containment facilities for growing and harvesting dangerous pathogens. Then we went back for a briefing on two promising biological incapacitants, Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) and staphylococcus enterotoxin protein.

  Of the two, VEE was much further along toward possible tactical use. Though VEE is normally transmitted by mosquitoes, Detrick scientists had shown it also could be transmitted to animal hosts by aerosol mists. Delivered this way, it would likely also infect human beings. Though I was told that adults usually recovered from VEE infection with no long-term brain damage, this high-fever-inducing virus sometimes kills the very young or very old. In my mind employing it in Vietnam, or for that matter anywhere else, should be out of the question. In contrast, I saw much promise in pushing ahead the staph enterotoxin program. While it would make you vomit continually for up to twenty-four hours, ruining church picnics and similar occasions, there were no known fatalities associated with infection. In leaving I told Riley I was surprised that so little was known on our side about the anthrax toxin, despite constant worries about its deadly properties reported in the popular press. Could it easily be weaponized for use against innocent civilian populations without warning?

  At that time I was technically on sabbatical leave from Harvard, intending to take up a visiting fellowship at Churchill College in Cambridge. I had not anticipated my PSAC duties when I made plans to see MRC's brand-new Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) in action. I planned to start work there with RNA phages, whose existence had been discovered the year before at Rockefeller University by Norton Zinder and his graduate student Tim Loeb. Until Loeb finished his thesis experiments, Zinder did not want to send out aliquots of his h phage to possible competitors. In the year that followed, several additional RNA phages were also discovered, one of which, R17, Sydney Brenner had already got possession of. Now in his lab at the LMB, I wanted to purify R17 as a first step toward studying its relatively small, single-stranded RNA molecule of likely fewer than four thousand nucleotides. They might be super messenger RNA templates for use in in vitro (cell-free) protein synthesis studies. Upon arriving in late March, I was joined by Nina Gordon, who the year before had done senior thesis research in my lab. Now she wanted to be in Europe near her Italian-born theoretical physicist boyfriend, Gino Segre, then in Geneva. Over the next two months, Nina and I were distressingly set back by contamination of our host E. coli bacteria by more conventional DNA phages. It was only when I got back to Harvard in early June, where I could enlist the expert hands of my graduate students, that our RNA phage research could effectively start.

  While still in England I hoped to learn more about anthrax by visiting the UK's top-secret biological weapons lab at Porton Down, near Salisbury. But its anthrax program proved no more advanced than that at Fort Detrick. In 1942 the UK had conducted extensive anthrax testing on a small island off the coast of Scotland, but the program's current leader, David Henderson, was not inclined to spend any more money on a weapon that he believed could destroy the moral authority of the British government. When temporarily back in Detrick, I was briefed in greater detail about a program on rice blast, a fungal pathogen, about which enterprise I had heard when last there. While geneticists elsewhere were working to develop new rice strains resistant to rice blasts, those at Detrick concentrated on developing appropriate blast strains for destroying the rice crops of North Vietnam. Producing rice blasts in large amounts was within Detrick's capabilities, but delivering them was another matter. Helicopter delivery was deemed totally impractical, and no operational American fighter pilot had the radar capabilities necessary for night spraying missions over the Red River delta rice paddies. Later an air force officer was to fill me in on a still-secret radar-guided, terrain-hugging bomber then being evaluated near Dallas.

  Likely it was only a bureaucratic snafu that had let me inside Detrick's Special Project facility, a part of the operation I would never see again. There scientists worked not for the Department of Defense but for the CIA on poisons to be used for assassinations. Among others they were keen to employ was the puffer fish toxin. Synthesizing it, however, was a chemical challenge worthy of the best organic chemists, and they had approached Harvard's Bob Woodward for help. Somewhere within this nondescript, drab building was likely stored the chemical agent that Bobby Kennedy later hoped could be slipped to Fidel Castro.

  Many faculty members at Harvard who were New Frontier boosters were embarrassed when JFK's thirty-year-old brother Edward Moore (Teddy) Kennedy campaigned against the incumbent George Lodge to become the new junior senator from Massachusetts. His one year of experience as an assistant district attorney was presumptuously paltry. And Teddy's undergraduate years at Harvard were tainted by the scandal of his having sent someone else to take a language exam in his place. Though he later obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia and passed the bar in 1959, Harvard was not proud to count him as one of its alumni. Also running for senator, as an independent, was Harvard history professor Stuart Hughes, whose campaign was based largely on opposition to the nuclear weapons race. Sam Beer, Franny Beer's political scientist father, did not warm to Hughes, believing that he was impractical and unelectabl
e and that as Democrats we should be backing someone who would strengthen JFK's support in the Senate. Soon after I was invited to see Teddy in action at a gathering Sam was holding for important Harvard colleagues at the Hotel Continental in Cambridge. That day Teddy was clearly less impressive than his appealing, fair-haired wife, Joan.

  PSAC's oversight of poisons took on more humane considerations after Jerry Wiesner read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, serialized by the New Yorker in June of 1962. Carson argued that chemical pesticides were fast spreading through the world's food chains, posing an immediate threat to the global environment. Not only were they killing off fish and songbirds, they possibly threatened human existence. With her thesis quickly generating a firestorm of public concern, JFK himself was drawn into the controversy and stated that Carson's book had led his administration to take the pesticide threat seriously. No federal agency then had a real mandate for an honest investigation of the chemicals’ ecological consequences. The obvious candidate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was too cozy with the agricultural chemical industry. So Jerry assigned his Life Sciences deputy, Colin MacLeod, to head up a special PSAC panel, which Paul Doty and I were asked to serve on. Meeting first on October 1, our deliberations momentarily came to a halt when the Cuban missile crisis drew PSAC's attention elsewhere. Only years later did I learn that one of the nation's contingent responses that scary week was to have jets from Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, drop VEE-filled devices on Cuba.