AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Early on the afternoon of December 4 my sister joined Dad and me in New York for our Scandinavian Airlines flight. Our plans were to stop over for two nights in Copenhagen to see friends Betty and I had made when we lived there in the early 1950s. But after crossing the Atlantic, the pilots discovered that Copenhagen was fogged in. So we found ourselves in Stockholm two days earlier than expected. Bypassing customs as if we were a diplomatic delegation, we were whisked by limousine to the storied Grand Hotel, built in 1874, across from the Royal Palace, onto which looked my room, among the finest in the house. I soon joined my sister and Dad for a herring-heavy smorgasbord, where we lunched with Kai Falkman, the young Swedish diplomat who would accompany us to all our Nobel week engagements. After a much-needed nap, we all supped together in the rathskeller of a restaurant in the Old Town, whose buildings date back to the fifteenth century. There Kai told us that the youngest of the four Swedish princesses, Christina, wanted to spend a year at an American university, possibly Harvard, following graduation from her Swedish high school. Conceivably she would like to talk with me during my Nobel visit. Naturally, I pledged to make myself obligingly available to explain Radcliffe's unique relation to Harvard.

  My sister, Betty, my father, and I upon our arrival in Stockholm in December 1962

  Not waking until almost noon the next day, I saw my picture on the front page of Stockholm's Svenska Dagbladet together with a chatty article mentioning my interests in politics as well as birds. Unfortunately, the sore throat that had followed my bad cold of October soon forced me to seek medical attention. So my first view of the Karolinska Institutet complex was of its main hospital, not of its research labs. There I was examined by its leading nose and throat specialist, who saw nothing worrisome but did reveal he had been a member of the committee that had chosen me for the Nobel. In that official capacity, he greeted me when I arrived at Nobel House the next evening for the reception given by the Karolinska Institutet. This was not a formal event, and I arrived in the pinstripes that I had worn on the air journey to Sweden. The Foundation House also served as the home of Nils Stahle, its executive director, and I was pleased that his pretty, red-haired, unmarried daughter Marlin was at home for the evening, as was Helen, the very blond daughter of Sten Friberg, the rector of Karolinska.

  My sister, Betty, watches as Princesses Désirée, Margaretha, and Christina take their seats.

  Both girls were later welcome sights at the first formal event of the week, the Nobel Foundation's reception for all the year's laureates. In the grand library of the Swedish Academy, the dominant figure was John Steinbeck, who had arrived in Sweden only that morning. Though his anticipation of the honor had been keen, he was more nervous than happy, worrying about his Nobel address the next evening. William Faulkner's address of 1950 was still remembered with reverence, and Steinbeck was feeling the pressure of expectations. That evening he and his wife went off to dinner with the Swedish literary intelligentsia while I went with my fellow laureates in science to sup at the elegant naval officers’ mess room on Stockholm Harbor at Skeppsholmen.

  The Nobel ceremony, December 1962. From left to right: Maurice Wilkins, Max Perutz, Francis Crick, John Steinbeck, me, and John Kendrew

  Francis and Odile Crick brought their own princesses to Stockholm.

  The next morning I got a sneak preview of the grandeur of the concert hall as my fellow laureates and I rehearsed the choreography of receiving a prize from the king's hands later that evening. As it usually is for most, this was to be my first experience of white-tie formality, and I was a bit self-conscious about how I looked. Betty, Dad, and I left the hotel at 3:45 P.M. to have more than enough time for me to join the backstage lineup. Precisely at 4:30 P.M. fanfare announced the arrival of the king and queen, who entered with their royal entourage and walked to their front-of-the-stage seats as the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra played the royal hymn. Then, with the trumpets again blaring, Max, John, Francis, Maurice, John Steinbeck, and I entered and took our seats near the front of the stage.

  Before the king awarded each of the prizes, appropriate academicians read descriptions in Swedish of our respective accomplishments. To let us know what was being said, translations of their speeches had earlier been given to us. As the king handed each of us our leather-bound, individually decorated citations and gold medals, he also gave us checks in the amount of our individual shares of the prize money.

  From the concert hall, we went directly to Stockholm's massive 1930s city hall for the Nobel banquet, which was held in the Golden Hall. Running the entire length of the beautiful room with vaulted ceilings was a very long table where all the laureates were seated with their spouses as well as the royal entourage and members of the diplomatic corps. Placed at its center facing each other were the king and queen. I was seated on the queen's side. While Max, John, Francis, and John Steinbeck all had princesses next to them, my conversation bits were to be alternately directed to the wives of Maurice and John Steinbeck. Talking across the table made no sense, because of both its width and the alcohol-enhanced din created by more than eight-hundred celebrants. During the dinner, the chairman of the Nobel Foundation, Arne Tiselius, proposed a toast to the king and queen; the king, in turn, proposed a minute of silence to honor Alfred Nobel's grand donation and philanthropy.

  As soon as dessert was finished, John Steinbeck went to the grand podium overlooking the hall to deliver his Nobel address. In it he emphasized man's capacity for greatness of heart and spirit in the endless war against weakness and despair. The Cold War and the existence of nuclear weapons silently lurked behind his message of the writer confronting the human dilemma. He saw humans taking over divine prerogatives: “Having taken god-like powers, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.” Ending his oration, he paraphrased St. John the Evangelist: “In the end is the Word, and the Word is man, and the Word is with men.”

  I became increasingly nervous and could not listen attentively, since in just a few minutes I was to be up on the podium to offer the response of the laureates in physiology or medicine. I hoped my extemporizing would rise above platitudes. Only after I was back at my seat did I relax, knowing that I had spoken from the heart. I was pleased at my last sentences, in which I had aimed for the cadence of one of JFK's better speeches. Graciously Francis then passed across the table his place card with a note on the back: “Much better than I could have done.—F.” I could then enjoy John Kendrew expressing his joy at being part of a group of five men who had worked and talked together for the past fifteen years and could now come together to Stockholm on the same happy occasion. Then the party moved to the floor below for dancing, most of it done by the white ties and gowns of the Karolinska medical students.

  Late the next morning the laureates in science gave their formal Nobel addresses. Francis, Maurice, and I were allotted thirty minutes each. It was not an occasion for questions from our audience of mostly fellow scientists. At seven-thirty that evening, I went alone to the palace for a second royal reception at which protocol had again somehow failed to place me beside a princess. This time I was between the wife of the Swedish prime minister and Sibylla, the wife of the Crown Prince Gustav Adolf, who had died in a 1947 airplane crash when his daughters, the princesses, were still young girls. I found it easier to converse with the prime minister's wife than with Sibylla, whose native language was German. Sibylla ate practically nothing, perhaps imagining her still comely figure metamorphosing into the stereotypical one for royal consorts of the past century

  The transcript of my Nobel speech

  Before lunch the next day at the American ambassador's residence, I was taken to the Wallenberg's family Enskilda Bank to exchange my advance check of 85,739 kroner for one denominated in dollars, approximately $16,500. Earlier at Nobel House, I had been given a bronze copy of my gold Nobel Medal that I could safely leave lying about my desk. There had been past thefts of the gold originals, and I was urged
to keep it in a bank vault. Seemingly hundreds of photos from the past days’ festivities were then shown so that I could order copies of the ones I wished. Immediately my eye alighted on one of Francis and Princess Désirée, sitting across from me at the Nobel banquet.

  Ambassador J. Graham Parsons greeted me graciously, giving no sign of the hawkish inclinations that had reputedly caused his recent banishment from the Washington corridors of Southeast Asia decision making. Also welcoming us was our embassy's number two man, Thomas Enders, whom I asked if he was related to John Enders, the Harvard Medical School's polio specialist who had won the Nobel eight years earlier. In fact, this Enders was the Nobel laureate's nephew, happily no longer living behind the Iron Curtain as a junior diplomat in Poland.

  Nobel Week concluded traditionally on Saint Lucia's Day. Like all the laureates, I was awakened by a girl in a white robe and a crown of flaming candles, singing the Neapolitan hymn that long ago became virtually synonymous with this Swedish winter festival. With our father departing that afternoon for a week in France, Betty and I again put on formal finery for the Luciaball of the Medicinska Föreningen. At dinner reindeer was served as the main course. Afterward our party moved on to a much smaller private affair that let me banter long with Ellen Huldt, a pretty dark-haired medical student, with whom I then arranged to have dinner the next night.

  Before getting into a taxi to fetch Ellen, I penned a letter to President Pusey, telling him of my visit that afternoon to the Royal Palace to see Princess Christina. With my diplomatic escort, Kai Falkman, I entered one of its private reception rooms to find her with her mother, Sibylla. Over tea and cakes, I related how much I enjoyed teaching the lively students of Harvard and Radcliffe and assured the mother that her daughter would greatly enjoy a year at Radcliffe. After returning home I sent back to Sweden several copies of Harvard's newspaper, the Crimson, to let Christina have a feel for Harvard undergraduate life.

  As Nobel week ended, I was to depart for a visit to West Berlin arranged by the State Department, where my lecture before its scientists was to be yet another reafflrmation of the United States’ unswerving commitment to those peoples trapped by the Cold War. Before flying there via Hamburg, I spent my last night in Sweden with John Steinbeck and his wife at the studio home of their friend the artist Bo Beskow. Liking Ballet School, one of his semifigurative blue paintings, I found its price to be within my somewhat improved means and arranged for it to be sent to Harvard. It long hung on the wall of the Biological Labs library.

  In Berlin, I stayed for three nights at the guesthouse of the Freie Universität, a postwar creation sited among the buildings that once housed many of Germany's best scientists before Hitler. Until the Nazis came to power, Leo Szilard and Erwin Schrödinger had lectured on quantum theory there, with the voice of Einstein always figuring prominently in any discussion. Now of the past giants, only the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Otto Warburg remained.

  Soon to greet me was Kaky Gilbert, who the year before her Radcliffe graduation had assisted Alfred Tissières and me with experiments on messenger RNA. As a student at the Freie Universität, she would be showing me West Berlin. Unfortunately, she could not get permission to join me on my half day's visit to East Berlin, where I was surprised by the extraordinary Hellenic and Assyrian collections of the vast Pergamon Museum. Kaky did, however, accompany me to lunch at the residence of the head of the American mission in West Berlin. There I met the Prussian-acting Otto Warburg, whose legendary contribution to enzymology made him the most talked-about biochemist of our time. Though half Jewish, Warburg's longtime interest in cancer had led Hitler, always paranoid about contracting it, to let him continue working in Berlin throughout the war. He told me that my Harvard colleague George Wald was much too interested in philosophy, in contrast to his total lack of interest in it. Later, when Kaky and I dined at what proved an all too typical German restaurant, I was again in throat agony. So we did not stay out long, going back to Dahlem on the underground train running out to West Berlin's southwestern suburbs.

  My next stop was Cologne, where Max and Manny Delbrück were spending the year helping its university establish an antiauthoritarian, American-style department in genetics. Though I could barely whisper, my throat again unbearably sore, Max nevertheless insisted upon my giving a scheduled speech, to the distress of many in the audience who surmised my discomfort. Fortunately, by the time I reached Geneva, my voice had returned, allowing me to go out to CERN, the big physics laboratory then led by Max's friend from Copenhagen days Vicky Weisskopf. Much of our talk was about Leo Szilard, who had just flown back from Geneva to New York. Szilard wanted Vicky and John to set up a CERN-like multinationally funded European molecular biology lab after the model of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Ideally Leo wanted the new lab to be in Geneva, but he would accept one on the Riviera. It would create an alternative intellectual home for him were the United States to tack right politically in response to even greater Soviet military threats.

  Alfred and Virginia Tissières had by then arrived from Paris to spend the holidays with their family in Lausanne. I went up to ski with them just before Christmas at Verbier, the new ski resort in Valais that Alfred's brother Rudolph had helped develop. Soon to arrive were my new friends from Stockholm, Helen Friberg and Kai Falkman, who planned to be there through the New Year. By then, however, I would be with the Mitchison family at their home in Scotland. Though London was covered by snow, green grass still surrounded the airport near Campbeltown where my small British European Airways puddle jumper landed on New Year's Eve morning. From there I was driven some twenty miles to their remote Carradale home, arriving very weary from the journey. After three days of brisk highland walks, I flew back to the States via Iceland.

  Back at Harvard I found on my desk a letter from President Pusey acknowledging my letter about Princess Christina, which he had passed on to Radcliffe's president, Mary Bunting. Appropriate application forms were dispatched to Sweden, and Christina promptly filled them out and asked her school, L'École Francaise, to send her academic records. News that she might be coming to Radcliffe first broke in the Boston Globe in mid-March, with an official announcement coming from the Royal Palace in early April. A day later, the Crimson asked about my role in her admission, and my attempt at humor badly backfired. To my embarrassment, the next day I read the words, “I didn't encourage her to come any more than I would encourage any pretty girl.” I could only hope that that day's edition never got to Stockholm. In any case, I had further reason to believe I had made the right choice in moving to Harvard. Princesses don't go to Caltech.

  Remembered Lessons

  1. Buy, don't rent, a suit of tails

  Though you may believe you will have no further occasion to wear a suit of clothes befitting an orchestra conductor, winning a Nobel Prize is too singular an occasion for a hired suit of clothes. Furthermore, if your career stays at a high level, you may be invited to a subsequent Nobel week when one of your proteges wins. And keeping the outfit in your closet long after the festivities are over will serve to remind you what shape you once were.

  2. Don't sign petitions that want your celebrity

  The moment your prize is announced, you are seen as fair game for petitioners of worthy causes in need of well-known signatories. In lending your name to such appeals, you often find yourself outside your expertise and expressing an opinion no more meaningful than, say, that of the average accountant. You trivialize your Nobel Prize and make future uses of your name less effective. Much better is to do real good as opposed to symbolic good.

  3. Make the most of the year followingannouncement of your prize

  You have a lifetime ahead of you for being a past prize winner but only a yearlong window during which you are the celebrated scientist of the moment. While everybody respects Nobel laureates, this year's winner is always the most sought-after dinner guest. In Stockholm this year's honoree is treated like a movie star by the general population, who will ask even an o
therwise obscure chemist for an autograph. As with the Miss America pageant, the announcement of the next winner will decisively mark the end of your reign as this year's science star.

  4. Don't anticipate a flirtatious Santa Lucia girl

  Much fuss is made after your arrival for Nobel Week about the pretty girl who will wake you up on Santa Lucia Day and sing the traditional song. Alas, she will not be alone, and very possibly she will be accompanied by one or more photographers expecting you to smile as you hear the Neopolitan tune that only sun-deprived Swedes could mistake for a carol. The moment her singing stops, she will be off to another laureate's room, leaving you several hours more of darkness to endure before the winter sun peeks above the horizon.

  5. Expect to put on weight after Stockholm

  Masses of invitations will come to you during your inevitable bout of post-Stockholm withdrawal syndrome. You may find yourself banqueting as a second profession, accepting invitations to places it never would have occurred to you to go before. I still remember well an excellent dinner in Houston at its once classy Doctors’ Club, before the Texas oil capital put itself on the map of high-powered biomedicai research. I remember glaring foolishly at a giant ice sculpture on the table, knowing it would not long honor my existence. When your hosts embarrassingly overstate your importance, it's easier to accept second helpings than to keep up conversation.