AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Two days later, Betty joined me in Indianapolis and together we drove north some one hundred miles to the small town of Chesterton, near Lake Michigan, where our mother had been buried eleven years before. We would have met at the Chicago airport, but the Democratic convention was in progress and the city was full of antiwar protesters tangling with unsympathetic policemen. That day we wanted to think about Dad and Mother, not Vietnam. Meeting us the next morning at the cemetery were Mother's nearby Olvaney cousins, whom we'd seen much of in Michigan City before our university studies. After lunch we set off to see the little bungalow on Chicago's South Shore in which we had grown up. The drive later through Grant Park was eerily peaceful. The night before, Mayor Daley's police had violently dispersed protesters attempting to camp out in its open spaces, onto which looked the windows of rooms in the tall hotels where the convention delegates were staying.

  Upon my return to Long Island, the three-week-long course on animal cells and viruses had started. There I first met the Liverpool-born, twenty-eight-year-old Joe Sambrook. He had flown east to lecture on pox viruses, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at the Australian National University. Over the past two years at the Salk Institute, he had shown SV40 viral DNA integrated into the chromosomes of cancerous SV40-transformed cells. His work had been the heart of Dulbecco's recent June symposium talk, leading John Cairns to suggest I approach Joe about leading our DNA tumor virus effort. Quickly sensing Joe's high intelligence and ambition, I offered him a position starting the following summer. He quickly accepted and wrote up a big grant proposal to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which would guarantee the Lab an infusion of $1.6 million over the proposed five years. Obtaining this money was virtually a foregone conclusion, as there then existed more cancer research money than good applicants to use it.

  In fact, the only reviewer with any misgivings about the NCI grant was Harvard's Charlie Thomas. He wondered about the risk to humans from working with tumor viruses at the molecular level. Could exposure to the monkey virus SV40 cause cancer in humans? We replied that we would follow the same procedures used in the Salk lab of Renato Dulbecco, who'd apparently worked safely with SV40. Furthermore, we knew that fifteen years earlier, SV40 had been an inadvertent contaminant of early batches of the polio vaccine with which several million individuals had been vaccinated, with no elevated incidence of cancer.

  Over the February 1969 Washington's Birthday weekend, we stayed at Redcote, the home of Edward Pulling, the newly elected president of the Long Island Biological Association. Though raised in Baltimore and educated at Princeton, Ed had been born in England and served as a British naval officer during World War I. Upon his recent retirement as founding headmaster of the Milbrook School, north of New York City, he and his wife, Lucy, moved to the estate she had inherited from her father, the J. P. Morgan banker Russell Leffingwell. When Liz and I had first visited their eighty acres of fields and woods the previous summer, Ed pointed out the hidden ditch called a “ha-ha.” It kept Lucy's horses from coming too close to the patio where we had cocktails before supper. Then also present was the journalist turned canny investor Franz Schneider, almost eighty, and his wife, Betty, twenty-five years his junior. Earlier in life, Betty regularly flew their seaplane from the dock by their house to and from New York City. Later they had us meet Ferdinand Eberstadt, who owned a large estate on Lloyd Neck that he would soon give to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a nature preserve to prevent the building of a nuclear power plant on adjacent land.

  On each such visit down from Harvard, we eagerly followed the building of the new house we were to occupy upon Liz's graduation from Radcliffe. Initially we had planned to renovate the 175-year-old Osterhout Cottage, next to Blackford Hall at the heart of campus. The necessary alterations would require that I put up $30,000, then the value of my shares of the fast-growing pharmaceutical company Syn-tex, acquired after meeting the company's founder, Carl Djerassi, a chemist and the inventor of the birth control pill. At a Cleveland gathering of the American Chemical Society in May 1960 we had each received a $1,000 award. Upon returning to Harvard, I invested my prize money in Syntex shares, later using another $1,000 from my salary to buy more. Soon after the renovation of Osterhout started, however, the local contractor told us the deterioration was beyond repair. He offered to build for the same sum a new house almost identical to the one that was meant to emerge after the extensive renovation. We would get higher ceilings and central air-conditioning to boot. Our architect, Harold Edelman, saw only value in a brand-new home, and never would we regret the decision.

  Over the spring break, Liz and I escaped the nationwide student unrest over Vietnam by going to the Caribbean, where my world renown paid off. Some ten years before, the wealthy European industrialist Axel Faber had set up a foundation to benefit Nobel laureates by subsidizing stays at exclusive hotels and resorts. For $10 per night, I had stayed at Le Richemond and the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. Having found the Dorado Beach outside San Juan more geared to golf than swimming, we moved first to St. Thomas and from there to St. John's to stay at the Caneel Bay Resort, where we sipped peach daiquiris with Abby Rockefeller's brother David and his new wife, Sydney.

  Liz's last two months at Radcliffe took a direction we never expected. Less than a week after our return, University Hall was occupied by some three hundred students protesting the war. Many were members of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, red and black banners hung from a second-floor window after the building's occupants, largely administrators, including Franklin Ford, were roughed up by the students protesting their earlier unlawful expulsion. SDS had been threatening violence for some time, no doubt encouraged by the effects of similar student uprisings elsewhere. Intending their actions to stop a war, those occupying University Hall saw no reason for their conduct to be governed by codes observed in times of peace.

  That afternoon they proclaimed their occupation would end only if the university acceded to several demands, chief among them the expulsion of ROTC from Harvard. In fact, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences two months before had voted to deny credit for ROTC courses and not to give academic appointments to the military officers teaching them. ROTC's presence, commonly supposed to be the root of the trouble, by itself never would have led to the occupation of University Hall. The unstoppable chain reaction began when Richard Nixon became president and Harvard lent him Henry Kissinger as national security advisor. The student protesters had reached the limit of their patience with Nathan Pusey, who had failed to address the moral quandary in which the university found itself, and who two years earlier had branded the campus's self-proclaimed student revolutionaries as “Walter Mittys of the left.”

  Despite repeated warnings to leave University Hall and Franklin Ford's closing off Harvard Yard to all except its freshmen inhabitants, the SDS-led students gave no sign of budging. Though a lightning police raid had been talked about earlier as the best way to deal with building takeovers, no one was prepared for what happened next. At five o'clock the following morning, four hundred blue-helmeted, shield-carrying Cambridge policemen entered Harvard Yard and with tear gas and clubs forcibly removed the students, then barely awake, many banded together arm in arm. After less than fifteen minutes of this mayhem, University Hall was cleared. Most of the students were herded into paddy wagons and carted off to the Cambridge city jail to be charged with trespassing.

  The rest of the Harvard student body, until then largely unsympathetic to the SDS gang, instantly ignited with indignation against the administration and, in particular, President Pusey Police brutality had made martyrs of the student protestors. Fifteen hundred students gathered that afternoon in Memorial Hall calling for a three-day boycott of classes. Even angrier crowds formed later in Soldiers Field across the Charles River. More than five hundred law students, from a school never before known for radicalism, voted for Pusey to resign. As I walked that day into the Faculty Club for lunch, Liz was am
ong the students lining the path to its front entrance to protest the raid. I had never before seen her make a display of political opinions.

  Though the police raid's impact upon students lasted only until commencement, schisms developed within the faculty that would last for years. A liberal caucus was formed soon after the event. The group believed that without Nathan Pusey as president, the whole ugly affair would not have happened. By reacting so insensitively to student concerns about Vietnam, he stood out as a naked proponent first of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy and later of Richard Nixon's. In contrast, a conservative caucus of roughly the same size assigned all blame to the student activists. How the offending students would be disciplined was not initially clear. Just before commencement, the liberal caucus felt semivictorious when a broadly constituted committee, including several students, voted for the temporary expulsion of only ten students, those known to have manhandled administrators during the April 9 takeover. Those in the conservative caucus had wanted many more students held accountable and for the sanction to be severe, ideally permanent expulsion.

  Exacerbating the spring tensions was an emerging political activism among many of Harvard's black students. Two months before, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had voted to set up an undergraduate degree program in Afro-American studies. Emboldened by the chaos following the raid, the more militant black students demanded Harvard go further and create a separate department whose faculty they could help choose. Outside the April 22 faculty meeting held at the Loeb Drama Center to consider this matter, one black student stood holding a meat cleaver. Inside, to my subsequent regret, I joined the many liberal caucus members favoring student input in faculty choices. I then realized that letting Harvard science students help choose future science faculty would have been nonsense. Subcon-ciously I must have believed this proposed Department of Afro-American studies would not long stand the test of time. Its offerings would not give black students the hard facts that would let them thrive in competition with students of other colors.

  By then the war had directly affected the lives of Harvard's graduate students in science. No longer could they automatically defer military service. If their draft number went against them, they soon might be off to Vietnam. To avoid that potential fate, several first-year graduate students joined me in Cold Spring Harbor for the summer of ‘69. There they might get deferments on the basis of involvement in cancer research. Two students stayed over the next two years helping Joe Sam-brook get his SV40 work off to a fast start. To further make the Lab a force in tumor viruses, Joe and Lionel Crawford from London organized a two-week workshop in August that attracted, among others, Arnie Levine, Chuck Sherr, and Alex van der Eb. They all later became leaders in tumor virus research. The workshop's core was a small tumor virus meeting with some eighty participants.

  Later that month, Jacques Monod led a big contingent from the Institut Pasteur to our meeting on the lactose operon. From that event was to emerge the first Cold Spring Harbor monograph, an enduring volume of work with its chapters edited by Jon Beckwith and my former student David (Zip) Zipser. (Soon after, Zip left a new tenured position at Columbia for Cold Spring Harbor to set up a bacterial genetic group in space below Al Hershey's lab.) During the meeting, we used our new flat-bottomed boat to take Jacques out into the chop of Long Island Sound. He wanted me to speed up, but I wouldn't. Unbeknownst to the visitors, Liz was three months pregnant with our first child.

  That summer, the Welsh-born Julian Davies was at the Lab doing research on yeast protein synthesis. Julian was rejoicing in his recent move to the University of Wisconsin, where he no longer had to listen to his former Harvard Medical School department chairman Bernie Davis bemoaning his left-wing faculty members. One day during the summer, Julian passed around the Lab notices for a demonstration protesting the investiture in Caernarfon of Charles Windsor as Prince of Wales. His summer assistant, the daughter of our local village police chief, saw the flyers and told her father of the planned action.

  Given the tenor of the times, Chief McKensie would take no chance of a student demonstration getting out of control. At the exact time Prince Charles was to be anointed, he appeared, halting the unauthorized march along Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's main thoroughfare. To my relief, Chief McKensie had no comparably reliable intelligence concerning the marijuana freely available at many Lab gatherings that summer. Getting a whiff of it myself at Jones Lab's first summer party, I took care to forgo further such gatherings. It was better not to know of things I was now officially obliged to stop.

  Even before Joe Sambrook's arrival, I knew the success of his tumor virus group would require constructing new lab facilities to supplement the space he was to have in the James Lab. Initially I thought $60,000 would cover the costs of an annex on its south side. So Liz and I flew down to Long Island from Cambridge to seek this sum from the pharmaceutical heir Carlton Palmer, whose grand Tudor-style home was on nearby Center Island. At the end of the Sunday lunch, hosted by our neighbor, the Lab trustee and lymphoma expert Bayard Clark-son, I was told that I would have to find fifty-nine more donors. The Lab still badly needed an angel, as I soon thereafter told a reporter for the Long Islander, the local Huntington weekly founded by Walt Whitman. To my delight, the resulting article generated a call to me from the former Pfizer executive John Davenport, who had a summer home near Lido Beach on the South Shore. While still with Pfizer, he had run an RNA tumor virus effort and liked what I proposed to do at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon he and Ed Pulling joined Liz and me for a home-cooked lunch at Osterhout, after which I gave John a tour of the science then going on at Cold Spring Harbor. Less than a week passed before Davenport took me to lunch at the University Club in New York City, where he told me that he was transferring $100,000 worth of Pfizer shares to the Lab. Though our new building's costs had risen to $200,000, I had by then raised the rest. Construction would start as soon as the winter snows melted.

  Almost all the next academic year, Liz and I lived in Cold Spring Harbor, much enjoying views of the inner harbor through the big eastern-facing windows of our new white cedar house. After flying to Florence for the November 1969 meeting on RNA polymerase, we drove to Venice and from there traveled by train to a big resort hotel on Lake Constance. There a meeting was held to further advance Leo Szilard's scheme for a European molecular biology research and teaching institution. From nearby Zurich we flew to London, going up to Cambridge so Francis and Liz could meet. The Double Helix no longer upset him since he realized that it enhanced, not diminished, his reputation. Back in Cold Spring Harbor for the holidays, we eagerly awaited the arrival of Rufus Robert Watson in late February 1970.

  In May, Nathan Pusey announced that after eighteen years as Harvard's president he would be stepping down in June of the following year. No one was surprised. His handling of the occupation of University Hall, while perfectly legal, had been hugely unwise, dividing the faculty into two angry camps that had no hope of being reconciled unless he went away. He would, in due course, move to New York City to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After raising piles of cash that let Harvard expand in many directions, he was now to have the far easier task of giving it away. Paul Doty and I could not help but note that his only obvious failure at fund-raising was in not finding a major donor for the proposed building to house his new Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

  In the summer of 1970, for the first time in its history Cold Spring Harbor did not play host to visitors conducting research of their own choosing. No free space remained to house them or let them carry on meaningful research. Instead we used our resources to start a new course on the molecular biology and genetics of yeast. It would allow scientists interested in the essence of eukaryotic cells to learn the powers of yeast genetics. In the fall, we used a $30,000 donation from Manny Delbrück to begin renovating the derelict wooden Wawepex lab into a dormitory for sixteen summer students. Its beds would let us start a summer neurobiology cour
se program. A new grant of almost $500,000 from the Sloan Foundation was used in part to cover the costs of renovating the top floor of the 1912 Animal House into lab and lecture space for neurobiology.

  With the completion of the James Annex in January 1971, our tumor virus group came into its own. No longer did we have to play second fiddle to equivalent endeavors at the Salk Institute. Working now with Joe Sambrook were the Caltech-trained Phil Sharp and Ulf Pettersson from Uppsala, who brought to us adenovirus tumor research. Both came as super postdocs and soon became bona fide members of the James Lab staff. To support their independent activities as well as new cancer research efforts in space to be vacated by Al Hershey's impending retirement, Joe wrote up a big grant proposal to expand our NCI funding to $1 million per year. Later, site visitors gave it top priority, allowing our Cancer Center to come into existence as of January 1,1972.

  Even larger sums for research would soon become available. Richard Nixon had just enthusiastically signed the National Cancer Act in response to recommendations by the philanthropist Mary Lasker's Citizens’ Committee for the Conquest of Cancer. Boldly it was proclaimed that if we can send men to the moon, we should be able to cure cancer. Though I did not believe there was sound logic in relating the two feats, I felt strongly that bigger infusions of federal monies were needed to let tumor virus systems point us toward the mutant genes that were known to cause cancer. So I spoke before the Citizens’ Cancer Committee at one of its first meetings in the summer of 1970.