Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (27 page)

At the January n, 1966, meeting when the Biology Department recommended the Hastings appointment, it also made Wally Gilbert a member, opening the way for him to obtain space of his own that I assumed would be adjacent to mine. There was also much discussion about John Edsall's memorandum to Franklin Ford urging the speedy creation of a Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Keith said he would form a three-person committee to draft a statement that everyone anticipated would express the Biology Department's support for the split. A similar discussion occurred in the Chemistry Department, which likewise accepted the split, though it expressed regret they would lose from their ranks important figures such as Paul Doty. Believing the matter to be sufficiently important for outside analysis, Franklin Ford took John Edsall's specific proposals before a specially convened ad hoc committee that requested more precise details before ruling in favor of a subsequent revised proposal. Officially the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology would come into existence on February 1, 1967, with its offices on Divinity Avenue in the large wooden house where the famed historian Arthur Schlesinger had been raised.

The impending creation of the BMB, however, did not put my mind at rest. While spending the spring in Alfred Tissières's lab in Geneva, I got wind that the biology faculty was proposing to move the geneticist Paul Levine onto the third floor, adjacent to my lab. Giving Paul this space would not only prevent Wally Gilbert from getting it but also limit the possibility of locating junior faculty members near Wally and me. As Dulbecco had just declined our offer, I wrote to Keith saying that if new blood was to enter the Biolabs, it would have to come through the junior ranks.

In my office in 1967

The thought of their making Paul my neighbor, and effectively forcing Wally to move to the fourth floor, made my blood boil, and I told Porter so. Ever since Wally had gained tenure, our students had two mentors simultaneously—a unique research experience. Spirited conversations over coffee, lunch, and tea would occur much less frequently with our two groups on two different floors. Over the summer, talk of Levine's relocation stopped, leading me to hope that I had made enough of a stink to scotch it. But the plan was resurrected in September with Geoffrey Pollitt, the Biolabs’ senior administrator, arguing that it would free up ten units of precious lab space. In my mind the same objective could be achieved by reducing Levine's domain, which now equaled mine in square footage, though with only half the personnel. Not until mid-December did Keith officially backtrack, offering Wally the same office and research space that in May he had proposed giving to Paul Levine.

Our new department was coming into existence not a moment too soon.

    Remembered Lessons

1. Success should command a premium

Whether my Biology Department enemies helped orchestrate Harvard's failure to acknowledge my Nobel Prize with a respectful salary increase, I will never know. I had added visibly to Harvard's image capital in a way that by my lights merited more than the president's pro forma one-sentence congratulatory letter. Much bunk is peddled about money not being a prime motive of the academic. This does not, however, change the fact that salary is the means by which any employer expresses how much he values you; whether you need the cash or not, make sure your salary reflects your status.

2. Channel rage through intermediaries

Feelings of intense anger against university administrators are best conveyed through friends who share your feelings of mistreatment. Directly confronting your dean all too easily leads to words that burn bridges within your institution. It never makes sense to be seen as a hothead unable to see another person's point of view.

3. Be prepared to resign over inadequate space

Your colleagues won't know whether your raise is a thousand dollars more or less than theirs, but everyone can see what sort of work space you are assigned. It affects what you can accomplish and how you are perceived. Assigning equal space to all equally ranked academics sounds fair but leads to inefficiencies. Individuals at different stages of their career have different needs but giving or taking away space accordingly leads to complaints of favoritism, and so political rather than rational allocation is the norm. Yet if you find yourself denied the space you need to exploit a bright new idea or experimental breakthrough, you may be overtaken by competition elsewhere. Losing an important space request means either your talents are not recognized or your department is relatively indifferent to whether you stay or go. If you don't make a credible threat to resign, you will never know where you stand. Such moments are inherently stressful and never to be taken lightly. But in the Darwinian world of an academic department, if you don't create such crises, limited resources will surely go to gutsier colleagues.

4. Have friends close to those who rule

When Charlie Wyzanski learned over a Society of Fellows dinner that I had been summarily called back to Harvard while on a visit to California, he wrote to his friend at the Harvard Corporation, Thomas Lamont. In a private letter, Charlie expressed how asinine Harvard would have looked if the matter had leaked to Boston newspapers. And a word to the wise was sufficient.

5. Never offer tenure to practitioners of dying disciplines

In the 1960s, the Harvard Biology Department continued to make tenured appointments in fields such as development and plant biology, tired games not likely to rebound soon. Undergraduate teaching needs were invariably cited for such appointments. MIT, on the other hand, practiced attrition with these dying disciplines, leaving the teaching of them to untenured faculty. Consequently, by the mid-1970s, our academic rival began moving from behind to far ahead of Harvard in biology, with predictable effects on the quality of graduate students in both places.

6. Become the chairman

Most top university scientists disdain duties that take time from research. They see administration as a bore, and everyone wants someone else to be the department chairman. As a result of shirking responsibility, most science departments are less exciting places than they should be. The straw that stirs the drink counts for a lot. Dull chairmen make foolish choices when they assign the teaching of important courses and the use of precious department space and facilities. The wrong faculty members handle departmental seminars and keep the library buying journals that no one reads. Departmental meetings have no purpose droning on without addressing vital issues until there is no oxygen left in the room. Being chairman need not consume more than 10 percent of an intelligent professor's time, possibly less than he or she might waste griping about bad decisions made by others.

7. Ask the dean only for what he can give

Both saying and hearing no are unpleasant experiences, making the denier look ungenerous and the denied clueless or impotent. Everyone has a wish list, but when you ask the dean for something, make sure you have thought through how he could reasonably give it without taking a costly political hit. It is quite another matter, however, to ask the dean to petition the university for a change of policy you want. Although a negative reply is always annoying, here neither you nor the dean looks bad personally, and you will at least gain insight into the university's finances and priorities.

12. MANNERS BEHIND READABLE BOOKS

T
HE DOUBLE HELIX, the story of how Francis and I found the structure of DNA, was published in February 1968—fifteen years after the discovery. That the tale's many unexpected twists should be revealed to the general public was long on my mind, but how to write them up did not crystallize until a spring 1962 dinner in New York City. There Francis and I were being honored with the Research Corporation Prize. Francis could not be there since he was in Seattle delivering three long-scheduled public lectures at the University of Washington. Abby Rockefeller invited me to spend the night at her parents’ home, where I admired her father's large Derain fauve painting of the Thames and beheld her family's porcelain with less appreciation. I walked from East Sixty-fifth Street to the Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue, then the venue of many such ceremonial affairs. On the dais I was next to Columbia University's literary polymath Jacques Barzun, known to me since my adolescence through his regular appearances on the CBS radio network.

Stimulated by Barzun's conversation, I used my after-dinner acceptance speech to tell the story of our discovery as a very human drama also featuring Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Erwin Chargaff, and Linus Pauling. My unexpected candor elicited much laughter and was later praised for allowing the audience to feel like insiders in one of science's big moments. Feeling jubilant as I walked back along Lexington Avenue to the Rockefeller home, I saw in my future the writing of what Truman Capote would later call the “nonfiction novel.” But since I was scheduled almost immediately to return to England to my mini-sabbatical at Churchill College, Cambridge, I could not see starting to write until my return to Harvard.

Abby Rockefeller

With Cynthia Johnson in Radcliffe Yard

Wally Gilbert and I ride the rhino outside the Harvard Biolabs with Barbara Riddle and blue-eyed Pat Collinge.

In London I initially hoped to use my half of the Research Corporation Prize to commission Francis Bacon to paint Francis Crick; I had recently seen one of Bacon's small portraits in Geneva, and it long lingered in my mind. But the Marlborough Gallery let me know that the Irish-born Bacon painted only close acquaintances. The fact that Francis and Odile had spotted the artist the previous summer in Tangier would not suffice. An hour later, I walked out onto Albemarle Street the contented possessor of one of nine copies of Henry Moore's bronze
Head of a Warrior.

The first chapter of what later came to be called
The Double Helix
was written in Albert and Marta Szent-Györgyi's house on Cape Cod. The summer was coming to an end and my Radcliffe summer assistant, Pat Collinge, was about to join her Harvard boyfriend, Jake, at work on a novel farther out on the Cape. Since the start of summer, Pat's blue eyes and urchin dress made her seem the perfect muse to draw out of me the first pages of my DNA story without apparent effort. Happily, she agreed to be driven down to the Cape in my open MG TF to spend a morning as my typist at Woods Hole before going on to Wellfleet. But I had writer's block for several hours before the words came to me: “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.” More than half the first chapter was typed out before her boyfriend showed up, leaving me wistfully contemplating how I would finish the rest of the chapter without the encouragement of her blue eyes. It wasn't so easy, and only once back at Harvard would I finish the final paragraphs, whereupon my secretary typed out a complete first chapter.

Events connected to my fall Nobel Prize conspired with the school year to keep me from writing any more until the following summer. It was then I spotted the engagingly pretty Radcliffe senior Cynthia Johnson, eating lunch under the big elm tree in front of the Biolabs. She was with our department's best-looking assistant professor, John Dowling, under whom she was doing summer research in George Wald's vision lab. The next day I joined them for lunch and soon afterward was playing tennis with Cynthia on the Radcliffe courts. Too soon I learned that she had a steady boyfriend, Malcolm MacKay, who, having just graduated from Princeton, was in Europe before starting Harvard Law School in the fall. Until that time, however, we took day trips together, once to the beach at Nahant, where, scarily, I first noticed that ceremonial overeating had given me a slight belly, the first fat I'd ever observed in my midsection. Later, on Martha's Vineyard, I stayed several weekends at Cynthia's family home in Edgartown, learning not only that her artist mother had drawn the Duke and Duchess of Windsor but that her grandmother was a close friend of Emily Post, whose book on manners precipitated the decline of the WASP ascendancy in America. Thinking that my being a writer as well as a laureate might offer romance enough to dislodge Malcolm from Cynthia's heart, I spent the last two weeks of August writing two more chapters. But when the fall came and Cynthia brought Malcolm to my flat for my approval, I knew I could not compete with his sailboats.

By then my free moments were devoted to completing six short chapters on the replication of living molecules for a book to emerge in time for my forthcoming January lectures to talented high school students in Australia. George Gamow had lectured to this Sydney summer school the year before and highly recommended it as an excuse for being in the warm sun during January. I likewise looked forward to avoiding the East Coast doldrums over the Christmas/New Year holidays and so accepted the necessity of writing up simplified versions of my Biology 2 lectures.

One muggy August evening, on the plain wooden desk of my Appian Way flat, I wrote out, “It is very easy to consider man unique among living organisms. Great civilizations have developed and changed our world's environments in ways inconceivable for any other form of life. There has thus always been a tendency to think that something special differentiates man from everything else. These beliefs often find expression in man's religions that try to give an origin to our existence and in so doing to provide workable rules for conducting our lives. Just as every human life begins at a fixed time, it was natural to think that man did not always exist but that there was a moment of creation perhaps occurring at the same time for man and all other forms of life. These views, however, were first seriously questioned just over 100 years ago when Darwin and Wallace proposed their theories of evolution based on selection of the most fit.”

The remainder of this introductory chapter came easily over the next several days, leaving me confident of getting the remaining five pieces done by the end of October. In that case, the book would be ready at the start of the Australian summer school. But pressing tasks for the President's Science Advisory Committee let me send off only three chapters (“Introduction,” “A Chemist's View of the Living Cell,” “The Concept of Template Surfaces”). Later John F. Kennedy's death in Dallas and my father's stroke soon after kept me from writing up the last three lectures. To my relief, my father's weakness on one side was not permanent, and by the time I took him down to Washington to be with my sister over the winter, he could walk to and from Harvard Square using a cane.

Despite a brief stopover in Fiji, I felt and looked haggard when I arrived in Sydney just after New Year's. The short brown beard that I had grown in September while lecturing in Ravello led a Sydney newspaper article to describe me as “haunted and Mephistophelean” and “as introverted as his host the physicist Harry Messel was extroverted.” It went on to characterize me as difficult to entertain, a portrayal reflecting several dinner parties given for me by senior academics, not one graced by the face of a pretty girl. In desperation I suggested an evening of nightclubbing only to find that in prudish Sydney chorus girls still danced fully clothed.

My life improved dramatically when a reporter for the
Mirror
arranged for me to be led around the Paddington art scene by the young painter and critic Robert Hughes. In the Rudy Komen Gallery, I bought the large blue painting
Kings Cross Woman
by the former boxer Robert Dickerson and a de Kooning-like green-faced woman by the equally talented Jon Molvig. Then we popped into the Kellman Gallery, where I acquired a life-size wooden man from the Sepie River peoples of Papua New Guinea. Its painted Dubuffet-like face later sat across from me at my Biolabs desk. At last in high spirits, I looked forward to a second day of gallery hopping, but Hughes pulled out, making me suspect that women did not make him tick, a notion since copiously disproved.

Even before my arrival back at Harvard, I feared my Australian lectures and their written versions were for college, not high school, students and that audiences would get lost. My three completed chapters, I decided, would work better as the start of a little college-level text on how DNA provides the information that enables cellular existence. A chance meeting at the Wursthaus in Harvard Square led me to learn that MIT's molecular biologist, Cyrus Levinthal, was advising the new science textbook company W. A. Benjamin. The firm was eager to expand its initial physics and chemistry list to encompass biochemistry and molecular biology. Less than a week later, its main editor, the young Canadian Neil Patterson, came to my office to make me a Benjamin author, as he had earlier the über-physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Soon after, I was in W. A. Benjamin's grubby New York City offices, above a bowling alley on Upper Broadway. My discomfort abated when I was told they would soon move to 2 Park Avenue, below Grand Central Station. Liking the way in which Neil Patterson sought out books by clever young scientists, I signed a contract that gave me a $1,000 advance for a 125-page book to be completed late in the year. In addition, I was offered options to buy five thousand shares of Benjamin stock; there seemed reason to hope the stock price would rise as new books rolled out. By then I had given my prospective book the title
The Molecular Biology of the Gene (MBG).
I was first tempted to call it
This Is Life,
a titular rejoinder to Erwin Schrödinger's
What Is Life?
On reflection, however, that would have been promising more than I could deliver.

In writing my new chapters, I used boldface sentences to summarize the main idea conveyed by paragraphs below it (e.g., “Molecules are restrictively sticky;” “Enzymes cannot be used to order amino acids in proteins;” “Template interactions are based on weak bonds over short distances”). I hit upon “concept heads” as a teaching device when writing the chapter “A Chemist's Look at the Living Cell” before going off to Australia. They naturally emerged from lists of ideas I prepared in outlining what topics each chapter should include. Almost from the start I saw the need to expand upon my Australian chapters, coming up with snappy concept heads such as “The 25-year loneliness of the protein crystallographer.”