When you get into science, you realize the people above you are not gods; that they’re very human and often they’ll say things which you’ll regard as just wrong. That’s why you want to get close to great people.
JAMES D. WATSON, TALK OF THE NATION, 2 JUNE 2000
Contingency always fascinated Jim Watson. How easily things could have turned out differently! How narrowly he missed reaching a dead end! In his last year at Chicago, as he was finishing his degree in zoology and applying to graduate schools, chance played a big role. His plans were all so improbable. As a relic of his old aspirations to be a naturalist and a curator of birds at a top museum, he mentioned ornithology as an interest in his applications. He had little formal training in genetics and yet genetics was what he intended to study. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena, was strong in genetics, but they turned him down—was it the C in physics, or distrust of Robert Hutchins’s unconventional policies at the University of Chicago? Harvard, weak in genetics at the time, accepted him but offered no financial assistance.1
Fortunately, his adviser had seen to it that he also applied to Indiana University. Watson did want to move into genetics, and Indiana was strong in genetics. On its faculty were such luminaries as Herman Muller, the pioneer of using radiation to induce mutations in fruit flies, and two others who worked with microorganisms: Tracy Sonneborn, who did genetics with paramecia, and Salvador Luria, an Italian émigré physician and physicist turned biologist who studied viruses that prey on bacteria. These tiny packages of genes are called bacteriophages—phages for short—and their genetics could be described statistically. Jim wrote many years later that Salva Luria and Max Delbrück had “changed the face of genetics by making the bacteria the obvious organisms for research on the nature of the gene. Experiments could be done in a day instead of weeks.”2
Muller, who had come to Indiana the year before, in Jim’s opinion “was perhaps the only American geneticist with intellectual credentials superior to those of Sewall Wright.” Jim heard that the younger geneticists, Sonneborn and Luria, “were both very clever and I might want to do my thesis work with them.”3
Dean Fernandus Payne wrote Jim that he was ready to take a chance on him, but added sharply that if his heart was still set on ornithology, he should try someplace else, like Cornell. After this, Jim visited Bloomington with his father, and the university awarded him one of half a dozen available fellowships; Jim’s was worth $900 a year.4
As a zoology student starting in on lectures at Bloomington, Jim was at first attracted to Muller’s Drosophila fruit flies, but even though he got an A in Muller’s course, “Mutation and the Gene,” he decided that Drosophila’s “better days were over.” Although students adored Sonneborn and were afraid of Luria’s apparent arrogance toward those he believed were wrong, Jim was more interested in Luria’s bacteriophages as a tool of genetics than in paramecia. What was more, Salva collaborated with Delbrück. Jim later recalled Luria as “a rather quiet individual [who did not] have a sense of theater.”5
Jim was obsessed by competition. How lucky it was that Caltech had turned him down! “There I would have felt myself inferior to many of my peers with much better backgrounds in physics, math and chemistry. But at Indiana, I was the only incoming Ph.D. student who already had started to think about genes.” Chicago’s “hard intellectual obstacle course,” its insistence on “the big picture as opposed to the details that go nowhere,” was paying off.6
Now tall and thin and awkward, Jim usually wore tennis shoes as he moved about the campus. In the corridors, he would walk past fellow students with a far-away look in his eyes, disdaining talk. Sonneborn invited him to join Friday evening seminars at his house. There he irritated some graduate students by his way of steering the conversation where he wanted it to go, and annoyed all by “his habit of opening a book to read when speakers are dull and unintelligent.”7Shy or not, he boldly, singlemindedly went up to Muller, Sonneborn, or Luria after seminars for discussions. Once again, his preferred contacts were with his elders.
At Bloomington, Jim’s “adolescent fantasies” were being fulfilled among the “high-power minds” he was meeting for the first time. He exulted, “The truly bright did not live like our relatives or nearby neighbors and wasted little time worrying about how they looked, or the polish on their cars, or whether their lawns were overrun with crab grass.” He was learning that he could burst through age barriers—and not destroy his career by setting his elders straight. Could he be in the same league as leading American biologists?8Having become “part of the highest form of human achievement,” science, he felt “light-years away from the uninformed prejudices of the poor or the callous selfsatisfaction of the rich.”9
In Watson’s paper for Sonneborn’s class, which he wrote on the genetics of Chlamydomonas, he was not shy about writing critically of the work of a scientist named Moewus. “Some of the statements reported as facts were merely wishful thinking. It is hard to imagine how all of [the] work was ever done.” Later, Moewus admitted that the experiments were unrepeatable.10
Indiana, Jim reflected later, probably was “the best place in the world” for him. There, “people were trying to move into the future. . . . When you go to graduate school, you’ve got to become future-oriented.” Jim aspired “to make the next big step in a major scientific thing.”11No one knew how to do it, but he could reject the professors who clearly weren’t getting anywhere. Half a century later, in an on-line exchange, he advised a student not to work in an area where there are “too many facts.”12
At Bloomington, the significance of what he had heard in Wright’s course at Chicago began to hit Jim “with a vengeance.” As units of heredity, genes had to replicate. Luria’s lectures pulled him “into the center of the gene-replication dilemma,” which was that no one knew how they did it.13It was clear, Luria said in the 1970s, “that we were thinking about nothing but the gene.”14At the time, Watson reflected later, one good idea was that genes probably provided the information for making proteins, but biologists still had only a foggy notion of what a protein was. A second good idea was that it might be DNA that carried the genes, and that viruses could yield answers about that sooner than larger organisms could.15But in those days, scientists still lacked a clear idea of what a virus was. Despite Avery’s finding, published in 1944, that DNA carried the genes in Pneumococcus, many scientists found it hard to believe that genes for such complex things as proteins could be anywhere but in equally complex proteins. Watson took a course with one of the disbelievers, Felix Haurowitz, and got an A.16
Like Max Delbrück, his copioneer on bacteriophages, “Lu,” as Salva Luria signed his letters, was “not afraid to say what . . . was bad science.”17Together with Delbrück, Luria had “changed the face of genetics” by showing that the bacteria their viruses preyed on were “the obvious organisms for research on the nature of the gene. Experiments could be done in a day instead of weeks.” He also showed that the bacteriophage viruses could form mutants “every bit as stable as those found in bacteria.” Delightfully to Jim, Luria was impolite, unlike many professors who were “too gentlemanly to unmask the trivial.”18He was attracted by the simplicity of Luria’s bacteriophage system. After only a few days in Luria’s course on viruses, and even though he did not know Luria at all, and was just a zoology student among 40 in the class, Jim asked to start working in Luria’s lab in the spring term of 1948.19Although Salva found Jim at that time “even more odd than later,” he accepted him promptly. He was “tremendously intelligent, with this mixture of self-assurance and uncertainty of himself that very often bright kids have.”20
Getting into a good lab was vital, as Watson appreciated later, and it was best “if you work for a young person who’s later going to be important.” The ideas are likely to be new and the professor will not be surrounded by too many students.21“I think you’re unlikely to make an impact unless you get into a really important lab at a young age because you’re unlikely to know what problem to work on,” Watson said in 1992.22
Luria set him to work on bacteriophages that had been made inactive by X-rays; Luria himself had been studying phages inactivated by less energetic ultraviolet rays, and their reactivation in a process he called “multiplicity reactivation.” Jim’s work on phages treated with X-rays, he saw later, was “a routine extension of Luria’s prior work,”23and so he did not need to be clever in planning the next day’s experiments. In Salva’s opinion, Jim “did a rather simple problem for his thesis but very beautifully.” Although Jim looked disheveled all the time, his notebooks were more perfect than the notebooks of anyone else Luria ever saw. His odd student was “a mess—except in things that mattered.” Luria rejected any idea that he had “programmed” Watson. He thought his biggest contribution to Jim was “to give him a pleasant environment.”24
One of Jim’s lab mates was Renato Dulbecco from Italy, later a Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering discoveries on viruses that induce cancer. Dulbecco’s family had not yet joined him, and he and Watson occasionally dined together at the Indiana Union. Jim tried out an idea on Renato, based on a theory of Luria’s, that the T2 bacterial virus had 25 genes. Why not calculate a crude weight of a gene by using electronmicroscope pictures that roughly indicated a total weight of the virus? Dulbecco wasn’t interested, perhaps because he was skeptical of Luria’s theory, or for a more general reason: “Despite Avery, McCarty, and MacLeod, we were not at all sure” that DNA was the only component of phages that “carried genetic specificity.”25
In the spring of 1948, not long after Jim started working in Salva’s lab, Max Delbrück stopped off in Bloomington for a day and met this excited student, who thought of him as “a legendary figure” because his ideas were so prominent in Schrödinger’s What Is Life? 26Jim was pleasantly surprised. He had expected a balding, overweight German. Instead, at 42, the thin and crew-cut Max appeared youthful in body and spirit, and he talked straight. “He did not beat around the bush and the intent of his words was always clear.”27
Delbrück was a veteran of the great physicist Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. He talked of Bohr’s hope that some principle of complementarity, like that needed for understanding quantum mechanics in physics, would explain biology. One day in August 1932, Max had rushed over from the Copenhagen train station to hear Bohr lecture on applying the physicist’s concept of complementarity in biology. Delbrück was so struck that he made it his mission to bring physics into biology. Delbrück, perhaps Bohr’s greatest contribution to biology, fervently hoped, but in vain, that biology would yield new laws of physics.28Luria didn’t share this hope. “I was always skeptical. . . . I always thought this was lots of baloney.”29By the late 1930s, Delbrück had hit on tiny bacteriophages—which infected bacteria and were less than one ten thousandth of a millimeter in length—as the target of his research. These ultramicroscopic phages could reproduce. Within half an hour of being invaded, a phage-infected bacterium would burst and release 100 or more progeny phages. So now Delbrück could state the “central” problem, in the words of Gunther Stent: “Just how does the parental phage particle manage to produce its crop of a hundred progeny in that half-hour?” Delbrück, Luria, and the taciturn biochemist Alfred D. Hershey of Washington University in St. Louis became the nucleus of a small band of phage workers infused with “the desire to solve the mystery of the nature of the gene.”30Delbrück was a relentless simplifier, and hence was constantly irritated that nature was so prodigal in adding functions at each age of evolution. The bacteriophage called T4 had 150 genes, many of them used only in emergencies. “Nature,” he said, “provided more than was needed.”31
Jim was inspired. “In the presence of Delbrück, I hoped that I might someday participate just a little in some great revelation.”32
According to Luria, Delbrück did not so much pick good people as attract them by his intelligence and the excitement of spending a day with him at the blackboard, writing and erasing, “chewing on a problem.” He insisted that “science had to be fun.”33
One of Max’s students at Caltech was Robert Sinsheimer, who wrote that the sheer force of Delbrück’s personality influenced students and colleagues alike. “Bright and rigorously logical, he imposed a quantitative intellectual discipline” on a largely qualitative and unfocused field. Delbrück tackled “problems that could be approached quantitatively, analyzed abstractly, and preferably studied with simple equipment.” As a combination of pater familias and Herr Professor, he created “an extraordinary cohesion” among phage workers, insisting that they concentrate on only a few types of phage—so that their results would be comparable. To Sinsheimer, Max could be “mercilessly caustic” in scientific debate—a stock response was “I don’t believe a word of it”—but he was “never mean-spirited.” By blunt and open criticism, by suspicion of “convoluted and arcane argument,” by exposing ambiguities and uncertainties in a speaker’s chain of reasoning, he persistently demanded clear concepts and logical presentation. The best policy for giving presentations, Max held, was, “Assume [listeners] are totally ignorant but infinitely intelligent.” It was “sink or swim” for his students, combined with parties and pranks and excursions to the California desert for hiking and climbing.34The French Nobel Prize winner François Jacob wrote that Delbrück’s “rigor, his frankness, his way of going to the heart of a problem were combined with his surprising youthfulness, of mind as of body.” Jacob wrote:
He loved jokes and gambling. But the game that for him mattered above all else was science: an open, direct science without secrets or any affectation of mystery, where the efforts of all were joined in mutual complement. He cared little about who was first to bring off a particular experiment. The essential thing was that it had been done. Only coherence and relevance mattered: the coherence of theories and of conceptions; the relevance of facts.
Delbrück was a confirmed reductionist. He believed, as Jacob wrote, that the biologist had to choose a “system” that defined “the experimenter’s freedom to maneuver, the nature of the questions he is free to ask, and even, often, the type of answer he can obtain.” There were so many questions. “To make them accessible to experiment, the questions had to be changed, broken down into parts.”35The bacterial viruses were the smallest packages of genes known. Decades later, as the Human Genome Project was revving up, the biologist Ron Davis of Stanford applied the doctrine to the genetics of plants: “It was Max Delbrück who started the concept that you . . . can’t work on a whole bunch of different organisms. You have to work on one and only one.”36
Delbrück expected that he would make progress on the gene faster by staying clear of chemistry and the details of the exact nature of the gene. Chemists would resolve the precise role of DNA while biologists focused on how genes are duplicated. Luria, explaining the small influence on them in those days of Avery’s great discovery that DNA carries the genes, admitted that he and Delbrück had a partly unconscious distaste for biochemistry and biochemists. “I don’t think we attached great importance to whether the gene was a protein or a nucleic acid.”37
Delbrück’s “fun and games” style was not lost on the young Watson. Max adopted a policy of “calculated bizarreness” and exhibited what Watson thought was “an extraordinary mixture of arrogance and decency.” Delbrück “despised all forms of pretense and had . . . little use for tortoise-like minds” buried in the past. So giving a talk before him “was for most scientists a frightening experience. He actually wanted to learn if you had a ‘take-home message.’ Unclear talks could provoke his scorn, as did unreadable scientific papers.” Delbrück never hesitated “to interrupt when the message was unclear or patently erroneous.”Even if the interruptions were not meant personally, biologist Norton Zinder recalled many years later, “Max destroyed young presenters with his interruptions. Even the hardiest could scarcely recover.”38
Under Delbrück’s influence, the decades-old laboratories at Cold Spring Harbor on the North Shore of Long Island were, after the war, becoming “the site to which the best and the brightest of the genedominated scientific world came to meet for the exchange of ideas.” Their protégés could attend a growing number of summer courses, including the one on bacteriophages that Delbrück began in 1945 as “a lifeboat” for scientists who were in danger of going stale.39Watson remembered “Max’s unchallenged scientific collectivism.” The idea was: “What mattered most . . . were the phage facts and ideas, not the individuals who brought them forth.” And so Delbrück’s followers could “take real joy in the discoveries of others.”40
Soon, at Cold Spring Harbor, Jim was to experience Max’s personality for much more than a day, and to begin building a picture of what science was supposed to be. Salva Luria took Jim and Renato Dulbecco with him to Cold Spring Harbor for the summer of 1948, where Luria and Delbrück had begun their summer phage experiments together in 1941. As refugees from wartime enemies, Italy and Germany, they were not pulled into war research. They and their small band of disciples, when not together for summers and small meetings, telephoned and wrote each other constantly.
Since 1933, Cold Spring Harbor had been the site of its increasingly famous annual Symposium on Quantitative Biology, which was designed to focus on an urgent problem in fundamental biology. Year-round research at Cold Spring Harbor was divided between the Biology Laboratory, supported by wealthy local people organized into the Long Island Biological Association, and a Genetics Unit of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Established by Andrew Carnegie in 1902, the institution operates labs in several fields at various locations around the United States and abroad, among them the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories in California. The Carnegie Institution took over the Eugenics Records Office, which had already been set up at Cold Spring Harbor, but had to close it in the late 1930s because its work was judged to be racist and unscientific.41 The scientific director of the laboratories was Milislav Demerec, whom Watson credited with bringing the labs into modern biology. Many years later, Sydney Brenner, who was recruited for a research visit to the United States by Demerec, recalled the relentless economy Demerec practiced. If Demerec came into a lab and spotted a gas burner going he would shut it off. But Brenner praised the initiative of “Old Demerec” in “shifting off Drosophila into the bacterial genetics which was very new then.”42
At Cold Spring Harbor, salt water and its smells lapped against the laboratory’s grounds. From this “oasis of calm and peace,” Jacob later wrote, the “excessiveness” of New York seemed far away.43The grounds were strung out along Bungtown Road, which ran from south to north a short distance from the harbor’s southwestern shore. This crudely paved road, much of it enclosed by jungly growth that flourished in the humid air, had gotten its name from the local nineteenth-century whaling industry. Blubber was rendered into oil that was stored in barrels stopped by bungs. Walking up and down this rural road was excellent for talking science. White frame houses from the village’s whaling days were dotted amid the trees and lawns bordering the harbor. Institutional buildings included a beautiful white frame laboratory built in the 1890s, a stuccoed concrete dining hall and dormitory called Blackford, built shortly after 1900, and a research building and a library, both in Italianate style.
The lawns could be used for volleyball or evening softball matches. The softballs frequently overshot the playing area into the cornfield where the geneticist Barbara McClintock’s experiments led to her theory of “movable genetic elements,” for which she received the Nobel Prize many years later. One could lounge on the lawns, look out across the water to the village of Cold Spring Harbor, and talk about the most interesting problems.
Toward the northern end of Bungtown Road a sand spit belonging to the laboratory almost closed the inner harbor off from the outer. One could go swimming and sailing and clamming—or play tennis. One could canoe across the harbor to the village “in pursuit of . . . ice cream sundaes or clams on the half shell.”44Between experiments, scientists could talk almost incessantly about the gene. In this beautiful place, in an informal and intimate atmosphere, good and bad science could be sorted out in “honest ways.” To Jim, “There was only one question, ‘What is the gene?’ It was paradise.”45
He was entering “a privileged inner circle of scientists” at the summit of modern biology, “before he had done anything to deserve it.” He could test himself against his elders and complete his liberation from traditional biology, even though he felt he was “more an observer than a real player.” The scientists were all on a first-name basis, and there was no “personal penalty” for disagreeing with Max. Jim was excited to find that “high-level science could be more than long days in the lab and much mental sweat.” It could include “outdoor fun and silly moments.”46He recalled later: “When you get into science, you realize the people above you are not gods; that they’re very human and often they’ll say things which you’ll regard as just wrong. That’s why you want to get close to great people ’cause . . . in a sense you discover they’re not so great and you don’t feel very great and so . . . maybe you’ll find an idea before they do.”47
Jim was mesmerized by Max, who was becoming his intellectual father and remained so for a few years. He was taken with “Max’s firm yet soft way of speaking,” and delighted in the company of Delbrück’s wife, Manny, a lifelong favorite.
As much as possible I tried to be near him—when he was eating in Blackford, or writing equations on the Blackford Hall Fireplace Room blackboard, or hitting tennis balls so much harder than I could, or swimming off the sand spit raft. Then, he was about to turn 42, and at 20 I was almost young enough to be his son. Others, observing our similar tall, thin shapes and my never subtle attempts to mimic Max’s behavior, jokingly began to call me son of Max.48
Late that summer the phage group assembled at Cold Spring Harbor for experiments and the annual phage course. Among those taking the course were Gunther Stent and Seymour Benzer, who both became famous biologists. To Watson, the gathering “was not for amateurs.” Half a century later, when the number of scientists thinking about DNA every day may have numbered a quarter of a million, Watson wrote that at that time, “logic, never emotion or commercial considerations, set the tone.”49
Soon after that summer, when Jim was back at Indiana working on his thesis, Dulbecco delivered a blow that forced Luria’s lab to repeat the work of the last year and a half. He discovered photoreactivation in phages. Apparently multiplicity reactivation would not, by itself, explain the genetic organization of phages. Now, Watson’s thesis on phages bombarded with X-rays was “much less likely to yield anything very valuable.”50Somewhat discouraged, Luria wrote Delbrück that “the whole picture of X-ray phage is very foggy.”51But the complexity of chemically induced indirect effects of the X-rays kept Jim from worrying “whether they would be very significant.” He realized that the time for doing a thesis “was primarily a time for learning until, eventually, I could stand on my own feet as opposed to those of Luria.”52
That fall, Jim, Salva, and Renato drove up to Chicago to take part in one of the frequent phage meetings staged by the famous Hungarianborn atomic physicist Leo Szilard, who in the aftermath of the explosion of the atomic bomb had shifted his interests from chain reactions to the gene. The portly and ebullient Szilard “crushed” Jim by telling him he had to learn to speak clearly. “Leo would start interrupting me as soon as I started to speak.” Perhaps Szilard wouldn’t have been so fierce if Jim had been saying nothing of importance.53
Jim plowed onward with his research on effects of chemicals on phage reactivation. His mentors arranged for him to speak at meetings in Bloomington and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In Bloomington, Elie Wollman of the Pasteur Institute in Paris summarized his colleague André Lwoff ’s significant discovery of a new virus survival trick. Certain phages could penetrate a bacterium and not, as was usual, make the cell turn out hundreds of phage copies. Instead, under some kind of genetic restraint, the viral genes would behave as part of the bacterial genome in a phenomenon called “lysogeny.” Delbrück, as the pope of the phage “church,” had dismissed lysogeny as “heresy.” But now Lwoff had definite proof of the phenomenon’s existence. Also at Bloomington, Alfred Hershey described the discovery in bacteriophages of the “crossing over” of genetic material, which biologists had hitherto thought was possible only in sexually reproducing organisms. Much later, with the advantage of hindsight, Gunther Stent, who attended the meeting, thought that if Hershey’s experiments had been properly understood, his epochal discovery three years later—that virus genes are carried by DNA alone—could have occurred three years earlier. Hershey’s discovery in 1952 would greatly intensify Watson’s focus on DNA.54
At Luria’s suggestion, Jim spent the summer of 1949 at Caltech, to which Dulbecco would soon move. The phage group gathered at Caltech instead of Cold Spring Harbor because Manny Delbrück was expecting a baby, and couldn’t travel. Max and Salva spent most of their time writing, and Jim did what he would remember as “token weekday experiments,” but there were phage seminars several times a week.55Max told Jim that he was lucky that his thesis was “boring.” Otherwise he would have been stuck with following it up, “instead of having time to think and learn.”56He could have been “trapped into a rat race where people wanted you to solve everything immediately.” Many years later, asked about his thesis work, Watson said he had been reviewing his notebooks, “but they failed to reveal the exact ups and downs of my thinking about the direct and indirect effects of X-rays as revealed by phage survival curves.”57
Soon, as Watson was passing his preliminary exams, Luria’s and Delbrück’s thoughts turned to where their protégé should go after receiving his doctoral degree. Luria thought he should go to Europe. Europe, with its slower pace, was better for developing innovative scientific ideas. And further, Jim needed to immerse himself in what Luria could not bear to learn: biochemistry. In Copenhagen there was an excellent biochemist, Herman Kalckar, who had attended a phage course at Cold Spring Harbor. A friend of Max’s, Kalckar was interested in the synthesis of nucleic acids. “DNA seemed to be the thing because of Avery.” Better still, in the fall of 1949 Kalckar attended a phage meeting in Chicago and agreed to take Watson (and Stent) for postdoctoral fellowships the next fall. An annual fellowship stipend of $3,000 was secured. Salva thought Kalckar would arrange for Jim “to learn the X-ray techniques of the Braggs [in England] and maybe apply it to study the molecular structure of DNA.” Max had a more mystical reason for sending Jim to Copenhagen. Niels Bohr, who had influenced Max profoundly, was still there. “Therefore I should go and pick up some of the spirit of Copenhagen,” Jim recalled. “I did. Most of the spirit was given on Friday night.”58
In his final year in Bloomington, Jim’s confidence grew. He thought of himself as a genuine member of the phage group, with which he had spent the summers of 1948 and 1949. He was convinced that he knew the factual details of the last 10 years of phage research better than Salva or Max. In the Szilard meetings up in Chicago, he spoke up when he didn’t “understand an argument or an experiment.” Now “effectively on my own,” he dreamed up several new ideas on how X-rays inactivate phages. They proved to be off base, but he was having fun.59
The struggle in the spring of 1950 was “to write up minor results” for his thesis. He thought of it as “torture.” He wrote the thesis in a month, but Salva “did not like it” and took it home for rewriting. “Not surprisingly,” Watson recalled, “the thesis was accepted without fuss at my Ph.D. exam in late May.” He later reflected that he got his degree fast, “not because I was really that bright, but because there was very much less to learn.”60
By then, Jim knew “more than subconsciously . . . that even the most elegant phage experiments were unlikely to reveal the gene at the crucial molecular level. Somehow, I had to move closer toward the chemistry of DNA.”61
In 1950, after a summer month with Max at Caltech, where Linus Pauling, the colossus of the chemical bond, was king, Jim went east for a final six weeks at Cold Spring Harbor before taking the boat to Europe. At Cold Spring Harbor, “practical jokes dominated the mood.” One evening he, Manny Delbrück, and two others let the air out of friends’ tires when they were over at Neptune’s Cove in the village. The payback was buckets of water thrown over their beds.62Late in August, the first phage conference—another stage in the growth of the phage “church”—drew some 30 scientists to Cold Spring Harbor. A big topic was following radioactive phosphorus from one generation of phage to the next. Summarizing the conference, as he would for many years, was Alfred Hershey, who had just moved to Cold Spring Harbor from St. Louis. (He later shared a Nobel Prize with Luria and Delbrück.) Watson recalled that when Hershey summarized the meeting, he often spoke more words in an hour “than he had spoken to outsiders over the past year.”63
Soon after Jim reached Copenhagen and Kalckar’s lab, he became afraid that he had made a bad move—he found that he was bored by biochemistry. He and Gunther Stent were more phage-conscious than Kalckar had expected. Kalckar’s habits seemed “vague.” Worse, Kalckar wasn’t really interested in DNA but only in “very small things,” mainly the role of enzymes, those catalyst-like worker proteins, in putting DNA together.64To Jim, “there was no way [Kalckar’s] experiments on how DNA precursors are made could help determine the structure of the gene.” Seeing little chance of getting guidance from Kalckar, Watson spent most of his time across town in the laboratory of Ole Maaloe, working on how radioactive phosphorus was handed down from parents to progeny. He lived in a pension filled with theoretical physicists visiting Bohr’s laboratory. He thought the Danish girls “very pretty” but he knew few of them.65Still, he wrote to Max that “as a city, Copenhagen is very nice.”66
But as the days shortened and “the long winter of rain and darkness”67deepened, Herman Kalckar’s marriage dissolved, and the atmosphere in his lab became “just plain depressing.” Jim wrote Max, “I find it difficult to describe the very morbid feeling which pervaded Herman’s lab during this interval.”68It was a relief to get permission—and travel expenses—from the U.S. fellowship headquarters to accompany Kalckar and his new girlfriend south to the sun, to the Zoological Station in Naples.
It was one of the shrines of classical biology, but during his weeks there Jim found “really nothing to do. . . . It was hard to be interested in it.”69He pushed to finish a paper he and Maaloe had written and corresponded about it with Max, who was planning to submit the paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Max, rejecting what Watson remembered as his “turgid style,” rewrote both the introduction and the discussion of the results.70At one point in the draft, Watson and Maaloe had written that they were confident that by means of radioactive phosphorus “the genetic material can be labeled.” Significantly, Max changed “genetic material” to “virus particle.” He was not yet ready to restrict the genes of viruses to viral DNA.71
At Naples, contingency influenced Jim’s career in a big way. He happened to attend a conference on macromolecules, both proteins and nucleic acids. He was interested in the topic because he didn’t see how biochemistry and genetics would get together and go beyond trying to figure out how genes were made without determining the structure of a gene. He knew by then that “the essence of the gene was a molecule. Genetic experiments were never going to say anything deep about the molecule. I had to study the molecule.”72By another accident, Maurice Wilkins from King’s College London substituted for his boss, John T. Randall, as a speaker. Several years earlier, Wilkins had become friends with the brash Francis Crick, who, like Wilkins, had left physics for biology.
At the conference, as Jim listened, Wilkins started by stating that “the study of crystalline nucleoproteins in living cells may help one to approach more closely the problem of gene structure.” Near the end, Wilkins showed an X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA fibers that he had taken. Suddenly Watson was aware that “there existed someone who actually was trying to solve the structure of DNA, which seemed a likely candidate for the gene.”73Instead of the murky pictures made earlier, “these pictures were very good. . . . There was a well-defined structure. . . . This time there was a marvelous structure that someone could find.” Responding strongly to visual evidence, as he would do so often in the future, he wondered who could study this structure. “Why not me?”74
On an excursion to the Greek temples at Paestum not far from Naples, Jim tried to talk to Wilkins about coming to work with him in London. But Wilkins shied away. Wilkins recalled that he found “Jim Watson very interested in DNA, but I couldn’t make out from what point of view. He was a bit of a puzzle to me. I didn’t quite know what to make of him.”75
Heading back to Copenhagen, Jim stopped off in Geneva and there heard of Linus Pauling’s great achievement of finding large stretches of the amino acid subunits of complex proteins arranged in what he called the alpha helix.76Helices were in the air. To continue his work Jim needed a new place to go the next year: Maaloe was off to Caltech for a year, and Jim was probably beneath the notice of the godlike Pauling, a titan at Caltech. There was one place left: Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, which was the world’s leading center for using X-rays to probe the structure of macromolecules and where, as Jim would soon find out, Crick was working. By a stroke of luck, Salvador Luria met the biophysicist John Kendrew of the Cavendish and arranged for Watson to go there.77