Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 10

  As I was to be away for three months, I decided to give up my apartment to Leslie and Alice Orgel. During my last weekend there, Mariette Robertson and I drove the freeways to Hollywood and wandered along the unromantic tackiness of Hollywood Boulevard before our movie began. Afterwards we went back to Del Mar Avenue to pack up my belongings for storage over the summer. Saying good-bye, our touching proved hard to stop. On the floor, we almost made our futures awkward but suddenly held back, knowing that each of us wanted someone else more.

  As I drove back to Pasadena, I was concerned that, once in Europe, Mariette would not prove up to Peter Pauling’s needs. His last letter to me complained that he had yet to meet any of the many rich, beautiful, and clever girls that Cambridge is famous for, though he did know some with only one of these three attributes and more with none. But if he was trying to stop getting along a little too well with girls, he had made the wrong car move. His brother, Linus Jr., had put at his disposal a recently acquired 1930 Mercedes-Benz open touring car, 18 feet long but mostly engine. The fact that it went only three miles for every gallon and could be used only for special occasions kept Peter from becoming the best-known person in Cambridge. His immediate concern, though, was that the May Ball in Peterhouse cost so much that not enough tickets had yet been sold. But at least he had a bright new girl to add to his car’s splendor.

  By now, the girls in Peter’s life were a headache for John Kendrew, who had just written me again about his ambivalent feelings as Peter’s Ph.D. supervisor. Personal charm had not helped Peter measure the absolute intensities of several key X-ray reflections from myoglobin crystals. This task should have consumed at most a month of time, but Peter barely completed it after nine months of capricious complaints. Giving Linus Pauling’s son the ultimatum of work or get out, however, was not yet in the cards. Everyone enjoyed his light, evasive banter over morning coffee, and, given the tiny size of the unit, Peter’s absence would be sorely felt. Moreover, John had a more serious worry that the unit would soon be kicked out of the Cavendish because of Sir Lawrence Bragg’s impending move to London. Bragg had resigned his professorship to be the Director of the Royal Institution, a position earlier held by his equally famous father. The first thought of the newly appointed Cavendish Professor, Nevill Mott, was that the biologically inclined crystallographers should find a more suitable home. So far, however, no suitable alternative to the Cavendish site had been proposed.

  Francis and Odile by then had a new daughter, whom, to my disappointment, they decided to call Jacqueline. To firm up his ideas while stuck in Brooklyn, Francis temporarily was keen to do a book for Academic Press, but, if completed, John Kendrew was sure that it would not be bought at King’s College London. Its structural chemists were again hopping mad at Francis for what they considered a further poaching of their intellectual property. After reading a paper from King’s on the structure of collagen, Francis concluded that Pauline Cowan had made a bad mistake and excitedly wrote back details of his newly conceived alternative model. Those at King’s were not pleased. John Randall, its Wheatstone Professor, angrily wrote to Francis that “you will lose the respect of your scientific colleagues …,” and Maurice Wilkins blew steam to John for more than four hours. Whether Francis had hit upon the right answer, however, was not immediately clear. But on the good side, Maurice had told John “that in contrast to Francis, Jim had been carried away last year by the impetuosity of youth and later might turn out not that unbearable.”

  Cheered up by this unexpected assessment of my character, I made final plans for getting to Woods Hole. I would not be driving alone because both Leslie Orgel and Jane Rich opted at the last moment to join me, tempted by my offer to pay for the gas that would transport them to Chicago and New York City, respectively. Leslie wanted to look over the University of Chicago while Jane saw a way to be with her parents before joining Alex at the National Institutes of Health. All three of us were thus in high spirits as we headed east out of Pasadena along Colorado Avenue. Still then early in the morning, we soon would be on the main highway speeding across the Mojave Desert toward Las Vegas. Although the temperature would be stifling, the filthy smog would be gone.

  Woods Hole: June 1954

  THE HIGH DESERT temperatures kept us worried that our radiator water might boil over until we passed through Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. At the latter, we went off the paved highway for what we anticipated was to be a more scenic route. On the map was a tiny red line leading to the northeast that Leslie was particularly keen to traverse, wanting real wilderness unpolluted by tourists attracted to the multicolored limestone spires. There was no problem in reaching the neatly laid out little Mormon town of Escalante, but beyond it we were no longer on a paved surface.

  As the road climbed through a ponderosa pine–dominated forest, it degenerated into a rutted track. Our average speed fell to no more than 10 miles per hour because of the precipitous voids that appeared to one side or the other. Luckily the constant turns gave me no opportunity to gaze downwards. It was virtually dark when, to our immense relief, a small sign marked the 9200-foot pass, some 3000 feet and two hours above Escalante. Optimistically, we thought the worst must be over, but only the absence of moonlight kept us from being petrified during our subsequent descent along a narrow ridge called Hell’s Backbone. Two more hours of nervous driving passed before we reached the canyon floor where we spotted a ranch-like motel. Jane then did not want to pay for a bed when she could use a sleeping bag on the ground outside. Ungallant as it was, Leslie and I did not join her but forked out $5 each for the certainty that we would not have to drive the next day half asleep. Jane in no way regretted her decision, sleeping so soundly that her distant twisted sleeping bag was thought by a stranger to be a sleeping calf. Later she was happy to pay for her breakfast, after which we traversed the less-demanding roads to Hanksville, and finally hit Green River and its transcontinental highway.

  The remaining mountain passes proved child’s play in comparison to those of our scenic bypass, and we were across the Rockies and into the plains of eastern Colorado before we stopped for the night. Crossing Kansas brought the excitement of water spouts, like tiny tornadoes sometimes, but afterwards there was little but corn to gaze upon until we reached Chicago. There Leslie left us to see the chemist Robert Mulliken, with whom he wanted to talk before deciding whether, after a year in Linus Pauling’s orbit, he should spend equal time at the University of Chicago before returning to England. Ninety minutes later, after Jane and I had driven past the steel mills of South Chicago and Gary, we reached my parents’ home beside the Indiana Dunes State Park, where I was again among the familiar songs of the phoebe and the red-eyed vireo. I had hoped we could then somehow link up with Av and Val Mitchison, then visiting Indiana University some four hours to the south. But they ran out of time, and Jane and I were off the next morning for New York. The next afternoon, I left her at her sister’s apartment and was in Woods Hole by noon of the next day.

  To most people, Woods Hole meant ferries to the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, but for scientists it stood for the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) that was established there in 1888. Situated around a small pond that opened into Vineyard Sound, MBL’s reputation came from its ready access to a plethora of marine animals useful for studying physiologic and developmental processes. Woods Hole was once a small village but its population now greatly expanded in the summer—through the influx of scientists to MBL and through the occupation of massive summer homes by many of America’s wealthier families. Particularly impressive were the wooden shingled mansions on Penzance Point, a narrow, mile-long, highly curved sliver of land that originated just beyond the last of the MBL buildings.

  Only one scientist had a home on Penzance. It belonged to Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian-born biochemist with whom George Gamow would be staying during August. Called Seven Winds, it was one of the more modest houses, sited on the Buzzards Bay side, more than halfway to the tip.
Through his Nobel Prize, awarded for the isolation and identification of ascorbic acid as vitamin C, Albert was the most famous scientist in Hungary and, after the war, had been seriously considered for its presidency. But the moment the communists seized power in 1947, Albert fled with his family. His political views were on the left, but his free-thinking mind was incompatible with the rigidity of communist orthodoxy. Initially he assumed that once in the States he would obtain an important academic position. But American university life and Albert moved to different beats, and his former patron, the Rockefeller Foundation, was unable to place him in conventional academia. So Albert established the Institute for Muscle Research at MBL, populated largely by fellow Hungarian refugees. By then, the annual budgets of the National Institutes of Health were rapidly rising, allowing Albert to get the grant support that covered research costs. It also provided him with a salary sufficient for his celebrity-like existence, made evident by the white Cadillac that he alternated with his dependable motorbike.

  I first saw Albert’s house late the afternoon of my first day in Woods Hole. After moving my belongings into the brick dormitory that overlooked Eel Pond, I had lunch in the still semi-empty wooden cafeteria. Then I went to the Old Mains, the turn-of-the-century laboratory where the Physiology Course had been taught for almost half a century. Already all the other instructors had arrived, and I found myself assigned a lower ground-floor lab. As Victor Bruce was not arriving until the next day, I had time to explore the grandeur of Penzance Point. To join me, I persuaded a young zoologist to abandon her lab chores for a tour of the big houses that were then still largely unoccupied. In the grounds of the largest—the white-shuttered opulence of one of the Pittsburgh Mellons—we most admired a large gazebo looking onto Buzzards Bay. Later, on the main road, we came upon Seven Winds, and its guest cottage next to a rocky beach, off which was moored a raft for swimming.

  My first day ended at the Captain Kidd, which served food but where most people went instead for the beer served on several round tables that dominated the large room overlooking at its far end Eel Pond. Here I was among biologists of many persuasions, who saw no reason to treat genetics as more than another important branch of biology. I quickly sensed an absence of Cold Spring Harbor–like intellectual intensity. But at the summer’s start, I almost welcomed this slower pace, hoping to broaden my biological outlook to the basic facts of physiology, particularly those that related to electrical signaling along nerve cells.

  Albert Szent-Györgyi on his motorbike at Woods Hole, 1957

  Within several days, however, I was back into my past, making the two-hour drive up to Cambridge to see Christa Mayr, now home from Swarthmore for a summer job at Harvard. Victor Bruce came along, still somewhat worn out by the journey from California with his wife, Nancy, and their year-old baby boy. On the second floor of Harvard’s massive red-brick Biological Laboratories, dating from the early 1930s, I found Christa helping with Drosophila experiments that Paul Levine, a newly appointed Assistant Professor, hoped would lead him to a tenured position. Like most summer jobs, Christa’s was far from intense and we saw no hurry to move on. But after she expressed enthusiasm about later spending a weekend at Woods Hole, the time came to leave. Saying that we were expected in Paul Doty’s nearby chemistry lab, we went down the stairs and in less than two minutes had moved from the boredom of old-fashioned biology into the sparkle of chemistry well done.

  Even though Doty’s labs were located within the turn-of-the-century Gibb’s building, they had been modernized—in contrast to those of the Bio Labs, which reeked of thirties mustiness. He was keen to show that double helices fell apart into intact, single strands when exposed to conditions that severed the hydrogen bonds holding together the adenine-thymine and guanine–cytosine base pairs. This much more confident Paul, then aged 34, already had tenure, having come to Harvard six years before after a brief spell teaching polymer chemistry at Notre Dame. Being here was a big plus for Paul because Harvard’s Chemistry Department had no equal in the States, if not the world. Year after year, his incoming graduate students were as good as they come. One, in particular, Helga Boedtker, proved particularly important; Paul married her after his first marriage had fallen apart. At first, they lived on the top floor of a nearby 1920s apartment building, and Paul took us there for lunch sandwiches. There I got real gossip about Harvard and its Chemistry Department filled with too many stars ever to be dominated by a Linus Pauling, popelike figure. In contrast, I gathered that Harvard’s Biology Department was floundering in the past, with its few outstanding professors such as Ernst Mayr and George Wald totally outnumbered by one mistaken appointment after another. But Paul held out hope that McGeorge Bundy, the young new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was too bright to let biology continue its dreary path to nowhere.

  Harvard thus loomed large in my mind as we drove back to the Cape. A faculty position there could give me not only a chemical colleague focused on DNA but also the opportunity to be near Christa and, if not her, the many girls whose faces caught my eye as I walked about Harvard Yard. With that end in mind, I returned five days later to the Boston region to see Lee Wakefield again and learn of the post-graduation plans of her and her elusive Vassar roommate, Margot Schutt. Alas, neither would be anywhere near Boston over the summer. Nor would Lee be visiting her mother’s family on Naushon Island off Woods Hole because she had opted for a summer of outdoor life in Wyoming. My summer fun would have to come from the world of science.

  Woods Hole: July 1954

  THE PHYSIOLOGY COURSE at Woods Hole initially took up all my time, with lectures in the morning followed by labs that ran through the afternoons. Harvard’s George Wald gave the most polished talks, addressing the chemistry of vision. His Brooklyn origins were utterly absent, except in the jokes he later told in the security of his home. In contrast, there were no big crescendos during the lectures on nerve cells by the more modest Steve Kuffler. They were given with such good will that I could never tell him that I remained ignorant of how electrical signals move along nerve fibers. Later the theatrics of Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose guest appearance mixed up apparent wisdom on how muscle proteins work with thoughts on magic molecules that block cancer cells from dividing, provided genuine fun. Those in Albert’s lab, however, knew his enthusiasms often exceeded his facts, and that for the moment there were no rabbits in his hat. At the other extreme were the ponderous orations by Max Lauffer on oxygen-carrying proteins. His labs were equally dreary, leading to an afternoon crisis after several of us temporarily absconded with the experimental lobsters.

  We were encouraged in such antics by Albert’s much-younger distant cousin Andrew Szent-Györgyi and his super-attractive wife Eve. Like Albert, both had fled Hungary when the Russians took over and were now working together under Albert’s patronage. As year-round inhabitants of Woods Hole, they let me know the local gossip and what to expect of dinner with several boring married couples. As a rule, the most attractive girls invariably took the invertebrate course, which emphasized dissection and drawing, rather than the physiology course.

  On the plus side, the students who opted for my phage section knew how to do experiments and got the right answer—that phage DNA, not phage protein, carries the genetic specificity. Earlier I had felt rejected when Frank Stahl, then working on phage for his Rochester Ph.D., chose not to take my lab. But he did not want to waste time repeating techniques he had already mastered. The lab he opted for then failed to inspire him and, at the end of most afternoons, he sat in front of our Old Mains lab drinking gin martinis. Frequently he was with Matt Meselson, who had just arrived from Caltech and was getting his first exposure to non-gene-dominated biology.

  At my suggestion, Matt had brought with him some RNA to do titration experiments aimed at showing whether the bases of RNA were tightly hydrogen-bonded. Not many afternoons, however, were needed to show they were not, and Matt’s summer largely became one for talking about what he should do after he completed his Ph.
D. under Linus Pauling. High on his possible objectives was finding a way to distinguish newly made DNA strands from their parental templates. In theory, they could be distinguished by the rate at which they sedimented in an ultracentrifuge using stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes to differentiate parental from progeny chains. But the differences would be so small that only very cleverly used ultracentrifuges might give clear answers. So I urged Matt to consider post-docing in Sweden. The ultracentrifuges had been pioneered there, and its women were said not to have sexual hang-ups.

  After the course started, instructors and their wives were invited after dinner to the director’s home for not-even-slightly-alcoholic Friday night punch and dessert. The occasion was even heavier than I feared, and I quickly left to search out the Bruces to see if Nancy had finagled a last-minute invitation for me to a Saturday lunch they were going to in a big house beyond Nobska Beach. Their invitation had come from the mother of one of Nancy’s Vassar friends, and the lunch was likely to be a class act. It produced, however, more moments of good manners than of unexpected conversation or beauty. Our hostess’s children had not yet arrived for the summer, and the gathering ended much sooner than I wanted—I knew our Old Mains lab would be deserted and I would have six hours to kill before I could move on to an evening party at J. P. Trinkaus’s home on Devils Lane. Trink, as he was known to all, was an embryologist at the Lab and seemed to know everyone. No one could complain that his beer-drenched parties were staid or that the couples that came together always left together. But after staying too long that night, I realized that no more came out of Trink’s parties than went into them.