Genes, Girls, and Gamow Read online

  On weekdays, however, most of us tried to maintain the facade that we were in Woods Hole primarily for science. But I deeply offended several old-timers by giving lectures in unlaced tennis shoes and wearing my floppy hat at night as well as during the day. My water pistol was also judged inappropriate, even though I generally restricted its aim to a pretty girl from the South taking invertebrate lab work too seriously. But I saw no reason to dress or act differently than I had during past Cold Spring Harbor summers when pomposity always backfired.

  As July progressed, I gravitated more and more towards those few visitors who had an interest in genetics. Particularly rewarding to have about were Boris Ephrussi (co-author of the Nature hoax of the previous year) and Harriet Taylor, who had just arrived from Paris. Later they were moving on to Harvard, where Boris was a visiting professor for the fall term. We were often joined at meals by the New York–based geneticist Ruth Sager and her husband Seymour Melman, an economist at Columbia University seemingly resigned to the fact that his wife bristled when identified as Mrs. Melman. Ruth, then at the Rockefeller Institute, had worked at Columbia and was full of gossip about the controversial German scientist, Franz Moewus, long suspected of faking much of his work at Heidelberg. There, he and his wife had used the green alga Chlamydomonas purportedly to show how genes control the synthesis of enzymes. In an attempt to establish Moewus’s innocence, Francis Ryan had brought him temporarily to Columbia to repeat certain key experiments. Now Moewus was in Woods Hole with his wife to be part of the Botany course. So far the jury was still out.

  With the exception of a brief note to my parents, I had not written a letter since arriving in Woods Hole and by mid-July had little reason to find envelopes addressed to me in the mailroom. To my surprise, I found, forwarded from Pasadena, a formal invitation from the Honorable James and Mrs. Griffiths to the wedding, several days later in London, of their daughter Sheila to Roy Pryce, the young historian she had met during her last days in Rome. Although I had long stopped thinking about Sheila since our meeting in the Italian Alps during summer 1952, the invitation jolted me.

  In the afternoons, Matt Meselson and I frequently retreated to a large garden that ran down to Quisset Harbor and whose largely absentee owner permitted the occasional visitor to enjoy. Two summer village waitresses often drove there with us, one with long blond hair while the other was slightly plump. They were in search of more structure for their lives than Matt and I wished to give, particularly when the afternoons were over and there were evening talks to attend, if nothing better came along. There was a drive-in movie theater two miles away in Falmouth, but I was never able to persuade the pretty little blond girl in the adjacent invertebrate course lab to come along. So I consoled myself with the knowledge that the social scene was bound to improve. Not only would George Gamow soon arrive, but Francis Crick’s job in Brooklyn had effectively ended, giving him the month of August before his return to England. And, Christa Mayr was coming down to Woods Hole for the last weekend in July.

  Before Christa got off the bus from Boston, I was apprehensive that she might have found a summer boyfriend while working at Harvard. But the enthusiastic way she had recently confirmed the visit gave me reassurance that no one new had seriously entered her life. For Saturday night, I found her a vacant dormitory room and we momentarily went to it after her bus arrived. From there, we walked on to the younger Szent-Györgyi’s house for I wanted Albert and Eve to meet her. Quickly Christa was let in on the practical joke that we hoped would mark the high point of this Woods Hole summer. With both Francis and Geo about to arrive, the time had come for a super summer party. And to give it some style, we hit on the idea of sending fake party invitations to the entire Woods Hole community. The invitations would come, reputedly from Geo himself, to celebrate his arrival through a “Wiskie-Twistie” RNA party at the Szent-Györgyi guest cottage. Albert’s wife Marta would not welcome the impending mob scene, but if Geo later went along with our gag, she could hardly stop him being himself. Marta’s style was that of a Hungarian Countess, and already I had fallen into her bad graces by being too casual at a barbecue presided over by Albert for his younger Hungarian colleagues. My standing with her could hardly have been any lower, so I felt no harm could come from being identified later as the hoax’s originator.

  It became even more apparent to me that a real party was badly needed when Christa and I ended the day at the Trinkaus’s weekly beer and gin bash. There, to my annoyance, Christa enjoyed the attentions paid to a pretty new face, while I was part of conversations warmed over too often. The next day, however, I had her undivided attention as we canoed across the Hole to Nonamesset, the closest of a string of unspoiled Elizabeth Islands lying off Woods Hole. Soon we were walking through a sheep meadow towards the narrow bridge going over to Naushon, the largest of the islands, on which most of the Forbes summer homes had been built. Nonamesset now belonged largely to sheep and their attendant ticks that we were constantly pulling off our bare legs below our swimming suits. Upon crossing the bridge, we continued on to the secluded harbor below the multistoried wooden mansion of Cameron Forbes, the 90-year-old family patriarch who long ago had been governor general of the Philippines. No cars were permitted on Naushon and its outlying appendages and horses and buggies used to go between the houses. Although we were trespassing, we didn’t believe anyone would mind and had no hesitancy in waving to the several carriages that passed us, presumably taking Forbeses to Sunday lunches at each other’s homes.

  After Christa went back to Cambridge, I joined the Harvard behavioral biologist, Don Griffin, for a tern-collecting trip to a deserted island off the Maine coast. Don, a newly appointed professor in the biology department, had asked me to come along after learning that I had once planned to be an ornithologist. After the terns were collected and banded, they were to be taken some 100 miles inland to see whether, upon release, they would quickly fly back to their home island. The chance to be on a Maine tern island by itself would have led me to the long car ride. More important, I thought, Don might start thinking of me as a potential member of the Harvard faculty.

  The weekend was about to start when I got back to Woods Hole after three days away, and I found a letter from Sydney Brenner telling me that he would soon visit the lab. He was away from Oxford for two months doing experiments in Milislav Demerec’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor as well as taking the bacterial genetics course there. His wife May had remained in England with their son Jonathan, largely because of her distaste for the American political scene but also because Sydney’s stipend as a graduate student was not meant to include bringing a family along.

  Francis Crick had already arrived and, with dormitory accommodations chancy to find, rented a small room in the home of long-time summer residents, the Littles, who had seven children known to all as the “little Littles.” Geo was still two days away, coming with his wife, Rho, and their almost out-of-adolescence son, Igor. Early on Saturday morning, with the help of Andrew and Eve, I secretly mimeographed more than 100 copies of the invitation to Geo’s party for later placement in the mailboxes used by Woods Hole scientists. Near midnight on Sunday, I placed the invitations into the various pigeonholes. For 48 hours the MBL community would savor their unexpected invitations. Then the real fun would begin.

  Woods Hole: August 1954

  THE EUPHORIA INITIALLY generated by multitudinous Seven Winds invitations slowly turned into a search for the culprits who had set up the denizens of Woods Hole for their subsequently deflated egos. Francis Crick was among those taken in, cheerfully asking me whether I had also been invited and anticipating an evening of Gamow-promoted high jinks. George Wald was mad at being had and stopped me in front of the Captain Kidd with the rumor, soon turned into fact, that Gamow denied any input into the invitation bearing his name. Although Wald did not directly imply that I was one of the pranksters, his disapproval indicated that I might have to think about a girl-containing university other than Harvard. Even deeper disapproval
came from the elderly Guternatches, whose pre-Nazi German origins gave them the unshakable belief that students did not trifle with their professorial elders.

  Rho Gamow, meanwhile, told everyone she knew that Geo was a co-conspirator. In more than 20 years together, Geo had never been happier than when perpetuating a practical joke. I knew, though, that I was in imminent danger of being thrown, clothes on, into Eel Pond by the Captain Kidd habitués who persisted in believing that DNA was not the only way of looking at biology. Such possible humiliation happily passed when Geo announced that the big party would go ahead and that all who had received the phoney invitations were welcome.

  Those of us who knew Geo were already part of a semi-continuing party atmosphere rotating between Seven Winds cottage and the Captain Kidd round tables, where Geo knew that he could find an ever-changing set of faces unprepared for his limericks and card tricks. Particularly lethal were the drinks that Geo prepared, for his idea of a tall drink was a tall glass completely filled with whisky. Whenever possible, I made my own drinks and so avoided having to slip outside to empty my glass on the rocks going down to the water. By now, Sydney Brenner was briefly with us, having decided to interrupt his Cold Spring Harbor stay to be with Francis and Geo.

  With the real party still a week away, Francis, Sydney, and I joined Geo daily in the water-facing living room of the cottage for extended discussions of Geo’s genetic codes. My mathematically deficient brain meant that I often missed the validity of the argument either for or against Geo’s diamond code or the alternative schemes hatched by Geo and his close friend, the bomb-making physicist, Edward Teller. We badly needed much more data on which amino acids were next to which in the newly sequenced proteins. We had the insulin sequence recently completed in Cambridge by Fred Sanger and that for the peptide ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone). Even with the limited data on hand, the diamond code looked dicey, irrespective of the implausible stereochemical assumptions it placed on how amino acids would be recognized by triplets of base pairs.

  After a third afternoon of intellectually forward and backward moments, Albert Szent-Györgyi asked us up for drinks at Seven Winds itself. There I had to face a Marta silently mad about the hordes that were to descend on her principality in a week’s time. Equally standoffish was her college-aged daughter, Ursula, who, to my annoyance, only smiled when Francis caught her eye. My attempts to mollify Marta obviously went nowhere because the next morning she had placed in my mail slot a small envelope filled with sand. Its accompanying note asked me to return the contents to its proper location. My golden tennis sneakers, that had happily reappeared painted after several days of stolen existence, must have annoyed her. She now thought them the source of the sand defacing her living-room rugs.

  After the fifth day, the coding powwows began to falter as it became painfully clear that further discussion was impossible without more amino acid sequence data. Nonetheless Geo’s morale remained high. He was especially proud of a driftwood model of the double helix that he had put together outside the cottage. It used my golden sneakers for its base and my floppy hat for the top. Sydney Brenner had already left by then, for he was needed back at Cold Spring Harbor to give a Friday-night lecture on the mutant bacteria he had isolated during his summer’s stay. But Francis’s visits to the Seven Winds, if anything, became more frequent, using a girl’s bike belonging to one of the “little Littles” to have afternoon swims off the cottage with Ursula Szent-Györgyi.

  On Sunday, Francis and I were invited to lunch off Strawberry Lane at the summer home of Dorothy Wrinch, a formidable white-haired English mathematician then on the faculty of Smith College in Northampton, Mass. In the late 1930s, Dorothy was notorious for her “cyclol” model of proteins. It proposed an interlocking caged structure as opposed to the already then favored model of a folded linear polypeptide chain held together by hydrogen bonds and Van der Waal’s interactions. Linus Pauling thought the cyclol model absurd, violating everything the rules of chemistry stood for. Nonetheless, for several years, the cyclol model remained on the scene because Dorothy had a backer in General Electric’s famous physicist, Irving Langmuir. But by now cyclols were long dead, Pauling’s α-helix model was triumphant, and Dorothy had become less prickly and more fun.

  Most of Dorothy’s luncheon guests were familiar MBL faces with one sparkling exception—Ellen, a fetching, green-eyed, red-haired girl in her early twenties, whom I had seen earlier in the box office of the Falmouth Summer Playhouse. Soon we began exchanging facts about ourselves and how Francis, Geo Gamow, and I were working out how genes provide the information needed to assemble amino acids into proteins. All too soon, Francis identified me as the sneaky perpetrator behind the fake invitation to what now could be the party of the summer, particularly if our new red-haired acquaintance would grace its presence. When she showed no hesitation in accepting Francis’s invitation, I almost stopped worrying whether August 12 would be a success. Although there was a modest wedding band on Ellen’s left hand, she gave no indication that she would be coming other than alone.

  Until the last moment, we did not know whether Albert and Marta would boycott the party by not coming down from Seven Winds to the cottage at the water’s edge. Meanwhile, Geo and I decided to share the cost; Geo provided the strong drinks, and I the beer, all of which we purchased at the liquor store near the ferry terminal. Virtually everyone invited came, except the Guternatches. George and Francis Wald arrived on time as did Ruth Sager, who earlier had virtually boxed my ears over her tongue-in-cheek invitation as part of Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Melman. She and Seymour walked in with the Ephrussis just in time to watch Albert and Marta enter and talk to Rho. Quickly the abundant whisky began dissipating into the countless tall drinks that Geo used his prerogative as host to dispense to all newcomers. Soon the noise level from the 100 and more guests inside the cottage precluded real conversations, and many of us moved to the grass between the cottage and the rocks at the water’s edge. I went outside soon after Marta walked in, fearing that if I chatted too long with her, I might be forced to apologize for the sand on her rugs. I was also keen to spot our box-office beauty, who had promised to come the moment the play had started.

  Happily, not too much more time passed before Ellen came through a gap among the long line of cars tightly packed outside the Szent-Györgyi compound. Even in the half dark she was a looker and in ordinary company should never want for attention. But if not immediately cared for, she might feel unwelcome in the MBL world—so long numbed by the absence of beauty that I feared it might not spontaneously ogle. I quickly placed a bourbon-and-Coke-filled glass in her hand and led her triumphantly towards Andrew and Eve Szent-Györgyi to show them that the right girl could take my thoughts away from Christa. A glance towards Francis reassured me that he would not quickly come over and dominate the conversation. His animated laughter, first directed towards fellow scientists, was pitched toward Ursula Szent-Györgyi, who had come in with her mother.

  Initially, Urs made dutiful, insipid girlish conversation with Igor Gamow, then keen to be a ballet star. Before the Gamows’ arrival, Albert and Marta hoped that Igor’s presence might cause Urs to come to life and stop acting as if life was meaningless when placed in the company of her stepfather’s colleagues. But, after five minutes of Igor’s ballet ramblings, Urs could take no more. Happily, she now coyly bantered with Francis, long educated to the fact that good parties are for the amusement, not the education, of the fairer sex.

  Urs had figured that her mother would bolt the occasion after not more than 30 minutes. But to her surprise and later annoyance, Marta passed more than an hour chatting happily before a momentary lull in the conversational roar made her suspect that the best moment of the evening had passed. It was best for her to announce her departure before there was no one on hand to notice. Quickly she gathered up Albert—always happy talking about fishing on the “middle grounds” or his daily swims around Penzance Point—and then Urs, who knew this was not the occasion to an
nounce her independence from her mother.

  At least one too many of Geo’s tall whiskies consumed while talking to Urs was now reverberating around Francis’s head. His conversational force was already ebbing when he made his way over to where Ellen and I had been earlier joined by Igor, whose ballet dizziness in no way implied disinterest in pretty girls. He needed no alcohol to come alive and his long Russian hair virtually fell into her face as he spoke of being a ballet student in a class run by a son of the great Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Michel Fokine. Jokingly, Igor recounted fears that heredity had given him his father’s ability to dance while his mother, once trained for the ballet in St. Petersburg, had passed on to him her minor talents as a physicist. Like his father, Igor liked to have a good time. By now, however, the cottage was no longer the place to have one. The beer and whisky were gone, and those who wanted more to drink had to get back quickly to the Captain Kidd before it closed.

  Sensing that I might unnecessarily lose my beauty to the dull security of her own car, I quickly got an increasingly hung-over Francis into a departing vehicle that would let him off at the “little Littleses’.” Igor, Ellen, and I were then free to do a quick mop-up of the plastic glasses and beer bottles that had been surreptitiously scattered on all sides of the Szent-Györgyi cottage. The task completed, Igor gallantly volunteered to help Andrew and Eve take charge of the chaos still within the cottage, allowing Ellen and me to slip away for a half-alcoholic, hand-holding walk beyond the big house at the end of Penzance Point. On a bench at the tip we watched the tidal water race through the hole, and she tried to be matter-of-fact in talking about a husband back in Boston. Things weren’t working out well, she said, and she was in Falmouth for the summer to sort out her thoughts and give a more artistic lilt to her life than had yet come from her briefly married existence.