Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 18

  Although the served dinner was formal, our conversation was far from stiff. It later centered on the fact that Tess, Victor’s second wife, came from a long line of ornithologists. Victor’s peerage, in fact, was bird-connected. He became a peer only because his Uncle Walter never produced a legitimate heir, devoting much of his life to the mammoth collection of birds that he housed in a special building at Tring in Hertfordshire, just under the Chiltern Hills northwest of London. This devotion to stuffed birds in no way implied a lack of interest in birds of the night, two of which he long kept in residence just outside of Tring. This was not the first time I had heard of Tring. It was Victor’s uncle’s money that had financed Ernst Mayr’s ornithological collecting adventures in the Solomon Islands 25 years previously.

  Outside The Golden Helix—the Cricks’ home in Portugal Place, Cambridge, July 1955: (from left to right) Sid Bernhard, Linda Pauling, Francis Crick (with Michael Crick talking to him), Jane Rich, Odile Crick, Jacqueline Crick, an unidentified man, and Ann Cullis; the Cricks’ elder daughter, Gabrielle, is in the group of three children in the doorway.

  During dessert, Victor wanted to know what Linda was next up to, smiling at the unexpected irony that she was the Cricks’ au pair. More seriously he despaired of his inability to help Peter and Linda be more than celebrity brats, abusing privileges that gave them more choices than they could handle. Then, with only a trace remaining of the summer’s light over the trees of John’s, and with Victor’s cognac reeling through my head, I jokingly told Tess I was prepared to put off marrying until Emma reached the age of consent.

  I wrote to Rosalind to report on my talk with Victor:

  Cavendish Laboratory

  Free School Lane

  Cambridge

  July 22, 1955

  Dear Rosalind

  I have had a long talk with Victor Rothschild about your ARC grant. His reaction was very sympathetic and he indicated that he would write Slater immediately. Apparently he knew your situation very well and had been talking with Slater about much new additional funds you could usefully absorb. The idea of having one or two people attached to K. Smith’s group appealed to him, and I think that Bernal should submit a detailed proposal along these lines. However, with August holidays coming up, nothing is likely to happen until Sept. Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could talk again before anything positive is done, so that the mistake of applying for too little could be avoided. Unfortunately I plan to leave for the continent on holiday on Monday and so it’s not likely that I shall see you before Sept 1.

  I shall most likely stop in Tubingen on my return from Switzerland

  Jim

  As July progressed further I—often with either Peter or Linda—saw more and more of the Swiss biochemist Alfred Tissières, who as a research fellow of King’s enjoyed a splendid first-floor Gibbs Building suite almost next to the Chapel. Late one afternoon, Linda, Alfred, and I happily went off to Victor and Tess Rothschild’s annual July garden party where ample punch more than compensated for the lack of other younger guests and kept us light-headed through the last vestiges of long-lasting, bluish twilight. A Bentley owner, though now it was temporarily on blocks at his mother’s home in Lausanne, Alfred was an experienced Alpinist who had been to the ice falls of the treacherous Rakapushi of northern Pakistan. He had spent the first part of his research fellowship at Caltech when Francis and I were searching for the double helix. Now his research in the Molteno Institute centered on the cytochrome proteins under the umbrella of David Keilen. In August he would be back in Switzerland and, after my walking tour with John Kendrew, I planned to join him in the Valais at Zinal.

  Alfred was but one of many distinguished Alpinists with King’s connections. One was the once-powerful economist Arthur Cecil Pigou, whose limp, almost 80-year-old emaciated body was draped on most sunny afternoons over a folding beach chair in front of the Gibbs Building. There Pigou noticed that Alfred, this summer, was frequently with a young woman, whose mannerisms augured more than friendship. So Pigou, whose misogyny was extreme even for King’s, worriedly took Alfred aside to tell him that a woman’s place was in someone else’s home. Even more important, they were the enemy of the hills.

  Before I went to the continent, a letter from Geo Gamow arrived. It was the first official RNA Tie Club circular, written on the club’s new stationery. The 20 club members were listed together with their amino acid code names. Also listed were two potential honorary members, Albert Szent-Györgyi and Fritz Lipmann. Geo proposed that four honorary members eventually be elected but wanted to collect first the monies needed to provide the first two members with club ties and pins. The $2 that he wished to extract from each real member, however, later proved a stumbling block to the honorary category. As club officers, Geo put himself at the top of the list as the “Synthesiser,” while I and Francis were the official “Optimist” and “Pessimist,” reflecting our differently held enthusiasm for RNA’s potential to bind specific amino acids. The Lord Privy Seal of the British Cabinet had no special interest to plead, but why Geo gave Alex that designation was a mystery. It was easier to understand Geo’s choice of the avid data classifier, Martynas Ycas, as the “Archivist.”

  Geo’s catchy club motto “Do or die or don’t try” hit me squarely in the belly. We could never say, “Don’t try RNA.” That would mean giving up further pursuit of the gene. Better to die scientifically than not go into this battle. Human affairs were another matter. Although it was too late to say don’t try Christa, dying because of her was not the way I wanted to go.

  The Continent: August 1955

  CAMBRIDGE HAD SETTLED into mid-summer quietude—except for the tourists all bound for King’s College Chapel—when I left for my month’s stay on the continent and the macromolecule gathering just across the Alps at Pallanza (Verbania) on Lake Maggiore. A brief plane flight across the Channel to Paris let me spend my first night with Boris and Harriet Ephrussi in their new home near the new Gif laboratory to which they would soon move their research groups. Buying their modest home had exhausted their free monies, and I went to sleep on a little day couch extended with a chair to accommodate my 6-foot, 2-inch length. Over supper Boris talked about the offer he had just turned down to move to the University of Chicago. With Harriet expecting their first child, they did not want to endure its decaying urban environment. Harvard, however, would have offered a real change from Paris, especially as Harriet was American and 20 years younger than the previously married, Russian-born Boris. Both had enjoyed their four-month sabbatical in the Cambridge next to Boston, but to their sorrow no hint was later given to them that Boris was wanted back to replace the still academically anemic Paul Levine.

  Over supper my throat was beginning to feel raw, and I awoke with it so sore that swallowing was an ordeal. I, however, saw no choice but to press on with my journey. After getting a tour of their new research facilities, I was driven to nearby Orly and the plane that was to take me on to Geneva. There for a day I was to be the guest of Jean Weigle, now back from his Caltech winter in the Delbrück orbit and again ensconced in his Geneva lab doing more phage experiments with his former student, Edward Kellenberger. Of Genevan heritage and of sufficient financial means to let him now have no teaching responsibilities, Jean was a keen Alpinist and listened with interest to my report on Alfred Tissières’s current life as a fellow of King’s College. They had previously moved in the same French-speaking Swiss climbing circles, but Jean, now aged 55, let me know that the 17-year-younger Alfred could do ascents that he no longer attempted.

  The cliffs of the Salève, the mountain over the French border, on Geneva’s southeast side, was the training ground where Jean learned how to face the high voids separating him from the ground many hundreds of feet below. His pleasure in climbing came not only from mastery of his toes and fingers on the rocks but also from muting the fear of falling that he admitted was often with him. Two years before, Jean had led me roped up to the top of the Salève, a minor feat tha
t left me exhausted yet optimistic that when roped to experienced climbers, I might get to the top of one or more real Swiss mountains. Jean that afternoon, however, was less keen about climbing than about his newest experiments concerning the bizarre changes in phage lambda’s hereditary properties that accompanied its growth on different bacterial hosts. But soon sensing that my throat was so sore that I could barely reply, I was quickly seen by a doctor who told me that I needed a course of penicillin and several days of rest to cure me of raging tonsillitis.

  My illness created the dilemma of where I was to recuperate. Jean had expected me to stay only one night in his austerely elegant apartment on the Place de Mezél, down the Grand Rue from the massive Cathedral dominating the old city of Geneva. Then my guestroom was to be occupied by an older woman friend coming from France, who Jean let slip was of Rothschild ilk. I had to go, but at first I did not realize my good fortune when Jean told me that my recovery would be presided over by Ann McMichael, the blond wife of a young American physician from Philadelphia undecided between pure research as opposed to clinical research. The McMichaels’ visit to Geneva was a follow-up to one made two years before to Caltech, where Ann had spent much time with Jane Rich while their respective husbands were in their labs.

  That I might not want to get well too soon hit me the moment the McMichaels arrived the next afternoon to take me to their small hotel on Lake Geneva. Ann had the good looks and warm personality of a typical American college girl that had so eluded me before on American campuses. Immediately she waxed warmly about their hotel’s marvelous vistas across Lake Geneva to the mountains on the French side. Later, eating the delicious pastries that awaited us at the hotel, I began to feel much better, especially when I noticed her gaze showed no tendency to turn when my eyes were simultaneously focused in her direction. By the next morning the penicillin had already done its job, and with my sore throat and fever virtually gone and with her husband already off to the lab, we wandered in and out of the lakeside shops. After our pension lunch at the hotel, we rushed to catch a tourist boat that went over to the French side. Soon, almost as new lovers, we walked and looked at each other among nearby orchards and vineyards, enjoying our luck in my being too sick to go on to Pallanza. Although I was now well enough to reach the meeting before it ended, my telegram had gone off the day before and no one was still expecting me.

  After we returned to the hotel for dinner, I started feeling guilty about not now trying to attend a small RNA meeting that had just started in France, only an hour’s drive south from Geneva. Six months before, Paul Doty and I helped organize it with Henri Lenormant, who had recently worked at Harvard Medical School. Initially the proposed tiny “RNA and Protein Synthesis” meeting in Lenormant’s provincial hometown of Culoz sounded like pure fun. To be sandwiched in between two international congresses, one of chemistry in Zurich, the other of biochemistry in Brussels, it might substitute for an RNA Tie Club meeting on adaptors. But Lenormant had no more success in getting modest French monies than Geo Gamow did with American funding. Then a grant of $150 from the Rockefeller Foundation gave the meeting its final form. Only the food and some accommodations at Culoz could be covered by this tiny sum—all travel costs had to be borne by the participants. Thus when I was later offered Italian funds to bring me to the continent, I decided to go to Pallanza instead of Culoz. It would have been impossible to attend both meetings since they were to be held at the same time.

  Ann McMichael now saw I could get to Culoz semi-honorably if, the following morning, she and her husband brought me there as half-sick in their car. The weekend was starting, and we drove off with the hope that they also spend Saturday night at the Chateau de Béon, the large home of Lenormant’s friend, the Baron d’Aiguy. There all of the participants were housed, the meeting itself being held at the local school. Only some 12 persons actually had gotten to the meeting, and so there was no trouble in inserting me onto the program to give an afternoon talk on tobacco mosaic virus. Starting with my 1952 Cambridge effort that established its helical symmetry, I later focused on its RNA component and whether there was a single or multiple identical chains enclosed within TMV’s coat of helically arranged protein subunits.

  Two unoccupied rooms were then found to give the McMichaels and me the opportunity of staying on for a most memorable post-meeting banquet of food and wine with much animated conversation that increasingly was in French. After dessert, with Ann’s husband seemingly content talking science, Ann and I followed the Baron down to his wine cellar to obtain more of the Sauternes that we were raving about. There he took pleasure in opening up one of his more cherished bottles that the three of us soon made short measure of. By then, Ann and I found it much easier to sip good wine rapidly than to reveal further our inability to comprehend even the limited repertoire of the French words that our gracious host dared inflict on us. Soon alcoholically unable to think ahead more than the next minute, we slipped out into the garden and the smell of roses that made us feel close and warm. Suddenly, realizing that no more voices were coming from the party, we went back inside and I was soon asleep in the sparsely furnished upstairs servantlike room.

  The following morning I was driven back to Geneva to catch the train that would let me meet up with John Kendrew for our week of cross-Alps walking. Ann’s affectionate smile deepened only slightly as we said good-bye, and her husband helped put my rucksack inside the train doors. My return to England would take me three weeks later through Geneva, but the McMichaels’ plans might be taking them away that weekend. Ann’s good-bye wave told me she hoped otherwise.

  John Kendrew at Peterhouse

  Three hours later, I went through the Simplon Tunnel that might have taken me earlier to Pallanza. I got off one stop earlier at Domodossola to catch the bus up the long valley to Macugnaga, the Italian mountain village lying below the Monte Rosa, the tallest mountain in the Alps. There at the small prearranged hotel was John, beginning to worry over why I had not shown up in time for supper. The next day we walked up to the relatively low Monte Moro Pass (2832 meters), from which we could later walk down to Saas Fee, the Valais village across the Mischabel range from Zermatt. It was a stiff 1500-meter turnback hike up to the pass and both of us were exhausted by the time we reached the border post and showed our passports.

  Already we were quite reddened by the sun because the day was cloudless and the massive Monte Rosa glaciers gleamed white far above us. In then descending the upper Saas Valley, we lost the trail near the top and had to scramble, if not slide, down a wild scree slope that at first had no visible end. At last we saw the trail to the bottom right and no longer had to contemplate the awful prospect of climbing back up to the pass. Some 90 minutes further down we saw the outline of the small hotel at Mattmark where I wanted to spend the night. But I could not persuade John, who was determined to push on to Saas Fee, some six miles further on. By then the slope was gentle, and I had no further fears of missteps on the rocks. Nonetheless I felt virtually dead by the time we found a simple hotel for the night and barely had the energy to eat our evening meal.

  I was so stiff and sore upon awakening that I saw the need for at least a day of newspaper-reading rest before setting out again on the slopes. But I did not anticipate resting alone. To my surprise, John told me over breakfast that he must immediately return to Cambridge. A phone call late the previous evening somehow made his departure imperative. More guarded than normal, John implied to me some most unanticipated event that he must immediately follow up. I was left in the dark as to whether the news was good or bad. In any case, he was soon on the postal bus to Visp and the train that would get him back to England the next day.

  Now alone, I wanted the satisfaction of scaling a 4000-meter peak and found a guide who would take me up from the Britannia Hut to the 4027-meter Allalinhorn. The walk up to the hut took four hours, and after supper of cheese and dried beef I went to sleep among some 30 climbers, most prepared for more difficult peaks. It was still dark when we le
ft the hut to go around the Kleine Allalin and onto the huge glacier that rose to the summit of the Allalinhorn. We followed behind a larger party and while the final steps were almost straight up, there was no real chance of a life-threatening fall. At the top, the view in all directions was so exhilarating, I wanted more of a challenge when I was later at Zinal with Alfred Tissières. As soon as we inched down the deep steps near the summit, our pace across the glacier picked up and I was back in Saas Fee before lunch. My next three days were marking time alone in a somewhat rainy Zermatt, reached in less than three hours of postal boat and train time. There my reddened face had turned to brown tan and I almost ran as I came down one afternoon to Zermatt from the Gornergrat.

  I felt more than ready for a serious Alpine experience when I moved on to the spectacularly mountainous Val de Zinal. The postal bus initially traversed a tight multiple hairpin road, bordered by huge voids, to get onto the eastern upper shelf of the valley. There my heartbeat calmed and I began to enjoy the mountain views looming ahead. At Zinal, I hoped to find Jane Rich moving on from a lengthy tour of her Scottish forebears. But, instead, I found a Morayshire-posted letter saying she had become entranced bouncing from castle to country home to cottage and finding her relations living in a hodgepodge of grandeur and poverty. So she was prolonging her stay in the land of kilts and porridge.

  Alfred, there before me, was soon joined by a Cambridge friend from Trinity College, who sported a long mustache appropriate to his war years in India. After lunch in a simple restaurant, we made the long walk up to the Cabane du Petit Mountet, perched on the moraine wall bordering the lower reaches of the Zinal glacier. We had just started when we saw an English climbing group coming down the trail, and I recognized one of the party as the physicist Willy Seeds, who had worked at King’s College London with Maurice Wilkins on DNA during the time of Maurice’s impasse with Rosalind Franklin. I thought Willy might stop and chat, but all he said was “How is Honest Jim?” and uninterruptedly continued his downward descent. Alfred saw the irony of the remark and over tea later at the Petit Mountet briefly explained to his friend why the King’s lab might regard me as the Judas once close to their midst.