Genes, Girls, and Gamow Read online

  Feynman, Richard (“Dick”) American physicist (b. 1918); after getting his Ph.D. from Princeton, he taught physics at Cornell before becoming, in 1952, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. A founder of quantum electrodynamics, he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics.

  Fraenkel-Conrat, Heinz German-born (1910), he studied medicine in Breslau and did his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. In 1952, he joined Wendell Stanley’s Virus Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on plant viruses.

  Franklin, Rosalind Cambridge-educated physical chemist (b. 1921). After four years in Paris (1947–51), she joined the Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit at King’s College London. There she located the phosphate atoms of DNA on the outside surface and discovered DNA’s “B” form. In 1953, she transferred to J. D. Bernal’s lab at Birkbeck College London.

  Gamow, George (“Geo”) Russian-born theoretical physicist (born in Odessa, 1904). He obtained his Ph.D. in 1928 from St. Petersburg University and then spent the next three years in Copenhagen and Cambridge before returning to Russia in 1931. A meeting in Belgium gave him and his wife (Rho) the opportunity to move to Washington, D.C., where, between 1934 and 1956, he was Professor of Physics at George Washington University.

  Gierer, Alfred German biochemist (b. 1929). He trained to work on tobacco mosaic virus in the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen, where he was a protégé of Gerhard Schramm.

  Gilbert, Celia Smith College–educated daughter of the journalist I. F. Stone and wife of Walter Gilbert.

  Gilbert, Walter (“Wally”) Boston-born (1932); after graduating from Harvard, he went to the University of Cambridge to study for his Ph.D. in theoretical physics supervised by Abdus Salem (who won the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics). Returning to Harvard in 1956, he taught theoretical physics until 1964, when he became Associate Professor of Biophysics. In the early 1970s, he independently developed a powerful way for sequencing DNA that led to his sharing the 1980 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Fred Sanger and Paul Berg.

  Griffiths, Sheila Raised in Wales (b. 1928), daughter of James Griffiths, a Labour Party MP and member of the Labour Government 1945–51. In the summer of 1952 she met JDW at a village in the Italian Engadine. She returned to England in the spring of 1953 and in the following year married a young historian, Roy Pryce, whom she had met in Rome.

  Haldane, J. B. S. Geneticist (b. Oxford 1892), educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, brother of the writer Naomi Mitchison. He displayed brilliance and eccentricity both as an experimentalist and theoretical geneticist, first in Cambridge and later at University College London. Long a member of the British Communist Party, he emigrated in 1956 to India where he died in 1964.

  Hershey, Alfred American chemist (b. 1908) who initiated studies on phage at Washington University. In 1950, he moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where, with Martha Chase, he showed that the DNA component of phages was its genetic component. For this work, he received a Nobel Prize in 1969 (shared with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria).

  Hinshelwood, Sir Cyril English physical chemist (b. 1897), educated at Balliol College, Oxford; was Oxford’s Dr. Lee’s Professor of Chemistry between 1937 and 1964. He became an authority on chemical kinetics for which he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Nikolai Semenov. His book The Chemical Kinetics of the Bacterial Cell (1946) generated widespread disapprobation from geneticists for its Lamarckian outlook.

  Hodgkin, Dorothy (née Crowfoot) British crystallographer born in Cairo (1910). She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and, later, as a Ph.D. student of J. D. Bernal in Cambridge, she was the first person to obtain X-ray diffraction patterns from protein crystals. In 1936, she moved back to Oxford where she used X-ray diffraction methods to establish the structure of penicillin. This work, together with her later elucidation of the structure of vitamin B12, led to her Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964.

  Huxley, Hugh English biophysicist (b. 1924) who began his studies on muscle contraction in Cambridge, at the Cavendish Laboratory, as a Ph.D. student of John Kendrew. From 1952 to 1954 he was a Commonwealth Fellow at MIT, where he began electron microscope studies that led to the sliding filament model of muscle contraction. After briefly coming back to the Cavendish Laboratory, he joined the Biophysics Department at King’s College London in 1956. In 1961, he returned to Cambridge.

  Huxley, Julian The grandson (b. 1887) of Darwin-proponent Thomas Henry Huxley and the brother of the novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley. After Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, he taught for three years at Rice University in Houston but returned to England during World War I. A prolific writer of books, he became the first Director General of UNESCO in 1946.

  Jacob, François Medically trained French biochemist (b. 1920) whose later research on gene regulation at the Institut Pasteur in Paris with André Lwoff and Jacques Monod led to their joint Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1965.

  Kendrew, John Oxford-born (1917) molecular biologist. After Trinity College, Cambridge, he spent World War II in aviation operational research where he first met J. D. Bernal. He and Max Perutz were the first members of the Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he initiated his studies on the oxygen-carrying protein myoglobin.

  Khorana, Gobind Born in India (1922), he was educated at Lahore and Liverpool universities. His studies on nucleic acid began when he was a postdoctoral fellow in Alexander Todd’s Cambridge organic chemistry lab between 1948 and 1952. His studies on RNA at the Institute of Enzyme Research of the University of Wisconsin culminated in his enzymatic synthesis of specific RNA sequences that proved crucial to the establishment of the genetic code. For this work, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley).

  Klug, Aaron Born in Lithuania (1926) and educated in South Africa, he obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge on studies of the structure of steel. In 1954, he joined Rosalind Franklin in London to work with her on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus. After her death in 1958, he continued to work at Birkbeck College until 1962 when he moved to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. For work done to establish crystallographic electron microscopy, he received the 1982 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

  Landau, Lev Russian theoretical physicist born in Baku, Azerbaijan (1908), and friend of George Gamow—both were in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr in 1930 when quantum mechanics was coming into existence. For his theories on liquid helium, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1962.

  Ledley, Robert American mathematician (b. 1926) briefly interested in the logic of the genetic code.

  Lewis, Elizabeth Vickery Born (1948) in Providence, Rhode Island; Radcliffe sophomore doing administrative work in JDW’s lab in 1967.

  Lewis, Julia Undergraduate (b. 1936) at Girton College, Cambridge in the mid-1950s, studying languages.

  Luria, Salvador Medical graduate of Turin University (b. 1912). He studied phages at the Radium Institute in Paris in 1938, but when Italy entered World War II he fled to the U.S., where he continued his phage experiments at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. In 1943, he became a member of the faculty of Indiana University; in 1950 he moved to the University of Illinois and from there to MIT in 1958. He shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey.

  Lwoff, André French microbiologist (b. 1902) at the Institut Pasteur who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with François Jacob and Jacques Monod; a precise and playfully elegant speaker and writer.

  Markham, Roy English biochemist (b. 1916), who innovatively focused on nucleic acids at his plant virology lab at the Molteno Institute in Cambridge.

  Mayr, Christa Elder daughter (b. 1936) of Ernst and Gretel Mayr.

  Mayr, Ernst G
erman-born (1904) American ornithologist who presided over the Rothschild bird collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1933 to 1953. He and his wife Gretel were summer residents at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from 1943 until 1953, when he was given a professorship at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

  Mayr, Susie Younger daughter (b. 1937) of Ernst and Gretel Mayr.

  McMichael, Ann A blond American girl whose physician husband was learning molecular biology in Geneva in the summer of 1955.

  Meselson, Matthew (“Matt”) Born in Denver (1930), he was a Ph.D. student of Linus Pauling at Caltech between 1953 and 1956; later as a postdoctoral fellow, he and Franklin Stahl used ultracentrifugation to demonstrate that the two chains of DNA separate during its replication. In 1961, he moved to Harvard as Professor of Biology.

  Metropolis, Nicholas Los Alamos computer whiz (b. 1915) who collaborated with George Gamow in 1954 to examine the randomness of amino acid sequences in proteins.

  Mitchison, Avrion (“Av”) Oxford-educated immunologist (b. 1928), son of Naomi and Dick Mitchison. As a Commonwealth Fellow, he researched in the U.S. between 1952 and 1954 at Indiana University and the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor; afterwards he lectured in zoology at the University of Edinburgh.

  Mitchison, Murdoch Cambridge-educated zoologist (b. 1921), who moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1952; older brother of Avrion. Married in 1947 to Rosalind Wrong, an Oxford historian.

  Mitchison, Naomi (“Nou”) Daughter (b. 1897) of famed Oxford physiologist John Scott Haldane and sister of J. B. S. Haldane. In 1916, she married her brother’s close friend G. R. (Dick) Mitchison (b. 1892), barrister and Labour MP.

  Monod, Jacques French microbial geneticist (b. 1910), who also excelled in music, sailing, and rock climbing. A member of the French Resistance during World War II, he became attached to the Institut Pasteur in 1945. There his charisma and intelligence quickly attracted an abundance of clever coworkers and sabbatical visitors. With André Lwoff and François Jacob, he was a recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

  Mulliken, Robert University of Chicago chemical physicist (b. 1897) whose molecular orbital approach to chemical bonding was never accepted by Linus Pauling. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1966.

  Nirenberg, Marshall American biochemist (b. 1927) who at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda discovered that synthetic polynucleotides promote the synthesis of sequence specific polypeptides. For this work he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley).

  Ochoa, Severo Spanish-born (1905) American biochemist in whose New York University laboratory Marianne Grunberg-Manago discovered the enzyme polynucleotide phosphorylase, which was later used to make synthetic RNA molecules. He was a joint winner with Arthur Kornberg of the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

  Oppenheimer, J. Robert American theoretical physicist (b. 1904) who oversaw in Los Alamos the construction of the first atomic bomb. In 1940, he married Katherine (Kitty) Harrison, previously married to the Caltech-associated, British-born physician Stuart Harrison.

  Orgel, Leslie English theoretical chemist (b. 1927) and friend of Av Mitchison when they were both prize fellows at Magdalen College, Oxford; afterwards at Caltech he joined Linus Pauling’s assembly of young theoreticians. In 1950, he married H. Alice Levinson who read medicine at Oxford.

  Pauling, Linda Lively blond daughter (b. 1932) of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling, who was an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland in the mid-1950s. After graduation, she crossed the Atlantic to be near her brother, Peter, in Cambridge.

  Pauling, Linus A native of Oregon (b. 1901), a professor in and chairman of the Chemistry Division at Caltech. As a senior at Oregon State Agricultural College, he met 18-year-old Ava Helen Miller, whom he married in 1923 after finishing his first year as a graduate student at Caltech.

  Pauling, Peter Born in 1931, son of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling. After graduating from Caltech in physics and chemistry, he went in the fall of 1952 to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to work for a Ph.D. with John Kendrew as his supervisor.

  Perutz, Max Austrian-British chemist (b. 1914). After graduating in Vienna, he went to Cambridge in 1936 to become a research student in X-ray crystallography of J. D. Bernal. In 1939, he came under the patronage of Lawrence Bragg, who was excited by Perutz’s objective of using X-rays to solve the structure of hemoglobin. Through Bragg’s backing, he became head, in 1947, of the Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems.

  Pontecorvo, Guido Italian-British geneticist born in Pisa (1907) whose brothers included the film director Gillo (Battle of Algiers), and the clever physicist Bruno (who left England in 1950 for the USSR when suspicion of his disloyalty arose). Originally an animal breeder in Tuscany, Guido moved to the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh, where, in 1938, he met the geneticist H. J. Muller and changed courses to pursue a Ph.D. under his supervision. He moved to Glasgow, becoming a Reader in Genetics in 1952 and later Professor.

  Rich, Alexander Harvard-educated American physician-turned-biochemist (b. 1924), who moved to Caltech in 1949 as a postdoctoral fellow attached to Linus Pauling’s laboratory. In 1952, he married Jane King, educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, and the daughter of a long-established New York family.

  Robertson, Mariette The daughter (b. 1932) of astrophysicist H. P. Robertson; she grew up in Pasadena and graduated from Wellesley College in 1953.

  Rothschild, (Nathaniel Mayer) Victor A scion of the British branch of the famous banking family (b. 1910); educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. After heroic duties destroying aerial bombs during World War II, he returned to Cambridge as a member of its Zoology Department. In 1946, he married his second wife, Tess (Teresa) Mayor.

  Sanger, Frederick Cambridge-educated English biochemist (b. 1918), whose subsequent work on proteins in Cambridge elucidated the amino sequence of insulin. For this work, he received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

  Schramm, Gerhard German biochemist (b. 1910) who initiated work on tobacco mosaic virus at a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. During World War II he moved to Tübingen, where later he helped form the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research.

  Schutt, Margot As a history student at Vassar College, she went to Edinburgh in 1952 for her junior year abroad. Returning to the U.S. on the S.S. Georgic, she and JDW became friends.

  Simmons, Norman American biochemist (b. 1915) studying tobacco mosaic virus at the University of California in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

  Stahl, Franklin Harvard-educated molecular biologist (b. 1929) who moved to Rochester for Ph.D. research under A. H. Doermann’s supervision. In the summer of 1954, at Woods Hole, he met Matt Meselson, initiating a friendship that led to his moving to Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow in 1956.

  Stanley, Wendell American chemist (b. 1904) who in 1935, at the then Rockefeller Institute Laboratory in Princeton, crystallized tobacco mosaic virus. For this accomplishment, he won the 1946 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (sharing it with John Northrop and James Sumner). In 1948, he became the first director of the new Virus Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Stent, Gunther Berlin-born (1902) physical chemist who trained at the University of Illinois and became a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech in the fall of 1948, joining Max Delbrück’s group. After further years as a postdoc in Copenhagen and Paris, he joined Wendell Stanley’s Virus Laboratory in Berkeley. In 1952, he married a young Icelander, Inga Loftdottir, then studying piano in Copenhagen.

  Stewart, Janet Undergraduate (b. 1936) at Girton College, Cambridge in the mid-1950s and friend of Peter Pauling.

  Stoker, Michael English virologist (b. 1916); studied medicine at Cambridge. After wartime service in India he returned to Cambridge and to research on animal viruses in the Pathology Department; a fellow of Clare College where he served as Medical Tutor.
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br />   Szent-Györgyi, Albert Hungarian-born (1893) biochemist who received the 1937 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his isolation of vitamin C. In 1947, he moved to the U.S. where he established his Institute for Muscle Research at Woods Hole. While still in Hungary, he married his second wife, Marta.

  Szent-Györgyi, Andrew Younger relation (b. 1926) of Albert Szent-Györgyi; researched with his wife, Eve, at Woods Hole in the mid-1950s.

  Szilard, Leo Hungarian-born (1898) physicist who trained in Berlin (Ph.D. 1922), where he taught physics and was associated with Albert Einstein until Hitler came to power. He fled first to England and then to the U.S., where, with Enrico Fermi, he built the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago. After World War II, he held a professorship at Chicago’s Institute of Radiobiology and Biophysics.

  Teller, Edward Hungarian-born (1908), German-trained physicist (Ph.D. Leipzig 1930) who joined George Gamow teaching physics at George Washington University between 1935 and 1941. After World War II, he was professor at the University of Chicago before moving in 1953 to Berkeley.

  Tissières, Alfred Medically qualified Swiss alpinist (b. 1917), who went to Cambridge after World War II to study biochemistry in David Kellin’s laboratory. He was a prize fellow of King’s College in 1951, and then went to Caltech for two years where he became a close friend of Max and Manny Delbrück. After returning to Cambridge, he resumed work at the Molteno Institute on oxidative phosphorylation with William Slater.

  Todd, Alexander Scottish chemist (born in Glasgow, 1907); Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cambridge from 1944, of towering presence (6 feet 4 inches tall). He and his research group established the covalent structure of the DNA and RNA backbones, receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1957. In 1937, he married Alison Dale, a daughter of the noted physiologist Sir Henry Dale who earlier (1936) had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.