Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 20

  Christa was not put off by Nou’s strong opinions and occasional outbursts about the inconsiderate behavior of those who disagreed with the way she wanted her house run or the food cooked. Seeing them chatting together, I was curious about what they were talking about and later was relieved when, unprodded, Nou reported Christa charming though not that formed—witness her being so intrigued by Guggenheim’s neurotic meanderings. Did I really want a young bird with wings too fragile for steady flight? These words were not to my liking, and we moved on to Pauling-family gossip and what Linda was like. If she was so lively and good-looking, Nou couldn’t understand why Linda and I weren’t perfect for each other’s needs. Nou didn’t expect a straightforward reply, understanding that I felt a need to keep my distance from antics made possible by being part of the Pauling royal family.

  Naomi (“Nou”) Mitchison at her son Av’s wedding to Lorna Martin on Skye, August 1957

  The following morning, Christa and I started back to Cambridge, our Carradale stay lasting only three nights because of her need to fly off to Düsseldorf and a further batch of relatives before her Munich University year started. To save time, we stuck to the nasty Great North Road (the AI) and the lorry fumes that hung over our tiny car all the way down to the Huntingdon turnoff for Cambridge. After letting Christa off to spend the night again at The Green Door, I made my dead-tired way to my room at Clare. Going early the next morning to the rental car garage, we were soon on the train to London and the terminus where Christa was to board the bus out to the airport. Undeniably, Christa had thoroughly enjoyed her first introduction to British intellectual life. Whether she had become more or less in love with me, I preferred not to contemplate.

  Cambridge (England): October 1955

  BACK IN CAMBRIDGE, alas, the cold but romantic old courtyard garret room that looked across to King’s College Chapel was no longer mine. The past spring it had been assigned for the coming year to a third-year undergraduate. I was now ensconced in a modern room whose windows looked out on the ghastly gray brick of the 1930s university library. When winter arrived, I suspected I would more appreciate it. Clare’s just-completed New Court, built as a memorial to Clare men lost in the war against Hitler, had centrally heated rooms.

  Linda Pauling now also had to move because Francis and Odile Crick’s au-pair girl for the coming year had arrived. Luckily Leslie and Alice Orgel still had not found someone to look after Vivian, their six-month-old daughter, born while they were in Chicago. So Linda, unsure how long her parents would continue funding her to be in Europe, took up residence in the Orgels’ flat at the end of Chaucer Road. A few days later she was joined by Mariette Robertson, increasingly nervous at the prospect of spending another Peter Pauling–less year with her parents in Paris. Now with the Mercedes touring car back in Peter’s hands, one to several Girton girls were likely to get to know him better than she liked to contemplate. But having made the plunge to Cambridge, Mariette knew even less where she stood in Peter’s eyes. He had just told her that this fall’s Michaelmas term was a do-or-die period for him to get some real research done.

  Two nights later, I brought Av Mitchison to the Orgels’ for a Linda-prepared supper. At the last moment, Av had come down from his Edinburgh lab. Although not invited to dinner, I knew Av would be more than welcome—he and Leslie knew each other well from their Oxford days as prize fellows of Magdalen College. As soon as Av and Linda spotted each other, they focused calculated silliness on each other with Av pressing Linda at length about the nature of her au-pair services to the Cricks. Knowing of Av’s past crushes for American blondes, one of which had been much too temporary for my sister’s ego, I was not surprised when Av asked Linda to join him in Edinburgh. There she could be the au pair for a large flat in the old city that he had recently occupied with his fellow zoologist and vole expert, John Godfrey. To my surprise, Linda instantly rose to the bait. Av’s proposal, though initially made in jest, over coffee became a firm offer of a free room, lots of spare time for exploring Scotland or attending lectures, and a weekly stipend of several pounds for covering daily expenses.

  To let Linda know what she might face from his Haldane blood, Av asked her to accompany him the next day to Oxford. His formidable grandmother lived in a big 1906 house close to the Dragon School, where his mother, Nou, was educated up to the age of 14. Suitably impressed, Linda all but decided to assume her new duties. She liked the possibility of being within range of a pass by a good-looking scion of one of Britain’s distinguished upper-middle-class families. But she was not sure whether Av might be more fearing than welcoming the prospect of her intrusion into his bachelor world. Could his occasional slight stutter be indicative of a brain not knowing how to make a decision?

  Waiting in vain almost a week for a direct reaffirmation from Av, Linda finally got the signal she wanted indirectly. In a letter to Leslie and Alice, Av asked whether they would be upset by losing their new au pair. Alice and Leslie, more curious of what Av might do with Linda than worried about their domestic needs, immediately signed off, urging Linda to set off to Edinburgh before Av changed his mind. Departing quickly was also Linda’s inclination. Far better to start her new life before her mother got wind of what she was up to and tried to stop her. On the sleeper from King’s Cross Station, Linda was nonetheless worried whether the best way to an Englishman’s heart was through her cooking.

  Four members of the RNA Tie Club in 1955: (from left to right) Francis Crick, Alex Rich, Leslie Orgel, and JDW

  In those days, Francis had little time or inclination to talk to me about plant-virus structures. He and Alex were still manic about collagen, wanting to come up with a better cable-like molecule based on three polypeptide chains than the one Linus had proposed five years before. The detailed ways in which hydrogen bonds held the three chains together were what now mattered. Not that they had to hurry because they were in a race with the great Pauling. Once he pontificated a chemical intuition, Linus almost invariably stuck with it. Only with DNA, where his three-chain model was so clearly wrong, had he ever acknowledged a major mistake. Now their genuine competition was from the youthfully pert Pauline Harrison. Linus, in fact, had spotted her several years before as not only pretty but bright when she was Dorothy Hodgkin’s research student at Oxford, studying plant-virus crystals. Now in the King’s College London lab, where Rosalind Franklin earlier worked on DNA, she was likely also trying to fit polyglycine-like extended polypeptide chains into a collagen cable.

  Odile Crick and Jane Rich, finding themselves collagen widows, saw no point in being excluded from their husbands’ conversations at The Golden Helix. Feeling that her time would be better spent at her parents’ home, Odile took her young daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline, to King’s Lynn, some 40 miles north of Cambridge. And Jane flew to Paris to see a New York friend temporarily living there. Until then, I could share with Ruth my Christa anxieties, which rose exponentially as two weeks passed in the absence of a letter from Germany. Nor did I now have any opportunity to share many thoughts with Hugh Huxley. He effectively remained aloof from his Cavendish acquaintances, staying for the most part at Christ’s College, where he recently had been made a Fellow. Upon my return from Scotland, I went over to his rooms, but he didn’t open up as to where his relation with Elizabeth Kendrew stood. Instead we talked about the powerful new German electron microscope to be put at his use when he moved to London to be part of Bernard Katz’s Physiology Department at University College. From others I gathered that the separation of John and Elizabeth Kendrew was final, with no possibility of reconciliation.

  I was now spending my afternoons in Michael Stoker’s animal virology lab in the Pathology Department. His RNA viruses were likely to offer better systems than RNA plant viruses for understanding how RNA is replicated. In the mornings and many evenings, I was in the Cavendish taking X-ray photographs of RNA-containing potato virus X. It was my response to an overnight visit from Rosalind Franklin, who stayed with the Cricks. Listening to
her treat Don and me as insignificant players in tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) research, I felt the need for another plant virus to call my own. Three years before I had obtained a not very good X-ray pattern from a preparation of potato virus given to me by Roy Markham. Now, I wanted photos good enough to establish the helical symmetry of the virus and, from it, the molecular weight of its protein subunit.

  The arrival, finally, of a letter from Christa let me enjoy the first real party of the fall, held on a Saturday night in Alfred Tissières’s rooms in King’s. My head was hazy when I had to climb afterwards into college—I had not been successful in getting an official key to open the door next to the bicycle shed. Even when half drunk, I could hoist myself onto it by standing on a bike below. That evening, as on many others, I dined at Lucy’s, a tiny storefront restaurant in All Saints’ Passage near St. John’s. At best providing room for only 10 persons cramped at small tables, I had learned of its existence through a friend of my sister’s during double-helix days, Geoffrey Bawa. Born in Ceylon to a tea planter, Geoffrey then had been in Cambridge to become an architect after earlier earning a London pre-war law degree. Finding that Lucy’s lamb chops and chips still tasted super, I ordered them on virtually all the subsequent 100 occasions I dined there over the next eight months.

  Variety in my evening food came largely from the occasional High Table meal in a college. Still an official research student, I did not have High Table rights at Clare and most appreciated a third Michaelmas-week invitation from the Master to join him there as his guest. An experimental physicist, once connected to the Cavendish, Sir Henry Thirkle many years before began devoting most of his time to college duties. His effective long tenure as Head Tutor at Clare meshed well with his bachelor existence. Now portly, but not embarrassingly so, Sir Henry told of the college’s good fortune in having Paul Mellon come there from Yale in the late 1920s. Not only had this led to a continuing exchange of students between Clare and Yale, but a major gift from Mellon had made possible the recent completion of the New Clare Court in which I lived.

  Sheila Griffiths, my Welsh almost-girlfriend of two and a half years ago, also helped me pass the occasional dinner. After her marriage to Roy Pryce, the young historian she had met in Rome, they had come to Cambridge where Roy edited The Cambridge Review. But the month before he had moved to a better position in Oxford. Until she could find an acceptable position in Oxford teaching in a nursery school, Sheila was resigned to living alone during the weekdays in their basement flat off Lensfield Road. With one of her brothers writing for The Guardian and her father a Labour Member of Parliament, Sheila’s well-intentioned gossip kept our dining hours together free of Christa uncertainties. Afterwards, I could go out to the street without fear of being unable to sleep.

  Max Perutz was often dispirited by a mysterious illness that made him weak. It had so long denied diagnosis that most Cavendish denizens had thought it psychosomatic. After a string of doctors had been unable to help him, Max was said to have almost taken up Tony Broad’s offer last year to put one of Wilhelm Reich’s “Orgone Boxes” at his disposal. The talented but eccentric builder of the Cavendish’s powerful rotating X-ray anode, Tony took Reich’s post-Freudian device seriously, saying it might sort out trouble spots within Max’s body. Fortunately Max felt less panicky after being told that he might be allergic to the gluten in wheat.

  Of light relief to all except Francis, who firmly pronounced himself indifferent, was the Queen’s visit to Cambridge in October. Knowing of the route the Queen would take, Jane Rich, who was now back from Paris, and I saw her Daimler glide by on King’s Parade. We celebrated seeing the Queen’s blue suit by having lunch at the Bath Hotel on Bene’t Street next to the Eagle. Often dining there, particularly when he needed to strengthen the faith of a wavering aristocratic son, was the famed Monsignor Gilbey. Easily spotted by his elegant clerical hat, and coming from the wealthy gin family, he was the Catholic chaplain in Cambridge, with an urbane knowing smile taken for profundity by those of his faith. Inherently of more concern to Jane and me, though, was what Peter Pauling was up to. Only on one occasion that fall had I been treated to a ride in his Mercedes roadster. But I later gathered from him that his limited monies for petrol were best utilized getting out to see the girls at Girton, some two miles to the northwest along the Huntingdon Road.

  My first glimpse of Girton’s inner portals came not through Peter but by way of Linda. Before she left for Scotland in early October, Linda arranged for me to have Friday afternoon tea there with two undergraduates, telling me they might make me less dependent on Christa’s whims. Initially they seemed to be more interested in themselves than me, which put me off. Statuesque Janet Stewart was clearly conscious of her good looks, poise, and intelligence. The more down-to-earth Julia Lewis had the sharp features of many English beauties and possibly the need for excitement beyond books and ideas. Soon I suspected that Peter had been expending more petrol upon Julia than she wanted. This latest of Peter’s dalliances was probably the reason Linda had me now at Girton. I was about to leave, but then in glided Pamela, the third of the close-knit girl trio. Accompanying her was her visibly possessive friend, Charles Clunies-Ross, whose family still owned the Cocos and Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean.

  Biking back from Girton through the cold darkness of late fall, I went straight to the Cavendish Lab to find Don Caspar. For several weeks he had been frustrated by uninformative X-ray photographs from his bushy stunt virus (BSV) crystals. The day before he finally hit pay dirt by tilting a large crystal at the appropriate angle to the powerful X-ray beam needed to examine objects as large on the molecule scale as BSV. To Don’s joy, the resulting photograph displayed the perfect fivefold symmetry expected from a polygonally constructed virus.

  Two days later, I accompanied Jane Rich into London. Alex was initially supposed to come, but at the last moment concluded that further conversation with Francis would be more interesting than having tea with Jane’s rich aunt at her hotel off St. James’s Street. Through Jane, I had been forewarned to expect a self-conscious New York society woman in her middle fifties. I was intrigued to learn that she lived just above the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and had two unmarried daughters who had gone to Smith, the New England women’s college that my New Haven cousins had also attended. Conversing with Mrs. Ames, however, proved a far less heavy affair than Jane had predicted. She understood perfectly why my long-term ambition was not to spend all my career at Harvard but eventually to move to Cold Spring Harbor and live in its beautiful, white-painted Director’s House.

  The next afternoon Jeffries Wyman was about, on his way to Egypt from Harvard, from which he now had irreversibly resigned. To the Dotys’ delight, he was leaving most of his valuable antiques with them so that they could appropriately furnish their new, large, mansard-roofed acquisition in the heart of Harvard. After coming to the Cavendish to learn about Max and John’s research, Jeffries had tea with John and me at the Regent House. Earlier Max begged off, worried that he might be exposed to gluten-containing food that would magnify his physical weakness. Over scones, Jeffries said I must come in the spring to Cairo where he was to head up UNESCO’s new Middle East Science Office.

  A few days later, my work with potato virus X took a possibly big step forward, when I developed an X-ray film displaying an almost well-oriented diffraction pattern. If only a little sharper, I might have a real personal trophy to take with me the following week to the Max Planck Institute for Virus Research in Tübingen—where the best TMV research in Europe was being carried out. Even more to the point, I was going on afterwards to Munich and Christa for a few days. Although her Munich letters to me ended “With love, Christa,” uncertainty about who might then be near her was always with me.

  Tübingen, Munich, and Cambridge (England): November–December 1955

  MY VISIT TO Munich to see Christa was less than perfect. On my way there, however, my weeklong side visit to the Tübingen TMV laboratory of Gerhard Schramm went more than we
ll. I met his clever young co-worker, Alfred Gierer, who was now isolating TMV RNA. Heading the Virus Institute, though not a bona-fide virologist, was Friedrich Freska, who speculated before the war on gene duplication in an article that had intrigued me while still a graduate student. Before meeting Freska, I anticipated a Max Delbrück–like, tall, precise individual, exuding more questioning logic than warmth. Instead he displayed no trace of arrogance and was delighted with the double helix. I saw him a week later in Munich, when Christa brought me to a public lecture on genetics and DNA that he delivered to a large university audience.