Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 24

  Linda immediately smelled an anti-Pauling conspiracy. Lady Adrian, as the wife of Lord Adrian, the famous physiologist and Master of Trinity College, had to know of her father. It was not right for the wife of one Nobel Prize winner to boot out of England the well-intentioned daughter of another world-famous visitor to Stockholm. An appeal was possible, but Linda would have to act fast. It was not clear at all whether Lady Adrian knew who Linda’s father was. And, if so, had Peter’s ignominy reached the Master’s Lodge at Trinity? Although Lady Adrian’s no-nonsense manner was not that of a busy gossip, her young physiologist son and heir to the title, Richard, might have briefed his parents. If Peter’s debacle had not been so immediate, Francis Crick or John Kendrew might have quietly gone to Richard to ask his mother to reverse course. But for Linda’s friends at this time, working to keep her in England when everyone’s sanity demanded that the Pauling name be off their lips as soon as possible, proved a hard task.

  Going back to Pasadena at this moment was not what Linda wanted and being under her mother’s thumb was the last thing she needed. There would be endless postmortems on how Peter got into his current situation and how they could have better handled his girl craziness. Even worse, her mother had just written to say that she had found Linda the perfect young Caltech faculty member. Barclay Kamb, according to Ava Helen, was both bright and nice and bound soon to be a tenured geophysicist at Caltech. The thought of her mother arranging her future instantly made Linda red and she decided instead to listen to John Kendrew’s suggestion that his art-historian mother help her. A resident in Florence since John’s boyhood, she had long been the mistress of a noted art authority, and a potentially perfect mentor to help Linda get a firsthand view of Florentine life and culture. With luck, a positive answer would come from Italy before she was kicked out of England. Nervously Linda wrote her parents that she needed money to sidetrack to the artistic wonders of Florence: once on the continent, she could reassess her options.

  To my chagrin, I also got a summons to the Magistrates’ Court at the Guildhall. Learning of Linda’s residency problem, I looked at my passport to discover that my permit had expired the week before. Going immediately to the police station, I hoped that my voluntary appearance would let my permit be routinely extended. Instead I was soon also in front of Lady Adrian, who came into the courtroom with a cane to handle her slight limp. After learning that I had ample money, lived in Clare, and worked at the Cavendish, my permit was extended until July 31. But I also was fined £5.

  When I had almost finished revising the manuscript needed for my forthcoming early April visit to Israel, I received an exciting letter from Alfred Gierer. From my November Tübingen visit, I knew he was studying the purified tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) RNA component and so I had written him immediately when I learned of Rosalind Franklin’s result that placed its sugar-phosphate backbone 40 angstroms out from the water-filled center of the virus. Now he revealed that his isolated RNA was infectious, not requiring TMV protein to aggregate around it for successful initiation of virus infection. This was a much cleaner result than Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat’s last June report that protein as well as RNA was needed for infectivity.

  Who was right might come out in London at the upcoming CIBA Foundation meeting on “The Biophysics and Biochemistry of Viruses” to which two persons from Berkeley’s TMV contingent, Robley Williams and Art Knight, were coming. Gierer could meet them there, but my last-minute efforts for getting him from Germany went nowhere. Meanwhile, I went into London to get an Egyptian visa stamped on my passport so that I could visit Jeffries Wyman in Cairo after my 10-day stay in Israel. Going to Egypt after being in Israel was said to be tricky, but I was told that, if asked, the Israelis would see that my passport bore no sign of my being with them.

  A preliminary program forewarned us that animal RNA viruses would be the main focus at this CIBA meeting to which Francis, Don Caspar, and I as well as Rosalind and Aaron Klug from Birkbeck College had been invited. Like all gatherings at CIBA’s posh Regency House in Portland Place, attendance was limited to 35 persons. I knew just enough about most speakers to fear the worst from almost half of them. Many virologists still did not think in terms of genetic information and were wedded to sloppy immunological and biochemical procedures that would never go to the heart of what viruses were.

  Spotting Robley Williams at the pre-meeting dinner on March 28, I immediately told him that Alfred Gierer was finding pure TMV RNA infectious. In response, Robley told that they, too, recently had some evidence that RNA preparations seemingly lacking any intact TMV rods could initiate viral infections. Even more important, he reported that when they reconstituted TMV rods from protein and RNA components coming from different TMV strains, the infections that resulted always displayed the disease symptom of the RNA partner, never that of the protein. To the amazement of André Lwoff, also drinking sherry with us, Robley seemed unaware of the bombshell implications of the combined Tübingen–Berkeley experimental results. The flatness of his tone made us wonder whether he had still not begun to think of RNA molecules as linear sources of genetic information.

  Mischievously, André and I on CIBA Foundation stationery wrote out the words “TMV PROTEIN INFECTIOUS—BE CAUTIOUS—WENDELL” and had it passed to Robley the following morning as an overnight telegraph message coming from the Berkeley Virus Lab’s Director. During his talk, given immediately after Francis’s delivery of our joint paper, Robley continued to downplay his new results, emphasizing their preliminary nature. Later over afternoon tea, our curiosity led André and me to ask Robley his reaction to Wendell Stanley’s message, saying that the telegram had mistakenly been first given to us. Unable to maintain straight faces, we admitted being the originators of a phoney message. Robley in reply told us he had questioned whether the message had been a hoax perpetuated by someone in Berkeley.

  In Cambridge, by then, the steady tears and “what ifs” of the past tumultuous month had largely subsided. Linda was off to Florence to live in a pension chosen by John Kendrew’s mother while Don and I kept Mariette Robertson company, each of us trying to show cheerfulness when we felt otherwise. Fortunately the brutal cold of February had passed and thousands of crocuses were up along the college backs. Three weeks to the date of Peter’s nuptials, and just before the CIBA meeting started, Mariette injected some new faces into our lives by holding a small Saturday-night party at the Orgels’. There I met the young American physicist, Wally Gilbert, then supervised by the almost-as-youthful Pakistani Abdus Salam, who later set up the International Centre of Theoretical Physics in Trieste and won a Nobel Prize in 1979. Earlier Wally and I saw each other at a gathering of physicists listening to the mathematician and pioneer of computing Alan Turing. Already legendary for helping crack the top-secret German Enigma codes, his talk that night was on the almost mathematician-designed morpho-genetic patterns of plants, a feature noted by the English biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson several decades before. The math of Turing’s argument was above me, but I comforted myself suspecting that it was unlikely to help biologists understand how growth patterns develop.

  Also at the Orgel party was Wally’s wife Celia, diminutive in size but not in spirit. They married when she was about to finish majoring in English at Smith College. More person-oriented than Wally, I told her that my ambition now was to find a rich wife. It was my response to her when she asked me what I could do to top the double helix. Celia immediately saw my major challenge ahead—scientists don’t usually mix with people with money. But as I had so abjectly failed to win the daughter of a poor academic, I thought I might less upset a rich girl to whom my newly acquired Cambridge mannerisms would not seem foreign.

  On my way to Israel on March 31, I stopped off in Athens, expecting spring warmth but finding temperatures only up to the mid-50s Fahrenheit. Alone and girlfriendless on top of the windy Acropolis, I had little inclination to delve into guidebook facts. It was a relief to go on to Israel for my weeklong meeting, finding hosts who
knew who I was. At Tel Aviv Airport, I was shepherded with other new arrivals into cars to take us to a pleasant beach hotel. From there we were bused every morning to Rehovot, southeast of Tel Aviv, to the Weizmann Institute of Science. The first half of the “International Symposium on Macromolecules” occurred there before concluding in Jerusalem.

  I happily had most of my meals with Weizmann Institute biologists, who correctly suspected my potential for being bored by too much chemistry. One night the microbiologist Ben Volcani brought me to his family’s flat on the institute grounds where I could smell the nearby orange groves. There was a palpable fear in the evening air of impending war between Israel and its Arab neighbors and institute scientists were rotating guard duty at night to intercept infiltrators coming across from the nearby border of Jordan. The next night I was taken by Leo Sachs and Matilda Danon, who worked together on cancer cells, to an Arab dinner in the ancient Arab part of Tel Aviv.

  The next day we avoided a chemist-filled excursion bus by going in Leo’s just-runnable big car to Nazareth and then on to the Sea of Galilee, above which rose the Golan Heights and the Syrian guns that too often rained artillery shots onto Jewish farms below. On Sunday I moved to Jerusalem with Ephraim Katchalsky, the intellectually spirited Israeli protein chemist, who drove scarily fast up the winding highway into the Judean Hills. There I learned that it might be possible for me to go to Egypt via Jordan rather than backtracking through Cyprus. Tourists were allowed by Jordan to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate into the old part of Jerusalem, provided they could show they were not Jews. All I had to do was to obtain a certificate of church membership. So, after the Monday morning session at which I spoke, I went to the West Jerusalem YMCA. There one of the staff used a sheet of their stationery to write that in 1928, in Chicago, I had been baptized an Episcopalian at the Church of the Redeemer, my father’s family church. This seemed not the moment to reveal I was a long-lapsed Catholic.

  Armed with my fake certificate and my passport, my border crossing was routine and I found myself close to the walled old city. While walking towards it, I was pestered by youths wanting to be my guides. I tried unsuccessfully to move faster than they, but soon was surrounded by beggars of all ages wanting baksheesh. Immobilized, I settled on a fee with one of the younger teenaged boys and quickly he alone was heading me in the direction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. My overnight stay was at a small, inexpensive hotel for Christians, right in the heart of an extraordinarily wondrous city. The next day, my guide and I went out to Bethlehem and the following afternoon, after a morning of buying trinkets, I was on a two-engine wartime C40 transport that let me look down at the great pyramids of Giza before landing at Cairo Airport.

  I was met by Jeffries Wyman, whose driver took us to a small pension near the flat that Jeffries and his Russian-born wife, Olga, inhabited. The daughter of a Grand Duke, who once ruled the Crimea, Olga and her family had fled to Paris during the revolution, and it was there that Jeffries married her in 1954. She had a son from a previous marriage. At dinner, I was surprised to find her more like a strong-willed peasant than an aristocrat. The next day, I went with Jeffries to lunch at the Gezira Sporting Club, located on an island in the Nile. There we saw the Russian ambassador and his entourage, now suddenly a big factor in Egyptian life. When Gamal Abdel Nasser began buying arms from Soviet countries, John Foster Dulles cut off American funding for the proposed High Nile Dam at Aswan. So Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal to find the monies needed for the dam and chose Russian engineers to complete the project.

  That afternoon, Jeffries took me out onto the Nile in a small sailboat and later put me on a night sleeper to Luxor, some 600 miles to the south. Telling me this would be the high point of my trip to Egypt, he was more than right. After lunch at my one-star hotel next to the much more opulent, river-facing Winter Palace Hotel, I made the two-mile walk down to the great temple of Karnak, whose vastness and unbelievably massive columns I was totally unprepared for. Roaming about it until sundown, my walk back was punctuated by prayers coming from the mud houses signifying the day-long Ramadan fast was over and feasting could begin. A simple ferry brought me the next morning across the Nile, where I was met by several small boys offering me their donkeys to ride to the Valley of the Kings and its fabled Tomb of Tutankhamen. I chose the one who offered the lowest price, but he had to beat his donkey continually to keep it going. My donkey ride ended at the 70-foot-high Colossi of Memnon, a pair of towering statues that were already a tourist attraction in Roman times. Here my donkey-beating guide wanted to be paid five times more than the fee he quoted to get my business. Angered by being tricked, I only doubled the original figure. But as the boy walked sullenly away, I regretted paying him less than a half dollar for his day’s work.

  Back in Cairo, this time staying in a large central hotel, I discovered the need to have a guide always on my side. Whenever I walked out into the street, pairs of beggars would descend menacingly behind demanding baksheesh to go away. Later I was not prepared for the extraordinary, virtually blinding, gold ornaments that dominated key rooms of the Egyptian Museum. By itself, this museum seemed worth the effort of coming to Egypt. Luckily I did not yet feel the dysentery bug already acquired somehow along my travels. Intestinal spasms first hit me in the departure lounge at Cairo Airport and dominated my two-day stopover in Germany to see how Alfred Gierer’s RNA infectivity experiments had progressed. By then I was more than ready to be on the Cambridge scene again, where an English-speaking doctor could give me pills to end the feeling of war within my lower parts. Unfortunately, in so crying for help, I got not pills but commitment to what proved a senseless week’s stay at the “Pest Hospital” on Mill Road; the possibility of my infecting a Clare oarsman preparing for the late May “bumps” was not to be risked.

  Cambridge (England): May–June 1956

  I HAD JUST been released from the “Pest House” when Celia Gilbert breathlessly opened the door of my Clare room to declare she had “found her.” Not having any idea what she meant, I got up from my prone position to offer Celia tea as well as chocolate biscuits. Too rushed to stop for more than a few minutes, Celia’s purpose was to invite me to dinner the next night. A daughter of a rich friend of her journalist father, I. F. Stone, was coming for Sunday-night supper. That her name was Margot Lamont made me realize that Celia had indeed located a rich girl. Her father was Corliss Lamont, a son of the celebrated banker and dominant figure in J. P. Morgan during the 1920s. Well known as the richest American sympathetic to left-wing politics, Corliss’s academic bent made him a natural friend of the intellectually inclined Izzie Stone, now a columnist for the left-leaning New York Post.

  Wally and Celia were living in Green Street, in a flat above the small coffee shop next to The Whim. When next day Celia introduced me to Margot, we started to probe each other’s pasts. Right away Margot apologized for a temporary problem with hearing in one ear, which slowed down Celia’s and my attempts to interject mild sarcasm in questions about her student life in the U.K. at Birmingham University. She had acquired a boyfriend, and her remarks about him made me feel that she wanted to be back with him as opposed to taking more time exploring the building styles of Cambridge’s colleges. After supper was over, she went off to her accommodation for the night, letting Celia and I agree that a monied left-wing home did not necessarily generate an unconventional mind.

  Being from the Bullard family was quite a different matter. The straight, dark-haired Belinda, 20-year-old daughter of Teddy, the Cambridge geophysicist, and Margaret, who now wrote novels, was definitely a free spirit. Three years before her mother’s Perch in Paradise caused a minor scandal; the bed-hopping antics of its main characters were too easily assignable to known Cambridge academics. Of an East Anglian family from Norwich, where everyone drank Bullard Ales, Teddy with his family lived in Clarkson Road, whose largish houses implied occupants with incomes more than academic salaries. Just before I was put in the “Pest House,” I went to the Bullard home for a Sat
urday-night party where Belinda told me she was in her second year reading biochemistry at Girton. There she knew Julia Lewis and had met Peter Pauling. Walking back with me to Clare, she helped me climb over the bike shed and then pulled herself over the top. Up in my room she saw that I was equal to nothing more. I told her that I was weak from a bug giving me gyp tummy.

  In a note to me in hospital, Belinda wrote that the almost-summer heat had already made many Girton girls’ backs red, the first cuckoo of the spring had been heard, and the little metasequoia in the Girton fellows garden had almost tetragonal symmetry. Soon I brought her around to see Celia, who afterwards pronounced her adorable. I knew then, but did not say, that, unlike Christa, Belinda would not cause constant butterflies to tremor through my stomach. Yet she was endearing and comfortable to talk intelligently with.

  A week later, I went to the Blue Boar Hotel for morning coffee with Celia’s father, on his way back from Moscow, who had checked in the night before. Izzie, in person, was much less the doctrinaire defender of the Soviet Union that I expected from his newspaper columns. When I kept going back to the rape of Czechoslovakia, he had no hesitation in admitting that his free-thinking ways would not let him prosper in a communist-ruled state. I gathered that his wife, Esther, was much less interested in politics, concentrating on looking after Izzie’s needs, both as a thinker and a wage-earner. This trait faithfully appeared to be passed on to Celia, equally happy that not a trace of domestic responsibility kept Wally from devoting all the time he wanted to theoretical physics. With his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis a done deal, he and Celia would be returning in the late summer to the States to be part once again of the theoretical physics group at Harvard. Izzie and Esther had a summer cottage on Fire Island, not too far away from Cold Spring Harbor where I was to spend much of the summer. So I might have more fun disagreeing with him there.