Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 7

  With my new interests, I belonged more appropriately to Pauling’s lab in next-door Crellin Laboratory. But I knew it would be unwise to have my fate determined by Linus. With my long-term goals unabashedly that of a biologist, I wanted to be judged by those with common objectives. Happily I saw a way of pursuing RNA’s structure while remaining independent of Pauling. By collaborating with Alex Rich, who worked in his lab, I could stay officially under Delbrück and not need Pauling’s blessing. There was no difficulty in persuading Alex to turn to RNA because there was no longer any reason for him to take X-ray photos of DNA, a task he had begun after Linus proposed his triple-helical structure. Instead, RNA was wide open and an obvious long-term objective for the new laboratory he would be starting a year hence at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Soon I was writing RNA chemists to send us their best RNA preparations for X-ray structure analysis, but until they came, I wanted to maintain the facade that I was still excited by phage work.

  At this point, my mind became increasingly dominated by the fear that I would soon be in the U.S. Army. Although I had been occupationally deferred all through the Korean War, which had just ended, my draft board in a South Chicago steel-mill district had decided that my time had come and made me IA. I first heard of my reclassification while temporarily home with my parents but waited to respond until I arrived at Caltech. Immediately George Beadle, the geneticist head of the Biology Division, wrote to the draft board asking that my occupational deferment be restored. His plea, however, went nowhere, and I faced the possibility of soon starting two years of military service without being able to do one push-up. So I was easily persuaded by Alex Rich to apply to be an officer in the Public Health Service, assigned to work with him at NIH. Quickly I filled out the appropriate application forms and went into LA to take the necessary physical exam. Afterwards, I was uncertain whether I should have been happy at passing it. If they had rejected me for my flat feet, the army might later do the same.

  The smog occasionally vanished, and I could then appreciate why the pre-automobile Pasadena had been so attractive to retirees born in the Midwest. But even the occasional tennis match on the Athenaeum courts only temporarily made life seem worth living. While my hosts in the Biology Division went out of their way to try to make me feel at home, I kept longing for unexpected responses to mealtime remarks. Their absence would have mattered much less if I had found a California girlfriend. But most graduate students seemed to be married and there was no obvious girl-seeking group I could be part of. So my thoughts often turned to Christa Mayr, to whom I had written the moment Pauling’s protein meeting ended. She soon replied, but her glowing descriptions of Swarthmore life made me feel uneasy.

  After several emotionally empty weeks, the mail finally brought an RNA sample for Alex and me to put before the X-ray beam. By using a needle, I could easily draw out long, thin, birefringent fibers after adding a little water to the powder-like pure RNA. With luck, these fibers would contain long, thin RNA molecules packed regularly next to each other. I eagerly passed on my first such fiber to Alex to take into the X-ray room. As he and Jane never rose before noon, only late the following afternoon were we able to examine the resulting X-ray film. Depressingly, it contained a blurred diffraction pattern no better than the one I had obtained six months before in Cambridge using plant viral RNA that Roy Markham had given me. At dinner with Jane, Alex and I reassured ourselves that better RNA samples might soon materialize and let us begin serious model-building. But as I walked back towards the Athenaeum, my thoughts could focus only on the return of the smog, my IA draft status, and the fact that there was only one secretary to stare at when drinking coffee at The Greasy Spoon—the coffee shop on the Caltech campus, where, twice a day, I used to go to pass the time.

  At this point in my Caltech life, I welcomed the arrival of Bob DeMars, who after finishing his Ph.D. with Salvador Luria had come West to be a postdoc with Max. Now temporarily living in the Athenaeum, he needed to acquire a car but was short of cash. So he accepted my offer to buy jointly the ’41 Packard sedan that Manny’s parents no longer used, possibly because it emitted an awful stench. The asking price of $125 seemed excessive, but Max said take it or leave it and we saw no point in arguing. Our first trip was a Sunday drive along the Angeles Crest Highway up to Mount Wilson, where, after our arrival, I decided it had to be less scary driving than looking over the sides of steep drop-offs. Later, in Bob’s presence, I began practice driving on the curved, deserted streets of San Marino. But I never came close to passing my first driving test, totally panicking after aborting a reverse parking maneuver.

  I was still without a license when I spotted a tallish girl with possible real flair at The Greasy Spoon. She came only irregularly, and it took me more than a week to discover that she was a research assistant at the Phytotron, Caltech’s environmentally controlled, new super greenhouse. Upon finally meeting her, I learned that her family was from the East and that she had gone to Vassar College. Seemingly now unattached, Rachel Morgan’s demeanor reflected old money—she might be the way to bring back the mannered days of England. So we used her car to go to dinner after I gave a Biology Division seminar on the double helix. That was my first occasion to wear a new checkered English suit that I picked out for myself just before I left Cambridge. We went to The Stuffed Shirt—Pasadena’s red-leathered, English-type restaurant off Green Street. There I learned that although her grandfather had been very rich, he was not J. P. but E. D. Morgan, whose large estate was also on Long Island. As the meal ended, I tried to set up a new date, but she controlled the occasion and I was left dangling. Then, as she dropped me off at the Athenaeum, her mood changed and she said that she wanted to cook for me in the near future.

  My new sky-high morale was tempered the next day when my Swiss co-hoax perpetuator, Jean Weigle, then in his Pasadena winter phase, warned me I should not count on Rachel’s affection. She had recently been very close to a just-departed South African botanist. In any case, I no longer wanted so desperately to leave Pasadena and was nervously apprehensive when Bob DeMars drove me to a Los Angeles Armory for a pre-induction physical. My hopes went up when I failed the exam on machine tools and did poorly on recognizing upturned shapes. They zoomed even higher when I was ascertained to be the most emaciated of a group of 35 nude males. I was taken away to a cubbyhole used by a Beverly Hills psychiatrist. At first sight highly civilized, he questioned me as to how I would enjoy army life and then to my reaction to pretty girls. Then he wrote some words on my form and went on to his next assignment, a very fat Mexican-American. Out of his sight, thinking he was on my side, I glanced at the psychiatrist’s verdict: “The aesthetic type—capable of military service.”

  This, however, was not an immediate death sentence because by then Caltech had found it could appeal at the California level and, if necessary, request further review by a presidential panel. So I was safe until late spring, by which time a Public Health Service Commission should be my safety net. So I relaxed over the Thanksgiving holiday, camping with the Delbrück’s among the Joshua trees in the high deserts east of Palm Springs. Afterwards, I had only a few days back in Pasadena before Bob DeMars and I drove up to the University of California at Berkeley. Gunther Stent, since 1952 its phage hot shot in the new virus lab there, had arranged that I be paid 40 large dollars to give a Friday afternoon Biochemistry Department lecture on the double helix. Located near the top of the campus, the Virus Laboratory had a marvelous view towards the Golden Gate Bridge and I could see that California life need not mean Pasadena smog. Moreover, there were good-looking girls everywhere, even among the overflowing audience at my talk.

  I turned from jocular to serious when Gunther brought me into the office of his department chairman for the usual 10—15-minute interval that Wendell Stanley allotted to speakers before his department’s seminar. Quickly I gushed forth on the beauty of his building, trying to erase the bad impression I created two years before in Copenhage
n. After Stanley’s lecture on tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) at the Polio Congress, I went with him among others to dinner at the home of physicist Niels Bohr. I still held in my mind the pretty electron microscope picture of TMV that had featured in Stanley’s talk that afternoon. To make small talk, I remarked that this structure was almost as beautiful as the smashing new Rome train terminal, which I had passed through when living in Naples. To my dismay, Stanley became very defensive under the false impression that I was comparing his new Berkeley Virus Laboratory, not his TMV, to a train station. Later, among his lab scientists, I tried to exude low-keyed maturity, knowing that if the army draft vanished I might welcome a job offer from Berkeley.

  On the way back to Pasadena, Bob and I stopped at the last moment at Stanford, allowing me to give an informal seminar before the geneticists associated with Ed Tatum. When we reached the Los Angeles region, it no longer seemed so intolerable, especially in view of the forthcoming supper at Rachel Morgan’s apartment several blocks from Caltech. That evening, when shown a photograph of her family in front of her grandparents’ Long Island mansion, I was so beguiled by her tallish blond presence that I momentarily stopped thinking about the draft. Soon after, we went into Los Angeles to see the Sadler’s Wells Ballet perform. But the huge Shriner’s Auditorium was not Covent Garden, and that evening’s ballet, Silvia, proved too slight to help make the evening click. Afterwards, I was also put off by Rachel’s matter-of-fact tone as we drove back to Pasadena.

  I was soon diverted from the thought that I might still be girlfriendless in southern California by the prospect of being in Chicago for Mother’s birthday on Christmas Eve. That evening at home we had oyster stew, a family custom that dated back to my mother’s early years. After a week in Chicago, I took the train to Boston for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Old Mechanics Hall. Francis Crick was coming up from Brooklyn while Av Mitchison was driving down from Bar Harbor. The three of us stayed two nights in Cambridge in Hugh Huxley’s second-floor flat on Harvard Street near where Trowbridge Street crosses it. Over the dinner he cooked the first night, Hugh talked about the thin-section electron micrographs that he was taking in F. O. Schmidt’s MIT lab. He had been there a year as a Commonwealth Fellow following his Ph.D. work at the Cavendish lab in Cambridge, England. Hugh then hoped to shake up muscle biology by showing at the molecular level how muscles contract.

  The next morning, I went over to the Mayrs’ house to learn that they were purchasing a 200-acre farm in New Hampshire and would start spending their summers there instead of at Cold Spring Harbor. Later, Christa came with me to the Mechanics Hall, where she saw Francis in action for the first time, talking about his meeting in New York with George Gamow, whom he found not the nut cake we guessed from his letter of the past summer. Then, most unexpectedly, Christa and I found ourselves face to face with Paul Weiss, who had taught me invertebrate zoology at the University of Chicago. I had last seen Paul in New York when I was interviewed for the fellowship that enabled me to go to Copenhagen to learn biochemistry. But 18 months later, during my last days in Copenhagen, he had angrily disapproved of my request to transfer to Cambridge, asserting that I was unqualified to take up X-ray crystallography. Now I had the last laugh, and enjoyed seeing Weiss’s inability to be even hypocritically pleasant as he beat a hasty retreat. Christa that day was great fun to be with. Again her face and voice made butterflies rumble through my stomach, but we parted as friends, not lovers, when we said good-bye at her parents’ home.

  The following afternoon, Hugh Huxley drove me out to the home of Lee Wakefield, the more straightforwardly nice of the two Vassar girls I’d met on the boat back from England. Then I learned that she was even more of a “proper Bostonian” than I had guessed on the Georgic. Her mother was a Forbes of the branch that summers off Woods Hole on Naushon Island. From Lee I learned that neither she nor Margot Schutt had yet planned what they would do after graduation. On the boat, Margot appealed to me the most, possibly because she kept hinting at her need to fly away from the confines of good taste. But she never answered the letter I posted to her at Vassar soon after I got to Caltech.

  On New Year’s Day, armed with a box of chocolates, I rode the New Haven train down to Yale to spend the night with my aunt and uncle. Aunt Betty, seeing that my hair had been recently cut and correctly judging that I was no longer likely to embarrass them, took me to the Lawn Club, cheerfully informing everybody within hearing distance that her nephew Jimmy would soon be an important professor somewhere. The next morning I continued on to New York for a night with the Cricks. They were living on Fort Hamilton Parkway in a dreary 1920s apartment about as far away from Manhattan as you can get in Brooklyn. They were not even close to where Francis was working at the Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute. Despite the million dollars behind David Harker’s lab, its ribonuclease project had gone nowhere, and Francis was there to give it real brain power. Odile, then several months pregnant, and I initially discussed what name she and Francis should give their second child. If it was a boy, I offered the English strength of Sebastian Trumpington Compton Crick. But if they had a girl, I was keen on Adenine Crick with the thought that she could be called Addy. We later went over the virtues of American life—doughnuts, frozen orange juice, and such like. Words, however, could not transform the Cricks’ daily life into an experience worth crossing the Atlantic. I also had the feeling that Odile had not forgotten the faux Pauling letter.

  Somewhat subdued, I took the hour-long subway ride back to Manhattan to take the train down to Washington for my first glance of George Gamow. Before meeting him, I was to visit the NIH in nearby Bethesda to see whether my commission in Public Health would soon materialize. Talking with their top brass was likely to be a heavy occasion because I would have to give the impression that I looked forward to being part of the Public Health Service, not that I was trying to avoid the draft. So ending my visit with zany Gamow paradoxically seemed the way to stay sane.

  Bethesda, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pasadena: January–February 1954

  THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, was not the big prison I anticipated. Its bosses were keen to get me, no matter for what reason, and I took comfort that so many of its scientists worked on problems with no immediate clinical consequences. Nonetheless its new Building 10 felt like a giant hospital, with its several hundred beds and shape of a giant, brick ocean liner. Happily NIH didn’t want me to appear until mid-summer even if my commission came through, as they expected, by late winter. My two nights in Bethesda were spent at the home of the ion-channel physiologist, Adrian Hogben, whom I had known when we were both postdocs in Copenhagen. From him I got a feeling that NIH, despite not feeling like a university campus, had real intellectual expectations.

  The next morning Adrian left me off at the Watergate Inn where Rock Creek empties into the Potomac River. There George Gamow instantly recognized me. From Francis Crick he knew more what to expect of my frame than I did of his. His high-pitched voice did not go with his generous bulk. Now 50 years old, the very tall thinness of his Russian youth had given way to a middle-age girth, accentuated by more alcohol than generally compatible with high-powered manipulation of mathematical symbols. Instantly I sensed his excitement with his new life as a biologist. Not that his physics was going badly. In fact, he was leading the world in cosmological insights. Five years before, he and his graduate student, Ralph Alpher, had calculated how the chemical elements were built up by neutron capture following the Big Bang when the Universe formed. To announce their answer, they prepared a short note to The Physical Review entitled “The origin of chemical elements.” Gamow was intrigued by the possibility of the paper being the first authored by alpha, beta, and gamma, provided that he could convince his sometime fellow cosmological explorer, the great physicist Hans Bethe, to add his name to the manuscript. Consent came swiftly from Bethe, not ordinarily given to Gamow-like foolery but obviously bitten by
the possibility of being associated with a seminal contribution to the first several minutes of the Universe. Initially the paper’s significance was not widely appreciated. The fact that it was published on April 1, 1948, confused even those who knew Gamow’s past tricks.

  As Gamow and I sat down, he told me that everyone called him Geo (“Joe”), and he pressed upon me a gift, the Japanese translation of his latest book, Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life. Telling me it was inscribed, I opened the front cover only to find the inscription, “I’ve fooled you—open the other side.” Geo delighted in his joke’s success, guessing correctly that I had no reason to know that Japanese books start where English books end. Then, being sure that I had a Scotch and soda, he started talking about a set of rules that would allow the 4-letter (A, G, T, C) DNA alphabet to be translated into the 20-letter (amino acid) alphabet of proteins.

  Under this scheme, proteins were assembled from the 20 different amino acids directly on the surfaces of DNA molecules. Immediately I knew there was no chance of this being right because no DNA is found in the parts of the cells where proteins are assembled. Instead, the surfaces on which the amino acids are linked to each other have to be RNA molecules. But my protestations on this point fell on closed ears. Geo wanted RNA and DNA to have the same structure, even though I told him that RNA gave a different and characteristic X-ray diffraction pattern. Already he had sent a note to Nature stating that a precise genetic code exists in which every amino acid is specified by some set of the four bases (A, T, G, C) found in DNA. Because there are 20 amino acids, some if not all had to be specified by more than two bases because the number of combinations of two bases is only (4X4). If, however, each amino acid was determined by triplets of bases, there would be many more combinations (4X4X4 = 64) than specific amino acids. Already Geo had a trick for reducing the 64 sets into 20 groups, but because I thought all DNA-based schemes must be bunk, I let him talk without really listening.