Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 8

  By the time Geo drove me to the airport, I was in a mild alcoholic daze even though early in the lunch I had stopped trying to match with Scotch and water Geo’s rapid downings of neat whisky. I was on my way to Knoxville, because Alex Hollander in Boston had offered me the princely sum of $150 to stop by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to talk about the double helix. There Alex was running the U.S.’s biggest effort to measure the genetic consequences of ionizing radiation. My flight there was especially fun because a very pretty stewardess became intrigued by my copy of Satan in the Suburbs, Bertrand Russell’s new book. At Oak Ridge, security passes were needed to move in and out of the giant factory-like home of Alex’s empire. Once inside, however, the atmosphere was academic, and it was fun to begin thinking about genetic damage in terms of a real molecule, DNA. By then, however, I was travel weary, and the final flight back to Los Angeles passed slowly, even though John Wayne and his Peruvian girlfriend, Pila, on their way back to the Pacific Coast, joined the plane at Dallas.

  Back in Pasadena, I again had more time than I knew how to fill. Happily my morale went up when I got my driver’s license and could buy my first car. In a Colorado Avenue used-car showroom, I found a three-year-old white Chevrolet convertible that I soon parked with semi-pride next to the Athenaeum. But I was envious when I saw next to it the Jaguar of my fellow resident, William Shockley. He was at Caltech briefly between his departure, from the Bell Labs and from his wife, and his move to the Bay Region to start up a company to exploit the transistor, which he had helped invent several years before. Conversationally Shockley did little to enliven the tedium of Athenaeum evenings, and I could only look forward to evenings when I was invited out to dinner. Most frequently it was to the Riches’, who were living in a comfortable old house off Oak Grove. Jane had little interest in subtle food but always could be counted on to listen to my complaints about single life in a place (Pasadena) that had the highest concentration of women over 60 than any other American city. All the seemingly suitable girls she knew were 3000 miles away, but their existence gave me hope there might be life after Pasadena.

  By then I knew I would go nowhere with Rachel Morgan—the girl I met at The Greasy Spoon soon after I arrived at Caltech. Soon after my return from the East Coast, she told me I could never be important in her life. This news kept me from sleeping for several nights, after which I turned to Alex Rich for possible help in getting sleeping pills. But he warned me that they could prove addictive and that I should avoid them. Instead, I took comfort in hearing by mail from Peter Pauling that his parallel search for the perfect girl in Cambridge was also going nowhere. At the summer’s end, he got unmistakable hints from his parents that his life would improve if he found a nice girl and got married. In fact, Linus dangled in front of Peter the inducement of a higher allowance. In contrast, Linus’s friend the British zoologist Lord (Victor) Rothschild, went no further than asking Peter, “How was his sex life?” To which Peter replied, “Non-existent.”

  Now Peter wanted to buy the radio I had left with him as well as my winter coat with my copy of Kinsey’s 1953 report, Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, thrown in for nothing. Over Christmas, he had been on a semi-lonely voyage to Greece that had had some awkward moments. He had just vowed to raise the minimum age to 21, not knowing whether this rule would accommodate the pretty and fresh new technician in the Cavendish lab who called everybody, including Max Perutz, by their first names. And Peter was ambiguous about what to do if his sister Linda came to England—that is, if she didn’t marry the college friend who was keeping his parents in the dark about their intentions.

  With the winter rains falling much of the time, Caltech at last seemed an appropriate place for inside work. For much of January, Alex and I were encouraged by our work on RNA. The RNA samples that had recently arrived gave better X-ray diffraction patterns than he’d seen during the fall. But our elation proved temporary when we later could not further improve our results. Although the RNA X-ray pattern was indeed specific, and not obviously related to DNA’s, it remained too fuzzy to give us hope that a well-defined RNA structure existed. What was worse, the same pattern emerged from RNA in which the base ratios almost smacked of complementarity (A = U, G = C) as well as from RNA where the base-pairing rules were clearly violated. On most days I was convinced that RNA must be single-stranded, arguing that the samples with base compositions hinting at double helices reflected the fact those RNAs arose by base-pair-mediated RNA duplication in the cytoplasm. My argument was admittedly far out and never convinced Alex.

  Outside the Riches’ Pasadena house, 1954: (from left to right) Jack Dunitz, Giovanni Giacometti, JDW, and Alex and Jane Rich

  Max and Manny Delbrück tried to rescue me by arranging a camping trip to the desert with Doriot Anthony, a young flutist from Boston, temporarily studying in LA and who frequently came to the Delbrück’s’ ranch-style home on Oakdale Avenue. But she proved as uninterested in me as I was with her. More girl hope came after George Beadle told me that Gary Cooper’s daughter, Maria, was thinking about being a biochemist and was coming with her parents to see Caltech the following week. The “royal visit” occurred just after lunch, and most of the Biology graduate students and postdocs eagerly awaited their walk down the halls of Kerckhoff. Suddenly they arrived with George happily in charge of a trio not up to our High Noon expectations. Gary was much less impressive than his well-dressed wife, while his daughter’s still-slender form was not that of Grace Kelly. By the time they left, I feared this might be the only Hollywood moment Caltech would bring into my life.

  About this time (February 1954), Geo Gamow wrote me from the train taking him across the western states for his spring residence at the Berkeley Physics Department. He wanted to know more about RNA and was rightly confused as to its role in certain viruses where conceivably it, not DNA, was the genetic component. After he picked up his new car, he planned to drive to Pasadena, to see the Delbrück’s. Max had known him since their early 1930 Copenhagen days when they were together in Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics. It was hard for Max not to be jealous of his high-spirited Russian companion, who, after growing up through the Revolution in Odessa, studied physics in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). By the time Geo reached Copenhagen, he was already famous for his tunneling theory, which used quantum mechanics to explain unstable atomic nuclei. Then he was treated as a hero in his home country, with one Russian paper writing that “a son of the working class has explained the tiniest piece of machinery in the world.” Although Pravda earlier had honored him with a poem, upon his return to Russia in 1931, he found himself in an intolerable situation. Quantum mechanics was being denounced as an enemy of dialectical materialism, as was Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  By then married, Geo concentrated on ways of returning to the West and made abortive moves to escape, first across the Black Sea and then from Murmansk into Norway. Thwarted in both attempts, freedom came to him through an invitation to a Solvay Conference in Belgium that he managed to have extended to his wife, Rho, who had once been a physicist. By not returning to Russia, the Gamows caused an uproar, and Stalin ordered that no more Russians be allowed to attend international scientific meetings. At the Solvay Conference, both his French and non-French speaking colleagues demanded that he cease trying to speak French. Geo badly wanted to move to the States. Within a year of his escape from Russia, however, an opportunity came when he received an invitation to join George Washington University in Washington, D.C. So Geo bought a ticket to Seattle before discovering that he was to live on the East Coast.

  Everywhere he insisted on having fun, even though many colleagues resented his having a good time at the expense of good taste. While in Copenhagen, his practical jokes culminated in an assault on the editor of Naturwissenschaften, the German equivalent of Nature. Upon reading a dreary, though legitimate, paper from India, George persuaded several European physicists to write to its editor that Naturwissenschaften was the victim
of a hoax and had published purposeful trash. Niels Bohr, in particular, was not amused by this Gamow foolery and made him go to Berlin to apologize in person.

  Geo now got much enjoyment from writing books for popular audiences, which he illustrated himself and filled with silly rhymes. Central to their contents were the adventures of Mr. Tompkins, whose initials were C (the speed of light), G (Newton’s constant of gravitation), and H (Planck’s constant). A bank teller, Mr. Tompkins would fall asleep during his physicist father-in-law’s lectures and in his dreams encounter the objects of these lectures. Relativity for example, was experienced while driving in a car at the speed of light of only several miles an hour. Unfortunately, Geo decided to tackle biology before the double helix was born, and his latest book on the facts of life that I had just read in English was not the success he hoped for. While he moved successfully among genes and chromosomes, Mr. Tompkins got mired in the red cells of our blood vessels and his dreams never reached beyond ideas that most educated people were already very familiar with. Unlike his prior popular books that sold well to students as well as adults, Geo’s biological effort bombed and was never reprinted by Cambridge University Press.

  Just before taking the long train trip west, Geo had written up the details of the genetic code that he had hinted about in his preliminary note to Nature. He’d been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and he wanted to submit his first biology manuscript to its journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, or PNAS for short. Titled “Possible mathematical relation between deoxyribonucleic acid and proteins,” Geo added as co-author his longtime companion, Mr. Tompkins. So when Merle Tuve, the geophysicist editor of PNAS, received Gamow’s manuscript, he assumed that Geo’s newest fun was at the expense of the Academy. Because Geo lived close by, Tuve asked him to drop by his office at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Implying that unnamed biologists were offended, Tuve warned Geo that although as an Academy member he could submit anything as long as it concerned the physical sciences, biology was out of bounds. The manuscript was returned to Geo, who put it in a new envelope and sent it for publication to the Royal Danish Academy, to which he recently had also been elected a member. Wanting publication more than fun, he removed Mr. Tompkins’s name. Later he sent reprints of it to all the biology members of the NAS writing on each, “Best regards from Geo.” Only then did his friend Harold Urey, the discoverer of deuterium, learn of this censorship and threaten to open up the affair. By then, however, Geo had other ways to amuse himself. If the Academy felt the need to look as well as be serious, that was their business. His role was to have a good time no matter the consequences to the ethos of science.

  Pasadena: February 1954

  SOON AFTER GEO arrived at Caltech in February 1954, I brought him to Max Delbrück’s house where Vicky Weisskoff and I had also been invited. Vicky now a professor at MIT, Max, and Geo had long known each other as theoreticians, and their dinner conversation initially centered on the Swiss-domiciled Wolfgang Pauli, whose legendary rudeness rivaled his formidable intelligence. Slowly Geo began to dominate the occasion by revealing his new manuscript with Mr. Tompkins’s name still attached. Vicky and Max tried initially to follow his argument but soon got lost. Max announced that Geo would give a seminar the next afternoon on his genetic code and the intervening hours would give us time to look over his paper and prepare to argue where we lost his reasoning.

  Soon, a number of Max’s Caltech friends and colleagues arrived for coffee and dessert, giving Geo the opportunity to move on to his limericks and card tricks that easily fooled most of us through his deft sleight-of-hand maneuvers. Only Vicky did not join in the fun. He had seen Geo pull off these same tricks before physicists on more occasions than he wanted to remember. Hearing Geo’s high-pitched voice squeal with delight was not Vicky’s way to end a civilized evening. The next afternoon, Vicky’s intellectual curiosity dominated his emotions, and he joined us in the small lecture room across from Max’s first-floor office. Soon we realized that Geo’s scheme would be proved or disproved over the next year by newly appearing amino acid sequences.

  Gamow’s brainchild was an overlapping code in which a given base pair was used to specify more than one amino acid. This was not a wild idea because the repeat distance (3.6 angstroms long) of amino acids along extended polypeptide chains was so similar to the repeat distance (3.4 angstroms) of base pairs along the double helix. Conceivably polypeptide chains contained the same number of amino acids as base pairs in their DNA templates. But because at least three base pairs must be needed to code for many, if not all amino acids, the amino acid sequences in proteins could not be a random collection. Instead, each amino acid would have only a restricted number of amino acids as their immediate neighbors. Up until now, however, too few proteins had had their polypeptide chains sequenced to reveal whether certain amino acid arrangements really were forbidden.

  The next day Gamow was off to the Rand Corporation, the think-tank in Santa Monica designed to advise the Pentagon on the technological future of war. Geo still maintained close contact with the world of top-secret weaponry that he had first come into contact with at Los Alamos during its push to make, first, atomic and then hydrogen bombs and was a long-time close friend with Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller. Talking to generals and their minions was fun for Geo as well as a source of a third of his income, with an equal amount coming from his books. Thus, although his salary at George Washington University was never commensurate with his intellectual stature, he could have an existence in which the pursuit of intellectual excitement was his primary objective.

  On Sunday, Geo and I sought out a beach on which to sit and hopefully meet some pretty faces. He drove us in his new white Mercury convertible that he called Leda, and he chose Long Beach as our destination, expecting long stretches of white sand. But, on arriving there, its only inhabitants, to our dismay, were the oil derricks that dominated both the beach and the neighboring waters as far as we could see. Geo tried to cheer me up by saying that I reminded him of his Russian friend of 20 years before, the already fabled theoretician Lev Landau and took a photo of me to mark the occasion.

  After he had left for Berkeley the next day, I was happily realizing that my life need not be that of a Chekhov hero exiled to a provincial town devoid of style and culture. To start with, the winter rains banished the smog on most days, letting me enjoy the San Gabriel Mountains, which rise up massively to the north of Pasadena. And a growing coterie of intellectuals, attracted to Caltech by Max Delbrück and Linus Pauling, gave subsequent camping trips to the Joshua Tree a lively air. Among these new intellects were several physicists working on the response of Max’s mold Phycomyces to light. Why Max had now moved on to light responses mystified those of us excited only about genes and how they function. Max’s mere interest in a problem, however, lent it a cachet among physicists more at home seeking the truth mathematically from the shapes of dose-response curves. In contrast, the chemists round Pauling were there to deal with well-defined molecules.

  JDW photographed by George Gamow on Long Beach, California, February 1954

  Thus a newly arrived Oxford theoretical chemist, Leslie Orgel, quickly joined forces with Alex Rich and me in focusing on RNA. As a prize fellow at Magdalen, Leslie had a major intellectual success analyzing newly discovered organic molecules that trapped iron within cagelike structures. Although there obviously would be other new classes of molecules to find and understand, Leslie let us know that the prior work of Pauling and his arch rival, Robert Mulliken of the University of Chicago, may have left very little new theoretical cream to be skimmed off. Going on as a pure chemist was likely to involve more hard work than was justified by the small gems yet to be discovered. So moving on to molecular biology and macromolecules like RNA made more sense than continuing bread-and-butter theoretical calculations. Leslie was at our side as Alex and I spent much of February 1954 going through mor
e and more RNA samples, one of which we hoped would yield an interpretable X-ray pattern. No real improvements came over our earlier January tries, however, and there seemed no good reason not to publish our results, inherently unsatisfying as they were. So our short manuscript describing the essential features of the RNA X-ray pattern was dispatched to Max Perutz for him to pass on to Nature.

  Happily, there was now Richard Feynman to share our frustrations. As the cleverest of Caltech’s minds, Dick, then just 35, never hid how hard it was for him to do innovative physics. Total relaxation between his bursts of intellectual activity was a necessity. The fame of his bongo-drum days preceded our first meeting, and he had recently remarried after a long single period after the immediate post-war death from tuberculosis in Los Alamos of his young, Brooklyn-born wife. Rumor had it that his new wife, Mary Lou, was a Jean Harlow-like peroxide blonde that he had picked out of the bongo world. They were living in Altadena just below the mountains, and the Riches and I were much excited when driving up there for supper. Our evening, however, was more muted than anticipated, with Mary Lou nervous about her cooking. Moreover, she was not a vamp but instead an early thirtyish woman extremely knowledgeable about art history. Dick often spent much of a lunch interval on a bench outside his Physics office reading The Saturday Evening Post, the weekly magazine that I had been brought up to despise. Its stories, however, were just what Dick wanted—devoid of any intellectual hang-ups and having predictably happy endings.