Genes, Girls, and Gamow Page 9

  I was then reading The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, a story of a completely different sort set in Africa. Earlier I’d read his equally bleak, London-centered The End of the Affair. For his protagonists, love inevitably led to more agony than pleasure, and I easily identified myself with their struggles. I went through both with few interruptions, having been stricken by malaise that I worried might be mononucleosis. Although the Caltech students’ clinic never confirmed this suspicion, I stayed largely confined to my Athenaeum room for much of a week.

  When again I felt almost normal, Mariette Robertson came by the Athenaeum to invite me to a party at her house at which girls, as opposed to intellectuals and their wives, would be present. She lived beyond the Paulings in the foothills of Sierra Madre, at the end of a narrow driveway in her parents’ expansive wooden house that was guarded by a nervous poodle whose curiosity made entering an awkward affair. As I was walking past Throop Hall several weeks before, Mariette had come up to me and introduced herself as Peter Pauling’s former Caltech girlfriend. Like Peter, she was a child of Caltech. Her father Bob was a clever astrophysicist, who, like Linus, was one of Caltech’s first graduate students in the early 1920s. Angela, her mother, was a Hungarian woman from the intellectual elite of Budapest that had produced their friend, Princeton’s fabulous mathematician, Johnny von Neumann. Peter was still much on Mariette’s mind, though she knew of his recent close friendship with young Nina, the Perutzes’ Danish au pair, in Cambridge. Later, I could not deny Nina’s beauty to Mariette, who now took comfort from Nina’s return to Copenhagen.

  Mariette’s Saturday-night party, filled with very un-Caltech-like faces and bodies, went on into the early morning. Most intriguing was a tiny dark-haired girl who had painted a second pair of lips on her cheeks and whom I arranged to meet the following Monday after her classes ended at Pasadena City College. At the appointed time, however, she did not appear, and after an hour I knew I had been stood up. Soon, dates with Mariette on weekend nights made more sense than her staying at home with her mother and me imposing myself on married friends. But I had to assume that she would write to Peter, so I wondered how he would let me know.

  Pasadena, Berkeley, Urbana, Gatlinburg, and the East Coast: March–April 1954

  GEO GAMOW WAS by now back in Berkeley using two boxes of Fisher balls and plastic bases to build his version of the double helix. But he was stuck on how far the two chains were separated along the helical axis and he asked me to send him quickly the correct coordinates. With them he could finish his model before I drove north for a weekend with him and the Stents. Formal coding proposals, however, were his real love, and he went on to describe a new scheme using triangles that might be applicable to single-stranded RNA templates.

  The week before, I had used my new car to move from the solitude of the Athenaeum to a three-room flat in a modest, single-storied dwelling on Del Mar Avenue. From there it was a quick morning’s walk to Lake Street for a breakfast of orange juice, chocolate doughnuts, and coffee at Winchell’s. Back to Caltech was an even shorter, five-minute stroll, punctuated by the calls of the mockingbirds that were the southern Californian equivalents of the robins that dominated the front lawns of my Chicago boyhood. By then, the Army was largely out of my mind because I officially knew that I could be part of the Public Health Service. But whether I would actually go to NIH would not be certain until the Presidential Review body made its decision. If they came down on my side, there might be good reason to stay at Caltech, especially given the real effort George Beadle had devoted to my cause. Also, spring had definitely arrived, and there were several semi-sunny days when the humidity approached East Coast levels.

  The Biology scene, moreover, was enhanced by a stream of visitors escaping the last days of winter. The most exciting mind was the dashing Jacques Monod on a tour from France that had earlier taken him to Berkeley, where Gunther Stent hosted Jacques’s playful intelligence. From Pasadena, the Delbrück’s quickly whisked Monod to the desert and the opportunity to scramble up rocks that no one else could master. Jacques had first come to Caltech before the war, at a time when he was not sure whether he wanted to be a biologist or a musician. There was no uncertainty now, however, as to what Jacques sought from life. Until he discovered how bacteria could enzymatically adapt to abrupt changes in their food molecules, he would not rest. But whether he could get real answers in Paris before we learned how RNA was involved in the transfer of information from genes was unclear to me.

  There was also a farewell party for Bill and Nora Hayes, who were returning to London after six months in the Delbrück environment. I felt awkward there because it was at my suggestion that Max had invited Bill to come, thinking I would do experiments on E. coli genetics with him once we had both arrived in September 1953. But once Francis Crick and I had found the double helix, what Bill was doing with bacteria bored me. All traces of this guilt were gone two days later when I picked up Leslie Orgel for a trip to Berkeley. As a theoretician, Leslie was not avoiding lab work and there was no question of bringing along his wife, Alice, as she was in the midst of a medical internship. Soon after we crossed the Tejon Pass, we cut to the west towards King City to avoid the trucks of U. S. 5. Leslie was usually oblivious of his surroundings but this day proved an exception. He luckily noted that my open Chevrolet convertible was on a collision course with a freight train whose tracks I had not spotted.

  Gunther Stent’s house on Channing Way in Berkeley, near the university, proved a more than adequate place to spend the night as well as the site of a Saturday-night dinner party with Geo. Earlier, we had gone to Geo’s office, where he displayed an incomplete double helix that he had built using the wrong conformation for deoxyribose. So informed, Geo was not at all upset and later proudly sent me photographs of himself next to a much more normal-looking double helix.

  Later, I diverted Geo from too many pre-dinner card tricks by proposing that he help Leslie and me form the RNA Tie Club. Its members would be united by their ties as well as a desire to understand the role of RNA in protein synthesis. During dinner, we all saw the value in limiting the club’s membership to 20, one for every amino acid. Then it would neither be too big or too small. Already Geo saw a unique role for himself designing the club ties, tie pins, and stationery. By dessert, Geo had begun sketching the tie, which I argued should display RNA as a single-chained molecule. And we all agreed that while the RNA Tie Club needed to be clannish, it should not be a secret society. With luck, public monies could be raised to bring its members together. Obviously Geo, Gunther, Leslie, and I should be founding members as should Francis and Alex Rich. But who the others were to be was left for further deliberation.

  Berkeley, California, JDW with Inga Stent,

  Leslie Orgel, and Gunther Stent

  Geo Gamow with a model of DNA in Berkeley, spring 1954

  I already knew that Geo and I would be spending some time together in the summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. Geo was to be the houseguest of Albert Szent-Györgyi, the celebrated Hungarian biochemist, while I was to be there as an instructor in its well-regarded physiology course. Up to then, genes were not focused on in Woods Hole, where the emphasis had long been on embryology and physiology. Dan Mazia, the Berkeley cell physiologist then in charge of the course, was excited by the double helix and thought introductory lectures on DNA would set the tone for subsequent talks on how fertilized eggs develop into multicellular organisms.

  Visiting Cold Spring Harbor this coming summer would not be a breather from girl-less Caltech. If only the Mayrs were to be there, I might count on Christa, although she was more likely to be around Boston now they had their New Hampshire farm. Even if Christa were elsewhere, however, perhaps the Woods Hole community was sufficiently large to give me hope that it would not prove another social desert. And, initially, I thought I would not be that far from Margot Schutt, my Henry James–fixated shipmate companion of the past summer. At last she answered my earl
ier letter of the fall. But she wrote mostly about friends we had formed on the Atlantic and said she was thinking of returning to Great Britain. I knew that I soon would be in Washington for a forthcoming National Academy of Sciences (NAS) meeting, so I proposed afterwards visiting Vassar College to see her. But she did not respond even though more than a month passed before I left Pasadena for my trip to Illinois and the East Coast.

  During these days, Mariette Robertson and I kept each other from being lonely by going to movies and, once, going into Los Angeles for an “Evening with Beatrice Lillie.” But this music-hall prattle proved embarrassingly boring, and must have left Mariette wondering why I remained so enchanted by things English. She was soon to leave Pasadena to accompany her parents to Paris, where her father, Bob Robertson, was to be the chief scientific adviser to the American military in Europe. Our friendship had even more reason to stay platonic, helped by her mother’s poodle jumping on me whenever Mariette and I moved close while talking sprawled on her living-room floor.

  After flying to Chicago, my parents drove me to Urbana and the University of Illinois to which Salvador Luria had moved soon after I finished my Ph.D. thesis. His departure from Bloomington was a big blow to science at Indiana University. Stupidly it never tried to match his good offer from Illinois, largely because of his leftist political actions, that included, unsuccessfully, trying to unionize its conservative faculty. At Urbana, Gunther Stent and I joined a group going to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains, where Alex Hollander had organized a mid-April meeting on genetic topics. Francis Crick would be there as would Max Delbrück. Eight of us from Urbana drove to the meeting in the large black hearse that Ed Lennox, an Atlanta-born physicist, now learning phage, used to move his many children to and from school. While driving south across Kentucky, Ed let Salva drive until we narrowly escaped a head-on collision as Salva played Russian roulette by passing on curves. Salva objected to his relegation to a rear seat, proclaiming that he had never been in an accident. But we had the premonition that Salva would have only one accident in his life.

  No big surprises emerged from the several-day meeting, but it was fun seeing friends who had vanished from my life when I was in Europe. Moreover, the occasion let Max and Francis continue to disagree on whether the intertwined strands of the double helix would separate during DNA replication. At the meeting’s end, Francis and I were passengers in a friend’s car along the Skyline Drive into Virginia, where we caught a bus to Washington. Both of us were there to talk before a session on “Proteins and Nucleic Acids” arranged by Linus Pauling, who gave the opening talk. The smell of McCarthyism hung over the NAS and was only partially compensated for by the lush greenness of the adjoining parkland across Constitution Avenue. Francis talked about the double helix while I spoke about what Alex and I had learned about RNA and speculated on its role as an information-carrying molecule between DNA and its protein products. Later I went upstairs to meet the National Research Council staff member who interacted with the Selective Service Presidential Review Committee. To my delight, he told me that the Army might soon announce that they would no longer draft individuals 24 or older. As I had just turned 26, I was very unlikely to be forced into an Army that now focused on the still-malleable young.

  At last my life seemed almost under my control as I pushed on to Swarthmore College to see Christa Mayr. During the next two days, we spent many hours wandering carefree through the wooded Swarthmore campus, then flooded with the first wave of migrating warblers. At other times, we stayed glued to radios tuned to the Senate hearings where Senator Joseph McCarthy at last met his match at the hands of the Boston attorney Joseph Welch. On the second evening we went into Philadelphia for dinner with a friend, who earlier had been with us at Cold Spring Harbor. The exciting unraveling of the McCarthy horror show dominated the evening talk, and I took pleasure in how effortlessly Christa held up her end of serious conversation.

  At no time during these two idyllic days did I see a Christa about to fall into my arms, and I left the next morning for New Haven knowing that I wanted her more than she needed me. In New Haven, I was joined by Av Mitchison whose year with mice in Bar Harbor was going very well. His mother, Naomi (Nou), had already crossed the Atlantic to contrast Maine life with that of the Mississippi sharecroppers that she had visited in the middle 1930s. Like her brother Jack, Nou had long been an intellectual star of the left. Just before she flew back to Scotland for New Year’s Eve, she and Av toured the Socialist world of New York City, finding its inhabitants too removed from political reality. Av’s sister, Val, would also visit Maine, soon taking a month away from her job covering the Royal Family for the Daily Mirror.

  Av and I sampled a lot of New Haven in three days. When I was growing up in Chicago I thought that the good manners of Yale were for sissies. But everywhere my Aunt Betty dragged me to we were received with genuine warmth and good food. In turn, Av delighted in telling strangers that he now worked in Bar Harbor with the very nice girl I knew at Indiana University. To my discomfort, he let on that she (Teke) might still be mine. But I knew my previous infatuation would never return and hoped Av would later tell her about my new love for a Swarthmore girl.

  Pasadena: May 1954

  ON MY RETURN to Caltech, I gave six lectures on bacterial genetics at the suggestion of George Beadle. The first was dreadful, but I used its failure to think through ways to lend the remainder coherence, if not actual zing. I was simultaneously preparing for my Woods Hole labs, where the students would do the now two-year-old Hershey–Chase experiment that showed that phage DNA, not protein, carries its genetic information. I persuaded Victor Bruce—Manny Delbrück’s engineer-turned-biologist brother—to come and help me, arguing that he should know how Woods Hole stacks up against Cold Spring Harbor. Matt Meselson, then finishing his Ph.D. thesis under Linus Pauling’s supervision, was coming, too. He was also unmarried and some weeks before had invited me to drive east to locate prospective girlfriends at Scripps Women’s College in Claremont. But we came away empty-handed and talked science all the way back to Caltech.

  As the spring came to a close, I saw George Beadle (“Beets”) constantly on the move in Kerckhoff Biology Building to find out what he could do on behalf of his faculty. He sensed that I needed to be cut free from any further dependency on Max Delbrück to sink or swim on my own. As soon as the Army ceased actively to pursue me, Beets offered me the position of Senior Research Fellow in Biology to start on July 1. Going with this position was a salary increase from my fellowship’s $3600 to the then-princely sum of $5000. Here Beets had the backing of Max, who nevertheless expressed disappointment with my progress over these first nine months at Caltech. With almost no deliberation, I accepted Beets’s offer, in part because he had worked so hard to keep me out of the clutches of the military. But I also knew that Caltech should be the perfect American place for me to pursue science if I had an appropriate Californian girlfriend. When I told Alex Rich of my decision, he was disappointed that I would not join him in Bethesda. He knew, however, that NIH and the Public Health Service would never have the same academic cachet as Caltech.

  Beets’s effort to keep good publicity flowing about Caltech led me to be approached by Vogue magazine, who wanted my photograph for their August issue. They planned to devote several pages to young celebrities who were making it big in the States, and I was to be included for the discovery of the double helix. The resultant publicity, I thought, should make “with it” American girls more eager to know me. No one at King’s College London or doing biochemistry in Cambridge was likely ever to see this issue of American Vogue. In fact, the only scientist I knew who read the British Vogue was Francis Crick because Odile regularly purchased it to give style to their magazine table. A week later, a Hollywood photographer, who frequently shot for Vogue, turned up in the company of the attractive wife of an astronomer connected to the Mount Wilson Observatory. Talking to her brought animated smiles to my face, and they got the shots they needed.


  At that time, I was working on the first draft of the second paper that Alex and I would write about RNA. Our first manuscript was soon to appear in Nature (May 22) and this new one was for The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an issue summarizing the talks presented the month before in Washington. Alex and I discussed its general form when we drove out to Joshua Tree National Monument for a camping trip with the Delbrück’s. This was to be the Riches’ last excursion to the desert before their return to the East Coast and Alex’s assumption of his new job at NIH. To escape the weekend traffic we returned on Monday, stopping off in Palm Springs to explore its glitter and going into several fancy clothing shops inquiring about garden-party clothes. Jane tried on several frocks, trying to keep a straight face while I talked about future parties on the great lawns of the Cape Cod summer mansions near Woods Hole.

  Initially I had planned to spend only the first half of the summer at Woods Hole, but by now I found it made sense to be away the whole summer. George Gamow would be there only in August. A late May letter indicated that he was still more than keen about the RNA Tie Club, writing that each of its 20 members should have a tie pin engraved with their respective amino acid abbreviations, such as GLU or VAL. Obviously, I must persuade Francis to join us at Woods Hole before he returned to England. There we could hold the first Tie Club meeting.