Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (17 page)

Eating by myself in the faculty club was never an event to be anticipated and so I always greatly welcomed invitations to dine with the Dotys, now living less than a thousand feet from Paul's lab in a huge mansard-roofed house on Kirkland Place. Equally important in maintaining my morale were dinners at Wally and Celia Gilbert's equally proximate flat. We had met the year before at Cambridge University, where Wally had gone from Harvard as a young theoretical physicist. Knowing that they soon would be going back to Harvard upon completion of Wally's Cambridge Ph.D., I offered Celia, who had been an English major at Smith, a job at my lab starting in the fall. With Celia about, even routine lab manipulations became moments of conversational mischief. But after only four Biolab months, she was struck with mononucleosis. Her illness ended her tenure in my lab and, perhaps as a small consolation, the anxiety she suffered when called upon to dilute phage solutions by factors as big as a million.

Subtle conversational moments returned in March when Alfred Tissières, with his Bentley, arrived from Cambridge. Soon finding himself a room in a house off Brattle Street, he took on the task of finding a lab technician to replace Celia. Happily, Kathy Coit, whose parents were now housing Alfred, expressed interest in joining us. Finding her not only intelligent but also an enthusiastic rock climber, Alfred persuaded her to become our factotum. Though this was her first exposure to science, Kathy's cheerful common sense soon made her indispensable to our day-to-day lab progress.

Covering Alfred's salary was a grant that I had obtained from the National Science Foundation to study the ribosomes of bacteria. Those funds also allowed us to buy a preparative Spinco ultracentrifuge needed to spin them away from other bacterial components. A more expensive analytic Spinco that could measure how fast ribosomes sedimented was needed, too, but my grant wouldn't stretch that far. Luckily, we had one at our disposal thanks to the protein chemist John Edsall on the floor above.

Most evenings I would be back in the lab, having already spent the daylight hours there. After hours, we were required to sign the night watchman's sign-in book. There was no good reason for its existence except catching an errant husband in a lie concerning his whereabouts of an evening. One night I entered and was pleased to find it had gone missing, with no untoward consequences for the building's proper function. More frustrating was the bolting of the departmental library when the dour librarian went home. Though faculty members had keys, graduate students didn't and could not search out journal references in the evenings or on weekends. My continued pestering for the department to pay students to guard the entrance finally led to that reform for the common good.

Harvesting tobacco mosaic virus in 1958. From left to right: Julian Fleischman, Kathy Coit, John Mendelson, and Chuck Kurland

Nathan Pusey regularly opened Harvard's stately President's House to his faculty and their spouses for Sunday afternoon tea and cakes. Paul Doty urged me to sample such an occasion, and I semiawkwardly presented myself at the front door when my fall term lectures were nearing their end. Led by a maid into the main drawing room, where I introduced myself to the Puseys, I soon was passed along to talk with the late-thirtyish Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl and his equally youthful wife, Brita. A prize catch in Pusey's efforts to resurrect the Divinity School, Stendahl had a strong, angular, slightly distorted face that struck me as that of a troubled minister in an Ingmar Bergman film. Liking his reasoned openness to the complexities of human life, I nevertheless could not even affect interest in the Evangelist Matthew, about whom he had just completed a scholarly tome. Later, when Anne Pusey moved to be near me, I felt much more at ease talking about my Chicago education and how fortunate I felt to be part of the Harvard scene. Simultaneously I tried to overhear what our president was saying to others. Later, as I walked out onto Quincy Street, I wondered whether any conversational gambit could possibly elicit from him an animated response.

Later during the monthly meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I was no more successful at discerning the feelings that occupied what he considered to be his soul. We always turned to Bundy for hints of what was coming next. Pusey seemed to come to life only when presenting honorary M.A.'s to those newly tenured faculty whose actual degrees had been conferred elsewhere. Through this gesture of sanctification, Harvard saw itself as ensuring that all faculty felt equally valued.

My social life at Harvard still left much to be desired. I had flown to London just before Christmas, and then for the New Year had gone by train up to the home of Dick and Naomi Mitchison on the Mull of Kintyre in the Scottish Highlands. My first visit to their Carradale House had been five years before, when I was invited by their youngest son, Avrion, then doing his Ph.D. thesis in Oxford on the immunolog-ical response. Av's mother was a distinguished writer of leftist persuasion, so I could again count on being part of an intellectual house party that featured long walks over boggy moors, heated conversations much more about politics than science, and hearty but never inspiring food. Still, I knew it would be much more fun than going back to the small home in the Indiana sand dunes to which my parents had moved after my sister's graduation from the University of Chicago. I would later regret not having been a more dutiful son when my mother, only fifty-seven, died of a sudden heart attack not long after the holidays. She never had the pleasure of visiting Harvard to see me as a member of its faculty. When I went home for her funeral, I could see my father was unlikely ever to recover entirely from her unexpected death.

At the end of July, I was happy to be able to bring my father along to the Isle of Skye, where I was to be the best man at Av Mitchison's wedding to Lorna Martin. It was my first chance to meet Av's intellectually powerful research supervisor, Peter Medawar. He came up from London with his strong-willed wife, Jean, and fetching bright daughter, Caroline, then intending to escape from much unwanted parental dating advice by going up to Cambridge. In the middle of the reception, I had no difficulty in spiriting Caroline away for a long car ride through the wild beauty of Skye, remaining absent long enough for Peter and Jean to grow worried that Caroline and I might have found each other perfect. But she had other plans for the next few weeks. And after putting my father on a plane back to Chicago, I anticipated intersecting in Tuscany with a Radcliffe girl I knew from the off-campus house on Massachusetts Avenue, who was traveling in Europe. Several letters from the prior locales on her itinerary gave me to believe that she would greet me warmly when our paths finally crossed in Assisi. But as we looked up at the Giotto frescos on the walls of its fifteenth-century basilica, I sensed that her affections were already subscribed; I later learned she was smitten with a young classics instructor.

Even before I went off to Europe, momentum was building for the appointment of a super geneticist to the biology faculty. Bagging such a star had been on Harvard's agenda since the late 1940s, when an offer failed to lure Tracy Sonneborn away from Indiana. Now the introductory course was being taught by Paul Levine, whose recent promotion to a tenured position had been a dicey matter. In so proposing him, the senior biology faculty had to emphasize his highly praised teaching, since his middling research on
Drosophila
was far from noteworthy. Given Bundy's known determination to prevent his out-of-date biology faculty from perpetuating their inherent mediocrity, the promotion had hints of a compromise between him and Pusey The letter from University Hall to the Biology Department stated that Levine's appointment was conditional upon the department's next tenured slot being reserved for a geneticist whose research was world-class. Initially I feared that they might somehow find a candidate who, though clever, did not yet feel it necessary to think in terms of the double helix. Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong.

The subsequent departmental committee made the Purdue University phage geneticist Seymour Benzer, already my close friend, number one on their list. Decisive was the maize geneticist Paul Mangelsdorf's highly positive reaction to Benzer's recent talk before the International Congress of Genetics in Toronto. Within days of Seymour's coming to Harvard to talk about his fine-structure genetic map of the r2 gene of phage T4, my senior biology colleagues voted unanimously for his appointment. Seymour, of course, had been earlier apprised of the department's intentions. Paul Doty and I both told him that it was virtually impossible for any properly constituted ad hoc committee not to back his addition to the Harvard faculty.

Alfred Tissières was now Bentley-less. In July he was to marry in Colorado the equally strong-willed Virginia Wachob, a girl of Scottish descent from Denver, whom he first met at Caltech during a year away from King's. Supporting both a wife and a Bentley, which soon might need a major engine overhaul, would not be possible given that Alfred's Harvard salary was slightly lower than mine. The Bentley now belonged to a much more handsomely rewarded law school professor.

With the assembling of the ad hoc committee taking longer than expected, it was early February 1958 before Seymour had his formal offer and an invitation back to Harvard to meet with Bundy Then he wanted reassurance that DNA-based biological thinking would have the continued strong support of the administration. To my distress, Seymour didn't immediately accept, implying worry at having greater teaching responsibilities than at Purdue. And so it was a great relief when Bundy happily called me early the next week with news that Seymour's letter of acceptance was on his desk.

Going off soon thereafter to the University of Illinois, as its George D. Miller Visiting Lecturer in Bacteriology, I could finally rest assured that the days of backward thinking in Harvard's Biology Department were numbered. My visit was arranged by Salva Luria, who by then had been a professor at Urbana for more than five years. My lectures on macromolecular replication and cell growth were a preview of ones I wanted to deliver later to Harvard undergraduates. Over the three weeks of my visit, I enjoyed much stimulation from the Urbana science scene. Especially enjoyable was talking with the diminutive, manic Sol Spiegelman, then also focusing much of his research on ribosomes.

Flying back to Boston on an intellectual high, I came back down to earth at Harvard with a thud. Seymour Benzer now claimed a heart condition that forced him to reverse his decision to come. Staying in Purdue, with its almost nonexistent teaching responsibilities, would be much less taxing, and he had to think of his health. The disappointment might have been unbearable if Av Mitchison had not happened to be in residence for the spring term, giving an advanced course on immunology. To my delight, he and his new wife, Lorna, together with Alfred Tissières and I, were temporarily occupying the Dotys’ big house on Kirkland Place while the Dotys spent Paul's long-overdue sabbatical in the other Cambridge. Parked next to my MG TF beneath the Dotys’ main bedroom was Alfred's consolatory sleek new Alfa Romeo sedan.

Had it not been for Doty's occasional flights back to oversee his ever-growing lab group, my direct line to McGeorge Bundy would have been cut off when I most needed it. With virtually no warning, I learned that an ad hoc committee soon would assemble to consider simultaneously the promotions from assistant professor to tenured associate professorship of Edward O. Wilson and myself. That I was to be considered a year prematurely was not at all the original intent of the Biology Department. Their concern primarily was Wilson, whom they needed to promote to keep him from accepting the same terms from Stanford. After undergraduate education as a naturalist in his home state of Alabama, Ed had moved north to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. Proving his brilliance during his initial studies on ants and their behavior, he became a junior fellow, then considered the best stepping-stone to an eventual permanent position on the faculty. Since my arrival, we seldom had reason to speak: I was a midwesterner, he a southern boy; he was par excellence a naturalist, while I knew nothing about ants, having by then lost all my earlier interest in animal behavior. But the vast museums of Harvard's past glory were not to vanish, and it appeared that Wilson might very well have the intelligence and drive needed to move Harvard's evolutionary tradition into the future.