Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (22 page)

In the fall we came together three times to hammer out details of our final report. I wrote the introductory sentence: “The boll weevil is almost a national institution.” Secretly I hoped that JFK himself might read it and mark me out as a potential speech writer. On the first day of our last scheduled meeting, we were interrupted by Colin MacLeod's deputy, Jim Hartgering, bursting in to tell us that the president had been shot in Dallas. Halfheartedly we tried to refocus on cotton insects until news reached us an hour later that JFK had died. In a state of shock, I walked about the PSAC offices, soon drifting upstairs to see Marc Raskin, who for months had wanted to resign from his sideline position on Bundy's National Security Council to start his own foreign policy institute. We wondered under what circumstances Diana de Vegh would hear the news. That Lyndon Johnson was to be our president was at that moment emotionally impossible to accept.

At last I saw no point in hanging around and went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel, where I was staying to be near the Szilards, rather than the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House, which was inexpensive in those days and where I had stayed on earlier Washington trips. Always looking forward to his next meal, Leo insisted that Trudy and I quickly go with him to the Rathskeller, across Dupont Circle down Connecticut Avenue. There he obsessed about how one might get Lyndon Johnson to end the nuclear arms race. I didn't have the heart to stay in town and see the funeral cortege that would soon be making its solemn way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Abjectly I flew back to Boston the next morning.

Though Bundy stayed on as national security advisor, Jerry Wiesner soon resigned to return to MIT as dean of science. Almost eight months were to pass before our cotton insects report finally was released in a gutted form. Gone were our recommendations to spend more on cotton research facilities and supplies and less on salaries. Unless many more entomologists were trained to help bring sawier approaches to the fields, we saw no chance of American cotton's escaping its total dependence upon pesticides. But we were told that the new president didn't want us to recommend policies requiring more money for cotton insect research. With our final report likely to have an impact on no one, I saw no reason to oppose its new, more pedestrian opening sentence, “Cotton is the largest cash crop in the United States.”

My last day as a $50-a-day PSAC consultant occurred when the Biological and Chemical Warfare subpanel was brought together to evaluate a proposed release of several infectious agents over the Pacific Ocean southwest of the Hawaiian Islands to test whether they would infect endemic Pacific birds. If no such infections occurred, VEE, for example, would finally get a true green light for appropriate military use. When I saw that a lieutenant general had come to preside over the briefing, I knew the army strongly wanted these tests to take place. Already they had co-opted the Smithsonian Institution for ornithological help. That morning I was the only panel member in opposition, in particular arguing that VEE was not an “incapacitating” agent. It killed the very young and very old and should never be sprayed over any civilian-populated areas. Talking later to Vincent McRae, I got the distinct impression that the lieutenant general had wanted a unanimous vote in favor of his Pacific tests. So I was not surprised never again to be called back to the Executive Office Building.

More than a year later, in early June 1965,1 was invited to a reception held for Presidential Scholars—those honored as the cream of the nation's graduating high school seniors, under a program LBJ invented—on the south lawn of the White House. I found myself next to the ice skater Peggy Fleming, who in turn was next to General William Westmoreland. Upon the dais Lucy Baines Johnson talked about how we should now strongly support our American soldiers, no longer in Vietnam merely as “observers” but now in frighteningly larger numbers as combat troops. Later going through the reception line, I watched Senator J. William Fulbright attempt civility when briefly speaking to the president. Equally gracious then was Lady Bird Johnson, leading some of us inside to see the executive mansion's reception rooms. I realized at that moment that an era had passed and that seeing the inside of the White House was a now-or-never opportunity.

    Remembered Lessons

1. Exaggerations do not void basic truths

Books, like plays or movies, succeed best when they exaggerate the truth. In communicating scientific fact to the nonspecialist, there is a huge difference between simplifying for effect and misleading. The issues that scientists must explain to society—then DDT contamination, today global warming or stem cell technology, say—require far too many years of training for most people to take hold of them in all their nuances. Scientists will necessarily exaggerate but are ethically obliged to society to exaggerate responsibly. In writing my textbooks I realized that emphasizing exceptions to simple truths was counterproductive and that use of qualifying terms such as
probably
or
possibly
was not the way to get ideas across initially. So while some of Rachel Carson's facts have proved less solidly grounded than she first believed, the truth is that man-made pesticides were spreading through the food chains so fast that they were very likely to reach levels dangerous to humans. No good purpose other than the bottom line of the chemical industry would have been served hedging that fact.

2. The military is interested in what scientists know,
not what they think

PSAC's briefing by Fort Detrick's staff focused on whether proposed biological warfare agents would be effective if deployed by either our military or the Soviets'. Whether these weapons
should
be deployed was not open for discussion. And so the question as to whether VEE should then be seen as a tactical or strategic weapon was never brought before us. I naively assumed that no one would seriously consider using it in any capacity in the near future, but what may seem absurd to a civilian can be perfectly plausible in a world where options are rarely taken entirely off the table. It is hardly surprising we were never told that the VEE was almost ready for military deployment. We would have gone instantly to McGeorge Bundy, if not the president, to let him know of our opposition to its use at any time. Whether either Bundy or JFK knew how advanced the nation's VEE program was I still don't know. My guess is that they knew no more than our PSAC panel. Top-secret clearance should never be confused with “need to know.” I was granted the former but only through my natural curiosity about a building with no apparent function did I learn that one of Fort Detrick's better-funded missions was to advance CIA assassination possibilities.

4. Don't back schemes that demand miracles

Ridding our southern states of the boll weevil by exposing female weevils to irradiated sterile males was a proposal that instantly smelled of nonsense to us experts. No one who briefed us was prepared to say how much it might cost. Even worse, almost all the small pilot tests done to date had failed, with their proponents now saying more research was needed. The sterile male project had an interest in preserving the congressional perception that the Boll Weevil Research Lab was on the verge of something big. Congressman Jamie Whitten could then bask in its supposed glory. Those reading our report knew that we thought the local research was going nowhere, but ultimately it is possible to ignore what even the government's own scientific advisers think. Never mind that producing enough sterile males to blanket the nation's cotton-growing regions might cost more than the profit from an average year's crop.

5. Controversial recommendations require political backing

Our PSAC panel's conclusion that pesticides pose a threat to the environment reached the public only through its release by President Kennedy. If he had owed a major debt to the chemical industry, his staff might have seen to it that passages damaging to those interests were toned down, leaving open the question of whether
Silent Spring's
argument had merit, and dampening the demand for corrective action. Happily, JFK owed no such political debt, and no White House pressure ever came to bear on us. In contrast, President Johnson's staff saw political harm in a White House report that said the nation's cotton farmers needed more than heavy pesticide spraying to keep their fields financially viable. When our badly gutted cotton insect report came out, most panel members realized we had toiled to no useful end.

10. MANNERS APPROPRIATE FOR A NOBEL PRIZE

I
NDIVIDUALS nominated for Nobel Prizes are not supposed to know their names have been put forward. The Swedish Academy, which judges candidates and awards the prize, makes this policy very explicit on their nomination forms. Jacques Monod, however, could not keep secret from Francis Crick that a member of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm had asked him to nominate us in January for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In turn, Francis, when visiting Harvard that February to give a lecture, let the cat out of the bag at a Chinese restaurant where we were having supper. But he told me we should say nothing to anyone, lest it get back to Sweden.

That we might someday get the Nobel Prize for finding the double helix had been bruited about ever since our discovery. Just before my mother died in 1957, she was told by Charles Huggins, then the University of Chicago's best-known physician-scientist, that I was certain to be so honored. Though many were initially skeptical that DNA replication involved strand separation, this doubting chatter went silent after the 1958 Meselson-Stahl experiment demonstrated that very phenomenon. Certainly the Swedish Academy had no doubt as to the correctness of the double helix when they awarded Arthur Kornberg half of the 1959 Physiology or Medicine prize for experiments demonstrating enzymatic synthesis of DNA. When photographed shortly after learning of his Nobel, a beaming Kornberg held a copy of our demonstration DNA model in his hands.

As the October 18 date for announcing the year's Nobel in Physiology or Medicine approached, I was naturally jittery. Conceivably the responsible Swedish professors had requested more than one nomination, reflecting split opinions during preliminary caucusing. Nonetheless, as I went to bed the night before the prize announcement, I couldn't help fantasizing about being awakened by an early morning phone call from Sweden. Instead a nasty cold I'd caught awakened me prematurely, and I was depressed to realize at once that no word had come from Stockholm. I remained shivering under my electric blanket, not wanting to get up when the telephone rang at 8:15 A.M. Rushing into the next room, I happily heard a Swedish newspaper reporter's voice tell me that Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and I had won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Asked how I felt, all I could say was, “Wonderful!”

First I phoned Dad and then my sister, inviting each to accompany me to Stockholm. Soon after, my telephone began to buzz with congratulatory messages from friends who had already heard the news on the morning broadcasts. There were also calls coming from reporters, but I told them to try me at Harvard after I'd given my morning virus class. I felt no need to rush through breakfast with Dad, so the class hour was almost half over when I walked in to find an overflowing crowd of students and friends anticipating my arrival. The words
Dr. Watson has just won the Nobel Prize
were on the blackboard.

The crowd clearly did not want a virus lecture, so I spoke about feeling the same elation when we first saw how base pairs fitted so perfectly into a DNA double helix, and how pleased I was that Maurice Wilkins was sharing the prize. It was his crystalline A-form X-ray photograph that had told us there was a highly regular DNA structure out there to find. If Linus Pauling's ill-conceived structure had not gotten Francis and me back into the DNA game, Maurice, keen to resume work on DNA the moment Rosalind Franklin moved over to Birkbeck College, might by himself have been the first to see the double helix. He was temporarily in the States when the prize story broke, and held his press conference next to a big DNA model at the Sloan-Kettering Institute. The long-standing rule that a Nobel Prize can be shared by at most three individuals would have created an awkward if not insolv-able dilemma had Rosalind Franklin still been alive. But having been tragically diagnosed with ovarian cancer less than four years after the double helix was found, she'd died in the spring of 1958.

Celebrating my big news with Wally Gilbert (left) and Matt Mesekon (right)

After class ended, I soon found myself with a champagne glass in hand and talking to reporters from the Associated Press, United Press International, the
Boston Globe,
and
Boston Traveler.
Their stories were picked up by most papers across the country, clippings from which came to me through the Harvard news office. Often they were accompanied by AP photos showing me in front of my class or holding the hand-size demonstration model of the double helix built at the Cavendish back in 1953. Able to afford the luxury of modesty, I tried to downplay potential practical applications, saying that a cure for cancer was not an obvious consequence of our work. And with my stuffy head and hoarse voice quite apparent, I emphasized that we had not done away with the common cold. This became the quotation of the day in the October 19
New York Times.
When asked how I would spend the money, I said possibly on a house and most certainly not on hobbies such as stamp collecting. To the question as to whether our work might lead to genetically improving humans, I answered, “If you want to have an intelligent child, you should have an intelligent wife.”

Richard Feynman s congratulatory telegram, signed with his RNA Tie Club code name, GLY

A number of the next day's articles described me as a boyish-looking bachelor whom friends found lively and kindly. Not surprisingly, some reports had bad gaffes such as Maurice's picture above my name, while others reported that I had worked during the war on the Manhattan Project, again confusing me with Wilkins, who had come to the United States in 1943 to work on uranium isotope separation at Berkeley. Naturally the Indiana papers played up my IU background, with the
Indiana Daily Student
quoting Tracy Sonneborn that I was a formidable reader with no tolerance for stupidity and a great respect for smarts. In a similar vein, the
Chicago Tribune
took pride in reporting my Chicago upbringing and appearance on
Quiz Kids,
quoting my father that it was through my childhood interest in birds that I got into science.

A hastily arranged evening blast at Paul and Helga Doty's Kirkland Place house allowed my Cambridge friends to toast my good fortune. Earlier I had talked by phone to Francis Crick, no less elated in the other Cambridge. Most of some eighty congratulatory telegrams arrived over the next two days, while the next week brought some two hundred letters I would eventually have to acknowledge. Joshua Lederberg, whose Nobel Prize had come three years earlier and who'd lived through the pandemonium that goes with it, advised me to follow his trick of replying with postcards from Stockholm. As he was then briefly hospitalized, Lawrence Bragg, our old boss at the Cavendish, had his secretary write of his delight. Unique in addressing me as “Mr. Watson,” President Pusey wrote: “It seems almost superfluous to add my congratulations to the many friendly messages you will be receiving.” And I had to wonder whether I had been mistaken in backing Harvard's Stuart Hughes for the Senate when not he but Edward M. Kennedy took the time to write, “Your contribution is one of the most exciting scientific achievements of our time.”

There were also the inevitable letters expressing not congratulations but the writer's personal hobbyhorse. One from a Palm Beach man, for instance, declared that marriages between cousins are the cause of all the great evils that have afflicted mankind. Here I thought better of writing back to ask whether there had been any such marriages among his ancestors. Several days later, the managing director of the Swedish company that manufactured Läkerol throat pastilles wrote to say that he was having an export carton sent direct from his New York distributor. He noted his product's absence of harmful ingredients, which feature made it suitable for everyday use even in perfect health. Soon I began popping several of his pastilles each day after my cold turned into a sore throat. Unfortunately, they were of no effect, my throat misery persisting through days of celebration.

From a Warsaw, Indiana, podiatrist came advice that all disease results from two simple but pervasive problems—fatigue and respiratory imbalance. Through his research he had learned that these two root pathologies were themselves founded in abnormal foot mechanics and gait. He had treated many people who never caught cold because of therapeutic restoration of normal walking mechanics. Among the beneficiaries of the treatment course, which typically ran three to four years, was the correspondent himself. Another revolutionary way to stop colds was suggested by a New Mexico man of Scottish descent who had noted that the main characters in John Buchan's novels
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and
John Macnab
never even sniffled. This immunity the New Mexico man attributed to strenuous workdays in the cold, fog, and rain.

More poignant, but strange nonetheless, was a letter from a seventeen-year-old Samoan girl in Pago Pago who, after thanking the Lord for his love and kindness, introduced herself as Vaisima T. W. Watson. She hoped that I was related to her father, Thomas Willis Watson, a U.S. Marine supply sergeant during World War II. Her mother had never heard from him following his return to the States. In my reply, I pointed out that Watson was a common name, with hundreds of entries in the Boston phone book alone.

Soon the itinerary of my forthcoming Nobel week, in broad outline at least, was sent to me from Stockholm. I would be housed in the Grand Hotel with my guests. My personal expenses there would be paid by the Nobel Foundation, which would also cover the food and lodging of a wife and any children. As getting there would be my responsibility, the Nobel Foundation would advance some of my prize money for airfare. The prize presentations were to take place at the Stockholm concert hall according to custom on December 10, the date on which Alfred Nobel died in San Remo, Italy, in 1896 at the age of sixty-three. I was expected to arrive several days earlier for two receptions, the first given by the Karolinska Institutet for its winners, and the second by the Nobel Foundation for all laureates except for those in Peace, who always receive their prizes in Oslo from the Norwegian king. At the prize ceremony and at the banquet the following night at the Royal Palace, I was to be dressed in white tie and tails. Meeting me at the airport was to be a junior member of the Foreign Ministry, who would accompany me to all official functions and see me off at my departure.

Making it an even more meaningful occasion was the awarding of the year's chemistry prize to John Kendrew and Max Perutz for their respective elucidations of the three-dimensional structures of the proteins myoglobin and hemoglobin. Never before in Nobel history had one year's prizes in biology and chemistry gone to scientists working in the same university laboratory. The announcement of John and Max's prize came several days after ours was announced, on the same day the physics prize was awarded to the Russian theoretical physicist Lev Landau for his pioneering studies on liquid helium. Unfortunately, because of a ghastly automobile crash that had recently caused him severe brain damage, he would not be joining us in Stockholm. After the double helix was found, the Russian-born physicist George Gamow had much raised my ego by saying that I reminded him of the young Landau. Last to be announced was the literature prize, awarded to the novelist John Steinbeck, who was to deliver his Nobel address at the large banquet in the Stockholm city hall following the prize ceremonies.

In the long letter detailing how to prepare for Stockholm, I was informed that appropriate accommodations would also be reserved for special research assistants. If I could tactfully bring along my lab assistant of the past summer, the Radcliffe junior Pat Collinge, the occasion would be even more decorative. Her fey urchin manners, together with her intense, catlike blue eyes, were likely to have no equal in Stockholm. Alas, she now had a Harvard undergraduate boyfriend of literary aspirations, whom I was unlikely to supplant. Pat promised, however, to help me master the waltz steps that I would need for the customary first dance following John Steinbeck's speech.