Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (25 page)

3. Make the most of the year following
announcement of your prize

You have a lifetime ahead of you for being a past prize winner but only a yearlong window during which you are the celebrated scientist of the moment. While everybody respects Nobel laureates, this year's winner is always the most sought-after dinner guest. In Stockholm this year's honoree is treated like a movie star by the general population, who will ask even an otherwise obscure chemist for an autograph. As with the Miss America pageant, the announcement of the next winner will decisively mark the end of your reign as this year's science star.

4. Don't anticipate a flirtatious Santa Lucia girl

Much fuss is made after your arrival for Nobel Week about the pretty girl who will wake you up on Santa Lucia Day and sing the traditional song. Alas, she will not be alone, and very possibly she will be accompanied by one or more photographers expecting you to smile as you hear the Neopolitan tune that only sun-deprived Swedes could mistake for a carol. The moment her singing stops, she will be off to another laureate's room, leaving you several hours more of darkness to endure before the winter sun peeks above the horizon.

5. Expect to put on weight after Stockholm

Masses of invitations will come to you during your inevitable bout of post-Stockholm withdrawal syndrome. You may find yourself banqueting as a second profession, accepting invitations to places it never would have occurred to you to go before. I still remember well an excellent dinner in Houston at its once classy Doctors’ Club, before the Texas oil capital put itself on the map of high-powered biomedicai research. I remember glaring foolishly at a giant ice sculpture on the table, knowing it would not long honor my existence. When your hosts embarrassingly overstate your importance, it's easier to accept second helpings than to keep up conversation.

6. Avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners

All too often some well-intentioned person gathers together Nobel laureates to enhance an event promoting his or her university or city. The host does so convinced that these special guests will exude genius and incandescent or at least brilliantly eccentric personalities. The fact is that many years pass between the awarding of a prize and the work it acknowledges, so even recently awarded Nobelists have likely seen better days. The honorarium, no matter how hefty, will not compensate you for the realization that you probably look and act as old and tired as the other laureates, whose conversation is boring you perhaps as much as yours is boring them. The best way to remain lively is to restrict your professional contact to young, not yet famous colleagues. Though they likely will beat you at tennis, they will also keep your brain moving.

7. Spend your prize money on a home

A flashy car that costs more than it's worth is bound to give even your best friends reason to believe demi-celebrity has gone to your head and corrupted your values. Show them that the somewhat richer are not so different and you are still one of them. A bigger home will only put you in the same league as your university president, whom no one can reasonably envy.

11. MANNERS DEMANDED BY ACADEMIC INEPTITUDE

F
ROM the moment of my Nobel Prize, I took comfort in expecting a larger than ordinary annual salary raise. Over the past two years, I had twice received an annual increase of $1,000, so when I opened the small envelope coming on July 2 from University Hall I expected to see a $2,000 increase. Instead, the historian Franklin Ford, Bundy's successor as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, informed me that for my first time at Harvard I was to receive no raise at all. Instantly I went ballistic and let all my immediate friends know my outrage. Was an administrative blunder to blame for Harvard's failure to acknowledge the windfall of prestige that I had provided or did President Pusey want to send a message that celebrities had no place on his faculty and should consider going elsewhere?

Venting my wrath to student friends who wrote for the
Crimson
would be fun but likely to backfire and generate the official reply that Harvard never could adequately reward all the important ways the faculty enrich the academic milieu. Instead I talked to Harvard's best chemist, Bob Woodward, who was himself bound to receive the Nobel Prize soon. Attempting to calm me down, he told me he thought Harvard's failure to reward me reflected bad judgment on the part of our mediocre president as opposed to a deliberate insult. Bob offered to write Franklin Ford that if he were similarly treated, he would feel equally upset toward those who led Harvard. Later, Franklin Ford called me to his office to say that no insult had been intended—rather, priority had been given to rewarding other professors whose salaries were particularly low. The following year my salary went up by $2,000. My Spartan existence at 10 Appian Way, then as before, had allowed me routinely to spend less than I was earning. I thought about money only when I wanted to acquire for the walls of my apartment a painting or drawing beyond my means. Still, I would have been $1,000 poorer before taxes every subsequent year had I not spoken up about my displeasure.

The letters that bookended the year I got a Nobel Prize but no raise from Harvard

More crucial to my morale than salary was how the science in my lab was going. Here I had cause for pleasure in the quality of my latest batch of graduate students—John Richardson, Ray Gesteland, Mario Capecchi, and Gary Gussin. With messenger RNA discovered, they knew how to proceed on their own. Underlying many of their successes was increasing use of phage RNA chains as templates for protein synthesis. To start us off, Ray Gesteland worked with Helga Doty to determine the molecular character of the RNA phage R17, whose RNA component of only some three thousand molecules most likely coded for only three to five different protein products.

The key surprise of the summer of 1963 was finding that RNA phages start their multiplication cycle through attachment to sex-specific thin filaments (or pili) coming off the surfaces of male
E. coli
bacteria. Such filaments are absent from female
E. coli
cells, explaining the until then mysterious fact that RNA phages grow only on male bacteria. Doing the electromicroscopy was Elizabeth Crawford, a summer visitor from Glasgow, with her molecular virologist husband, Lionel. Soon after their arrival, the three of us went up to the White Mountains, where we unintentionally aroused the ire of a nest-guarding goshawk that repeatedly dive-bombed us as we came down from a not undemanding walk up to the four-thousand-foot Carter's Dome.

Just before Labor Day, I flew to Geneva on my way to lecture at a NATO-sponsored molecular biology summer school at Ravello, Italy, across the bay from Naples. Among the other lecturers were to be Paul Doty, Fritz Lipmann, Jacques Monod, and Max Perutz. My high-ceilinged room in the Villa Cimbrone would have been perfect but for the nightly ravages of mosquitoes. Good fortune gave me as one of the sixty students the young German protein chemist Klaus Weber, then experimenting on the enzyme ß-galactosidase for his Ph.D. at Freiburg. Klaus had come to Ravello to broaden his knowledge of nucleic acids and by the two-week program's end he'd accepted my invitation to come the following year to work on RNA phages in my Harvard lab.

At completion of the summer session, Leo Szilard flew down from Geneva to help lead further discussions about establishing in Europe a meeting and course site similar to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. In Europe primarily to promote his latest scheme for preventing the nuclear annihilation of the planet, Leo came to Ravello on his way to a Pugwash disarmament meeting in Dubrovnik. Among those also briefly staying at the Villa Cimbrone were Ole Maaloe from Denmark, Sydney Brenner and John Kendrew from Cambridge, Ephraim Katchalski from Israel, and Jeffries Wyman, now living in Rome. By the end of the two-day meeting, widespread support existed for forming a European Laboratory of Fundamental Biology as well as a European Molecular Biology Organization of some one hundred to two hundred leading European biologists.

In a Rome art gallery on my way back, I lacked the courage to buy an almost affordable surrealist painting by an artist then unknown to me, Victor Brauner. During the following days, however, I acquired a small Paul Klee drawing from Gallery Moos, located below Jean Weigle's Geneva flat, and several André Derain drawings from Galerie Maeght in Paris. A week later, Princess Christina saw my new works of art at a small Sunday afternoon party I gave to help introduce her to Harvard life. Accompanying her was Antonia Johnson, the daughter of a leading Swedish industrial and shipping family, also to spend the coming year in the Radcliffe quad. To make the occasion more friendly, I invited some of my students, particularly those doing undergraduate research. But forty-five minutes later, when Christina and Antonia went off to another welcoming occasion, I remained unsure whether we would have reason to greet each other with more than a nod in passing during the year ahead. Neither Christina's nor Antonia's course choices were likely to bring them to a Harvard science building. On the other hand, Christina was likely to be friendly with my Radcliffe friend and future tutee Nancy Haven Doe, who had gone to the Spence School. She came from the New York social scene, which Radcliffe's first princess was bound to sample.

In the meanwhile, I became increasingly immersed in Biology Department politics. Carroll Williams was no longer chairman, having been succeeded by the into-Harvard-born behavioral biologist Don Griffin, who specialized in bat navigation. After being a Harvard junior fellow, he quickly rose in the academic ranks at Cornell before being called back in 1956. Don had natural affinities with Harvard's organismal biologists, so it was not anticipated that his first major goal as chairman would be to reduce the power of Harvard's separately funded biology museums, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Harvard Herbarium. Until this landmark turnabout, tenured museum scientists not only chose future museum curators but also had a say as to appointments to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Back in June 1963, the tenured faculty, following Don's lead, voted that only professors supported by FAS monies would have automatic voting rights. At the same time, they opened up the possibility of key museum members having three-year terms on the Committee of Permanent Professors if so approved by two-thirds of the FAS-funded faculty. In this way, widely respected museum scientists such as the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr would retain voting rights. Carroll Williams, who still held much political power in the department, later tried hard to have the decision reversed. If the museum deadbeats were removed from the department scene, Carroll would no longer be seen as a neutral party in the tension between old-fashioned organismal biologists and the new group of molecular biologists. Instead he would be perceived as the leader of a conservative biology caucus openly determined to stop DNA-centered work from ever dominating Harvard's biology. It remained unclear whether Carroll would prevail until the fall of 1963, when a letter came from Franklin Ford reaffirming the opinion that only faculty paid by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences should vote on their respective department appointments.

These sensible voting qualifications, however, did not adequately guarantee first-rate appointments to the biology faculty. At least one-third of the Biological Laboratories remained unchanged since its construction thirty years earlier. Particularly out of date were its teaching labs, library, animal quarters, and machine shops. Moreover, the practice of relying on the senior faculty's government grants to renovate the out-of-date labs of incoming junior faculty put the latter cohort in a servile role. New funding would have to materialize from the Faculty of Arts and Science, not just from federal grants, if Harvard was to hold its own with Stanford, Caltech, MIT, and Rockefeller. Keith Porter, Paul Levine, and I prepared a report on facilities, which Don Griffin passed on to Franklin Ford. In it we outlined three possible scenarios for action. The first proposed extensive remodeling of the Biolabs; the second, a new five-story wing to the east; and the third, a ten-story building whose site demanded demolition of the historic brick Divinity School residence hall on Divinity Avenue, to the front of the Biological Laboratories.

A message soon came back from University Hall that no monies existed for construction of new Biology Department facilities. Any expansion of the biology faculty would have to occur within the preexisting confines of the Biological Laboratories. This rebuff had an unexpected positive consequence. Administrative approval would be fastest for scientists already in situ, whose space requirements could be met by relatively inexpensive renovations of existing labs. Thus promoting Wally Gilbert to tenure was to prove much easier than we'd guessed the year before.

Wally still had a heavy physics teaching load and was supervising the Ph.D. theses of several graduate students. Only after the August 1961 Moscow Biochemistry Congress did Wally use most of his free time for experimentation in molecular biology. He first demonstrated that single poly U molecules serve as templates for several ribosomes simultaneously. Then he revealed the presence of transfer RNA molecules at the carboxyl ends of growing polypeptide chains. Currently he was showing that the attachment of streptomycin to ribosomes causes misreading of the genetic code. Even with these demonstrations of extraordinary talents as an experimentalist, I feared great difficulty getting him appointed to the biology faculty. In their eyes, Wally and I were too similar in our semiobjectionable objectives.

Luckily, Paul Doty soon orchestrated an arrangement to give Wally tenure, not as a member of the Biology Department but as a member of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Biophysics. Toward this end I wrote to Arthur Solomon, the long-reigning head of biophysics at Harvard, that Wally was in the same league, intellectually and experimentally, as Seymour Benzer or Sydney Brenner. Franklin Ford soon guaranteed funds to back the new tenured biophysics slot, and Wally's promotion breezed through the ad hoc committee early in April 1964.

The approval process for Wally occurred when I was in Paris to lecture at an April meeting marking the fiftieth anniversary of the French Biochemical Society. There, for the first time, I announced evidence for the existence of two ribosomal sites that specifically bind transfer RNA. One site I called A in view of its function to bind incoming amino acid transfer molecules in the presence of messenger RNA codons. The second site I called P since it holds the growing polypeptide chains to the ribosomes. In ways yet to be determined, growing polypeptide chains immediately moved from A sites to P sites after each new round of peptide bond formation. Toward the end of my lecture, I emphasized that we also expected to find along mRNA molecules signals for starting and stopping polypeptide synthesis. Our failure so far to find them may have reflected the fact that current cell-free systems for protein synthesis used only synthetic RNAs as templates. These contain no signals. Synthetic molecules likely worked as good templates only through mistakes in codon reading. Fearing afterward that my talk would be perceived as speculative, I was hugely relieved when Francois Jacob, never one for idle praise, called my lecture one of the best he had ever heard.

I was at the time very proud to be a senior fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows. The main task of the eight senior fellows each year was to choose a similar number of junior fellows whose terms ran three years. We were also expected to dine each Monday with the junior fellows in the society's wood-paneled quarters in Eliot House. The society's reputation for exemplary minds was still deserved. The evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman were both selected in 1962.

It was much more fun, I found, to sit next to junior fellows rather than senior fellows; utterly painful was getting caught beside either the acerbic but shy critic Harry Levin or the overly polite classicist Herbert Bloch. And though the philosopher Willard V. O. Quine may have been the brightest of all, his voice came alive only when talking about maps. One such evening per year would have been enough for me. Dinners became more agreeably animated after the economist Wassily Leontief took over as chairman in July 1964 and brought about the appointment as senior fellow of Boston's senior judge, the gossipy Charles Wyzanski, whose interests—intellectual as well as social— went far beyond the Harvard scene.