Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (26 page)

The historian Crane Brinton still presided over the society when I suggested inviting Princess Christina to one of our Monday night dinners. Soon I got the message that her royal presence might distract from its intellectual purposes. We had recently run into each other at the usually jammed coffee shop across from Widener Library. Antonia Johnson was with her, so the three of us shared a booth for lunch.

Much of our conversation centered on Antonia's current boyfriend in Philadelphia, who was doing biophysics research at the University of Pennsylvania. Several weeks later, I met Christina again at a waltz evening at the Parker House Hotel, where she discovered that I did not belong on a dance floor. I was the unlikely escort of the full-bodied blond bombshell Sheldon Ogilvy, whose college education in New York City had recently gone astray. Somehow she was on the guest list for this minor monthly Boston society dance. Exuding the happy insouciance of a Truman Capote heroine, Sheldon sipped Brandy Alexanders when we sat together at the Club Casablanca beneath the Brattle Theatre.

Early in May, Christina and I were both at a Saturday night dance in Locust Valley, on Long Island's Gold Coast. It marked the twenty-first birthday of Deming Pratt, Nancy Doe's Radcliffe roommate. A marriage bond once connected Deming's branch of the oil-rich Pratt family to the royal Bernadottes of Sweden. Nancy told me I was to come, so I arranged to stay that night at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, only a fifteen-minute drive to the east. The scotch and soda I consumed over a pre-dance supper at the Piping Rock Club gave me the courage to once again subject Christina to my lack of rhythm. Much of the evening I gossiped with the Texas department store heiress Wendy Marcus and her escort, a
New York Times
Latin America correspondent. Leaving after most guests had already departed, I absentmind-edly drove off without turning on the headlights. Immediately I was pulled over by a local police officer, who mercifully only told me to stay on the shoulder until my head cleared. The times then were much more foolishly forgiving than today of intoxication behind the wheel. Later I shuddered at the thought of the publicity that would have ensued had the policeman been more hard-nosed and done his duty to haul me in.

The arrival of summer left Sheldon Ogilvy no reason to remain in Cambridge and she became ensconced at 336 Riverside Drive in New York City. Though no relation of the advertising whiz David Ogilvy, she got hired as the receptionist at Ogilvy and Mather's offices on Madison Avenue. I popped in to see her when I came down late in July for the 1964 International Biochemical Congress at the Hilton Hotel. Francis Crick was there to give one of the congress's keynote speeches. In my talk, I slipped in a slide showing a photo from the Nobel Prize dinner of Francis apparently peering inappropriately at Princess Désirée. Later, to make amends, I introduced Francis to Sheldon at a lighthearted dinner at the piano bar restaurant on the roof of the St. Regis. The next day Francis telephoned her at work to get her address and phone number for his next trip to the States. I only learned this in early December, when Sheldon wrote telling me that she would be having lunch with Francis again on his way back to England, and that she first felt a bit odd in accepting his attention and then a bit odd about being so scrupulous, given that the three of us had had so much fun together at the St. Regis.

No longer a receptionist, Sheldon was on to teaching foxtrots to what she called “little WASP girls” in Westchester so they would look presentable when they suddenly blossomed into debutantes. In her note, she expressed regret at backing out with virtually no notice from an October weekend with me at Cold Spring Harbor. The previous night's activities, she explained, had left her too black and blue to appear in public. Discretion kept me from asking for details. Less athletically, she was immersed in Virginia Woolf and wanted my help to win readmission to Barnard and dispel the cloud hanging over her since her abrupt withdrawal. Although I could see that her cause would benefit from a supportive letter, it was not all clear to me what I could credibly write.

Over the fall of 1964, a growing faculty consensus, strongly encouraged by Franklin Ford, emerged for placing the long-running undergraduate concentration in biochemical sciences under the jurisdiction of the Committee for Higher Degrees in Biochemistry. Most biochemical science majors historically aimed for medical school, and many members of its Board of Tutors, correspondingly, had medical school affiliations. In 1958, the microbiologist Alvin Pappenheimer came to Harvard from New York University Medical School to become the board's head tutor, replacing the veteran John Edsall. Now Pap wanted to resign since he had just been appointed master of Dunster House.

The proposed merger would allow the junior faculty members to rotate in and out of the head tutor position without the dean's having to create a tenure slot for each new appointee.

To win support from those who wanted a separate biochemistry department created immediately, Franklin Ford gave permission to start a search for a senior biochemist or molecular biologist, a boon to these disciplines. Equally important, he and President Pusey promised a new science building to be sited between the Converse Memorial Lab and the Biological Laboratories. The official formation of the new Committee on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) was announced at the February 1965 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Its new chairman was to be John Edsall, signifying to all a seriousness of commitment.

Widespread enthusiasm then existed for bringing the Canadian-trained M.D. David Hubel, who was associate professor of neurophysiology at Harvard's Medical School, to the Biology Department with tenure. Current experiments by Hubel and his Swedish-born collaborator Torsten Wiesel were radically advancing knowledge of how the visual cortex is organized. To allow their collaboration to continue, Don Griffin proposed giving Wiesel an appointment as a senior research associate in biology. Especially impressed by their accomplishments was Francis Crick, who now used his role as a nonresident fellow of the Salk Institute to meet frequently with Hubel and Wiesel in La Jolla. Attracting Hubel and Wiesel would be a massive step forward for the Biolabs, stamping it indelibly as a place of high-level biology. Speculation already existed that they were bound to receive a joint Nobel Prize. Common sense thus dictated that Wiesel also be offered a tenured position. But we were told that the dean could not now create a new tenured slot for him, especially since he was said to have no interest in teaching undergraduates.

I soon had an opportunity to become better acquainted with Hubel and Wiesel through a late winter visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The occasion for coming to the San Diego region was a three-day gathering on the role of genes in the immune response, held at Warner Hot Springs near Palomar Mountain and its big telescope. There Norbert Hilschmann from Lyman Craig's lab at Rockefeller University put up a slide showing amino acid sequences from antibody-like Bence-Jones proteins found in victims of multiple myeloma. He took care not to let this slide stay on the screen long enough for its data to be copied down by his rival at Rockefeller, Gerry Edelman, then also in the audience. Enraged by this act of bad form, Max Delbrück rose and denounced Hilschmann. But those of us who knew Gerry well could see Hilschmann was in a no-win situation.

In deciding at the last moment to extend my California visit for an additional week, I would be violating a long-standing Arts and Sciences rule that during term the president and fellows must approve all visits of more than a week away from Harvard. But I was not scheduled for lectures during the time in question, and asking at the last moment for approval might delay my departure to Warner Hot Springs. So I decided simply to tell Don Griffin that I was to be away for some two weeks. The thought never occurred to me that he would see the need to tell Franklin Ford. But this he did, and I only learned of it at the Salk Institute in the middle of watching Hubel and Wiesel in action. They were among the first to know of my instant rage when I got a phone call from Don telling me that President Pusey wanted me immediately to return to Harvard. I was being treated like an AWOL soldier. Deeply upset, I told Don that while Pusey might get satisfaction from humiliating me, he was giving Hubel reason to wonder why he should consider giving up Harvard Medical School, where he could travel as he saw fit, to move to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and be governed by rules more befitting teenagers than serious scientists. Don phoned the next morning telling me I could stay. Until then, only the compound curse “F Harvard and f Pusey” went through my brain, and I vocalized it openly many times as the day turned to night.

Upon my return to Harvard, Paul Doty gave me the dope that Kenneth Galbraith had also had a run-in with Pusey over traveling during term. Denied a request to spend a winter without teaching commitments skiing in Gstaad, Ken obtained a doctor's note that the break was medically necessary to prevent undue stress on his circulatory system. Not wanting to risk a fight that Ken might make public, Pusey caved in. The Harvard Corporation was still embarrassed about almost having blackballed Ken after World War II for supposed left-wing economics. I feared the line Pusey had taken with me was his way of reasserting authority over his faculty. Needless to say, I was apprehensive on receiving Franklin Ford's July 1 note concerning my salary for the coming year. To my relief, I got a $1,000 increase.

Three months earlier, I had been even more gratified to read another letter from Ford stating that Mr. Pusey and the Corporation wanted to reconsider aspects of policies concerning travel and salaries. They wanted the matter studied over the next year by a faculty committee whose work would be highly confidential. Would I consider chairing the committee, despite my plan to be away for much of the next year? I felt immensely vindicated and phoned Paul Doty. To my surprise, he did not seem happily surprised at the Corporation's turnabout. It was only several hours later, on my way to Paul's house, that I looked again at Ford's letter and suddenly noted it was dated April 1, 1965. Meeting his friend Dorothy Zinberg at the gate, I saw clearly that we were victims of the same hoax. I should have known that Harvard never would have changed course so dramatically, but I couldn't for the life of me work out how Paul had obtained the University Hall stationery.

At no time did my run-in with President Pusey make me want to leave Harvard. Nowhere else was I likely to get such a caliber of graduate students. Their latest triumphs involved besting two labs at Rockefeller University in understanding key features of protein synthesis. For more than a year, Norton Zinder's Rockefeller group and my RNA phage group had raced each other to find out how so-called nonsense bacterial suppressor strains misread mutant chain-terminating signals to generate biologically active polypeptide chains. By late spring Gary Gussin and Mario Capecchi wrote up for publication in
Science
that mutant tRNA molecules read “nonsense” signals as “sense” signals, thus winning the race.

Less than six months later, Capecchi and Jerry Adams showed that formyl methionine tRNA molecules initiate the synthesis of bacterial protein chains. Earlier I visited Rockefeller University to see whether Fritz Lipmann's big lab was following up the discovery of f-met-tRNA, made some months before in Denmark. Its existence might explain why so many bacterial proteins had methionine as their terminal amino acids. But Fritz was not thinking along these lines, and I left New York City knowing Jerry Adams would have no competition studying how protein synthesis starts. Soon Jerry discovered how to radioactively label f-met-tRNA molecules, allowing him and Mario to label the formyl groups at the ends of RNA phage proteins made in vitro. Their experimental results were sent off to the
Proceedings of the National Academy
just before I flew to London to spend December 1965 in Cambridge.

By then, virtually everybody in the Biological Laboratories knew that their best interests would be served if the BMB Committee rapidly converted into a genuine department. Uncertainty about being allocated space was causing qualms for prospective faculty recruits. Keith Porter had taken over as chairman after Don Griffin's three-year stint. Only months before the changeover Griffin had unexpectedly announced that he was resigning to move to Rockefeller University and its field station in Millbrook, some fifty miles north of New York City. In a panic, the Biology Department offered his tenured slot to Edwin Furshpan, who studied invertebrate synapses at Harvard Medical School in a lab nearby that of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. Behind this hurried offer were hopes that it would make David Hubel more inclined to move to Cambridge.

This ploy, however, didn't work. David, Torsten, and Ed eventually decided to remain at Harvard Medical School. The Pappenheimer microbiology tenure slot was also up for grabs, since Boris Magasanik had turned it down more than a year before to remain a member of the MIT biology department, whose future he saw no reason to question. Now the department was prepared to change tracks and offer the position to Renato Dulbecco, whose research on DNA tumor viruses was zooming forward. No one, however, was surprised when Renato declined it, knowing his research facilities in the soon-to-be-completed Salk Institute would be incomparably better than Harvard could offer in the Biolabs.

Wanting to pull off at least one coup of tenure acceptance, Keith Porter enthused about recruiting the circadian rhythm expert Woody Hastings, from Illinois. Long a fixture of the Woods Hole summer scene, Woody was liked by all, and I went along in voting for his appointment though I saw his science as having little potential to make lasting ripples. As I was soon to leave the Biology Department to take on BMB stripes, I saw only ill will coming of opposing Woody on intellectual grounds. If the appointment was to be blocked, the move would have to occur at the ad hoc committee level. But the committee was composed of academics who thought biology teaching had to remain diverse, and the appointment went through.