Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (44 page)

Tracy Sonneborn
(1905-1981)—He spent the rest of his career at Indiana University, Bloomington; he retired from teaching in 1976 but continued to do research until his death at the age of seventy-five.

Günther Stent
(b. 1924)—In 1952 he moved from Caltech to the University of California at Berkeley, where he has remained since. During a 1972 sabbatical at Harvard, be began studying neurobiology, and soon developed a leech colony at Berkeley to support his lab's neuroembryology and neurophysiol-ogy research. He is currently professor emeritus of neurobiology.

Leo Szilard
(1898-1964)—He remained loosely affiliated with the University of Chicago until he became a founding fellow of the Salk Institute in 1963. Only several months after moving there, he died of a heart attack and his ashes, at his wish, were dispersed over the Pacific Ocean.

Howard Temin
(1934-1994)—Howard remained at the University of Wisconsin for his entire academic career. In 1975, with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research on tumor viruses. Though never a smoker, he became a victim of lung cancer, dying at the early age of fifty-nine.

Alfred Tissières
(1917-2003)—He remained at the Department of Molecular Biology of the University of Geneva for the rest of his career, living with his wife, Virginia, in the nearby village of Vandoeuvres. A sabbatical year at Caltech led to his influential work on the heat shock response in
Drosophila.

Alex Todd
(1907-1997)—After his work on the structure and synthesis of nucleotides, which won him the 1957 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, he continued to work on the structures of a variety of molecules found in insects and plants. He retired from his positions as professor of organic chemistry at Cambridge University in 1971 and lived in Cambridge until his death.

Niccolò Visconti di Modrone
(1920-2004)—After working between 1950 and 1954 on phage genetics with AI Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor, Niccolò left research for business and cofounded the pharmaceutical company Lepetit, and later Pierrel. Upon retiring, he took up residence in his hometown of Milan and maintained a close friendship with his colleagues at CSHL, including Waclaw Szybalski, Evelyn Witkin, and Barbara McClintock.

Liz (Lewis) Watson
(b. 1948)—She has received master's degrees in historic preservation from Columbia University and in library and information science from Long Island University. She has devoted much time to preserving the historic buildings of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in 1991 published a pictorial history of CSHL titled
Houses for Science.
For many years she was also a member of the Huntington Historic Preservation Commission, and in 2001 she was appointed by Governor George Pataki to the New York State Board for Historic Preservation.

Klaus Weber
(b. 1936)—Since 1975 he has worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, where he is now professor emeritus. Along with wife Mary Osborn, he pioneered the use of immunofluorescence microscopy and has made significant contributions to the study of the cytoskeleton.

Jerome Wiesner
(1915-1994)—He served as president of MIT from 1971 to 1980 and devoted a majority of his time after retirement to teaching and policy research, strongly focusing on nuclear arms control.

Maurice Wilkins
(1916-2004)—After his contributions to the double helical structure of DNA at King's College, London, he focused increasingly on issues of the social responsibility of scientists, teaching undergraduate courses on the topic and serving for twenty-two years as president of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science. He was also very proud of his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Carroll Williams
(1916-1991)—He spent his entire career in insect physiology at Harvard, starting with the completion of both his Ph.D. and M.D. and his appointment to its faculty in 1946, from which he retired in 1987.

Edward 0. Wilson
(b. 1929)—He is currently Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus and curator of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. In recent years his interests have turned increasingly to conservation biology.

Tom Wilson
(1902-1969)—He died of a heart attack all too soon after his move in 1968 from Harvard University Press to Atheneum Publishers in New York City.

Barbara Wright
(b. 1926)—She continued in research after marrying Herman Kalckar and moving to the United States, working first at NIH and later at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Biomedicai Research Institute. In 1982 she became a research professor in biological sciences at the University of Montana.

Sewall Wright
(1889-1988)—After his mandatory retirement from the University of Chicago at the age of sixty-five, he moved to the University of Wisconsin where he served as professor of genetics for thirty-four more years.

Norton Zinder
(b. 1928)—Continuing study of phage Φ and its interactions with
E. coli,
he remained all his career at the Rockefeller University where he is now professor emeritus.

David Zipser
(b. 1937)—After completing a postdoc with Sydney Brenner and then serving on the faculty of Columbia University, he moved in 1970 to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as its bacterial geneticist. Increasingly attracted by brain research, he left CSH in 1982 for the University of California, San Diego, where he is now Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Remembered Lessons