Avoid Boring People Part 4

The weeks that followed Kennedy's victory were in no sense anticlimactic. The main question in the air was who from Harvard would be called to be part of the new administration. Arthur Schlesinger's departure to help Kennedy as a speechwriter was virtually taken for granted. Everyone was equally pleased by the selection of John Kenneth Galbraith as amba.s.sador to India and Edwin Reischauer as amba.s.sador to j.a.pan. Most excitement came from McGeorge Bundy's nomination as the president's national security advisor with West Wing offices. For his chief deputy Bundy further raided the Harvard faculty, picking his friend the economist Carl Kaysen.

Before taking office, Kennedy saw fit to resign from Harvard's Board of Overseers, promising to attend its January meeting just prior to his inauguration. For several weeks I antic.i.p.ated having him listen to me speak, since I had been asked with Frank Westheimer to brief the overseers about new opportunities for research in molecular biology and biochemistry. But our president-elect did not get to Harvard that day, having more pressing matters to attend to. The occasion, however, gave me my last opportunity to speak to McGeorge Bundy as dean. He had raised my curiosity in the weeks before by asking me to come and see him. So I half dreamed that I also might be asked to move to Was.h.i.+ngton. At the last moment, however, his aide Verna Johnson phoned me to cancel the appointment. Taking me aside at the overseers' meeting, Bundy wanted to personally tell me the good news that I was being promoted to full professor as of July 1. He then mischievously added that no higher academic accolade could ever come my way.

Remembered Lessons 1. Teaching can make your mind move on to big problems Eminent researchers who revel in trivial or nonexistent teaching loads may be availing themselves of a luxury no thinker can well afford. When I'm not challenged by an immediate need to make sense of incompatible observations, my mind too often runs slowly. A very strong incentive for coming to grips fast with unexplainable experiments is the need to lecture about them. For this the best audiences are advanced undergraduates or graduate students, who know enough to have reactions that may spark a flash of insight. In the early 1970s, when lecturing about DNA duplication in such a fog of uncertainty, I suddenly saw why viral DNA molecules have redundant ends that become linked during their replication processes. The idea that this was a device to copy their ends was too pretty to be wrong.

2. Lectures should not be unidimensionally serious It is no fun to either give or listen to hourlong talks that provide nonstop flows of dry facts or even ideas. Presentations of all kinds should alternate easy-to-understand and familiar material with the messages that are more difficult to a.s.similate. At Harvard I tried to put a human face on experiments, adding asides about personalities and letting my listeners put themselves in the place of the experimenter, as eventually they would need to do.

3. Give your students the straight dope In my Biology 2 lectures in the early 1960s, I regularly gave one t.i.tled "Against Embryology," since its main point was that multicellular organisms were best put on the back burner until we understood the basic nature of life by studying single-celled bacteria. The early sixties were not a propitious time, for example, to go to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole to study sea urchins. Those who went instead to Cold Spring Harbor to pursue genes within bacteria would have much brighter futures. This was not a message that most of my fellow biology professors agreed with, and many of them thought it inappropriate for me to announce it to my students. But to sugar-coat science that is going nowhere ill prepares students for their futures.

4. Encourage undergraduate research experience If one or more lab benches were free, I automatically accepted bright undergraduates keen to do research under my supervision. Often they were undecided between medical and graduate school and benefited from seeing the differences between scientific and clinical challenges. Being part of a research group, moreover, let them see that personalities often are as important as brains in pus.h.i.+ng forward the scientific frontier. It is also true that a certain kind of apt.i.tude is required to do successful research. You frequently spot individuals in labs whose first-rate talents may never come out through exams. They come alive only when they are challenged with "new unknowns" as opposed to "old knowns."

5. Focus departmental seminars on new science The quality of a scientific department is generally revealed by its weekly seminars. Star scientists likely will travel only when they see themselves benefiting from being away from their home base. Seminars that fail to attract broad student audiences will likely bore the largely faculty-const.i.tuted audiences, there only for reasons of department loyalty. It's best to invite speakers from emerging disciplines not yet established on your campus. Choosing too many speakers from friends of senior faculty risks giving your students no more than what they already have. Younger faculty members, for the most part, should be in charge of arranging and hosting potentially exciting speakers. They have more time and incentive to do this job well, as they antic.i.p.ate meeting minds that could enrich their future intellectual lives.

6. Join the editorial board of a new journal Editorial boards of preexisting journals seldom change fast enough to accommodate new scientific disciplines. A new discipline creates a new discourse and requires a new journal. Editors rooted in the past may not know how to a.s.sess the importance of new science, or even whom to approach as a referee. Only six years pa.s.sed between the finding of the double helix and the founding of the Journal of Molecular Biology. Journal of Molecular Biology. At first I was hesitant to join its editorial board and spend the time looking for the wheat among the chaff. But when the protein crystallographer John Kendrew became its chief editor, I knew the At first I was hesitant to join its editorial board and spend the time looking for the wheat among the chaff. But when the protein crystallographer John Kendrew became its chief editor, I knew the JMB JMB would attract high-quality papers. In return for executing the responsibility to see that important new ideas got out as soon as possible, I was also among the first to benefit from knowing about them. would attract high-quality papers. In return for executing the responsibility to see that important new ideas got out as soon as possible, I was also among the first to benefit from knowing about them.

7. Immediately write up big discoveries We made a bad mistake in not immediately publis.h.i.+ng our lab's February 1960 discovery of T2 messenger RNA. At the time Wally and I wanted the story filled out a bit more by the simultaneous demonstration of E. coli E. coli messenger RNA. But the latter task proved much trickier than initially expected. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Sydney Brenner and Francois Jacob came independently to the concept of messenger RNA in late April, with Sydney soon proving its existence through experiments with Matt Meselson at Caltech. Though we published simultaneously, Sydney let it be known that I had delayed their publication, leading others to believe our Harvard experiments were derivative of theirs. In fact, they predated them by four months. messenger RNA. But the latter task proved much trickier than initially expected. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Sydney Brenner and Francois Jacob came independently to the concept of messenger RNA in late April, with Sydney soon proving its existence through experiments with Matt Meselson at Caltech. Though we published simultaneously, Sydney let it be known that I had delayed their publication, leading others to believe our Harvard experiments were derivative of theirs. In fact, they predated them by four months.

8. Travel makes your science stronger No matter how prestigious your own inst.i.tution, at any given moment the real action in your specialty is likely happening elsewhere. Living in Boston does not mean that you need not continuously monitor the action in other scientific hot spots such as Stanford, Caltech, or La Jolla. Turning down invitations to speak before their audiences works against your future. By moving out of your own turf, you are likely to spot clever graduate students and postdocs who might enhance your own environment. Learning first about clever brains through their publications likely means that someone else has already recruited them. Naturally, there is a point beyond which traveling becomes counterproductive. Whenever possible, you should not cancel lectures for key undergraduate courses. But when you don't have any to give, much time should be spent seeing high-level science done elsewhere.

9. MANNERS NOTICED AS A DISPENSABLE WHITE HOUSE ADVISER.

I WAS to wait eight months before the Kennedy administration let me know, in September 1961, that my talents might be of use to them. After we had lunched at the long head table of the Faculty Club, Harvard's physical chemist, George Kistiakowsky, motioned me aside to ask whether I would like to a.s.sist the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in evaluating our nation's biological warfare (BW) capabilities. Curious ever since the end of World War II as to what BW weapons we might have developed, I indicated my availability whenever PSAC wanted me. Now some three years old, PSAC had been created by President Eisenhower as a response to the shock of Sputnik's moving the Soviets into s.p.a.ce ahead of us. After James Killian, then president of MIT, George had served as its second leader, reflecting Ike's respect for his ac.u.men at applying science to military purposes. At Los Alamos, his long experience with explosives was used in the fabrication of the first nuclear weapons. WAS to wait eight months before the Kennedy administration let me know, in September 1961, that my talents might be of use to them. After we had lunched at the long head table of the Faculty Club, Harvard's physical chemist, George Kistiakowsky, motioned me aside to ask whether I would like to a.s.sist the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in evaluating our nation's biological warfare (BW) capabilities. Curious ever since the end of World War II as to what BW weapons we might have developed, I indicated my availability whenever PSAC wanted me. Now some three years old, PSAC had been created by President Eisenhower as a response to the shock of Sputnik's moving the Soviets into s.p.a.ce ahead of us. After James Killian, then president of MIT, George had served as its second leader, reflecting Ike's respect for his ac.u.men at applying science to military purposes. At Los Alamos, his long experience with explosives was used in the fabrication of the first nuclear weapons.

PSAC was now headed by Jerome Wiesner of MIT's big Electronics Lab, who at the war's end was also at Los Alamos. Most of its members were physicists and chemists, reflecting a major preoccupation with nuclear weapons and missiles. George was still a member, as was Paul Doty, who was hopeful that with JFK as president we might be able to slow down, if not stop, the testing of ever bigger hydrogen bombs. Soon I filled out several White House forms for an FBI background check necessary to get me a top-secret security clearance. Only at that level of authorization could I get into Fort Detrick, the nation's big, rambling biological warfare complex, twenty-five miles to the north of the D.C. line in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Paul Doty (left) with Jerry Weisner (right) and the president who gave them hope That fall Wally Gilbert was increasingly in the Biolabs, coming over from the Physics Department, where he still had serious teaching responsibilities. The messenger RNA concept was on everyone's mind, with the previous June's Cold Spring Harbor symposium dominated by its implications. Seeing newly made mRNA molecules functioning in the E. coli E. coli cell-free systems made Alfred Tissieres wonder whether RNA molecules containing only single bases might also stimulate protein synthesis. But to his disappointment, the polyadenylic acid, or poly A (AAA...), from Paul Doty's lab had no apparent template capabilities. Alfred then put synthetic RNA out of his mind until he came along with Wally and me to hear Marshall Nierenberg's electrifying announcement at the Biological Congress in Moscow in August that polyuridylic acid, or poly U (UUU ...), coded for polyphenylalanine. Later poly A was also revealed to have template capabilities coding for polylysine. Its mRNA-like activity had been missed by Alfred, who had the misfortune of being given aggregated poly A incapable of binding to ribosomes. cell-free systems made Alfred Tissieres wonder whether RNA molecules containing only single bases might also stimulate protein synthesis. But to his disappointment, the polyadenylic acid, or poly A (AAA...), from Paul Doty's lab had no apparent template capabilities. Alfred then put synthetic RNA out of his mind until he came along with Wally and me to hear Marshall Nierenberg's electrifying announcement at the Biological Congress in Moscow in August that polyuridylic acid, or poly U (UUU ...), coded for polyphenylalanine. Later poly A was also revealed to have template capabilities coding for polylysine. Its mRNA-like activity had been missed by Alfred, who had the misfortune of being given aggregated poly A incapable of binding to ribosomes.

Upon his return from Moscow, Wally moved into Alfred's former office lab to study interactions between poly U and ribosomes. Over the coming year, Alfred was to spend periods in Paris and Cambridge waiting for his new lab to be completed in Geneva. Several nights before the Tissieres were to depart, they joined me and Franny Beer, again my summer technician, for an elegant private supper at the American Academy's new emba.s.sy-like home, Brandegee, southwest of Boston. Franny and I drove out in my MG, which I planned to let her borrow while I was away for the coming six weeks. After Moscow, I was to go on to Cambodia, where my sister's husband, Bob Myers, was our CIA station chief, and then to j.a.pan, where Masayasu Nomura would give me an insider's tour of the country.

That summer Franny was my daily sounding board about my new Radcliffe friends, the striking blond twins Sophia and Thala.s.sa Hencken. Living in a large, comfortable house in posh Chestnut Hill, they existed in the perpetual shadow of their mother, a garden expert with her own TV show. Though seemingly destined to marry a Social Register type, Thala.s.sa had just discovered a handsome young Pakistani engineer who possessed more panache than was usually dealt out to the suitors of future members of Boston's Vincent Club. Sophia, the less flamboyant of the two, had a boyfriend from New Orleans who, though not appropriate for the Brookline Country Club, did a skillful rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The twins' mother was planning a big party for their twenty-first birthday, to be held in their home in mid-October. I had hoped that my multiple letters and postcards from the Royal Hotel in Katmandu would secure me an invitation to be at either Sophia's or Thala.s.sa's side for the big night. Alas, that did not come to pa.s.s, although I was invited and Franny graciously came as my date. At the party, the twins were somewhat upstaged by the elegantly tall soph.o.m.ore Ann Douglas Watson, no relation, whose obvious social and intellectual superiority over the males her age made me wonder hopefully whether the promise of not having to change her name afforded me any advantage as a suitor. But the real catch at the party, all too clear to Mrs. Hencken, was Desmond FitzGerald, the future Knight of Glin, then over from Ireland to study art history at the Fogg Museum.

Soon after, the twins had Desmond invite me to a Sat.u.r.day night party that he gave at his Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue flat with Dorothy Dean. Her regal black-draped form often graced the lunch scenes at University Restaurant or Hayes-Bickford's and even more the largely gay evening crowds at Club Casablanca beneath the Brattle Theatre. In talking first to Thala.s.sa, who professed ignorance about most of the other guests, I found my ear tuning into the opinionated, laughing voice of Abby Rockefeller, the youngest of the guests and the eldest daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller. Instead of going on to college, Abby was studying the cello in Boston, living at a friend's home north of Harvard Square. So with my windowless MG now entrusted for the winter to Miss McCartney's Brattle Square garage, the next afternoon I walked up Brattle Street to the Churchill family residence to continue our spirited conversation of the night before. Over tea we concurred that no more than pennies would ever trickle down from the haves to the have-nots.

By then my security clearance had materialized, and I was soon making regular flights to Was.h.i.+ngton as part of PSAC's new Limited War Panel. Its recent creation was PSAC's response to the ever growing American involvement in Vietnam. With the use of nuclear weapons ruled out ever since Eisenhower had decided not to so rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, it was unclear how to keep South Vietnam from falling to the Viet Cong. No one on Bundy's staff thought a ma.s.sive deployment of ground troops was the answer. Whenever their southern borders were truly threatened, the Chinese could supply more bodies as cannon fodder than any American president dared contemplate matching. Use of highly lethal chemical and biological agents was also a Rubicon the government had no wish to cross. So the army's chemical and biological warfare units were considering deployment of "incapacitating agents" that would put enemy soldiers out of action only temporarily. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara apparently liked this idea, and PSAC's task was to give JFK an independent appraisal of their possible military feasibility.

The first new chemical agent I was to hear about was in fact a killer-but only of plants. Agent Orange was on the agenda of my first visit to the Executive Office Building, where the southeast side of the third floor, once occupied by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, now contained PSAC's offices. Speaking to the full Limited War Panel, a Green Beret officer explained how spraying this herbicide along roadsides had cut down Viet Cong ambushes. Were his presentation a seminar, I would have questioned his lack of statistical a.n.a.lysis. But as a mere consultant, I thought it prudent to stay quiet at my first briefing by military officers. Later Vince McRae, PSAC's deputy handling limited war matters, let me know he never challenged the competence of officers during military briefings. This was for their superiors to do if they felt so inclined. PSAC's effectiveness on military matters depended upon the Department of Defense seeing the committee as a potential ally for bending the president to their will. Whether Agent Orange reduced ambushes was for the army alone to judge. PSAC's place was to judge whether the chemical's use posed any negative health consequences for the military personnel involved in herbicide spraying. But here again we were a.s.sured that such defoliants were no danger to humans.

My conversation with Vince allowed me to find out where my glamorous Radcliffe friend Diana de Vegh was working in the White House. Soon learning that her office was on the floor above, I bounded up the stairs to find her in conversation with her boss, Marcus Raskin, a junior staff member of McGeorge Bundy's National Security Council. Earlier employed by the liberal Democratic congressman Bob Kastenmeier from Wisconsin, Marc was now the Security Council's token left-winger. Having Raskin around, Bundy believed, might afford him more than one type of option for handling a potentially tricky foreign policy dilemma. Much later I learned that Marc's earlier candor about Cuba had by then already put him out of the loop of important decision making. Diana, however, showed no awareness of her office's irrelevance to national security, elated by a helicopter ride over to the Pentagon earlier that day. As she already had plans for the evening, we agreed to have dinner on my next trip to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Also then a consultant to PSAC was my Harvard colleague E. J. Corey. A first-rate organic chemist, E.J. was to focus on chemical agents, while I handled biological ones. He would go to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to check up on the Chemical Corps, and I would be calling at Fort Detrick to get the inside skinny on our biological warfare programs. When E.J. and I later put together a report that had the potential to reach JFK, we used E.J.'s ultrasecure safe in the Converse Memorial Laboratory office to store the top-secret materials. Early on, we were briefed on corresponding Soviet efforts. We saw photos, most likely predating Gary Powers's U2 overflights, showing grid lines inter-pretable as Soviet biological and chemical weapon testing sites. By then the Soviets clearly had the capabilities to deploy deadly organic phosphate nerve toxins in the United States on a ma.s.s scale. But would they ever do so if they thought we might respond with a nuclear blast? Moreover, would any serious military establishment take the chance that a s.h.i.+ft in wind direction might cause a cloud of nerve gas to drift over friends rather than the target?

Much more urgently in need of serious PSAC review was the Chemical Corps' incapacitant BZ, about which the corps was very enthusiastic. Volunteers exposed to it temporarily became zombie-like without apparent long-term consequences. Might this agent win battles without killing enemy soldiers? But in conditions of extreme heat, would individuals so drugged become fatally dehydrated? Even more worrisome, volunteers exposed to BZ initially experienced delusions reminiscent of those caused by LSD. So neither E.J. nor I saw BZ as a wise measure to neutralize the Viet Cong.

The evening before my first visit to biological warfare headquarters in Fort Detrick, I stopped over in Was.h.i.+ngton for the deferred supper with Diana de Vegh. We dined at the red-leather-upholstered Jockey Club in the Fairfax Hotel near Dupont Circle. It was the the place for top executives and politicians to see or be seen, and n.o.bodies were hard to find there during the dinner hours. Diana apparently expected less to see than to be seen, because she did not wear her gla.s.ses, without which faces farther away than mine were all a blur. Already part of the Georgetown "New Frontier" crowd, she avoided talk about JFK, focusing on her recent weekend with Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and his wife, Phyllis. place for top executives and politicians to see or be seen, and n.o.bodies were hard to find there during the dinner hours. Diana apparently expected less to see than to be seen, because she did not wear her gla.s.ses, without which faces farther away than mine were all a blur. Already part of the Georgetown "New Frontier" crowd, she avoided talk about JFK, focusing on her recent weekend with Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and his wife, Phyllis.

A power of a very different sort greeted me when I first arrived at the officers' club of Fort Detrick. I was met by the civilian scientific director, the Texas-bred Riley Housewright. Long attached to the biological warfare effort, he had joined the army upon finis.h.i.+ng his wartime bacteriology Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Over lunch Riley told me he viewed his Detrick program as a distasteful national necessity. Afterward, we toured the huge Detrick complex escorted by several army personnel. After being shown a large variety of bomb devices intended to aerosolize biological agents, I was put in protective clothing and taken into a large factory-like building with huge containment facilities for growing and harvesting dangerous pathogens. Then we went back for a briefing on two promising biological incapacitants, Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) and staphylococcus enterotoxin protein.

Of the two, VEE was much further along toward possible tactical use. Though VEE is normally transmitted by mosquitoes, Detrick scientists had shown it also could be transmitted to animal hosts by aerosol mists. Delivered this way, it would likely also infect human beings. Though I was told that adults usually recovered from VEE infection with no long-term brain damage, this high-fever-inducing virus sometimes kills the very young or very old. In my mind employing it in Vietnam, or for that matter anywhere else, should be out of the question. In contrast, I saw much promise in pus.h.i.+ng ahead the staph enterotoxin program. While it would make you vomit continually for up to twenty-four hours, ruining church picnics and similar occasions, there were no known fatalities a.s.sociated with infection. In leaving I told Riley I was surprised that so little was known on our side about the anthrax toxin, despite constant worries about its deadly properties reported in the popular press. Could it easily be weaponized for use against innocent civilian populations without warning?

At that time I was technically on sabbatical leave from Harvard, intending to take up a visiting fellows.h.i.+p at Churchill College in Cambridge. I had not antic.i.p.ated my PSAC duties when I made plans to see MRC's brand-new Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) in action. I planned to start work there with RNA phages, whose existence had been discovered the year before at Rockefeller University by Norton Zinder and his graduate student Tim Loeb. Until Loeb finished his thesis experiments, Zinder did not want to send out aliquots of his h h phage to possible compet.i.tors. In the year that followed, several additional RNA phages were also discovered, one of which, R17, Sydney Brenner had already got possession of. Now in his lab at the LMB, I wanted to purify R17 as a first step toward studying its relatively small, single-stranded RNA molecule of likely fewer than four thousand nucleotides. They might be super messenger RNA templates for use in in vitro (cell-free) protein synthesis studies. Upon arriving in late March, I was joined by Nina Gordon, who the year before had done senior thesis research in my lab. Now she wanted to be in Europe near her Italian-born theoretical physicist boyfriend, Gino Segre, then in Geneva. Over the next two months, Nina and I were distressingly set back by contamination of our host phage to possible compet.i.tors. In the year that followed, several additional RNA phages were also discovered, one of which, R17, Sydney Brenner had already got possession of. Now in his lab at the LMB, I wanted to purify R17 as a first step toward studying its relatively small, single-stranded RNA molecule of likely fewer than four thousand nucleotides. They might be super messenger RNA templates for use in in vitro (cell-free) protein synthesis studies. Upon arriving in late March, I was joined by Nina Gordon, who the year before had done senior thesis research in my lab. Now she wanted to be in Europe near her Italian-born theoretical physicist boyfriend, Gino Segre, then in Geneva. Over the next two months, Nina and I were distressingly set back by contamination of our host E. coli E. coli bacteria by more conventional DNA phages. It was only when I got back to Harvard in early June, where I could enlist the expert hands of my graduate students, that our RNA phage research could effectively start. bacteria by more conventional DNA phages. It was only when I got back to Harvard in early June, where I could enlist the expert hands of my graduate students, that our RNA phage research could effectively start.

While still in England I hoped to learn more about anthrax by visiting the UK's top-secret biological weapons lab at Porton Down, near Salisbury. But its anthrax program proved no more advanced than that at Fort Detrick. In 1942 the UK had conducted extensive anthrax testing on a small island off the coast of Scotland, but the program's current leader, David Henderson, was not inclined to spend any more money on a weapon that he believed could destroy the moral authority of the British government. When temporarily back in Detrick, I was briefed in greater detail about a program on rice blast, a fungal pathogen, about which enterprise I had heard when last there. While geneticists elsewhere were working to develop new rice strains resistant to rice blasts, those at Detrick concentrated on developing appropriate blast strains for destroying the rice crops of North Vietnam. Producing rice blasts in large amounts was within Detrick's capabilities, but delivering them was another matter. Helicopter delivery was deemed totally impractical, and no operational American fighter pilot had the radar capabilities necessary for night spraying missions over the Red River delta rice paddies. Later an air force officer was to fill me in on a still-secret radar-guided, terrain-hugging bomber then being evaluated near Dallas.

Likely it was only a bureaucratic snafu that had let me inside Detrick's Special Project facility, a part of the operation I would never see again. There scientists worked not for the Department of Defense but for the CIA on poisons to be used for a.s.sa.s.sinations. Among others they were keen to employ was the puffer fish toxin. Synthesizing it, however, was a chemical challenge worthy of the best organic chemists, and they had approached Harvard's Bob Woodward for help. Somewhere within this nondescript, drab building was likely stored the chemical agent that Bobby Kennedy later hoped could be slipped to Fidel Castro.

Many faculty members at Harvard who were New Frontier boosters were embarra.s.sed when JFK's thirty-year-old brother Edward Moore (Teddy) Kennedy campaigned against the inc.u.mbent George Lodge to become the new junior senator from Ma.s.sachusetts. His one year of experience as an a.s.sistant district attorney was presumptuously paltry. And Teddy's undergraduate years at Harvard were tainted by the scandal of his having sent someone else to take a language exam in his place. Though he later obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia and pa.s.sed the bar in 1959, Harvard was not proud to count him as one of its alumni. Also running for senator, as an independent, was Harvard history professor Stuart Hughes, whose campaign was based largely on opposition to the nuclear weapons race. Sam Beer, Franny Beer's political scientist father, did not warm to Hughes, believing that he was impractical and unelectable and that as Democrats we should be backing someone who would strengthen JFK's support in the Senate. Soon after I was invited to see Teddy in action at a gathering Sam was holding for important Harvard colleagues at the Hotel Continental in Cambridge. That day Teddy was clearly less impressive than his appealing, fair-haired wife, Joan.

PSAC's oversight of poisons took on more humane considerations after Jerry Wiesner read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Silent Spring, serialized by the serialized by the New Yorker New Yorker in June of 1962. Carson argued that chemical pesticides were fast spreading through the world's food chains, posing an immediate threat to the global environment. Not only were they killing off fish and songbirds, they possibly threatened human existence. With her thesis quickly generating a firestorm of public concern, JFK himself was drawn into the controversy and stated that Carson's book had led his administration to take the pesticide threat seriously. No federal agency then had a real mandate for an honest investigation of the chemicals' ecological consequences. The obvious candidate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was too cozy with the agricultural chemical industry. So Jerry a.s.signed his Life Sciences deputy, Colin MacLeod, to head up a special PSAC panel, which Paul Doty and I were asked to serve on. Meeting first on October 1, our deliberations momentarily came to a halt when the Cuban missile crisis drew PSAC's attention elsewhere. Only years later did I learn that one of the nation's contingent responses that scary week was to have jets from Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, drop VEE-filled devices on Cuba. in June of 1962. Carson argued that chemical pesticides were fast spreading through the world's food chains, posing an immediate threat to the global environment. Not only were they killing off fish and songbirds, they possibly threatened human existence. With her thesis quickly generating a firestorm of public concern, JFK himself was drawn into the controversy and stated that Carson's book had led his administration to take the pesticide threat seriously. No federal agency then had a real mandate for an honest investigation of the chemicals' ecological consequences. The obvious candidate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was too cozy with the agricultural chemical industry. So Jerry a.s.signed his Life Sciences deputy, Colin MacLeod, to head up a special PSAC panel, which Paul Doty and I were asked to serve on. Meeting first on October 1, our deliberations momentarily came to a halt when the Cuban missile crisis drew PSAC's attention elsewhere. Only years later did I learn that one of the nation's contingent responses that scary week was to have jets from Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, drop VEE-filled devices on Cuba.

Our panel dealt with two major groups of pesticides: the long-lived chlorinated hydrocarbons, of which DDT was the best-known, and the much more toxic, short-lived organic phosphates, such as Sevin. The latter originally were developed as nerve agents for military deployment but later synthesized as less toxic derivatives, such as parathion, to kill insects. The use of both pesticide groups was steadily increasing, with many insects in turn developing genetic resistance, especially to the chlorinated hydrocarbons. Because of their much greater stability, Carson had focused more attention on the chlorine-containing pesticides, pointing out ever-increasing concentrations in the fatty tissues of creatures throughout the food chain. While large amounts of DDT given to human volunteers had no short-term effects, its more toxic derivatives, such as dieldrin, might well pose public health threats. An already widely used pesticide, dieldrin was a nasty liver toxin at high doses. More worrisome, mice exposed to it at much lower levels were developing liver adenomas that conceivably might develop into malignant carcinomas. But with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) calling these adenomas benign, the USDA blocked the invocation of the so-called Delaney amendment, which prohibited cancer-causing agents in the nation's food. If the FDA were to ban outright all chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, however, American agriculture would have been deprived of a chemical that had become vital to its productivity. Prudence suggested that the proper course was to recommend sharp curtailment of dieldrin use until the question of its carcinogenicity was settled.

Only after a thorough review of how the USDA and FDA dealt with pesticides did our panel invite Rachel Carson to appear. Pleased at being asked, she was nevertheless perfectly even-tempered on that late January day, giving no indication of the nutty hysterical naturalist that agricultural and chemical lobbyists had portrayed her to be. The chemical giant Monsanto had distributed five thousand copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring Silent Spring ent.i.tled "The Desolate Years," describing a pesticide-free world devastated by famine, disease, and insects. The attack was mirrored in ent.i.tled "The Desolate Years," describing a pesticide-free world devastated by famine, disease, and insects. The attack was mirrored in Time Time magazine's review of magazine's review of Silent Spring Silent Spring deploring Carson's oversimplification and downright inaccuracy. Two weeks after meeting with her, our panel finished a much debated first draft of our presidential report. Though it accepted as indispensable the role of pesticides in modern agriculture and public health (e.g., to control mosquitoes), most of it was devoted to dangers that pesticides posed for human beings, fish, wildlife, and the environment. deploring Carson's oversimplification and downright inaccuracy. Two weeks after meeting with her, our panel finished a much debated first draft of our presidential report. Though it accepted as indispensable the role of pesticides in modern agriculture and public health (e.g., to control mosquitoes), most of it was devoted to dangers that pesticides posed for human beings, fish, wildlife, and the environment.

The USDA reacted to the draft with instant fury, and Secretary Orville Freeman wrote to PSAC that in its present form the report would profoundly damage U.S. agriculture. After more pages on the benefits of pesticides had been added and the full PSAC panel had approved it, the USDA then demanded that they make a full review of it before the president released it. But Jerry Wiesner held firm, refusing to add a blanket statement that the food of our nation was safe or to remove the final sentence, which paid tribute to Rachel Carson for alerting the public to the problem. To our great relief President Kennedy released the doc.u.ment un corrupted on May 15,1963.

By then Diana de Vegh was no longer part of Marc Raskin's attic office above PSAC in the Executive Office Building. Despite having recently purchased a house on a quiet street near Georgetown University, she had precipitously left for Paris. My Was.h.i.+ngton meals increasingly had to be taken with fellow panel members or with Leo Szilard and his wife, then living out of suitcases at the Dupont Plaza Hotel.

During the Cuban missile crisis, Leo was so terrified that war was about to break out that he left New York for Geneva via Rome, where he tried unsuccessfully to get the pope's attention. A month later, the Szilards somewhat sheepishly returned to Was.h.i.+ngton, where Leo continued to devise unorthodox schemes to reduce the probability of nuclear war. Now aboveground test blasts were again occurring, with the Soviets breaking the international moratorium soon after the Berlin Wall went up. Six months later, our bomb makers were to follow suit.

At that time, my major political concern was ever-expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Then just back in Was.h.i.+ngton were my sister, Betty, and her husband, Bob, the former CIA station chief in Cambodia. Bob's more than fifteen years of experience in the Far East had convinced him that sending more American troops to Vietnam would create a quagmire that would long haunt our nation. But he knew that many U.S. Army officials were more optimistic. In their ranch-style house, within easy commuting distance to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, I expressed my belief that our Limited War Panel had nothing to offer the American cause in Vietnam. By then I had learned that staph enterotoxin could no longer be considered merely an "incapacitating" agent. Monkeys exposed to it through their lungs promptly died. We had to a.s.sume that humans would suffer the same fate if exposed. I informed John Richardson of this fact four months later, when he came out to Bob and Betty's house following his removal as station chief in Saigon, an action taken to mean that the United States no longer supported the corrupt Diem government. Two years before, on my way to Cambodia for a family visit, I had been warned by Bob Bloom, then leading the CIA's secretly funded Asia Foundation, that any successor to Diem was likely to be even worse.

A month later I was with the "superspook," Desmond FitzGerald, whose house I came to one mid-June evening to take his stepdaughter, a cla.s.smate of Abby Rockefeller's, to dinner. A member of the Social Register elite that helped found the CIA, Desmond knew from his experience in the Philippines that bribes, not soldiers, were generally the best way to promote American foreign policy objectives in Asia. His mind seemed elsewhere when I indicated doubt that Fort Detrick's rice blast a.r.s.enal could prevent North Vietnam from continuing to support the Viet Cong. Only twenty-five years later did I learn that Desmond had been entrusted by Bobby Kennedy with the task of a.s.sa.s.sinating Fidel Castro.

Though I attended a full Limited War Panel meeting in early May, my main PSAC role then was to lead its new panel on cotton insects. Its origin lay in a request to JFK from Arizona's Senator Carl Hayden that the federal government somehow prevent the boll weevil from spreading from Mexico into his state's highly profitable irrigated cotton fields. Pesticides already amounted to 20 percent of total production costs in southeastern states, and every year boll weevils were becoming increasingly resistant to the chlorinated hydrocarbons being used. When our panel first met in nearby Beltsville, Maryland, we were briefed about the problem as well as a possible solution. The sterilization procedures that had supposedly eliminated screwworms from selected horse-racing regions of Florida promised a theoretically ideal method of purging the cotton crop of the boll weevil. But the technique's application to weevil eradication seemed practically daunting. Producing and releasing enough sterile boll weevils to significantly reduce their population could easily cost several billion dollars.

During our subsequent tours of the cotton fields of Mississippi, Texas, California, and Mexico, the entomologists who dominated our panel believed integrated pest management approaches could save farmers from further pesticide expenditures. Our first stop was the Boll Weevil Research Laboratory at Mississippi State College in Starkville, not surprisingly located in the congressional district of the powerful Jamie Whitten. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Whitten was more influential in shaping agricultural research policies than the secretary of agriculture. Later as we drove toward the vast cotton fields of the still British-owned Delta and Pine cotton plantation near Greenville, the homes of the "hoe-hands" who weeded the cotton fields struck me as even more run-down than the dwellings bordering the rice paddies of Cambodia that I had visited two years earlier. Later the Delta and Pine official showing us around his vast domain remarked that his farm laborers lazily stopped hoeing every time his car pa.s.sed out of sight.

On our way to the USDA cotton insect lab near Brownsville, Texas, we were lucky not to be in a convertible when our car was doused with pesticides released by a small plane flying overhead. Pesticide advertis.e.m.e.nts were ubiquitous on the large roadside billboards, where competing agrochemical companies touted the merits of their respective pesticide brews like so many aftershaves. Before I got to Texas, I had hopes that the boll worm, in some years a worse pest than the boll weevil, might be best controlled by spraying with polyhedral viruses. Similar viruses had already been used to control the spruce bud worm in Canada, but such an enterprise could not be supported here, as we found to our dismay that 85 percent of the Brownsville laboratory's budget went to salaries. A major function of most USDA regional labs was then to provide patronage jobs for friends of local congressmen. At the Boll Weevil Research Lab, for example, the chief administrative a.s.sistant was a close relative of Congressman Whitten.

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 inst.i.tution." 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 inst.i.tute. We wondered under what circ.u.mstances 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.s 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 Inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sed 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 probably or or possibly 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. 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 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sa.s.sination possibilities. 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 pa.s.sages damaging to those interests were toned down, leaving open the question of whether Silent Spring's 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. 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 n.o.bEL PRIZE.

INDIVIDUALS nominated for n.o.bel 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 Inst.i.tutet in Stockholm had asked him to nominate us in January for the 1962 n.o.bel 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 n.o.bel 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 n.o.bel, a beaming Kornberg held a copy of our demonstration DNA model in his hands.

As the October 18 date for announcing the year's n.o.bel 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 s.h.i.+vering under my electric blanket, not wanting to get up when the telephone rang at 8:15 A.M. Rus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.bel 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 cla.s.s. I felt no need to rush through breakfast with Dad, so the cla.s.s hour was almost half over when I walked in to find an overflowing crowd of students and friends antic.i.p.ating my arrival. The words Dr. Watson has just won the n.o.bel Prize Dr. Watson has just won the n.o.bel Prize were on the blackboard. 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 Inst.i.tute. The long-standing rule that a n.o.bel 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 cla.s.s ended, I soon found myself with a champagne gla.s.s in hand and talking to reporters from the a.s.sociated Press, United Press International, the Boston Globe, Boston Globe, and and Boston Traveler. 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 cla.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 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 cla.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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. 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." 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 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 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 Chicago Tribune took pride in reporting my Chicago upbringing and appearance on took pride in reporting my Chicago upbringing and appearance on Quiz Kids, Quiz Kids, quoting my father that it was through my childhood interest in birds that I got into science. 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 n.o.bel 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 Lakerol 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 The Thirty-Nine Steps and and John Macnab John Macnab never even sniffled. This immunity