Avoid Boring People Part 7

The sad underutilization of lab s.p.a.ce at Cold Spring Harbor could prove a blessing. Its scientific direction could be changed fast without the unpleasantness of alienating excellent scientists already there who were oriented in the old way. To move swiftly into molecular biology, MIT in the mid-1950s had effectively fired its entire Biology Department, a move that generated much bitterness. This would not be necessary at Cold Spring Harbor.

On Sunday, February 4,1 made my first public appearance as director. The occasion was the annual meeting of the Long Island Biological a.s.sociation, whose membership initially was drawn from the owners of the great estates that had once dominated much of the landscape of the North Sh.o.r.e. Though the twenty years since the war had seen many big estates subdivided, there still remained, within a several-mile radius around the lab, the opulent homes of many of Harvard's most loyal and generous Wall Street benefactors. Thus, I thought, my Harvard professorship could prove as relevant as my n.o.bel Prize in mobilizing the local gentry behind our new cancer research objectives. Equally important was the high esteem in which John Cairns and his family were held by the Cold Spring Harbor community. That afternoon I publicly announced my hope that John would remain as a lab scientist and continue to live in Airslie, the large wooden manor house built for Major William Jones in 1806. Long part of the Henry deForest estate just to the north of the lab, it became the director's home in 1942. Being single and planning to be on site at most six to eight days a month, I did not need its many rooms. Before the a.s.sociation meeting started, I requested the even older Osterhout Cottage as my own residence. Alfred and Jill Hershey had lived there for several years before building a largely gla.s.s-walled house on land west of the lab.

At that time, my father was avoiding the winter cold in an old-fashioned resort on the west coast of Florida below Sarasota. This was his fifth winter there, the first having followed the mild stroke in November 1963. Once the awful shock of my mother's sudden death in 1957 had pa.s.sed, Dad's broad, warm smile helped him make new friends among kindred souls, who valued books and Rooseveltian ideals. In particular, he met several quiet intellectuals a.s.sociated with the experimental New College, on the grounds of the once expansive Ringling estate outside Sarasota. Two years before, he'd been proud to attend a lecture I gave to its students. The college's focus on the great books of Western civilization reminded me fondly of my University of Chicago years. His last Florida visit, however, had gone less well, as Dad's long-dormant stomach ulcer again opened up. Fortunately, it soon healed, and he felt confident enough to spend several spring weeks on a cruise to the Mediterranean before pa.s.sing much of the summer on Martha's Vineyard in Edgartown's quaint Harbor View Hotel.

Still, he was only in middling health when he left my sister's Washington home after Christmas to again take up residence in Florida the year I became director. The persistent bad cough he'd developed over the holidays wouldn't abate in the Southland's warmth. But his Sara-sota physician rea.s.sured my sister, Betty, several times over the phone that Dad did not have a virulent pneumonia. He was otherwise in good spirits, particularly when two Atlantic Monthly Atlantic Monthly issues serializing issues serializing The Double Helix The Double Helix appeared without generating a firestorm of criticism. He was also proud that his New College friends got a kick out of seeing me on the appeared without generating a firestorm of criticism. He was also proud that his New College friends got a kick out of seeing me on the Merv Griffin Show. Merv Griffin Show.

Then, without warning, my sister called late one afternoon to report that Dad's persistent cough was never to go away. It was caused by an inoperable lung cancer, and the prognosis was that Dad had but a few months left. The two packs of Camels that he had smoked every day since college had finally caught up with him. Betty had gotten the grim news while I was en route to Cambridge from New York City after the lunch marking the publication date of The Double Helix. The Double Helix. I was at my office when she finally reached me that afternoon. Then with me was the very pretty Elizabeth Lewis, the Radcliffe junior who on many afternoons a.s.sisted my secretary, Libby Aldrich's sister-in-law, Susie. Liz's appearance in the Biolabs several times a week to file reprints or to help me a.s.semble successive drafts of I was at my office when she finally reached me that afternoon. Then with me was the very pretty Elizabeth Lewis, the Radcliffe junior who on many afternoons a.s.sisted my secretary, Libby Aldrich's sister-in-law, Susie. Liz's appearance in the Biolabs several times a week to file reprints or to help me a.s.semble successive drafts of The Double Helix The Double Helix invariably made me feel good. Conversely, I always felt lonely when she retreated back into her student life. invariably made me feel good. Conversely, I always felt lonely when she retreated back into her student life.

When she first came to Harvard, Liz thought about majoring in math, a subject that she had much enjoyed as a student at the Lincoln School in Providence, where her father, Robert Vickery Lewis, of Welsh and Yankee antecedents, practiced medicine. After his college years at Brown, he studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met his future wife, the nurse Edith Mae Belle Irey, of Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch heritage. Being at a small Quaker school in no way prepared Liz for the Harvard math concentration, and she switched to physical science as a possible route to medical school.

At my cousin Alices wedding to James Houston in 1967; I am to the right of the bride, and next to me are Betty's husband, Bob Myers; my sister, Betty; my father; and William Weldon Watson.

Our first effective date was unplanned, she coming with me at the last moment for an early pre-supper get-together at Carl and Anne Cori's home off Brattle Street. Afterward we drove along the Charles River to Boston, where we saw an English movie at the Exeter Theatre. Her exams were finished, and she was about to depart for a summer job in Montana at a resort ranch above Yellowstone Park. It had seemed a long summer when in early August a brief note from her made me realize just how keenly I had been antic.i.p.ating her return to my office in the fall. Just after she got back to Radcliffe, we ran into each other on Brattle Street near Sage's Market, which coincidence gave me my second chance to drive with her into Boston. After lunch on Newbury Street, we went into Bonwit Teller, the elegant shop spread over the several s.p.a.cious floors of what had been a gracious city mansion.

Over the fall months, she had increasingly continued to forgo evening meals at Moors Hall to join my father and me for supper at the Hotel Continental. Upon his return from Martha's Vineyard in August, Dad had chosen to move into the hotel, leaving his apartment at 101/2 Appian Way. It would save him the trouble of shopping, preparing meals, and tidying up. At the time I did not let on to Dad how my affection for Liz had increased over the past eighteen months. I knew he would worry that at nineteen she was likely to reserve her true affection for someone much closer to her own age. Appian Way. It would save him the trouble of shopping, preparing meals, and tidying up. At the time I did not let on to Dad how my affection for Liz had increased over the past eighteen months. I knew he would worry that at nineteen she was likely to reserve her true affection for someone much closer to her own age.

As soon as I put down Betty's call, I asked Liz to stay with me for supper at the Continental. I did not want to be alone. It would be our first dinner together by ourselves. Afterward she did not go back to her dorm, telling me she did not want me to be alone that evening any more than I did. The next afternoon she left my office early to go grocery shopping on Brattle Street, planning to cook dinner that evening on the antique stove in my Appian Way flat. She had brought school-books to read after dinner in the unheated alcove off the main room. The next night, when again we went together to Carl and Anne Cori's home for dinner, Anne knew she no longer had to find single girls to sit next to me.

Early the following morning, I left Liz to fly to Sarasota to collect a now very apprehensive Dad and bring him by plane to my sister's home in Washington. In 1964, after resigning from the CIA, her husband, Bob Myers, founded The Washingtonian The Washingtonian magazine with his University of Chicago roommate Laughlin Phillips. Bob was its first publisher and Laughlin the editor. Just recently, Bob had become publisher of the magazine with his University of Chicago roommate Laughlin Phillips. Bob was its first publisher and Laughlin the editor. Just recently, Bob had become publisher of the New Republic, New Republic, but too late for Dad, long a faithful reader, to take anything but a brief pleasure from seeing his son-in-law help run his favorite magazine of liberal politics. but too late for Dad, long a faithful reader, to take anything but a brief pleasure from seeing his son-in-law help run his favorite magazine of liberal politics.

Upon my return to Cambridge, I found myself all too soon scheduled to leave Liz again for the annual American Cancer Society (ACS) get-together of scientists and science journalists, this time being held in La Jolla, to the north of San Diego. Out of this meeting, it was hoped, would emerge optimistic press coverage to kick-start the ACS annual fund drive. Several months before, I'd eagerly accepted the invitation to attend, believing the meeting would help me focus on how to start up tumor virus research at Cold Spring Harbor. As it was to be held just before Harvard's weeklong spring break, there was also the possibility of Liz's joining me there after the conference.

To appear as a couple on a trip without causing a scandal, however, it would be necessary for us to marry immediately after Liz's arrival in California. Happily, she had no qualms, instantly accepting my proposal that we effectively elope. We decided not to let anyone know except for her parents in Providence. In the end, the only other person at Harvard in on our plan was my secretary. She found out when Liz came in saying this would be her last day of work. Susie said that Dr. Watson would be much disappointed. Liz replied that, in fact, he wouldn't be disappointed at all.

Before flying west I called Sylvia Bailey, the English-born secretary of Jacob Bronowski, the English polymath hired by the Salk Inst.i.tute upon Leo Szilard's death, for advice about how Liz and I could best get wed in California. To my surprise, she called back the next day, saying that it would be faster to arrange a church ceremony than a civil ceremony before a justice of the peace. If I gave her the go-ahead, she would contact her friend the Reverend Forshaw, whose Mission-style church was in the center of La Jolla. In turn, Liz went with her mother back to Bonwit Teller's, this time no longer just looking but ready to bring home several outfits appropriate to the occasion and the many photographs we would take to send to relatives and friends by way of announcement.

At the ACS science writers' gathering, I spoke at length to Bob Rein-hold, a former Crimson Crimson editor, now writing about science for the editor, now writing about science for the New York Times. New York Times. In the article he soon wrote about my plans to turn Cold Spring Harbor toward cancer research, he remarked on the nervous way I held my can of c.o.ke, having no way of knowing that this was no garden-variety tic but the anxious antic.i.p.ation of my wedding the next evening. My nervousness disappeared as soon as Liz came off the plane. Her smile would always make me feel good. Shortly, we drove north of La Jolla to get a marriage license that would permit us at 9:00 P.M. on March 28 to be wed in the La Jolla Congregational Church. That I was not a churchgoer was of no concern to Reverend Forshaw, whose library prominently displayed one of Bertrand Russell's thicker tomes. In the article he soon wrote about my plans to turn Cold Spring Harbor toward cancer research, he remarked on the nervous way I held my can of c.o.ke, having no way of knowing that this was no garden-variety tic but the anxious antic.i.p.ation of my wedding the next evening. My nervousness disappeared as soon as Liz came off the plane. Her smile would always make me feel good. Shortly, we drove north of La Jolla to get a marriage license that would permit us at 9:00 P.M. on March 28 to be wed in the La Jolla Congregational Church. That I was not a churchgoer was of no concern to Reverend Forshaw, whose library prominently displayed one of Bertrand Russell's thicker tomes.

Upon our return to the La Valencia Hotel, we had an early supper at its Whaler's Bar before going on to Jacob and Rita Bronowski's one-story gla.s.s house in La Jolla Farms near the Salk Inst.i.tute. Its stylish ambience was much better suited to wedding photos after sunset than was the church. Afterward, Liz met my small circle of La Jolla friends, who came to the La Valencia for a surprise party without knowing its purpose. We spent our first night as a married couple in one of the rooms looking out on the Pacific Ocean.

Liz and I on our wedding day, March 28,1968, in La Jolla, California The next morning we telephoned my sister to tell her and Dad the news and to let them know that we would stop off in Washington on our way back to Harvard. I went to find postcards to let friends such as Seymour Benzer and Paul Doty know that "a nineteen-year-old was now mine." After a leisurely lunch, we drove east to see the desert plants blooming around Borrego Springs. We spent the night at Casa del Zora before driving through the Anza Desert to the Imperial Valley and from there to the village of San Felipe, some seventy miles south of the Mexican border. There we spent two nights in a hotel catering to fishermen, taking care not to get sunburned while spending much of Sunday swimming in the already warm waters of the Gulf of California.

Unknown to us was Lyndon Johnson's sudden decision to make a major address to the nation that evening. Only after we were back on the U.S. side of the border, driving across southern Arizona, did we learn that the night before, Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection. We hoped he would get us out of the quagmire in Southeast Asia before his term ended, but it seemed a vain hope. Though Johnson then presented the Tet offensive as a big setback for the Viet Cong, he had to believe otherwise, else he would not be stepping down.

By nightfall we were outside Tucson. The next day we admired thousands of tall cacti on an early morning walk in the Saguaro National Park. Dropping off our rented Ford Mustang at the airport, we caught the plane for Washington. Spring was in full bloom, allowing everyone at Betty's house, next to Glover Archibald Park, to half ignore Dad's awful prognosis as Liz and I shared the details of our wedding and the days afterward. Unexpectedly on hand was a photographer sent by McGraw-Hill's new magazine Scientific Research. Scientific Research. Its forte was fast-breaking stories about scientists as well as science itself. Word that I had just married was already about, and they wanted a picture of Liz and me. The resulting photos revealed Liz a photographer's dream, and we were to be seen together on the cover of the April 29 issue. Its forte was fast-breaking stories about scientists as well as science itself. Word that I had just married was already about, and they wanted a picture of Liz and me. The resulting photos revealed Liz a photographer's dream, and we were to be seen together on the cover of the April 29 issue.

The next morning we drove north for four hours to Cold Spring Harbor to see our eventual home. From Washington, I had let John Cairns know of our impending day trip, and the Lab arranged a special welcome dinner prepared by Francoise Spahr. Her husband, Pierre-Francois, was over from Geneva for six months to work with my former Harvard student Ray Gesteland, whom John Cairns had recruited to the lab staff a year earlier. But by the time we gathered in the main room of the big Victorian house at the Lab's entryway, the news of our marriage was eclipsed by horrid events elsewhere. In Memphis, an unknown a.s.sa.s.sin had just killed Martin Luther King Jr. Before driving off to Providence the next afternoon, Liz and I were interviewed separately by a reporter from Long Island's leading newspaper, Newsday. Newsday. To her dismay, he wound up suggesting in the article about us that her Radcliffe education would effectively lead her to a life of darning my socks. To her dismay, he wound up suggesting in the article about us that her Radcliffe education would effectively lead her to a life of darning my socks.

Liz and I graced the cover of Scientific Research on April 29,1968.

At Liz's home, I met her father, a physician, whom I discovered to be, like my father, a keen reader and skeptic. In this important way, Liz and I had similar upbringings. Though her parents sent her to Central Baptist Church, its chief attraction to them was the music-Providence's best. That evening, my eyes kept drifting to the TV set and its images of the widespread race riots in the wake of the King a.s.sa.s.sination. The a.s.sailant was still unknown.

The next morning, April 6, was my fortieth birthday, and were it not for Liz by my side I would have been feeling sadly old. We pushed on toward Cambridge just before noon to give Liz time for a Sat.u.r.day afternoon of housewares shopping in Harvard Square. Her first big purchase was an ironing board that I carried back from Dixon's Hardware. Later enriching our Appian Way flat was a second silver candlestick, a gift from the Society of Fellows to complement the one given to me upon my becoming a senior fellow. Another early purchase was a big cookbook by Julia Child, a local resident, which Liz bought upon the suggestion of the woman at the Radcliffe registrar's office who recorded the change of Liz's name from Lewis to Watson. Its recipes proved much more satisfying to Liz to master than those in her organic chemistry cla.s.s. Inevitably my days as a beanpole were soon to end.

The Newsday article, April 6,1968 As soon as Liz had taken her final exams, we made the five-hour drive down to Cold Spring Harbor, where the Lab had rented a house on Sh.o.r.e Road to let Dad live with us over the summer. He had been hospitalized several times while with Betty but now was pain-free enough to move in and out of our rented four-door Dodge. The new car spared Liz having to master jump-starting my MG TE The day after we arrived, another multicourse meal, this time featuring lobster americaine, was cooked by Francoise. While eating it, we were horrified to learn that Robert Kennedy had just been shot dead in Los Angeles. I had pinned my hopes on him to win the Democratic nomination for president. Not since World War II had daily life been so frequently overshadowed by such a string of woeful events.

Nancy and Brook Hopkins began coming over to our Sh.o.r.e Road home to keep Dad company. Nancy was down for the summer with more than a dozen graduate students from MIT and Harvard, all focused on phage , working together in the vacant lab s.p.a.ce underneath that of AI Hershey. Also about were Max and Manny Delbruck, back for Max's fourth consecutive year of teaching a course in the Animal House on the photosensitivity of the mold Phycorny ces. Phycorny ces. Instantly I sensed their approval of Liz, and relief that I no longer would suffer from chronic restlessness. Over July, Dad's condition worsened to require a twenty-four-hour home nurse. The chemotherapy he was receiving from the Lab's local doctor, Reese Alsop, was mainly palliative. By month's end, however, the pain proved too great to treat at home, and he was admitted to Huntington Hospital before being settled in a nearby nursing home. He would pa.s.s only a night there before pneumonia mercifully ended his agony. Instantly I sensed their approval of Liz, and relief that I no longer would suffer from chronic restlessness. Over July, Dad's condition worsened to require a twenty-four-hour home nurse. The chemotherapy he was receiving from the Lab's local doctor, Reese Alsop, was mainly palliative. By month's end, however, the pain proved too great to treat at home, and he was admitted to Huntington Hospital before being settled in a nearby nursing home. He would pa.s.s only a night there before pneumonia mercifully ended his agony.

Two days later, Betty joined me in Indianapolis and together we drove north some one hundred miles to the small town of Chesterton, near Lake Michigan, where our mother had been buried eleven years before. We would have met at the Chicago airport, but the Democratic convention was in progress and the city was full of antiwar protesters tangling with unsympathetic policemen. That day we wanted to think about Dad and Mother, not Vietnam. Meeting us the next morning at the cemetery were Mother's nearby Olvaney cousins, whom we'd seen much of in Michigan City before our university studies. After lunch we set off to see the little bungalow on Chicago's South Sh.o.r.e in which we had grown up. The drive later through Grant Park was eerily peaceful. The night before, Mayor Daley's police had violently dispersed protesters attempting to camp out in its open s.p.a.ces, onto which looked the windows of rooms in the tall hotels where the convention delegates were staying.

Upon my return to Long Island, the three-week-long course on animal cells and viruses had started. There I first met the Liverpool-born, twenty-eight-year-old Joe Sambrook. He had flown east to lecture on pox viruses, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at the Australian National University. Over the past two years at the Salk Inst.i.tute, he had shown SV40 viral DNA integrated into the chromosomes of cancerous SV40-transformed cells. His work had been the heart of Dulbecco's recent June symposium talk, leading John Cairns to suggest I approach Joe about leading our DNA tumor virus effort. Quickly sensing Joe's high intelligence and ambition, I offered him a position starting the following summer. He quickly accepted and wrote up a big grant proposal to the National Cancer Inst.i.tute (NCI), which would guarantee the Lab an infusion of $1.6 million over the proposed five years. Obtaining this money was virtually a foregone conclusion, as there then existed more cancer research money than good applicants to use it.

In fact, the only reviewer with any misgivings about the NCI grant was Harvard's Charlie Thomas. He wondered about the risk to humans from working with tumor viruses at the molecular level. Could exposure to the monkey virus SV40 cause cancer in humans? We replied that we would follow the same procedures used in the Salk lab of Renato Dulbecco, who'd apparently worked safely with SV40. Furthermore, we knew that fifteen years earlier, SV40 had been an inadvertent contaminant of early batches of the polio vaccine with which several million individuals had been vaccinated, with no elevated incidence of cancer.

Over the February 1969 Washington's Birthday weekend, we stayed at Redcote, the home of Edward Pulling, the newly elected president of the Long Island Biological a.s.sociation. Though raised in Baltimore and educated at Princeton, Ed had been born in England and served as a British naval officer during World War I. Upon his recent retirement as founding headmaster of the Milbrook School, north of New York City, he and his wife, Lucy, moved to the estate she had inherited from her father, the J. P. Morgan banker Russell Leffingwell. When Liz and I had first visited their eighty acres of fields and woods the previous summer, Ed pointed out the hidden ditch called a "ha-ha." It kept Lucy's horses from coming too close to the patio where we had c.o.c.ktails before supper. Then also present was the journalist turned canny investor Franz Schneider, almost eighty, and his wife, Betty, twenty-five years his junior. Earlier in life, Betty regularly flew their seaplane from the dock by their house to and from New York City. Later they had us meet Ferdinand Eberstadt, who owned a large estate on Lloyd Neck that he would soon give to the Fish and Wildlife Service as a nature preserve to prevent the building of a nuclear power plant on adjacent land.

On each such visit down from Harvard, we eagerly followed the building of the new house we were to occupy upon Liz's graduation from Radcliffe. Initially we had planned to renovate the 175-year-old Osterhout Cottage, next to Blackford Hall at the heart of campus. The necessary alterations would require that I put up $30,000, then the value of my shares of the fast-growing pharmaceutical company Syn-tex, acquired after meeting the company's founder, Carl Djera.s.si, a chemist and the inventor of the birth control pill. At a Cleveland gathering of the American Chemical Society in May 1960 we had each received a $1,000 award. Upon returning to Harvard, I invested my prize money in Syntex shares, later using another $1,000 from my salary to buy more. Soon after the renovation of Osterhout started, however, the local contractor told us the deterioration was beyond repair. He offered to build for the same sum a new house almost identical to the one that was meant to emerge after the extensive renovation. We would get higher ceilings and central air-conditioning to boot. Our architect, Harold Edelman, saw only value in a brand-new home, and never would we regret the decision.

Over the spring break, Liz and I escaped the nationwide student unrest over Vietnam by going to the Caribbean, where my world renown paid off. Some ten years before, the wealthy European industrialist Axel Faber had set up a foundation to benefit n.o.bel laureates by subsidizing stays at exclusive hotels and resorts. For $10 per night, I had stayed at Le Richemond and the Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. Having found the Dorado Beach outside San Juan more geared to golf than swimming, we moved first to St. Thomas and from there to St. John's to stay at the Caneel Bay Resort, where we sipped peach daiquiris with Abby Rockefeller's brother David and his new wife, Sydney.

Liz's last two months at Radcliffe took a direction we never expected. Less than a week after our return, University Hall was occupied by some three hundred students protesting the war. Many were members of the radical group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The afternoon of Wednesday, April 9, red and black banners hung from a second-floor window after the building's occupants, largely administrators, including Franklin Ford, were roughed up by the students protesting their earlier unlawful expulsion. SDS had been threatening violence for some time, no doubt encouraged by the effects of similar student uprisings elsewhere. Intending their actions to stop a war, those occupying University Hall saw no reason for their conduct to be governed by codes observed in times of peace.

That afternoon they proclaimed their occupation would end only if the university acceded to several demands, chief among them the expulsion of ROTC from Harvard. In fact, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences two months before had voted to deny credit for ROTC courses and not to give academic appointments to the military officers teaching them. ROTC's presence, commonly supposed to be the root of the trouble, by itself never would have led to the occupation of University Hall. The unstoppable chain reaction began when Richard Nixon became president and Harvard lent him Henry Kissinger as national security advisor. The student protesters had reached the limit of their patience with Nathan Pusey, who had failed to address the moral quandary in which the university found itself, and who two years earlier had branded the campus's self-proclaimed student revolutionaries as "Walter Mittys of the left."

Despite repeated warnings to leave University Hall and Franklin Ford's closing off Harvard Yard to all except its freshmen inhabitants, the SDS-led students gave no sign of budging. Though a lightning police raid had been talked about earlier as the best way to deal with building takeovers, no one was prepared for what happened next. At five o'clock the following morning, four hundred blue-helmeted, shield-carrying Cambridge policemen entered Harvard Yard and with tear gas and clubs forcibly removed the students, then barely awake, many banded together arm in arm. After less than fifteen minutes of this mayhem, University Hall was cleared. Most of the students were herded into paddy wagons and carted off to the Cambridge city jail to be charged with trespa.s.sing.

The rest of the Harvard student body, until then largely unsympathetic to the SDS gang, instantly ignited with indignation against the administration and, in particular, President Pusey Police brutality had made martyrs of the student protestors. Fifteen hundred students gathered that afternoon in Memorial Hall calling for a three-day boycott of cla.s.ses. Even angrier crowds formed later in Soldiers Field across the Charles River. More than five hundred law students, from a school never before known for radicalism, voted for Pusey to resign. As I walked that day into the Faculty Club for lunch, Liz was among the students lining the path to its front entrance to protest the raid. I had never before seen her make a display of political opinions.

Though the police raid's impact upon students lasted only until commencement, schisms developed within the faculty that would last for years. A liberal caucus was formed soon after the event. The group believed that without Nathan Pusey as president, the whole ugly affair would not have happened. By reacting so insensitively to student concerns about Vietnam, he stood out as a naked proponent first of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy and later of Richard Nixon's. In contrast, a conservative caucus of roughly the same size a.s.signed all blame to the student activists. How the offending students would be disciplined was not initially clear. Just before commencement, the liberal caucus felt semivictorious when a broadly const.i.tuted committee, including several students, voted for the temporary expulsion of only ten students, those known to have manhandled administrators during the April 9 takeover. Those in the conservative caucus had wanted many more students held accountable and for the sanction to be severe, ideally permanent expulsion.

Exacerbating the spring tensions was an emerging political activism among many of Harvard's black students. Two months before, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had voted to set up an undergraduate degree program in Afro-American studies. Emboldened by the chaos following the raid, the more militant black students demanded Harvard go further and create a separate department whose faculty they could help choose. Outside the April 22 faculty meeting held at the Loeb Drama Center to consider this matter, one black student stood holding a meat cleaver. Inside, to my subsequent regret, I joined the many liberal caucus members favoring student input in faculty choices. I then realized that letting Harvard science students help choose future science faculty would have been nonsense. Subcon-ciously I must have believed this proposed Department of Afro-American studies would not long stand the test of time. Its offerings would not give black students the hard facts that would let them thrive in compet.i.tion with students of other colors.

By then the war had directly affected the lives of Harvard's graduate students in science. No longer could they automatically defer military service. If their draft number went against them, they soon might be off to Vietnam. To avoid that potential fate, several first-year graduate students joined me in Cold Spring Harbor for the summer of '69. There they might get deferments on the basis of involvement in cancer research. Two students stayed over the next two years helping Joe Sam-brook get his SV40 work off to a fast start. To further make the Lab a force in tumor viruses, Joe and Lionel Crawford from London organized a two-week workshop in August that attracted, among others, Arnie Levine, Chuck Sherr, and Alex van der Eb. They all later became leaders in tumor virus research. The workshop's core was a small tumor virus meeting with some eighty partic.i.p.ants.

Later that month, Jacques Monod led a big contingent from the Inst.i.tut Pasteur to our meeting on the lactose operon. From that event was to emerge the first Cold Spring Harbor monograph, an enduring volume of work with its chapters edited by Jon Beckwith and my former student David (Zip) Zipser. (Soon after, Zip left a new tenured position at Columbia for Cold Spring Harbor to set up a bacterial genetic group in s.p.a.ce below Al Hershey's lab.) During the meeting, we used our new flat-bottomed boat to take Jacques out into the chop of Long Island Sound. He wanted me to speed up, but I wouldn't. Unbeknownst to the visitors, Liz was three months pregnant with our first child.

That summer, the Welsh-born Julian Davies was at the Lab doing research on yeast protein synthesis. Julian was rejoicing in his recent move to the University of Wisconsin, where he no longer had to listen to his former Harvard Medical School department chairman Bernie Davis bemoaning his left-wing faculty members. One day during the summer, Julian pa.s.sed around the Lab notices for a demonstration protesting the invest.i.ture in Caernarfon of Charles Windsor as Prince of Wales. His summer a.s.sistant, the daughter of our local village police chief, saw the flyers and told her father of the planned action.

Given the tenor of the times, Chief McKensie would take no chance of a student demonstration getting out of control. At the exact time Prince Charles was to be anointed, he appeared, halting the unauthorized march along Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's main thoroughfare. To my relief, Chief McKensie had no comparably reliable intelligence concerning the marijuana freely available at many Lab gatherings that summer. Getting a whiff of it myself at Jones Lab's first summer party, I took care to forgo further such gatherings. It was better not to know of things I was now officially obliged to stop.

Even before Joe Sambrook's arrival, I knew the success of his tumor virus group would require constructing new lab facilities to supplement the s.p.a.ce he was to have in the James Lab. Initially I thought $60,000 would cover the costs of an annex on its south side. So Liz and I flew down to Long Island from Cambridge to seek this sum from the pharmaceutical heir Carlton Palmer, whose grand Tudor-style home was on nearby Center Island. At the end of the Sunday lunch, hosted by our neighbor, the Lab trustee and lymphoma expert Bayard Clark-son, I was told that I would have to find fifty-nine more donors. The Lab still badly needed an angel, as I soon thereafter told a reporter for the Long Islander, Long Islander, the local Huntington weekly founded by Walt Whitman. To my delight, the resulting article generated a call to me from the former Pfizer executive John Davenport, who had a summer home near Lido Beach on the South Sh.o.r.e. While still with Pfizer, he had run an RNA tumor virus effort and liked what I proposed to do at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon he and Ed Pulling joined Liz and me for a home-cooked lunch at Osterhout, after which I gave John a tour of the science then going on at Cold Spring Harbor. Less than a week pa.s.sed before Davenport took me to lunch at the University Club in New York City, where he told me that he was transferring $100,000 worth of Pfizer shares to the Lab. Though our new building's costs had risen to $200,000, I had by then raised the rest. Construction would start as soon as the winter snows melted. the local Huntington weekly founded by Walt Whitman. To my delight, the resulting article generated a call to me from the former Pfizer executive John Davenport, who had a summer home near Lido Beach on the South Sh.o.r.e. While still with Pfizer, he had run an RNA tumor virus effort and liked what I proposed to do at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon he and Ed Pulling joined Liz and me for a home-cooked lunch at Osterhout, after which I gave John a tour of the science then going on at Cold Spring Harbor. Less than a week pa.s.sed before Davenport took me to lunch at the University Club in New York City, where he told me that he was transferring $100,000 worth of Pfizer shares to the Lab. Though our new building's costs had risen to $200,000, I had by then raised the rest. Construction would start as soon as the winter snows melted.

Almost all the next academic year, Liz and I lived in Cold Spring Harbor, much enjoying views of the inner harbor through the big eastern-facing windows of our new white cedar house. After flying to Florence for the November 1969 meeting on RNA polymerase, we drove to Venice and from there traveled by train to a big resort hotel on Lake Constance. There a meeting was held to further advance Leo Szilard's scheme for a European molecular biology research and teaching inst.i.tution. From nearby Zurich we flew to London, going up to Cambridge so Francis and Liz could meet. The Double Helix The Double Helix no longer upset him since he realized that it enhanced, not diminished, his reputation. Back in Cold Spring Harbor for the holidays, we eagerly awaited the arrival of Rufus Robert Watson in late February 1970. no longer upset him since he realized that it enhanced, not diminished, his reputation. Back in Cold Spring Harbor for the holidays, we eagerly awaited the arrival of Rufus Robert Watson in late February 1970.

In May, Nathan Pusey announced that after eighteen years as Harvard's president he would be stepping down in June of the following year. No one was surprised. His handling of the occupation of University Hall, while perfectly legal, had been hugely unwise, dividing the faculty into two angry camps that had no hope of being reconciled unless he went away. He would, in due course, move to New York City to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After raising piles of cash that let Harvard expand in many directions, he was now to have the far easier task of giving it away. Paul Doty and I could not help but note that his only obvious failure at fund-raising was in not finding a major donor for the proposed building to house his new Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

In the summer of 1970, for the first time in its history Cold Spring Harbor did not play host to visitors conducting research of their own choosing. No free s.p.a.ce remained to house them or let them carry on meaningful research. Instead we used our resources to start a new course on the molecular biology and genetics of yeast. It would allow scientists interested in the essence of eukaryotic cells to learn the powers of yeast genetics. In the fall, we used a $30,000 donation from Manny Delbruck to begin renovating the derelict wooden Wawepex lab into a dormitory for sixteen summer students. Its beds would let us start a summer neurobiology course program. A new grant of almost $500,000 from the Sloan Foundation was used in part to cover the costs of renovating the top floor of the 1912 Animal House into lab and lecture s.p.a.ce for neurobiology.

With the completion of the James Annex in January 1971, our tumor virus group came into its own. No longer did we have to play second fiddle to equivalent endeavors at the Salk Inst.i.tute. Working now with Joe Sambrook were the Caltech-trained Phil Sharp and Ulf Pettersson from Uppsala, who brought to us adenovirus tumor research. Both came as super postdocs and soon became bona fide members of the James Lab staff. To support their independent activities as well as new cancer research efforts in s.p.a.ce to be vacated by Al Hershey's impending retirement, Joe wrote up a big grant proposal to expand our NCI funding to $1 million per year. Later, site visitors gave it top priority, allowing our Cancer Center to come into existence as of January 1,1972.

Even larger sums for research would soon become available. Richard Nixon had just enthusiastically signed the National Cancer Act in response to recommendations by the philanthropist Mary Lasker's Citizens' Committee for the Conquest of Cancer. Boldly it was proclaimed that if we can send men to the moon, we should be able to cure cancer. Though I did not believe there was sound logic in relating the two feats, I felt strongly that bigger infusions of federal monies were needed to let tumor virus systems point us toward the mutant genes that were known to cause cancer. So I spoke before the Citizens' Cancer Committee at one of its first meetings in the summer of 1970.

Under the "Conquest of Cancer" legislation, the president appointed not only the NCI director but also members of a new National Cancer Advisory Board, among which I was included for a two-year term to begin in March 1972. Before that, I had been advising NCI as a member of its Cancer Center Study Section. Directing the NCI then was the bureaucrat Carl Merrill, mindlessly generating a complex flow chart for the cure of cancer modeled after Admiral Rickover's successful Polaris missile program. The one such planning session that I attended in Washington accomplished nothing. I was hoping my forthcoming National Cancer Advisory Board meetings would do more good. The several other pure scientists on the board also appreciated nonsense for what it was. Its clinical oncologists, however, wanted to create more comprehensive cancer centers. But such centers, already operating in New York City, Buffalo, and Houston, had shown no capacity to cure most adult cancers; I saw no reason for more of them other than to create more good-looking places to die. Only inspired science, not public relations, could lead to the knowledge that might let us finally cure most cancers. A real role lay ahead for our lab.

Ulf Pettersson in the lab at Cold Spring Harbor, December 1971

Joe Sambrook at CSHL in 1973

Jane Flint, Terri Grodzicker, Phil Sharp, and Joe Sambrook at CSHL in 1973 Remembered Lessons 1. Accept leadership challenges before your academic career peaks By forty, I was the right age to begin directing a major research inst.i.tution. My ever-increasing focus on cancer was best fulfilled by presiding over seasoned professionals, as opposed to graduate students and beginning postdocs. So I consciously made the decision not to run a research group at Cold Spring Harbor. This allowed me to focus my efforts first on recruiting scientists who cared as much as I did about the biology of cancer, then on finding the funding they needed to make their ideas work.

2. Run a benevolent dictatorship I was appointed to provide a vision for Cold Spring Harbor's future, not to persuade existing staff members to share it. A research inst.i.tution cannot ultimately be a democracy. Still, a wise autocrat takes the trouble to sell his program. I never made appointments without seeking informal counsel among relevant scientists already at Cold Spring Harbor. And in time, most new appointments arose from their sponsorship by scientists already there. To my knowledge, I never appointed anyone not wanted by others on our staff.

3. Manage your scientists like a baseball team Sports and top-quality research have much in common. The best stars of each are young, not middle-aged, though occasionally someone older than forty can still be a formidable force either across the net or at the blackboard. No one can long remain a science manager unless constantly on the prowl for talented rookies able to move the game to the next level. Research inst.i.tutions that let the average age of their staff creep up inevitably become dull places. Lowering your average age by constructing new buildings to create more s.p.a.ce, however, is not the way to go. If the older buildings are not exuding vitality, they become mere financial drains. Equally important, good managers see the need to retire scientists who are no longer hitting home runs. Only individuals who continually reinvent themselves through new ways of thinking should enter middle age still part of your staff.

4. Don't make midseason trades Once you have hired a scientist, give him or her an honest chance to hit the ball over the fence. Grand slams usually come only after a player has put in three to five seasons. Treating your players according to who's got the hot hand from one week to the next only drives down overall self-confidence. Consistency and steadfastness are the way to get the best out of your players. In this regard, handling the science of others is radically different from doing your own. As a scientist, you can profit from frequent quick course changes until the right path becomes clear.

5. Only ask for advice that you will later accept Don't second-guess advice you've sought from a colleague whom you highly respect. If a smart friend advises you to hire one of his or her best students or postdocs, consider it a lucky break and just do it. Conversely, never ask advice from someone with an outlook on science alien to your own; people they recommend will share their values, not yours.

6. Use your endowment to support science, not for long-term salary support Generally, a bare minimum of any research inst.i.tution's funds should go to salaries for older scientists. Under normal funding circ.u.mstances, those who have remained successful invariably get adequate research grants to cover themselves and then some. Revenue generated by the endowment is best used to support scientists at the beginning of their careers, when their grant support usually is not adequate to their research needs. Science is not a welfare state: feeding the young until they can feed themselves serves the greater good, while failing to cull the herd does not.

7. Promote key scientists faster than they expect By promoting your best performers rapidly, you necessarily reduce money that might be given to those whose work no one would miss. Be generous with those you value: a salary increase below the rate of inflation is the universal sign to start looking elsewhere.

8. Schedule as few appointments as possible When a scientist pops into your office or calls to schedule a meeting, learn then and there what he or she wants. You can avoid wasting your time and theirs by immediately saying yes to their request for a piece of equipment or a salary slot they legitimately need to move forward with their jobs. Even if so acting means promising money you don't yet have, do it. Your purposes will be served if their worries exclusively concern getting their work done, not currying favor with you. Any scientist on the scene knew clearly where he or she stood with me; I backed everyone I wanted to stick around.

9. Don't be shy about showing displeasure When someone working for you says something stupid or in other ways makes your blood boil, express your anger immediately. Don't go about silently seething, letting only your spouse know you are upset. That is bad for your health and really not fair to those whose behavior has offended you. They very likely already fear they are in deep s.h.i.t, and would naturally want to respond to your criticism sooner rather than later. When things are left to fester, the festering takes on a life of its own, sowing unproductive distrust. The fault might even be yours. If so, apologize as fast as you flared up. Being an a.s.s occasionally is forgivable; being unable to admit it is not.

10. Walk the grounds Your staff will seldom come to your office to tell you of impending bad news. Only when the bough breaks do you learn the awful truth. To stay ahead, it's best to make walking the grounds a part of every day. This allows you to meet those lower on the lab's totem pole and acknowledge their existence with a smile or word of praise. Equally important is to pop in on labs in the evening or on weekends. Those populated only during weekday daylight hours are likely going nowhere, while scientists at their benches on Sat.u.r.day afternoons are seldom there killing time.

15. MANNERS MAINTAINED WHEN RELUCTANTLY LEAVING HARVARD.

DURING my initial years as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I was never the Lab's primary fund-raiser. As president of the Long Island Biological a.s.sociation (LIBA), Edward Pulling saw this as his role. Living scarcely more than a mile away, he frequently popped over to give potentially generous neighbors tours of the Lab. Early in 1972, Ed and his fellow LIBA directors committed themselves to raising $250,000 over the coming year. With it, the Lab would winterize Blackford Hall as our year-round dining hall, construct a second annex to James Lab for cell culture facilities, and buy a handsome Victorian house on Bungtown Road, on the way to the sand spit, for post-doc housing. Ed believed professional fund-raising help would be a waste of time and money. His acquaintances wanted only his rea.s.surance that their money would be put to good use. My job was to be on hand when Ed had a hot prospect.

Ed was on to someone big when he saw the need to track down Liz and me on a brief late June holiday north of San Francisco. From a phone booth in Inverness on the way to Point Reyes, I confirmed that we would be there the next Wednesday when he brought Charles S. Robertson to tour the Lab. Charlie's wife had recently died, and he was looking for an inst.i.tution to which to donate his estate, some ten minutes away on Banbury Lane in Lloyd Harbor. Excitedly Ed told me that some years before, the Robertsons had made the largest gift to date in the history of Princeton University: $35 million. Their wealth came from Marie's family, the Hartfords, whose one A&P grocery store in lower Manhattan sp.a.w.ned in just two generations some fourteen thousand more across the United States and Canada. At the start of World War II, they were the fifth wealthiest family in the United States. Charlie and Marie's gift to Princeton had been announced as anonymous, but when rumors arose that the CIA was behind the new Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, they had to go public lest the gift be tainted.

With Edward Pulling at the annual meeting of the Long Island Biological a.s.sociation, December 1976 Joining Charlie on his visit was his long-valued New York legal counsel, Eugene Goodwillie. After Marie's sudden death, Goodwillie told Charlie to quickly establish a legal residence in Florida. In this way, his estate would not be socked with punitive New York inheritance taxes. By the same logic, it was best for Charlie not to hang on to the Long Island estate, to which he felt such deep sentimental attachment. Its land had once belonged to his mother's Sammis family, and his marrying into great wealth allowed him to reclaim it. To keep the land forever intact, rather than subdivided into two-acre building plots, Charlie resolved to give it to a nonprofit inst.i.tution. To be settled today was whether Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was the worthiest beneficiary of the Banbury Lane property.

Charlie Robertson with me and Liz at CSH, September 1974 The visit started off well, with Charlie sensing the frenetic pace of the James Lab tumor virus effort as well as the boldness of the picture-window offices and seminar room of the James Annex. My grand office alone spoke of how the Lab was again on an upward course. Before lunch, I walked the sixty-seven-year-old Charlie and even older Eugene Goodwillie up to the Page Motel to introduce them to our living history in the persons of Max and Manny Delbruck. Delbruck had just arrived from Pasadena for a three-week Phycomyces Phycomyces workshop. Then, rather imprudently, I led my not-so-nimble guests down the steep one-hundred-foot path to Bungtown Road. Neither visitor stumbled, though they were only half smiling when we safely reached Osterhout Cottage. There they joined Ed Pulling for a lunch that Liz had taken great pains to prepare. She ate virtually nothing as she jumped up and down serving several courses that started with consomme Bellevue topped with horseradish-flavored whipped cream. workshop. Then, rather imprudently, I led my not-so-nimble guests down the steep one-hundred-foot path to Bungtown Road. Neither visitor stumbled, though they were only half smiling when we safely reached Osterhout Cottage. There they joined Ed Pulling for a lunch that Liz had taken great pains to prepare. She ate virtually nothing as she jumped up and down serving several courses that started with consomme Bellevue topped with horseradish-flavored whipped cream.

After lunch, Goodwillie drove back to New York City while I followed Charlie to the sixty-acre estate that sloped down to the eastern sh.o.r.e of Cold Spring Harbor. Before the war, much of it was still farmland, but that afternoon only several empty chicken coops spoke of that history. For the past thirty-five years the main house had been a large whitewashed brick Georgian structure built in 1936, and in it Charlie and Marie had raised their five children. Below the house, halfway down the sloping bluff, was a large salt.w.a.ter swimming pond, which the children when young used to enter raucously, I was told, via a long steel slide. But the children were now grown and, furthermore, recipients of generous trusts, leaving Charlie free to dispose of his estate without detriment to them.

I sensed Charlie wanted us to do real science on his lands, and so to be straight with him I had to confess, nervously, that dividing our research facilities into two sites was not realistic. Instead I saw the best use of his land and buildings as a high-powered conference center similar to that of the CIBA Foundation on Portland Place in central London. Toward that end, the high-ceilinged, seven-bay garage could easily be transformed into a perfect meeting room for thirty to forty people. That night, Liz and I went to sleep not at all sure that the gift of the Robertson estate was what we now needed. Spending time to raise monies for conferences on Banbury Lane would divert us from raising funds to expand our cancer research programs.

To our relief, Charlie took less than a day to reach a decision that far exceeded our most optimistic hopes. Late the next morning, we learned that he had decided it made no sense to give his estate to an inst.i.tution surviving hand to mouth. He would soon have Eugene Goodwillie draw up doc.u.ments establishing an $8 million endowment to support research on the lab grounds. In return, we would accept the gift of his estate, which he would separately endow with $1.5 million. It should generate funds covering the annual operating costs of his estate, including a large annuity to be paid to Lloyd Harbor in lieu of taxes. The estate would come with a covenant to the Nature Conservancy, preventing any changes to the building and lands except for the building of a new residence to complement the visitors' rooms in the main house.

The remainder of the day we walked about in a virtual daze, half worrying that becoming rich would destroy the Lab's unique way of doing science. But we soon returned to our senses and accepted the generous offer. Even with the forthcoming Robertson monies, we had more expenses than funds to cover them. Many key Lab buildings remained habitable only during the summer, and fixing them up for year-round use could easily occupy the rest of the decade.

Robertson House in the 1970s Over the past six months, we had used acc.u.mulated profits from symposium book sales to winterize and totally renovate Cold Spring Harbor's original Firehouse. After buying it in 1930 for $50, the Lab had rented a barge to bring the building across the inner harbor to a site next to Davenport Lab, where it was subdivided into three apartments for summer use. Handling the badly needed renovation in 1972 was a local builder, Jack Richards, who had joined the Lab staff the year before to oversee construction of the James Lab Annex. Large picture windows, to rival those of Osterhout and the James Annex, were installed, creating views on the inner harbor from each of the three apartments, converting them from utilitarian to spectacular. Richard Roberts, the English chemist soon to move from Harvard, bringing the Lab expertise in nucleic acid chemistry, would occupy the topfloor apartment with his wife and two children. Below him would be Ulf Pettersson and his family, leaving behind a cramped apartment in a barn on Ridge Road. The bas.e.m.e.nt flat would house Klaus Weber and his wife, Mary Osborn, soon to come down from Harvard to learn how to work on proteins of animal cells grown in culture.

Klaus Weber had risen rapidly at Harvard since joining me as a postdoc in the spring of 1965 to do protein chemistry on RNA phages. Recently promoted to full professor, he did not yet have the research facilities that normally go with the rank. All his previous research triumphs had come from using microbial systems, but he foresaw a bigger future for himself in moving on to animal cells and their related viruses. To learn how to grow and use them, he had just been granted a sabbatical leave for a year's work at Cold Spring Harbor. Going back to Harvard afterward would make sense only if they could provide s.p.a.ce specifically outfitted for work with animal viruses. Toward that purpose, in the spring of 1972,1 helped prepare a big application to the National Cancer Inst.i.tute for funds to construct an extension to the Harvard Biological Laboratories. Mark Ptashne would potentially join Klaus in the new s.p.a.ce. He too was keen to work on cancer-causing retroviruses since taking the tumor virus workshop the previous summer (1971). The idea was spreading: MIT was thinking of proposing to use "war on cancer" funds to create a similar facility by converting a former candy factory virtually adjacent to its main campus.

Next on the facilities agenda of Cold Spring Harbor was the winterization of Blackford Hall, courtesy of LIBA's amazingly fast $250,000 fund drive. Unfortunately, Jack Richards found it painful to work with Harold b.u.t.trick, the well-connected New York architect that a LIBA supporter had chosen for the project. A direct descendant of Stanford White, b.u.t.trick thought himself of higher caste than the builders there to take orders. After the project ended, I quietly made Ed Pulling aware that b.u.t.trick and Jack had irreconcilable differences.

During mid-July, Liz and I were briefly in England so I could take part in a forthcoming hourlong BBC Horizon Horizon program on DNA. Our second son, Duncan, was only five months old and so I initially did not want to partic.i.p.ate. But Francis, normally allergic to TV exposure, was keen on the project. So for several days we were filmed walking through key Cambridge colleges or standing next to the bar at the Eagle, the pub where twenty years before we'd regularly eaten lunch, and where Francis had first brazenly announced our having discovered the secret of life. An unusual ingredient ofthat interlude was the constant presence of the producer's girlfriend Eva. Several years before, she had been crowned Miss World, and she still retained global dimensions. Sadly, though, she may have paid dearly for a picture-perfect figure, regurgitating meals, as Liz accidentally observed her doing in the washroom of the restaurant one evening. program on DNA. Our second son, Duncan, was only five months old and so I initially did not want to partic.i.p.ate. But Francis, normally allergic to TV exposure, was keen on the project. So for several days we were filmed walking through key Cambridge colleges or standing next to the bar at the Eagle, the pub where twenty years before we'd regularly eaten lunch, and where Francis had first brazenly announced our having discovered the secret of life. An unusual ingredient ofthat interlude was the constant presence of the producer's girlfriend Eva. Several years before, she had been crowned Miss World, and she still retained global dimensions. Sadly, though, she may have paid dearly for a picture-perfect figure, regurgitating meals, as Liz accidentally observed her doing in the washroom of the restaurant one evening.

That summer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory published Experiments in Molecular Genetics, Experiments in Molecular Genetics, a much expanded version of material taught by Jeffrey Miller two years before in our annual bacterial genetics course. Its intellectual sparkle and visual elegance would likely lead to its wide adoption and thus real money for the Lab. It was a bargain-maybe too much of one: more than 450 pages for only $11.95. Like Jeffrey and all our other authors, I also then wrote gratis for the Lab. At roughly the same time, I was about to finish two long introductory chapters for the a much expanded version of material taught by Jeffrey Miller two years before in our annual bacterial genetics course. Its intellectual sparkle and visual elegance would likely lead to its wide adoption and thus real money for the Lab. It was a bargain-maybe too much of one: more than 450 pages for only $11.95. Like Jeffrey and all our other authors, I also then wrote gratis for the Lab. At roughly the same time, I was about to finish two long introductory chapters for the Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses. Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses. When first conceived, it was to be a short book. But it steadily grew to more than 750 pages in thirteen chapters, written by twenty-two authors who included David Baltimore and Howard Temin, who were to share the 1975 n.o.bel Prize for their research on retroviruses. Also writing much of the book was Joe Sambrook, whose great talents as a scientist I found equaled by his ability to produce succinct, readable prose as well as edit the lesser sentences of others, myself included. He refused, however, to share credit as one of the editors. The book spine later showed only the name of my former Harvard postdoc, John Tooze, then in central London helping Michael Stoker run the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory bordering on Lincoln's Inn Fields. When first conceived, it was to be a short book. But it steadily grew to more than 750 pages in thirteen chapters, written by twenty-two authors who included David Baltimore and Howard Temin, who were to share the 1975 n.o.bel Prize for their research on retroviruses. Also writing much of the book was Joe Sambrook, whose great talents as a scientist I found equaled by his ability to produce succinct, readable prose as well as edit the lesser sentences of others, myself included. He refused, however, to share credit as one of the editors. The book spine later showed only the name of my former Harvard postdoc, John Tooze, then in central London helping Michael Stoker run the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratory bordering on Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The Lab's next book was the small volume Biohazards, Biohazards, drawn from the proceedings of a meeting held in January 1973 at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, California. Its three days of discussions were organized to codify lab procedures appropriate for working with tumor viruses. No consensus emerged, however, among the one hundred attendees as to what precautions, if any, should be taken. drawn from the proceedings of a meeting held in January 1973 at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, California. Its three days of discussions were organized to codify lab procedures appropriate for working with tumor viruses. No consensus emerged, however, among the one hundred attendees as to what precautions, if any, should be taken.

Helping to organize the meeting as well as to edit the book was our recently appointed staff member Bob Pollack, continuing research on SV40-transformed cells that he began at New York University Medical School. Originally a physicist, Bob had anxieties like those of Charlie Thomas about the safety of tumor virus research. I sometimes shared those worries, and as a precaution discontinued positive air pressure in our James virus labs. Positive air pressure was widely used in microbiology, a relatively higher pressure in the room preventing microbial contaminants in the outside air from entering. By the time of the meeting we had put these rooms under negative pressure, with their air venting through HEPA niters to keep viruses from escaping into the outside air.

Of increasing concern to me then was the possible doublin