Avoid Boring People Part 8

Salvador Luria, Nancy Hopkins, and David Baltimore at the MIT Cancer Center in 1973 Soon my main concern at Harvard turned to making the Biological Laboratories another major site for tumor virus research; after coming strong into the molecular age, Harvard was risking again being behind the curve. In April 1973, however, the National Cancer Inst.i.tute turned down Harvard's application for construction monies for animal cell facilities. The proposal's reviewers were not convinced that the building addition would be used in a way that well served NCI's mission. True enough, given my Cold Spring Harbor responsibilities, I would likely never directly oversee a tumor virus lab in Cambridge. Nor was it clear whether Mark Ptashne would abandon gene regulation in bacteria to work on retroviruses. And Klaus Weber might go back to Germany were he offered a high-level appointment. In contrast, MIT's application for NCI construction funds was approved without a hitch.

Actually, it was a shoo-in with David Baltimore and Salvador Luria as its main drivers. Soon they would conscript two Cold Spring Harbor initiates into tumor virus research: Nancy Hopkins, after two years in Bob Pollock's lab, and Phil Sharp, after three highly productive years in James Lab.

Moving much too slowly were the joint efforts of the Biology Department and BMB to recruit a tenure-level RNA retrovirologist. Though discussions began in the fall of 1972, letters seeking advice from eleven referees did not go out until six months later, in February. The referees were asked to compare as candidates Mike Bishop, Peter Duesberg, Howard Temin, Peter Vogt, and Robin Weiss. Temin's name was high on most lists, although with the caveat that he was not a consistently good lecturer. Two respondents advised that we also consider Harold Varmus. Mike Bishop was not on top of any list except for Bob Huebner's, who called him a highly intelligent biochemist as well as a lucid teacher.

On July 10, 1973, I went to University Hall to see the economist Henry Rosovsky, who had just replaced his fellow economist John Dunlop as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dunlop had hurriedly taken on the role during the April 1969 University Hall occupation when Franklin Ford suffered a mild stroke. I was then BMB's new chairman, a task I was to have only until February 1975, when Matt Meselson replaced me. During my brief tenure, I wanted to ensure that Harvard somehow acquired animal cell facilities equal to those MIT would have in eighteen months. That morning with Rosovsky, I stressed how important it was for him to ensure Klaus Weber's return to Harvard, a commitment Klaus could not make until up-to-date animal cell facilities were available in the Biological Laboratories or, better still, in the proposed new animal cell annex. Six weeks later, I took Klaus to Henry's offices to give Henry personal a.s.surance that Klaus would come back to Cambridge if he could continue the experiments he and Mary Osborn had started at Cold Spring Harbor. By then Harvard decided to resubmit its application to NCI for construction monies, now opting for a completely separate new building on roughly the same site proposed for the annex. Several of the Biology Department faculty had become queasy about living with possible biohazards in their midst.

Harvard's president, Derek Bok, became actively involved on November n when the ad hoc committee met to consider whether Howard Temin should be offered tenure. I appeared as an early witness, sensing there would be no objection. Soon the question became whether he would agree to come. To answer it, he and his wife came to visit Harvard in mid-December. Their main host was Matt Meselson, a close friend of Howard's since their days together at Caltech in the late 1950s. I was worried from the start that his population geneticist wife, Rayla, would not want to leave the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Matt, however, thought we had a good chance of getting them to join us.

In January 1974, Henry Rosovsky scheduled a day to hear everyone out about the proposed NCI grant resubmission. Carroll Williams expressed concern that receipt of NCI monies would force Harvard to use all of the government-financed s.p.a.ce for work with cultured animal cells and their viruses. If the federal funds came forth, he thought BMB should relinquish some of its s.p.a.ce in the Biolabs to let the Cellular and Developmental Biology subdepartment increase its numbers. In contrast, I argued for Harvard's quickly recruiting several animal cell hotshots who would create a high-powered cancer center like the one at MIT. It was my belief that all outstanding research on animal cells would easily fall within the purview of the NCI mission. Until we understood how cells sent out and received molecular signals to divide, we could not get at the essence of cancer, and understanding the mechanism was plenty to keep an animal cell group busy. I then told Henry the building would function best with a director reporting directly to the dean, which Carroll Williams resisted, seeing it would diminish the power of department chairmen. But I felt the chair's usual three-year term did not allow him or her to take on necessary long-term funding objectives.

The animal cell building proposal went to NCI in January just ahead of the deadline. The cover letter, signed by Derek Bok, was essentially written by me, with the requested construction money adjusted to $5.76 million, reflecting our architect's prediction of further inflation, which was then bedeviling the entire American economy. In its final form, the proposal was my vision-not Carroll Williams's-of how animal cell science should proceed at Harvard. But its realization much depended upon whether Howard Temin joined our faculty. More than a month of uncertainty pa.s.sed before Howard finally turned us down, saying his wife saw her life diminished by moving to Harvard. No job she might find in Boston would be as good as the one she had with the population geneticist Jim Crow in Madison. To keep our NCI application alive, an offer was made to the English retrovirologist Robin Weiss. But soon he turned us down, as he had MIT the year before. My dominos continued to fall when Klaus Weber in early April formally accepted an offer to head a Max Planck Inst.i.tute in Gottingen, Germany. It would provide even better facilities than could be fixed up for him within the confines of the Bio-labs. Harvard then had no choice but to tell NCI it no longer could claim a future in tumor viruses.

Klaus's decision was already 90 percent made when Derek and Sissela Bok invited Liz and me for a late March Friday night dinner at Elmwood, the gracious old wooden house just off Fresh Pond Parkway where they lived with their four children. Upon Derek's becoming president, they chose not to live in the formal Quincy Street fishbowl successively occupied by Lowell, Conant, and Pusey Two years younger than I, Derek had concluded three very successful years as dean of Harvard's Law School. A graduate of Stanford, he was the first president of Harvard not a product of the college. That evening I tried to forget about the animal cell biology fiasco and Harvard's lack of a tumor virus future. I realized there was no longer a good reason for Cold Spring Harbor and Harvard to remain closely connected. Derek graciously kept our conversation on other matters, knowing only too well that my heart was now mostly at Cold Spring Harbor. Harvard had no one leading it into the future in the way David Baltimore was blazing the way for MIT biology.

Two weeks later, I drove over to the gla.s.s-faced MIT biology building for a meeting hosted by Paul Berg. There, with David Baltimore's help, he a.s.sembled a small group to discuss implications of the powerful new recombinant DNA technology developed at Stanford. Phil Handler, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, had asked Paul to come up with an appropriate response to a letter published in the September 21,1973, issue of Science. Science. The academy had been called on to offer guidelines for recombinant DNA experiments that might create biohazards not only for the lab worker but also for the general public. That morning our small group, which included Dan Nathans and Norton Zinder, concluded the matter would best be dealt with by a much larger group a.s.sembled at the same Asilomar, California, site where we had considered potential biohazards of tumor virus research the year before. Until Asilomar II could be held, likely early the next year, we proposed a worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments in a letter to the journals The academy had been called on to offer guidelines for recombinant DNA experiments that might create biohazards not only for the lab worker but also for the general public. That morning our small group, which included Dan Nathans and Norton Zinder, concluded the matter would best be dealt with by a much larger group a.s.sembled at the same Asilomar, California, site where we had considered potential biohazards of tumor virus research the year before. Until Asilomar II could be held, likely early the next year, we proposed a worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA experiments in a letter to the journals Nature Nature and and Science. Science. I then visualized the Lab publis.h.i.+ng Asilomar II's proceedings. Unlike our first biohazard book, this one I expected to make real money. I then visualized the Lab publis.h.i.+ng Asilomar II's proceedings. Unlike our first biohazard book, this one I expected to make real money.

All the world's major tumor virologists a.s.sembled three months later for the Lab's annual early June symposium. Joe Sambrook organized the DNA tumor virus sessions, and David Baltimore put together the ones on RNA retroviruses. Between Renato Dulbecco's introductory talk and David's concluding summary, there were 116 presentations, out of which 101 ma.n.u.scripts were generated. They would fill our first two-volume symposium proceedings, consisting of almost twelve hundred pages. Though no scientific bombsh.e.l.l exploded, the meeting's highly charged atmosphere made it likely that a deep truth would emerge at any moment. More presentations came from Cold Spring Harbor scientists than from the faculty of any other inst.i.tution, even London's better-funded Imperial Cancer Research Labs in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Klaus Weber and Mary Osborn notably reported upon their purification of the SV40 antigen. In their talk they provided strong presumptive evidence that the T antigen was the product of SV4o's A gene, one that functions early in the SV40 life cycle as well as in SV4o-transformed (cancerous) cells. Further studies might soon convincingly show it to be the primary cancer-causing genetic unit on SV4o's small circular chromosome.

I spent much of the remainder of the summer on Martha's Vineyard preparing the third edition of The Molecular Biology of the Gene. The Molecular Biology of the Gene.

Next to our old farmhouse was a small barn, whose large central room provided an ideal writing s.p.a.ce. I was getting invaluable feedback from several science-oriented Harvard and Radcliffe students, who later extended the glossary and corrected the final proofs. Doing the many needed new ill.u.s.trations was Keith Roberts, by then running his own plant cell biology lab at the John Innes Inst.i.tute in Norwich, England. As a postdoc at Cambridge five years before, he had created the new drawings for the second edition as well.

Over the following academic year, I was again on leave, working full time at Cold Spring Harbor at a salary identical to what Harvard would have paid me for teaching. Our settled residence in Cold Spring Harbor allowed Liz to take two cla.s.ses per week at the New York School of Interior Design. Often sitting near her was the pet.i.te, blond Barbara Lish, wife of the writer Gordon Lish, then America's most influential arbiter of fiction, whom we befriended. Most unexpectedly we b.u.mped into the Lishes at an early December gathering of intellectuals on the Florida coast. Arthur Schlesinger, Gunnar Myrdal, Saul Bellow, Vernon Jordan, and I had all been a.s.sembled just north of Daytona Beach with the unexpressed purpose of drawing attention to ITT's big beachfront development called Palm Coast. It was still a day when public intellectuals could sell real estate. Attracting us to this most unlikely gathering was the generous $4,000 honorarium, a much more substantial monetary award than normally given for intellectual chitchat. Barbara and Gordon were there in pursuit of Truman Capote. At the meeting, Gordon persuaded Capote to let Esquire, Esquire, where he reigned as "Captain Fiction," to serialize his newest opus, where he reigned as "Captain Fiction," to serialize his newest opus, Answered Prayers. Answered Prayers. Before arriving at Palm Coast, we visited Disney World, where Duncan, just shy of his third birthday, screamed all through the jungle boat ride. Before arriving at Palm Coast, we visited Disney World, where Duncan, just shy of his third birthday, screamed all through the jungle boat ride.

We were just a month settled into Airslie, its new picture windows alluringly draped with Swedish cloth we found in the D&D building on Third Avenue. Its many rooms let Liz invite her parents and her two brothers and sister, as well as her aunt from California and grandmother from Philadelphia, to spend Christmas day with us. But the big Christmas feast, preparation for which included many hours basting two geese, did not go as planned. By the time the fowl were on the dining table everyone except the schoolteacher aunt and physician dad had come down with twenty-four-hour retching flu. The night before, we had received all the families in Lab housing for warm Christmas grog. I didn't know whether they had brought the contagion or whether one of Liz's family members was its origin. Fortunately, there was no sign of a Boxing Day epidemic.

That year, the newly winterized Davenport Lab was utilized by three supermotivated yeast geneticists on sabbaticals: David Botstein from MIT, Gerry Fink from Cornell, and John Roth from the University of California at Berkeley.

After Christmas, our yeast trio and the tumor virologists began to discuss what should happen at Asilomar II, scheduled for February 1975.1 increasingly worried about restrictions that might be imposed on the use of recombinant DNA technologies to clone putative cancer-causing genes. In fact, these procedures would greatly reduce whatever risks we were now incurring using live SV40 virus or adenovirus 2. Our call for a moratorium, however, created the mistaken impression, magnified by each successive press conference, that working with recombinant DNA was a potential major public health hazard possibly equal to nuclear weapons. Even before the meeting started, Joe Sambrook had been asked to join fellow tumor virologists in coming up with guidelines that could only r.e.t.a.r.d the development of recombinant DNA technology.

When I arrived at Asilomar, I found that virtually all the 140 partic.i.p.ants were inclined toward accepting restrictions of one sort or another. Only Stanley Cohen, Joshua Lederberg, and I thought they were the wrong way to go. To no avail we voiced the impossibility of regulating an unquantifiable risk. Harm to someone or something had to be demonstrated before regulation could be rational, and to our knowledge no tumor virologist had come down with a cancer likely to have been caused by lab exposure. But for Paul Berg and his Asilomar II co-organizers, there seemed no way out of accepting some form of NIH-imposed guidelines. If we attendees did not accept them, the wrath of public opinion would surely descend upon all of us. And if we did not propose them they would be imposed upon us in more draconian form. At the meeting's end, virtually all partic.i.p.ants warily voted to approve the mildly restrictive rules prepared by the several working groups. If the public found them satisfactory, recombinant DNA experimentation should not be too badly set back. On the small feeder plane taking partic.i.p.ants back to the San Francisco airport, however, I was full of foreboding. I believed that trying to look good, as opposed to doing good, could only backfire.

A week after Asilomar I flew up to Boston to speak at the dedication of MIT's Cancer Center. In my talk, I offered my view on how to fight the escalating "war on cancer." I proposed that money would be best spent initially on creating centers filled with Ph.D.'s, as opposed to M.D.'s. I did not see the big clinical cancer centers then as having the potential to attract the very bright young scientists who could find the molecular essences of cancer. And without those molecular keys all the money in the world would only little improve what clinicians could do. Only after my speech did I learn that an inexperienced young stringer for the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post had been in the audience. To my horror, the next day the had been in the audience. To my horror, the next day the Post Post ran his story over the headline "n.o.belist Calls War on Cancer a Failure." I immediately wrote d.i.c.k Rauscher, the RNA tumor virologist now heading the NCI, to say that I had been badly misquoted. Fortunately, someone on his staff, Phil Stansley, also heard my talk, and backed me up. ran his story over the headline "n.o.belist Calls War on Cancer a Failure." I immediately wrote d.i.c.k Rauscher, the RNA tumor virologist now heading the NCI, to say that I had been badly misquoted. Fortunately, someone on his staff, Phil Stansley, also heard my talk, and backed me up.

With my $1,000 MIT honorarium I soon acquired for the Lab a Milton Avery-like abstract painting by the talented Long Island artist Stan Brodsky. It gave real style to the fireplace room of Blackford Hall until it was damaged by a large spoon thrown during a summer banquet food fight. After repairs costing almost half the original purchase price, it went back on the same wall until the next food fight damaged it again. This time the harm was slight, and it was only a few days before its subtle red, pink, and blue colors could again be admired.

In the fall of 1975, I resumed teaching at Harvard, flying up to Boston to spend Sunday and Monday nights at the Harvard Faculty Club. My lectures on tumor virus and animal cells were updated versions of those I had given three years before, using as a text the Lab's monograph The Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses. The Molecular Biology of Tumor Viruses. This was to be the last course I would teach at Harvard. Matt Meselson was unwilling to appeal to the dean for an exception to Harvard's long-standing prohibition against sharing faculty with other inst.i.tutions. And so I was informed that, as of July 1,1976, I would no longer be a professor at Harvard. It was a situation of my own making, but all the same I was much annoyed, if not insulted, since Jack Strominger had recently become director of research at the Dana Farber Cancer Inst.i.tute across the river while retaining his professors.h.i.+p in our department. Jack, moreover, now was being paid by both inst.i.tutions, while I would have been content with only one salary if I could keep both jobs. There were many things I knew I would miss about Harvard, but by far the first would be its students; the obligation to lecture to them forced me to extend my own thinking, and occasionally the most extraordinary ones came down for research at Cold Spring Harbor, enriching the intellectual fellows.h.i.+p there. This was to be the last course I would teach at Harvard. Matt Meselson was unwilling to appeal to the dean for an exception to Harvard's long-standing prohibition against sharing faculty with other inst.i.tutions. And so I was informed that, as of July 1,1976, I would no longer be a professor at Harvard. It was a situation of my own making, but all the same I was much annoyed, if not insulted, since Jack Strominger had recently become director of research at the Dana Farber Cancer Inst.i.tute across the river while retaining his professors.h.i.+p in our department. Jack, moreover, now was being paid by both inst.i.tutions, while I would have been content with only one salary if I could keep both jobs. There were many things I knew I would miss about Harvard, but by far the first would be its students; the obligation to lecture to them forced me to extend my own thinking, and occasionally the most extraordinary ones came down for research at Cold Spring Harbor, enriching the intellectual fellows.h.i.+p there.

Just after Christmas, I flew to the West Coast with Liz, Rufus, and Duncan for a two-week visit that started in southern California, where for a week we stayed in an apartment on California Avenue just west of Caltech. There Max Delbruck had arranged for me to give a lecture honoring the recently deceased Jean-Jacques Weigle. I had always enjoyed Jean's nimble brain both at Caltech and when visiting him in his hometown of Geneva, where he did phage experiments in the summer. Afterward we drove up to San Francisco, where W. A. Benjamin held a book party to mark the appearance of the third edition of The Molecular Biology of the Gene. The Molecular Biology of the Gene. Like the first and second editions, its sales over five years would approach a hundred thousand copies. Like the first and second editions, its sales over five years would approach a hundred thousand copies.

Then working at Cold Spring Harbor developing a powerful new way to clone genes was the thirty-two-year-old Tom Maniatis. His highly innovative experiments at Harvard as a postdoc with Mark Ptashne had led to his recent appointment as a.s.sistant professor. Initially he was to come to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for only a year for work, returning to Harvard upon its building of facilities for animal cell experimentation. In collaboration with Argiris Efstratiadis of Fotis Kafatos's Harvard lab, Tom was using messenger RNA molecules from red blood reticulocytes as templates to make full-length double-stranded DNA copies of the globin gene. No biohazard possibilities could arise from such experiments, so despite the recombinant DNA moratorium, Tom and his four young collaborators were able to move full steam ahead in their Demerec Laboratory s.p.a.ce.

With Rufus (right) and Duncan in 1973 By then, his well-directed intelligence had also caught the attention of Caltech's biology department. Caltech let Tom know it was prepared to make him a tenured member of its faculty. Upon learning this, Mark Ptashne got BMB to ask Henry Rosovsky to move quickly in a.s.sembling an ad hoc committee and win approval to offer him a tenured a.s.sociate professors.h.i.+p. In February I went back to Harvard to attest to Tom's accomplishments before Derek Bok. As expected, Tom was approved.

Resignation...

The worry for Harvard all too soon became the possibility that Tom might choose to accept Caltech's offer anyway. The ever more vocal in-house opposition to recombinant DNA experimentation within the Biological Laboratories was hardly an inducement to prefer Harvard. The newly appointed a.s.sistant professor Ursula Goodenough and George Wald's wife, Ruth Hubbard, also a scientist, were claiming recombinant DNA experimentation using E. coli E. coli might put the women in the Bio Labs at risk of cyst.i.tis. Both should have known that over the past ten years live might put the women in the Bio Labs at risk of cyst.i.tis. Both should have known that over the past ten years live E. coli E. coli cells had been regularly ground up by the pound by men and women alike without a single case of illness. cells had been regularly ground up by the pound by men and women alike without a single case of illness.

...and response Initially Mark and Tom did not worry, knowing that Henry Rosovsky was not one to be intimidated by such nonsense, whose source was mainly left-wing elements that had been gaining ground on campus ever since the occupation of University Hall, and which after Vietnam had been further energized by Watergate. It did not matter to Rosovsky that at a public meeting in late May more students had been moved by the rhetoric of Richard Lewontin, Harvard's population geneticist, railing against future capitalistic exploitation of DNA research than had been stirred by my pleas to get on with cancer research using recombinant DNA. Henry Rosovsky sided with scientific progress and gave Harvard scientists the go-ahead to continue the controversial research. So Harvard's "science for the people" leaders took their case to the Cambridge City Hall and its populist mayor, Alfred Vellucci, always keen to put the Harvard elite in their place. At George Wald's urging, he and his fellow councilmen held hearings on June 27 and July 7, 1976, after which they voted for a three-month moratorium on recombinant DNA research within Cambridge city limits. Tom now felt going back to Harvard would be to enter a state of chaos, and so he accepted Caltech's offer, as feared.

Before reaching that decision, Tom had seen me very angered by Harvard for very different reasons when I appeared in his Cold Spring Harbor lab late in the evening directly following my return from several days in Cambridge. Derek Bok had invited me to his office in Ma.s.sachusetts Hall, and I was expecting that Harvard would bid me farewell in some meaningful way. But for my presence at the Biological Laboratories for the past twenty years, its science would have commanded much less attention from the outside world. Wally Gilbert might very well still be a physicist, while Matt Meselson, and likely also Mark Ptashne, would be teaching in California. To my dismay, Derek's goodbye was entirely perfunctory, giving not a hint that my departure was any loss for Harvard or any detriment to its future.

At the start of June, I flew back to Boston for my last visit to University Hall as a member of its faculty. That afternoon, Henry Rosovsky and I tried hard not to focus on the fact that I was soon to be gone. It was easier to talk about George Wald's pretentious irresponsibility in opposing recombinant DNA. After twenty minutes of not wanting to say goodbye, I thanked Henry for trying so hard to get Harvard on the animal cell bandwagon. If I had not become irreversibly committed to Cold Spring Harbor, together we would have won. Realizing it was almost time for his next appointment, Henry, to my surprise, revealed that in looking over my salary history he noticed that I had always been paid too little. It was his way of saying he liked me. He and I knew that I would be sad walking out of Harvard Yard that day. Even I was not entirely immune to the old chestnut that there is no life after Harvard.

Remembered Lessons 1. Avoid boring people Never make dull speeches that easily could be delivered by someone else. Predictable words naturally compel audiences to tune out and lock their pocketbooks. Just as tedious is bringing small groups of busy people together for committee meetings with no opportunity for them to offer real input. This is on a par with holding meetings where talk is not followed by meaningful decisions. In both circ.u.mstances, committee members will likely soon stop attending gatherings they know will be a waste of their time. Not boring others, of course, requires that you take pains not to become boring, as often happens when you begin to bore yourself. A leader's mind must continually be reconfigured through exposure to new patterns of acting and thinking. Reading the same papers and magazines as everyone else around you is not likely to make you an interesting dinner guest, let alone alter your consciousness. In my case, a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement, Times Literary Supplement, courtesy of my father-in-law, made me more interesting to sit beside than someone whose diet was limited to courtesy of my father-in-law, made me more interesting to sit beside than someone whose diet was limited to Time, Newsweek, Time, Newsweek, or the or the Economist Economist-or Nature Nature for that matter. for that matter.

2. Delegate as much authority as possible Administrators, like scientists, do their jobs best when left alone to do them, freed of the irksome impression of simply carrying out someone else's will. My growing avoidance of micromanagement left me always available to give advice about matters that were not obvious. On learning how my staff wanted to proceed, I generally gave them a go-ahead. Few mistakes were made that closer oversight might have avoided.

3. Inst.i.tutions are either moving forward or they are moving backward There is no downtime in the management of high-powered science. New ideas or techniques need to be quickly exploited before scientists elsewhere do experiments that your people could have done first. Success automatically creates the need for new personnel and facilities that often require new buildings. If you are not ever agile in moving forward, the consequences will go beyond losing credit for the next breakthrough; top staff will move elsewhere to get the resources and support required to maintain their own leaders.h.i.+p roles in their respective disciplines. As in sports, last year's champions.h.i.+p doesn't count at the end of this season. Therefore, never be or expect other scientists to be sentimental about inst.i.tutions. Going down with the s.h.i.+p is nuts.

4. Always buy adjacent property that comes up for sale An inst.i.tution's growth inevitably demands expanding the size of its campus. Therefore, never hesitate to buy land ab.u.t.ting yours even if there is no immediate use for it. Though the seller will charge you a premium knowing that land is worth more to someone with an adjacent lot than it is to a third party, your bargaining power is still greater than it will be when s.p.a.ce is a dire need. It pays to overpay a little now rather than wait till your neighbor has you over a barrel.

5. Attractive buildings project inst.i.tutional strength Sometimes it seems money could be saved by building facilities that are less extravagant, with cheaper materials and unknown architects. This, however, is bad for business in the long term. Donors to Harvard never need fear that a building with their name on it will one day be sold off to stanch a hemorrhaging negative cash flow. Less than st.u.r.dy structures give out messages that their inst.i.tution's life may be equally short. In contrast, solid, stylish buildings give donors the confidence that their descendants will one day bask in reflected glory. The lure of permanence inspires generosity.

6. Have wealthy neighbors Research grants, no matter how much overhead they cover, are never enough to meet immediate needs. Unlike universities that can depend upon rich alumni, research inst.i.tutions must have rich neighbors nearby who are inclined to take pride in local accomplishments. Typically their enthusiasm will be proportional to the research effort's potential to alleviate human misery. Nothing attracts money like the quest for a cure for a terrible disease.

7. Be a friend to your trustees Entering worlds where your trustees relax-joining their clubs or vacationing where they go with their families in the summer, for instance-is a good way to put relations on a social footing. Seeing you as more friend than suppliant will incline them to go the extra distance for you in a pinch.

8. All take and no give will disenchant your benefactors Philanthropy is a two-way street. The kindness of individuals donating to your cause should be acknowledged with a reciprocal gift to theirs. This by no means implies matching their generosity-it's the thought that counts. Since coming to Cold Spring Harbor, I have always made at least modest gifts to my trustees' other charities. By my so doing, they know I value the other activities that also give purpose to their lives. Equally important is being generous to your own inst.i.tution. Why should others help if you don't also show you consider the cause worthy of some of your own discretionary income? It never hurts when those who decide your salary see you bite the bullet to give some of it back.

9. Never appear upset when other people deny you their money Philanthropists are like others in not wis.h.i.+ng to be taken for granted. Your inst.i.tution is but one of many with its hand out. Soon after I became director, I approached the Bell Labs for sponsors.h.i.+p. My intermediary was a key scientist there who personally knew the value of our summer courses. When he called to say no money was coming our way, I expressed rude anger. Within minutes, I knew what a fool I had been to scotch any chance of our being shown some love in the future.

10. Avoid being photographed You may raise the money but your success in the end totally depends upon those whose work you host, so it is their visibility, not yours, that matters. If they are not presentable, you are in deep trouble. Photos that put their names to their faces help them move more effectively in the outside world. They may not consider themselves photogenic, but they will enjoy the pride their spouses and especially their mothers will take in seeing them. Most important, keep your face out of your in-house publication unless you can be pictured beside a recognizable celebrity, such as Muhammad Ali or Lance Armstrong. Some of their glamour will momentarily rub off on you.

11. Never dye your hair or use collagen A dye job works only if your hair is not noticeably thinning. It's impossible to seem as genuine as you must with a wan pate showing through a scattering of coal-black hairs. Of course, the impression of youthful vitality men sometimes cultivate with reddish dyes is even more disastrous. You wind up looking like Strom Thurmond. Gray hair and wrinkles at fifty bespeak dependability. Contrary to our present national ethos, it's better to act younger than you look, rather than the reverse. Harvard's Pusey had a wrinkleless face that reinforced the impression of a life devoid of pain or pleasure.

12. Make necessary decisions before you have to Success more often comes from being first to take action than from being cleverer than your compet.i.tors. When it's the right thing to do, do it fast. If you wait too long, someone else is bound to propose it first and you will find yourself following someone else's agenda. In such circ.u.mstances, those taking orders from you will have reasonable cause to wonder why you are getting the top salary.

EPILOGUE.

THIRTY years on, it would please me to report that the state of science at Harvard had righted itself in a manner befitting the world's richest and most influential university. The relatively short reign of Larry Summers as its twenty-seventh president, however, suggests that Harvard is once again headed in the wrong direction. Nothing may have distinguished Summers's time in office like the leaving of it, but his proposals for the future of science-which have yet to be modified by his successor-figured more critically in his vexed relations with the faculty than any clumsy words that marked his ultimate undoing. That the catalyst should have been his uttering an unpopular, though by no means unfounded, hypothesis only compounds the sorrows that any thinking person must feel contemplating the future of free inquiry at Harvard.

Despite Larry Summers's professed desire to move science onto Harvard's front burner, as his vision became clear many leading scientists on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) were increasingly worried. Prominent among the uneasy was Tom Maniatis, who came back from Caltech in 1981 to become Professor of Molecular Biology. In his time at Harvard, Maniatis had been at the forefront of work in gene isolation and cloning, as well as a significant player in the biotechnology industry. And so it was notable when in the spring of 2003, he went to Ma.s.sachusetts Hall to voice his concerns about Summers's plan to make Harvard the engine of a "second Silicon Valley," whose center would be a vast new campus of biology and medicine on Harvard-owned land across the Charles River in Allsten. The Allsten vision was to be dominated by "translational research"-a term denoting science highly directed toward immediate application and, one might add, marketing. Tom was no stranger to the development of medical advances from cutting-edge science. He had, after all, founded with Mark Ptashne the successful biotech firm Genetics Inst.i.tute and his lab had recently undertaken work on ALS. If anyone could appreciate a scientific utopia, it was he. In Tom's mind, however, Summers's plans would further weaken the already feeble heart of Harvard's historically distinguished pure biology programs still located in laboratories along Divinity Avenue to the immediate north of Harvard Yard.

Maniatis had barely begun to voice his opinions when Summers, oblivious to his visitor's distress, seized control of the conversation, using the remainder of the appointed hour to expound on his grand vision of how Harvard should move forward. He asked a purely rhetorical question: Should the president of Harvard be guided by the views of the perennial winners in the research game at Harvard or by the losers? By "the winners," Summers meant the Medical School, whose clinical studies had in recent decades brought the university its lion's share of awards and patents; "the losers" were the pract.i.tioners of basic science at FAS, which despite employing ill.u.s.trious figures like Tom had lagged behind its rivals, most notably and proximately MIT. Summers would afterward inform a close aide that his meeting with Maniatis had gone extremely well; Tom meanwhile had walked out of Ma.s.sachusetts Hall seething and more apprehensive than ever about the future of science at Harvard.

Only two years later Summers's inability to get outside his own head landed him in fatally hot water. It reached the boiling point following his appearance at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research on women in science, which was held in Cambridge in mid-January 2005. There he suggested that the relatively small number of women in tenured positions in the physical sciences might in part be attributable to a lower frequency among women as compared to men of innate potential for doing science at the highest level. Aware that many women would not take kindly to these words, he was careful to leave open the alternative explanation that in the past many talented women had been strongly discouraged by their teachers from ever trying to master top-level mathematics and sciences.

Summers's remarks might have gone unnoticed outside the meeting were it not for the presence of my former student, now a professor of biology at MIT, Nancy Hopkins. Over the past decade she had worked tirelessly and effectively to improve the working conditions of women scientists there. Before Nancy's highly visible efforts, the salaries and s.p.a.ce a.s.signments of women at MIT were notably unequal to those of their male counterparts. But Nancy did not challenge Summers at the meeting. Instead she instantly bolted from the room, later saying Summers's words made her sick, and soon appeared on national TV attacking him and setting off a firestorm of feminist anger.

It did Nancy Hopkins no particular credit as a scientist to admit that the mere hypothesis that there might be genetic differences between male and female brains-and therefore differences in the distribution of one form of cognitive potential-made her sick. Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated. To my regret, Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times for being candid about what might well be a fact of evolution that academia will have to live with. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist voiced a word in Summers's defense; I suspect the majority were fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness. If I were still a member of the faculty, the number of tenured scientists standing visibly behind the president in this matter would have literally doubled. But that would not have been enough to put out the flames. Apparently desperate, Summers soon contritely proposed a $50 million kitty to recruit more women to Harvard's senior science faculty.

The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers's dismissal late last February as Harvard's president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of disregard for the social niceties that ordinarily permit human beings to work together for a common good. While academia almost expects its younger members to be brash and full of themselves, these qualities are most unbecoming in more seasoned members of the society, and generally fatal in leaders. Reading up on a topic the night before and then appearing at conferences with the bravado to suggest that one knows more than those who have spent their careers thinking about the issues at hand is no way for a president to act. Summers's non-age-adjusted IQ, moreover, at age fifty-one is likely 5 to 10 points lower than when he was a twenty-year-old Wunderkind. Harvard's longstanding mandatory retirement age of fifty-five for academics was never a matter of arbitrary ageism but a recognition born of experience that as academics age they live more by old ideas and less by new ones. Summers, still acting as if he were the brightest person in the room, was bound to offend people who knew better.

It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social inept.i.tude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist-the very cards that endowed him with great quant.i.tative intelligence may also have disabled the normal faculties for reading human faces and voices. The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger's syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral "disabilities." Like exceptional math apt.i.tude, Asperger's occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. The reason why must remain a mystery until further research shows how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.

If Summers's tactlessness does, in fact, have a genetic basis, much of the anger toward him should rightly yield to sympathy. No longer can his upbringing be blamed for failing to instill in him the graces of the civilized individual. In any case, all discussion should stop as to whether his dismissal was unduly precipitous-it was in all likelihood overdue. Whether those prominent individuals who promoted his candidacy should hang their heads in shame, however, is less obvious.

Summers's departure has to be seen as the first of many necessary Steps to reclaim for Harvard its once legitimate claim to primacy in science, at least relative to MIT. Toward that end, Tom Maniatis, having come to Cold Spring Harbor to receive its honorary degree in April 2006, prevailed upon me to agree to meet with Derek Bok, the former president, whom the Harvard Corporation had called to serve again until a new leader could be found. A time was soon set up for me and Derek to get together at what had been the home of many Harvard presidents before Bok, the grand Georgian structure on Quincy Street across from the Faculty Club, now called Loeb House.

The day before my 10:00 A.M. appointment, Liz and I drove up to Cambridge to see Tom and his mult.i.talented Long Island-born partner, Rachel von Roeschlaub. After an hour of tennis at the famous Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, we drove in tandem to dinner at the Charles Hotel, where Liz and I were to stay the night. Before the food came, Tom described the brutal cuts in funding recently dealt out to Harvard's science departments when Summers had launched a ma.s.sive hiring campaign in translational life sciences and committed large pots of cash to develop Allsten.

Derek's initial reaction to my furrowed face must have been the same as mine to his graying hairs. Neither of us could pa.s.s for middle-aged. Twenty-eight years had elapsed since we were last face to face at the June 1978 commencement ceremonies, on which occasion I was delighted to be receiving an honorary D.Sc. A photo from that day shows Derek at forty-eight and me at fifty, each happy with himself, with a few more good years left to advance the causes of Harvard (in his case) and of scientific research (in mine). Neither of us could then have suspected that nearly thirty years later we might yet have cause to meet in the service of both.

Knowing that a pet.i.tioner's allotted hour always pa.s.ses quickly, I went straight to my main message: It was wrongheaded to build a huge Allsten biology complex to compensate for the lack of greatness increasingly enveloping the biology labs along Divinity Avenue. Most likely, I argued, it was the B+ level of most of Harvard's life sciences, both in Cambridge and across the vast medical complex, that would gravitate to the brochure-perfect new campus, resulting in very little bang for the vast bucks that would be spent. This, I insisted, is not how great inst.i.tutions are built.

With Derek Bok at Harvard commencement ceremony, June 1978 I went on to tell Derek that he and the Harvard Corporation should ask why MIT's life sciences now so completely outcla.s.s Harvard's. Past stinginess of Harvard deans played a big role in a problem that indiscriminate lavishness could not now fix. For far too long, University Hall had witlessly acted as if Harvard did not have to spend its own money to keep a place in the top league of science. The leaders.h.i.+p a.s.sumed that Harvard's golden name would naturally move the federal government to fund not only the university's research but also the creation of new facilities required to stay at the cutting edge. But brand names count for very little in science. And so, foolishly, Harvard sat back on its heels for about two decades while MIT smoothly integrated the privately funded Whitehead Inst.i.tute into its biology operations and, under the never shy Eric Lander, created a huge DNA sequencing facility. Thus MIT became a major player in the Human Genome Project, the intellectual driveshaft for much of today's most exciting biology and medicine.

Only belatedly had Harvard tried to enter the Genome Age by committing itself, as the twenty-first century began, to becoming strong in systems biology, a discipline so sprawling and unwieldy as to merit comparison to Enron's limitless expansions before its collapse into nothingness. In turn, the large MIT Center for Genome Research, thanks to the generosity of the California-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, was able to metamorphose in 2003 into an even more ambitious incarnation, the Broad Inst.i.tute of MIT and Harvard. Its sleek Cambridge Center edifice across from MIT's Koch Biology Building would have looked as much at home in the Boston financial district. By diverting funds that might have been spent along Divinity Avenue, Harvard under Summers bought a say in how and by whom the Broad's ma.s.sive genomic resources would be utilized. Within its doors, however, Harvard Yard seems light-years away.

Through such lavish commitments to joint ventures the pain of being shortchanged continued to be felt along Divinity Avenue. Still much rued was the failure in 2001 of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to lure the clever Roderick MacKinnon, then in his late forties, away from Rockefeller. Longtime Harvard stalwart and X-ray structure whiz Steve Harrison, who was convinced that MacKinnon's crystallo-graphic studies on ion channels would earn him a n.o.bel Prize (he would indeed share the 2003 award in Chemistry), felt likewise certain that with the right inducement MacKinnon would return to Harvard, where he'd had a lab at the medical school before leaving for Rockefeller. The package offered to him by then-dean Jeremy Knowles, however, was not remotely compet.i.tive with Rockefeller's commitment. Upon seeing the dean's letter, in fact, MacKinnon's wife wondered whether a mistake had been made in locating the decimal point. Depressed at Knowles's failure to think realistically big, Steve himself developed a case of wanderl.u.s.t and spied a much brighter future for himself at Harvard Medical School. He wasted little time moving his highly productive X-ray crystallographic research group across the Charles.

Several years before these events, a dinner party at Mark and Lucy Ptashne's spectacularly renovated huge house on Sparks Street had reunited me and Jeremy, whom I first knew when he was one of Oxford's stars in chemistry. Given his background, I had a.s.sumed he would use his new powers as Harvard's number two to brighten the future of science there. So I was slack-jawed as Jeremy told the a.s.sembled scientists and their spouses of the forthcoming boon to their work in the form of $1 million for supplies and equipment he would soon disburse among all the science departments. I blurted out that such a pittance would scarcely cover a small fraction of the scientists working at Cold Spring Harbor, adding that the miserly way Oxford was being run toward insignificance was no way for Harvard to keep pace with MIT. The stunned silence made me realize that no one had ever before witnessed such brazen disrespect for University Hall. Back at the Charles Hotel, I went to bed imagining Jeremy moving through a Max Beerbohm short story.

At this writing, University Hall is still under temporary stewards.h.i.+p. Larry Summers's firing of the East Asian studies scholar Bill Kirby as dean was not only the last straw of the Summers presidency; it also paralyzed Harvard administratively. But making new faculty appointments is not something that can wait-a short hiatus from hiring could do years of damage. Derek correctly understood that the job must be filled at once but also that the next president had the right to choose the next dean. So just prior to our appointment, Derek asked Jeremy to return temporarily to the helm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

We now know that the eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust will be the next president of Harvard. Who should the next dean be? Clearly it must be someone of commanding intellect and deep knowledge of the Harvard scene. But even if he or she also possesses Henry Rosovsky's uncanny sense of knowing when not to say no, this person will be taking on a role now too large for one individual. For the sake of excellence in all areas of inquiry, Harvard should divide the responsibility into three more manageable groupings-science, humanities, and social sciences. Each should be led by a distinguished academic with substantial powers of the purse. Only the capacity to judge and pay market rates can a.s.sure a better than 50-50 chance that the first-choice candidates of the respective ad hoc committees will accept a Harvard offer.

To be certain of success overall, Harvard salaries must once again be much higher than those of serious compet.i.tors. To get stars, you must offer star salaries. The best of academia no longer will come to Harvard because it is Harvard. No one goes into scientific research to get rich, but one doesn't undertake it to evade the comforts of life. Living close enough to Harvard Yard to enjoy its ambiance and diversions is now beyond the means of new Harvard appointees with families unless the faculty salary is matched by another of the same magnitude. Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth-provided that it abandon the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allsten expansion, at present envisioned to cover the area of twenty-five football stadiums.

Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time. Such minds inevitably draw their like, and the rest takes care of itself. The dividends of such greatness, however, go beyond what is to be gained by winning the next scientific race. They extend to the enrichment of the student body by giving them a broader appreciation of intellectual values.

Harvard's new president will need to see paramount among her goals the seeking of potential greatness for its undergraduates through equipping them with the best ideas of the past, honest a.s.sessments of the world today, and realistic expectations about the future. This was Robert Hutchins's vision for the University of Chicago when in 1929, at age thirty-one, he became its president. His charismatic impact reached its apogee in the 1940s as great books and ideas became the mainstays of undergraduate education along the Midway. Though his successors, pressed to maintain a viable inflow of new undergraduates, saw the need for partial retreat from the purity of his vision, those educated in the primacy of great thoughts never doubted that they were the chosen people.

Even now, mention of the University of Chicago to educational leaders not directly exposed to Hutchins or to his immediate successors elicits wistful admissions that Hutchins largely had it right when he branded much of American higher education as a prolonged mismatch of triviality and ignorance. During our meeting Derek allowed that despite the failure of Hutchins's ideas to take hold at any other major American university, his was the only past American university presidency that educators still actively talk about. While the Ivy League turns out graduates who for the remainder of their lives seek out one another, the University of Chicago still strives to see its graduates leave with lifetime-long ideas and a pa.s.sion to see the world as it is. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought Main Currents in American Thought and and The Brothers Karamazov The Brothers Karamazov had much more impact on my life than any of my University of Chicago cla.s.smates. had much more impact on my life than any of my University of Chicago cla.s.smates.

At their best, universities promote outside their walls the spirit and values that enable the proper conduct of their work within those walls. Going to the College of the University of Chicago completed my conversion to a life devoted to discovery of the natural world for its own sake, the impulse first stirred by looking for birds with my father. Yet whatever great advance in knowledge a university may bring us, it will fail in its ultimate mission if it allows concerns such as self-marketing and customer satisfaction-concerns of the service inst.i.tutions that most universities are fast becoming-to overtake the pure good of pursuing truth. And this is particularly important to science, in which the race, though it may be to the swift, is never over.

Before leaving Derek's temporary office I remarked that the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the a.s.sault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to better prove its hypotheses, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the A's, T's, G's, and C's of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes whose malfunctions are likely to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.

The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to antic.i.p.ate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so. Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of goodwill may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek asked apprehensively how many years would pa.s.s before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of "fifteen years" meant Summers's then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.

Upon returning to the Yard, however, I was not sure that even ten years would pa.s.s.

Cast of Characters

With Swedish pro Carl Wermee at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York George Beadle(1903-1989)-After heading the Biology Division at Caltech from 1946, in 1961 he became the president of the University of Chicago, so serving until he was sixty-five. Then, as director of the Inst.i.tute for Biomedical Research of the American Medical a.s.sociation, he resumed research on the origins of modern corn. In 1982 he moved with his wife, Muriel, a writer, to a retirement village in Pomona, California.Seymour Benzer(b. 1921)-In 1976, he moved from Purdue to Caltech, where he exchanged phage for Drosophila, Drosophila, using it to effectively probe the genetic basis of behavior and neurodegeneration. using it to effectively probe the genetic basis of behavior and neurodegeneration.Derek Bok(b. 1930)-After retiring as Harvard president in 1991, he remained highly involved with higher education, writing six books on the topic: Our Underachieving Colleges Our Underachieving Colleges (2005), (2005), Universities in the Marketplace Universities in the Marketplace (2003), (2003), The Shape of the River The Shape of the River (1998), (1998), Universities and the Future of America Universities and the Future of America (1990), (1990), Higher Learning Higher Learning (1986), and (1986), and Beyond the Ivory Tower Beyond the Ivory Tower (1982). His recent research focuses on the U.S. government's approach to domestic problems, about which he has written two books, (1982). His recent research focuses on the U.S. government's approach to domestic problems, about which he has written two books, The State of the Nation The State of the Nation (1997) and (1997) and The Trouble with Government The Trouble with Government (2001). Following the resignation of Larry Summers, Derek returned in July 2006 to Harvard to serve as acting president for one year. (2001). Following the resignation of Larry Summers, Derek returned in July 2006 to Harvard to serve as acting president for one year.Sir (William) Lawrence Bragg(1890-1971)-He left his post as director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1954 to head the Royal Inst.i.tution in London, which his father, William Henry Bragg, had directed between 1930 and 1942.Sydney Brenner(b. 1927)-Upon the retirement of Max Perutz, he became head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, serving until 1986. By then he was devising methodologies for studying the human genome, early on seeing the importance of making DNA copies of cellular messenger RNA molecules. Increasingly he worked outside the United Kingdom, at the Scripps Research Inst.i.tute in La lolla, California, at the Molecular Sciences Inst.i.tute that he founded in Berkeley, and in Singapore as a biotechnology adviser to its government. In the United Kingdom, he and his wife, May, maintain their primary residence in the town of Ely, to the north of Cambridge.Jacob (Bruno) Bronowski(1908-1974)-One of the early research fellows of the Salk Inst.i.tute for Biological Studies, he later spent two years (1971-1972) filming the justly famous BBC series The Ascent of Man, The Ascent of Man, which traced the history of science and mankind from prehistoric times and which aired just shortly before his tragically premature death from heart failure. which traced the history of science and mankind from prehistoric times and which aired just shortly before his tragically premature death from heart failure.McGeorge Bundy(1919-1996)-In 1966 he left the Lyndon Johnson White House to direct the Ford Corporation in New York for twelve years. During the following ten years he taught history at New York University, subsequently becoming a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Corporation, where he chaired its Committee on Reducing Nuclear Dangers.d.i.c.k Burgess(b. 1942)-Following two years as a postdoctoral fellow in Geneva, Switzerland, he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is currently the James D. Watson Professor of Oncology.John Cairns(b. 1922)-After leaving Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1972, he headed the Mill Hill Laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund outside London until 1980. He then recrossed the Atlantic to join the Harvard School of Public Health. Upon his retirement in 1991, he and his wife, Elfie, moved back to the United Kingdom, living outside Oxford.Mario Capecchi(b. 1937)-After finis.h.i.+ng his Ph.D. work, he stayed on at Harvard as a.s.sistant and then a.s.sociate professor of biochemistry until 1973, when he moved to the University of Utah, where he has remained since. There he has pioneered gene targeting in mouse embryo-derived stem cells.Erwin Chargaff(1905-2002)-More a writer than a scientist in the later part of his career, he published several books, including the autobiographical Hera-c.l.i.tean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature. Hera-c.l.i.tean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature. He remained on the Columbia faculty until his retirement in 1974. He remained on the Columbia faculty until his retirement in 1974.Seymour Cohen(b. 1917)-In 1971, he left the University of Pennsylvania for the University of Colorado in Denver, where he was a professor in the School of Medicine until 1976. He then moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, from which he retired in 1985.Francis Crick(1916-2004)-At the age of sixty-one, he moved to the Salk Inst.i.tute to pursue a new career as a neurobiologist, eventually to study the nature of consciousness with Caltech's Christof Koch. The already much valued biography, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Atlas Books/ Harper Collins), by English scientist/writer Matt Ridley, appeared in mid-2006. (Atlas Books/ Harper Collins), by English scientist/writer Matt Ridley, appeared in mid-2006.Manny Delbruck(1917-1998)-She continued to live at Caltech until her death from breast cancer.Max Delbruck(1906-1981)-After 1957, his research turned to problems in sensory physiology, which he studied using the mold Phycomyces, Phycomyces, until his death from multiple myeloma. In 1969, he received the n.o.bel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria for their work on bacteriophage. until his death from multiple myeloma. In 1969, he received the n.o.bel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Alfred Hershey and Salvador Luria for their work on bacteriophage.Milislav Demerec(1895-1966)-Following his retirement at age sixty-five as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1960, he continued work on Salmonella Salmonella genetics at Brookhaven National Laboratory until 1965. genetics at Brookhaven National Laboratory until 1965.August (Gus) Doermann(1918-1991)-After conducting research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he worked at Rochester and Vanderbilt before becoming professor of genetics at the