 |
|
|
|
|
I am close to completing 50 years of association with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In mid-June of 1948, I arrived here to spend the summer doing phage experiments under Salvador Luria, with whom I had just started my Ph.D. thesis research at Indiana University. It was to be an interval that set the course of my future life. Until then, my impressions of what high-level science was like had come largely from books, journal articles, and university lectures. Suddenly I had the opportunity to associate faces and voices with ideas and experiments. Not discouraged by personalities who did not always measure up to their science, I was happily finding out that high-level science could be more than long days in the lab and much mental sweat. It could also encompass a life that had room for outdoor fun and silly moments that did not always treat gently individuals who thought too well of themselves.
Dominating the intellectual esprit that summer was the German-born theoretical physicist-turned-phage biologist Max Delbrück. He, with his wife Manny, had been in Cold Spring Harbor every summer save one since 1941. Born in 1906 in Berlin, Max had moved in the circle of the great theoreticians when quantum mechanics revolutionized the world of physics. At that time, Berlin was one of the world's great centers for science, but its central role vanished as soon as Hitler took over in 1933. Coming from a distinguished Protestant academic family, Max did not have to leave, but feeling at odds with the Nazi-led university scene, he migrated to the United States in early 1937. By then he had become more interested in the gene than the atom and so used his Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to go to the California Institute of Technology to work with its strong contingent of geneticists. There he soon saw the possibility of using the viruses of bacteria (bacteriophages or phage for short) as model systems for studying the fundamental properties of genes.
It was after his move to Vanderbilt University in Nashville in early 1940 that he received an invitation from Milislav Demerec, then the Laboratory's Director, to participate in the 1941 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium. Even more important, he was asked to stay on for the remainder of the summer to do experiments in one of the unheated lab buildings assigned to summer visitors. Max extended this invitation to his new friend Salvador Luria, who had done phage experiments in Rome and Paris before fleeing ahead of advancing German troops to a boat that would take him to New York. He had restarted phage experiments at the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University when he and Max first met in late December of 1940 at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Philadelphia. After first talking about their phage work, Max took Salva to dinner with a friend of his from the past, the theoretician Wolfgang Pauli, legendary for both his ideas and his rudeness.
Six months later, his summer experiments with Salva were going so well that Max, who had left for Pasadena in late July to get married, brought his new bride Manny (Mary Bruce) back to Cold Spring Harbor for the remainder of the summer. In no sense was it a traditional honeymoon. But Manny was then, as throughout her life, never bound by conventions. She quickly began to share Max's enchantment with Cold Spring Harbor and eagerly looked forward to returning the following summer.
The collection of scientists that Demerec assembled that summer of '41 was extraordinary. It included the young Drosophila geneticists, Ed Lewis and Jim Neel, as well as the already revered Hermann J. Muller, arguably the world's best geneticist, just back in the States after nine years in Berlin, Moscow, and Edinburgh. Sewell Wright, the best population geneticist in the United States, also was there, as were four leading maize geneticists including the Cornell University-trained Marcus Rhodes and Barbara McClintock. Later that year, Barbara, personally incompatible with the University of Missouri, was appointed to the Cold Spring Harbor staff by Demerec, remaining here for just over 50 years until her death in 1992. With Bentley Glass and Alexander Hollander also in residence, this particular cohort of summer visitors represented an intellectual virtuosity never before seen in Cold Spring Harbor's 51 years of existence.
Max and Manny were to spend six years in Nashville before they returned to Pasadena where they had first met. In 1946, as soon as George Beadle moved from Stanford back to Caltech as head of its Biology Division, he asked Max to come back as a tenured professor. Accepting this invitation was easy for Max. He had greatly enjoyed his earlier stay at Caltech, and Manny's family lived nearby in an affluent San Marino home. Her father had managed copper mines in Cyprus, and most of Manny's early life had been spent in the Middle East. She had returned to the United States only when she reached college age and entered the orange-grove-surrounded Scripps Women's College in Claremont, some 20 miles to the east of Pasadena.
Although once again based in California, the Delbrücks continued to make the trek east to Cold Spring Harbor each summer, and 1948 was no exception. Max's firm yet soft way of speaking mesmerized me that summer of '48. As much as possible I tried to be near him-when he was eating in Blackford, or writing equations on the Blackford Hall Fireplace Room blackboard, or hitting tennis balls so much harder than I could, or swimming off the sand spit raft. Then, he was about to turn 42, and at 20 I was almost young enough to be his son. Others, observing our similar tall, thin shapes and my never subtle attempts to mimic Max's behavior, jokingly began to call me son of Max.
Manny was constantly finding novel ways to avoid boredom and relished the nonconformity of many of the personalities then in pursuit of the gene. She could not resist making fun of snobs enamored of money or possessions and took much pleasure in telling tales about friends whose character defects led them to embarrassing moments. When given the chance, she was always outdoors, never hesitating to choose a canoeing adventure to an unknown site over newspapers or magazine reports of events out of her control. I could not then imagine Max having a more suitable wife and wondered whether I would ever have such an idyllic companion for life.
That summer I relaxed in Manny's noncompetitive reflective presence, not at all embarrassed by either my excessive skinniness or my inability to easily make social remarks that put others at ease. Still necessarily more an observer than a real player in the phage group, I took pleasure in Max's letting me call him by his first name and in return soon being known to others as Jim. Although we would eagerly listen to Max's opinions, no personal penalty was incurred by not adopting his way of thinking. Instead, the scientific mood was much that of a Socratic dialogue leading toward conclusions that might someday reveal the deep nature of the gene.
With my thesis research on X-ray-inactivated phage effectively a routine extension of Luria's prior work on UV-inactivated phage, I had no need to be intellectually clever in planning the next day's experiments. Nor did they seem so immediately important as to preclude more fun activities, especially after the Lurias returned to Bloomington in early August to await the birth of their son Danny. Then Max and Manny persuaded Renato Dulbecco, whom Luria had brought over the year before from Italy to work in his Bloomington lab, to drive us up to the Marine Biological Lab at Woods Hole. There we met the German refugees Hans Gaffron and Victor Hamburger and listened to much gossip about the legendary Berlin biochemist Otto Warburg, whose ideas about photosynthesis and cancer then provoked much controversy. After our return to Cold Spring Harbor, Renato's family arrived from Italy and soon he was driving off to Bloomington. But as I was to be with Luria at a mid-September Genetics Society meeting in Washington, I stayed on in my Blackford Hall room long after virtually all of the other summer visitors were gone. Max and Manny also lingered on, and after the Blackford Hall dining room closed on Labor Day, we had meals with those Carnegie staff who lived in the big Victorian, Jones-built house on Route 25A that today we call Davenport House.
The academic year that followed at Indiana University in 19481949 saw me focused on chemically induced indirect effects of X-rays on phage. For days at a time, I would think I was on to something big, but then cold reality inevitably arrived. Particularly awkward were my presentations in either Bloomington or Chicago before Max or the Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard, the most famous of the phage course's converts to the pursuit of the gene. Leo would start interrupting me as soon as I started to speak. Later I comforted myself by hoping that he wouldn't have been so ferocious if there was nothing of importance in what I was saying. In retrospect, however, that was the sad truth, and my Ph.D. period proved primarily a time for learning until eventually, I could intellectually stand on my own feet as opposed to those of Luria. But Salva's help was always there. Seeing that I could not use the English language effectively, in April 1950, he pared my unconceptual Ph.D. thesis to 50 pages.
|