James Watson - AVOID BORING PEOPLE - Lessons from a Life in Science

Soon I was in England to meet John Kendrew's coworker Max Perutz, to make preparations for my coming to Cambridge in early October. Though John was still in the States, my meeting with Perutz and his boss, the Cavendish Professor of Physics, Sir Lawrence Bragg, went well and I took that night's train to Edinburgh for a two-day peek at the Scottish Highlands near Oban. In returning by train to London, I was engrossed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

Delbrück was ending his European trip with visits to André Lwoff and Jacques Monod at the Institut Pasteur, and so from London I flew to Paris. There on a Sunday afternoon, after watching Monod nimbly scale the big boulders in the woods at nearby Fontainebleau, I said goodbye to Max as he boarded a plane at Orly Though Max was highly skeptical of my foray into a Pauling-like structural chemistry, he did not choose this occasion to say so. Instead he wished me well and I felt the creeping apprehension of knowing that I would no longer be part of the world in which grace and the fall from it could be comfortably predicted by asking, “What will Max say?” Soon I would be somewhere he did not matter.

Max Delbrück arrives in Copenhagen, September 1951. From left: Günther Stent, Ole Maaloe, Carsten Bresch, and Jim Watson

Remembered Lessons

1. Have a big objective that makes you feel special

No one within the phage group of 1950 would have denied our air of self-importance or our sense of being a happy few. The disciples of George Beadle and Ed Tatum working with Neurospora on gene-enzyme connections never came together with such esprit de corps. Max Delbrück's personality was a big factor. His reverence for deep truths and commitment to sharing them unselfishly was saint-like. But these virtues attend many uninspired minds as well and were never the key to the fervor of his acolytes. Instead it was his great commission that we go to the heart of the gene, in search of its genetic and molecular essences. To obssess over less fundamental goals made no sense to Max. Phages, being virtually naked genes that yielded answers after only a night's sleep, had to be the best biological tools for moving forward fast. Legions of graduate students across biology were pursuing things worth knowing but perhaps not worth devoting one's life to. The quest for such an unrivaled prize of indisputable significance fired in our imaginations a devotion such as religion fires in others', but without the irrationality.

2. Sit in the front row when a seminar's title intrigues you

By far the best way to profit from seminars that interest you is to sit in the front row. Not being bored, you do not risk the embarrassment of falling asleep in front of everybody's eyes. If you cannot follow the speaker's train of thought from where you are, you are in a good place to interrupt. Chances are you are not alone in being lost and most everyone in the audience will silently applaud. Your prodding may in fact reveal whether the speaker indeed has a take-home message or has simply deluded himself into believing he does. Waiting until a seminar is over to ask questions is pathologically polite. You will probably forget where you got lost and start questioning results you actually understood.

Now, if you have suspicions that a seminar will bore you but are not sure enough to risk skipping it, sit in the back row. There a dull, glazed expression will not be conspicuous, and if you walk out, your departure may be thought temporary and compelled by the call of nature. Szilard did not follow this advice, habitually sitting in a front row and getting up abruptly in the middle of talks when he'd had too much of too little. Those outside his close circle of friends were relieved when his inherent restlessness made him move on to a potentially more exciting domicile.

3. Irreproducible results can be blessings in disguise

A desired result in science is gratifying, but there is no contentment until you have repeated your experiments several times and got the same answer. AI Hershey called such moments of satisfaction “Her-shey heaven.” Just the opposite feeling of maddening inferno comes from irreproducible results. Albert Keiner and Renato Dulbecco felt it before they found that visible light can reverse much UV damage. Del-briick, struck by how long this phenomenon remained undiscovered, put it down to fastidiousness. He described what he called “the principle of limited sloppiness.” If you are too sloppy, of course you never get reproducible results. But if you are just a little sloppy, you have a good chance of introducing an unsuspected variable and possibly nailing down an important new phenomenon. In contrast, always doing an experiment in precisely the same way limits you to exploring conditions that you already suspect might influence your experimental results. Before the Kelner-Dulbecco observations, no one had cause to suspect that under any conditions visible light could reverse the effects of UV irradiation. Great inspirations are often accidents.

4. Always have an audience for your experiments

Before starting an experiment, be sure others are interested in the premise. Mindless minor variations on prior good science will generate yawns in the world beyond your lab. Though such almost repetitive motions are good ways for students to learn lab techniques, they should be seen as exercises and not as real science, with their results publishable only in journals that hotshot scientists never read. Now, trying to break new ground may lead to consequences that seem worse than yawns, and you must be prepared for most of your peers to think you are out of your mind. If, however, you cannot think of at least one and preferably several bright individuals who can take appreciative notice of what you are doing, your tenacity may very well indicate that you are either stupid or crazy.

5. Avoid boring people

Social gatherings of even successful academics are no different from gatherings of any professional cohort. The truly interesting are inevitably a small subset of any group. Don't be surprised when arriving at some senior colleague's house for dinner if you feel an unexplainable desire to leave when you learn whom you're seated next to. Routinely reading the New York Times at breakfast will expose you to many more facts and ideas than you are ever likely to acquire during evenings with individuals who in most instances haven't had to think differently since getting tenure. Unless you have reason to anticipate a very good meal or the presence of a fetching face, take care not to accept outright any invitations to senior faculty's homes. Leave open the possibility that a sixteen-hour experiment might keep you from coming. If you later find out that someone you want to meet will be there, make known your sudden availability and come gallantly with a small box of chocolates to enjoy with the coffee.

6. Science is highly social

In high school there is a domain of facts and ideas in which you can succeed separate from the world of hanging out with your peers. Once you get into science, however, worlds collide, and not only your fun but also your professional success demands you know as much about your peers’ personality quirks as you do about their experiments. Gossip is a fact of life also among scientists, and if you are out of the loop of what's new you are working with one hand tied behind your back. The intellectual vitality of the phage group drew not only from its meetings but also from constant visits to one another's labs, often for joint experiments. Particularly at the start of your career, you should seize any chance to see how other labs function and talk about results that might be interpreted in new ways. It's all too natural when young to see one's peers merely as competitors. Some ofthat is necessary and appropriate, but scientific knowledge is not a zero-sum game: there is always something more to be discovered, and getting to know your colleagues can only help you get a piece of the prize.

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