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

I was more than worried that one too many of those dinosaurs would vote against me. In fact, a majority of them did, opting to postpone for one year the decision on my promotion. This I heard from Ernst Mayr, who wisely didn't identify those against me, and I couldn't contain my outrage. Retreating to the Doty house before I used the

F-word in front of too many biology graduate students, I agitatedly awaited dinner with Paul and the Berkeley zoologist Dan Mazia. Over dinner Dan tried to console me by saying that at Berkeley they never would have tried to stave off what was so obviously inevitable. Paul Doty, trying to rescue his dinner party from the pall hanging over it, reassured me that the game was not over until it was over. McGeorge Bundy's power would be badly eroded if he let one of his second-rate departments defy him. Paul counseled me to try to refrain, at least for the time being, from further vulgar diatribes against my biology colleagues.

The subsequent weekend was inevitably tense, as I waited to see the color of the smoke emerging from University Hall. To my great relief, Bundy did play hardball, telling Frank Carpenter that no more tenured appointments or discretionary funds at the dean's disposal would go biology's way until they promoted me. Quickly those professors who only several days earlier were strongly opposed to me now implied they had acted too hastily. Upon further reflection they could now enthusiastically accept the ad hoc committee's recommendation.

Relieved not to have to consider offering myself to the Chemistry Department, I couldn't find it in me to gloat. But it was hard not to appreciate Seymour Benzer's later comment that the imbroglio attending my promotion made him even more certain that he had done the right thing turning down Harvard. Life was too short to share a department with so many prima donnas whose meager accomplishments scarcely justified even the status of has-been. Still, I did not regret moving to Harvard. More and more I was learning that the quality of your students matters much more than that of your faculty colleagues. In that regard Harvard couldn't be faulted.

Remembered Lessons

1. Bring your research into your lectures

In the fall of 1956, there was simply not enough known about DNA to organize a whole course around it. So I opted to talk about DNA in the context of a course on viruses, wherein I could compare the elegant experiments of the phage group with the old-fashioned approaches of plant and animal virologists. Graduate students self-selected according to their attraction to my molecular messages. Reading through their term papers, I could also spot those who zoomed in on important issues and did not waste pages of type on observations of no consequence.

2. Challenge your students’ abilities to move beyond facts

Asking bright students to merely regurgitate the facts or ideas of others does not prepare them for the world outside classrooms. So my exams increasingly featured questions that assessed the plausibility of hypothetical headlines from the New York Times or Nature. For example, should they believe claims that a virus had been found that multiplied outside cells in a medium solely composed of the small-molecule precursors to DNA, RNA, and protein? Any student answering yes would have missed the essence of my course and so been advised not to choose a scientific career. Happily, no students failed to answer correctly.

3. Have your students master subjects outside your expertise

The best way to prepare your students for the independence they all want is by seeing that they are exposed to peripheral disciplines and to the technologies needed to move from the present to the future. During the late 1950s when we aimed to discover how information encoded within DNA molecules is expressed in cells, the answers had to be sought at the molecular level. So it was a no-brainer that I should have my prospective students acquire strong backgrounds in chemistry to complement my strengths as a biologist. During their first graduate year I made sure that they took rigorous courses in physical and organic chemistry. They might later use only a small fraction of this expertise, but they would never feel unqualified for experimentation at the molecular level.

4. Never let your students see themselves

as research assistants

It makes sense to have your students pursuing thesis objectives that genuinely interest you. At the same time you should take care that they never see themselves as working primarily for your professional advancement. Students function best when they can be assured of enjoying most of the credit for their efforts. After they came into my lab, generally only a month or two would pass before I backed away from their daily progress. I then let them work at their own pace and come into my office when they had results, either positive or negative, that I should be aware of. You know that they have become truly independent when they give thoughtful seminars before their lab peers. Novice speakers can profit from taking their licks when their conclusions go beyond what is justified by their data. Nothing banishes illogical conclusions from one's brain like the need to present them to others. Later I made it a point that my name never be included with theirs on research papers emerging from their experiments.

5. Hire spunky lab helpers

As an untenured scientist, most of your nonsleeping hours are spent in lab-related activities. Those working with me were effectively my surrogate family, with whom I would eat many meals and go to the beach or go skiing. So when hiring assistants to help with more routine lab management, I wanted to surround myself with faces that laughed at the right times and whose inherent positive outlook would be a calming influence when our experiments went nowhere. The best to have around were unmarried people of my own age; not yet saddled with family responsibilities, they were therefore not obliged to keep strictly regular hours. They could be called on for help in the evening hours or on weekends when we wanted our answers fast. In return, I treated them more as friends than as employees and didn't expect them to hang around when there was nothing particular to do.

6. Academic institutions do not easily change themselves

Most academic battles involve space or faculty appointments and promotions. All too often, academic life is a zero-sum game, with an equivalent loser for every winner. Sadly, most academic department heads and deans do not display long-term consistency, often maintaining their own academic power by giving to a professor what he or she was denied the year before. Before I went to Harvard, Leo Szilard told me that it moved only lethargically, an assessment based no doubt on his never having been asked to join its Physics Department. But he was also familiar with academia's general love of orthodoxy and warned that I should be realistic about how much change I could expect to see in a place as fossilized as Harvard's Biology Department. His pessimism would have been dead on had it not been for McGeorge Bundy's determination to see through a radical upgrade of biology at Harvard. University leaders with such strong convictions are rare.

8. MANNERS DEPLOYED FOR ACADEMIC ZING

UPON the return of the Dotys from England, I needed a new place to live and luckily stumbled upon a vacant one-bedroom flat on the thousand-foot-long Appian Way, less than a five-minute walk from Harvard Square. Appian Way runs between Garden and Brattle Streets and is bordered on its northern side by Radcliffe Yard, where once virtually all of Radcliffe's classes were taught by Harvard professors. But with the disappearance of separate classes for women, the former classroom space in the Yard's Longfellow Hall was now used by the School of Education. Soon after my moving onto Appian Way, the Education School was to expand across it, in the process tearing down all its modest wooden homes except for number 10—the mid-nineteenth-century house, long owned by the Noon family, in which I occupied second-floor quarters. I regularly wrote out my bimonthly checks to Theodore W Noon, who had been at Harvard at the turn of the century and an instructor at Lawrenceville before the first Great War. Long retired from teaching, he was nearing eighty, and would eventually live to almost a hundred.

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