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

Kaky and I dined at what proved an all too typical German restaurant, I was again in throat agony. So we did not stay out long, going back to Dahlem on the underground train running out to West Berlin's southwestern suburbs.

My next stop was Cologne, where Max and Manny Delbrück were spending the year helping its university establish an antiauthoritarian, American-style department in genetics. Though I could barely whisper, my throat again unbearably sore, Max nevertheless insisted upon my giving a scheduled speech, to the distress of many in the audience who surmised my discomfort. Fortunately, by the time I reached Geneva, my voice had returned, allowing me to go out to CERN, the big physics laboratory then led by Max's friend from Copenhagen days Vicky Weisskopf. Much of our talk was about Leo Szilard, who had just flown back from Geneva to New York. Szilard wanted Vicky and John to set up a CERN-like multinationally funded European molecular biology lab after the model of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Ideally Leo wanted the new lab to be in Geneva, but he would accept one on the Riviera. It would create an alternative intellectual home for him were the United States to tack right politically in response to even greater Soviet military threats.

Alfred and Virginia Tissières had by then arrived from Paris to spend the holidays with their family in Lausanne. I went up to ski with them just before Christmas at Verbier, the new ski resort in Valais that Alfred's brother Rudolph had helped develop. Soon to arrive were my new friends from Stockholm, Helen Friberg and Kai Falkman, who planned to be there through the New Year. By then, however, I would be with the Mitchison family at their home in Scotland. Though London was covered by snow, green grass still surrounded the airport near Campbeltown where my small British European Airways puddle jumper landed on New Year's Eve morning. From there I was driven some twenty miles to their remote Carradale home, arriving very weary from the journey. After three days of brisk highland walks, I flew back to the States via Iceland.

Back at Harvard I found on my desk a letter from President Pusey acknowledging my letter about Princess Christina, which he had

passed on to Radcliffe's president, Mary Bunting. Appropriate application forms were dispatched to Sweden, and Christina promptly filled them out and asked her school, L'École Francaise, to send her academic records. News that she might be coming to Radcliffe first broke in the Boston Globe in mid-March, with an official announcement coming from the Royal Palace in early April. A day later, the Crimson asked about my role in her admission, and my attempt at humor badly backfired. To my embarrassment, the next day I read the words, “I didn't encourage her to come any more than I would encourage any pretty girl.” I could only hope that that day's edition never got to Stockholm. In any case, I had further reason to believe I had made the right choice in moving to Harvard. Princesses don't go to Caltech.

Remembered Lessons

1. Buy, don't rent, a suit of tails

Though you may believe you will have no further occasion to wear a suit of clothes befitting an orchestra conductor, winning a Nobel Prize is too singular an occasion for a hired suit of clothes. Furthermore, if your career stays at a high level, you may be invited to a subsequent Nobel week when one of your proteges wins. And keeping the outfit in your closet long after the festivities are over will serve to remind you what shape you once were.

2. Don't sign petitions that want your celebrity

The moment your prize is announced, you are seen as fair game for petitioners of worthy causes in need of well-known signatories. In lending your name to such appeals, you often find yourself outside your expertise and expressing an opinion no more meaningful than, say, that of the average accountant. You trivialize your Nobel Prize and make future uses of your name less effective. Much better is to do real good as opposed to symbolic good.

3. Make the most of the year following

announcement of your prize

You have a lifetime ahead of you for being a past prize winner but only a yearlong window during which you are the celebrated scientist of the moment. While everybody respects Nobel laureates, this year's winner is always the most sought-after dinner guest. In Stockholm this year's honoree is treated like a movie star by the general population, who will ask even an otherwise obscure chemist for an autograph. As with the Miss America pageant, the announcement of the next winner will decisively mark the end of your reign as this year's science star.

4. Don't anticipate a flirtatious Santa Lucia girl

Much fuss is made after your arrival for Nobel Week about the pretty girl who will wake you up on Santa Lucia Day and sing the traditional song. Alas, she will not be alone, and very possibly she will be accompanied by one or more photographers expecting you to smile as you hear the Neopolitan tune that only sun-deprived Swedes could mistake for a carol. The moment her singing stops, she will be off to another laureate's room, leaving you several hours more of darkness to endure before the winter sun peeks above the horizon.

5. Expect to put on weight after Stockholm

Masses of invitations will come to you during your inevitable bout of post-Stockholm withdrawal syndrome. You may find yourself banqueting as a second profession, accepting invitations to places it never would have occurred to you to go before. I still remember well an excellent dinner in Houston at its once classy Doctors’ Club, before the Texas oil capital put itself on the map of high-powered biomedicai research. I remember glaring foolishly at a giant ice sculpture on the table, knowing it would not long honor my existence. When your hosts embarrassingly overstate your importance, it's easier to accept second helpings than to keep up conversation.

6. Avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners

All too often some well-intentioned person gathers together Nobel laureates to enhance an event promoting his or her university or city. The host does so convinced that these special guests will exude genius and incandescent or at least brilliantly eccentric personalities. The fact is that many years pass between the awarding of a prize and the work it acknowledges, so even recently awarded Nobelists have likely seen better days. The honorarium, no matter how hefty, will not compensate you for the realization that you probably look and act as old and tired as the other laureates, whose conversation is boring you perhaps as much as yours is boring them. The best way to remain lively is to restrict your professional contact to young, not yet famous colleagues. Though they likely will beat you at tennis, they will also keep your brain moving.

7. Spend your prize money on a home

A flashy car that costs more than it's worth is bound to give even your best friends reason to believe demi-celebrity has gone to your head and corrupted your values. Show them that the somewhat richer are not so different and you are still one of them. A bigger home will only put you in the same league as your university president, whom no one can reasonably envy.

11. MANNERS DEMANDED BY ACADEMIC INEPTITUDE

FROM the moment of my Nobel Prize, I took comfort in expecting a larger than ordinary annual salary raise. Over the past two years, I had twice received an annual increase of $1,000, so when I opened the small envelope coming on July 2 from University Hall I expected to see a $2,000 increase. Instead, the historian Franklin Ford, Bundy's successor as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, informed me that for my first time at Harvard I was to receive no raise at all. Instantly I went ballistic and let all my immediate friends know my outrage. Was an administrative blunder to blame for Harvard's failure to acknowledge the windfall of prestige that I had provided or did President Pusey want to send a message that celebrities had no place on his faculty and should consider going elsewhere?

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