Free Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science by James D. Watson Page A

the head of the inner harbor on whose innermost western shores lay Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I was let off in front of Blackford Hall, the summer center for the Lab where everyone ate, and whose upstairs dormitory space contained seventeen austere, concrete-sided single rooms. In one of these I was to stay all summer. Downstairs, in addition to the dining room, there was a lounge with a fireplace, a large blackboard, and three imposingly baronial wooden chairs that had been there ever since Blackford's construction in 1906.
    Then the laboratory was effectively divided into two parts: a year-round Department of Genetics, supported by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Biological Laboratory, a largely summertime effort under the patronage of the wealthy local estate owners. The latter body organized the summer courses and prestigious June meeting, the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology, as well as providing housing and lab benches for summer visitors such as Luria and Delbrück. In 1941, the Yugoslav-born and Cornell-trained Milislav Demerec, the new director of the Department of Genetics, also took control of the community-supported Biological Laboratory, changing its emphasis from physiology and natural history to the study of the gene, his own interest. During his first year as director, Demerec staged the 1941 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Genes and Chromosomes. To this seminal meeting came both Hermann J. Müller and Sewall Wright, as well as Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria, for whom Demerec provided space to work together on phages in the Jones Laboratory.
    After America entered World War II later that year, Demerec deployed most Biological Lab space to war-related activities. Jones Laboratory, however, being unheated, remained unoccupied and was thus still available to Delbrück and Luria by the time summer came. There were effectively no other wartime summer visitors except for the German-born ornithologist Ernst Mayr, then based at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, whose research on evolution was complementary to Demerec's interest in genetics. With the director's natural affinity for European-born scientists, Cold Spring Harbor's atmosphere rapidly changed from that of a Yankee bastion, with a history of research in eugenics and an unmistakable anti-Semitic bias, to an international institution whose vigor much depended on foreign visitors, the matter of whose being in some cases Jewish posed no impediment to either scientific involvement or social acceptance.
    Cold Spring Harbor was a place where reasoning through numbers was paramount long before Demerec's rule. In 1930 the biophysicist Hugo Fricke was appointed to the Biological Laboratory's staff, and 1933 saw the first Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology, its main purpose being to bring physicists and chemists together with biologists to help decipher the molecular basis of life phenomena. It was in this sense quite natural that physicists such as Delbrück and later Szilard were so warmly welcomed into the Cold Spring Harbor community.
    My first afternoon's inspection of the digs and labs for the summer visitors revealed much physical dilapidation, the general atmosphere being that of a run-down summer camp. In fact, some visitors lived in tented cabins sited on the grass behind Blackford Hall, itself centrally heated only many years later. Both Hooper House and Williams House, then used to house summer scientists with families, were built in the 1830s as “tenements” for workers in the antebellum whaling industry. Equally rundown was the three-story Firehouse, whose name dated from its original use as the town's first fire station before the Biological Lab bought it in 1930 for $50 and transported it across the harbor on a barge to provide more summer housing.

    Canvas tents behind Blackford Hall sheltered some summering scientists.

    The Laboratory towed in the Cold Spring Harbor