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

Firehouse to house summer scientists in 1930.
    The research buildings housing the Department of Genetics dated from the first decade of its existence and, while of far sturdier construction, had an unmistakable turn-of-the-century smell. The main laboratory, an Italianate 1904 building, had a library on the first floor with labs on the top floor and in the basement. On two sides it was surrounded by the cornfields of the Brooklyn-raised and Cornell-trained geneticist Barbara McClintock, whom Demerec had recruited in 1941. Before coming to the symposium that June, she had resigned from the University of Missouri, where her sharp, independent mind was not so well appreciated. Demerec, however, with his eye for real talent, soon got Carnegie's permission to offer her a modest salary and second-floor space in the 1912 Animal House. There mice strains predisposed to cancer had been under intensive study since the early 1920s.
    Despite the extraordinarily beautiful surrounding harbor and hills, the state of the labs and residences gave first-time visitors the distinct impression that Cold Spring Harbor would not likely long remain a site of high-powered science. But I then had no concern for the state of the buildings as long as they had the facilities needed for my phage experiments. Our IU contingent was to work in the 1927 Colonial Revival-style Nichols Building, which housed the Biological Laboratory's only two scientists, Vernon Bryson and Albert Keiner. Both did experiments on mutagenic agents in bacteria, and we could use their steam sterilizer (autoclave) and oven to prevent unwanted contamination of our bacterial cultures.
    Several days later, Luria arrived with his New York-born wife, Zella, a Ph.D. student in psychology whom he'd met soon after arriving at IU. She was expecting their child at the end of the summer and welcomed the prospect of Blackford meals over preparing food in their Williams House apartment, furnished with castoffs from local estate owners. Renato Dulbecco by then also was on hand, having driven east in a secondhand Pontiac that he subsequently would use to take his wife and two young children back to Bloomington after their arrival from Italy. One of its first uses on the East Coast was to drive Max Del-briick and his wife, Manny, to the Marine Terminal at La Guardia Airport, where they boarded a Pan Am flying boat to England. From there they were to go on to Germany, where Max's family had suffered badly in the war, his brother, Justus, dying of diphtheria in a Russian prison camp after earlier being incarcerated by the Nazis.

    Tracy M. Sonneborn and Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor in 1946
    Back for their sixth straight summer were Ernst Mayr, his wife, Gretel, and their two almost teenage daughters. He had long been one of my heroes, not only for his ornithological expeditions in the late 1920s to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but even more because of his seminal 1942 book, Systematics and the Origin of Species. I had excitedly read it during my last year at the University of Chicago, along with the equally influential Genetics and the Origin of Species by Theo-dosius Dobzhansky, a professor at Columbia University and frequent visitor to Cold Spring Harbor to see his close friend Demerec.
    In our Nichols Lab room, Dulbecco and I soon began daily experiments to see whether UV light and X-rays inactivate phages by causing localized damage to one or more of their genes. Luria had arrived hoping that the phenomenon he observed, called multiplicity reactivation (whereby UV-damaged phage particles could somehow still multiply), was best explained by the independent replication of undamaged genetic determinants. But Renato's experiments soon began to show that the genes surviving a given UV dose replicated more slowly than their unirradiated counterparts. Conceivably there were no independently multiplying sets of phage genes. Instead they might linearly arrange on one or several