James D. Watson's Eventful Woods Hole Summer
James D. Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 was one of the most important insights in the history of biology, died on November 6 at age 97. In later years, Watson’s legacy became controversial due to remarks he made that were widely criticized as racist and sexist. His obituary in the New York Times is here.
When Watson was 26 years old, he spent the summer of 1954 at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), teaching in the Physiology course at the invitation of Dan Mazia. This was one year after Watson and Francis Crick had published their seminal paper in Nature proposing the double-helix model of DNA.
At the time, their proposal was controversial. Many scientists thought the Watson-Crick model was too simple to be right. As Watson recalled at a lecture he gave at MBL in 2004, “There was no enthusiasm at all in Woods Hole about DNA. But there wasn't enthusiasm in any other place, either. You'd go to the Captain Kidd and people would think calcium was as important as DNA. It turns out calcium is almost as important as DNA, so these people weren't jerks!”
But in a story that is now MBL legend, Watson’s teaching assistant in Physiology that summer was a Caltech graduate student named Matthew Meselsen. One day Watson, Physiology faculty Sydney Brenner, and Meselsen were in the Lillie Building looking out the window, and they noticed a Physiology student named Franklin Stahl sitting under a big tree, selling gin-and-tonics to passersby. Watson sent Meselsen to go talk to him, and before long Meselsen and Stahl were brainstorming a way to test whether the double-helix model was correct. Their idea was to experimentally demonstrate how DNA makes copies of itself, which the model suggested was by semi-conservative replication. Four years later, they succeeded in this elegant demonstration at Caltech, providing convincing evidence that the Watson-Crick model was indeed right.
During that summer of ’54 in Woods Hole, however, Watson had already moved on to wonder about the structure of RNA, a molecule that seemed to have something to do with protein synthesis in the cell. So, Watson and George Gamow dreamed up the “RNA Tie Club,” a semi-serious effort to crack the code of protein synthesis. The club’s members, including Watson, Crick, Gamow, Brenner, Alex Rich and others, wore ties specially embroidered with a helix to their first meeting at a Penzance Point cottage owned by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
Scientifically, though, the club was “sort of stuck. So, having fun seemed like the best use of your time," Watson later said (hence the “Whiskey-Twisty RNA Tie Party” they threw at the Szent-Gyorgyi cottage later that summer).
Outside of the RNA club circle, many other scientific luminaries - Rosalind Franklin, George Wald, Joshua Lederberg - were also at the MBL in 1954, Watson recalled.
"That summer, everyone seemed to pass through Woods Hole," Watson later said. "In many ways it was the most eventful summer of my life."
Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for elucidating the structure of DNA. (Rosalind Franklin, whose crucial X-ray images of DNA were provided to Watson and Crick by Wilkins without her knowledge, died before this Nobel was awarded.) Watson joined the Harvard University faculty in 1955 and stayed until 1968, when he left to lead Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1968 to 2007). Watson also served as the first director of the Human Genome Project (1990-1992).
Sources:
Photos from MBL Archives
Kenney, Diana, “Feting DNA’s 50th,” Cape Cod Times, Aug. 7, 2004. This article was based on an interview with Watson and Meselsen in 2004 and Watson’s talk at MBL, which was not recorded per Watson’s request.
“The Most Beautiful Experiment: Meselsen and Stahl,” video by Science Communication Lab.
“The Semi-Conservative Replication of DNA,” video by iBiology.