Watson and DNA by Victor K. McElheny

Author:Victor K. McElheny [VICTOR K. MCELHENY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

LIMITS

In the years after he became full-time director of what he called “DNA Town,” Watson pushed out in many directions. One place he failed was in his hope to acquire an estate called Fort Hill, an antiquated great stone pile atop a bluff on Lloyd Neck with a dramatic view of Long Island Sound, a good 20 minutes’ drive from the laboratory. The lab was using it while the owning family debated how to dispose of it. As trustee Charles Stevens remembered, “It was beautiful. He loved it. Jim was dying for that house, but he couldn’t take it unless it was endowed.”86He tried many expedients, including the establishment of a center for cancer epidemiology to be headed by John Cairns or Julian Peto from England or Malcolm Pike from California. They all fought shy of the idea. Jim planted one of his young scientists, Ronald McKay, his wife, Jill, and their small daughter, Ramah, in a lonely apartment in the Fort Hill mansion.

In the summer of 1979, he installed a team of scientists, including Martin Raff and Bruce Alberts, at Fort Hill for six weeks so that they could draft Molecular Biology of the Cell without the distractions of family. Alberts remembered it as a tense “summer from hell.” Watson had had the vision to launch the project but dreamed it could be done in a single summer (it took years). Jim’s draft of chapter 1 was well written, but his colleagues decided it was far too long. Jim stopped writing. Alberts’s wife and children were housed in a “shack” without air conditioning in the village of Cold Spring Harbor. “It was the hardest thing I ever tried. . . . Hellishly hot, 150 hours a week. . . . It took a couple of months to recover . . . That’s never happened before or since.”87

Site map of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, by Jim Duffy.

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