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 Watson
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Leave it to the miracles of the Information Age. You can "talk" to just about anyone.
You can, for example, "chat" on line with a Nobel Prize laureate with Hoosier connections, a man who many consider one of the most influential individuals of the 20th century.
That's what an international audience got to do last week when Indiana University graduate James D. Watson "met" with people joined in a virtual conversation. They talked through the medium of their individual computers in a Yahoo! chat room.
The cyber opportunity to communicate with Watson March 24 was part of Time magazine's continuing on-line quest to identify the 100 most important people of the 20th century. Watson has been chosen a candidate in Time's "scientists and thinkers" category, primarily because of his partnership with others in the discovery of the double-helical structure of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule, for which he and collaborator Francis Crick received the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Watson dispensed some advice to the cyber assemblage in answer to a student who asked about academic mentors. "As a graduate student," he said in the chat room, "your best bet is to work for a young person who's going to be important."
The Nobel laureate's additional advice to the university student: "Avoid mature sciences. Pick an area in which there are not too many facts."
Watson, who received his Ph.D. in 1950 from IU, spoke from what seemed to be personal history. Late in the 1940s, he was one of three brilliant young scientists working in the attic of IU Bloomington's Kirkwood Hall. They had only a portable air conditioning unit to ward off the sweltering heat of southern Indiana summers. In every sense of the word, the attic was a hothouse of activity.
All three would eventually win Nobel Prizes.
Watson had entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated at 19. Then he arrived in Bloomington for graduate study.
The top floor of IU's Kirkwood Hall was a rarefied atmosphere. In the attic lab, Watson's companions in scientific research included faculty member Dr. Salvador Luria, who, in 1969 would share the Nobel Prize in medicine for the study of the mechanism of virus infection in living cells.
Another was Dr. Renato Dulbecco, a post-doctoral bacteriologist. Dulbecco received widespread publicity in late 1949 for his discovery that an ultra-violet short wave would kill a specific virus, and that a hardly visible light ray would bring it back to life. The discovery was made in connection with research being conducted by Luria and Hermann J. Muller, an IU faculty member who had received the Nobel Prize in 1946 for his discovery of the production of mutations from X-ray irradiation.
Dulbecco went on to receive his Nobel Prize in 1975, along with two associates, for research involving the interaction between tumor viruses and genetic material.
Helen Arthur, a former lab assistant to Luria who later served as director of physical facilities and lab services at the IUB Department of Biology, remembers Watson as a curly haired, gangly youth who, as a child, had been a member of the television program Quiz Kids, produced at NBC's Merchandise Mart studios in Chicago. The show was a kind of "college bowl" for very precocious youngsters.
At IU, Watson was "a genius, quiet, a listener," recalled Arthur.
Luria would arrive at the lab in the mornings and don an immaculate white lab coat. The routine was always the same, Arthur said. Luria, Dulbecco and Watson would engage in what was Luria's version of meditation.
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As a teaching assistant, Watson took undergrads on morning bird watches and was one of the founders of a tongue-in-cheek organization called the Society for the Promulgation of Unimportant Information.
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"Following Luria's lead, the two others would walk around and around a pipe that ran from floor to ceiling for as long as a half hour, and then Luria would lay out the work for the day," said Arthur.
During his years at IU, Watson lived in a room in Rogers Center (now called the John W. Ashton Center), located on the southwest corner of 10th and Union streets.
Sears Crowell, IUB professor emeritus of biology, remembers the bird loving side of Watson. Ornithology had been one of the young man's serious academic interests, but he chose to work with Luria and Dulbecco instead. Still, he didn't entirely forget about the birds.
Crowell taught an elementary course in ornithology, and Watson was his teaching assistant.
"He would take the students out for early morning walks," Crowell said. And the two had another entirely different activity.
"Watson and I and another graduate student formed an organization called the Society for the Promulgation of Unimportant Information," Crowell related. "This involved cutting out a clipping about something or other and posting it so others could see it. We were interested in that sort of foolishness at that time," he explained
Watson returned to the campus in February 1992 and spoke at the Indiana Memorial Union's Alumni Hall. The hall was packed."I was amazed and amused because he said some humorous things," Arthur said." I had never seen that side of him before."
After leaving IU, Watson joined the Cavendish Laboratories at the University of Cambridge (England) where he teamed up with Francis Crick. Others were at work on the same research problem--to determine the structure of DNA. They included Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling.
All of them were close to the solution. Apparently, Wilkins showed Watson an X-ray diffraction picture of DNA that had been taken by Franklin, and Watson later wrote that the X-ray provided several of the vital helical parameters.
On Feb. 28, 1953, Francis Crick walked into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and announced that "we had found the secret of life."
According to Time's biographical sketch:
"That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure--a 'double helix' that can 'unzip' to make copies of itself--confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's heredity information."
Franklin died in 1958 at age 37. The Nobel Prize isn't given posthumously, and so it went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins.
"It was Watson who fit the final piece into place. He was in the lab, pondering cardboard replicas of the four bases that, we now know, constitute DNA's alphabet: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. He realized that 'an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair.' These pairs of bases could thus serve as the rungs on the twisting ladder of DNA."
Watson received an honorary doctorate from IU in 1963, and his memoir, The Double Helix, was a best seller in 1968.
Related Link:
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/time100/scientist/index.html
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