During my teaching years at Madison, the University of Wisconsin, although modest in size by today's standards, was the dominant factor in the life of the capital city. The atmosphere of the university was one of calm dedication to the pursuit of knowledge. Student disturbances never occurred on any significant scale; the relationships of students, faculty, and administration were characterized by friendly respect.
Madison was an attractive city of modest size, so that the university set the tone of the whole community. To be a teacher there was most pleasant in every way. And yet it was, as I soon came to realize, a somewhat isolated and circumscribed life, with a built-in tendency to provincialism. Only the rare professor who had sufficient private resources could indulge in European or wider travel. Great art, great music, great theater were all rather inaccessible. We tended to develop insulated interests and concerns, and to be rather naively satisfied with our lot and all our surroundings.
My own personal doors and windows to the wider world had been opened a small crack when the family moved from a tiny rural village to the state capital. But these doors and windows were to be flung wide in 1932 by another and far more drastic change of scene.
For in the late fall of 1931 I had had a phone call from New York City. It was Max Mason. Would I come to New York to discuss the possibility of joining the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation?
This was not only wholly unexpected—it was very upsetting. Things were going very well at the university, and there were even rumors of a significant promotion. We had that special set of close friends which is characteristic of a couple's first married years. Our young son was happy in a good school. We loved our new house, and in particular I was so pleased with a study just then built into our third floor that I was quite content to believe that here I was as near heaven as I would ever ascend. Furthermore, we both had our roots in the Middle West, and neither of us had any interest in big cities—we knew Chicago, but as a place we disliked, and to which one went only on the occasion of a mathematics convention, or when one needed to shop at Marshall Field's or wanted to go to the theater. Why should we leave Madison for anywhere?
A request from Max, however, was not to be disregarded, nor was there sense in turning down a free trip to New York City, which I had never seen.
Arriving at the Rockefeller Foundation offices and being asked my ideas about their program in supporting science, I explained that, satisfied as I was with being immersed in the physical sciences, I was convinced that the great wave of the future in science, a wave not yet gathering its strength, was to occur in the biological sciences. The startling visions that were just then beginning to open up in genetics, in cellular physiology, in biochemistry, in developmental mechanics—these were due for tremendously significant advances.
It seemed clear to me that the Rockefeller Foundation had a great opportunity. Although they had been very active and very successful in public health and medicine, their program in the "Natural Sciences" (the term they used for everything in science other than medicine) had put major emphasis on the physical sciences, including large support for astronomy. This had been more than justified, and had paid great dividends. Indeed these dividends are still coming in, as for example from the large 1928 grant to construct the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar. But despite my personal commitment to the physical sciences, I strongly felt that the Rockefeller Foundation ought to undertake a large and long-range support of quantitative biology.
This was by no means a uniquely inspired conviction, for others had the same idea, notably the German physiologist and Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, who had written: ". . . the most important problem in biology is to obtain an understanding in physiochemical terms of the processes—and the substances which take part in these processes —that occur in the normal living cell." *
The idea that the time was ripe for a great new change in biology was substantiated by the fact that the physical sciences had by then elaborated a whole battery of analytical and experimental procedures capable of probing into nature with a fineness and with a quantitative precision that would tremendously supplement the previous tools of biology—one can almost say "the previous tool" of biology, since the optical microscope had furnished so large a proportion of the detailed evidence.
Even at that time, more than thirty-five years ago, one could identify some of the procedures and the instruments that were ready to be applied more intensively to basic biological problems. Although a practical working instrument had not yet been built, it was known that a microscope using ultraviolet light could discriminate detail about ten times as fine as that analyzable by a microscope using ordinary light. Indeed the wave aspects of quantum theory indicated that an electron microscope—although the working models were then some few years off—could reveal details at least a thousand times finer. More indirect ways of analyzing structure—extensions of the ordinary processes of seeing—were soon to be available through the use of X ray and electron diffraction studies.
In addition to new ways to see in greater and more revealing detail, there was a rich promise of new ways to separate out the constituents of complicated biological systems such as blood and the other fluids of the body. The supercentrifuge of the Swedish chemist Theodor Svedberg, for example, was already available.
When one today looks through the massive annual issue of Science which is devoted to equipment, he realizes the tremendous range and power of the instrumentation— much of it employing automatic electronic techniques— now available for quantitative experimentation in biology and medicine. This was of course not foreseeable in any detailed way during 1931-1932. But enough was discernible to convince one that biology was about to have the tools to enable it to enter upon a new era.
Although I was convinced that the Rockefeller Foundation ought to move in this direction, it seemed even clearer to me that I was not qualified to direct such a program.
I told this emphatically to the top officers of the foundation. But as I was enthusiastically convinced of the importance of moving in that direction, and because I did have the necessary background in the physical sciences, they somewhat rashly, as it seemed to me, offered me the directorship of that division of the Rockefeller Foundation dealing with all aspects of science other than professionally medical.
I took the train to Madison in a confused state of mind, excited but disturbed.
Back home, my wife and I cast up the account of pros and cons. There seemed to be so many reasons for continuing the contented and assured life we had in Madison. We recognized some real disadvantages in going to New York: we were convinced we would never really like living there; and we assumed that we would never have friends comparable to the first young group. The salary was substantially larger, but that actually did not seem important to us. We realized that there was a sort of Parkinson's Law for the personal budget, assuring that extra salary would promptly be absorbed in extra expenses.
There was, of course, the promise of wide travel, being an attraction but also a burden to a family that loved its life together. We debated the issue day after day.
Finally I said, "After all, we must make up our minds,"
and my wife replied, "Of course we have made up our minds." And of course we had, not because of desire, but because we realized that this was a greater opportunity than would ever again face us. We could not go on living with ourselves unless we met the challenge.
I think, also, that I was both realistic and accurate about my abilities and my limitations. I loved to teach, and knew that I had been successful at it. I had a good capacity for assimilating information, something of a knack for organizing, an ability to work with people, a zest for exposition, an enthusiasm that helped to advance my ideas. But I lacked that strange and wonderful creative spark that makes a good researcher.
Thus I realized that there was a definite ceiling on my possibilities as a mathematics professor. Indeed, I think I realized that I was already about as far up in that profession as I was likely to go. So this offer opened whole new possibilities for me. We began to pack.
The first days in the great city and with the wholly strange new job were confusing indeed. My wife, in fact, was literally and unpleasantly dizzy most of the time during the first few months.
We were temporarily settled in an apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. The trip down to the office, then at 61 Broadway, had to be made by subway. I got detailed instructions about which train to take and where to change, but on my very first ride, after what I feared was too long a journey between stations, I felt pressure in my ears, and realized I must be in a tunnel under the East River, heading by mistake for the wilds of Brooklyn.
I got out at the next stop, emerged to the surface, found myself in utterly strange surroundings, and in complete bewilderment got into a cab and said "61 Broadway."
I was late to work on the first morning.
The sweep of the new job was at once apparent. My first interview related to the Highlands Museum in North Carolina, the second to geophysics at Harvard, and the third to the undergraduate science curriculum of the University of Yencheng in China, an institution that was training young Chinese who wished to get subsequent medical training at the Peking Union Medical College, which had been developed under Rockefeller Foundation support.
I had been in the office less than three months—barely long enough to learn the mechanics of the procedures—when I left for Europe, taking the family along. The insular Midwesterner had to have his horizons opened up.
This was the first trip abroad for us, and there was so much to learn.
I had fair German, but only rudimentary oral French, so that language was at once a problem. We established ourselves in a pension at St. Cloud, a short commuting train ride outside Paris, where was located the European office of the Rockefeller Foundation. Even getting to the office presented a language difficulty. It was on a street only one block long—Rue de la Baume. Unless you pronounced the address to suit the extremely critical and never very accommodating judgment of the Paris taxi drivers, you found yourself being rushed to the Rue de la Pompe, way out in the 16th Arrondissement. The safeguard was to say, firmly, "Rue de la Baume, entre Percier et Courcelles," the latter being the two better-known adjoining streets.
We arrived in Paris late in April, when that marvelous city was lovely indeed.
At that time the principal office of the Rockefeller Foundation, other than the home office in New York, was in Paris. The Division of Natural Sciences, of which I was the young and inexperienced chief, had three officers more or less permanently based in Paris. Two of these were primarily concerned with fellowship activities. It was their job to travel to universities and research centers and seek out the most promising young scientists, to offer them the chance to spend a year or even two wherever in the world they could have the best opportunity to broaden and improve their training. In those days fellowship opportunities of that sort were rare indeed, and the Rockefeller Foundation appointments were highly prized and eagerly sought.
The other and more senior science officer based in Paris was Professor Lauder W. Jones, an organic chemist on leave from Princeton. The three science officers shared the responsibility of studying all requests for aid that originated in Europe, and of forwarding their recommendations to the main office in New York.
Lauder Jones was comfortable in both French and German. He hugely enjoyed travel, partly for the obvious reasons, and partly because he was a gourmet who loved to sample the best food and wines of every region of Europe. He had a fabulous memory, and when he and I went to a new city—new to me, that is—he always gave me a long lecture on its most distinguished cafes and restaurants, its food specialties, and the noteworthy local wines. He was acquainted with every maitre d'hotel, and more particularly with every cellarman, wherever we went. On my first trips with him I absorbed a great deal of knowledge about European universities, institutes, and scientific leaders, and I absorbed a great deal more besides.
During the first few months when I was based in the Paris office, I traveled with Lauder Jones to essentially all of the university centers of western and southwestern Europe, and we made particularly extensive visits in Scandinavia and in England. At the larger centers we would spend several days, meeting the local scientific leaders, learning about their facilities and the problems that chiefly concerned them, being especially interested to discover any deficiencies in equipment, personnel assistance, or support that might be preventing these leaders from realizing their full potential. We were insistent about meeting the promising younger persons, passing back to our colleagues in Paris any suggestions about attractive fellowship candidates.
At the larger institutions we made systematic departmental visits, aimed at getting an understanding of that institution's primary interests in physics, biology, chemistry, and other sciences, the character and quality of leadership, and the nature of the institution's most important resources. Going to a smaller and more remote place, we would characteristically be seeking contact with some one outstanding man, the excellence of whose work had attracted general attention. And we did indeed go to a considerable number of less famous universities—for example in the Baltic states, in Finland, and in southeastern Europe.
These first tours were almost wholly different from the later visits. The Rockefeller Foundation had a high reputation in Europe, owing largely to the qualifications of the officers who had, previous to my time, dealt with the institutions there, and also, of course, owing to the considerable financial support with which the Rockefeller Foundation had aided European scholarship. Therefore, this being the initial set of visits of a new head of a major division of the foundation, there inevitably was a considerable amount of ceremony and of official attention. We met with all of the great scientific figures of Europe and were formally entertained by many of them. To give a little of the flavor of those first days in European university centers, let me recount the program for just one day, not untypical of this first tour, but very untypical of later visits.
On May 12, 1932, Lauder Jones and I left Paris on the night train for Munich. Arriving there the next morning, we established ourselves at the splendid hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten, and we were presently called on by Professor Karl von Frisch, the Austrian-German zoologist who has since become very famous for his studies of the ways in which bees communicate. Professor von Frisch took us to visit the old Institute of Zoology, located in a monastery. The Rockefeller Foundation had made grants to enable them to build a new Institute of Zoology at Munich, as well as a new Institute of Physical Chemistry. Near a well in the courtyard he showed us some of his current experiments with bees.
At one o'clock we went to the Rathaus (the town hall) where we were officially entertained by the Oberbiirgermeister (the mayor) and the other principal city officials, along with the Gottingen physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (an old friend of mine), Von Frisch, the physical chemist Kasimir Fajans, then professor of chemistry at Munich, and others.
After the lunch we went with Sommerfeld to the Institute of Theoretical Physics, and then to the Organic Chemical Institute of the Technische Hochschule to visit the great German chemist Hans Fischer (1881-1945).
Next we went to the home of the Rector of the University of Munich for "tea," the quotes being required first because what we actually had was coffee generously laced with brandy, and second because we ended up drinking beer. My companion officer had remarked to the Rector's wife that Bavarian beer was his "weakness": to which she replied that he must correct his terminology—Bavarian beer must be his "strength." Whereupon she quite naturally ordered up some Lowenbrau.
Back at the Vier Jahreszeiten we had only time to clean up before starting off for dinner at Fajans' home. My respect for my Rockefeller Foundation colleague's intellectual and general fortitude was increased when, after cocktails and a fine dinner with two wines, he entertained Fajans' elderly mother-in-law by reciting Goethe and Schiller to her at length. And, as Pepys remarked on various similar days, so to bed.
This was, to be sure, a gala day with more ceremony than real work; but it does reflect the warmth and friendliness with which the new young Rockefeller Foundation officer was greeted at all the academic capitals of Europe.
All this was completely fascinating, but it was also hard work. We took many notes and wrote extensive diary every day—or, I should say, every night. One set of such visits did little more than furnish the basis for a continuing series of visits. And, indeed, for my first ten years with the Rockefeller Foundation, I steadily kept repeating these survey tours. During the earlier years the foreign travel was largely confined to Europe, with heavy emphasis on England, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and France; with somewhat less emphasis on Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and Italy; and with occasional trips to Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and southeastern Europe. Later there were frequent trips to Mexico, Central America, South America (especially Colombia and Brazil); and still later the travel was extended to Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and Hawaii, and to most of the principal regions in Africa south of the Sahara. In between the foreign trips there was an almost constant program of visits to the universities and colleges, big and small, in the United States.
To a person who had previously been teaching mathematics and physics in a Midwestern university in the United States, this kind of program was almost too stimulating. In addition to gradually building up a background of knowledge about scientists and institutions, I had the problem of repairing, at least in part, the deficiencies in my own scientific training.
My conviction that physics and chemistry were ripe for a fruitful union with biology, necessarily somewhat tentative and amateurish when I first accepted the post as a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, steadily became more firm and more enthusiastic as my European visits brought me into contact with scientist after scientist who expressed a desire to participate in our program.
My own training had been, almost exclusively, within the physical sciences. Clearly this was a handicap, both to me and to the program; I earnestly set about trying to minimize the difficulty. Over my first five years I followed a strict program of individual study in the various relevant areas of the biological sciences.
I started with genetics, not because I realized in 1932 the key role this subject was destined to play, but at least in part because it is a field congenial to one trained in mathematics.
I went at one after another of the areas in which we were working— cellular physiology, organic chemistry, biochemistry, developmental mechanics, the techniques for studying molecular structure, and so on—and did the best I could, subject to the disadvantage of working alone with no laboratory experience, to familiarize myself with the background material.
After World War II, when the National Academy of Sciences sought to produce a series of reports on the biological dangers from radioactive fallout, fifteen of the top geneticists of the United States were chosen to form the committee. But because of some sharp differences of opinion and viewpoint, it was difficult to choose one of these experts as an unbiased chairman of the committee. Because I knew all the men on the committee, and as they felt I was sufficiently familiar with the scientific facts involved, I was asked to serve as chairman. My long years of very amateur study were ridiculously crowned when the press, giving great attention to the report, insisted on referring to me as "the famous geneticist"!
Any division of the Rockefeller Foundation receives a steady stream of requests for aid; and each one of these had to be dealt with responsibly. In the case of any sizable request, this always involved a visit to the institution in question, to study the situation firsthand. As the group of science officers had the steadily accumulating chance to explain the nature of our interest in quantitative experimental biology, we rather rapidly expanded our knowledge of, and our personal acquaintance with, scientists—many of them physicists, biochemists, or organic chemists—who were themselves interested in biological problems.
Although this new Rockefeller Foundation program in quantitative experimental biology was not started until I assumed, in February 1932, my duties as Director of the Division of Natural Sciences, the record of grants indicates that we began rather promptly to find opportunities to finance promising research programs that were relevant to our program interests. In 1932, for example, we made the first of what turned out to be a long series of grants to the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. That institution began a series of summer symposia on quantitative biology, and these meetings played a critically important role in attracting to newer fields of biology a considerable number of brilliant young scientists, several of whom went on to furnish leadership in the new developments. This record is impressively set out in a volume published by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Also in 1932 my division of the Rockefeller Foundation made the first of a considerable series of grants to the California Institute of Technology to help support the research program under Dr. Linus Pauling. The Foundation report for 1932, using language that might have seemed a little overoptimistic at that time, stated that Pauling's "program in structural chemistry extends the technique of wave mechanics to the study of complex inorganic and organic molecules."
But in 1951 Dr. Pauling magnificently substantiated that statement by publishing his famous theoretical deduction of the a-helix structure that occurs in proteins, a result which Sir W. Lawrence Bragg has called "the first example of a correct determination of atomic arrangement in biological substances."
Soon after 1932 we began to support the researches of W. T. Astbury in England, a pioneer in the X-ray analysis of natural fibers, his early work being done on wool. And then we began making grants to a considerable number of physicists who were applying X-ray diffraction methods to the study of the structure of biologically important substances, particularly proteins.
I include a few details of the early grants made in the Rockefeller Foundation program for two reasons. First, I consider the emergence of the subject now regularly called molecular biology to be one of the greatest developments in the history of science. The triumphs to date of molecular biology have been largely in the field of genetics. But there is every reason to believe that molecular biology will now attack, and similarly conquer, other basic biological problems—those of immunology, of cellular growth and development (including cancer), and even some of the most basic aspects of the functioning of the central nervous system.
Second, I believe that the support which the Rockefeller Foundation poured into experimental biology over the quarter century following 1932 was vital in encouraging and accelerating and even in initiating the development of molecular biology. Indeed, I think that the most important thing I have ever been able to do was to reorient the Rockefeller Foundation science program in 1932 and direct the strategy of deployment of the large sums which that courageous and imaginative institution made available. It was indeed a large sum, for between 1932 and my retirement from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959 the total of the grants made in the experimental biology program which I directed was roughly ninety million dollars.
There is some purely factual basis to support the views of the preceding paragraphs. When I read Jim Watson's exciting account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, and came, page after page, to the names of the individuals who had played leading roles, I was struck by the fact that all these names had been written down by me, time after time, in my Rockefeller Foundation diary, and indeed also in recommendations I had made to the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees. As I read on in the Watson book, I jotted down the names of what seemed to be the most significant actors in the play. I wrote down thirteen names in a first and most important category, and fourteen others, who were somewhat less importantly involved. And of these two lists, every person in the former and more significant group had received assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation. All but three of the second group of fourteen had also received Rockefeller Foundation assistance.
Recently President George W. Beadle of the University of Chicago identified eighteen of the Nobel Laureates, over the period 1954 to 1965, as having been involved in one or another aspect of molecular biology. The mere fact that fifteen of the eighteen had received assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation is not especially significant; for if they are such outstanding scientists it ought to be easy to identify them for aid. So it is much more noteworthy that the Rockefeller Foundation assisted every one of the fifteen before he received the Nobel Prize, and indeed on the average over nineteen years in advance.
Two powerful streams of thought have converged to form the present discipline of molecular biology—the flow of structure studies which recognize physical laws as basic and sufficient for the understanding of the form and function of the parts of a living system, and the considerable flow of studies in the genetics of phage.* The work in phage genetics was to a great extent developed under the leadership of Max Delbriick and his associates. Delbriick was originally trained as a physicist. Watson, one of the two architects of the structure of DNA, is a biologist originally trained in phage genetics.
* Phage—in full, bacteriophage—are viruses that are found in bacteria. In part, at least, because of the simplicity of the host organism, it has been possible to analyze in considerable detail the functions and activities of phage. They may well be the most completely understood of all biological entities.
To substantiate the claim of the Rockefeller Foundation's influence upon the emergence and development of molecular biology, I have stated some facts about the record of grants to those scientists who led in this development. I can add to this some direct evidence from certain leading recipients of this aid.
Not long ago, I wrote to a number of leading scientists who had been involved in the development of molecular biology, asking for their opinion as to the most satisfactory definition of the phrase "molecular biology," and also raising some questions as to the ways in which this field came into being. In reply, Delbriick wrote me: "I can only testify as far as I am concerned and here very strongly and unambiguously: without the encouragement of the Rockefeller Foundation received in 1937 and their continuing support through the mid-forties I believe I would hardly have been able to make my contributions to biology."
As part of this same exchange of correspondence about molecular biology, I received a letter from Sir W. Lawrence Bragg, the younger of the father-and-son team that received the Nobel Prize in 1915 for their determinations of crystal structures by X-ray diffraction techniques. In this letter Sir Lawrence said, "concerning the part the Rockefeller Foundation played in helping the Cambridge School: Your help came at a vital time just before the war when I was trying to find some way of supporting Perutz's work [Max F. Perutz was the chairman of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge] and it was continued after it. This school was responsible for DNA, for the first protein structures, for the first understanding of virus structure, and for work on muscle. The extent to which the X-ray analysis of protein was pioneer work is shown by the fact that only now, twelve years after the trail was beaten at Cambridge and the Royal Institution, has any other research centre succeeded in getting a protein 'out.' I am allowing myself to put this so strongly just because I think that the Foundation's help made an outstanding difference to these advances." Perutz has also written me, ". . . the Cambridge work on the structure of large molecules would never have got off the ground but for the Foundation's support."
The Rockefeller Foundation has, I firmly believe, a solid and authoritative basis for taking satisfaction in the role it played in emphasizing, over a period of over a quarter of a century, the support of research in quantitative biology.