Whatever truth there was in some of the criticism, most of it was disingenuous. Science has always been intensely competitive, always marked by heated battles over priority, about who got there first. Among many others, the bitter rivalries of Newton and Leibniz, Lavoisier and Priestley, and Edison and Tesla come quickly to mind. Sir Howard Florey, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, observed that priority is an essential concept to scientists. “Like geographical explorers of old,” he said, “the scientist likes to be the first to make a discovery, the first to do something.” Such competitiveness is scarcely unique to science, of course; it is also integral to love, to the arts, sports, law, politics, and business. Fierce competition, in short, is part and parcel of any field of stake or moment.
Competition is as ancient as the hunt; the same fire that rouses the thrill of pursuit is kept kindled by the joy of victory. There is pleasure in the run, of course, but the high glory is in being first across the line. The biologist Richard Lewontin put it succinctly: “What every scientist knows, but few will admit, is that the requirement for great success is great ambition. Moreover, the ambition is for personal triumph over other men, not merely over nature. Science is a form of competitive and aggressive activity, a contest of man against man that provides knowledge as a side product.” The exhilaration of winning is lashed to the rush of discovery.
Watson’s portrayal of his fellow scientists is on occasion harsh, but he is also brutally honest about his own behavior. As Medawar writes, “He betrays in himself faults graver than those he professes to discern in others.” A lack of tact may betray a friendship, but too much tact may betray the truth. In fact, tact has never been Watson’s long suit, but then he has never claimed otherwise. (The editor of Nature put reviewers’ offended sensibilities and claims of injudicious writing in perspective: “If, of course, his picture is seriously awry, then other people are free to protest and even have a duty to do so. It is not enough simply to resolve never again to invite Professor Watson to tea and biscuits.”) Matt Ridley has put it well: “What a much duller—and safer—history DNA would have had without Watson stirring things up.”
For those of us who read The Double Helix when we were young, however, whatever offense Watson may have caused his fellow scientists was of little consequence; what mattered was the idea that the most famous biologist in the world was saying that science was fun; that science was about asking important questions and taking seriously one’s own intellectual life. The book was a classic adventure tale brilliantly told: a zigzag quest, wrong turns, setbacks, new leads, and hot pursuit—part Robert Louis Stevenson, part James Barrie. There was treasure to be found, enemies to fight, exciting terrain to cover, mishaps aplenty, and a shot at glory. It was irresistible.
Impatience in the pursuit of something great, Watson made abundantly clear, was more virtue than vice. Instead of society’s usual, more disparaging take on this particular aspect of temperament, Watson was actually saying that speed and passion were essential to the chase. Instead of entreaties to slow down, be patient, be circumspect, someone was acknowledging that impatience is the obverse of exuberance and that exuberance was a good, even necessary thing. “Damn the men of measured merriment!” Martin Arrowsmith had exclaimed. “DAMN their careful smiles!” The ghost of Sinclair Lewis’s driven protagonist had found its niche in The Double Helix. Intemperance, when coupled with the discipline of scientific thought, was given a far more kindly reading than it usually gets. Francis Crick wrote later that Watson “just wanted the answer, and whether he got it by sound methods or flashy ones did not bother him a bit. All he wanted was to get it as quickly as possible.… In some ways I can see that we acted insufferably … but it was not all due to competitiveness. It was because we passionately wanted to know the details of the structure.”
Watson and Crick knew that what they were looking for was as important as it gets, and they did not, or could not, rein themselves in. Maurice Wilkins, their colleague and competitor at King’s College, London, was, on the other hand, decidedly lower-key than his Cambridge compatriots. “Maurice continually frustrated Francis by never seeming enthusiastic enough about DNA,” wrote Watson. “Francis felt he could never get the message over to Maurice that you did not move cautiously when you were holding dynamite like DNA.”
Science, as depicted by Watson, was fast and exciting. It was not a calling for the indifferent, the slow, or the faint of heart. Science needed reason and discipline, of course, but it also required passion; it wanted commitment; it was cutthroat, it was human. “Our characters were imperfect,” Watson said not long ago, “but that’s life.”
When I first thought about writing about exuberance, thirty years after having read The Double Helix as an undergraduate, I hoped to capture some of its importance by interviewing several scientists, most of whom I knew personally to be highly exuberant; a few others I knew only through their work. My interest was not in demonstrating that exuberance is essential to good science—clearly it is not; many outstanding scientists are introverted and not demonstrably enthusiastic, and for many others patience and dispassion are essential to the excellence of their work—rather, I hoped to show that for many scientists exuberance plays a critical role in how they think about and actually do their work.
Most of the scientists I interviewed were biologists. In addition to James Watson, I interviewed Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on unconventional “slow viruses”; Robert Gallo, discoverer of the first human retrovirus, codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, and the only scientist to win the Lasker Award, which is often described as the American Nobel Prize, for both basic and clinical research; Samuel Barondes, a pioneer in the study of a class of proteins called galectins and a leading researcher into the genetic causes of mental illness; Joyce Poole, the scientific director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya; Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist who discovered new ways of understanding how elephants communicate; and Hope Ryden, who studies and writes about wildlife, including beavers, mustangs, and bobcats. I also interviewed two astrophysicists, Robert Farquhar and Andrew Cheng, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
James Watson was an obvious scientist to interview about exuberance. When I asked him to rate both himself and Francis Crick on a hypothetical ten-point scale of exuberance, he said emphatically, “Ten!” then quickly added, “And then some!” He described exuberance, in his staccato, stream-of-consciousness way, as “an obsessive fascination, like religious fanaticism. You have to talk about it. Exuberance flows, it is never slimy. It is close to delirium. There is no feedback, no restraint, no bringing you back.”
The greatest thing, Watson said, is the exuberance of sharing beauty or discovery with someone else: “It is necessary to share it. You run around and tell everyone. Shy people are seldom exuberant. It is a state of mind which can only be relieved by communicating the idea. If you are delirious, you have to share it. You have to demonstrate it to other people.” When asked if he thought there could be such a thing as solitary exuberance, he said, “Perhaps. I don’t know. You have to demonstrate it to other people.” The major disadvantage of exuberance, from his perspective, was that “bad people can be exuberant,” which makes them more dangerous than they would otherwise be, because they are more persuasive and energetic. In its most extreme form, he says, exuberance is “associated with madness.” It can also, he added, “prove too much for your friends to put up with.”
When he and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, Watson recalls, both were “bubbling over with exuberance. We had to share our ideas, we had to talk about it. It was a happy state, virtually delirious.” (A scientist who was at the Cavendish in the weeks following Watson and Crick’s discovery used similar language to describe their mental state: “Both young men are somewhat mad hatters who bubble over about their new structure,” Gerard Pomerat wrote in his diary at the time. “The two chaps,” he added, were “certainly not lacking …
in either enthusiasm or ability.”) Watson relates in The Double Helix that Crick constantly “would pop up from his chair, worriedly look at the cardboard models, fiddle with other combinations, and then, the period of momentary uncertainty over, look satisfied and tell me how important our work was. I enjoyed Francis’s words, even though they lacked the casual sense of understatement known to be the correct way to behave in Cambridge.” The next morning, he said, “I felt marvelously alive when I awoke.” Crick, meanwhile, had “winged into the Eagle [a Cambridge pub] to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”
Watson places positive traits such as curiosity and exuberance (which he, like nearly everyone else I interviewed, believes to be more innate than learned) within an evolutionary context. When asked by the novelist Melvyn Bragg why scientists do science, he responded: “I just like to know why things happen and I think that is probably something we have inherited. Curiosity about things, why things happen, can prepare you for how you live in the world. It has great survival value, this sort of curiosity and it is a question of how our curiosity is directed. Many people are very curious about things, are obsessed about things, which you could say have no consequence.” (A mind focused on the most critical scientific issues—DNA, cancer, sequencing the human genome, and neuroscience—has marked Watson’s scientific career. He has lived James Merrill’s injunction that “it’s not the precious but the semiprecious one has to resist.”)
In his Liberty Medal address in Philadelphia on the first Independence Day of the new millennium, Watson spoke about the survival value of the pursuit of happiness, and the importance of having constraints upon that happiness: “Our various brains have been programmed by our genes to initiate actions that keep us alive. Most individuals are only fleetingly happy, say, after we have solved a problem, either intellectual or personal, that then lets our brain rest for a bit. Equally important, happy moods also reward higher animals after they make behavioral decisions that increase their survivability.” But, he went on to say, “these moments of pleasure best be short-lived. Too much contentment necessarily leads to indolence … it is discontent with the present that leads clever minds to extend the frontiers of human imagination.” Happiness, joy, and exuberance exist because they lure us onward and give us respite from our pursuits, but too much pleasure slackens the desire to explore, compete, and make a difference. “Every successful society,” Watson emphasized, “must possess citizens gnawing at its innards, and threatening conventional wisdom.” He concluded his remarks, “As long as we see happiness ahead, the worries and faults of today are bearable. So in the perfect world we want some day to exist, humans will be born free and die almost happy.”
The biologist Robert Pollack has observed that Watson is “always a student, always ready to hear a new idea, always ready to get the picture, always ready to be excited.… [He has] an absolute enthusiasm for ideas.” His enthusiasm is infectious, albeit yoked to occasional irascibility and brusqueness. The British scientist Lionel Crawford wrote of the intimidating yet inebriating effect of working in Watson’s lab, fending off barbs and impatience, keeping up a relentless pace: “It was not only in the lab that patience was in short supply, it was also true of the seminar room. In a seminar by Julian Davies, I remember Jim suddenly standing up about halfway through and saying ‘That’s enough of that crap Julian, you’ve got another ten minutes and just give us the facts.’ ” It was “very different from the deferential attitude of the seminar audiences [Crawford] had been used to in England.” But “together with the impatience came a great deal of encouragement and enthusiasm. This is what made our summers in Jim’s lab exciting, sometimes exhilarating, and finally exhausting.”
When he turned seventy, Watson told a gathering at Harvard that he thought it would be “very depressing, but it’s not really, because there’s so much exciting still to hear.” At seventy-five he remains an unalloyed enthusiast: optimistic, exuberant, and passionately involved in both science and life. Conversations with Watson gallop through an unbounded range of topics and iconoclastic opinions: the idiocy of one scientist or another, tennis, things Irish, things Scottish, beautiful women, the value of green tea, science (always), the idiocy of most psychiatrists, why fat people are happy, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (always), his plan to tell the Pope that if saints get credit for their miracles so should scientists, a fiendish delight in Francis Crick’s notion that everyone should be declared legally dead after the age of eighty-five, the satisfactions of revenge, and whether or not, somewhere, we have the new Copernicus in our midst and are unaware of it.
Watson, in full pursuit of an idea, is an unnerving mix of exuberant intuition and deadly logic: one side of his brain lopes ebulliently from thought to thought and the other side applies a quick, remorseless logic to ill-conceived ideas. He is a man of enormous passion. His idealistic but practical mind and heart are drawn far more to the future than to the past. At a scientific meeting in Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, Watson talked about the role of passion and reason in the Scottish Enlightenment and touched upon his own lowland Scots ancestry. Passion in the service of reason, he said, was what his scientific life had been all about: it had been at the heart of how a problem in chemistry, the structure of DNA, could be solved by a birdwatcher (himself) and a physicist (Crick). His life, he said, had been all about curiosity and passion.
The next evening, at a book signing in Virginia, Watson’s curiosity and restlessness were at full throttle: yes, the double helix was important; yes, the Human Genome Project was important; but How does the brain work? How do we cure mental illness? How does the golden plover navigate? His enthusiasm for understanding how the world works is palpable and he remains a case study in his own Fourth Rule for How to Succeed in Science: “Have Fun and Stay Connected. Never do anything that bores you.” His experience in science, he says, is that “someone is always telling you to do things that leave you flat. Bad idea.”
In his most recent book, DNA: The Secret of Life, Watson ends on an optimistic, indeed a near-quixotic note. “I may not be religious,” he writes, “but I still see much in scripture that is profoundly true.” He quotes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—“if I understand all mysteries but have not love, I am nothing”—and says, “Paul has in my judgment proclaimed rightly the essence of our humanity. Love, that impulse which promotes our caring for one another, is what has permitted our survival and success on the planet.… So fundamental is it to human nature that I am sure that the capacity to love is inscribed in our DNA—a secular Paul would say that love is the greatest gift of our genes to humanity.” Love, certainly, but perhaps exuberance and a passionate curiosity as well.
No one would agree more on the importance of passion in science than Robert Gallo, who for many years was the chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute and is now director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland. When asked to define “exuberance,” he says that it is, for him, “an over-average bite of life … a zest for fun, an overoptimistic view of one’s prospects, an overreaction or hypersensitivity to things one does or is involved in.” Being exuberant, he believes, “is linked to openness, confidence, overconfidence, and a delight in one’s work. It may favor (all things being roughly equal) discovery and, perhaps to the same extent, making mistakes. Its role in research may be inclining some spirits to try to open a field even when they do not always realize it.”
Gallo draws upon Jacques Barzun’s discussion of Romanticism in From Dawn to Decadence, comparing Barzun’s concept of passionate love with the intensity some scientists bring to their work. “His concept of this love,” Gallo says, “is not only Eros but also much more, crystallizing on the loved one much imagery and the almost perfect joy in its presence. He said it favors youthful feelings, naiveness. Is this a form of exuberance? Aren’t some this way with their work in science? Would t
his lead to more imagination? A tendency to love hypothesis as much as the answer, if a scientist was bent this way.” The role of exuberance in other aspects of scientific research, he adds—with considerable personal experience to back it up—may be to supply inspirational leadership, “as long as the leader is not decapitated.”
At a more personal level, Gallo—who describes himself as “very highly exuberant” and once told an interviewer that he did not wear shoes with laces because he couldn’t wait to get to work and tying his shoes would slow him down too much—talks about exuberance in his own life: “Hyperenthusiasm, the joy of competitiveness, not only with colleagues but with scientific riddles, the great fun in telling your colleagues about your work, the feeling on occasion of ‘knowing’ one will be right, the energy that fills you, is central to what propels me but I do not know why. Honestly, it is not just winning a race. It is much more internal. The same feelings tell me [even] if I am wrong I will eventually get there.”
Resilience is something Gallo understands well and, more than almost anyone I know, personifies. For years he was the subject of unrelenting journalistic and federal investigation into a dispute about contaminated laboratory samples and claims of primacy in the discovery of the AIDS virus, a dispute that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, near-continuous assaults on his character, and a scandalous number of hours away from his scientific work. (All charges against him were ultimately dropped and a closely related case against a collaborator was dismissed with the pointed comment from the federal appeals board, “One might anticipate from all this evidence, after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing. That is not the case.”) Recently the codiscoverer of the AIDS virus, Luc Montagnier, acknowledged that cell cultures in both his and Gallo’s laboratories had been contaminated. This critical issue of dispute is discussed further in the chapter notes in a description of events agreed upon by the two scientists.