Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science by James D. Watson Page A

bombs, they would have all the power they needed to conquer the world. Secretly Leo assigned his patent to the British Admiralty, revealing it to close friends only after the uranium atom was experimentally split in Berlin in 1939. Until then Leo had incorrectly targeted first beryllium and then indium as elements likely to produce the necessary chain reaction.
    Immediately Leo tried to stop his physicist friends outside the Third Reich from publishing more on uranium fission. But that cat was let out of the bag when, against Leo's advice, Frederic Joliot in Paris soon published his findings that uranium-235 fission generates two neutrons, not one. Leo then became obsessed with seeing that the United States moved ahead as fast as possible toward the construction of atomic weapons. It was he who first composed Einstein's famous fall 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt and, a year later, co-opted Enrico Fermi, the 1938 Italian Nobel Prize winner, by then a refugee at the Columbia University Physics Department, to work on uranium fission. Two years later, they moved from Columbia to the University of Chicago, where their nuclear reactor first went critical in early December 1942. Judged too independent to be part of any military-led team, Leo, unlike Fermi, was kept from the subsequent bomb-making activities at Los Alamos by General Leslie Groves, then in charge of the Manhattan Project. But as soon as the first bombs went off, Leo worked incessantly to see that civilians—not the military—were in control of the Atomic Energy Commission.
    Now Leo had set his sights on cracking the genetic basis of life. After taking the 1947 phage course, he saw the need for frequent assemblies of bright people to inform him of new facts to chew on. That Bloomington weekend, however, provided no take-home lesson, either from my brief presentation on X-ray-killed phages or from Renato's much more sophisticated experiments on UV-inactivated phages. The most important new results presented, in fact, came from Szilard and Novick themselves. Over the past six months they had become convinced that despite Max Delbrück's very public reservations, Joshua Lederberg's 1946 demonstration of genetic recombination in E. coli was correct. Gleefully Leo wrote both Max Delbrück and Salva Luria that he would eat his hat if someone was able to disprove his and Aaron's new experiments. In fact, they were soon to find out that Lederberg had already published similar confirmatory data.
    After Szilard and Novick went back to Chicago, Renato returned to experiments where he began seeing irreproducibility, a problem never before encountered in Luria's lab. Agar-coated plates expected to show statistically equivalent numbers of multiplying phages often yielded wildly disparate counts. Then, on a mid-November afternoon, he noticed the agar plates on the top of piles had more phage plaques. Plates lower in the piles, less exposed to the recently installed fluorescent lights, had fewer plaques. This observation was confirmed the next day, telling Renato that visible light reverses much UV damage, an effect soon called photoreactivation. Immediately I tested whether photoreactivation occurred with X-ray-damaged phages but was disappointed to discover only a small, possibly insignificant effect. Salva, then at Yale for a week of lectures, only learned of the light bombshell when Renato and I met him just before Thanksgiving at Szilard's second get-together at the University of Chicago. Immediately Salva feared that his past multiplicity reactivation results might have been badly compromised by inadvertent light exposure. But Renato put his mind at ease, pointing out that Salva already had reproduced multiplicity reactivation under light conditions insufficient for photo-reactivation.
    In turn, Salva reminded Renato of a letter from Cold Spring Harbor, from Albert Keiner, which had arrived in Bloomington just before he left for Yale. In it Keiner excitedly told Luria of his