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

discovery early in September that UV-killed bacteria and fungi could be resurrected by visible light. For many preceding months Keiner had also been plagued by ir reproducible results that he thought might be due to variations in the temperatures to which his UV-exposed bacterial cultures were exposed. Just after Dulbecco and I left Cold Spring Harbor, Keiner found that light, not temperature, was the uncontrolled variable messing up his experiments. Luria did not show Kelner's letter to Dulbecco, only casually mentioning the result to him, and Dulbecco made no connection to his own irreproducible results.
    We were then all gathered in front of a blackboard in Szilard and Novick's lab, located in the former synagogue of an abandoned Jewish orphanage in a run-down neighborhood adjacent to the University of Chicago. As a physicist, Leo knew that visible light alone was unlikely to furnish sufficient energy to reverse UV damage. But he was intrigued to learn from Renato that visible light had no effect on free phages. It only worked after the damaged phages had entered their host bacteria cells. Immediately Leo began to speculate whether UV-induced mutations would also be reversed by visible light under such circumstances. To answer this question, he and Novick did experiments over the next six months that showed UV-created mutations were “cured” by visible light in the same proportions that visible light reactivated UV-killed bacteria.
    Though I was also finding some of my “indirect effect” experiments difficult to reproduce, Chicago was not the place to say so. It was only just before Christmas that I realized that my IU X-rays were producing not only very short-lived free radical molecules but also much more stable peroxide-like intermediates that persisted after the X-ray machine was turned off. Not anticipating this, I had not been controlling the time from X-ray exposure that I did my assays for viable phages. My experiments continued, more confusing than enlightening, until our next Szilard-inspired get-together in Bloomington, just prior to a meeting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory at which Luria and Delbrück were to speak.
    Initially Luria had wanted me to make a presentation as well, believing that my results indicated that what had been described as direct X-ray effects were actually caused not by ionizations directly breaking vital phage components but by the effects of reactive chemicals such as free radicals generated by X-rays within the phage particles. Szilard, however, sitting in the front row of our Bloomington gathering, unsentimentally tore that argument apart. He focused on my observation that purified phage particles suspended in nonprotective media lost their ability to kill bacteria every time they were inactivated. All too clearly I saw that I must do more experiments before I ventured again to speak even informally.
    My bungled presentation was then followed by a slapstick exchange between Szilard and Novick. Novick was to present their seemingly paradoxical data produced following mixed infection of bacteria by the closely related phages T2 and T4. Sensing that no one followed Novick's argument, Szilard stood up to compound the confusion. Unlike me, however, they truly had something important to say in explaining results that had baffled Delbrück three years earlier. In the end Max had to clarify what they jointly failed to get across. Following mixed infection by T2 and T4, some progeny particles had the T2 genotype but the T4 phenotype, and vice versa. In fact, Leo and Aaron had pulled off some neat science. At the time, Max wrongly thought it elegant but not very important, and he urged Leo and Aaron not to publish their results. Only two years later did they write them up for Science.
    Photoreactivation discussions dominated the Oak Ridge meeting. Albert Keiner talked about results that he had rushed to publish upon learning that Renato Dulbecco also had found photoreactivation. Renato,