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Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
July 28 - August 3, 2005 Edition
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North Road: Uncoiling the double helix July 28, 2005 Milton and Virginia were old friends. We saw each other often. In the old days we came and went in each other’s homes all the time. They read or listened to books constantly and remembered most of what they read. Each could quote poetry at the drop of a hat, some of it, I think, neither one had seen or heard in years. Virginia was a particularly good writer and critic. She had a career before she married, writing radio scripts for dramas. Milton was a detail man, loved a good argument or negotiation of a difficult conflict. Five years after Virginia’s death he has attained serenity under thoughtful care at Long Hill in Edgartown. As they grew older they seemed ever more anxious to share with us and often pressed upon us something of value to borrow with no thought of return. Books had been their currency and that’s what they loaned out most. Several years ago while still in his own home, Milton went to one of his bookcases and pulled out a faded 1960’s edition of James Watson’s “The Double Helix”. “Here,” he said to me, “You must read this if you haven’t already. I like it because of his humor. He tells a good story. You’ll like it too.” I nearly failed physics and chemistry in college. Returning to Wesleyan as a senior from my tour in the Army, I had the awful luck to take physics with the entering freshman. The professor told me I might as well not apply to any of the good medical schools because of my grade at the end of the year. Not only was I humiliated, but I was pissed. I never could see the connection between the extravagant experiments Professor “Moth” Eaton ran at the front of the amphitheater with my future life as a healing physician. When I was accepted at Cornell, I was tempted to throw a stink bomb in Eaton’s next freshman class. In any case, Milton’s generosity with Watson’s book brought back some of my old feelings of inadequacy, which were still dormant not too far beneath my attempt to remain cool. It was hard to say no as Milt opened a page to show me a picture of the young Watson smiling in Stockholm receiving his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for discovering the molecular structure (a double helix) of DNA. I took the book, opened it that night and read 25 pages without enthusiasm or anything like an epiphany. “When are you going to return Milton’s book?” Mary Ann asked. Every week or two it would be moved to dust the table and she would repeat the question. “You know you’ve had that book a couple of months now. You’d better take it back.” “Milton read that thing 30 years ago. He doesn’t want it right back. I still want to read it.” Each time I said that, I felt guilt, the guilt of a college boy failing in physics, the guilt of a phony medical student having gotten into Cornell by some devious means, the guilt of a modern doctor who didn’t know beans about DNA, let alone its complex physical structure. I had peeked at the photograph of its model in the center of the damned book, which increased the guilt of a little boy who had taken something from his father on false pretenses without the slightest intention of following through with a bargain. I slept poorly some nights. I wondered why. One particular stretch in June I began to tell the time by when the birds first chirped in the morning. I knew it was only 4 am when the light was still absent and the birds were quiet, except for a heron or gull down in the marsh. I knew it was 10 minutes past four when the sky began to look the slightest bit tinged with gray out the window. Of course I had to make allowances for how close we were getting to the summer equinox. I knew for certain it was 4:30 when the sparrows and the finches and the mourning doves were calling for more thistle seed at the feeder near our bedroom window. At the crack of waking, I count the number of hours and minutes slept. My eyes can’t yet focus on the hands of the clock; has it been six hours or only five hours? That’s not enough sleep. What am I going to do all day? I began thinking of the after-lunch nap even before I put on my glasses to be sure I had read the clock correctly. I’ve been known to be a whole hour off. I got up once at 5:30 and didn’t realize the early time until I overheard on Channel 10 from Providence an interview between a minister and six prostitutes whom he was trying to lure off the streets down around the Rhode Island Hospital. I never watch early morning talk television before 6:30. The answer, of course, to my insomnia was to take up that damnable book. I’d learn what James Watson did and what this DNA structure was all about if it killed me. Besides, my doctor had told me never to stay lying sleepless in bed. You know, don’t you, she’d said to me while I perched on the end of her exam table, my sciatic nerve screaming to be relieved off the table, you know, don’t you, that your brain stem regulates your sleep pattern and you’re teaching it to stay awake while you’re lying there, thrashing and turning about in the bed. Get up and teach it that awake is walking or sitting in a chair, keeping your mind clear to read a book. Don’t watch TV though. The light stimulates your melatonin to turn off and wakes you up for real. So I took up Watson. I followed him from a lab in the States to a lab at Cambridge, England. I was mildly scandalized by the looseness with which he kept his contracts from the institutions funding his grants to study abroad. I even allowed he was human enough to sin having a good time in Paris and on the shores of the Mediterranean where Science seemed far removed. I was shocked at the petty competitiveness between him and Linus Pauling. Pauling the giant, Watson, the midget. They actually concealed scientific data from one another, mostly Watson hiding on Pauling. There were all kinds of intrigues. The leading woman scientist in the saga of discovering the structure for DNA was considered beneath contempt. Her work of years was denigrated, I thought, by virtue of her inability to see the genius of Watson’s theories and calculations. No more of her x-ray diffraction data. Back to modeling with Tinker Toys went the boys (Watson and friends). Finally the damn model was finished to huzzahs from all the science crowd of the world. Pauling was a disappointed man. He stands tall yet. He retained his grace. The world goes on richer by far because the Tinker Toy hot shots solved the puzzle. Watson rose like cream in a bottle. Sleep returned after each hour of reading. I finished the book in a week. I smiled. And finally, I could look Mary Ann in the eye and tell her I’d returned the book to Milton safely, as good as I got it and I the better in more ways than one. |
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