ADDENDUM to Genetic Recombination in Bacteria, A discovery Account

The following footnotes were in large part deleted from the accompanying article. The
footnote matter was less pertinent to the main readership of the Annual Reviews of Genetics.

Amplification at page 25:

New York City at that time thus had a network of institutions directed to enhancing the
intellectual and social mobility of its melting pot youth. Generationally, I was fortunately
placed: my teachers were already successors to an earlier era of patronizing condescension to
the wave of Eastern European immigrants. Many of them were Jewish; all were inculcated
with ethnic neutrality, and liberal minded tolerance: attitudes conveyed to their students. (Cf.
Brumberg "Going to America, Going to School"}.

The numerous Nobel Prizes that have emerged from New York’s science high schools and
City Colleges are further witness of the encouragement given to the talent and ambition of its
students, perhaps more than of the laboratory facilities or of the academic attainments of their
faculty at the time.

Equally important as the schools to my own education was the local Washington Heights
branch of the Carnegie- Astor New York Public Library system. These institutions symbolized
and embodied the melting pot ideology. My father was an orthodox rabbi, born and educated
in Israel, and thus had more prestige, higher intellectual aspirations for his children, and less
income than most of his neighbors. Like many other children of Jewish immigrants in New
York City of the first quarter-century, I was recruited into an efficient and calculated system
of Americanization, fostered by the rich opportunities and incentives of the educational
system. So recently arrived, the very last of the wave before the restrictions on immigration
took hold, my parents had an uncomplicated appreciation of America as a promised land. My
own political ideologies have been more consistent with than reactive to that belief.

My earliest recollections aver an unswerving interest in science, as the means by which
man could strive for understanding of his origin, setting and purpose, and for power to
forestall his natural fate of hunger, disease and death. The Jewish reading in Genesis of the
expulsion from Eden makes no presumptions of the benignity of Nature. "By the sweat of thy
brow ...." This may have been the most acceptable deviation from the orthodox religious
calling of my family tradition. These images were reinforced by the role of Albert Einstein
and Chaim Weizmann as culture heroes - heroes whose secular achievements my parents and
I could together understand and appreciate, regardless of the intergenerational conflicts evoked
by my callow agnosticism. I could not then see how the monotheistic worldview and the
central teachings of the Old Testament, and their ethical imperatives for contemporary life,
related to the tribal rituals shaped in the Diaspora. But the utopian-scientific ethic offered an
acceptable resolution. My own career could advance our shared ideals in a modern, American
idiom. Science would be a path to knowledge of the cosmic order. It would also be a means
of alleviating human suffering. The Jewish tradition is remarkably tolerant of skepticism. The
sages were more insistent that ultiomate questions be in mind than that they be answered in
the framework of a particular dogma. I have in mind, e.g., Maimonides’ teachings of the

269. aod
unknowability of God. The agnostic set of mind thus permitted, together with my reaction to
my father’s orthodoxy, carried over into my reflex responses to other sources of authoritative
knowledge. This was an integration, not a rejection of Jewish identity: what could be a more
Jewish name than "Joshua"? and I have always borne it proudly.

The library was my university as I went through grade school and junior high school.
Here was the universe of knowledge, huge but finite. The teen-ager, unencumbered by any
informed guidance and tutelage, fantasized mastering all of it. There were few books (except
perhaps musical scores) that were totally incomprehensible to me; most were merely difficult
and would eventually yield to diligent study. At that age, of course, there is little sense of the
finitude of human life. After 1938, I also had access to the Stuyvesant High School library,
and more importantly Cooper Union, for its stacks gave access to scientific journals like the
Journal of the American Chemical Society and Science magazine. The librarians did (and do)
welcome me as their most enthusiastic patron; I loved nothing better than to scan the shelves,
discipline by discipline, and try to find whatever work both challenged, and was accessible, to
me. I was also a voracious reader of contemporary fiction.

In the main text, I refer to having received Bodansky’s Introduction to Physiological
Chemistry as a Bar Mitzvah present. In my original writing, I referred to it as testimony of
my firm and precocious interest in biochemistry, crystallized already by my 13th birthday. It
was also my covenant with my father, that a career in science would be a redeeming surrogate
for the study of Torah, an alternative approach to enlightenment and truth.

I did have some opportunity for "experiment" at home, what with the toxic and explosive
chemicals that could then be purchased in chemistry sets, and over the counter at Eimer &
Amend’s, near Stuyvesant High School. Besides nearly destroying myself with looking for
the threshold of explosion in throwing metallic sodium in water, most of these were
elementary syntheses of azo dyes and the like, sometimes in concert with some high school
chums. I did make a more original study of the reaction of ferric iron with thiosulphate, but
got little satisfaction either from experiment or the published literature. Stuyvesant also
sponsored a Biology Club, and one could beg the storekeeper to use the microtome to cut
histological sections. I started a project to try to understand the effect on tissues of fixatives,
chemicals intended to coagulate and solidify tissue proteins but hopefully leave the essential
structures close to their living form. These chemicals, like formaldehyde, acetic acid, picric
acid, etc. do alter the staining properties, and I thought this interaction should give clues to
the chemical nature of tissue materials. Indeed it should; however, the use of specific
enzymes, and then of antibodies, have provided much more specific probes for this kind of
histochemistry.

The New York Museum of Science and Industry, and the NY World’s Fair (starting 1939)
were also wonderful stimuli, picturing science-technology utopias of the near future. They
offered samples of polaroid optical sheets, and of the new bakelite plastics that could be taken
home for further experiments. Above all they left a vision of "Better Things for Better Living
Through Chemistry." (DuPont’s slogan now leaves out the word chemistry -- it has become a
dirty word!)

One of the guides at the New York World’s Fair was a young psychologist, Henry Platt.
He had a vision of a means of encouraging young scientific minds, namely to offer them a
laboratory where they could conduct authentic scientific research, with appropriate equipment
and supervision. By lucky chance, he met Thomas J. Watson at the Fair, and persuaded him
to support the project. This materialized as the American Institute of Science Laboratory,
housed in an IBM showroom building on Fifth Avenue, in the shadow of the Empire State
Building. I was lucky to be accepted into that program: having graduated from High School
in January, and being obliged to wait until September to start at Columbia, it was a happy
way indeed to occupy the interval. And I was too young to work without running afoul of
the child labor laws! The AISL did indeed offer better facilities, and unbroken time, to
continue the cytochemical work I started at Stuyvesant; and I begin to focus on the chemistry
of the nucleolus. It had many of the properties of nucleic acids, but not consistent with being
pure DNA. (My own studies were hardly contributory to a solution: Brachet had already
applied ribonuclease to the histochemical identification of RNA in nucleoli. His work,
published in Nazi-occupied Brussels in November 1940, was not communicated to the U. S.
until some time later). The work did confirm my fascination with the chemistry of the cell,
and I determined to concentrate on such studies as soon as I could acquire the authentic and
mature expertise that Columbia could offer.

Before entering Columbia College, however, I had not yet met a working scientist. I can
recall having attended popular lectures by Wendell Stanley, on the chemistry of tobacco
mosaic virus; earlier, as a ten-year old, how impressed I had been by the newspaper accounts
of his having crystallized life {cf. Lila Kay}. These stories were among many accounts that
pointed to the Rockefeller Institute as the sanctum sanctorum of biomedical science.

With these cardinal inspirations, my entry to Columbia that fall was motivated by a
passion to learn how "to bring the power of chemical analysis to the secrets of life". I looked
forward to a career in medical research where such advances could be applied to problems
like cancer and the malfunctions of the brain.

I had applied to Cornell, on account of Leslie Sharp’s presence on the faculty - a name
that I knew from his Textbook of Cytology. But Cornell was in practice open only to
wealthy tuition-paying students, or to farm boys who could enroll in the N.Y. State funded
College of Agriculture. My application for a scholarship at Telluride House was rejected. I
also had City College in mind, but thought of this as a last resort, as it had limited graduate
work, and scarcely any research facilities. No one so much as hinted that I could seek work
and scholarships at other state universities. Berkeley might have been a superb possibility,
but California seemed like the other side of the moon. Financially, a commuter school like
Columbia was almost the only feasible possibility, barring a scholarship. This perhaps did not
exist for a Jewish boy from New York at that time.

Hitler had achieved power in Germany when I was eight years old, just old enough to
have no doubt about the aims of his march across Europe. Eight years of fascinated horror at
the unfolding of history followed -- the persecution of the German Jews, the flight of
intellectuals like Albert Einstein, the occupation of Austria, Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact and
partition of Poland, the fall of France, the victory of the RAF in the Battle of Britain, the
Nazi invasion of Russia, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Then, in December 1941, we
knew that the War would dominate our lives until a painful victory was won. My debt to the
Navy for sponsoring my education, and to my age peers who served in combat can hardly be
discharged. That sense of obligation, and the generational scar of the costs of unpreparedness,
of the delusions of unilateral disarmament, continue to mark my ongoing volunteer service on
consulting bodies like the Defense Science Board and the Chief of Naval Operations’
executive panel.

ADD at p. 35:

... I then wrote Tatum of my research plan (Fig. 1 ) and applied for such an accommodation.
Dean Aura E. Sevringhaus of P&S also approved such a visit as qualifying for an elective
quarter offered to medical students during their third year of study. Part of my justification
was the potential practical applications in medicine of a better understanding of bacterial
genetics. I am sure that he concurred (perhaps with different emphasis) with my own private
judgment that I could make a greater contribution to medicine as an investigator than in
clinical practice.

ADD at foot of p. 39 My arrangements to move to Stanford were completed several weeks
before I received a telephone call from a Swedish journalist probing my reactions to having
received the Nobel Prize. The timing added a bittersweet note to the award, to be receiving it
literally whilst packing to leave Madison for Palo Alto. It was hard enough to turn one’s
back on so many old friends and a fine institution, without the glare of public enquiry: "just
why are you moving?". It also ambiguated the claim that either institution might make on
behalf of that prize: this account should help make clear how much in fact belongs to
Columbia and to Yale.