Blinded by Science

An exclusive excerpt from Watson's new memoir, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.

In the years ahead, Harvard plans to spend billions of dollars on a massive science complex in Allston. But James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and former director of the Human Genome Project, has bad news: Unless the university changes course, Allston will be the greatest waste of money Harvard has ever known.

by James Watson
September / October 2007, Page 102

Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images The author in London, May 2005

“THE BEST OF ACADEMIA NO LONGER WILL COME TO HARVARD BECAUSE IT IS HARVARD. ...PAYING TOP SALARIES IS WELL WITHIN THE MEANS OF THE LARGEST UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENT ON EARTH—PROVIDED THAT THE ALMOST SOVIET-STYLE FANTASY OF THE ALLSTON EXPANSION IS ABANDONED.”

Thirty years after I left Harvard, it would please me to report that the state of science at Harvard has righted itself in a manner befitting the world’s richest and most influential university. The relatively short reign of Lawrence Summers as its 27th president, however, suggests that Harvard is once again headed in the wrong direction. Nothing may have distinguished Summers’ time in office like the leaving it, but his proposals for the future of science—which have yet to be modified by his successor, Drew Faust—figured more critically in his vexed relations with the faculty than any clumsy words that marked the beginning of his ultimate undoing.

Despite Summers’ professed desire to move science onto Harvard’s front burner, as his vision for the future of Harvard science became clear, many leading scientists on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) grew worried. Prominent among the uneasy was Tom Maniatis, who came back from Caltech in 1981 to become a professor of cellular and molecular biology. In his time at Harvard, Maniatis had been at the forefront of work in gene isolation and cloning. And so it was notable when, in the spring of 2003, he went to Massachusetts Hall to voice his concerns about Summers’ plan to make Harvard the engine for a “second Silicon Valley” whose center would be a vast new campus of biology and medicine across the Charles River in Allston. The Allston vision was to be dominated by “translational research”—a term denoting science directed toward immediate application and, one might add, marketing.

Tom was no stranger to the development of medical advances from cutting-edge science; he had after all founded, with geneticist Mark Ptashne, the successful biotech firm Genetics Institute. In Tom’s mind, however, Summers’ plans would further weaken the already feeble heart of Harvard’s historically distinguished pure biology programs still located in laboratories along Divinity Avenue north of Harvard Yard.

Maniatis had barely begun to voice his opinions when Summers seized control of the conversation, using the remainder of the appointed hour to expound on his grand vision.

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  Face Off: War of the Words
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  Online Publishing: The Faculty Votes Aye
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  The Secretive Seven
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  How to Run Harvard
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  The Brawl at Depaul

Keywords:

• James Watson,
• Allston,
• Academia

Mentioned:

• 
  Derek Bok : HLS Class of 1954
• 
  Lawrence Summers : GSAS Class of 1982
• 
  Henry Rosovsky : GSAS Class of 1953 : GSAS Class of 1959
• 
  Mark Ptashne : GSAS Class of 1968
• 
  Nancy Hopkins : College Class of 1964 : GSAS Class of 1971
• 
  Steven Pinker : GSAS Class of 1979
• 
  E.O. Wilson : GSAS Class of 1955