An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [68]
The Troubled Helix
Seated in a chair, with quick access to escape through the back door of the conference room, Jim Watson was twitching, peering, scanning, squinting, and yawning. His fingers, linked together on the top of his head, were tapping restlessly, and he alternately was paying avid, if fleeting, attention to the data being presented, snatching a look at his New York Times, and drifting off into his own version of planetary wanderings. Jim is not good at looking interested when he is bored, and it was impossible to know if he really was thinking about the science at hand—the genetics and molecular biology of manic-depressive illness—or was instead mulling about politics, gossip, love, potential financial donors for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, architecture, tennis, or whatever other heated and passionate enthusiasm occupied his mind and heart at the moment. An intense and exceedingly blunt man, he is not someone who tends to bring out the dispassionate side of people. For myself, I find him fascinating and very wonderful. Jim is genuinely independent and, in an increasingly bland world, a true zebra among horses. While it could be argued that it is relatively easy to be independent and unpredictable if you have won the Nobel Prize for your contributions to discovering the structure of life, it is also clear that the same underlying temperament—intense, competitive, imaginative, and iconoclastic—helped propel his initial pursuit for the structure of DNA.
Jim’s palpably high energy level is also very appealing; his pace, whether intellectual or physical, can be exhausting, and trying to keep up with him, in discussions across the dinner table or walking the grounds of Cold Spring Harbor, is no mean task. His wife maintains she can tell whether or not Jim is in the house simply by the amount of energy she feels in the air. But however interesting he is as a person, Jim is first and foremost a scientific leader: director until only very recently of one of the foremost molecular biology laboratories in the world, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the first director of the National Center for Human Genome Research. In the past few years, he has turned his interest toward the search for the genes responsible for manic-depressive illness.
Because the scientific understanding of manic-depressive illness is so ultimately beholden to the field of molecular biology, it is a world in which I have spent an increasing amount of time. It is an exotic world, one developed around an odd assortment of plants and animals—maize, fruit flies, yeast, worms, mice, humans, puffer fish—and it contains a somewhat strange, rapidly evolving, and occasionally quite poetic language system filled with marvelous terms like “orphan clones,” “plasmids,” and “high-density cosmids”; “triple helices,” “untethered DNA,” and “kamikaze reagents”; “chromosome walking,” “gene hunters,” and “gene mappers.” It is a field clearly in pursuit of the most fundamental of understandings, a search for the biological equivalent of quarks and leptons.
The meeting where Watson was peering and twitching and yawning was focused specifically on the genetic basis of manic-depressive illness, with the intent of bringing together clinical psychiatrists, geneticists, and molecular biologists, all of whom are in one way or another actively engaged in the search for the genes responsible for manic-depressive illness, to share information about their research methods, findings, and the pedigrees of the affected families whose genetic material is being analyzed. Pedigree after pedigree was being projected onto the screen, some with relatively few ill family members, others containing large numbers of squares and circles that had been completely blackened in, indicating men or women who suffered from manic-depressive illness. Half-blackened