3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Cold Spring Harbor (1943–1952) 247
In 1951, he invited me to give a series of lectures in Pavia, which were subsequently
published. I was put up at the Collegio Ghislieri, a renaissance palace, very
elegant, but not heated after the 1st of April, not heated. I nearly froze to death.
They put an electric heater on the podium where I lectured. The Po Valley can be
extremely cold, even in April. Adriano was always full of plans of how to bring Italy
up to the international level of research. He wanted to have his own institute in
Naples funded by UNESCO but attached to the University of Rome. The genetics
establishment at Rome didn’t want to have this separate institute, but Adriano was
afraid that if it was under the director of the genetics department at Rome he
could not carry out his plans. This ruined the last years of his life. He died rather
unexpectedly and rather young of liver cancer in 1983.
Adriano was always full of plans and full of ideas. It was always fun to talk with
him. As a person he was very simpático.”
(2) Ernst Caspari (1909–1988): “One of the greatest pleasures of the summers that
Gretel and I spent at Cold Spring Harbor was that we met there just about every
summer also the Casparis. He was one of Alfred Kühn’s most prominent students
and some historians believe that he should be given credit for discovering the
one-gene-one-enzyme relationship. Being Jewish, he was driven from Germany,
and eventually found a haven in Rochester. His original research never reached
again the heights of his success in Germany. Caspari was a broadly interested and
widely read biologist, intelligent and critical, and was particularly good in writing
review articles. His wife Hansi was also German Jewish, and Gretel and I found
that we were very close in our thinking in most matters, so we were in each other’s
company most of the time. Caspari, in contrast to the phage group, was one of
those who were at once convinced by Avery’s demonstration that DNA was the
genetic material and he quickly convinced me also. Whenever I had problems
in experimental zoology or physiological genetics, I always discussed them with
Caspari. He was an inveterate smoker and eventually he developed cancer of the
bladder and succumbed to it after a long struggle.”
(3) Max Delbrück (1906–1981): “As with Caspari, it was Cold Spring Harbor which
brought Gretel and me together with Max and Manny Delbrück. We saw them
there virtually every summer in the 1940’s and up to 1950. As everyone knows,
Max was a charismatic figure, almost always surrounded by a group of his admirers.
Although trained as a physicist, he had become interested in biology through
Niels Bohr in Copenhagen who always thought that there were some undiscovered
physical laws lurking in living organisms. This is well described by Lily Kay
(1985) in a paper on Max Delbrück. In Max’ lab no experiment was ever made
without having been thoroughly analyzed in an almost Socratic manner. If the
experiment would not lead to clear-cut results it was not to be done. Whenever
anybody attended his seminar he could expect afterwards a severe dissection by
Delbrück. I remember a paper presented by Alex Novikoff who argued against
extreme reductionism and in favor of higher levels of integration. Alas, Novikoff
was too far ahead of his time and Delbrück massacred him unmercifully.