Clearly it depended very much on Bronk and his ability to deny any bureaucratic structure. I can speak to this because that ability was in full evidence when the condition for my staying at the Rockefeller came up. I went to him, and you remember I said I was working with Joe Gally mainly; I had another student, Don Olins, who in fact was the man who, with his wife later on, discovered the nucleosome – the part of the chromosome that is the protein part of the chromosome that's so important in its organization and burying the helix. At that time the question was: well, could I stay after I got my degree? Incidentally, it might be worth my saying something about that.
My degree examination had the famous René Dubos, it had a physical chemist Norman Sutin, who then was at Brookhaven, and it had in fact Maclyn McCarty. It had a group of really distinguished scientists but, in a very curious way. It wasn't even very much about antibodies; it was actually about quantum mechanics. I was asked about the de Broglie relationship, which has to do with a certain particle wave thing and calculating a certain wave length for... consistent with... with what was known about quantum mechanics. And I think there was a considerable degree of frustration at that, because most of the people there were not particularly familiar with quantum mechanics, but I think that is an indicate... indication of the way things were at the Rockefeller. Things were just go and flower organically; they didn't have a committed sort of style, and so when it came to the question of could I stay after my degree, I went to see Bronk and asked him, and he came up with a perfectly startling suggestion. He said, 'Yes', if I was willing to take on the post of an assistant dean, then I could do it.
And I remember being shocked and sort of overwhelmed and I said, 'Could I get back to you?' I went home and I remember speaking to Maxine and saying, 'You know, this is ridiculous. I'm not a dean, I don't know anything about it, I don't want to do it, I'm a scientist etc.' She said, 'Shut up and accept.' And I said, 'Why?' She said... I said, 'So what?' She said, 'You know you're going to do the science anyhow, and if this helps that would be good.' So I did accept and I did learn one of the secrets of the system, which was a non-system – namely as an assistant and finally an associate dean I brought material to him one day about a certain candidate person, and when he saw it he became furious. He said, 'Never do that again. Never bring all this stupidity in.' And I had all kinds of, you know – what do you call them? – CVs and marks and things of that kind. He said, 'That isn't the way we work around here.' I said, 'What... what do you wish, sir? He said, 'Look, is he our kind of person or isn't he? I hold you personally responsible.' And that taught me a great deal about this plastic style, and it was in fact my taking on that that allowed me to continue to do this thing, and in fact finally the curious thing which is worth reflecting on.
I had been working in pure physical chemistry on fluorescence – the excitation of molecules by light to emit another wavelength of light – and I was the recipient of a grant from the National Institutes of Health on fluorescence spectroscopy, of all things, and I was building a fancy spectrofluometer... here we go back to my brazing machine, what have you... what they called an absolute energy recording spectrofluometer, and I had this grant. But the funny thing was that all the work on immunoglobulin was being supported by this grant which just had nothing to do with fluorescence. Of course, we used some fluorescence on antibodies but these days that wouldn't have gone. So the combination of remarkable person-centered ability of Bronk to see creativity in terms of a contingent set of relationships, the fact that the relaxation was very great with the NIH, enabled me to bring... to bring together a bunch of colleagues who were able then to attack this structure. So there we went, and I must say that was a remarkably intensive period of about four years in which we went after chain by chain – first the light chain, then the heavy chain, of the antibody – and it was remarkable.
