Protein Science (1992), I, 182-186. Cambridge University Press. Printed in the USA. Copyright 0 1992 The Protein Society 0961-8368/92 $5.00 + .OO RECOLLECTIONS A little ancient history RICHARD E. DICKERSON Molecular Biology Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90024 (RECEIVED August 28, 1991; ACCEPTED August 29, 1991) In September 1957, Peter J. Wheatley despaired of sup- porting a wife and two daughters on his Leeds University professorial salary of E900 per annum (then $2,500), re- signed from the university, and prepared to move to Zu- rich to head up a new crystallographic laboratory for Monsanto. He was to take with him his graduate student John Daly, but with only 3 months left of my postdoc- toral year at Leeds, I was told to find another supervisor. (John Daly was notable in my memory for two things: He brewed ginger beer in the closet of his apartment, having occasionally to endure the trauma of exploding beer bottles, and he was a tireless promoter of a series of fantasy novels that no one else had ever heard of, The Lord of the Rings, by an obscure British academic named Tolkien.) Leeds University had a decent inorganic X-ray struc- ture group for its day. It had oscillation cameras for data collection. An electronic computer was available at Man- chester University, just over the Pennine Hills, and one could always go there to calculate a three-dimensional Patterson map from a new data set. After that you were on your own at Leeds, with Beevers-Lipson strips and a desk calculator. Understandably, we worked in projec- tions. My project was a five-atom structure, dimethyl- sulfoximine, (CH,),SONH, which to no one’s surprise turned out to be tetrahedral. It was somewhat of a come- down from my nine-atom boron hydride thesis project with Bill Lipscomb at Minnesota. But my wife Lola and I thoroughly enjoyed Yorkshire, and we hated to cut short our time in England. Fortunately, just at that juncture, Max Perutz and John Kendrew at Cambridge University began advertising worldwide for postdoctoral fellows. John’s low-resolution map (6 A) of myoglobin showed solid cylinders that ev- eryone fully expected would turn out to be Linus Paul- ~~ ~ Reprint requests to: Richard E. Dickerson, Molecular Biology Insti- tute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90024. ~~~ -~~ ~~ ~ ~~ ing’s a-helices. John was gearing up for a high-resolution analysis of myoglobin, while Max was working toward an initial low-resolution picture of hemoglobin. Peter Wheatley, perhaps in a fit of conscience, sent them a warm letter of recommendation on my behalf. Bill Lips- comb, my Ph.D. supervisor in Minnesota, also had rec- ommended me, so I received a telephone call suggesting that I might like to drive up to Cambridge for an inter- view. (In England, one travels “up” to Cambridge, and suspended students are “sent down.” The only exception to this barographic hierarchy is London: Everyone goes “up to London.”) I visited them, and we all went (up) to London to see David Phillips, who was collaborating with Kendrew on myoglobin data collection at the Royal Institution. There was a meeting of minds, and at the end of 1957, Lola and I moved all our worldly goods, which fitted into one very small British Ford “Popular,” south to Cambridge. (The next larger model, which we couldn’t afford, was called the “Prefect.” Ford Prefect later be- came famous as the adopted name of the alien hero of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that’s another story.) I had written to Herb Gutowsky at the University of Illinois to see if they would wait one more year for their assistant professor, and if they would be happy hav- ing a protein crystallographer rather than an inorganic crystallographer. They would. I also wrote to Lipscomb for advice, and he replied, “It’s a wonderful opportunity, but be careful-don’t become a professional postdoc!” Max and John’s offices and wet laboratories were in a one-story corrugated prefabricated building in a court- yard of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory complex. This construction, known as “the Hut,” had been built for Metallurgy during the Second World War. It was a great experience to sit in an office with fellow postdoctorals Roger Hart and Alver from Norway, with John Kendrew in the adjacent office separated only by a plasterboard partition, Sidney Brenner and Francis Crick across the corridor, and Max Perutz across from John. Eleven o’clock coffee was heralded each morning by Francis 182Ancient history Crick’s unmistakable laugh ringing down the corridor. When he left for an extended visit of his own to the US., he was sorely missed. At one end of the long building was the densitometer room, where several young women spent their days feed- ing precession films through a Joyce-Loebl double-beam microdensitometer and measuring peak heights by hand with a millimeter scale. At the other end was the sole wet lab, occupied by people such as Seymour Benzer and Leslie Barnett. Figure 1 shows part of the structure group outside the Hut in 1958. The universal suit and tie among men did not reflect any “dressing up” for a photograph; these were standard laboratory wear at the time. The French popular science journal La Recherche once paid Max a left-handed compliment by describing him as, “a person who gives the appearance of wearing clothing chiefly io keep warm.” In England in 1958 this was no small matter! The Hut still is to be seen in the Cavendish courtyard, a melancholy relic that stands open to the weather and is used only as a bicycle shed. No one there apparently re- alizes today that the Hut is an historical treasure, and should be bronzed. Once while I was there in 1959, two Russian visitors came to visit Perutz. As he hosted them in his office in the Hut, they exclaimed in puzzlement, “But where is your Institute?” It is typical of Max that he 183 took pleasure in telling them with a smile, “This is my In-