I would suggest that creativity in science is every bit as intertwined with personality as one finds in a writer, artist, or musically gifted composer or performer. It would seem unsurprising in an artist if he appeared unusually ascetic, withdrawn from the hurly-burly world of the surrounding New York, ensuring that he lived close enough to the Rockefeller Institute so he could walk to work. In his ways, Avery could seem curiously ambivalent. He suffered mood swings at times, when alone in the lab, when he would appear to be dejected by the difficulties facing him. Afterwards he would declaim, clearly referring to himself, that resentment hurts the person who resents much more than the person who is resented. He left many letters unanswered and refused to have a secretary. He refused to review, or sponsor, any scientific paper in which he had made no contribution. In Dubos’ words, ‘Graciousness and toughness when it came to what he himself was determined to do, was part of his nature.’ Avery was a very successful teacher during his early medical career, yet in his later years he appears to have resented being expected to lecture on his own research. In this respect, he bore some interesting similarities to Charles Darwin. Avery scrupulously avoided any discussion of his own health and any intrusion, however small, into his private life – which was devoted to his younger brother, Roy, and to an orphaned first cousin whom he supported all through his life. He never expressed resentment about criticisms of his work, even when these were unjustified. He left no record of his private thoughts, other than the letters to his brother. A single experience struck Dubos as being significant.
One day, in early 1934, the same year that Avery suffered the onset of his thyrotoxicosis, Dubos told Avery that he was about to be married. The lady in question was a Frenchwoman living in New York, named Marie Louise Bonnet. Avery immediately rejoiced at the news. They were conversing in the laboratory on the sixth floor of the Rockefeller hospital building. During the subsequent animated conversation, Avery climbed out of his chair, walked to the window and looked out, as if lost for a moment in deep reflection. Returning to his chair, he mentioned that he had contemplated marriage years before, but that circumstances had not proved favourable to his plans. It seems likely that the lady in question was a nurse that Avery had met during the course he had taught to student nurses at the Hoagland Laboratory. Avery would have been about 32 years old at the time. For a moment or two the older man’s eyes were full of longing.
‘One of the great joys of life,’ he remarked to Dubos, ‘is to go home to someone who would rather see you than anybody else.’
Fate would prove cruel to both men. Marie Louise Bonnet subsequently died from tuberculosis at a time when Dubos was pioneering the very antibiotics that would eventually help to cure the same illness. The marriage was childless and the effects of his wife’s death on Dubos were devastating. He resigned, forthwith, from his antibiotic researches, which were later taken up by his former teacher, Selman Waksman at Rutgers Agricultural College, now Rutgers University, and which led to the discovery of a series of important antibiotics, including streptomycin. This breakthrough resulted in Waksman being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1952.
Much of what Dubos witnessed of Avery spoke of an intense focus and purity of purpose in science and his work. But, increasingly, his devotion to his research appeared to be accompanied by insularity bordering on reclusiveness.
Scientists who have laboured long and hard at a difficult but eventually rewarding line of research are usually happy to talk about it – if not to the media or ordinary social channels, certainly to colleagues. They travel to scientific symposia. They take part in conferences. They enjoy the camaraderie that comes from sharing the same interests. In the words of Frank Portugal, ‘wide-ranging discussions with peers both individually and at meetings are part and parcel of the scientific process. It is an important component of how collaborations are formed and scientific advances are made and respected.’ Most scientists are only too glad to accept the, often rare, honours and distinction their work brings their way. Not so Oswald Avery.
In 1944 Avery was proposed for an honorary degree at Cambridge University, a recognition most scientists would cherish. The following year he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society of London. Avery’s roots were English – in the late nineteenth century his family had emigrated to Canada from the city of Norwich – but he refused to visit England even on such prestigious occasions, putting forward the excuse that his state of health did not permit it except by travelling first class. In Dubos’ opinion, this was disingenuous, since the respective foundations would have funded the flights. That he might have felt nervous, claustrophobic, on the lengthy flight is possible. Recalling those dark moods in which Avery might mumble to himself about the damaging inflictions of resentment, it seemed more than likely to Dubos that he might have been unable to suppress lingering anger at the hurtful controversy provoked years ago by his polysaccharide typing of pneumococci. Whatever his reasons, Avery refused both honours.
An incident highlighted just how strong was Avery’s aversion to such formal acknowledgement of his work. Sir Henry Dale, who was President of the Royal Society in England, took it upon himself to bring the Copley Medal to the Rockefeller Institute, there to confer it on the shy and retiring Avery in person. Dale was accompanied by a Dr Todd, who knew Avery personally. The two highly respected English visitors arrived at the Institute in New York unannounced and went directly to Avery’s department in the main hospital building. But when they saw Avery working in his lab, through the ever-open door, they retreated without intruding on his presence.
Dr Todd would later recount how Sir Henry Dale said simply: ‘Now I understand everything.’
Bizarre as this behaviour would appear, it was in keeping with Avery’s increasingly reclusive personality: a man who avoided any of the normal personal contacts outside of immediate family and work colleagues. Genius can be strange. Yet such idiosyncratic behaviour apart, it was this son of an evangelical Baptist preacher who first discovered that DNA was the molecule of heredity. And putting such personal matters aside, the question remains: why was such a fundamental discovery not recognised by the awarding of the Nobel Prize?
In his letters to his brother, Avery retained a modest outlook. Could it be that a combination of Avery’s innate conservatism, his tendency to over-caution, and his downplaying of the implications of his discovery in the paper of 1944 might have contributed to his being overlooked? In Dubos’ words, the paper … ‘did not make it obvious that the findings opened the door to a new era of biology’. Dubos wondered if the Nobel Committee, unaccustomed to such restraint and self-criticism ‘bordering on the neurotic’ might have caused them to wait a while for both confirmation of the discovery and to see what the broader implications might be. To put it another way, Dubos questioned if the paper might have been a failure not in its own merits, as a scientific communication, but from the public relations point of view.
This lack of recognition is made all the more puzzling by the fact that, if the importance of the 1944 paper was not universally recognised when it was published, it became more and more obvious with the passage of time. The Hershey and Chase paper was published in 1952. And although he was retired by the time Crick and Watson published their famous discovery of the three-dimensional chemical structure of DNA in 1953, Avery was still alive. He wouldn’t die until two years later, in 1955.
More recently the Nobel authorities have allowed open access to their earlier thinking, and this has confirmed much of what Dubos had concluded. As part of the system for deciding who should get Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Committee receives proposals from leading experts around the world. In the words of Portugal, who reviewed their working and archives, ‘It seems that key biological chemists were not convinced by Avery’s claim that DNA was the basis of heredity.’ Not a single geneticist nominated Avery for the Nobel Prize. In part this may have reflected a difficulty in extrapolating his discovery in a single type of bacterium to genetics more widely, but even those colleagues who did nominate him for the Nobel Prize tended to overlook his work on DNA in favour of his immunological typing of the pneumococcal capsule. Portugal also wondered if Avery’s own idiosyncratic behaviour, including his reluctance to meet with and exchange findings with colleagues,