Composing a Further Life

They preferred that you work alone. Every emphasis was put on doing real science and real problems. That’s what turned them on. This is the way almost everybody does it now, but that was unusual at that time.
    “I worked for a person who really would let you go on your own. He was brilliant, Melvin Calvin, who won a Nobel Prize for photosynthesis in 1961 that wasn’t shared with anybody. He could have gotten it for inventing homogeneous catalysis, he was the first person to do that. He could have gotten it for a collection of other things.” As often happened in our conversations, I took us on a detour so I could understand what Dick was saying—surely, I thought, photosynthesis was not discovered in the nineteen sixties! “Oh, people had known about photosynthesis since back in the 1700s. But they didn’t know how you get from carbon dioxide in water to glucose and amino acids and things like that.”
    “Did they have the role of chlorophyll then?”
    “Yes, they knew it was important in capturing energy. And Calvin wasn’t the one who figured out how it did that. That came later. What Calvin figured out was how you get from carbon dioxide and water to sugars and other compounds plants need to grow and maintain themselves. And it turned out to be an extraordinary pathway. For example, the familiar sugar, glucose, has six carbons. Carbon dioxide has only one. So everybody tried to figure out how you got from carbon dioxide with one carbon to glucose with six. Many tried to get there directly, but the actual pathway turned out to be much more complicated. In a flash of insight, Calvin realized that three, four, five, and surprisingly even seven carbon atoms formed a complicated web of reactions that allowed plants to make useful and complex sugars, such as glucose and sucrose. And all of that came to him as he was waiting for his wife at the supermarket. He went home and he wrote it down. He was right. Calvin could do that.
    “Calvin was known around Berkeley as the meanest, orneriest, nastiest person in the department, if not on the whole campus, to everybody outside his own laboratory, which had about sixty people. To people inside … I remember I got a call, ‘This is Genevieve Calvin, I couldn’t reach your wife, so I had to call you. Could you come to our house for dinner? I know how busy you are but …’ It meant a great deal to me. I was one of his TAs … just a grad student.” Dick paused as tears came to his eyes. “Sorry … I didn’t expect to have this kind of reaction.
    “Well, I would grade papers. He didn’t grade the papers, but when time came to assign the grades—there were perhaps two hundred students in the class—this guy a few years away from a Nobel Prize would sit down and go over every student’s grade. Now and then he would raise a student’s grade because this student had shown enough of an upward trend. He’d be doing this maybe about ten thirty or eleven at night, and then he’d drive everybody home.
    “He was a good person. It’s a terribly important thing to do all through your life, to associate yourself with people who will help you
on
your way, rather than standing
in
your way, people you won’t have to get around but people who will help you get over. And I have come in contact with a lot of such people during my life.” He shook his head ruefully. “I didn’t expect to get this kind of reaction. I’ve never gotten this kind of reaction in talking about the support I’ve gotten.”
    “It happens to me, too,” I said, “when I think about some of my teachers.” Josephine Belknap, the math teacher whose name stood next to that of Luke Ponder in the book Dick and I wrote together, saw that I was ahead of my high school class in math and suggested that I be released from attendance and from the daily assignments to burrow into analytic geometry on my own, on two conditions: first, that I keep up with the class and take the exams, and second, that I tutor a classmate who was having difficulty and make sure she could keep up. Like Melvin Calvin, she encouraged me to go ahead on my own and at the same time taught me a lesson in caring for others. The two conditions were closely related because, as is often said, the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.
    “It’s over now,” Dick said, of the way his memory had affected him. “I’m back.”
    Once again, after he got his doctorate from Berkeley, in 1961, Richard took a job in industry rather