1950s – Fungi, Flies and Phage

"Following World War II many outstanding advances in biology have been made in laboratories all over the world. To mention only a few of these: Bacteriology has been revolutionized by a group of young investigators using the methods of genetics, cytology, and biochemistry. Our knowledge of viruses has been greatly increased, particularly from a biological point of view. Through a growing interest by physicists and physical chemists in biological problems, biophysics has grown rapidly. It has made extensive use of the electron microscope, the preparative and analytical centrifuges, the Tiselius electrophoresis apparatus and other techniques completely unknown to the biology of a few years ago." Caltech Biology Annual Report, 1950.

In terms of faculty appointments, the 1950s were quantitatively static. In the course of the decade all of the associate professors hired in the late 1940s became full professors, and four new faculty members joined the Division, all at the level of associate or full professors (Arthur Galston, 1951, Renato Dulbecco, 1952, Roger Sperry, 1954 and Robert Sinsheimer, 1957). By the 1957-58 school year, and until the end of the decade, there were no associate or assistant professors. Four faculty members departed in the '50s – MacGinitie retired in 1957, E.G. Anderson in 1959, Went departed (1959) to become head of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Arthur Galston left to join the faculty at Yale in 1955.

The three new senior appointees of the 1950s who were still at Caltech by the end of the decade were Renato Dulbecco, Roger Sperry, and Robert Sinsheimer. Two were to win Nobel Prizes, Dulbecco for work in animal viruses (by the time of his award he had left to join the new Salk Institute), and Sperry for discovering that different brain hemispheres serve different functions in humans. Sinsheimer was later Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Cruz, which named its Robert L. Sinsheimer Laboratories after him.

Remarkable scientific progress was made in the laboratories of those appointed in the '40s, three of whom (Beadle, Delbrück, and Lewis) were also to win Nobel Prizes. A roster of some of the students, postdocs and long-term visitors to the Delbrück lab in 1951-60 gives an idea of the nature and significance of the work there - Jean Weigle, Renato Dulbecco, Marguerite Vogt, Seymour Benzer, Giuseppe Bertani, Margaret Lieb, Gunther Stent, Elie Wollman, Dale Kaiser, Gordon Sato, Ole Maaloe, Niccolo Visconti, Robert Sinsheimer, James Watson, Harry Rubin, George Streisinger, Naomi Franklin, Andre Lwoff, Charles Steinberg, Frank Stahl, Howard Temin, Matthew Meselson, Harriet Ephrussi-Taylor, Francois Jacob, Sydney Brenner and Millard Sussman. Similar lists could be drawn for other Divisional laboratories.

One other notable piece of progress was the admission of women as graduate students in what had before been an all-male student body. Dr. L. Elizabeth Bertani was the first of many women to be granted a Ph.D. in Biology at the Institute, for her 1957 thesis “Studies on the Establishment of Lysogeny by Bacteriophage P2.” In fact, the Biology Division faculty had decided to admit women a full ten years earlier, having recommended to the Institute the admission of women to graduate standing after a unanimous faculty vote in 1947. It took some time for the Institute to catch up.

“The next question considered was “Does the Division want to recommend that women be admitted to graduate study in Biology?” After much discussion and a statement from each member present, Dr. Sturtevant moved that the Division go on record as favoring the admission of women graduate students at the Institute. Dr. Bonner seconded the motion and it was unanimously carried. Dr. Sturtevant recommended that Dr. Beadle inform the proper authorities of the Division’s recommendation.” Minutes of Staff Meeting May 20, 1947, p.2. Beadle’s Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded in 1958.

In the '50s the Division was active in building – the Norman Church Laboratories of Chemical Biology opened in 1955, largely a chemistry building, but with a small western wing for Biology Division labs. Construction was started for the Campbell Plant research Laboratory, a greenhouse completed in 1960 (and demolished in the 1980s); and the Gordon A. Alles Laboratory for Molecular Biology – also completed in 1960. E. G. Anderson's retirement in 1959 marked the end of research at the Division's 10-acre farm in Arcadia, which had been used for maize studies since the founding of the Division.

"I discovered a little book called Viruses, which was from a symposium held at Cal Tech in 1950. It’s a remarkable book. I read avidly about phages in it and got very excited. This was the beginning of the phage ideas – stuff that was going to become clear in the next twenty years! So I started to work on bacteriophages..." Sydney Brenner, My Life in Science, BioMed Central, 2001, p.21.

"When the Pasadena meeting on protein structure finished at the end of September, the full horror of being in Pasadena hit me. Not knowing how to drive a car, much less owning one, I was effectively confined to the girlless Caltech campus and had to continue living at the faculty club... I became part of Max Delbrück's ground-floor phage group in the 1930s-style Kerckhoff Biology Building." James D. Watson, Genes, Girls and Gamow, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 45.