BioEssays 29.12 1257 Interview I was pretty good at French and ended up reading most of their very early papers, published in such journals as Comptes Rendues of the French Academy of Sciences and the Annales de l'Institut Pasteur. I loved the minimalist style of the Comptes Rendues papers in particular which were shortusually only 2 or 3 pages with one or two tables of data-but often presented incredibly important conclusions.
BioEssays: In your book, you comment that Watson was not a terribly clear or inspiring lecturer but did he have some influence on you, beyond providing this course?
JB: Yes, his personality was clearly very different from the professors in the conservative chemistry department, who, to my mind, were from another era. Jim represented something different. He had great parties at his house, he bopped around in a red convertible-not something I expected from a scientist, based on my experiences in the chemistry department.
BioEssays: So, perhaps part of his appeal was that he was really alive and he was exciting therefore. One gets the impression from your book that part of the appeal of Lowell Hager was that he was not a conventional character, he was interesting too.Is that right?
JB: Yes, both as an undergraduate at Harvard and in the Chemistry Department, I was used to a very formal, old school, affected environment which I had bought into, but was beginning to become annoyed with. Although my Harvard undergraduate education was extraordinarily important to me, there were also destructive aspects to it. To interact with somebody like Lowell Hager, who, with his unaffected, open mid-western background, broke the Harvard mould, really appealed to me and changed me. He wasn't a Jim Watson, but he was definitely a newer generation kind of person who was fairly uninhibited.
BioEssays: Let's now go over your post-graduate career briefly, after you got your PhD. You had a sequence of really tremendous advisers, all of whom, one gathers from the book, were influential on you and important to you. Maybe you could say a few words about each of them, starting with Art Pardee? JB: Well, after I got excited about the science done at the Pasteur Institute and particularly that of Jacques Monod, Franc ΒΈois Jacob and E Β΄lie Wollman, I wanted to go directly to do a post-doc with Jacob. It didn't hurt that I had been a Francophile for some time, an attitude that was fortified when I spent the summer of 1957 bicycling through Europe, much of it in France. I applied to Jacob's lab and he interviewed me while he was visiting Boston but suggested I should get some more training in bacteriology before I applied to his lab. At his suggestion, I applied to Arthur Pardee, who had spent a sabbatical year with Jacob and Monod a couple years before.
In that year at the Pasteur, Pardee carried out experiments that provided the foundation for understanding regulation of gene expression in bacteria. The classic paper by Pardee, Jacob and Monod, often referred to as the PaJaMo paper, presented