Interview with Arthur W. Galston - Caltech Oral Histories

Galston–17COHEN: What about Beadle? Did he care at all that you were doing things like this? You saidthat you were called in by DuBridge, but did Beadle care that you were doing these things?GALSTON: I think he wished I hadn’t done it, because he wanted me to be around and he feared Iwouldn’t be.COHEN: So it was taking you away from your work, not that he cared one way or the other.GALSTON: Well, I think Beadle cared. I think Beadle had basically good instincts. He wantedthe things I wanted, but he wasn’t going to work for them. He had too many important scientificfish to fry.COHEN: So you really can’t compare how Morgan ran the department with how Beadle did.GALSTON: I didn’t know how Morgan ran it. I liked very much the way Beadle ran things. Hedidn’t please everybody. He always fought with the Dutchmen. [Laughter] Well, he foughtwith Frits Went, because Fritz was irresponsible about financing this huge edifice that had beenbuilt at Caltech for which he had the major responsibility. Wiersma and Van Harreveld—theanimal physiologists—always felt, I think, that Beadle was favoring Neurospora genetics overeverything else.COHEN: Was he?GALSTON: Yes. [Laughter] And it was proper to do so in those days. Neurospora went out offavor when I was first at Yale; a young man by the name of Joshua Lederberg, a graduatestudent, did his Nobel Prize-winning work as a graduate student, and biologists switched frommajor emphasis on Neurospora to a little bacterium called E. coli. And that has been the favoredorganism ever since. But in those days, Neurospora was the hot stuff.COHEN: And Beadle was really interested in that.GALSTON: That’s right.http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Galston_A