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improved social skills encouraged a close friend and his girlfriend to set me up on my first real college date. Dominating the college social scene during my junior and senior years were two girls who were almost always seen together: Rosemary Raymond and Irene (Reno) Lyons. Rosy was the more smashing, often spotted driving about in her parents’ new, Raymond Loewy-designed, ultramodern Studebaker. But Reno was also clearly fun, and I did not believe she would go out with me. She agreed, however, and we went to a Saturday night party in a campus dorm, from which we went on to have a snack at the Tropical Hut on Fifty-seventh Street, where my awkwardness abated only somewhat.

    “Jimbo” Watson, eighteen years old and at ease
    That was not only my first college date but also my last. The pursuit of happiness thereafter was mainly taken up with improving my tennis skills on the courts under Stagg Field with Howard Holtzer, my only real competition in zoology. Though he was five years older than me, I could occasionally beat him with cross-court forehand shots. At that time I was just filling out several applications for graduate school, with Caltech as my first choice. Not only was its Biology Department heavily into genetics, but its world-famous chemist, Linus Pauling, was also interested in biology at the molecular level. I also applied to the Biology Department at Harvard for no good reason except that Harvard was Harvard. Indiana University was a sleeper that I applied to on the advice of my undergraduate advisor. I was told they had several outstanding younger geneticists, though their names then meant nothing to me. I did know, however, that the great geneticist Hermann J. Muller had just arrived there. He became a celebrity that October when it was announced he had won the 1946 Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1926 that X-rays cause mutations.
    As early April approached, I began to worry about the fate of my applications. And so it was a considerable relief when I did receive an acceptance letter from Fernandus Payne, the dean of Indiana University's graduate school. In addition to a $900 annual stipend, all tuition fees were waived. I was warned, however, that if I expected my main interest to continue to be birds, I should choose a different place. So my future was already secure when I received Caltech's rejection letter, which hurt but didn't surprise me. They had no way of knowing that I had become more interested in studying genetics than birds. They also expected their students to do well in math. Last to arrive was a letter from Harvard offering acceptance but no financial aid for tuition or living costs. I was in no sense disappointed, as there was no one on its faculty truly interested in the gene.
    During my last quarter, I registered for the simpler of the two departmental organic chemistry courses, the one for pre-meds as opposed to future scientists. The course material was not much of a challenge, and the professor gave us the option of counting only the top three out of four required exams toward our final grade. After getting As on the first three tests, it seemed perfectly reasonable to skip the final two and a half weeks of lectures. In this way, I graduated from Chicago never having studied ring-shaped, aromatic carbon compounds. My grades for my two other spring courses, which included Vertebrate Embryology and a statistics-oriented psychology course, were also Äs, as in fact were all my grades the final year. I ascribed my success in the final laps primarily to lack of competition, since better science students tended toward the more rigorous programs of physics and chemistry.

    Indiana University made its position perfectly clear.
    Just before the June 1947 commencement, at which I would receive a B.S. degree, I learned that I had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. I had long coveted the honor but never thought I could pull off enough Äs in science to pull up the rest of my