Welcome to Milton Gardens

From left to right:
1. View of the house on the corner of Oakland Beach and Dearfield from inside the hollow center rented then owned in the 1920s by the St. Claires. House to the right of the St. Calaires was rented for two years by the Leavitts. House to the left of the St. Claires is on lot 4.
2. Winter scene at the entrance to the hollow center showing the St. Claire’s house and the Leavitt’s house in the back and the back of the Magill’s house (525 Milton Road) to the right of the entrance off Milton Road.
3. The kids of Milton Gardens around 1931 or 32 with June Magill (face partially hidden), Jean St. Claire, and Tommy (Betty) St. Claire in the back row (left to right). Nancy Adamson is in the middle row between and in front of June and Jean. The Leavitt’s house in in the background.
Click to enlarge.

Left to right:
1. Queen Ann’s Lace.
2. Butterfly Weeds on Cape Code.
3. Yellow Roses with Purple Background.
4. Scene of sons John, Peter, and David (descending in age), and daughter Phoebe in small skiff launch in pond in the back yard in Rowayton CT.
Click each to enlarge.

Leland and Helen bought Elmwood on Old Dominion Drive in Mclean VA in 1939. This is where they lived until Leland’s retirement from the Veterans Administration, and where they raised their youngest daughter Mary Lois who was 5 years old when they left Milton Gardens.
Left to right:
1. Leland the late 40s with Shandy and Chang (smaller dog) in front of Elmwood.
2. Leland with me on his Tennessee Walker and holding Blue Jean around 1950-51.
3. Leland and Helen in the early 1950s.
Click to enlarge.

The scenes below show my Grandfather Leland preparing to take me (eldest grandchild Crick Leavitt) and my cousin Suzy Cornbrooks (eldest Granddaughter) for a surrey ride on dirt roads in the late 1940s in McLean. We trotted down Grandfather’s long dirt driveway to Old Dominion Drive and then did a sharp right onto Balls Hill Road, a dirt road then which headed toward Seven Corners. I found the intersection of Balls Hill and Old Dominion on Google Maps and if you go to the satellite image, you can see my Grandfather’s long driveway winding up to the house, McLean House, on the west side of Old Dominion where Balls Hill angles off of Old Dominion. It’s all still there. Read the rest of this entry »

From left to right:
1. June Magill furthest right with St. Claire girls Tommy (standing 2nd from left) and Jean (standing next to June) at Virginia Beach in 1939.
2. Three Magill sisters Lois, June, and Kate with their children and three husbands Rex Gatten (Lois), Peter Leavitt (June) and Charlie Cornbrooks (Kate) standing behind at Christmas in 1952. All sisters and families ended up living in Rowayton CT. June is in the center with four of five children Phoebe, Peter, David, and me standing. Kate is with one of two daughters, Susie, and Lois is with one of three children, Meg.
3. June with Tommy St. Claire Hardy in the 1980s. The Hardys ended up living in New Canaan near Rowayton CT.
4. June and cousin Barbara with Nancy Adamson Foster and sister Kate bundled up at Saranac Lake in the late 1980s. Nancy and family became June’s neighbors in Rowayton CT.
5. June with the Leavitt siblings and their father Arthur at Christmas in 1970. John’s wife Lilias and the Leavitt daughters Anne and Ruth are in front with June (left to right) and husbands Joe Blandin (Ruth), Peter Leavitt (June), John Leavitt (Lilias) and Roger Wilson (Anne) in the back. The Leavitt family lived at Milton Gardens for two years from 1927 to 1929 in the house on lot 7/8 on Dearborn. The Leavitts and the Magills were also neighbors on Old Dominion Drive in Mclean VA in the 1940s and 50s.

See June Leavitt’s story

Peter Leavitt, a 35-year resident of Woodstock CT, was born on January 22, 1913 in Constantinople, Turkey. He was the son of Arthur Howland Leavitt of Spencer MA and Englishwoman Elsie Baker. The Baker family members were prominent textile merchants in Constantinople and Arthur, who spoke many languages fluently, was in the Foreign Service stationed at the US embassy as a courier and translator. Peter is shown below at the age of five or six with sister, Ruth, younger brother John, and mother Elsie. In the second picture, a slightly older Peter is sitting on a launch at a dock on the Bosphorus between European and Asian Turkey in the early 1920s.

Read the rest of this entry »

By John C. Leavitt

Leland Magill is where I came from. He is forever in my thoughts.

This is a self-portrait taken in July 1966 in the Casbah of Tangiers, Morocco. This moment is a benchmark in my life. I spent that summer in Europe and North Africa. Then, a month later I embarked on a career as a molecular biologist by starting graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, a move that I do not regret.

As Drover said in Australia “In the end the only thing you really own is your story …” so here it is!

Table of Contents

Where Did I Come From?

• About Milton Gardens and My Grandfather H. Leland Magill
• June Magill – First Daughter of Milton Gardens and Quentessential Rowayton Mom
• June Magill’s Artistry
• Leland and Helen Magill in McLean VA in the 1940s and 50s

Growing Up in Rowayton – Chronicles of Cricky

• Our Packard
• Nursery School in 1948
• Leavitt Kids Around 1953/54
• Times with Grandfather in McLean Virginia
• My Backyard in 1953
• The Magill Sisters Populate Rowayton
• My 2^nd Grade Teacher Mrs. Golding
• Camp Mohawk 1953
• My First Yankees Baseball Game
• The Day the Squirrels Fought Back
• Struggles in School
• Not My Birthday – Around 1955
• My Dog Freckles
• The Parallel Lives of Rowayton Kids
• Trip to the Natural History Museum in 1955
• Delivering the Newspaper and Mail in Rowayton
• Sailing School
• Sailfish Racing
• An 8^th Grade Incident
• Tennis at Bayley Beach
• School Bus Antics at the End of the School Year
• Life at the Bluff
• The Bayley Beach Stand
• Our Family Friend Jerry Beatty
• Voyaging to Nearby Planets in the 1950s
• Senior Year at NHS
• Paul Tebo
• Dick Wilmont
• My Norwalk High School Graduation
• My Friends in the NHS Graduating Class
• The Spring of 1963 – My Sophomore Year at Bethany College
• Stefan and Marion Schnabel
• Summer of 1966
• Seeds for the Future

Chronicles of My Life as a Molecular Biologist

• Salary History, Grad School to 2010 – No, I didn’t get rich
• The Garret Ihler Story – My Grad School Mentor
• Some Trials and Tribulations at Johns Hopkins
• My Escape from Johns Hopkins
• Later at the National Institutes of Health
• My Move to Palo Alto CA
• My Role in the Emergence on Proteomics
• How Dekalb Genetics Made Roundup Ready Corn
• Satisfaction with My Career
• My Views on Stem Cell Research
• Addendum: Some Minor Details

My Life With Becki

• Becki and I Get Together
• Golden Gate Bridge Walk – 1987
• JD Sharing My Breakfast
• Our Special Day
• Our Drive Through Milton Gardens and Rowayton on June 28, 2010
• Becki Shovelling Our Driveway So I Can Go to Work – Whenever I Bug Her Too Much She Says “Go to work!”

Marriottsville Years – 1974 through 1999 (unfinished)

Palo Alto Years (to be added) – 1982 through 1995

Woodstock Years – 1996 to the present (unfinished)

• Years 2009 through 2011 – Our life described in Letters to Daughter Elizabeth

My Feelings About the Origin of Life on Earth

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I was born John Cristopher Leavitt on September 8, 1943. Where did the name “Cricky” come from? This all started in 1945 when I was almost two years old. My parents and I shared a house with the Frasers on Leroy Avenue in Darien. Alan and Scud Fraser’s daughter, Gail, was my age but couldn’t say “Christopher” which is what my mother called me. Instead she said “Cricky” which unfortunately stuck. But she got the worst of it because I called her “Wudgie” .

Growing Up in Rowayton

Our Packard

This was our car in 1946 – a dark red convertable Packard and one of the earliest images I recall. That’s my mother in the driver’s seat. We lived on Harstrom Place in Rowayton CT at the time.

Nursery School in 1948

The picture below shows Caroline Hoyt (second from left) and Margo Baumgarten (center) and me (furthest to the right) at Thomas Nursery School on Highland Ave across from the Beattys.

Times with Grandfather in McLean Virginia – Howdy Pardner

This is when I rode with the James Gang. Just Kidding . Read the rest of this entry »

Salary History from Grad School in 1966 to 2010 – No, I didn’t get rich.

The Garret Ihler Story – My Grad School Mentor

Who was the first to isolate a gene?

It was Garret Ihler in Charlie Thomas’ lab at Harvard in 1968-69 before the advent of recombinant DNA. The paper, appropriately titled “Isolation of Pure lac Operon DNA”, was published in Nature (vol. 224 pages 768-774) in 1969.  This paper, certainly, was fresh in the minds of Dan Nathans and Hamilton Smith a few years later as they developed restriction enzymes to cut and paste defined DNA fragments (Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978). Ihler’s work started molecular biologists thinking of the benefits of molecular cloning of recombinant genes. Although lac is an E. coli (lactose) operon consisting of three structural genes (encoding the enzymes required for metabolism of lactose), lac is a single transcriptional unit with one promoter and two regulatory domains (for the repressor and operator). Ihler’s paper points out that purification of individual genes would permit investigation of their mechanisms of transcriptional control and expression (the subject of my Ph.D. Thesis). To put this event in perspective, the hottest area of genetics at that time was transcriptional control in the E. coli bacterium with the discovery of sigma factor and investigations into the mechanism by which RNA polymerase transcribed genes. A few years later we would be able to cut genes with restriction enzymes and paste these genes with a ligase into vectors that could be used to transfer genes into cells. Nathans and Smith’s work allowed Paul Berg to put the E. coli gene gpt (encoding guanine phosphoribosyltransferase) next to the SV40 promoter to correct the genetic defect for Lesh-Nyan Syndrome (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1980). I benefited from all four of these developments because through their work I had the incentive and was able to clone the human beta-actin gene in December of 1982 and characterize its function in recipient cells using Paul Berg’s vector. Garret Ihler’s work and his mentoring instilled in my mind the goal and benefits of purifying a gene. There is more to the story of Garret Ihler’s accomplishment.

If you look at the 1969 Nature paper, you will find that it has 6 authors – Shapiro, MacHattie, Eron, Ihler, Ippen, and Beckwith. If you look at the acknowledgement at the end of the paper, you will see that Garret Ihler was actually a postdoctoral fellow in Charlie Thomas’ lab and that Thomas’ grant supported the work. In fact, the lac operon was isolated and purified in Charlie Thomas’ lab (noted for DNA replication research) by Garret Ihler.

Picture the group in Beckwith’s lab pondering the prospect of isolating a pure gene but not knowing how. Shortly afterwards Karin Ippen takes a stroll across campus with Ihler describing to him the issue of the day in the Beckwith lab. Picture Ihler enamored with Karin Ippen (the feeling turned out to be mutual). He was also clever especially with lambda transducing phages – these phages with the transduced lac operon from E. coli had been isolated in the mid-1960’s. In fact Ihler could take these phage strains “off the shelf” at a moment’s notice with the lac operon inserted into the lambda genome in opposite directions. Shortly Ihler had thought of the solution for the Beckwith lab with Ippen as his audience. He had the tools at his fingertips – the strains of transduced lac, a reliable exonuclease, and a method of separating and purifying each DNA strand from the lambda double helix. Nevertheless, he offered the idea to Ippen who took it back to the Beckwith lab; subsequently, she was pushed aside by the aggressive members of the group. So Ihler decided to act quickly. He grew up two transducing phages each with the lac operon in opposite orientations, he separated the DNA strands using poly-UG, and then hybridized the two opposite strands. He isolated the “heavy” DNA lambda phage strands (higher poly-UG binding strands) from two different phages each with the opposite lac orientation. When preparations of the two heavy strands were allowed to hybridize only the lac operon sequences could hybridize – the two strands were complimentary only in this part of the phage genome because the flanking lambda DNA sequences of the hybrid DNA were from the same heavy strand of the lambda genome and thus homologous, not complimentary sequences. Ihler nibbled away the lambda DNA “tails” with an exonuclease and precipitated the remaining DNA to yield a pure DNA fragment encoding the lac operon.

Today this seems quite a simple experiment (if you are a molecular biologist), but in the context of the late 1960’s it was a clever experiment with a conceptual pay-off. What happened next poisoned the environment for molecular geneticists especially in the Boston area.

Beckwith took this work and euphorically ran with it. Four co-authors from the Beckwith lab were added with trivial contributions and the paper was published. Beckwith scheduled a news conference basically to take credit for the work much to the embarrassment of Ihler. He used this news conference to belittle the accomplishment and used this media platform to express his personal political agenda which had no connection to Ihler’s work. Surprisingly, the tone of this press conference is preserved in a paper by Beckwith published a year later (Bacteriological Reviews 34:222-227, 1970) where he underplays the role of Ihler – he contributed “a critical idea”. When I read the final section of this paper I could only conclude that Beckwith was deluded by his perception of self-importance. This paper can be found on the Internet for anyone wishing to read it along with Ihler’s recounting of the story at http://mbch.tamu.edu/ihler/  .

Luckily for me, Ihler took a faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, and earned his M.D. at the same time. He and Karin married while I was finishing up my Ph.D. He later became an esteemed Professor at Texas A&M noted and especially appreciated by medical students for his stimulating lectures. Karin also developed a productive research program as a Full Professor of Microbiology and Genetics at A&M. Sadly Karin died of breast cancer in 1995 with Garret at her side. Her presence and work has been memorialized through the annual Karin Ippen-Ihler Lecture Series at A&M.

Ihler was probably correct in his belief that Beckwith’s press conference led to misplaced fears and “widespread attempts to regulate cloning and gene transfer”. It did not help that Michael Crichton published “Andromeda Strain” in the same year. Fortunately, all of this concern had fallen by the wayside 13 years later when I was doing this type of work. But now we are experiencing the same hysteria over stem cell research.

Some Trials and Tribulations at Johns Hopkins

I was reminded of the following experiences during my six and a half years at Johns Hopkins by the news in 2006 of fraud by the Korean stem cell scientists who made worldwide news in May of 2005 for their published cloning of human stem cell lines corresponding to afflicted human individuals. Although it seems certain that the Koreans’ work will be disproved and retracted, I prefer to wait for the dust to settle before commenting further on this fiasco. However, in this context I thought that I could discuss my own brushes with overzealous ambition and fraud that occurred during my 30 year career as a bench scientist and researcher. Here is part 1 which relates to events of the 1970’s at Johns Hopkins. In part 2, I follow-up with some more bizarre examples that occurred in the 1980’s while I was at NIH and then at the Pauling Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

Becki and I Get Together

This picture of me and Becki was taken at a Pauling Institute party at the Stanford Court on Nob Hill San Francisco in November 1986.

Our 1987 Golden Gate Bridge Walk

The best fireworks display we ever saw. Becki is in the Bay Area for the week.

One of our favorite activities in San Francisco was, and still is, walking the Golden Gate Bridge. Whenever my kids who lived in Odessa TX would visit, we would make a point of spending a day in San Francisco and having a date with the Bridge.
(click to enlarge the small pictures)

In May of 1987, I noticed that the 50th anniversary of the bridge was going to be celebrated in the evening with a spectacular fireworks display and a concert at Chrissey Field (near the Presidio) with the bridge lit up in full view for the ocassion. So Becki and I reserved a room at the Stanford Court on Nob Hill (our favorite hotel in SF) for the nights before and after the event. Six months earlier we had spent 5 days at the Court as the guest of Ryoichi Sasakawa, a billionaire Japanese industrialist who was visiting Linus Pauling. Read the rest of this entry »