When Francis Crick expounded, in 1958, the “central dogma” of molecular biology, Walter Gratzer was in the midst of his PhD, studying variants of the protein haemoglobin while working in the National Institute of Medical Research Council in north London. To contrast the two men, one among the most celebrated scientists of his age, the other largely unknown even within the scientific community, illuminates the varied and tortuous paths of scientific advance.
Although the history of science is often told through the lives of giants such as Crick, their success owes much to an army of brilliant people that grew up in the 20th century; Gratzer, a research scientist and pioneer in the genre of science writing, was one of them.
As a German refugee he had arrived in Britain with no English, yet became a skilled raconteur, with a reverence of the printed and spoken word. Born to Jewish parents in 1932 in Breslau, Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland, he was the son of Hans Graetzer (who changed his name to Grätzer, then Gratzer) and Margit (née Perlstein), who was originally from Hungary and educated by nuns. Hans worked as PA to the manager of AEG, the electrical equipment company, before the family fled to the UK in 1939, never to see most of their relatives again. Despite internment as an “enemy alien”, the young Walter won a scholarship to Cheltenham grammar school, near where he and his parents settled, and another to read chemistry at Oxford, evolving into an English gentleman, shedding accent and umlaut.
After National Service in the RAF and a stint learning nucleic acid biochemistry at Harvard, where he met his future wife Hannah Gould, a professor of immunology, Gratzer returned in 1963 to a position at the Medical Research Council’s biophysics unit at King’s College London. This was the site of Franklin and Wilkins’ x-ray studies of DNA that provided the key data underpinning Watson and Crick’s model of the double helix. In a converted Covent Garden warehouse, Gratzer’s research — inspired by Crick’s dogma (that information flows one-way from DNA to RNA to protein) — aimed to understand how the diversity of RNA and proteins were linked and how they give rise to the physical properties of cells and tissues. His experimental findings over 33 years, while worthy, were not groundbreaking for molecular biology.
Yet Gratzer had a significant, if then little known, influence on the progress and dissemination of the new science. In 1966 John Maddox, a physicist and former science correspondent on The Manchester Guardian, became the editor of Nature, a scientific journal he intended to mould into a pre-eminent outlet for reliable scientific news. Maddox discovered a willing accomplice. Nothing pleased Gratzer, a magisterial writer, more than a euphonious sentence, or the proper use of a series of commas. Moonlighting as the anonymous “Correspondent in Molecular Biology”, Gratzer not only distilled what had been recently discovered, but also advised on the publication of original research papers.
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Every Tuesday evening, a Nature employee would stroll across The Strand and up Drury Lane hefting a suitcase bulging with the dreams of the world’s scientists. Over coffee, brewed in lab glassware, problematic manuscripts would be discussed; a sherry might be drunk. On Wednesday, careers were made, trends set; Gratzer paid a return visit to Nature’s office in Little Essex Street, depositing the suitcase, each manuscript annotated with the names of suitably qualified peer reviewers or marked for disappointment. His extraordinary memory, grasp of fields and range of acquaintance served the journal well. Trainees at Nature sought to emulate him.
Yet Gratzer shunned limelight, hated lecturing, deplored networking, rarely travelled; instead, he read and wrote. He was happiest with a book in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. His generous spirit complemented by acerbic wit made a book review by Gratzer an exquisite torment. In person, as in print, his was an unplumbable depth of historical anecdotes and literary allusions. While not discovering the new principles of a nascent science, in a series of books and anthologies he focused on the reliability of evidence, the effects of chance and personality and, most acutely, the role of human foibles in the progress of science. He edited, among others, the Longman Literary Companion to Science (1989), The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes (2002) and The Undergrowth of Science (2000).
In the second half of the 20th century, molecular biology explained evolution and transformed biology, environmental science, medicine and humanity’s understanding of itself. Gratzer and Crick had encyclopaedic knowledge, confidence of judgment, facility for conversation, a mistrust of Big Science and the goal of understanding the molecular underpinning of life. Whereas Crick was a famous playmaker, the Messi of team molecular biology, and entered the pantheon, Gratzer took a back seat, guiding and chronicling the progress of the field.
Professor Walter Gratzer, physical biochemist, was born on September 20, 1932. He died of complications from dementia on October 20, 2021, aged 89