Coal Stoves and High Table

George W. Beadle may have been a visiting professor at Oxford, he may be a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, he may be Chancellor of the University of Chicago, but he doesn’t deserve a wife like Muriel nor does he deserve to be co-hero of her chatty and charming little book, These Ruins Are Inhabited—not just because he begins every other sentence with “Gee, honey,” but because no man deserves her.

In 1958 Dr. Beadle, who was teaching at the California Institute of Technology, was asked to occupy the Eastman chair at Oxford University (an appointment which, incidentally, entitled him to be a Fellow of Balliol College, but a Fellow whose voting privileges had been withdrawn ever since the too vigorous participation in college affairs of a former Eastman professor called Felix Frankfurter).

About the Author

Aloïse Buckley Heath

Aloïse Buckley Heath (1918–1967) was the sister of National Review’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr.

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George W. Beadle may have been a visiting professor at Oxford, he may be a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, he may be Chancellor of the University of Chicago, but he doesn’t deserve a wife like Muriel nor does he deserve to be co-hero of her chatty and charming little book, These Ruins Are Inhabited—not just because he begins every other sentence with “Gee, honey,” but because no man deserves her.

In 1958 Dr. Beadle, who was teaching at the California Institute of Technology, was asked to occupy the Eastman chair at Oxford University (an appointment which, incidentally, entitled him to be a Fellow of Balliol College, but a Fellow whose voting privileges had been withdrawn ever since the too vigorous participation in college affairs of a former Eastman professor called Felix Frankfurter).