Genes, Girls, and Gamow
After the Double Helix
by James D. Watson
Knopf, 304 pp., $26
A DOCTORATE from Indiana University in 1949, the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University, the discovery of DNA. Thereafter, immortality. James Watson has plainly come to regard his life as a sign of grace.
And with some reason, I suppose. Watson was twenty-three when in the early 1950s he joined Francis Crick in a scientific partnership. They proposed to discover the secret of life. The odds in their favor were not great. Biologists knew that in perpetuating themselves, living systems must squeeze their identity into what the physicist Erwin Schr dinger had called a code script. Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was plainly involved. Beyond this, experiments had revealed little and various theories nothing. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had for years studied DNA by means of X-ray crystallography, but it was slow, frustrating, and inconclusive work, rather like deducing the score of a symphony from its echoes in a concert hall. But the matter had come to occupy Linus Pauling, and as far as Watson and Crick were concerned, his presence on the scene was ominous. Pauling possessed an intelligence of almost supernatural vigor. He seemed eager to offer a revelation.
And yet there it was. The patient plodding researchers continued to plod patiently, consuming time but not covering distance; Pauling's infallible intuition failed him as he emerged noisily from the California Institute of Technology in 1951 with a bizarre triple helix in hand. Watson and Crick spotted the truth. DNA was a double helix, its two strands supported by chemical struts, adenine paired with thymine and guanine with cytosine. The molecule's structure at once revealed its secrets. DNA expressed a cryptogram and so contained a message, its four chemical constituents comprising an elementary alphabet. And it penetrated the future by unwinding itself and then separating, its halves recombining to form two double stranded helices where before there was only one.
This was all very elegant. The double helix electrified the emerging discipline of molecular biology. It electrified the world as well, Watson and Crick winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology.
That they had made a discovery of great importance, no one disputed, least of all Watson. But the real story, he believed, had been pointlessly sanitized. And so, in 1968, he published a memoir of rectification under the title, "The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA." The book was a considerable success, the more so since Watson expressed with candor his conviction that scientific research is ruthless, unprincipled, and driven largely by an undignified scramble for fame. Watson's narrative supported his claim. Having appropriated Rosalind Franklin's research results because they were crucial, Watson admitted that he and Crick had denied her the appropriate credit because it was easy.
Watson's book amused the general public and outraged his colleagues, Crick denouncing it as something like "that found in the lower class of women's magazines." E.O. Wilson, the environmental biologist and Watson's colleague at Harvard in the 1960s, was moved to describe Watson as the most unpleasant human being he had ever met--the "Caligula of Science."
Blood dries quickly, Charles de Gaulle observed, and so does outrage. Watson's memoir came to be appreciated as an achievement in brashness. Scientists whom Watson had neglected personally to offend quickly reached the conclusion that in disciplines other than their own, scientific research was every bit as nasty as Watson had indicated. The book is now considered a classic.
NOW, in "Genes, Girls, and Gamow," Watson proposes to take up the story where "The Double Helix" ends. "For better or worse," he writes, "I and my friends were present at the birth of the DNA paradigm--by any standards one of the great moments in the history of science, if not of the human species. In this way we were unique players in a momentous drama. Thus there will be many readers wanting to know better what actually happened in our lives."
This is not so. Watson has been misinformed.
