|
'It is a strange model and embodies several
unusual features. However, since DNA is an unusual substance,
we are not hesitant in being bold.'
Thus quietly, Jim Watson, aged twenty-four,
wrote from Cambridge to a friend in the States, one month
before the public announcement in April 1953 of a discovery
that many scientists now call the most significant since
Mendel's. DNA is the molecule of heredity, and to know its
structure and method of reproduction enables science to
know how genetic directions are written and transmitted,
how the forms of life are ordered from one generation to
the next. The search for this molecular structure is the
story told here, in a book that also has its unusual features
as well as a measure of boldness. The work was done between
the fall of 1951 and April 1953, and the scientific paper
announcing the discovery was published in Nature
immediately.
In 1962 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and
Physiology was awarded to Francis H. C. Crick, James D.
Watson, and Maurice H. F. Wilkins, the three men who almost
a decade earlier had worked together, merging data from
chemistry, physics, and biology, to solve the structure
of DNA -- Crick and Watson on the building of a hypothetical
model that would conform in all its parts to what Wilkins'
X-ray pictures had already shown of the molecule. The interplay
of ideas, temperaments, and circumstances was an especially
fortuitous one, since the result was something that, in
Watson's words, was too pretty not to be true: the double
helix. Watson shows us how this particular piece of science
was worked out, but along the way he manages to tell a great
deal more, something of the general creative process itself.
It is his own account and, in order to recapture some of
the original excitement, he has told it now as he saw it
then, in the early 1950s. It is not, perhaps, wholly objective.
Involved is the way a young American scientist saw the challenge
of a great discovery waiting to be made, and the way he
was caught up into the very air of Cambridge and the minds
it nurtured; there was also the boredom of tedious experiment,
and the aggressive miscalculations resulting from wrong
notions stubbornly held to or facts only half understood;
there were self-doubts and insecurities, both intellectual
and social; there was hard competition, between men and
labs as well as theories, and one had to learn tightrope
walking; there were dull conferences to attend, but warm
and fascinating people to talk to; there was more than work
-- the Backs of the colleges, beside the River Cam, to walk
along, foreign girls to be puzzled by, finances to be figured,
wine to be tasted, books and politics to be argued. There
was much to be learned, and since science is also part of
life, this is the kind of whole picture Watson gives. It
is an amazing narrative.
What we have, then, is more than the "inside
story" of one participant's version of a revolutionary
discovery. We have a book, written on the assumption that
science is a human endeavor, and important enough to be
written about forthrightly.
James D. Watson, born in 1928, was graduated
from the University of Chicago and took his Ph.D. in genetics
at Indiana University. After the work described in The
Double Helix, he spent two years at Cal Tech and then
joined the faculty of Harvard, where he is Professor of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
|
