I
spent most of my weekend reading a delightful book on a subject that, intrinsically,
is of absolutely no interest to me --- that is an account of the process by
which the structure of DNA was discovered by two scientists working between
1951 and 1953, in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.
The book, The Double Helix, was written in 1968 by James D Watson, an
American student who was 23 years of age when he embarked on the search with a
British scientist, Francis Crick, who was 12 years older, but was still a
graduate student working towards his doctorate.
I found the book, published 15 years
after the events, to be charming because of the remarkably frank, yet on the
whole friendly, descriptions Watson gives of the scientists he worked with and against, in the
process of making this epoch-making discovery, which has generally been
regarded as having unveiled the secret of life (if it means anything to say
that, I am not sure).
For example, in the first paragraph
of the book, he writes of Crick, with whose name he has become inextricably
linked by history, in this way: “Although some of his colleagues realized the
value of his quick penetrating mind and frequently sought his advice, he was
often not appreciated, and most people thought he talked too much.”
Two pages later: “Though he had
dining rights for one meal a week at Caius College, he was not yet a fellow of
any college. Partly this was his own choice……also a factor was his laugh
against which many dons would almost certainly rebel if subjected to its
shattering bang more than once a week. I am sure this occasionally bothered
Francis, even though he obviously knew that most High Table life is dominated
by pedantic, middle-aged men incapable of either amusing or educating him in
anything worthwhile…”
The young American was obviously
being introduced to an entirely non-American way of life as he settled in to
work at the Cavendish, a laboratory so much dominated by tradition that the
door, to which there was only one key,
was firmly locked at 10 o'clock every night because Rutherford, who had
held the post of Cavendish professor from 1919 for 18 years, and had ruled
unchallenged over the laboratory and all its works during that time, had held
the belief that young scientists would be better employed on the tennis courts
in the evenings, rather than swotting away in the lab. And Rutherford had
passed on a good 15 years before Watson ever showed up, but such was the power
of tradition….
In chapter two he describes how Crick
was working on other things, although he was not influenced by the sceptics
among scientists who thought the evidence about DNA (whatever it was) was
inconclusive, because, suggests Watson: “One could not be a successful
scientist without realizing that in contrast to the popular conception
supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of
scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” Another
factor that prevented Crick from moving into the field was that the major work
had been done by a friend, Maurice Wilkins, at King’s College, London, and “the combination of England’s coziness
--- all the important people, if not related by marriage, seemed to know one another --- plus the English sense
of fair play would not allow Francis to move in on Maurice’s problem, In
France, where fair play obviously did not exist, these problems would not have
arisen. The States also would not have permitted such a situation to develop.
One would not expect someone at Berkeley to ignore a first-rate problem merely
because someone at Cal Tech had started first. In England, however, it simply
would not look right.”
One can almost imagine this skinny,
enthusiastic youngster, looking so much like a kid among all these older
fellows, settling in among them with a series of unending chuckles at their
eccentricities. For me these descriptions of this colleagues so much enlivened the complex stuff describing the
problems they were solving, all of which are completely over my head, as to make me glad I have read the book at last, after all these years.
Their friend Maurice Wilkins --- with
whom they were joined in the Nobel Prize awarded for this work in 1962, had
employed a young woman named Rosalind Franklin as his assistant in London, but
she turned out according to Watson, to be determined not to be anyone’s
assistant, since she undertaken work as a crystallographer that was as
important in the field as anything being done by anyone. “Mere inspection suggested she would not
easily bend,” comments Watson. “By choice she did not emphasize her feminine
qualities….she might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild
interest in clothes. This she did not….at the age of thirty-one her dresses
showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.” (A good deal
of the book is devoted to Watson’s fascination with beautiful young women, and
of how he went out of his way to meet as many as he could of continental au pair girls, of whom there were plenty
in the service of Cambridge’s academics.)
Rosy, as they called her, died at the early age
of 37, and after giving her a hard time all through the book, Watson recants on
the last page, saying that in the years after she died, both he and Crick came
to greatly appreciate her personal honesty and generosity, “realizing years too
late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific
world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosy’s exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she
was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level
until a few weeks before her death.”
And so he should have asked her
pardon thus, because apparently he and Crick had used her crystallography,
provided to them by Maurice Wilkins for whom she worked, because it turned out
to provide some of the elements essential to their success in their enterprise. Questions about the
doubtful ethics of their use of her material without seeking her permission
have dogged Watson through his life.
The closeness of the relationships
among scientists, from all over the world, working on the same problem, provide
a fascinating interest in this remarkable book (recently named in the Observer’s list of the 100 best
non-fiction books ever written). In particular, the two Cavendish scientists
were in competition with Linus Pauling, working on the same problem in
California, who had, with a typical flourish of publicity, declared results
that in England they feared might mean he would beat them to the prize. He might
have done, too, because he was on his way to England when he was stopped from leaving
the United States because of his interest in the World Peace movement, generally
regarded in the US as a work of communism.
The English researchers feared that if Pauling had seen the direction in
which they were taking their research, he might well have leapt intuitively to
the solution of the problem. But he never saw it and was just pipped at the
post when Crick and Watson announced their achievement, which Pauling greeted
with warm generosity.
Pauling (I had the pleasure of interviewing
him once) is the only person ever to have received two unshared Nobel prizes,
for chemistry, and for peace. He was the outstanding figure in US chemistry
research for many years, and a firm opponent
of the Cold War with its nuclear deterrent, but at the end of his life he began
to recommend megadoses of vitamins for improved health and as cures for various
diseases, including at one point cancer, claims that have since been
experimentally disproven.
Just to end this, the book contains two pages
that are an amusing description of a Christmas Watson spent in the home of the
left-wing British writer, Naomi Mitchison, to whom his book is dedicated, along
with a household full of her high-powered British intellectual family and
friends. He remarks mildly at how puzzled he was that such a leftist household
could have been worried about how he dressed for dinner. A remark, so mild, yet
so pointed, so amusing, that I could not help myself from laughing out loud as I was reading this book,
of which more than half was a complete mystery to me.
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