Honest Jim and the Double Helix

It isn’t every day that I eat pizza with a Nobel laureate. The experience was a fringe benefit of an undergraduate studentship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a cluster of biological research labs perched incongruously on the coast of Long Island, New York. The institute has played host to an impressive eight Nobel laureates in the past half-century, the most famous being James Watson, who together with Francis Crick solved the structure of DNA and set molecular biology in motion. Cold Spring Harbor is, in short, a heady place for a young scientist.

During his long presidency at the institute, James Watson made an annual tradition of holding a pizza party for the motley class of international undergraduates who arrived each summer to wreak energetic havoc in the laboratories. This prospect naturally excited us: one lad had brought a battered copy of Watson’s memoir all the way from Mexico, hoping to get it autographed. ‘This book’, he explained, ‘is what made me become a biologist.’ Nobody scoffed at him: we were all very young and likewise rather giddy with enthusiasm for science. That same burning enthusiasm, vividly portrayed, is both the driving force and saving grace of Watson’s famous – and infamous – personal memoir, The Double Helix. The book describes the short, seminal period between 1950 and  1953 when Watson left Indiana for post-war Europe as a precocious 22-year-old with a Ph.D. in genetics. Genetics was, at the time, fraught with confusing phenomena and huge unanswered questions: it was still unclear whether the stuff of genes was DNA, the coding material inside the nucleus of every cell, or proteins, the building blocks of those cells. Wisely backing DNA, Watson made the first in a series of far-sighted career choices in determining to solve its molecular structure. Unfortunately, this meant he had to learn some biochemistry and it was this unwelcome task that took the young American to Copenhagen. At first, the project proved a failure: biochemistry was frankly boring. In fact, as Sir Lawrence Bragg notes in his laconic foreword to The Double Helix, this dismissal is characteristic of Watson’s entire book: ‘He writes with a Pepys-like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit.’ Watson, who was recently forced to resign from Cold Spring Harbor after remarking in an interview that Africans are not as intelligent as white people, is certainly as brutally tactless in prose as he is in person. Yet this characteristic outspokenness creates a memorably entertaining memoir. Migrating expediently from Copenhagen to Cambridge, Watson observed: ‘I had never seen such beautiful buildings in all my life . . . Thus I was only nominally depressed when I peered inside several damp houses known to contain student rooms. I knew from the novels of Dickens that I would not suffer a fate the English denied themselves.’ Cambridge, despite the cold, the damp and the appalling post-war food, offered more than impressive architecture: it also provided an intellectual soulmate: ‘Departing would be idiocy, for I had immediately discovered the fun of talking to Francis Crick.’ These two men went on to form one of the great synergistic partnerships of oddballs in scientific history. Crick was a loose cannon in the well-mannered Cambridge establishment, brash, brilliant, butterfly-minded and incurably apt to burst in on other people’s experiments with flights of uninvited theory. Watson describes his friend with a typically unflattering affection: ‘I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood . . . he talked louder and faster than anyone else and when he laughed, his location within the Cavendish was obvious.’ The Englishman, meanwhile, found in Watson a brashness and a love of wild talk to match his own. So the two men talked . . . in the tea-room of the Cavendish laboratories, in the Eagle pub, on the Cambridge Backs. . . and somehow, out of all this hot air and two brilliant minds, there emerged the famous structure of DNA. One of the principal strengths of Watson’s memoir is to weave that emerging epiphany into the narrative exactly as the thoughts of the protagonists evolved. The book is far from a biology lesson and is unlikely to bore you even if you neither know nor care about DNA. I, however, find Watson’s vivid description of the genesis of an idea quite engrossing – replete with false starts, constructive errors and random inspirations. ‘I believe there remains a general ignorance about how science is “done”,’ he states, setting out to demystify and humanize this far-from-abstract endeavour. It is clear that the Cambridge duo took their work intensely personally. High on excitement, they worked until midnight; struck with despair, they threw parties instead, or played tennis, or chased pretty girls. (Watson, in fact, pursued women with the same dedication he applied to DNA, although any romantic success goes conspicuously unreported. His attitude to what he called ‘popsies’ makes this hardly surprising.) Putting aside the intermittent bigotry, The Double Helix offers a surfeit of human interest, a light touch with the biology and the rollicking pace of a detective novel, making it a uniquely readable scientific memoir. It helps, of course, that Crick and Watson were the ultimate ‘ideas men’: there is no need to make years of patient experimental work sound thrilling because they very rarely did any. Hence Crick’s persistent failure to obtain a Ph.D. and Watson’s remark, upon nabbing some valuable virus from a generous colleague, that ‘The idea of Francis and me dirtying our hands with experiments brought unconcealed amusement.’ Fortunately, others were engaged in the tedious experimental slog which science so often requires and it is they who provide The Double Helix with its famous central drama. In 1950, when Watson arrived at Cambridge, DNA was considered the personal property of Maurice Wilkins at King’s College, London. England was a small place; science was a civilized business and trespassing on other people’s projects was very bad form. Only this, concluded Watson, could be preventing Crick – with his huge talent for crystallographic theory – from devoting more time to DNA. To the young American, such civility looked frankly foolish: ‘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.’ Why, then, should he and Crick be forced from the race? If Watson had put this case less forcefully, been less hubristic or simply more English, the course of history might well have been altered. If his character had been more in sympathy with that of the reclusive Maurice Wilkins, their competition-cum-collaboration might have been less controversial. As for Crick, a cache of his lost correspondence, discovered in 2009, sheds light on a complex but genuine friendship with Wilkins. Watson, however, struggled to respect this, preferring the role of ‘young Turk’ to that of patient diplomat. Less forgivably, Watson didn’t even try to respect Wilkins’s colleague Rosalind Franklin, a meticulous and fiercely intelligent crystal-lographer. Franklin was the stuff of Watson’s nightmares: not only did she insist on cautious experiments, she also didn’t flirt, didn’t like him and didn’t even bother wearing make-up. Watson’s snide depiction of her is his memoir’s least edifying feature: ‘The thought could not be avoided’, he states, ‘that the best home for a feminist was another person’s lab.’ (The Double Helix is not Franklin’s story but anyone unsatisfied by her portrayal therein should turn to Brenda Maddox’s sympathetic and nuanced biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.) This epic personality clash between the scientists at Cambridge and those at King’s College, London, has led to half a century of debate about the extent to which the Cambridge duo begged, borrowed or stole data from King’s to inspire their insight into DNA. The Double Helix offers only a single viewpoint and it is that of a thoroughly self-involved narrator. (Did Watson actually intend to appear as much the anti-hero as the hero of his own memoir? Probably he simply didn’t care: his initial title for the book was the defiant ‘Honest Jim’.) Whatever the author’s intentions, however, The Double Helix remains a gem of science writing and a ripping yarn to boot, featuring a rich cast of contrasting characters and a wealth of period detail. Watson consummately conveys the spirit of an adventure ‘characterized by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty’. Furthermore, while no one should conclude that all biologists behave like Crick or Watson, the book also illuminates some understated truths about scientific research. There is the essential, yet often troubled, relationship between experimentalists and theorists; the crucial reminder that what soon becomes the acknowledged truth starts out as a total mystery; and the universal certainty that a solution of breathtaking elegance, once found, simply has to be correct. Fifty years further on, at Cold Spring Harbor, I do not remember whether my Mexican friend got an autograph on that influential paperback. But I do remember Watson, then in his seventies, dispensing words of wisdom and social awkwardness in equal measure. Another student, smarter and less awed than most of us, seized the chance to ask for career advice: a mere decade later, having taken it, he is a precociously brilliant professor in today’s hot field of systems biology. James Watson, it seems, never lost his sharp eye for the way of the future.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Catherine Merrick 2011