IT IS REMARKABLE that the scientist who played a key role in the latest act of one of the past century’s most awesome scientific dramas—the vast international effort to decipher life’s hereditary script—was also a leading man in the first act.
In 1951, James Watson, who later became the genome project’s main advocate and first director, was a twenty-three-year-old, newly minted Ph.D. The former radio Quiz Kid and ornithologist from Chicago had gone to Cambridge, England, in search of glory, girls, and the secret of genes—not necessarily in that order. At the storied Cavendish Laboratory, he instantly bonded with Francis Crick, a loquacious British ex-physicist who was a dozen years older but was still working on his doctoral thesis in biology. Brash, ambitious, a trifle loud, the two scientists were then “almost completely unknown.”
Not for long. Watson subsequently admitted to feeling “slightly queasy” when Crick bounded into The Eagle pub on February 13, 1953, “telling anyone within earshot that we had found the secret of life.” But they had. Building on the work of competitors they were determined to beat, Crick and Watson had correctly deduced the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. That structure, they reported in a short article in Nature just weeks later, was the beguilingly beautiful “double helix.” Noting that the helix could “unzip” and copy itself, Crick and Watson confirmed what had hitherto only been suspected: that DNA was the substance that embodied the genetic code. Their brilliant insight—which heralded a new age in biology and medicine—proved to be the scientific coup of the second half of the century.
Watson tells how they pulled it off in this now-classic memoir. First published in 1968 and in print for more than three decades, The Double Helix remains unique in the annals of science writing. The discovery it describes was of a magnitude comparable, in terms of scientific and social significance, to the breakthroughs that led to the splitting of the atom and the invention of the computer. As a how-I-did-it account by a scientist of the first rank, the book has simply never been duplicated. It is also a wonderfully readable human drama that lets nonscientists share some of the intellectual excitement, high emotion, and incredible suspense. Small wonder that The Double Helix became the inspiration for the whole genre of science best-sellers. Its enduring freshness owes much to Watson’s decision to write it from the viewpoint and in the voice of his younger, rather than mature, self.
Much was made, at the time of the book’s initial publication, of Watson’s candid and sometimes barbed sketches of scientists at work. Yes, the theme of The Double Helix is the unbridled lust for fame. (“It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who never risked a thought” is a typical aside.) And, yes, the memoir bares one of the most intense rivalries in the annals of twentieth-century science, in which Crick and Watson pitted themselves against fellow scientists who initially held the lead: Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkens, and most of all, Rosalind Franklin, who took the first x-ray photographs of DNA and tragically died of cancer at thirty-seven in 1958 before reaping the rewards her critical experimental work deserved.
The Double Helix is also an affectionate paean to a rare friendship, and, perhaps more surprisingly, a joyous celebration of the importance of being playful while pursuing a Nobel. As Watson tells it, there was always time—even during the stomach-crunching final stretch—for a game of tennis, an afternoon at the movies, or a bottle of burgundy, anything at all to avoid “narrow-mindedness and dullness.” Neither is dullness something that readers of The Double Helix run the slightest risk of encountering.
Sylvia Nasar holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at Columbia University and is the author of A Beautiful Mind, the biography of mathematician John Nash.