VIRTUALLY everybody mentioned in this book is alive and intellectually active. Herman Kalckar has come to this country as professor of biochemistry at Harvard Medical School, while John Kendrew and Max Perutz both have remained in Cambridge, where they continue their X-ray work on proteins, for which they received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962. Sir Lawrence Bragg retained his enthusiastic interest in protein structure when he moved in 1954 to London to become director of the Royal Institution. Hugh Huxley, after spending several years in London, is back in Cambridge doing work on the mechanism of muscle contraction. Francis Crick, after a year in Brooklyn, returned to Cambridge to work on the nature and operation of the genetic code, a field of which he has been the acknowledged world leader for the past decade. Maurice Wilkins’ work remained centered on DNA for some years until he and his collaborators established beyond any doubt that the essential features of the double helix were correct. After then making an important contribution to the structure of ribonucleic acid, he has changed the direction of his research to the organization and operation of nervous systems. Peter Pauling now lives in London, teaching chemistry at University College. His father, recently retired from active teaching at Cal Tech, at present concentrates his scientific activity both on the structure of the atomic nucleus and on theoretical structural chemistry. My sister, after being many years in the Orient, lives with her publisher husband and three children in Washington.
All of these people, should they desire, can indicate events and details they remember differently. But there is one unfortunate exception. In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King’s is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. Later, when she moved to Bernal’s lab, she took up work on tobacco mosaic virus and quickly-extended our Qualitative ideas about helical construction into a precise quantitative picture, definitely establishing the essential helical parameters and locating the ribonucleic chain halfway out from the central axis.
Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly 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. Rosalind’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.
The letter written to Delbrück telling of the double helix.
In Stockholm for their Nobel Prizes, December 1962: Maurice Wilkins, John Steinbeck, John Kendrew, Max Perutz, Francis Crick, and James D. Watson.
JAMES D. WATSON was born in 1928 in Chicago. After graduation from the University of Chicago, he worked in genetics at Indiana University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1950. He spent a year at the University of Copenhagen, followed by two years at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. There he met Francis Crick, and the collaboration resulted in their proposal in 1953 of a structure for DNA. After a two-year period at Cal Tech, he joined the faculty at Harvard where he remained as Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology until 1976. Since 1968, as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his research has centered on bacterial virus, molecular genetics, and the synthesis of proteins.
In 1962, together with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, Dr. Watson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology. Prior to The Double Helix, he wrote The Molecular Biology of the Gene, which is now in a third edition.
