The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson (PDF)

Description

The classic personal account of Watson and Crick’s groundbreaking discovery of the structure of DNA, now with an introduction by Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind.By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science’s greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick’s desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I decided to give this book a try after watching the short, well-acted BBC Horizon documentary “Life Story” which is based on this book with Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park) playing the role of James D. Watson. The names of James Watson and Francis Crick have been forever immortalized in high school biology textbooks for their principal role in the 1953 discovery of the molecular structure of the DNA with the names of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin being only mentioned in passing. They make it seem as if everything was smooth sailing during this discovery. “Honest Jim” puts any such misgivings on the part of the reader to complete rest by giving a brutally candid and perhaps even one-sided recounting of the events that led to the fateful 1953 discovery.This 226 page book, first published in 1968, has gained much notoriety and rightly so for some of the statements made by the author would seem bold, innopportune and outright outrageous.There are a lot of personalities involved and like another reviewer I’ll list the most important ones and their situation in 19511. James Watson – A 23 year old recently-graduated molecular biologist and geneticist from Indiana University who goes to Copenhagen University as a postdoctoral fellow in 1950 at the behest of his supervisor Salvador Luria and collaborator Max Delbruck in order to learn nucleic-acid chemistry necessary for tackling DNA’s structure. A year later, after hearing about X ray crystallography (XRC) from Maurice Wilkins of King’s College, London, he switches to Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University to work in Max Perutz’s lab with the hope of getting to learn XRC.2. Maurice Wilkins – Of King’s College, London. A Physicist turned Biologist who uses XRC to generate photographs of DNA.3. Francis Crick – A 35 year old, loud mouthed PhD student of Max Perutz at Cavendish lab who becomes Watson’s close colleague and collaborator. He makes his ambitious wish clearly known to all – to discover DNA’s structure and beat the American chemist Linus Pauling at his own game. The only problem preventing him from pursuing this along with his dissertation work is that it’s unethical to hijack someone else’s project within England – in this case, Maurice Wilkins’s in nearby King’s College. Once he teams up with J.D. Watson, all concerns for ethics go down the drain.4. Linus Pauling – The famous Caltech, Pasadena based Chemist who is fresh out of his triumph of deciphering correctly the alpha-helix structure of proteins and is on an all out mission to decode the structure of the DNA. He is more hands-on and prefers to deduce molecular structure by building trial-and-error toy models of biomolecules that satisfy experimentally measured data instead of resorting to purely XRC based approach.5. William Lawrence Bragg – The son in the father-son duo of W.H.Bragg-W.L.Bragg who developed the technique of X-ray crystallography for probing crystal structures and after whom the Bragg’s law is named. He is the director of Cavendish lab and is particularly interested in having the DNA structure figured out at Cambridge before any outsider beats them to it.6. Rosalind Franklin – The most tragic character in this tale of intrigue. She’s been hired to assist Maurice Wilkins on the DNA project and XRC is her specialization. Believes in systematically deducing DNA’s structure purely from XRC instead of playing with toy models. Has a sour working relationship with Maurice Wilkins and prefers to carry out her task independently. Maurice frequently complains about her to Watson and Crick who on their part try to pump him for XRC photographs generated by Rosalind.The whole book is a very quick read with some pages containing photographs of the people mentioned and some of the handwritten technical letters that JDW wrote back to Max Delbruck. The 2012 special annotated edition of this book has a lot more illustrations. Even though this book is aimed at a general audience there are a lot of terminologies (such as sugar-phosphate backbone, nucleotides, tautomers, etc) which are not clearly explained and may require the reader to frequently look up Wikipedia.As for my views on how the events unfolded, I consider it a tragic irony that the structure of the DNA was ultimately decoded not by the experienced and righteous Linus Pauling but instead by two youthful, relatively unknown braggarts at Cavendish Lab that were trying to imitate Pauling’s model-building tactics. Also JDW’s occasional gibes at Rosalind Franklin (or “Rosy” as he called her mockingly) seem annoying and though he does try to patch up his professional relationship with her by giving her full credit for generating the excellent XRC photographs, it feels half-hearted and too late. The what-if question remains that she might have perhaps beaten them all to the solution only if she and Maurice had been aware that JDW and FC were closing in on the answer. But then again she might have also suffered the same fate as Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell did. Perhaps her own memoir on the events that transpired might have thrown light on what was happening at that time. All this is left for the reader to speculate upon.My only complaint about this book is that it ends in a very anti-climactic fashion. After leading the reader through the neck and neck race that went on, JDW finishes the memoir in a mundane fashion. All along he makes it very clear that glory is all he cares about. To each his/her own, I suppose. After all not everyone can be like Grigori Perelman. What JDW manages to successfully capture in this book and convey to the readers are – the sense of urgency that prevailed at that time among DNA researchers, the styles and techniques adopted to infer molecular structure and the ultimate thrill of discovery. For this sake alone, this book deserves to be read. (And also because it features on Library of Congress’ “Books that Shaped America” list)Lastly, here are some excerpts that will demonstrate why this book is considered scandalous1. The opening line of Chapter 1 begins memorably as such – “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.” One can only imagine what FC’s first reaction could have been when he read that line.2. On the sticky “Why-only-me?” situation that Maurice Wilkins found himself in – “All this was most unsettling to Maurice. He had not escaped into biology only to find it personally as objectionable as physics, with its atomic consequences. The combination of both Linus and Francis breathing down his neck often made it very difficult to sleep. But at least Pauling was 6000 miles away and even Francis was separated by a 2 hour rail journey. The real problem, then, was Rosy. The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.”3. On W.L.Bragg – “For too long he had lived under the shadow of his famous father, with most people falsely thinking that his father, not he, was responsible for the sharp insight behind Bragg’s law.” This is awkward considering that the foreword to this book was written by W.L.Bragg and on his part W.L.Bragg states gracefully “Those who figure in this book must read it in a very forgiving spirit.”

⭐This book was good. I had to use it for a class. It came in good condition and I would recommend!

⭐Surprisingly personal to temper the science. This book captured perfectly the excitement of discovery. I chuckled at the frank description of the randiness of all these scientists. They may be geniuses, but they’re still very human. You’ll have to read the book to see what I mean. Hopefully this wonderful book will never be out of print.

⭐After reading “The Code Breaker”, in which DNA and James Watson are repeatedly mentioned, I thought it would be a good idea to read “The Double Helix” by Watson again. I had bought the book and read it shortly after it came out in 1968, but, along with many books in my former “library”, I had given it away when we moved from Mississippi to California in 2011. So, I bought a paper-back version from Amazon.Re-reading the book brought back many memories about one’s youth, and a reminder that more than half a century had passed since Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Several of the main players are no longer with us: Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, Sir Lawrence Bragg. James Watson is 92 years old.While re-reading the book, several thoughts came to my mind:When Watson and Crick were reasonably sure that double helix was the structure of DNA, “Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that they had found the secret of life”, recalled Watson. Really? I thought to myself. After all, how could we claim to have found the secret of life when we still do not know the definitive answers to questions such as:(a) Will death reveal the meaning of life?(b) Are we created by some ultra-intelligent beings in a simulation game, which even some renowned physicists seem to believe?In the Introduction by Sylvia Nasar, author of “A Beautiful Mind”, she stated that “Neither is dullness something that readers of the Double Helix run the slightest risk of encountering”. Nobel Prize Physics Laureate Richard Feynman stated that “He (Watson) has described admirably how it feels to have that frightening and beautiful experience of making scientific discovery.” While there is no reason to disagree with these statements, I wonder how many readers who are not well versed in biomolecular biology understand many of the scientific descriptions in the book. For example, in Chapter 25, I certainly enjoyed Watson’s narrative of his disappointment, and those of his companion movie goers, including a number of Cambridge undergraduates, that in the movie Ecstasy, “the only swimming scene left intact by the English Censors was an inverted reflection from a pool of water”. Later in the same chapter, I found it difficult to follow Watson’s excitement that “suddenly I realized the potentially profound implications of a DNA structure in which the adenine residue formed by hydrogen bonds similar to those found in crystals of pure adenine.” I wonder this dichotomy of enjoying one part and unable to appreciate another part of the book is just my own experience or is common to many readers, even though everyone, when asked, would praise how great the book is.Watson certainly was the type who “tells it like it is”. Even late in life, he refused to walk back his racially insensitive comments when given the chance to do so, because he was incapable of not telling the truth, according to his own assessment. It is sad that at age 92, his own Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, had cut all ties with him since 2019. Perhaps, back in 1967, when he started the book with the frank but somewhat offensive statement “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood“, already signaled that trouble awaits down the road.Somewhat differently but fittingly, the book ends with an epilogue containing a moving tribute to Rosalind Franklin, whom he had some rather disparaging comments earlier in the book.

⭐A fascinating first-hand account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. Some of the details are a bit technical, but it is nevertheless very readable.

⭐A book that in truthfully telling the story of a Nobel Prize winning finding, makes science and discovery exciting. It’s a book to share with anyone remotely interested in biology, science, chemistry or with model building or photography. Science is fun. Too many people have forgotten this of late!

⭐Don’t read this if you’re a feminist. Don’t read this if you are easily offended. Remember the time, the place, we had to get from this;”There was not a trace of warmth or frivolity in her words. And yet I could not regard her as totally uninteresting. Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.”To one of the most understated sentences in any scientific publication”It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”This is James Watsons account of the journey. A journey to the structure of DNA, and from that simple sentence, genetics. A young American, not well respected, and a headache to his mentors, Watson tells it how it was from his point of view. Unapologetic, gritty, and to be fair, his writing isn’t up to his biology, so Feynman he ain’t, but that is to miss the point. This is about what is was like, the infighting, the mistakes, in one memorable case, the utter stupidity, but heh, nobody said the road to a Nobel was easy….Read it, make up your own mind, but you won’t fail to be fascinated.

⭐I bought this having lost my own copy and after reading Rosalind Franklin’s biography (which is heartily recommended) . By his own hand, Watson reveals his character and frankly, he comes over as not a very nice fellow.

⭐This is a very entertaining and interesting story, taking you on a highly engaging, behind-the-scenes look at monumental scientific discovery. Well written and a joy to read!

⭐James Watson may be a Nobel prize winning scientist but he writes like a detective novelist. A gripping read! Very accessible to non- scientists too.

⭐Interesting to understand the thought process behind one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs. Although, there were points I got lost when the science got a bit much (dull?) for someone without an knowledge of the topic.It’s only a short book so you’ll rattle through it no problem.

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