The Double Helix, page 1
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For Naomi Mitchison
Contents
Foreword: by Sir Lawrence Bragg
Preface
Introduction: by Sylvia Nasar
Illustrations
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Foreword by Sir Lawrence Bragg
THIS ACCOUNT of the events which led to the solution of the structure of DNA, the fundamental genetical material, is unique in several ways. I was much pleased when Watson asked me to write the foreword.
There is in the first place its scientific interest. The discovery of the structure by Crick and Watson, with all its biological implications, has been one of the major scientific events of this century. The number of researches which it has inspired is amazing; it has caused an explosion in biochemistry which has transformed the science. I have been amongst those who have pressed the author to write his recollections while they are still fresh in his mind, knowing how important they would be as a contribution to the history of science. The result has exceeded expectation. The latter chapters, in which the birth of the new idea is described so vividly, are drama of the highest order; the tension mounts and mounts towards the final climax. I do not know of any other instance where one is able to share so intimately in the researcher’s struggles and doubts and final triumph.
Then again, the story is a poignant example of a dilemma which may confront an investigator. He knows that a colleague has been working for years on a problem and has accumulated a mass of hard-won evidence, which has not yet been published because it is anticipated that success is just around the corner. He has seen this evidence and has good reason to believe that a method of attack which he can envisage, perhaps merely a new point of view, will lead straight to the solution. An offer of collaboration at such a stage might well be regarded as a trespass. Should he go ahead on his own? It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial new idea is really one’s own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others. The realization of this difficulty has led to the establishment of a somewhat vague code amongst scientists which recognizes a claim in a line of research staked out by a colleague—up to a certain point. When competition comes from more than one quarter, there is no need to hold back. This dilemma comes out clearly in the DNA story. It is a source of deep satisfaction to all intimately concerned that, in the award of the Nobel Prize in 1962, due recognition was given to the long, patient investigation by Wilkins at King’s College (London) as well as to the brilliant and rapid final solution by Crick and Watson at Cambridge.
Finally, there is the human interest story—the impression made by Europe and England in particular upon a young man from the States. He writes with a Pepys-like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit. One must remember that his book is not a history, but an autobiographical contribution to the history which will some day be written. As the author himself says, the book is a record of impressions rather than historical facts. The issues were often more complex, and the motives of those who had to deal with them were less tortuous, than he realized at the time. On the other hand, one must admit that his intuitive understanding of human frailty often strikes home.
The author has shown the manuscript to some of us who were involved in the story, and we have suggested corrections of historical fact here and there, but personally I have felt reluctant to alter too much because the freshness and directness with which impressions have been recorded is an essential part of the interest of this book.
W. L. B.
Sir Lawrence Bragg (b. 1890) was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University at the time of the discovery of the Double Helix. He and his father, William Henry, the originators of X-ray crystallography, received the Nobel Prize in 1915.
Preface
HERE I relate my version of how the structure of DNA was discovered. In doing so I have tried to catch the atmosphere of the early postwar years in England, where most of the important events occurred. As I hope this book will show, science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles. To this end I have attempted to re-create my first impressions of the relevant events and personalities rather than present an assessment which takes into account the many facts I have learned since the structure was found. Although the latter approach might be more objective, it would fail to convey the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty. Thus many of the comments may seem one-sided and unfair, but this is often the case in the incomplete and hurried way in which human beings frequently decide to like or dislike a new idea or acquaintance. In any event, this account represents the way I saw things then, in 1951–1953: the ideas, the people, and myself.
I am aware that the other participants in this story would tell parts of it in other ways, sometimes because their memory of what happened differs from mine and, perhaps in even more cases, because no two people ever see the same events in exactly the same light. In this sense, no one will ever be able to write a definitive history of how the structure was established. Nonetheless, I feel the story should be told, partly because many of my scientific friends have expressed curiosity about how the double helix was found, and to them an incomplete version is better than none. But even more important, I believe, there remains general ignorance about how science is “done.” That is not to say that all science is done in the manner described here. This is far from the case, for styles of scientific research vary almost as much as human personalities. On the other hand, I do not believe that the way DNA came out constitutes an odd exception to a scientific world complicated by the contradictory pulls of ambition and the sense of fair play.
The thought that I should write this book has been with me almost from the moment the double helix was found. Thus my memory of many of the significant events is much more complete than that of most other episodes in my life. I also have made extensive use of letters written at virtually weekly intervals to my parents. These were especially helpful in exactly dating a number of the incidents. Equally important have been the valuable comments by various friends who kindly read earlier versions and gave in some instances quite detailed accounts of incidents that I had referred to in less complete form. To be sure, there are cases where my recollections differ from theirs, and so this book must be regarded as my view of the matter.
Some of the earlier chapters were written in the homes of Albert Szent-Györgyi, John A. Wheeler, and John Cairns, and I wish to thank them for quiet rooms with tables overlooking the ocean. The later chapters were written with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed me to return briefly to the other Cambridge and the kind hospitality of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College.
As far as possible I have included photographs taken at the time the story occurred, and in particular I want to thank Herbert Gutfreund, Peter Pauling, Hugh Huxley, and Gunther Stent for sending me some of their snapshots. For editorial assistance I’m much indebted to Libby Aldrich for the quick, perceptive remarks expected from our best Radcliffe students and to Joyce Lebowitz both for keeping me from completely misusing the English language and for innumerable comments about what a good book must do. Finally, I wish to express thanks for the immense help Thomas J. Wilson has given me from the time he saw the first draft. Without his wise, warm, and sensible advice, the appearance of this book, in what I hope is the right form, might never have occurred.
J. D. W.
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
November 1967
Introduction by Sylvia Nasar
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.
Illustrations
PHOTOGRAPHS
Crick and Watson, along the backs
Francis in the Cavendish
Maurice Wilkins World Wide Photos
The microbial genetics meeting, Copenhagen, March
Linus Pauling Information Office, California Institute of Technology
Sir Lawrence Bragg
Rosalind Franklin
X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, A form
Elizabeth Watson
In Paris, spring 1952
The meeting at Royaumont, July 1952
In the Italim Alps, August 1952
Early ideas on the DNA-RNA-protein relation
X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, B form
Original model of the double helix
Watson and Crick in front of the model Photograph A. C. Barrington Brown
Morning coffee in the Cavendish photograph A. C. Barrington Brown
Letter to Max Delbrück
In Stockholm, December 1962 Svenskt Pressfoto, Stockholm
DIAGRAMS
Short section of DNA, 1951
Chemical structures of the DNA bases, 1951
Covalent bonds of the sugar-phosphate backbone
Schematic view of a nucleotide
Mg++ ions binding phosphate groups
Schematic view of DNA, like-with-like base pairs
Base pairs for the like-with-like structure
Tautomeric forms of guanine and thymine
Base pairs for the double helix
Schematic illustration of the double helix
DNA replication
IN THE summer of 1955, I arranged to join some friends who were going into the Alps. Alfred Tissieres, then a Fellow at King’s, had said he would get me to the top of the Rothorn, and even though I panic at voids this did not seem to be the time to be a coward. So after getting in shape by letting a guide lead me up the Allinin, I took the two-hour postal-bus trip to Zinal, hoping that the driver was not carsick as he lurched the bus around the narrow road twisting above the falling rock slopes. Then I saw Alfred standing in front of the hotel, talking with a long-mustached Trinity don who had been in India during the war.
Since Alfred was still out of training, we decided to spend the afternoon walking up to a small restaurant which lay at the base of the huge glacier falling down off the Obergabelhorn and over which we were to walk the next day. We were only a few minutes out of sight of the hotel when we saw a party coming down upon us, and I quickly recognized one of the climbers. He was Willy Seeds, a scientist who several years before had worked at King’s College, London, with Maurice Wilkins on the optical properties of DNA fibers. Willy soon spotted me, slowed down, and momentarily gave the impression that he might remove his rucksack and chat for a while. But all he said was, “How’s Honest Jim?” and quickly increasing his pace was soon below me on the path.
Later as I trudged upward, I thought again about our earlier meetings in London. Then DNA was still a mystery, up for grabs, and no one was sure who would get it and whether he would deserve it if it proved as exciting as we semisecretly believed. But now the race was over and, as one of the winners, I knew the tale was not simple and certainly not as the newspapers reported. Chiefly it was a matter of five people: Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, and me. And as Francis was the dominant force in shaping my part, I will start the story with him.
Francis Crick and J. D. Watson during a walk along the backs. In the distance, King’s College Chapel.
1
I HAVE never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him. It has nothing to do with his present fame. Already he is much talked about, usually with reverence, and someday he may be considered in the category of Rutherford or Bohr. But this was not true when, in the fall of 1951, I came to the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University to join a small group of physicists and chemists working on the three-dimensional structures of proteins. At that time he was thirty-five, yet almost totally unknown. Although some of his closest 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.
Leading the unit to which Francis belonged was Max Perutz, an Austrian-born chemist who came to England in 1936. He had been collecting X-ray diffraction data from hemoglobin crystals for over ten years and was just beginning to get somewhere. Helping him was Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish. For almost forty years Bragg, a Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of crystallography, had been watching X-ray diffraction methods solve structures of ever-increasing difficulty.* The more complex the molecule, the happier Bragg became when a new method allowed its elucidation. Thus in the immediate postwar years he was especially keen about the possibility of solving the structures of proteins, the most complicated of all molecules. Often, when administrative duties permitted, he visited Perutz’ office to discuss recently accumulated X-ray data. Then he would return home to see if he could interpret them.
