“The Double Helix” by James Watson of Watson-Crick fame is a scientific memoir with a difference. Watson describes the period before and after the famous Letter to Nature paper about a possible structure of DNA, not scrimping on the details and being quite frank. The picture that emerges from the book paints Watson as a generator of (mostly incorrect) ideas with an aversion to experimental science and an interest in au pair girls – not what I expected from one of the most famous biologists of the 20th century. Crick is a talkative academic with an irritating laugh, and Watson is an arrogant and lonely young American on the make, happy to have escaped the Mid-West, not too happy about alien Europe. Something in their mutual chemistry makes them ignore formal authority, abandon the work they had been allocated, and pursue the biggest challenge in science: they want to discover exactly how biological information is transmitted through the generations.
And if we are to believe the book, Watson’s collaborator and cheese to his chalk Crick did what any PhD student is advised not to do – instead of concentrating on working on his PhD calculating atom positions in hemoglobin (no computers or even calculators then), solving the …show more content…
The picture of DNA diffraction pattern used in the Nature paper was obtained by Rosalind Franklin and shown to Watson and Crick by Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins, who later shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick – Franklin was dead by then from cancer caused by X-ray exposure, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Watson’s unsympathetic description of Franklin in “The Double Helix” caused Harvard University Press, the intended publisher, to cancel its publication, and Watson later admitted that he may have misrepresented Franklin in the
And if we are to believe the book, Watson’s collaborator and cheese to his chalk Crick did what any PhD student is advised not to do – instead of concentrating on working on his PhD calculating atom positions in hemoglobin (no computers or even calculators then), solving the …show more content…
The picture of DNA diffraction pattern used in the Nature paper was obtained by Rosalind Franklin and shown to Watson and Crick by Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins, who later shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick – Franklin was dead by then from cancer caused by X-ray exposure, and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Watson’s unsympathetic description of Franklin in “The Double Helix” caused Harvard University Press, the intended publisher, to cancel its publication, and Watson later admitted that he may have misrepresented Franklin in the