(The annotated and the Illustrated) Double Helix

Author: James D. Watson

Publisher: Simon & Schuster 2012 

(The original book was published in 1968.)

… Often, he (Doudna’s father) would bring home a book for her to read.  And that is how a used paperback copy of James Watson’s Double Helix ended up on her bed one day when she was in sixth grade, waiting for her when she got home from school.  … “When I finished, my father discussed it with me,” she recalls.  “He liked the story and especially the very personal side of it—the human side of doing that kind of research.”

— From “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race”—

Watson’s “Double Helix” may have inspired Doudna to pursue a carrier in science, and likewise Schrodinger’s “What is Life?” influenced Francis Crick to abandon physics and pickup biology to search for the structure of DNA.  Watson joined Crick at the Cavendish laboratory and together they abandoned their other scientific goals in the pursuit of the structure of DNA.  Linus Pauling at Caltech, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at Kings College London were their rivals in pursuing the same goal.  Pauling was using a model building technique, while Wilkins and Franklin were looking at x-ray crystallographic images of the DNA.  

Watson and Crick choose the Pauling’s model-building method and then combined it with examining x-ray crystallographic images produced by Franklin to discover the structure of DNA before the others.  This is the story of that discovery written by Watson.

Watson was relatively young, and he included some details of his social life in this book.  Here is one such activity that resonates with that of my younger days.  

“Peter (Pauling’s son) and I had both been too young to observe the original showings of Hedy Lamarr’s romps in the nude, and so on the long-awaited night we collected Elizabeth (Watson’s sister) and went up to the Rex.  However, the only swimming scene left intact by the English censor was an inverted reflection from a pool of water.  Before the film was half over, we joined the violent booing of the disgusted undergraduates as the dubbed voices uttered words of uncontrolled passion.

(The Ecstasy is a 1953 Czech film.)

When Crick, Watson and Wilkins won the Nobel prize for the discovery of DNA in 1962, Watson received thousands of letters mostly congratulatory, but he also received letters that he describes as “writer’s personal hobbyhorse kind”.  The following is Watson’s recount of receiving one such letter.

… One from a Palm Beach man, for instance, declared that marriages between cousins are the cause of all great evils that have afflicted mankind.  Here I thought better of writing back to ask whether there had been any such marriages among his ancestors.

He also received a congratulatory telegram from Feynman.  “… and there he met the beautiful princess and they lived happily ever after.”  Feynman was referring to a daughter of the king of Norway.  Unfortunately, Watson did not get to sit next to a princess during the Nobel price ceremony.  

Like Doudna’s father, I too “liked the very personal side of the story—the human side of doing that kind of research.”