Genes and Girls and Gamow by JD Watson
Jim Watson is almost equally famous as a winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the DNA double helix as he is the author of a book, The Double Helix, which told in a racy style the background to that discovery.
The Double Helix appeared in the 1960s, a relatively short time after the work it described, and was very much a child of its times. By portraying scientists as human beings involved in a race to make a fundamental discovery before the other guy did, and, in Watson's case at least, with that prize as a definite objective, it played a large part in destroying the public image of scientists as soul-less automata engaged in objective research.
Fifty years after the discovery of the structure of DNA, and almost 40 years after his original biographical memoir, Watson has now picked up the story of his life in the years immediately after that breakthrough.
The result is a curious sort of a memoir which has neither a definite beginning nor a definite end, and which spans an interval of only a few years, from 1953 to 1956.
The science in the story is related to the attempt by researchers in the 1950s to build from the discovery of the structure of DNA towards an understanding of the genetic code by which the instructions stored in DNA molecules are translated, in the form of proteins, into a form the body can use.
The fact that girls feature in the title will be no surprise to anyone who has read Watson's original book. However an obsession with pretty young things, that seemed a natural part of the irreverent approach of a young man describing his recent youthful endeavours, somehow jars coming from a senior citizen looking back over a span of nearly half a century.
The third theme of the book and its title refers to George Gamow, an ebullient Russian polymath who made fundamental contributions to quantum physics and to the Big Bang theory, but also got involved in the biological investigation of the genetic code.
By far the most interesting aspect of the story, as Watson clearly realises, is the insight it provides into the way Gamow, without actually making a major breakthrough himself, acted as a catalyst to speed up the process of this investigation.
But this is not enough to justify the publication of this memoir for a wide audience. There is nothing here that is new, and nothing in the familiar material to change the received wisdom about what happened in molecular biology in the 1950s.
In addition, Watson has a most peculiar style, of which the following is an extreme, but not unrepresentative example. "Unclear then was which of us was the more gauche, she for the question or I for the answer."
There is, however, some insight into the role played by Watson in determining the structure of DNA. It is well known the Cambridge team of Watson and Francis Crick depended entirely on experimental work carried out by Rosalind Franklin at King's College in London. The kindest thing ever said about the way Watson obtained her data is that it was ungentlemanly. In an aside referring to an invitation extended to Crick to talk about their work for the BBC, Watson tells us: "I consented only if it was broadcast exclusively on its overseas services. I was afraid that we might be thought grabby and did not want to stir up more discussion as to whether we had improperly used the King's College data." Why not, one inevitably asks.
This book will be welcomed by historians of science eager for such titbits of background information, and for anyone who might find the idea that scientists are human beings surprising. But there is no great discovery described here, and most of us, surely, no longer find it surprising that many scientists in the 1950s were male chauvinist pigs.
It is hard to see why Watson bothered to write the book, and even harder to see why most people would want to read it.
• John Gribbin is a visiting Fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex.
