The Double Helix

A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

James D. Watson

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780743219174
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Anatomy & Physiology
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

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.

Somewhere between Bragg the theorist and Perutz the experimentalist was Francis, who occasionally did experiments but more often was immersed in the theories for solving protein structures. Often he came up with something novel, would become enormously excited, and immediately tell it to anyone who would listen. A day or so later he would often realize that his theory did not work and return to experiments, until boredom generated a new attack on theory.

There was much drama connected with these ideas. They did a great deal to liven up the atmosphere of the lab, where experiments usually lasted several months to years. This came partly from the volume of Crick’s voice: he talked louder and faster than anyone else and, when he laughed, his location within the Cavendish was obvious. Almost everyone enjoyed these manic moments, especially when we had the time to listen attentively and to tell him bluntly when we lost the train of his argument. But there was one notable exception. Conversations with Crick frequently upset Sir Lawrence Bragg, and the sound of his voice was often sufficient to make Bragg move to a safer room. Only infrequently would he come to tea in the Cavendish, since it meant enduring Crick’s booming over the tea room. Even then Bragg was not completely safe. On two occasions the corridor outside his office was flooded with water pouring out of a laboratory in which Crick was working. Francis, with his interest in theory, had neglected to fasten securely the rubber tubing around his suction pump.

At the time of my arrival, Francis’ theories spread far beyond the confines of protein crystallography. Anything important would attract him, and he frequently visited other labs to see which new experiments had been done. Though he was generally polite and considerate of colleagues who did not realize the real meaning of their latest experiments, he would never hide this fact from them. Almost immediately he would suggest a rash of new experiments that should confirm his interpretation. Moreover, he could not refrain from subsequently telling all who would listen how his clever new idea might set science ahead.

As a result, there existed an unspoken yet real fear of Crick, especially among his contemporaries who had yet to establish their reputations. The quick manner in which he seized their facts and tried to reduce them to coherent patterns frequently made his friends’ stomachs sink with the apprehension that, all too often in the near future, he would succeed, and expose to the world the fuzziness of minds hidden from direct view by the considerate, well-spoken manners of the Cambridge colleges.

Though he had dining rights for one meal a week at Caius College, he was not yet a fellow of any college. Partly this was his own choice. Clearly he did not want to be burdened by the unnecessary sight of undergraduate tutees. Also a factor was his laugh, against which many dons would most certainly rebel if subjected to its shattering bang more than once a week. I am sure this occasionally bothered Francis, even though he obviously knew that most High Table life is dominated by pedantic, middle-aged men incapable of either amusing or educating him in anything worthwhile. There always existed King’s College, opulently nonconformist and clearly capable of absorbing him without any loss of his or its character. But despite much effort on the part of his friends, who knew he was a delightful dinner companion, they were never able to hide the fact that a stray remark over sherry might bring Francis smack into your life.

Francis next to a Cavendish X-ray tube.

2

BEFORE my arrival in Cambridge, Francis only occasionally thought about deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and its role in heredity. This was not because he thought it uninteresting. Quite the contrary. A major factor in his leaving physics and developing an interest in biology had been the reading in 1946 of What Is Life? by the noted theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger. This book very elegantly propounded the belief that genes were the key components of living cells and that, to understand what life is, we must know how genes act. When Schrödinger wrote his book (1944), there was general acceptance that genes were special types of protein molecules. But almost at this same time the bacteriologist O. T. Avery was carrying out experiments at the Rockefeller Institute in New York which showed that hereditary traits could be transmitted from one bacterial cell to another by purified DNA molecules.

Given the fact that DNA was known to occur in the chromosomes of all cells, Avery’s experiments strongly suggested that future experiments would show that all genes were composed of DNA. If true, this meant to Francis that proteins would not be the Rosetta Stone for unraveling the true secret of life. Instead, DNA would have to provide the key to enable us to find out how the genes determined, among other characteristics, the color of our hair, our eyes, most likely our comparative intelligence, and maybe even our potential to amuse others.

Of course there were scientists who thought the evidence favoring DNA was inconclusive and preferred to believe that genes were protein molecules. Francis, however, did not worry about these skeptics. Many were cantankerous fools who unfailingly backed the wrong horses. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

Francis, nonetheless, was not then prepared to jump into the DNA world. Its basic importance did not seem sufficient cause by itself to lead him out of the protein field which he had worked in only two years and was just beginning to master intellectually. In addition, his colleagues at the Cavendish were only marginally interested in the nucleic acids, and even in the best of financial circumstances it would take two or three years to set up a new research group primarily devoted to using X rays to look at the DNA structure.

Moreover, such a decision would create an awkward personal situation. At this time molecular work on DNA in England was, for all practical purposes, the personal property of Maurice Wilkins, a bachelor who worked in London at King’s College.* Like Francis, Maurice had been a physicist and also used X-ray diffraction as his principal tool of research. It would have looked very bad if Francis had jumped in on a problem that Maurice had worked over for several years. The matter was even worse because the two, almost equal in age, knew each other and, before Francis remarried, had frequently met for lunch or dinner to talk about science.

It would have been much easier if they had been living in different countries. The combination of England’s coziness—all the important people, if not related by marriage, seemed to know one another—plus the English sense of fair play would not allow Francis to move in on Maurice’s problem. In France, where fair play obviously did not exist, these problems would not have arisen. The States also would not have permitted such a situation to develop. One would not expect someone at Berkeley to ignore a first-rate problem merely because someone at Cal Tech had started first. In England, however, it simply would not look right.

Even worse, Maurice continually frustrated Francis by never seeming enthusiastic enough about DNA. He appeared to enjoy slowly understating important arguments. It was not a question of intelligence or common sense. Maurice clearly had both; witness his seizing DNA before almost everyone else. It was that Francis felt he could never get the message over to Maurice that you did not move cautiously when you were holding dynamite like DNA. Moreover, it was increasingly difficult to take Maurice’s mind off his assistant, Rosalind Franklin.

Not that he was at all in love with Rosy, as we called her from a distance. Just the opposite—almost from the moment she arrived in Maurice’s lab, they began to upset each other. Maurice, a beginner in X-ray diffraction work, wanted some professional help and hoped that Rosy, a trained crystallographer, could speed up his research. Rosy, however, did not see the situation this way. She claimed that she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice’s assistant.

I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated, austere life could not be thus explained—she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.

Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he didn’t see some reason for her complaints—King’s had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women’s combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.

Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also, there was no denying she had a good brain. If she could only keep her emotions under control, there would be a good chance that she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech’s fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt that he was interested. Our first principles told us that Pauling could not be the greatest of all chemists without realizing that DNA was the most golden of all molecules. Moreover, there was definite proof. Maurice had received a letter from Linus asking for a copy of the crystalline DNA X-ray photographs. After some hesitation he wrote back saying that he wanted to look more closely at the data before releasing the pictures.

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 six thousand miles away, and even Francis was separated by a two-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.

Maurice Wilkins.

3

IT WAS Wilkins who had first excited me about X-ray work on DNA. This happened at Naples when a small scientific meeting was held on the structures of the large molecules found in living cells. Then it was the spring of 1951, before I knew of Francis Crick’s existence. Already I was much involved with DNA, since I was in Europe on a postdoctoral fellowship to learn its biochemistry. My interest in DNA had grown out of a desire, first picked up while a senior in college, to learn what the gene was. Later, in graduate school at Indiana University, it was my hope that the gene might be solved without my learning any chemistry. This wish partially arose from laziness since, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was principally interested in birds and managed to avoid taking any chemistry or physics courses which looked of even medium difficulty. Briefly the Indiana bio chemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion.

So I was not faced with the prospect of absorbing chemistry until I went to Copenhagen to do my postdoctoral research with the biochemist Herman Kalckar. Journeying abroad initially appeared the perfect solution to the complete lack of chemical facts in my head, a condition at times encouraged by my Ph.D. supervisor, the Italian-trained microbiologist Salvador Luria. He positively abhorred most chemists, especially the competitive variety out of the jungles of New York City. Kalckar, however, was obviously cultivated, and Luria hoped that in his civilized, continental company I would learn the necessary tools to do chemical research, without needing to react against the profit-oriented organic chemists.

Then Luria’s experiments largely dealt with the multiplication of bacterial viruses (bacteriophages, or phages for short). For some years the suspicion had existed among the more inspired geneticists that viruses were a form of naked genes. If so, the best way to find out what a gene was and how it duplicated was to study the properties of viruses. Thus, as the simplest viruses were the phages, there had sprung up between 1940 and 1950 a growing number of scientists (the phage group) who studied phages with the hope that they would eventually learn how the genes controlled cellular heredity. Leading this group were Luria and his German-born friend, the theoretical physicist Max Delbrück, then a professor at Cal Tech. While Delbrück kept hoping that purely genetic tricks could solve the problem, Luria more often wondered whether the real answer would come only after the chemical structure of a virus (gene) had been cracked open. Deep down he knew that it is impossible to describe the behavior of something when you don’t know what it is. Thus, knowing he could never bring himself to learn chemistry, Luria felt the wisest course was to send me, his first serious student, to a chemist.

He had no difficulty deciding bet...