Lucky Jim
BERLINSKI, DAVID
Lucky Jim James Watson’s days after the double helix. BY DAVID BERLINSKI Adoctorate from Indiana University in 1949, the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University, the discovery of DNA....
...But the real story, he believed, had been pointlessly sanitized...
...Beyond this, experiments had revealed little and various theories nothing...
...Watson plainly loved the man and is devoted to his memory...
...Watson travels from England to California and back again to England...
...A computer program cannot, after all, create a computer...
...His most recent book is Newton’s Gift (Free Press...
...David Berlinski is the author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Advent of the Algorithm...
...It reads as life moves...
...Now that he is old, Watson is eager to convey the extent to which his scientific achievements were a distraction from his search for pretty young women, a search that was neverending because never successful...
...Watson and Crick spotted the truth...
...He exchanged letters with various eminences and visited their laboratories...
...DNA was introduced originally as a code script, and it has enjoyed successive incarnations as a blueprint, design, template, or computer program...
...Watson, on the other hand, became a powerful scientific administrator, first at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and, more recently, as the director of the Human Genome Project...
...Watson’s book amused the general public and outraged his colleagues, Crick denouncing it as something like “that found in the lower class of women’s magazines...
...A molecule is one thing, a living creature another...
...Long walks are taken, often on disagreeable mountain paths...
...Watson pursued a number of experiments with RNA...
...Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had for years studied DNA by means of X-ray crystallography, but it was slow, frustrating, and inconclusive work, rather like deducing the score of a symphony from its echoes in a concert hall...
...As so often happens in the sciences, molecular biology has resolved its mysteries by magical thinking...
...Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was plainly involved...
...Gamow enters variously into his memoir, performing card tricks or otherwise engaged in amiable trifles and then shambles off, a larger figure, one hopes, in real than in remembered life...
...Whatever the process, it is DNA, according to official doctrine, that is still crucial, still in charge, an agency capable of achieving every biological effect...
...Every life is no doubt precious, but few are interesting...
...And so, in 1968, he published a memoir of rectification under the title, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA...
...There is the sound of someone snoring...
...Evolutionary biologists now assign to the human genome full responsibility for altruism, date rape, aggression, eating disorders, and a taste for Mansfield Park...
...Now, in Genes, Girls, and Gamow, Watson proposes to take up the story where The Double Helix ends...
...There are outstanding scientific problems to be solved, but Watson does not solve them...
...The enchanting young women are forever too busy to see Watson or, having seen him, too busy to see him again...
...Living systems divide naturally into two molecular classes...
...Details have accumulated, but the secret remains a secret...
...Thereafter, immortality...
...James Watson has plainly come to regard his life as a sign of grace...
...And it penetrated the future by unwinding itself and then separating, its halves recombining to form two double stranded helices where before there was only one...
...E.O...
...The molecule’s structure at once revealed its secrets...
...Thereafter a mystery begins as the proteins somehow organize themselves to form an organism...
...George Gamow was an imaginative Russian physicist and a dabbler in molecular biology...
...The incredible discrepancy between the beginning and the end of this process suggests that something remarkable has taken place...
...Watson was twenty-three when in the early 1950s he joined Francis Crick in a scientific partnership...
...But the proteins comprise the stuff of life, the basic building blocks of every living system...
...He is always ill at ease and often maladroit...
...In this way we were unique players in a momentous drama...
...He thought diligently, although not obsessively...
...Crick speculated that a sequence of intermediate molecules must link DNA with various emerging proteins...
...BY DAVID BERLINSKI Adoctorate from Indiana University in 1949, the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University, the discovery of DNA...
...A part of Watson’s narrative is devoted to reviving the dead, a familiar if often fruitless pastime...
...They proposed to discover the secret of life...
...This was all very elegant...
...Having appropriated Rosalind Franklin’s research results because they were crucial, Watson admitted that he and Crick had denied her the appropriate credit because it was easy...
...Pauling’s infallible intuition failed him as he emerged noisily from the California Institute of Technology in 1951 with a bizarre triple helix in hand...
...Still, there remains the great work...
...Although more powerful by far than astrology, molecular biology is not appreciably different in kind, the various celestial houses having about as much to do with human affairs as the various genes...
...He was right...
...The odds in their favor were not great...
...Once again, he is mistaken...
...The lightning that missed him struck Crick instead...
...And with some reason, I suppose...
...But the matter had come to occupy Linus Pauling, and as far as Watson and Crick were concerned, his presence on the scene was ominous...
...Whatever the message contained in DNA, it must somehow be conveyed to the proteins...
...Whatever it may be doing in the real world, that elegant molecule bestowed on James Watson a form of immortality...
...That they had made a discovery of great importance, no one disputed, least of all Watson...
...And yet there it was...
...And they are for the most part located in the cell’s cytoplasm, an arena in which countlessly many seething chemical activities take place...
...The conveyance was in 1953 a mystery...
...Pauling possessed an intelligence of almost supernatural vigor...
...The experiences that Watson recounts must have been painful to relive, which makes them painful to read...
...The metaphors are helpful, but they are misleading as well...
...For better or worse,” he writes, “I and my friends were present at the birth of the DNA paradigm—by any standards one of the great moments in the history of science, if not of the human species...
...Thus there will be many readers wanting to know better what actually happened in our lives...
...Charm is occasionally a substitute for literary skill, but Watson lacks both, and he is inclined to offer candor as a substitute...
...Molecular biology has traced the story from DNA to the various proteins...
...A molecule is sent into the future, and directly thereafter an organism appears, bouncing, energetic, and alive...
...It is ribonucleic acid, or RNA, that acts as a second source of information within the cell, and, as the name suggests, RNA is single stranded, containing only one gently floating filament...
...The patient plodding researchers continued to plod patiently, consuming time but not covering distance...
...It electrified the world as well, Watson and Crick winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology...
...Watson’s first memoir described a quest, and the quest gave to his narrative its powerful effect of artistic compression...
...Still, if DNA has been assigned magical properties, there is at least one respect in which the designation is merited...
...Wilson, the environmental biologist and Watson’s colleague at Harvard in the 1960s, was moved to describe Watson as the most unpleasant human being he had ever met—the “Caligula of Science...
...It rains...
...The book is now considered a classic...
...After almost half a century he is still suffering in retrospect the sentiments that only a young man can suffer when someone deeply loved tells him, no, honey, things are just not going to work out...
...The burden of Watson’s memories lies elsewhere...
...The double helix electrified the emerging discipline of molecular biology...
...The book was a considerable success, the more so since Watson expressed with candor his conviction that scientific research is ruthless, unprincipled, and driven largely by an undignified scramble for fame...
...Biologists knew that in perpetuating themselves, living systems must squeeze their identity into what the physicist Erwin Schr?dinger had called a code script...
...This is not so...
...In continuing to attend so earnestly to the ones that got away, Watson appears something of a schnook...
...He seemed eager to offer a revelation...
...Metaphors all lapse just when they are most needed...
...DNA was a double helix, its two strands supported by chemical struts, adenine paired with thymine and guanine with cytosine...
...It struck him so many times, in fact, that he is now widely regarded as a one-man miracle...
...Something was ventured, and something gained...
...The days follow one another...
...Dick Feynman and I sat next to each other,” he writes, and “although we could not say it to others, we felt we might be Caltech’s most obvious candidates for future Nobel awards...
...The truth is we do not know how the genome of any organism achieves any effect beyond the molecular...
...It is now fifty years since Watson and Crick initiated “the DNA paradigm,” and Watson is understandably eager to claim that in discovering DNA he and Crick had really discovered the secret of life, just as they had hoped to do...
...Watson and Crick were thus in the position of an observer who can see that an architect’s plans are being carried out, but cannot determine how his commands are communicated...
...DNA expressed a cryptogram and so contained a message, its four chemical constituents comprising an elementary alphabet...
...It is a mistake...
...Blood dries quickly, Charles de Gaulle observed, and so does outrage...
...Others enter his life like quick sunbursts and then leave Watson dazzled but disappointed when they cover themselves in clouds...
...But his second memoir has plainly been compiled from diary notes...
...For ten years or so following his great triumph, Watson sought fitfully to enlarge its scope...
...The days accumulate...
...Watson has been misinformed...
...This is hardly a criticism of Watson and Crick’s discovery, but it is a fact...
...If DNA is the master, RNA is its messenger, ferrying information from DNA and impressing it on the proteins...
...DNA involves command, control, and coordination, and is found in the cell’s nucleus...
...But lightning did not strike twice...
...Some depart for foreign ports with what seems a rare urgency...
...Scientists whom Watson had neglected personally to offend quickly reached the conclusion that in disciplines other than their own, scientific research was every bit as nasty as Watson had indicated...
...Watson’s memoir came to be appreciated as an achievement in brashness...
...Watson’s narrative supported his claim...
Vol. 7 • March 2002 • No. 26
