The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

"This was rather shocking when it came out and I have a copy here which I got him to sign. It is signed James Watson in rather small tiny writing. I also met Francis Crick just before he died. This is a really interesting story. The discovery of the double helix was fascinating because various people were working on it – Linus Pauling in California and Rosalind Franklin in King’s College London and she was very close. James Watson acquired her results without asking her, which I think was really bad news. And they went off and made this wild guess and they guessed right. And full marks – they were bright young men both of them – but they made a brilliant guess and the result was that they and Maurice Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize and Rosalind Franklin didn’t, which was very unfair. James Watson was an enormously brash American and Francis Crick was hugely thoughtful, although I gather he had wild parties, but he was much the more sensible of the two. I don’t think they remained friends for very long because they were such different people. But the book itself is a vivid and fairly hilarious account of life in Cambridge in the middle of the last century, with some science thrown in. And it is Watson’s personal account. I once went to a grand dinner at the Guildhall and we milled around in the quadrangle beforehand in our dinner jackets and Jim Watson was there. This was the celebration of 50 years since the discovery of DNA and Francis Crick was sadly too ill to come. David Attenborough came up to me and said, with pride: ‘I had my picture taken with Jim Watson! I had to listen to him for 20 minutes, but I had my picture taken with him.’ I said: ‘For goodness’ sake, David, you are far more famous than Jim Watson.’ But he wouldn’t accept that. For him, Jim Watson was a great hero and it was really nice to hear that."

"It’s up there with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Einstein’s theory of relativity, or the discovery of cosmic background radiation. One of the great breakthroughs of human knowledge. Before Watson and Crick began their work, it was realised that genes are made of DNA; the double helix structure revealed two things. First it tells us how genes replicate—which was what Watson was particularly obsessed about—because the two strands of the molecule are reciprocal and so, if the cell can read what’s on one strand, it can then copy it and you get two daughter double strands. That’s what happens in the cell every second, it’s happening in your cells right now. What I think is even more exciting is that Watson and Crick realised that the order of bases—the rungs that hold the ladder of DNA together—is highly significant. The sequence of those bases is what they called in their second 1953 article in Nature (after they had described the double helix structure) ‘genetic information.’ This is what genes contain. This realisation was an incredible moment in human history. In his book, Watson described what was a very exciting time to have been alive. Anybody who reads The Double Helix is drawn into this world of competition and excitement and academic existence, much of which no longer exists because of the changes in the way that science is done, and the increasing pressure on academic time from various sources. It’s both. I think this is a fantastic book. It’s catty, it’s extremely opinionated and it’s also unreliable because it’s Watson’s personal account. Crick didn’t want him to publish it—they had a huge row in the mid-1960s over whether it should be published. Crick thought the book was ill-conceived because it was so personal. This might be a difference between Cambridge and Harvard as to how you should behave—or even a difference between UK and US attitudes. Watson was presenting events as he saw them at the time. This is one of the issues with the book: why it’s so powerful and also why it misleads a lot of people. It’s renowned for the awful way Watson treated Rosalind Franklin, including calling her ‘Rosie’ throughout, which is a name she never used. But if you read the book right to the end there is a longish epilogue in which Watson—the mature man in his late 40s in the late 1960s—looks back on his younger self (who comes over as a braying, incredibly intelligent ass) and moderates what he wrote in the book. As an insight into the mind of an incredibly smart, ambitious and irritating young man at a key moment in history, this book is unparalleled. But you must not take everything in there as true. It is Watson’s account as he saw it at the time, filtered through twenty years of subsequent reflection. In that sense it’s a very honest book. If Crick had prevailed and Watson had written a more restrained account, it would probably have been less interesting. This additional material helped bring the period to life. The writing is very dynamic, very exciting, but when you actually see the people and the places involved, it brings it all into focus. Jan Witkowski and Alexander Gann from Cold Spring Harbor worked with Watson on this edition, going through the archives and digging out all the material. In writing my book, I found this additional material invaluable. Some of the notes give you extra insight into people. For instance, it turned out that one of Watson’s colleagues in Denmark was having an affair, which meant that things were difficult in the lab—that was one of the reasons Watson ended up in Cambridge. The photos, the notes, the reproductions of archive material, provide an extra insight into some of the characters that are in the book. Absolutely. Warts and all. In a way, Watson deserved credit for describing himself as he was. Maybe he didn’t realise quite how irritating he was. His casual sexism was certainly very typical of the time. One issue that gets overlooked is how young he was—only 25 when he published the articles in Nature. Franklin was 8 years older than him, and she must have found him intensely annoying. He describes how she frightened him, how he thought she was going to hit him. And I thought ‘Well, yes, I can imagine that happening because you have got this woman who’s in her early thirties who is established faced with this brilliant jackass cackling at her and being annoying.’ Even a saint would lose their temper under those circumstances, I think."