Honest Jim

"I proceeded to forget Maurice, but not this DNA photograph. A potential key to the secret of life was impossible to push out of my mind. The fact that I was unable to interpret it did not bother me. It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought."

(page 24)

In The Double Helix, James Watson provides a superb personal account of his and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, which discovery set off the molecular biology wave that engulfed the overall study of life. The story itself is highly relevant in the history of biology, and thereby inherently interesting, but Watson managed, 15 years hence, to candidly recapture his twenty-something point of view, and that made the all the difference. It is the rarest of books: a scientific page-turner, with suspense, strong personalities and a child-like narrator.

The opening line of the book, "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood," is as famous in scientific circles as is the opening line "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" from Anna Karenina in literature. Watson’s portraits of the leading characters are juicy: sharp, gossipy and sometimes unfair. But the reader quickly finds that Watson treats himself with the same sharp candor, and it becomes clear that you are seeing a relatively unfiltered view of colleagues and situations.

The dramatis personae? All capable scientists, all with considerable egos. Watson of course, young post-doc, fiercely ambitious, sharp-eyed, awkward; Crick, older post-doc, cosmopolitan, brilliant, brash, pushy with his ideas; Rosalind Franklin, X-ray crystallographer and newcomer to the investigation of DNA’s structure, cool, cerebral, precise, edgy to all but her friends; Wilkins, X-ray crystallographer and one of the world’s leading investigators of the structure of DNA, diffident, cautious, phlegmatic; Lawrence Bragg, X-ray crystallographer, director of Watson’s Cavendish lab, someone who had already seen his best days, not always clued in; Linus Pauling, world’s preeminent physical chemist at the peak of his powers, who had already beaten Bragg’s lab to the discovery of the alpha helix, and on the hunt for the structure of DNA.

Bragg, a Nobelist, in his reaction to the book, was able to see past Watson’s sometimes insulting portrait of him, and provided a foreword to the book, in which he gave the reader a useful perspective: Watson "writes with a Pepys-like frankness. Those who figure in the book must read it in a very forgiving spirit." (page 3) Watson explicitly prioritized his impressions rather than favor a perfectly accurate telling, wanting to convey the spirit of scientific exploration. In this he succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.

Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who shared the Nobel with Watson for the DNA discovery, were unable to be so magnanimous: both were angered by the book and actively sought to suppress its publication, nearly succeeding. Twenty five years on, Wilkins was not sanguine regarding the book: "I'm Jim. I'm smart. Most of the time Francis is smart too. The rest are bloody clots. Jim plays himself the holy fool." (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, p 182)  Ten years after that, Crick commented on The Double Helix in his own memoir, What Mad Pursuit, having softened somewhat: "I now appreciate how skillful Jim was, not only in making the book read like a detective story but also by managing to include a surprisingly large amount of the science." (page 81)

The Science

Why was Watson so mad keen to find the structure of DNA? It was becoming clear by around 1950 that DNA was a required part of the mechanism of biological inheritance. There was tantalizing evidence that the physical gene was located in the DNA present in all living organisms. This was relatively new, as the search for the physical gene had focused previously on protein. Watson, with a fresh doctorate and seeking a research career, quickly focused on the physical gene. He found in Francis Crick someone who shared his ideas, and they formed an ad hoc, semi-authorized research program to determine the structure of DNA, hoping that by solving the structure of DNA they would learn more about the mechanism of genetic inheritance. Their problem was that they each were assigned other research they were to pursue under the terms of their grants.

Both were actively contributing to the general field of macromolecular biomolecules. In the course of their two year part-time collaboration, Crick, an X-ray crystallographer, had, for example, independently determined a theoretical model for a helical biomolecule, and Watson had done viable research on the helical structure of the tobacco mosaic virus capsule. Their approach for the search for the DNA structure centered around the attempt to build an actual model of the DNA molecule, explicitly emulating Linus Pauling in his recent successful determination of the alpha helix structure.

They employed a multi-disciplinary approach, which was crucial. Drawing ultimately from X-ray crystallographic information and theoretical considerations, the known biochemistry of DNA, chemical bonding and quantum-mechanical conformational considerations, DNA base-pairing research, and the current genetical research from various fields of biology, Watson and Crick built a series of models, each turning out to have fatal flaws which did not take into consideration all of the known facts. The final model, of course, succeeded; Watson and Crick had learned sufficiently from their failed attempts, and with the assistance of other scientists in their own Cavendish lab and particularly in the King’s college lab, they worked out the final pieces of the puzzle.

Watson and Crick understood what they had accomplished. "Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone in hearing distance that we had found the secret of life." (page 115) Finding the structure of DNA has indeed led to great insight into the genetical character of living organisms, and the development of heretofore undreamed of tools for the manipulation of the gene. Yet much mystery remains in molecular genetics, particularly around the control of genetic expression.

The Controversy

Following their publication of the correct model for the structure of DNA in 1953, Watson and Crick were accused by some in the British scientific world, mostly sotto voce, of stealing the credit and/or the data needed for their discovery from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Watson was keenly aware of this; his first working title for the book was an ironical Honest Jim. In the lead-in to the Double Helix, Watson alluded to the origins for that title. Hiking in the Alps in 1955, he bumped into Willy Seeds, a researcher in Maurice Wilkins’ lab. "Willy soon spotted me, and slowed down, and momentarily gave the impression that he might remove his rucksack and chat for a while. But all he said was, 'How is Honest Jim?'" (page 7)

Perhaps the largest unspoken theme in the discontent around Watson and Crick’s discovery is that they were part-timers, almost dilettantes; how dare they take my research and ideas and incorporate them in a solution, in an area they weren’t even primary researchers?

But did they steal the credit/data? In a word? No. Accusations were voiced. ‘They used other’s research.’ ‘They didn’t do their own research.’ This seems misdirected. Newton’s famous statement ‘I stand on the shoulders of giants’ pithily summarizes an enduring truth of the practice of science: It is primarily a collaborative and a cumulative exercise. All scientists spend their formative years learning the results of past research. Some scientists never do any individual research, but focus on theoretical pursuits ultimately based on other’s research. And so on. Most of the information they relied upon was already published, or freely shared.

The most serious allegations revolved around using someone else’s research without their explicit permission, in particular Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallographic data, which had yet to be formally published in a peer-reviewed journal, the standard means of sharing scientific information. Yet Rosalind Franklin shared that very data in a colloquium to which Watson and Crick had been invited, and which Watson attended. It was also published in a report intended to be shared between research institutions in Britain, in particular the Cavendish and King’s labs, available to Watson and Crick.

Even so, Watson and Crick never sought formal permission to use her unpublished data, some of it crucial to their solution; this fact was central to the unease in the UK scientific community.

These two threads in the practice of science, collaboration and competition, clearly co-exist uncomfortably. This in fact is a major theme of the book. Bragg, in the book’s foreword, captures some of these difficulties, the investigator here Watson and Crick, the colleague, Wilkins:

"The story is a poignant example of a dilemma which may confront an investigator. He knows that a colleague has been working for years on a problem and has accumulated a mass of hard-won evidence, which has not yet been published because it is anticipated that success is just around the corner. He has seen this evidence and has good reason to believe that a method of attack which he can envisage, perhaps merely a new point of view, will lead straight to the solution. An offer of collaboration at such a stage might well be regarded as a trespass. Should he go ahead on his own? It is not easy to be sure whether the crucial new idea is really one's own or has been unconsciously assimilated in talks with others. The realization of this difficulty has led to the establishment of a somewhat vague code amongst scientists which recognizes a claim in a line of research staked out by a colleague - up to a certain point. When competition comes from more than one quarter, there is no need to hold back."

(page 1)

After Watson and Crick had created and shared with King’s an unsuccessful DNA model, Bragg had told them to stop working on DNA and defer to the King’s lab. But the situation changed when Linus Pauling published a model of DNA very like the one Watson and Crick had constructed. It was also incorrect, but made clear that there was now formidable competition outside of the two UK labs. Bragg changed his mind, and gave Watson and Crick the green light to pursue DNA model-building once more; he did not trust that the King’s college would succeed in the competition, as he felt that they were too fractious, cautious, and slow to the mark.

Collaboration

Many of the perceived successes and failures in this story revolve around collaboration, or the lack thereof. "Politeness, Francis Crick said ... is the poison of all good collaboration in science. The soul of collaboration is perfect candor, rudeness if need be. ... A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship. The collaborator points out the obvious, with due impatience. He stops the nonsense." (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, p 147) 

The collaboration between Watson and Crick is celebrated in the history of science. At their first meeting, in his own words Crick was ‘electrified.’ "When I first met Jim, it was remarkable, because we both had the same point of view (about DNA), but he knew all about phage, which I had only read about in books, you see, and I knew all about X-ray diffraction, which he only knew about second-hand." (Judson, Eighth Day of Creation, p 112-113)  They filled in each others scientific gaps, so to speak, which provided a foundation for their subsequent multi-disciplinary approach.

Judson, in his Eighth Day of Creation, quoted a scientific friend on Watson and Crick: "There has to be an extraordinary interaction between two people, before the mind can do what they did. Jim and Francis talked in half sentences. They understood each other almost without words. Modern science is said to be run in teams - but not in this sense at all. Jim and Francis were pretty nearly unique. ... That marvellous resonance between two minds - that high state in which one plus one does not equal two but more like ten." (pages 193-194)

Francis Crick subsequently became the preeminent theoretician of molecular biology for the next thirty years, a phenomenal run; As a student of molecular genetics in 1979 I read Crick’s survey article on the state of DNA research, where he puzzled over the mounting evidence that only a small percentage of DNA seemed to code for proteins, and introduced the terms exon and intron into the lexicon. He played a large role in the research to flesh out what he labeled the Central Dogma of molecular biology: DNA to RNA to Protein. He finally took his hands off the wheel of molecular biology in the early 1980’s and spent the rest of his career in the field of neurology.

James Watson became a successful science administrator, wrote a leading textbook for molecular biology, and jump-started the Human Genome Project. He has continued to court controversy, overly candid as ever, and prone to saying things embarrassing and egregious.

See my review of Brenda Maddox’s must-read book, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, for additional discussion regarding both the controversy over credit for the discovery, and of the roles played by others, particularly the contributions made by Rosalind Franklin.

 

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Notes

1. The Norton Critical Edition. All references to the book are from the Norton Critical Edition. in this edition, Watson’s account is placed in historical perspective by Gunther Stent’s introduction and by retrospective views from two major figures in the adventure, Francis Crick and Linus Pauling, and by Rosalind Franklin’s last student, Aaron Klug. Background materials include reproductions of the original scientific papers in which the double helical structure of DNA was first presented in 1953 and 1954. There is an extensive and valuable Criticism section, which begins with “A Review of the Reviews” by Gunther Stent, where other leading scientists and scholars reveal their own experiences and views of Watson’s story. There are reviews by Philip Morrison, F. X. S., Richard C. Lewontin, Mary Ellmann, Robert L. Sinsheimer, John Lear, Alex Comfort, Jacob Bronowski, Conrad H. Waddington, Robert K. Merton, Peter M. Medawar, and André Lwoff; as well as three letters to the editor of Science by Max F. Perutz, M. H. F. Wilkins, and James D. Watson.

2.The Path to the Double Helix by Robert Olby is the most rigorous book regarding the history of the science of the discovery of the structure of DNA. It is highly recommended for those interested in the history of molecular biology. Another superb telling is Horace Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation.