The Double Helix. James D. Watson.

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
James D. Watson
New York: Atheneum. 1968.

From the Dust Jacket: "DNA is the molecule of heredity, and to know its structure and method of reproduction enables science to know how genetic directions are written and transmitted, how the forms of life are ordered from one generation to the next. Crick and Watson merged data from chemistry, physics and biology to solve the structure of DNA, building a hypothetical model that would conform in all its parts to what Wilkins' X-ray pictures had already shown of the molecule. The result was something that, in Watson's words, was too pretty not to be true: the double helix."

From the Dust Jacket: "The story tells something of the general creative process itself. A book written on the assumption that science is a human endeavor."

From my reading of The Double Helix--I did not understand much of the technical information, just as Watson did not understand much that he read in the materials on genetics or Linus Pauling's theories either--I concluded that the elements of thought on this problem in genetics and the variety of people and materials involved in one way or another in the thinking on that problem and how all of these elements combined to produce Watson's creation of the model for DNA, reveal the complex and possibly accidental ways in which ideas are born and applied in science and art and all other original creations on earth. Not exactly the way the Almighty did it in His seven days of creation. RayS.

The problem of the role of Rosy, and all other women in the professional world, cited in the final quote, but a major part of this story, is another problem that requires a correction. How many creative solutions have been lost because one-half of the human race is ignored? RayS.

Some interesting quotes:

Sir Lawrence Bragg: "...the birth of a new idea is...drama of the highest order." p. vii.

"...science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders...its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles." p. xi.

"I am aware that the other participants in this story would tell part of it in other ways, sometimes because their memory of what happened differs from mine and, perhaps in even more cases, because no two people ever see the same events in exactly the same light." p. xii.

"...there remains general ignorance about how science is 'done.' " p. xii.

"...styles of scientific research vary almost as much as human personalities." p. xii.

"...boredom generated a new attack on theory." p. 9.

"...a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid." p. 14.

"My interest in DNA had grown out of a desire, first picked up while a senior in college, to learn what a gene was." p. 21.

"Most of the time I spent...reading journal articles from the early days of genetics." p. 30.

"Most of the language [of Linus Pauling] was above me, and so I could only get a general impression of the argument...had no way of judging whether it made sense...only thing I was sure of was that it was written with style." p. 38.

"I soon was taught that Pauling's accomplishment was a product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning." p. 50.

"The idea of using tinker-toy-like models to solve biological structures was clearly a last resort." p. 69.

"...not to say that the geneticists themselves provided any intellectual help...would have thought that with all their talk about genes they should worry about what they were...almost none of them seemed to take seriously the evidence that genes were made of DNA." p. 74.

"...Francis [Crick] was visibly annoyed by my habit of always trusting to memory and never writing anything on paper." p. 75.

"I was even unable to understand large sections of their classic paper published just after the start of the war in the Journal of General Physiology." p. 111.

"Several days later, on the bus to Oxford, the notion came to me...."p. 114.

"The idea was so simple that it had to be right." p. 114.

"Every helical staircase I saw that weekend in Oxford made me more confident that other biological structures would also have helical symmetry." p. 114.

"Al Hershey had sent me a long letter from Cold Spring Harbor summarizing the recently completed experiments by which he and Martha Chase established...a powerful new proof that DNA is the primary genetic material." p. 119.

"...success in Cambridge conversation frequently came from saying something preposterous, hoping that someone would take you seriously." p. 125.

"When I first reported [the results] to Francis they did not ring a bell, and he went on thinking about other matters...however, the suspicion that...were important clicked inside his head as the result of several conversations with the young theoretical chemist John Griffith...while they were drinking beer after an evening talk by the astronomer Tommy Gold..." p. 126.

"My scheme was torn to shreds by the following noon." p. 189.

"After lunch I was not anxious to return to work, for I was afraid...I would run into a stone wall...." p. 193.

"...much of our success was due to the long uneventful periods when we walked among the colleges or unobtrusively read the new books that came into Heffer's Bookstore." p. 200.

"By then all traces of our early bickering [with Rosy] were forgotten, and we both [Francis Crick and James Watson] came to appreciate greatly her [Rosy's] personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggle that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking." p. 226.