Eureka proclaimed too loudly

James Watson has all the makings of a great biographical subject. He is notoriously volatile, splenetic, and aggressive. During his career he has not fought shy of public controversy. And of course he is globally famous for a single achievement: having been one of the two men who, in 1953, ‘discovered’ the double-helix structure of DNA. The discovery was, as one peer put it, ‘a scientist’s dream: simple, elegant, and universal for all organisms’. It brought the pathologically ambitious Watson a Nobel Prize at the age of 34, and ‘triggered and sustained a revolution in science that affects us all’.

The story of how that discovery occurred, like that of most scientific epiphanies, exists in several forms. It has, as a chemist might put it, multiple allotropes. There is the wipe-clean Eureka legend that has Watson and Crick swilling bitter in the Eagle pub in Cambridge, and scribbling the double helix on the back of a beer-mat during 30 minutes of visionary brilliance. Then there is the story told in Watson’s million-selling 1968 book, The Double Helix — which Victor McElheny calls ‘the most indiscreet memoir in the history of science’ – where Watson paints himself as a ‘brat-genius’, and Crick as his immodest mentor and partner-in-ego.

Both of these accounts assign credit for the discovery almost exclusively to Crick and Watson. Other versions, however (most of them published since 1968), have sought to redistribute acclaim to the other scientists who were involved at the time. Among the best of these is Brenda Maddox’s recent biography of Rosalind Franklin, the London-based molecular biologist who ‘raced’ Watson and Crick to the double-helix discovery, and whose research contributed so vitally to their breakthrough. Franklin was among the many casualties of Watson’s The Double Helix.