From Nautil,us, October 20:
James Watson once said his road to the 1962 Nobel Prize began in Naples, Italy. At a conference in 1951, he met Maurice Wilkins, the biophysicist with whom he and Francis Crick shared the Nobel for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. Meeting Wilkins was when he “first realized that DNA might be soluble,” Watson said. “So my life was changed.”
That’s a nice anecdote for the science textbooks. But there’s “a tawdry first act to this operetta,” writes Howard Markel in his new book, The Secret of Life, about the drama behind the scenes of the famous discovery.
At the time, Watson was an arrogant, gawky 22-year-old, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His biology lab director, Herman Kalckar, invited Watson and another fellow in the lab, Barbara Wright, to accompany him to the Naples conference. The confident and competitive Watson didn’t think much of Wright’s work. It was “rather inexact,” he sniped. But Watson was pleased to be invited on the trip. “It should be quite exciting,” he wrote his parents.
character-assassination of Rosalind Franklin.
Watson was bored with most of the presentations at the conference. But he perked up when Wilkins projected images of DNA, captured with X-ray crystallography. The novel image showed the molecule arose from a crystalline structure. Watson later tried to buddy up to Wilkins at a cocktail party, but the socially awkward Wilkins did his best to avoid the bumptious American. Watson thought he had another opening when he spotted Wilkins chatting with his sister, who had joined Watson in Naples. But when Watson approached them, Wilkins slipped away.
Nonetheless, Watson’s encounter with Wilkins cemented his future. He was determined to discover the precise molecular structure of DNA. He knew he had little chance to join Wilkins at his lab at King’s College at the University of London, mainly because Wilkins didn’t like him. Watson set his sights on joining the other prominent biology lab probing molecular structures. At Cavendish Laboratory Biophysics Unit at Cambridge, Watson met the intellectually unstoppable Crick, and in two years, the duo built the first sound model of DNA’s structure. Their model showed the world how DNA did its thing and shaped the course of biological life.
In The Secret of Life, Markel, a distinguished professor in the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, and author of nonfiction books that roll along like novels, relishes explaining the backstory to Watson’s and Wilkins’ first encounter. Turns out Kalckar was having an affair with Wright and wanted to keep their trysts secret. Watson was invited to Naples “to act as a beard for his boss, to provide cover for his affair with Wright,” Markel told me in a recent interview. In The Secret of Life, Markel writes, “one cannot help but smile at the paradox that the unraveling of the double helix of DNA began with the coupling of Kalckar and Wright.”
That flair of fun wit helps define the tone of The Secret of Life. Markel has mounted on his book’s stage all the players at King’s College and Cavendish Lab who schemed to win favor for their research. Watson is clearly the Iago of the cast. Although Watson doesn’t beguile his boss into killing his wife, he does commit character-assassination of Rosalind Franklin. In particular, Markel told me, Watson’s 1968 book, The Double Helix, “really did a number on her.” Watson’s portrayal of Franklin as a raging termagant who one day “in her hot anger” was going to strike Watson for interrupting her constituted one scene that lived in infamy for years.
The London-born Franklin, a chemist and mathematician, drove herself to perfect X-ray crystallography. The process to determine the atoms that constitute a molecule is painstakingly slow. Crystallographers take hundreds of photographic images of a molecule and apply complex mathematical formulas to determine its final shape and size, informing them which atoms are involved. After the preternaturally meticulous and patient Franklin made a name for herself in crystallography, she was hired to deconstruct DNA at King’s College. Wilkins felt DNA was his dominion and Franklin was being hired as his assistant, not an independent scientist with her own mind and methods.
Wilkins and Franklin never got along. Markel amplifies a chorus of their colleagues on why. Watson blamed Franklin for refusing to accept her role as Wilkins’ assistant. In The Double Helix, he wrote, condescension dripping from his pen, the real problem was “Rosy.” Others say Wilkins was jealous of Franklin, intimidated by her, resentful of her for correcting his science in public, or, as Crick wrote, Wilkins “was in love with Franklin,” adding, “And Rosalind really hated him … either because he was stupid, which was a thing which always annoyed her, or else something else happened between them.” In any event, Crick said, it was a “big love-hate thing between them.”....
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