The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins

by Maurice Wilkins

Quick, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helical structure of DNA? Most people would say Watson and Crick. But most people would make Maurice Wilkins very upset. The Rodney Dangerfield of biology, Wilkins shared the prize with Watson and Crick but missed out on the limelight, due largely to Watson's hit book, The Double Helix. Wilkins thought the book was so misleading he asked Harvard University Press not to publish it. Things have quieted down a bit now, and Wilkins is now telling the story his way. This book tells how he showed his colleagues the x-ray picture that gave them their crucial insight, and about his interactions with Rosalind Franklin, the researcher who actually created the picture, and who also received very little credit for her role in the discovery. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the DNA discovery. Finally Wilkins gets to have his say.

Genres: Science, Biography, Genetics

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Bruce Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started off interesting enough, but as he states in the book, he is writing in response to the actions of others. He is careful to let us know how socialist he is, how 'concerned' with poverty, sexism and all of the other buzz words. Despite what I consider to be negatives, he sometimes manages to surprise, like this:

Sometimes I was bored with scientists: all the whirring of their clever brains made them seem introverted and inhuman. I knew that the very intense, worm-like burrowing into the Great Mass of Nature could lead them to discover new levels of exciting existence, but few scientists find it easy to communicate how that lifts up their spirits. Maurice Wilkins, The Third Man of the Double Helix, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 188