The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

by James D. Watson

FROM my first day in the lab I knew I would not leave Cambridge for a long time. Departing would be idiocy, for I had immediately discovered the fun of talking to Francis Crick. Finding someone in Max’s lab who knew that DNA was more important than proteins was real luck. Moreover, it was a great relief for me not to spend full time learning X-ray analysis of proteins. Our lunch conversations quickly centered on how genes were put together. Within a few days after my arrival, we knew what to do: imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game.

All that most of them wanted out of life was to set their students onto uninterpretable details of chromosome behavior or to give elegantly phrased, fuzzyminded speculations over the wireless on topics like the role of the geneticist in this transitional age of changing values.

The book I poked open the most was Francis’ copy of The Nature of the Chemical Bond. Increasingly often, when Francis needed it to look up a crucial bond length, it would turn up on the quarter bench of lab space that John had given to me for experimental work. Somewhere in Pauling’s masterpiece I hoped the real secret would lie. Thus Francis’ gift to me of a second copy was a good omen. On the flyleaf was the inscription, “To Jim from Francis—Christmas ‘51.” The remnants of Christianity were indeed useful.

I had less success arguing that the States’ greatest virtue was its wide-open spaces where people never went. Odile looked in horror at the prospect of being long without fashionably dressed people.

Pauling’s reaction was one of genuine thrill, as was Delbrück’s. In almost any other situation Pauling would have fought for the good points of his idea. The overwhelming biological merits of a self-complementary DNA molecule made him effectively concede the race. He did want, however, to see the evidence from King’s before he considered the matter a closed book.

The final version was ready to be typed on the last weekend of March. Our Cavendish typist was not on hand, and the brief job was given to my sister. There was no problem persuading her to spend a Saturday afternoon this way, for we told her that she was participating in perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin’s book. Francis and I stood over her as she typed the nine-hundred-word article that began, “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.”