A TEAM OF TOP SCIENTISTS

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31760, 17 August 1968, Page 4

A TEAM OF TOP SCIENTISTS

(Reviewed by R.A.MG) The Double Helix. By James D. Watson. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 266 pages. This book by a Nobel prizewinner has become something of an axe to chop down the wooden idol of scientific respectability: it has been reviewed overseas in the intellectual and not-so-intellectual magazines, until most curious people already have a vague idea what is in it. The trouble is, something has gone a bit wrong in the lines of communication and the image the book collected, particularly in America, does not match up with the book itself.

Dr Watson gives us his reminiscences of the early 1950 s when he was mostly in Cambridge working in the Department of Physics, and played a central role in finding an acceptable model of the structure of the molecule of DNA, which is short for deoxyribonucleic acid. This is a very interesting substance because it provides the key to the mechanism of heredity. As Watson says DNA was of importance because if some current theories were right “DNA would have to provide the key to enable us to find out how the genes determined, among other characteristics. the colour of our hair, our eyes, most likely our comparative intelligence, and maybe even our potential to amuse others." Watson teamed up with an immodest physicist, Francis Crick, and using their own critical insight and a lot of information gathered from other laboratories, particularly at King's College, London, they eventually made a model in the shape of two helics, one of the opposite sequence to the other and fitting with the same axis one stepped along from the other. Two helices paired this way have a series of matching points at which they are joined by links which run roughly radially from the central axis, and provide the whole structure with some rigidity by fixing the two helices relative to each other. Watson and Crick did not come to this problem in a state of pure ignorance; on the contrary DNA was already being studied in England by Wilkins in London and in California by Linus Pauling, a chemist of unquestioned eminence. The problem was not so much one of gathering evidence but one of finding a single coherent explanation which would link together a lot of diverse and scattered facts which were already known or believed to be pertinent

In point of fact much of the more advanced sciences are concerned with theory or model building and not with stamp-collecting facts, and one of the salient virtues of this book is that it makes dear tn the most brash and tact-

less fashion that among scientists there are abstract think' ere and there are stamp collectors, and the two modes of progression are rarely found in the same man at the same time. Scientists today work in

teams; we are told that this is because problems are complicated and expensive, but there are good psychological reasons also, namely that the process of discovery involves a range of skills which are not all patient, not all ereative, and not all hard-headed and down to earth. By one of those pleasant ironies of human nature the most creative thinkers are often the most socially deviant as well as being intellectually unusual, and putting a research team together always leads to some interesting human problems if anything is going to get done. It is these human problems which form the central theme of the book. Scientists have developed a style for communicating between themselves about their findings, including their methods and their conjectures. They have so formalised this, under the pressure of the information explosion and the conventions of belonging to the community of respectable scientists, that it is impossible from most published papers to discover anything about the actual sequences of ideas and activity that leads to an experiment, a theory, or a “law.”

What exactly scientists do when they make discoveries outside the sort of discover}’ of a new plant or fossil, is a closed book which remains closed because of the conventions that a scientist is not to be caught with his pants down, seen to spend his time in the main fruitlessly, or be subject to the same limitations in his creative activities as the more compulsively introspective members of the Other Culture, as Snow would misleadingly say. Significantly, Watson has written a book which is in bad taste by conventional standards, and is therefore very likely to be valuable: true accounts of significant human activities, like sex, religion, death or creativity, have always caused a degree of discomfort and attempts at suppression; Watson’s book is unusual because it makes clear that the pace of scientific advance is dictated as much by the mutual dislikes and snobberies of scientists as by any willingness to be objective and co-operative tn the search for truth.

Watson is concerned to portray the leading personnel of the DNA story as people, with characteristic working habits which stemmed more from their limitations and personalities than from either their training or the logic of the work upon which they were engaged. He succeeds in this, so well in fact that we want to hear what the others thought of him. Crick emerges as brilliant and at the same time infuriating; the sort of man who can always pinpoint the weaknesses of other people's work and invari-

ably does so loudly and with manic enthusiasm; Wilkins as a sort of grey respectable research administrator who had more to put up with from his assistant Rosalind Franklin than a bachelor could hope to handle: and Bragg as a weak administrator who had done his best work earlier and then evaluated his colleagues in terms of how they carried on what he had started.

Watson himself comes out as a bit of a dabbler, his diversity of interests makes him hard to evaluate both as a scientist and as a biographer. but it is clear that his sympathies lie with the creative and intellectually-ele-gant theoretician first and the results of the experimentalists get used as theory fodder; in no place does one get the impression that Watson collaborated with people whom he regarded as capable of producing useful data; they existed to be used in a race against Pauling and in a battle against the English establishment and he was both skilled and lucky in that race.

One cannot help but feel that Watson was helped by being an American outsider, with an inappropriate scientific training, weak on most of the basic skills that were supposed to be pertinent to solving the DNA problem, unable at one stage to read and understand the key papers in the relevant journals, and uninhibited by the conventions of how a British scientist should behave with regard to poaching on somebody else’s special research speciality. To -get himself accepted in a research group of unquestionably high standards he had to go for something big that could be tackled in fits and starts between more pedestrian research that provided the bread and butter.

Going for something big is a queer business; it does not mean long periods of unbroken effort and thought, but may be done in hursts like a crossword puzzle, the key ability is one of being able to pick it up and put it down, and see remote analogies. The checking out can often be left to somebody else, and in fact was left to Wilkins who shared in the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick. The working habits of Watson and Crick have been noted with prurient cariosity by many reviewers who were out for a story and neither scientifically literate nor much aware of how creative thinkers work; the only moral to be drawn is that you can have a lively and satisfying sex life and be an abstract thinker at the same time, or nearly at the same time. In fact the two go rather well together in the sort of people who can win Nobel prizes but not fit in a placid scientific establishment where everyone knows his place and his problem.