Journal of the History of Biology 36: 591–597, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Essay Review: Defined by DNA: The Intertwined Lives of James Watson and Rosalind Franklin ∗ RENA SELYA Department of the History of Science Harvard University 1 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA E-mail: [email protected]

The spring of 2003 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the elucidation of the double helical structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule, heralded as a major scientific turning point in the twentieth century. In late February 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick brought together evidence from chemistry, genetics, and X-ray crystallography and built an accurate double helical model of the molecule that constitutes all genetic material. One of their key pieces of evidence was a photograph of the “B” form of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemist at King’s College, London. Watson saw Photograph 51, as it is known, without Franklin’s knowledge; her colleague and rival Maurice Wilkins showed it to Watson in confidence. This story of scientific dishonesty is one of the most famous episodes in the history of contemporary science. Commemorated with lavish celebrations in England and the United States, TV specials and magazine covers, the fiftieth birthday of the “secret of life” has also given us two new books on James Watson and Rosalind Franklin. Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is a graceful biography of Franklin that offers a critical reappraisal of the DNA story, while Victor McElheny’s story in Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution will be familiar to anyone who has read any of Watson’s own works. In both cases, an idealized image of a scientist is invoked to explain and cohere the life stories of these complex individuals. The persona of “the scientist” looms large in the mythology of molecular biology. Often colorful, sometimes brash, but always brilliant, the individuals who contributed to our

∗ Review of Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (New York:

HarperCollins, 2002); and Victor K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003).

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understanding of the fundamentals of life have also shaped the way “the scientist” is viewed in contemporary popular culture. Franklin and Watson represent two very different models of the scientific life. Where Watson has sought the limelight, Franklin avoided it. While Watson is an outgoing, at times graceless social presence, Franklin was a quiet, serious, reserved Englishwoman. Watson typifies the gawky, socially awkward scientist, while in Maddox’s portrait, Franklin was a sophisticated and elegant adventurer, who was also a brilliant experimentalist. She faced many challenges as a woman in science, but the quality of her work speaks for itself. Watson, on the other hand, was a member of the American scientific elite, whose early path was smoothed by patrons such as Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria. Franklin died at the age of 37, in the middle of her scientific career, while Watson is still a significant presence on the American scientific scene. Despite these differences, the two are forever linked because of Watson’s less than charitable portrait of Franklin, or “Rosy,” as he referred to her in his best-selling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix.1 These two books follow familiar themes in scientific biography. Little time is spent on the subject’s childhood or early education; instead they emphasize evidence of future successes. The bulk of each work focuses on the content of the scientific work that made Watson and Franklin famous. Maddox locates Franklin in the context of her aristocratic Anglo-Jewish family, and gives us a feel for the excitement and hope of the immediate postwar period. Although McElheny does not provide much detail on Watson’s social or cultural context, he does convey a sense of how Watson and his peers saw themselves in the context of the burgeoning American scientific arena. Humanizing details about their personalities and private lives illuminate them as individuals, but at the same time support the idealized image of the scientist that each author wishes to convey. Although McElheny is loath to discuss Watson’s personal life in his book, in all of Watson’s own publications, his personal life is completely intertwined with his scientific career. In The Double Helix and its 2002 sequel, Genes, Girls and Gamow, he carefully documents his unsuccessful attempts to meet and woo women.2 Watson seems to have been convinced that his scientific and social successes were somehow related; he often mentions the Nobel Prize and getting more dates in a single breath.3 Personal and scientific relationships were also related issues for Franklin, although Maddox’s evidence about her emotional attachments to Jaques Mering and Don Caspar comes from other sources, not from Franklin’s own words. Such 1 Watson, 1980. 2 Watson, 2002. 3 Watson, 1980, p. 131; McElheny, 2003, p. 113.

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personal details are an important element in a full biography of any scientist, since they reinforce the message that scientists – even geniuses – are human. These two biographers are also willing to present their subjects’ flaws as part of their scientific personae. Maddox does not whitewash Franklin’s sometimes strained relationship with her mother, nor does she deny that Franklin could occasionally be brusque to the point of rudeness when speaking with other scientists. McElheny is honest about Watson’s failures in the scientific arena. He notes that Watson was “shrieky and petulant” when he arrived at Harvard, and he does not dismiss the accounts of many of his interviewees who had painful or unpleasant memories of their time with Watson at Harvard or Cold Spring Harbor.4 This honesty only reinforces the persona of the genius scientist that McElheny wishes to portray, since Watson’s idiosyncrasies and social awkwardness fit in with the image of the successful scientist as somehow excused from social mores. Relying heavily on Watson’s own recollections and published accounts (although technically without his participation in the project), Victor McElheny focuses his portrait of Watson around the simple assertion of his genius.5 Genius is both Watson’s “problem” and his source of strength: it led him to the double helix, it explains and excuses his behavior towards other scientists, and it sets the standard for what a great scientist should be. Genius needs no context: Watson’s relevance is entirely self-generated, and the scientific, political and cultural milieu of his work is rarely described from any perspective other than his own. In his role as a science writer, McElheny first wrote about Watson in 1968, around the time of the publication of The Double Helix, and his sympathy for and admiration of Watson is evident throughout this work. Watson’s candid version of his life story has been repeated many times over the past thirty-odd years, and McElheny’s portrait does not provide much new insight into the key events that define Watson’s scientific career. There is a growing body of secondary literature on the various contexts of biological research in the mid-twentieth century, and McElheny could have used that work to enrich his story and put Watson into a clearer context.6 The most obvious example of his reiteration of Watson’s version of events is in the story of the double helix discovery, and particularly Rosalind Franklin’s role in it. McElheny relies heavily on The Double Helix and 4 McElheny, 2003, p. 95. 5 McElheny, 2003, p. 4. 6 McElheny does cite the standard histories by Robert Olby and Horace Freeland Judson,

but these works do not provide much extra-scietnific context for the discovery of the double helix. Recent work by Soraya de Chaderevian offers new perspectives on the scientific and cultural context of the 1950s, when the work was done, while Pnina Abir-Am has done a careful analysis of the construction of the history of molecular biology that Watson has offered since the 1960s. Abir-Am, 1998, de Chaderevian, 2002, Judson, 1979, Olby, 1974.

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early published interviews with Watson and Crick to reconstruct the events of 1951–53, with Watson and Crick cast as adventurous heroes, Maurice Wilkins as the unsuspecting mole, and Franklin as a resistant, but important, figure in the background. McElheny dismisses as “legends” those narratives that accuse Watson and Crick of “stealing” Franklin’s data from the famous Photograph 51, and instead repeats Watson’s claim that because he “didn’t go into a drawer and steal it” he is innocent of any wrongdoing.7 In this account, Watson held a “lifelong disdain” for Franklin, but was able to overcome it a bit in 1955 to write her a long letter advising her on how to secure funding for her laboratory.8 This characterization is certainly consistent with the tone set by The Double Helix and Watson’s later spoken and written comments about Franklin, but it is not born out in the historical record. In her book, Maddox describes how Watson and Franklin had many pleasant, positive interactions when she visited the United States and he visited England in the years before her death – Watson even offered to drive Franklin from Woods Hole to California in 1954 and he gave her useful constructive advice about a major publication.9 McElheny easily could have found the letters that document this warmer relationship, but he relied instead on Watson’s published works, which only tell the negative part of the story. In contrast to McElheny’s devotion to Watson’s words, Maddox uses a wide range of sources to embed Franklin in an historical framework. The Franklin family gave Maddox access to their letters to and from Rosalind, and these, combined with archival sources and extensive interviews, are the basis for her nuanced and sympathetic portrait of a woman who was at once a product of her time and place and somehow removed from it. Maddox explains Franklin’s scientific style not as genius, but as the convergence of her background, training, and innate abilities. Franklin’s slow, careful work on the DNA structure did not lead her immediately to the double helix, because “Rosalind had been trained as a child, as a Paulina [graduate of St. Paul’s School for Girls in London], as an undergraduate, as a scientist, never to overstate the case, never to go beyond hard evidence. An outrageous leap of the imagination would have been as out of place as running up an overdraft or wearing a red strapless dress.”10 In Maddox’s view, Franklin certainly was a wonderful scientist, but like all scientists, her success was the result of a complex combination of innate ability, social context, and careful training.

7 McElheny, 2003, p. 52. 8 McElheny, 2003, p. 37, 79–80. 9 Maddox, 2002, p. 241, 253. 10 Maddox, 2002, p. 202.

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While these two works are quite different in their presentation of the history of the double helix, they do share a similar message. Each author has set out to establish and confirm the historical significance of his or her subject within the context of the double helix story, and each demonstrates how one single episode in an individual’s life can completely shape his or her reputation. The discovery of the double helical structure of the DNA molecule took approximately two years, but it dominates the stories of these two scientists’ lives. Adequate attention is paid to their scientific accomplishments after April 1953, but as evident in the titles of each book, DNA defines Watson and Franklin’s place in the history of science. Of course, it is not unusual for one discovery to define one’s scientific reputation. What is unusual in this case is the range of historical and scientific lessons that emerge from this well-known story. Although Franklin also made important contributions to physical chemistry and our understanding of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) before she died, she is the subject of historical attention mainly because of her underrecognized role in the DNA story. To her credit, Maddox devotes as much space in her book to Franklin’s virus research as she does to her DNA crystallography work. This is in stark contrast to Anne Sayre’s 1975 elegy to her friend Rosalind, which is almost entirely focused on disproving Watson’s version of events.11 In the end, Franklin’s historical significance as an experimentalist and as a woman in science is bound up in the 22 months she spent taking photographs, sparring with Wilkins, and calculating the structure of DNA at King’s College, London. The lessons that Maddox convincingly draws from Franklin’s life are based almost entirely on her role in the double helix story. Maddox discusses the initial furor that the figure of “Rosy” in The Double Helix caused, and notes that fifty years later, “Watson is still justifying himself” in public statements about Franklin.12 (He did, however, grant Maddox interviews when she was researching her book.) Maddox also provides us with a reasonable discussion of the question of whether Franklin should have shared in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the double helix. She notes that even if Franklin had lived, the Nobel committee may not have considered her for the Prize, given the politics of nomination and a noted gender bias against rewarding women in the sciences. In the end, Maddox concludes that Franklin herself was satisfied with her place in the scientific world. She “died proud of her world reputation” in several scientific areas.13

11 Sayre, 1975. 12 Maddox, 2002, p. 317. 13 Maddox, 2002, p. 327.

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In Maddox’s view, Franklin was a woman who was content with her lot, and her only regret was that she did not live longer. James Watson is still vigorously active, and he, too, has lived under the shadow of the double helix for the past fifty years. In his own words and in McElheny’s account, his career as a scientist and administrator, as well as his personal life, was defined by his time in Cambridge, drinking coffee and building models with Francis Crick. On the strength of this single discovery, Watson built a career at some of the most elite scientific institutions in the United States, including Caltech and Harvard University. None of his research projects proved to be as successful as the double helix, however, and Watson eventually turned his attention to scientific administration. He deserves a significant amount of credit for revitalizing the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and turning it into an extremely well-funded center for research on molecular biology and molecular genetics. Confident of his own intelligence and worth, he has consistently convinced other brilliant individuals to participate in advancing his ideas about molecular biology. Watson’s double helix fame attracted significant amounts of money for the Laboratory, and the Long Island grounds reflect the importance of the DNA icon. Watson himself encourages this close association with DNA. His public comments and publications always refer to his role in elucidating the double helix, and he is honest about its role in his scientific career. For example, in 1990, he commented in Science that he had accepted the job as first director of the Human Genome Project partially because he realized that “only once would I have the opportunity to let my scientific life encompass the path from the double helix to the 3 billion steps of the human genome.”14 This domination by a single discovery or episode is by no means unusual in the history of science, but it does set up a significant challenge to any biographer seeking to tell the story of an entire life, rather than the history of that single incident. In this case, Maddox rises to the challenge more successfully than McElheny; a full, historically situated study of Watson remains to be written. Perhaps we need another fifty years before these two icons of twentieth century science can both be fairly and historically evaluated.

References Abir-Am, Pnina G. 1998. “Entre mémoire collective et histoire en biologie moléculaire: les premiers rites commémoratifs pour les groupes fondateurs.” Pnina G. Abir-Am (ed.), La mise en mémoire de la science: pour une ethnographie historique des rites commémoratifs. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, pp. 25–74. 14 Watson, 1990, p. 46.

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de Chaderevian, Soraya. 2002. Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Judson, Horace Freeland. 1979, expanded 1996. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. New York: Simon and Schuster. Olby, Robert. 1974, 1994. The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Sayre, Anne. 1975. Rosalind Franlin and DNA. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Watson, James D. 1980. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. New York: Norton Critical Edition (originally published 1968 by Atheneum Books). Watson, James D. 1990. “The Human Genome Project: Past, Present and Future.” Science 248: 44–49. Watson, James D. 2002. Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.