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The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix

di James D. Watson

Altri autori: Sir Lawrence Bragg (Prefazione), Alexander Gann (A cura di), Jan Witkowski (A cura di)

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On the fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick receiving the Nobel Prize, a freshly annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix provides new insights into the personal relationships among James Watson, Frances Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and a scientific revolution. In his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, James Watson offered a thrilling drama of the race among scientists to identify the structure of DNA. Professors Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski have built upon this narrative; juxtaposing Watson's racy account with the commentary of other protagonists offering an enhanced perspective of the now legendary story. They have mined many sources: including a trove of newly discovered correspondence belonging to Francis Crick mislaid some fifty years earlier; excerpts from the papers of Maurice Wilkins, Linus Pauling, and Rosalind Franklin; and a chapter that had been dropped from the original. After half a century, the implications of the double helix keep rippling outward; the tools of molecular biology have forever transformed the life sciences. The New Annotated and Illustrated Edition of The Double Helix adds a richness to the account of the momentous events that led the charge. The Double Helix is the best book I know about a scientific discovery this new edition suffuses the whole with social history, fascinating documentation, photography, and cunning background research. The early fifties, the beginning of the modern age of molecular biology, spring to life. Ian McEwan, author of Atonement --Provided by publisher.… (altro)
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I picked this book up in the hopes it would be the next step in my attempt to understand the building blocks of life. There is a little of that in its pages, but mostly it is something else: A gossipy account of how science is done by real human beings with their ambitions, rivalries, jealousies, and charm. Above all, the tale conveys a sense of the thrill of intellectual achievement.
The edition I read is expanded with annotations and appendices that fill in aspects of the story. At times, I found this paratext distracting and thought perhaps I should have read the unadorned version instead, which is written in an elliptic, casual style. It resembles the kind of crime story one quickly turns the pages of to while away a convalescent afternoon. On balance, though, I’m glad I read this edition to help fill in the story.
In its unconventional way, this book is a further take on what we’re all engaged in: Life investigating and attempting to understand life. ( )
  HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
What a fascinating story. Watson does a great job explaining the process of discovering the DNA structure. He explains, in approachable language, the difficulties and the false moves. (The double helix might seem obvious in retrospect, but it is important to recognize how limited was the information they had on DNA. Certainly, somebody was going to discover the structure very soon, but despite Watson's relaxed attitude to research they managed to be first.)

He also relates the rest of his life during this process, briefly describing a lot of the other people involved. (For example, I had heard of Pauling's triple-strand model, but didn't realize that Pauling's son was a graduate student in the same Cambridge lab.) While I can imagine that the details of his social life are more than some readers want, I think that they filled in Watson's personality, gave a portrait of a different age of science, and helped make me feel like I was right there in the process. Watson creates a lot of suspense, and I had to put the book down a few times.

Watson is opinionated and doesn't hold back. While his sexism is certainly objectionable, I would rather read his honest(-ish) take than a whitewashed story that hid his sexism.

> Of course there were scientists who thought the evidence favoring DNA was inconclusive and preferred to believe that genes were protein molecules. Francis, however, did not worry about these skeptics. Many were cantankerous fools who unfailingly backed the wrong horses. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

> Not even the possession of University Chairs gave many the assurance to do clean science; some actually wasted their efforts on useless polemics about the origin of life or how we know that a scientific fact is really correct. What was worse, it was possible to get a university degree in biology without learning any genetics. … That was not to say that the geneticists themselves provided any intellectual help. You would have thought that with all their talk about genes they should worry about what they were. Yet almost none of them seemed to take seriously the evidence that genes were made of DNA.

> Pauling's talk was made with his usual dramatic flair. The words came out as if he had been in show business all his life. A curtain kept his model hidden until near the end of his lecture, when he proudly unveiled his latest creation. Then, with his eyes twinkling, Linus explained the specific characteristics that made his model—the alpha-helix—uniquely beautiful … A few days later the next issue of the journal arrived, this time containing seven more Pauling articles. Again the language was dazzling and full of rhetorical tricks. One article started with the phrase, "Collagen is a very interesting protein." It inspired me to compose opening lines of the paper I would write about DNA, if I solved its structure. A sentence like "Genes are interesting to geneticists" would distinguish my way of thought from Pauling's.

> The $3000 fellowship stipend that I had received for being in Copenhagen was three times that required to live like a well-off Danish student. Even if I had to cover my sister's recent purchase of two fashionable Paris suits, I would have $1000 left, enough for a year's stay in Cambridge

> Maurice had told Francis, however, that the diameter of the DNA molecule was thicker than would be the case if only one polynucleotide (a collection of nucleotides) chain were present. This made him think that the DNA molecule was a compound helix composed of several polynucleotide chains twisted about each other.

> Most of our conversation, instead, centered on Rosy Franklin. More trouble than ever was coming from her. She was now insisting that not even Maurice himself should take any more X-ray photographs of DNA. In trying to come to terms with Rosy, Maurice made a very bad bargain. He had handed over to her all the good crystalline DNA used in his original work and had agreed to confine his studies to other DNA, which he afterward found did not crystallize. … The point had been reached where Rosy would not even tell Maurice her latest results.

> the crystallographer V. Vand sent Max a letter containing a theory for the diffraction of X rays by helical molecules. Helices were then at the center of the lab's interest, largely because of Pauling's alpha-helix. Yet there was still lacking a general theory to test new models as well as to confirm the finer details of the alpha-helix. This is what Vand hoped his theory would do. Francis quickly found a serious flaw in Vand's efforts

> It was downright obvious to her that the only way to establish the DNA structure was by pure crystallographic approaches. As model building did not appeal to her, at no time did she mention Pauling's triumph over the alpha-helix. The idea of using tinker-toy-like models to solve biological structures was clearly a last resort.

> After tea, however, a shape began to emerge which brought back our spirits. Three chains twisted about each other in a way that gave rise to a crystallographic repeat every 28A along the helical axis. This was a feature demanded by Maurice's and Rosy's pictures, so Francis was visibly reassured as he stepped back from the lab bench and surveyed the afternoon's effort. Admittedly a few of the atomic contacts were still too close for comfort, but, after all, the fiddling had just begun. With a few hours' more work, a presentable model should be on display.

> Nothing in Francis' argument justified all this fuss. She became positively aggressive when we got on the topic of Mg++ ions that held together the phosphate groups of our three-chain model. This feature had no appeal at all to Rosy, who curtly pointed out that the Mg++ ions would be surrounded by tight shells of water molecules and so were unlikely to be the kingpins of a tight structure. Most annoyingly, her objections were not mere perversity: at this stage the embarrassing fact came out that my recollection of the water content of Rosy's DNA samples could not be right. The awkward truth became apparent that the correct DNA model must contain at least ten times more water than was found in our model.

> I was sacked. The letter quoted the section of the fellowship award stating that the fellowship was valid only for work in the designated institution. My violation of this provision gave them no choice but to revoke the award. The second paragraph gave the news that I had been awarded a completely new fellowship. I was not, however, to be let off merely with the long period of uncertainty. The second fellowship was not for the customary twelve-month period but explicitly terminated after eight months

> There was no way to test our dreams, however, unless Rosy did an about-face from her determination to rely completely on classical X-ray diffraction techniques. … The time had not yet come to press Rosy and Gosling about building models. If anything, the squabbling between Maurice and Rosy was more bitter than before the visit to Cambridge. Now she was insisting that her data told her DNA was not a helix. Rather than build helical models at Maurice's command, she might twist the copper-wire models about his neck.

> Since the war, Chargaff and his students had been painstakingly analyzing various DNA samples for the relative proportions of their purine and pyrimidine bases. In all their DNA preparations the number of adenine (A) molecules was very similar to the number of thymine (T) molecules, while the number of guanine (G) molecules was very close to the number of cytosine (C) molecules. Moreover the proportion of adenine and thymine groups varied with their biological origin. … Chargaff, as one of the world's experts on DNA, was at first not amused by dark horses trying to win the race. Only when John reassured him by mentioning that I was not a typical American did he realize that he was about to listen to a nut. Seeing me quickly reinforced his intuition. Immediately he derided my hair and accent, for since I came from Chicago I had no right to act otherwise.

> Fortunately, Linus did not look like an immediate threat on the DNA front. Peter Pauling arrived with the inside news that his father was preoccupied with schemes for the supercoiling of alpha-helices in the hair protein, keratin

> There were some fuzzy data using sea urchins, interpreted as a transformation of DNA into RNA, but I preferred to trust other experiments showing that DNA molecules, once synthesized, are very very stable. The idea of the genes' being immortal smelled right, and so on the wall above my desk I taped up a paper sheet saying DNA RNA protein. The arrows did not signify chemical transformations, but instead expressed the transfer of genetic information from the sequences of nucleotides in DNA molecules to the sequences of amino acids in proteins.

> [Pauling's] model was a three-chain helix with the sugar-phosphate backbone in the center. This sounded so suspiciously like our aborted effort of last year that immediately I wondered whether we might already have had the credit and glory of a great discovery if Bragg had not held us back. … At once I felt something was not right. I could not pinpoint the mistake, however, until I looked at the illustrations for several minutes. Then I realized that the phosphate groups in Linus' model were not ionized, but that each group contained a bound hydrogen atom and so had no net charge. Pauling's nucleic acid in a sense was not an acid at all. Moreover, the uncharged phosphate groups were not incidental features. The hydrogens were part of the hydrogen bonds that held together the three intertwined chains. Without the hydrogen atoms, the chains would immediately fly apart and the structure vanish. Everything I knew about nucleic-acid chemistry indicated that phosphate groups never contained bound hydrogen atoms. No one had ever questioned that DNA was a moderately strong acid.

> I could not refrain from pointing out the superficial resemblance between Pauling's three-chain helix and the model that Francis and I had shown her fifteen months earlier. The fact that Pauling's deductions about symmetry were no more inspired than our awkward efforts of the year before would, I thought, amuse her. The result was just the opposite. Instead, she became increasingly annoyed with my recurring references to helical structures. Coolly she pointed out that not a shred of evidence permitted Linus, or anyone else, to postulate a helical structure for DNA. Most of my words to her were superfluous, for she knew that Pauling was wrong the moment I mentioned a helix. … Interrupting her harangue, I asserted that the simplest form for any regular polymeric molecule was a helix. Knowing that she might counter with the fact that the sequence of bases was unlikely to be regular, I went on with the argument that, since DNA molecules form crystals, the nucleotide order must not affect the general structure. Rosy by then was hardly able to control her temper, and her voice rose as she told me that the stupidity of my remarks would be obvious if I would stop blubbering and look at her X-ray evidence. … Walking down the passage, I told Maurice how his unexpected appearance might have prevented Rosy from assaulting me. Slowly he assured me that this very well might have happened. Some months earlier she had made a similar lunge toward him. They had almost come to blows following an argument in his room.

> Then the even more important cat was let out of the bag: since the middle of the summer Rosy had had evidence for a new three-dimensional form of DNA. It occurred when the DNA molecules were surrounded by a large amount of water. When I asked what the pattern was like, Maurice went into the adjacent room to pick up a print of the new form they called the "B" structure. The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race. The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously ("A" form). Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could arise only from a helical structure. With the A form, the argument for a helix was never straightforward, and considerable ambiguity existed as to exactly which type of helical symmetry was present. With the B form, however, mere inspection of its X-ray picture gave several of the vital helical parameters. Conceivably, after only a few minutes' calculations, the number of chains in the molecule could be fixed.

> On our way to Soho for supper I returned to the problem of Linus, emphasizing that smiling too long over his mistake might be fatal. The position would be far safer if Pauling had been merely wrong instead of looking like a fool. Soon, if not already, he would be at it day and night. There was the further danger that if he put one of his assistants to taking DNA photographs, the B structure would also be discovered in Pasadena. Then, in a week at most, Linus would have the structure.

> No serious models were built, however, for several days. Not only did we lack the purine and pyrimidine components, but we had never had the shop put together any phosphorus atoms. Since our machinist needed at least three days merely to turn out the more simple phosphorus atoms, I went back to Clare after lunch to hammer out the final draft of my genetics manuscript.

> They had just returned from motoring in a friend's Rolls to a celebrated country house near Bedford. Their host, an antiquarian architect, had never truckled under to modern civilization and kept his house free of gas and electricity. In all ways possible he maintained the life of an eighteenth-century squire, even to providing special walking sticks for his guests as they accompanied him around his grounds.

> Three days later the phosphorus atoms were ready, and I quickly strung together several short sections of the sugar-phosphate backbone. Then for a day and a half I tried to find a suitable two-chain model with the backbone in the center. All the possible models compatible with the B-form X-ray data, however, looked stereochemically even more unsatisfactory than our three-chained models of fifteen months before. So, seeing Francis absorbed by his thesis, I took off the afternoon to play tennis with Bertrand. After tea I returned to point out that it was lucky I found tennis more pleasing than model building. Francis, totally indifferent to the perfect spring day, immediately put down his pencil to point out that not only was DNA very important, but he could assure me that someday I would discover the unsatisfactory nature of outdoor games.

> Though I kept insisting that we should keep the backbone in the center, I knew none of my reasons held water. Finally over coffee I admitted that my reluctance to place the bases inside partially arose from the suspicion that it would be possible to build an almost infinite number of models of this type. Then we would have the impossible task of deciding whether one was right. But the real stumbling block was the bases. As long as they were outside, we did not have to consider them. If they were pushed inside, the frightful problem existed of how to pack together two or more chains with irregular sequences of bases.

> Nonetheless, neither of us had any hesitation in breaking off work for the weekend. There was a party at Trinity on Saturday night, and on Sunday Maurice was coming up to the Cricks' for a social visit arranged weeks before the arrival of the Pauling manuscript.

> Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands. We came upon them because of Max's membership on a committee appointed by the Medical Research Council to look into the research activities of Randall's lab. Since Randall wished to convince the outside committee that he had a productive research group, he had instructed his people to draw up a comprehensive summary of their accomplishments. In due time this was prepared in mimeograph form and sent routinely to all the committee members. As soon as Max saw the sections by Rosy and Maurice, he brought the report in to Francis and me. Quickly scanning its contents, Francis sensed with relief that following my return from King's I had correctly reported to him the essential features of the B pattern

> But a recent rereading of J. M. Gulland's and D. O. Jordan's papers on the acid and base titrations of DNA made me finally appreciate the strength of their conclusion that a large fraction, if not all, of the bases formed hydrogen bonds to other bases. Even more important, these hydrogen bonds were present at very low DNA concentrations, strongly hinting that the bonds linked together bases in the same molecule

> I thus started wondering whether each DNA molecule consisted of two chains with identical base sequences held together by hydrogen bonds between pairs of identical bases. There was the complication, however, that such a structure could not have a regular backbone, since the purines (adenine and guanine) and the pyrimidines (thymine and cytosine) have different shapes … My scheme was torn to shreds by the following noon. Against me was the awkward chemical fact that I had chosen the wrong tautomeric forms of guanine and thymine. … The letter [to Delbrück, reporting "a very pretty model" for DNA] was not in the post for more than an hour before I knew that my claim was nonsense. I no sooner got to the office and began explaining my scheme than the American crystallographer Jerry Donohue protested that the idea would not work. The tautomeric forms I had copied out of Davidson's book were, in Jerry's opinion, incorrectly assigned. My immediate retort that several other texts also pictured guanine and thymine in the enol form cut no ice with Jerry. Happily he let out that for years organic chemists had been arbitrarily favoring particular tautomeric forms over their alternatives on only the flimsiest of grounds. In fact, organic-chemistry textbooks were littered with pictures of highly improbable tautomeric forms.

> The metal purine and pyrimidine models, needed for systematically checking all the conceivable hydrogen-bonding possibilities, had not been finished on time. At least two more days were needed before they would be in our hands. This was much too long even for me to remain in limbo, so I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting accurate representations of the bases out of stiff cardboard. But by the time they were ready I realized that the answer must be put off till the next day. After dinner I was to join a group from Pop's at the theater.

> When Jerry came in I looked up, saw that it was not Francis, and began shifting the bases in and out of various other pairing possibilities. Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds.

> The unforeseen dividend of having Jerry share an office with Francis, Peter, and me, though obvious to all, was not spoken about. If he had not been with us in Cambridge, I might still have been plumping for a like-with-like structure. Maurice, in a lab devoid of structural chemists, did not have anyone about to tell him that all the textbook pictures were wrong. But for Jerry, only Pauling would have been likely to make the right choice and stick by its consequences.

> Soon I left Cambridge to spend a week in Paris. A trip to Paris to be with Boris and Harriett Ephrussi had been arranged some weeks earlier. Since the main part of our work seemed finished, I saw no reason to postpone a visit which now had the bonus of letting me be the first to tell Ephrussi's and Lwoff's labs about the double helix. Francis, however, was not happy, telling me that a week was far too long to abandon work of such extreme significance. A call for seriousness, however, was not to my liking

> His schemes, until then unknown to us in detail, always dealt with groups of three bases, hydrogen-bonded in the middle, many of which we now knew to be in the wrong tautomeric forms. Thus his idea did not seem worth resurrecting only to be quickly buried. However, when Maurice sounded upset at our objection, we added the necessary reference. Both Rosy's and Maurice's papers covered roughly the same ground and in each case interpreted their results in terms of the base pairs. For a while Francis wanted to expand our note to write at length about the biological implications. But finally he saw the point to a short remark and composed the sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

> In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong, I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration, using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule.

> Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death.

> Though many were initially skeptical that DNA replication involved strand separation, this doubting chatter went silent after the 1958 Meselson-Stahl experiment demonstrated that very phenomenon. Certainly the Swedish Academy had no doubt as to the correctness of the double helix when they awarded Arthur Kornberg half of the 1959 Physiology or Medicine prize for experiments demonstrating enzymatic synthesis of DNA.
  breic | Jun 16, 2020 |
James Watson's "The Double Helix" is very readable for a scientific memoir, detailing the days when Watson and his partner Francis Crick came up with the structure for DNA. In fact, one of Crick's major objections to the memoir is just that-- it's not scientific enough.

I found the book to be fascinating look at an exciting time in science and an interesting peep into a brilliant mind. It is difficult to read at times, due to the sexism evident toward Rosalind Franklin. Without her X-ray work, their model probably wouldn't have ever come to fruition, yet the comments about her not fixing her hair or clothing really rankle (as does his insistence on calling her Rosy despite, as is made clear early in the book, this is something they called her behind her back in part due to her temperament.) Watson does apologize in the final chapter of the book, saying his opinion changed in later years.

Anyway, this was an interesting read, even for a non-scientist. ( )
  amerynth | Mar 25, 2013 |
Library Journal August 2013
  smsulibrary2 | Apr 7, 2014 |
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Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
James D. Watsonautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Bragg, Sir LawrencePrefazioneautore secondariotutte le edizioniconfermato
Gann, AlexanderA cura diautore secondariotutte le edizioniconfermato
Witkowski, JanA cura diautore secondariotutte le edizioniconfermato

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On the fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick receiving the Nobel Prize, a freshly annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix provides new insights into the personal relationships among James Watson, Frances Crick, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin and a scientific revolution. In his 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, James Watson offered a thrilling drama of the race among scientists to identify the structure of DNA. Professors Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski have built upon this narrative; juxtaposing Watson's racy account with the commentary of other protagonists offering an enhanced perspective of the now legendary story. They have mined many sources: including a trove of newly discovered correspondence belonging to Francis Crick mislaid some fifty years earlier; excerpts from the papers of Maurice Wilkins, Linus Pauling, and Rosalind Franklin; and a chapter that had been dropped from the original. After half a century, the implications of the double helix keep rippling outward; the tools of molecular biology have forever transformed the life sciences. The New Annotated and Illustrated Edition of The Double Helix adds a richness to the account of the momentous events that led the charge. The Double Helix is the best book I know about a scientific discovery this new edition suffuses the whole with social history, fascinating documentation, photography, and cunning background research. The early fifties, the beginning of the modern age of molecular biology, spring to life. Ian McEwan, author of Atonement --Provided by publisher.

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