Happy Birthday, DNA! Return with us now to those thrilling days of discovery, fifty years ago this month

Natural History, April, 2003 by Everett I. Mendelsohn

Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution by Victor K. McElheny Perseus Publishing, 2003; $27.50

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox HarperCollins, 2002; $29.95

James D. Watson opened his irreverent and at times malicious popular book, The Double Helix, with the comment: "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." Watson was referring of course to his partner in the discovery of the structure of DNA. The narrative is clear: immodesty led to success. It is that singular success that is now being celebrated, the fiftieth anniversary of the three papers on DNA (one by Watson and Crick, one by Maurice Wilkins and two coauthors, and the third by Rosalind Franklin and a coauthor) originally published in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953.

The tone of the papers, obviously constrained by the editorial policies of what was at the time indisputably the premier journal of science, was subdued if not comically understated:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

Watson and Crick knew, however, that if their structure was correct, they were on to something very big, and in one of the last paragraphs of their "Letter" to Nature they stated their claim:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

One could almost say, "The rest is history." The details sketched by Watson and Crick relatively rapidly stimulated enormous amounts of experimentation and further theorizing. Yes, their discovery does mark a critical milestone in the coming age of molecular biology. The combined effort is as important as any discovery in twentieth-century science. The detailing of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953 and its implications for how genetic information is replicated marked the opening of a major shift in how genetics would be practiced. Prior to 1953 the replication process was "black boxed." In contrast, following the work of Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin, genes were understood as molecules, and the search for how the molecules functioned and how they influenced the development of the structures and processes of living organisms became the focus of the new, very active, and very large field of molecular biology. Numerous Nobel Prizes were awarded for the scientific discoveries that resulted, and numerous patents were granted for the application of the new science to medicine, agriculture, and commerce.

Victor McElheny's book Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution is the first full biography of Watson (Crick has yet to be the subject of a full biographical account). In McElheny's account, Watson's is a long and eventful life in science: the DNA discoveries; the appointment at Harvard; the years as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, during which Watson oversaw its reconstruction as a leading center for biological research; and the vigorous efforts he made as the first director of the Human Genome Project.

In their initial paper Watson and Crick conceded that they had not done experimental work on DNA, nor had they collected X-ray data; rather, they relied on previously published data. In their final paragraph they note:

We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M.H.E Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin and their coworkers at King's College, London.

Maurice Wilkins, who did important work on the X-ray crystallographic analysis of DNA, went on to share the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick in 1962. Rosalind Franklin, a colleague of Wilkins's at King's who had produced some of the clearest X-ray pictures of DNA, died young, of ovarian cancer, on April 16, 1958. Franklin had been a focus of parody in Watson's Double Helix, but her pictures had been shared with Watson and Crick, and they proved to be crucial in confirming their structural analysis of DNA. Unable to defend herself from the grave, she became a feminist icon and the subject of two biographies; Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is the more recent.

It is fitting that these two biographies are part of the public record of the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. And there is little doubt that Watson and Crick will get the lion's share of attention--after all, they are both still alive and active, and both have enjoyed long and quite successful careers since their youthful discovery. Yet I'm not sure either of them is entirely comfortable sharing the limelight with Franklin. The irony is that Franklin looms as large as she does today in part because of the way Watson portrayed her in The Double Helix.

Maddox recounts Watson's first encounter with Franklin, which took place at a lecture she gave as part of a colloquium at King's College. Watson, in recalling the lecture for his book, betrays something of his attitude toward women: "Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair." But he says little or nothing about the stunning X-ray pictures she had made and which he hoped would give him the evidence he and Crick needed to support their developing theory of a helical structure for DNA.