The old zoology department at University College London, converted from an ancient Bloomsbury warehouse, was a labyrinthine building. When I first arrived there as an undergraduate, in the early 1980s, I was delighted to stumble across an office ostensibly inhabited by Professor James D Watson. Because Watson and his helix-busting partner Francis Crick, as well as Charles Darwin, were the only biologists I'd ever heard of, I felt as though I was joining a scientific elite. During my time at UCL, I never ran into Watson. Not surprising really, given that he was then employed as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. So why the office?
The discovery in 1953 that DNA, the chemical that makes up the gene, exists in a double helical structure was the single most important breakthrough in scientific thinking of the 20th century. Watson described the events leading up to that discovery in his 1968 bestseller, The Double Helix, which confirmed him as the egotistical and brash character whom many in the field had known for years. For Rosalind Franklin, a physicist at King's College London whose data was used by Watson and Crick to derive their structure, the story was more double-cross than double helix. "Honest Jim", as Watson likes to be known in defending his frank assessments of colleagues, has more than once been chastised for failing to offer credit where it was due.
Genes and genetic engineering have moved a long way since the 1950s, when molecular biology was an esoteric no man's land between biology and physics. Today, DNA technology is pervasive, and Watson's self-regard and bullish eloquence have been crucial to the inexorable rise of the gene. He sat on most of the important committees that argued over the ethics and safety of genetic manipulation, and he fought hard to establish the Human Genome Project.
His latest book, Genes, Girls and Gamow, a sequel to The Double Helix, is a sad disappointment. It reads like a bloated diary covering the years between 1953, when the double helix was discovered, and 1956, when the genetic code itself was cracked. Reviewing The Double Helix in 1968, Peter Medawar observed that "auto-biographies, unlike all other works of literature, are part of their own subject matter. Their lies, if any, are lies of their authors not about their authors who (when discovered in falsehood) merely reveal a truth about themselves, namely that they are liars." In publishing his autobiographical recollections, Watson crafts a string of anecdotes aimed at creating an image of himself as he sees it. At the same time, however, he unwittingly reveals those other aspects of his character that have long infuriated his colleagues.
Sydney Brenner, the brilliant South African who eventually cracked the genetic code, is introduced here with little fanfare, and described as "short and almost pudgy". Knowing what we now do about Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of the double helix, what are we to think when, in this book, she is seen engaged in proprietary rows with everyone except Watson, who portrays himself instead as a mentor placating her foes? Genes, Girls and Gamow concentrates largely on the background of the race to crack the genetic code. It was evident that DNA acted through the intermediary of RNA, and Watson, along with the late George Gamow, a Russian physicist with an adolescent sense of humour and a serious drink problem, as immortalised here, established the "RNA Tie Club". The club had only 20 members (one for each of the amino acids that go into making up the proteins encoded by the genes). The society Watson provides glimpses of has a certain cold-war charm: Russian emigres, left-leaning pacifists and scientific mavericks are forever bumping into each other in Cambridge, New York, California and on the west coast of Scotland.
For all the rumours, it turns out that Watson did at least have some friends. In 1957, for instance, he stood beside the wildly eccentric Avrion Mitchison as best man at his wedding. The son of Naomi Mitchison and nephew of the pioneering geneticist J B S Haldane, Mitchison belonged to the British intelligentsia's foremost family, and rapidly climbed the ladder of the scientific establishment himself so that, by the time I arrived at University College London, he was long entrenched as its professor of zoology. For me, then, this book, which has none of the lucid power of Watson's selected essays, A Passion for DNA (Oxford University Press), at last offers some clues as to why a small space in Bloomsbury was inhabited by science's most famous absent tenant.
