James D. Watson RIP

James Watson was one of the pair 'Crick and Watson' who elucidated the structure of DNA in 1953. This is, without doubt, one of the defining discoveries in science during the 20th century and created the entire industry of biotech. The advantage that Crick and Watson had was that they were both intellectual magpies, coming to DNA after having worked in other areas. On the other hand, they were fortunate in being the first to unravel the structure; colleagues such as Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind "Rosy" Franklin contributed in major ways.

 In 1967 Watson wrote the book "The double helix" that recounts the story of how Watson started work on DNA, how he met Francis Crick, then Wilkins and Franklin, how they progressed and stumbled and progressed and stumbled. It's illuminating to read this book from the perspective of 2025, especially regarding the inter-personal reactions. All three men were condescending, at the least, to Franklin who made the important contribution of the X-ray photographs. 

I suspect that I read "The double helix" while I was at school, or at least at university. I'm fairly sure that we covered DNA, RNA and protein synthesis as part of the A-level biology curriculum, and this was new science - only twenty years after the discovery. But it wasn't until 2004 that I bought a paperback copy of the book (1999 edition) and I have the 2012 annotated version as an e-book. 

It was this book - or rather, the discovery that the book describes - that opened the way for a great deal of my reading in the past few years. Without C&W (not country and western!), there would have been no "The code breaker" by Walter Isaacson, telling the story of Jennifer Doudna and her work on the CRISPR system of gene editing, or Doudna's own book, "A crack in creation", or any of the biochemistry books by Nick Lane that deal in part with how life could have started and how RNA could have been built initially. I also read a biography of Rosalind Franklin whose name escapes me at the moment. Doudna didn't have good words for Watson who had become controversial in later life.

Gene editing was a common topic in science fiction - fiction that later became facr - as in Robert Silverberg's "Up the line", for example.

An obituary can be read here.

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This day in blog history:

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427	09/11/2011	Feeling the pressure	MBA, Finance
1185	09/11/2018	Improving a solution	Programming, Priority tips
1439	09/11/2021	The department of bright ideas	Programming, Problem solving
1854	09/11/2024	Beneath a scarlet sky	Literature, Italy