Jon Turney considers the literary legacy of James Watson:
The dominant impression of the American, gawky, gauche, preoccupied with sexual as well as worldly success, but with little experience of either, comes from his own account of the Cambridge days in The Double Helix. The other character sketches in that “personal account of scientific discovery”, as the subtitle puts it, are often little more than cartoons – boastful [Francis] Crick, scary [Rosalind] Franklin, authoritative but avuncular [Lawrence] Bragg. But however uncharitable he was toward others, Watson was equally unsparing of himself. He created a vivid impression of the state of mind of a startlingly young, intellectually arrogant but socially awkward interloper making his way among the British intelligentsia. It was the work not of Watson the scientist, but of Watson the writer.
In fact, surveying his working life, his writing is probably as important as his contributions in research or science advocacy.
He may not have originated the scientific memoir, but he certainly reinvented it. A host of later books chronicling the vicissitudes of research and the tensions and rivalries within and between labs are mainly inspired by The Double Helix. And he was equally influential in a completely different sphere. Molecular Biology of the Gene, first issued in 1965, three years before the autobiographical book appeared, reinvented the undergraduate science textbook, and was another huge publishing success.
Julie Chovanes adds:
When a collection of Watson’s essays were published in A Passion for DNA the New England Journal of Medicine hailed him as the “prose laureate” of the biomedical sciences. Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley and Edward Wilson may have better claims to that title. But, while Wilson comes close, Watson has been a more influential writer than any of them.
Someone should archive his writings using DNA.
(Photo by Flickr user kyz)
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