Volume 10, Number 6 · March 28, 1968
Lucky Jim
By P.B. Medawar
The Double Helix
by James D. Watson
Atheneum, 226 pp., $5.95
On May 30, 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick published in Nature a correct interpretation of the crystalline structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. It was a great discovery, one which went far beyond merely spelling out the spatial design of a large, complicated, and important molecule. It explained how that molecule could serve genetic purposes—that is to say, how DNA, within the framework of a single common structure, could exist in forms various enough to encode the messages of heredity. It explained how DNA could be stable in a crystalline sense and yet allow for mutability. Above all it explained in principle, at a molecular level, how DNA undergoes its primordial act of reproduction, the making of more DNA exactly like itself. The great thing about their discovery was its completeness, its air of finality. If Watson and Crick had been seen groping toward an answer; if they had published a partly right solution and had been obliged to follow it up with corrections and glosses, some of them made by other people; if the solution had come out piecemeal instead of in a blaze of understanding: then it would still have been a great episode in biological history, but something more in the common run of things; something splendidly well done, but not done in the grand romantic manner.
Review, 2996 words
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