麻豆传媒

Watson and DNA: Making a scientific revolution by Victor McElheny, Perseus/Wiley, $27.50/拢18.99, ISBN 0738203416

THIS biography of James Watson, one of the central figures in the molecular biology revolution, is more than just the life story of a controversial scientist with wild hair and untied shoelaces. Packed with factual information, anecdotes and gossip about those involved, it explores the main ideas, personalities and events surrounding the discovery of the DNA double helix structure 50 years ago. For anyone interested in the genetic code, the organisation and control of genes and the launch of the human genome project, this book will be a riveting read.

For historians of science, Watson and DNA is a gold mine. If a selection of this material were used for a beautifully written biography, like the recent ones of Dorothy Hodgkin by Georgina Ferry and of Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox, the book could become a popular classic.

It will have less appeal, however, to readers looking for in-depth characterisations or lucid explanations of the science involved. The writing style is sometimes brash, with baseball analogies and a celebrity-style emphasis on the Nobel Prize and its winners. Much of the text is a collage of facts and extracts from recent interviews carried out by the author, exhaustively annotated and bristling with quotations (the 1350 notes alone occupy 57 pages at the end).

Where McElheny speaks with his own voice, the writing style is smoother than in the parts where he is quoting others. He does provide some interesting new insights into the controversy surrounding the publication of Watson鈥檚 vivid, personal account of the DNA discovery, The Double Helix. A characteristic recent episode is described, in which Watson made an exaggerated off-the-cuff remark that a potential drug to inhibit the blood supply to tumours would soon cure cancer, leading to a report in The New York Times that launched a brief stock market frenzy.

Watson was not interviewed for this book, but the many quotations provide plenty of personal anecdotes and insights into his personality and his effects on others. McElheny recounts how Watson inspired great warmth and loyalty from many of his colleagues, while also causing offence to others. At Harvard, for example, he clashed with the biologist E. O. Wilson over the relative importance of the new, molecular, versus old, plant and animal, biology. Various choice opinions are quoted from Wilson on Watson, describing him as 鈥渢he most unpleasant person I have ever met鈥�, and 鈥渢he Caligula of biology鈥�.

Watson is a unique personality in one of the greatest intellectual developments of the past 50 years. It is a curious feature of his career that he did not spend much of it doing experiments himself. For the DNA discovery, he and Francis Crick were not involved in any experimental work but deduced the structure, mainly from work done at King鈥檚 College London.

Then he worked at Caltech and Harvard, where he studied RNA and ribosomes, to find out how the genetic message is translated from DNA to direct the cell machinery to make proteins. His teaching at Harvard led to the writing of a classic textbook of molecular biology. After that he devoted his energies to building up and directing one of the major centres of molecular biology, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York. Given the comment of one of his research students at Harvard 鈥� 鈥淗e would walk into the laboratories and things would start falling off shelves鈥� 鈥� it is perhaps just as well that he did not remain personally involved in experiments. But he has clearly inspired many of the big advances in molecular biology, and the exciting discoveries and controversies of his career make a fascinating story.