James Watson of double helix fame dies at 97
I must admit that my first reaction on reading the news of the death of one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, James Watson, was to think in wonder: he was still alive? It was so very long ago that I first heard of him, and back then I was a child and he was quite the celebrity and brash young man. I later read his book The Double Helix when it came out in 1968, and the impression its somewhat gossipy pages gave was of a brilliant young man in a great hurry, who considered the pursuit of scientific discovery a competitive race. The book certainly wasn’t your typical dry work of science, and it ruffled a lot of feathers, including that of his older partner in the discovery, Francis Crick:
Crick himself immediately understood the significance of his and Watson’s discovery. As Watson recalled, after their conceptual breakthrough on February 28, 1953, Crick declared to the assembled lunch patrons at The Eagle that they had “found the secret of life.” Crick himself had no memory of such an announcement, but did recall telling his wife that evening “that we seemed to have made a big discovery.” He revealed that “years later she told me that she hadn’t believed a word of it.” As he recounted her words, “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it.”
… Crick was incensed at Watson’s depiction of their collaboration in The Double Helix (1968), castigating the book as a betrayal of their friendship, an intrusion into his privacy, and a distortion of his motives. He waged an unsuccessful campaign to prevent its publication. He eventually became reconciled to Watson’s bestseller, concluding that if it presented an unfavorable portrait of a scientist, it was of Watson, not of himself.
Watson was a man of his times, too, as this article describes, making statements that were later criticized as racist and sexist. There was also the controversy about whether he and his colleague Crick gave enough credit to the work of Rosalind Franklin on which they built their theory. Long ago I read quite a bit about that, too, and I think this quote from the article is a pretty fair description:
The breakthrough did not come until 1953, when Watson visited Wilkins at King’s College in London, and Wilkins showed him a new x-ray crystallography image of DNA. The image was made by PhD student Raymond Gosling, who was working for Rosalind Franklin, a gifted chemist and crystallographer who also worked at the college. Watson was dazzled.
“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson wrote in his 1968 book, The Double Helix. “The pattern was unbelievably simpler than those obtained previously. Moreover, the black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could only arise from a helical structure.”
Critics have argued that Watson, Crick and Wilkins effectively stole Franklin’s work, especially since they later also came into possession of some of the data she had derived by analyzing the image. They did not — but nor did they cover themselves in glory.
Gosling, who had been working for Franklin when he created the picture, was now working for Wilkins, who thus had legitimate access to his work. What’s more, Franklin’s data was not confidential, but rather was readily available and had been passed to Watson and Crick by other researchers who knew that they were exploring the structure of DNA. Informal protocol did call for Watson, Crick and Wilkins to tell Franklin that they were working with her material and to seek her approval, which they did not do; that was a breach of professional courtesy, however, not scientific ethics. Most important, Franklin’s data was raw; it required far more work and far more independent analysis before it could reveal the double helix. Watson, Crick and Wilkins did that work — and they did it well.
Unfortunately, Franklin died of cancer before the others won the 1962 Nobel prize for their 1953 discovery, and at the time of the award she was therefore ineligible to share it. Also, the personal portrait Watson painted of her in his book was unflattering, and people who knew her said it was deeply untrue.
Watson and Crick (I think of them together always, because that’s the way I first learned about them) made a discovery with extremely far-reaching consequences. Later research based on their work told us so much about the human genome, as well as that of other living things, and the knowledge has been used not only in medicine but in forensics, in anthropology, in botany, in evolution, in paleontology, in genealogy, and in history. And I’ve probably left a few things out.
RIP.
A critic of his summarized The Double Helix thus: “I’m Jim, I’m smart. Francis is smart too most of the time. The rest are bloody clots”. A magazine article about him had picture of him on the cover with a creepy smile and the caption, “Mad Scientist?”
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I didn’t know haut bourgeois married couples in Britain ever spoke to each other except in irritation.
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I have the impression of higher education today that institutional politics has extinguished any admiration for genuine accomplishment.
I bought my thin hardback copy of Erwin Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” [1944] in a Washington, D.C. used bookstore in around 1974. (That copy, I was amused to find, had been in the library of Felix Frankfurter prior to my owning it.)
Anyhoo, it’s possible, even likely, that Dr. Watson was spurred by just such a call: find the stabile crystal(s) !. And indeed, he did.
I read The Double Helix around the time it came out. I’m sure it was one of those things that encouraged me to pursue science. In fact, I studied both physics and biology in my freshman year of college, as I was considering the biology path.
My physics advisor and mentor was something of a pioneer and a science racer. Fast, fast, fast. So he built and executed an important experiment and published it before anyone else. But another researcher repeated it later with more care and ultimately won the Noble prize. I don’t think there was much animosity over that because the other guy really nailed it. I met him briefly once.
There was some animosity over another item in my mentor’s career. He basically took credit for an important experimental breakthrough that some said was mostly the work of his grad student. Said grad student was not happy. However, it is almost always true that each researcher is standing on the shoulders of previous giants. By which I mean, the grad student was certainly leveraging some of my mentor’s previous work. And the “big guy” provides the funding.
“Dr. Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design. What is the origin of (the) digital information found in DNA?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XJvcJ4_L10
An interview with Watson and Francis Crick published here in 2015 (38:57): https://youtu.be/NGBDFq5Kaw0
h/t Richard Dawkins by way of Matt Ridley: https://x.com/RichardDawkins/status/1987228097817506196
GB,
Ive read Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt and found it interesting. Part of my reading list of critics of standard Darwinian evolution. I’m not a creationist. However, I find it strange that the biologists really close ranks on any criticism (of which there are some legitimate ones) of orthodox DE. Not a great way to advance a scientific field.
Matt Ridley wrote an excellent biography of Francis Crick. He considered Franklin an excellent technician who lacked imagination, and I’m inclined to think that’s pretty fair. Her very fine X-ray crystallography was a terrific clue and stepping stone, but she was not particularly close to the fundamental insight that broke the puzzle open for Watson & Crick. Franklin herself never claimed otherwise.
Hi there, blog. I saw a headline at some point today saying something about how Watson and Crick’s 1953 discovery had initiated the “golden age of biotech”. Which I thought was just a stupid statement, since biotech didn’t even exist before then, so to my mind, it was maybe the ‘Iron Age’ of biotech from there… at best.
Even now, I still feel, if we must insist on categorizing the progress level, as if biotechnology is maybe in the Bronze Age. But it doesn’t particularly matter to me where on the scale of advancement we happen to be at the moment, even though I work in the field.
(If anything, one would have to put in a word for PCR as helping inaugurate the next level. But that’s a big tangent, so never mind.)
I wish I had enough knowledge of macromolecular crystallography to really appreciate the specifics of the achievement of Watson and Crick. It’s ironic that my graduate school years were spent with a professor whose main research focus was indeed crystallography, but I never picked up much about the subject. (My project was very much a sideshow in that lab, which is fine, but I mention it only to provide some context for the remark.)
Physicsguy,
As to the biologists closings ranks on criticism; wasn’t it Max Planck who said; ‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’?
Wendy,
Ridley also wrote The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge [2015]. Extends the idea of evolution to many areas beyond biology, via the best adaptation surviving and less successful ideas going by the wayside. Clearly applies to cultural changes and memes.
Philip Ball, in How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology [2023], also discusses newer understanding that transcription and translation of DNA is not the only source for making proteins, but that RNA and other proteins can also achieve this in some rather complex ways.
My understanding is that in addition to the usual evolution by (sexual) natural selection, DNA changes can occur via “drift” within smaller isolated populations of organisms, and via “horizontal” transfers among some single celled microbes.
I suspect that ideas relating DNA “information” to consciousness and intelligence are animated partly by “life” having a metabolism component providing the energy to living forms(via ATP and electron transfers across cell membranes) as well as the DNA information component. But inorganic crystals also contain “structural” information and are not considered animate nor intelligent. In fact, when such solids become liquid or gaseous, they become more “animated” but lose their atomic/molecular level crystalline structure.
Molly,
I think their reluctance has more to do with what they perceive as attacks from creationists in the K12 curriculum. At least that’s my view after conversations with the biologists I knew. Being a relatively young science they thought any attacks from religion to be a mortal threat to their discipline, hence the stone walls. DE is their Newtonian foundation, or so they think. It’s not an old vs young scientist thing.
The Comeys of double-cross fame….
Now here’s a rather allegorical(?) allegation:
“Comey’s Daughter Reportedly Sought To Cut Deal With Epstein To Smear Trump”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/comeys-daughter-reportedly-sought-cut-deal-epstein-smear-trump
Pattison, author of The Fossil Men, writes two separate themes; one is even earlier paleontology and the other the bitter rivalry within that narrow aspect of pre-hominin science. Skillfully combined in one book. The rivalry issue might be interesting, given one of the subjects discussed above.
Then there’s David Gelerntner, Yale computer prof, who says Darwin doesn’t work because the math fails. See his “Giving Up Darwin”. If your calculator has sufficient places, like maybe a thousand, you might try to follow his theory.
Richard,
Jerry Coyne provides a decent refutation of Gelerntner (and some others) here:
Good discussions by Jerry Coyne refuting David Gelernters’ anti-Darwin CRB Review article*, and related ID assertions.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/05/17/computer-scientist-david-gelertner-drinks-the-academic-kool-aid-buys-into-intelligent-design/
More Coyne: Quillette article/ review critical of Gelernter’s views on Darwin:
https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/david-gelernter-is-wrong-about-ditching-darwin/
David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching Darwin
written by Jerry A. Coyne Published on September 9, 2019
Peter Robinson of Uncommon Knowledge fame had Gelernter, Meyer, and Berlinksi on one of his interview shows: https://www.hoover.org/research/mathematical-challenges-darwins-theory-evolution-david-berlinski-stephen-meyer-and-david
Mathematical Challenges To Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution, With David Berlinski, Stephen Meyer, And David Gelernter Recorded on June 6, 2019 in Italy.
When I saw that, I was disappointed that Robinson did not have a follow up with someone from the pro Darwinian side, but from searching for that link I see Robinson has had these and other participants back for discussions several times. Therefore I should not expect to find a balanced pro-con discussion or presentation from him. At least on this topic he appears to have no interest in exploring the Common Knowledge.
However, Stephen Meyer is knowledgeable about the materialistic view of science, cosmology, and biology, even if he does not accept it and makes claims for “intelligence” that could have a different answer (or at least a different type of ‘watch maker” design than he wants to believe. Today I happened to find this video where he touches on some of that: Stephen Meyer Scientists Tried to Create Life and Failed: Here’s Why [14 mins]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjjJEP0RMeM
It is an interview of Stephen Meyer by Ben Shapiro, that seems to make a strong case for rejecting a natural materialistic view of science and biology. He cites a 11/7/2016 Royal Society meeting that was called to answer a growing set of supposed issues with the NeoDarwinian Theory of evolution; i.e., that is was “not working”. But supposedly these pro-NeoDarwinian attendees could not find a better answer to the objections being raised.
Bottom line for me is I don’t accept Meyer’s views but I need to dig deeper to understand the limits and flaws (or baseline assumptions) in his reasoning. It is always possible that my view is wrong (won’t be the first time), but typically these analyses fail to allow for the nearly infinite number of opportunities for possibly favorable natural biochemical reactions to occur [millions or billions per second?] and for RNA/DNA based evolution to try different chemical “trials” in a variety of different environmental conditions over a few 100 million years about 3500 million years ago.
RA, I will add “Pattison, author of The Fossil Men” to my potential “to buy” book list.
*See here: https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
Giving Up Darwin
By: David Gelernter Posted: May 1, 2019
This article appeared in: Volume XIX, Number 2, Spring 2019
R2L, RIchard Aubrey:
The Gelernter link is now: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/
Gelernter doesn’t reject Darwinism totally and neither does Meyer:
____________________________________
Meyer doesn’t reject Darwinian evolution. He only rejects it as a sufficient theory of life as we know it.
–David Gelernter, “Giving Up Darwin”
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There are reasonable arguments — some mathematical — against strict Darwinism explaining evolution totally. One may jump to the conclusion of Intelligent Design, but that’s not necessary to critique Darwinism.
Darwinists may complain that these are God of the Gaps attacks to be shrugged off. But we’ve already seen the Darwinists overthrown by a gap they couldn’t honestly explain — the mitochondria.
It was Lynn Margulis who pointed out that the most likely explanation of mitochondria is that it emerged from the symbiosis of a primitive cell with aerobic bacteria. Naturally, she was attacked by the Darwinists but she eventually won the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis#Endosymbiosis_theory
IMO, with Gelernter and Meyer, Darwinism, as currently defined, can’t explain some important gaps, as Gelernter enumerates in his article. I would rather not resort to Intelligent Design, but some explanation(s) beyond Darwinism have yet to be found.
“I would rather not resort to Intelligent Design, but some explanation(s) beyond Darwinism have yet to be found.”
Nice summation huxley. From my view there’s some major issues with orthodox DE. However, much like Newtonian physics, it works fairly well in many circumstances, but the need for a biological “relativity and maybe QM” seems to be there. Has it been found? No. But the resistance of biologists to even searching for such is wrong. Again in my conversations with biologists, any suggestion of looking beyond standard DE is met with anger and great resistance.
But by no means historically atypical. Scientists are as human as anyone else, and they get emotional investments in their ideas, or hostility to other ideas. There was quite a dispute in the late 19C because geologists and paleontologists kept finding more and more evidence that the Earth and thus the Sun were first hundreds of millions, then billions of years old. A swath of the physics community, led by Lord Kelvin, insisted that was impossible because no energy source could keep the Sun burning that long, therefore the geologists and biologists must be wrong.
Then came the discovery of nuclear physics and the overturn of Dalton.
(That incident is one reason I always remind myself that all scientific conclusions are conditional, there’s always a spoken or silent ‘as far as we currently know’.)
And of course the geological community was limited for a long time by the imposing presence of Lyell, who’s accomplishments were real, but who’s utter insistence that all geology must be interpreted in light of current-visible processes limited many promising careers and slowed understanding of plate tectonics.
But Lyell had his own reasons, which he thought good, for his attitude.
@HC68: “… all scientific conclusions are conditional, there’s always a spoken or silent ‘as far as we currently know’.”
It is good that this qualification is spoken explicitly on occasion.
And it applies to all contenders for proposed explanations.
@R2L:And it applies to all contenders for proposed explanations.
But it does not apply equally to all contenders. A new proposed explanation has to do just as well as the older ones at explaining what they explain, and has to do better at explaining things they didn’t explain. It is an extremely high bar that a new proposed explanation has to clear.
Lots of differing views. Behe’s irreducible complexity lost in court but courts don’t do science. Iirc, it was about being in a school curriculum. Makes sense; every biological process–used in the sense of an organ or something like–has a cost; metabolic, mobility, various. If there were not an advantage-plus offsetting the cost, the thing would be selected against. See natural selection. So everything has to show up freshly assembled, glue not quite dry (joke), and ready to operate. Or it couldn’t exist. Half an eye has a cost, not least holes in the skull increasing the brain’s susceptibility to injury. But not worth the effort, so to speak, until functioning at something over 99%.
Ernst Myer developed punctuated equilibrium. The punk eek folks have not, so far as I know, told us where to look for a punctuating event but that’s the way they read the fossil record. The late S.J. Gould of Harvard referred to traditional Darwin gradualism as ‘Darwinian fundamentalism” and not in a complimentary sense. “Evolution by jerks vs. evolution by creeps.”
But a related issue is the sacred nature of evolution. Long ago, Buckley sponsored a debate between evolutionary biologists and scientific creationists. I’d never heard of the latter but I learned that if you wish to argue evolution with them, best leave your lunch money at home. They know the business. Perhaps he evolutionists–Stockbreeding for Dummies–hadn’t sent their best but, boy….
But the important thing, from my point of view, was that on the evolutionists’ side of the table was the then head of the ACLU, and the Rev. Barry Lynn, then head of Americans United for The Separation of Church and State. It’s been a while and he may have passed the baton.
Neither of these guys had science as their day job. What the heck were they doing there? Evolution must not be dethroned. You don’t have to be able to spell it and as long as you believe it, you’re an intellectual giant compared to those subliterate, halfwit hillbillies. Can you imagine losing evolution?
For at least sixty years, fluoride in the drinking water has been another one of those sacred items. Only half wits doubt it. But recent studies show “strong inverse correlation” between it and children’s intellectual development.
Lots of caveats, of course. Perhaps the drinking water level is okay but sloshing the kids with the stuff straight as happened to me in elementary school, or also fluoride-heavy toothpastes might put one into the “toxic” level. But who wants to admit the hillbillies may have been right? You don’t have to know how to spell the stuff (quick, without looking, does the “u” come before or after the “o”) to be a scientific genius. Darn shame to lose that, too. Where’s the ACLU?