DNA: The Secret of Life by James D Watson with Andrew Berry
Heinemann £20 pp415
WATSON AND DNA by Victor K McElheny
Wiley £18.99 pp365
James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel prize with Francis Crick and Maurice
Wilkins for the discovery of the structure of DNA, is one of the greatest
living biologists. His special scientific gift was to know precisely when to
turn from the big picture to the smallest details, and vice versa, making
unusual connections that illuminated many clues mostly overlooked and
discarded by others. One piece of the jigsaw puzzle was an x-ray picture of
DNA belonging to the rival researcher Rosalind Franklin.
She never got to share the Nobel prize, since she had died by the time of the
award in 1962.
Watson’s new book is an important event, for he is a scintillating writer, and
who better to chart the progress and the undeniable disappointments of
genetic science 50 years on? But it is good to have an excellent
third-person account in Victor McElheny’s Watson and DNA for its invaluable
array of objective character perspectives.
McElheny tells us, for example, that Watson’s scientific style is “that of a
commando operation: small, aggressive, narrowly focused, quick and
opportunistic”. And so is Watson’s writing, which has just the right amount
of anecdote to put flesh and blood into a story that starts with youthful
optimism and ends in notable successes not untrammelled by doubt and human
greed.
The molecular-biology revolution, for all its undoubted achievements, has been
riven with rows over intellectual property rights and the scramble for
commercial applications. At the same time, the promise of genetic
engineering, heralding cures for 4,000 genetically based illnesses, has
proved to be more disappointing than anyone imagined. Ultimately, as Watson
himself emphasises, we have not cures but increasingly accurate diagnostic
tests for abnormalities that enable a mother to decide whether or not to
have an abortion.
Readers will compare this new book with Watson’s first, The Double Helix,
which became a classic, an unusual mix of scientific suspense as well as an
unabashed account of Watson’s own dippy personality. It told the story of
lab culture in Cambridge in the early 1950s, before biology went big, and
researchers were obliged to spend 75% of their time writing grant
applications. DNA: The Secret of Life recalls that world of youthful
excitement and promise as if it were another planet.
For, by the 1980s, as biotechnology expanded rapidly and the pharmaceutical
industry burgeoned, science began to change out of all recognition. By the
1990s, Watson, now a grand old man of science, found himself in charge of
the $3 billion human-genome project, the scheme to identify the 100,000 (now
scaled down to 35,000) genes by the turn of the new century. It did not take
long for problems and passions to arise, bringing the project to the brink
of disaster. Watson tells the story well, but McElheny’s terse, impartial
commentary is also essential at this point.
In 1992, Watson opposed the decision of Bernadine Healy, boss of the American
Institutes of Health and the project’s biggest source of funding, to file
for patent on genes known to relate to the brain, but not as yet
specifically identified. The issue of patenting goes to the heart of the
tensions between those who believe that such knowledge should be published
freely, and those who argue that science can only flourish when discoveries
are patented and profits from their success ploughed back.
Healy, an admirer of Baroness Thatcher, defended the patenting bid as a
decisive choice for science as “pro-competitive”. Watson retorted that
attempting to copyright unspecified genetic fragments was “lunacy” and
resigned. For his part, Watson’s unhappiness lay not only in his reluctance
to see genes patented, but in his conviction that such issues should involve
the views of scientists and not just politicians and business people. Patent
battles persist and grow more threatening by the day, casting shadows over
the application of the new genetics.
Watson meditates even more sombrely at the end of his chronicle on another
unfolding story: the fact that genetic therapy has been killing patients
rather than curing them. By this year, three attempts to deliver genetic
alterations in young patients have ended in catastrophe, one patient having
died of cancer, two others of leukaemia. Genetic therapy has been
consequently constrained by severe regulations and future prospects look
grim.
In his final chapter, moreover, Watson engages in a remarkable spasm of
indignation, revealing the story of a deeply wounding attack on his
reputation. In 2001, he wrote an article for a German newspaper advocating
diagnostic tests early in pregnancy for untreatable diseases such as
Tay-Sachs, which involves great suffering and early death in childhood.
Watson, who was clearly advocating abortion, was consequently condemned by
leading figures in the German medical world for promoting eugenicist
policies “following the logic of the Nazis, who differentiated between a
life worth living and a life not worth living”.
For all his scientific brilliance, the incident reveals Watson’s strange
political Achilles heel. Tay-Sachs is restricted to Ashkenazi Jews. The idea
that, in Germany of all places, he could get away with promoting abortion
within a Jewish population indicates that the targets of his criticism did
not have a monopoly in obtuseness.
Watson’s personal story, which parallels the extraordinary advances in the
knowledge of human heredity for half a century, reveals in a striking and
highly readable fashion the ethical and political conflicts that are
inseparable from this fast-moving science. A great man in every sense
emerges from the chronicle, but it was only to be expected that he is
thoroughly human and occasionally all too fallible.
Available at the Books Direct prices of £16 plus £1.95 p&p,
and £15 (Watson and DNA) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksdirect
Ideas men
“I never met two men who knew so little and aspired to so much,” was
how one DNA researcher dismissed Crick and Watson in the early 1950s. But it
was partly their willingness to make daring leaps into the unknown that led
them to succeed more quickly than their rivals. Equally important was the
pettiness of these rivals, not least Linus Pauling and Erwin Chargaff, who
spent an entire boat journey from Paris to America not speaking to each
other, even though Chargaff had information that could have been invaluable
to Pauling.
Read on... websites:
www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/watsoncrick.html
Time magazine on Watson and Crick, including a talk and slides
