AMONG James Watson's gifts is the flying gibe. I once heard him lecture and he said, in effect, that thin people were more depressed than fat people. Knowing of his interest in mental illness, I went up afterwards and said: “Jim, you know depression is more complicated than that.”

He whirled on me. “Brenda, you've become so politically correct, you're boring!” Boring? No word could have been better aimed to wound a writer. In his new book, Watson playfully uses it as a verb and adjective to describe what he doesn't do and doesn't like.

Ostensibly he has written a book of manners for those who would get on in science. But the “lessons” are unnecessary — apart, perhaps, from: “Always be the first to publish”, which is what he, at the age of 25, and Francis Crick did after their discovery of the structure of DNA in Cambridge, in 1953. The real value of this book lies in its social history of molecular biology in postwar England and the US.

After discovering what was called “the secret of life”, Watson moved to Harvard, but had an uneasy climb up the ladder there. His lectures were popular but he encountered opposition as he rose to become an associate professor. Winning a Nobel prize in 1962 did not bring the expected rise in salary nor the company of pretty girls, and he left in 1976.

DNA of Dr Watson

A former protegee of James Watson examines the complex legacy of a Nobel laureate

• Enhancing the species

Background

• The Sunday Times reviews DNA: The Secret of Life by James D Watson with Andrew Berry

• Call that being nice, professor?

• Race row Nobel winner suspended, scraps tour

• Black people 'less intelligent' says scientist

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• Buy the book

The Double Helix, his racy account of the 1953 discovery, published in 1968, was at first titled Honest Jim, then Base Pairs. His penchant for insult required many changes to avoid libel suits — a reference to “Linus [Pauling]'s screwy chemistry” had to be deleted as did the self-mocking titles. But it remains one of the great books of the 20th century.

The present anecdotal autobiography tells of Watson's rise from gauche Chicago kid (born in 1928) to Nobel laureate and identifies many enemies. A new villain emerges in the form of the conservative (and deeply religious) president of Harvard from 1953-71, Nathan Pusey, who, Watson felt, would not spend enough money to keep Harvard in the top league of genomic science.

And, yes, the book does mention innate racial differences in intelligence. What it says, without the spontaneous asides that have thrown him into the headlines, is “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically”. Within ten years, he predicts, the genes that affect intelligence will be known. The rise of a flawed man makes a fascinating story. Those who can ignore Watson's latest gaffe will not be bored.

Watson once said of Craig Venter: “Craig wanted to own the human genome the way Hitler wanted to own the world.” Venter's own autobiography, My Life Decoded, suggests that a more apt comparison would be with Watson himself. Along with brilliance and imagination, indifference to what others think may be essential to triumph in science.

Venter's account of the race to decode the human genome — the complete set of DNA genes in the nucleus of every cell, is the most valuable part of this triple-layered tale. In 1998 he founded a company, Celera, to employ a controversial technique to assemble a representation of the entire DNA in the genome.

With this approach and with private funds, Venter said that he could decode the genome faster and more cheaply than Watson's publicly funded international Human Genome Project. It was civil war until June 2000 when a truce was engineered to allow both sides to celebrate the purported completion of the job even though it was by no means finished.

Both programmes went on to complete their projects then Celera published the entire genome of a single human being. Guess whose? Knowing his own genetic make-up enables Venter to be the first autobiographer to name the genes responsible for his personality traits — risk-taking, sailing, attracting the opposite sex. But his story needs no biological markers to make it readable.

Born in 1946, he was a blond, surfing Californian kid, successful with girls, mediocre at lessons. When he was drafted, he was found to have an IQ of 142, and trained as a medic. In Vietnam, he was so overwhelmed by the suffering that he decided to commit suicide by swimming out to sea. But he was attacked by a sea snake and changed his mind. Clutching the snake, he swam back to shore and killed it. Its skin now hangs in his office.

The science in his book makes it heavy-going for the uninitiated, but it is fascinating and, despite the constant beat of “Me! Me! Me!”, well written.

Avoid Boring People and Other Lessons From a Life in Science by James D. Watson
OUP, £14.99

A Life Decoded by J.Craig Venter
Allen Lane, £25

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