James D. Watson
AVOID BORING PEOPLE
And other lessons from a life in science
347pp. Oxford University Press. £14.99 (US $27).
978 0 19 2802273 6

In 2003, after I favourably reviewed James D. Watson’s book DNA: The secret of life, he sent me a copy with an inscription in tiny, angular handwriting: “Thanks for reviewing my book as opposed to me”. Indeed, ever since publishing The Double Helix in 1968, his account of how he and Francis Crick co-discovered the structure of DNA, Watson has been a member of the very small club of celebrity scientists whose lives attract at least as much attention as their work. With his larger-than-life personality and a penchant for making inflammatory statements about science and society, Watson is never far from the headlines.

And what his friends have always feared has now come to pass. His statements to a Sunday Times reporter about the mental inferiority of black people (he expressed a hope that everyone was equal, but added that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”) reignited an ever-smouldering debate about the genetics of racial differences. A huge ruckus ensued. His UK book tour to promote Avoid Boring People was abruptly cancelled, and he was summoned back to the United States by his employer, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where he was chancellor. Summarily forced to retire, the Nobel laureate has been left without a job and in considerable ignominy. His legacy may now be forever tainted by accusations of racism.

It would be easy to condemn Watson as arrogant and opinionated – he is – but a more nuanced look at his past reveals an infinitely more complex individual than that typically portrayed in the media. When he took a job at Harvard University, some of his colleagues found him so abrasive and lacking in inter-personal skills that one of them remarked that he wouldn’t put Watson in charge of a lemonade stand. Yet with an intuitive flair for recognizing scientific talent, he founded a department at Harvard that became a world-beater. Although Watson can seem relentlessly self-centred, he flouted scientific convention by unselfishly refusing to put his name on his students’ publications. And despite repeated statements about women that can only be viewed as sexist, he has ardently supported the work and careers of his female students.

Much of this complexity is on vivid display in the latest instalment of his autobiography. Avoid Boring People is actually the third volume in the continuing saga of Watson’s life, following The Double Helix (1968; dealing solely with his work with Crick) and Genes, Girls, and Gamow (2002; describing his post-Double Helix years between 1953 and 1958). The new book deals mainly with the period between Watson’s birth in 1928 and 1976, when he left Harvard permanently to run Cold Spring Harbor.

Watson was initially interested in ornithology, but turned to genetics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. While obtaining his doctorate at Indiana University under Salvador Luria (who later won a Nobel Prize for his work on the genetics of viruses), Watson realized that the central problem in biology was the nature of the genetic material. His obsessive pursuit of the gene bore fruit in 1952 at Cambridge University, where Crick and the twenty-four-year-old Watson discovered the double-helical nature of DNA, a finding for which they (along with Maurice Wilkins) shared the Nobel Prize eleven years later. Watson took an academic job at Harvard, and his tenure there, marked by his arduous and successful attempts to strengthen biology, occupies most of Avoid Boring People.

There is some overlap between this book and Watson’s two earlier autobiographical works, but there is much that is new and interesting. We learn about the perks that accompany a Nobel Prize, including a living alarm clock in the form of a white-robed soprano sporting a tiara of lit candles. And Watson tells for the first time the story behind the writing of The Double Helix and its famous opening sentence, “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood”. Crick, understandably, was initially unenthusiastic, though the passage of time seems to have dulled his ire. Another high point, at least for scientists, is Watson’s description of how he single-handedly transformed Cold Spring Harbor from a sleepy scientific backwater into a powerhouse of research. This is a story of visionary scientific leadership on a massive scale.

One wishes that Watson had continued his narrative for at least another fifteen years to include another high point in his career: the Human Genome Project. A major force in persuading the US government to become involved in sequencing the human genome, Watson directed the project until 1992, when, in an uncanny foreshadowing of his present situation, he was forced to resign after he took the principled and admirable stand that patenting genes for commercial profit is bad for both science and society.

The style of Avoid Boring People is eccentric. Watson leavens his narrative by casting it as a series of lessons he learned from each phase of his career. Every chapter begins – usually awkwardly – with the word “Manners” (e.g., “Manners Maintained When Reluctantly Leaving Harvard”) and ends with a series of “Remembered Lessons”. Some of these, such as “keep your intellectual curiosity much broader than your thesis objective”, are quite useful for the budding scientist. Others, however, are pedantic or solipsistic: few people are likely to benefit from Watson’s warning that they should “expect to put on weight after Stockholm”.

As usual, Watson pulls no punches. His opinions of other scientists are frank and often harsh. Edward Tatum, who shared the Nobel Prize with George Beadle for discovering that genes produce enzymes, is dismissed as a “polite plodder, who would have gone nowhere but for Beadle”. And there is Watson’s hunt for a mate, a leitmotif of all his autobiographical works. Here, after failing to find a “suitable blonde”, he finally marries a brunette Harvard undergraduate twenty-one years his junior.

On the whole, though, the book is a mixed bag. It’s not easy to produce scientific autobiography: one must simultaneously explain complicated science to the public, weave in relevant personal details (but not too many), and, finally, write engagingly. Watson perfectly combined these skills in The Double Helix, a masterpiece of the genre and perhaps the best existing account of how modern science is actually done. But things have gone downhill ever since. Genes, Girls, and Gamow was a disappointment, meandering and poorly written. Avoid Boring People is additionally plagued by Watson’s photographic memory, a boon for biographers but not for readers. He seems reluctant to leave out any detail, however trivial. One example:

"A month later Susie [a Sussex undergraduate] was to be in the States on her way to a month-long holiday near Denver, where she planned to visit her British boyfriend. She seemed eager to stop off in Cold Spring Harbor, where in mid-July I would be staying at the home of the lab’s director, John Cairns. In the end she came only for a day, letting me admire her swimsuited form on the raft off the lab’s beach. Ensuring that the occasion’s memory would not be one to cherish was the continuous presence of the Cairnses’ German police dog, who nearly bit me on the leg before being dispatched. Early in September, on her way back to England, Susie stopped off in Boston long enough to let me take her to supper at the Union Oyster House after I ruefully observed her lack of attention to the art on the walls of my Appian Way flat."

Like the human genome itself, Watson’s account comprises nuggets of meaningful information embedded in larger stretches of apparently useless spacer. If only some of that spacer were devoted to explaining some of the book’s tersely delivered science:

"To increase their chances of succeeding, Benno [Benno Müller-Hill, a German biochemist] again turned to bacterial genetics, making a mutant repressor that had enhanced affinity for the chemical that induced isopropyl-ß-D-1-thiogalactosidase (IPTG). By growing E. coli cells in very low concentrations of IPTG, a much more effective repressor became available."

Even a professional geneticist will struggle to figure out what was going on in this experiment.

The book’s epilogue, though bizarre, is its most illuminating part. Despite having left Harvard over thirty years ago, Watson takes it personally that biology is, as he sees it, in decline there. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard’s local rival, has come from behind to overtake the biology programme he lovingly and successfully tended during his years as a Harvard professor. Part of the problem is Harvard’s recently deposed president, Larry Summers, who, in Watson’s opinion, combined arrogance and ignorance of matters scientific with a determination to expand Harvard biology. The result, Watson notes, is over-expansion and science done on a “B+ level”. Summers, however, was not undone by his vision for Harvard science; rather, he was hounded from office after making public comments about the possibility that women are under-represented in science because of innate differences between the sexes. It is ironic that the final chapter’s account of a public figure laid low by unwise comments about genetic differences parallels in many ways what may be the final chapter of Watson's career.

Watson concludes the book by arguing that there may well be differences in “the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution” (read “races”), and that the genes for these differences could be found within a decade. This, along with his remarks to the Sunday Times reporter, clearly shows that differences in people’s IQ now occupy him greatly. And when one considers his other published or spoken statements, including his concerns that a “genetic underclass” may exist and that genetic differences in intellect cannot be erased by education, one might easily conclude that he sees black people as a permanent drag on human progress.

But the race issue is only a sideshow, albeit an unpleasant one, in the Watson story. After all, one can love Wagner’s music without endorsing his politics. Certainly Watson’s genetic determinism and his statements on race have been unwise, invidious and, most important, lacking in scientific support. His conclusions are wrong because he lacks the statistical savvy of population genetics and is wedded to an iron-clad genetic determinism despite ample evidence of environmental effects on IQ. Unfortunately, his stature and Nobel Prize have endowed his personal prejudices with undeserved credibility. But what is not in question are Watson’s enormous contributions to science. Not only did he help make what was arguably the greatest discovery in the history of biology, but he also nurtured and inspired legions of younger scientists.

Whenever I ponder Watson, my thoughts go back to a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1992 – Alumni Day at the University of Chicago. As a colleague and I were chatting in the lab, we were accosted by a rumpled, elderly gentleman with wild wisps of white hair. The man informed us that the room in which we were standing was a teaching lab when he was an undergraduate. My colleague told him that it was now used for DNA research. “What do you do with the DNA?” asked the man. Assuming that the visitor knew nothing about molecules, my colleague provided a patient and detailed explanation of how he was determining the sequence of a DNA fragment, using the analogy of coloured beads on a string. The man listened carefully and enthusiastically, sporadically nodding his grasp of the details.

The ageing alumnus finally introduced himself. My friend, who turned a flaming crimson, had been explaining DNA, as if to a child, to Jim Watson. But, far from being offended, Watson was so pleased that a scientist had taken such time and care to explain his work that he endowed our department with a generous lectureship. That, too, is the real – and complex – Jim Watson.

Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary geneticist in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His bookSpeciation (co-authored with H. Allen Orr) appeared in 2004.

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