Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Double Helix, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Research, Adventure, and the Thrill of Discovery
Scientific Collaboration, Competition, and Community
DNA and the Secret of Life
Academic Life and the University
Summary
Analysis
For Christmas, Watson went to Avrion Mitchison’s parents’ house in the Scottish fishing village of Carradale, where they always invited a mix of scientists and left-wing intellectuals over for the holidays. His sister Elizabeth also visited from Denmark, where—to Watson’s horror—she was dating an actor. In Carradale, Watson spent most of the time trying to keep warm. He tried (and failed) to grow a beard, and he tried to avoid getting noticed during the nightly board and party games.
Watson’s Christmas vacation wasn’t truly a break from intellectual life—rather, it gave him an opportunity to meet others with same high-minded interests. Again, this shows that the scholarly life is really just as personal as it is professional. It's also related to class: when Watson left the comfortable bubble of Cambridge, he could clearly see that he now belonged to a powerful, privileged elite. And yet, despite his academic pretensions, Watson clearly shared the preoccupations of any ordinary young man—he worried about being popular, growing a beard, and withstanding the Scottish winter.
Themes
Watson returned to Cambridge on a snowy January 4th. He was hoping for news about his fellowship, but there was none. A few weeks later, he learned that the Board was taking away his old fellowship but giving him a new one. However, it only lasted eight months instead of twelve. A few days later, the Board’s chairman wrote asking Watson to give a lecture about viruses in June. But Watson didn’t want to go back to the U.S., so he declined.
Like his and Crick’s argument with Sir Lawrence Bragg, Watson’s issues with his fellowship showed that he needed to find a balance between freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, he wanted to preserve his freedom to study what he wanted; but on the other, he had to stay within certain bounds in order to get funding. The new, shorter fellowship was clearly a kind of punishment for Watson’s decision to leave Copenhagen and abandon his earlier research without due cause. However, he was lucky to receive it at all—although he had been surviving on his savings, he likely couldn’t continue his research with Crick without another fellowship.
Themes
