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
Linus Pauling was supposed to visit London for a conference that May, but U.S. State Department revoked his passport because of his peace activism. This scandalized London’s scientific establishment, but it didn’t surprise Watson—a few weeks before, the same thing had just happened to Salvador Luria, who was supposed to attend a virology conference at Oxford. Watson went in Luria’s place.
The U.S. government’s treatment of Pauling and Luria shows how Cold War politics strongly shaped science in the 1950s. But, in part because politics started to take over science, science also gained the power to shape politics. Even if their work may have seemed obscure and cut off from the world, researchers actually had influence in the international community.
Themes
At the conference, Watson explained Al Hershey and Martha Chase’s recent research showing that phages infect bacteria using DNA. This proved that DNA is the key genetic material. Most of the audience was uninterested, but a trio of French virologists clearly understood the experiment’s significance. One of them, André Lwoff, shared Watson’s hunch that ions were probably key to understanding the structure of DNA. Meanwhile, Maurice Wilkins confirmed that he and Rosalind Franklin hadn’t touched Crick and Watson’s molecular models, and he promised to send them back. He also reported that Franklin thought she’d proven that DNA couldn’t be a helix.
Hershey and Chase’s phage research was extremely significant, so it’s no surprise that the audience’s ambivalence disappointed Watson. Hershey and Chase disproved the common scientific belief that proteins were the key to genes—instead, they showed that Crick, Watson, and others in their network were right to focus on DNA. It’s also significant that Watson ended up attending this conference to present someone else’s transformative research on DNA. This represents how he ended up on the sidelines of the research he truly cared about, even as others were taking it forward without him. At the same time, Wilkins and Franklin’s reluctance to use the molecular models suggests that DNA research couldn’t truly succeed without Crick and Watson. Clearly, they were itching to get back to it.
Themes
