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
Maurice Wilkins was busy when Watson visited to report Linus Pauling’s blunder. Instead, Watson visited Rosalind Franklin—who asked him not to burst into her lab without knocking. He showed her Pauling’s paper and pointed out the error, but she calmly noted that there still wasn’t any evidence for DNA having a helical structure at all—her X-ray diffraction evidence disproved the idea. But Watson told her that she interpreted her X-ray data wrong: the distortions she saw in her images weren’t evidence against helices, but rather evidence of how helices fit together into a crystal structure. Franklin started angrily walking toward Watson, who ran to the door in fear. At just that moment, Maurice Wilkins entered the doorway, looking to meet Watson. Franklin slammed the door shut, and the men went for tea.
Watson’s visit to Franklin only reinforced his preconceptions about her. However, readers already know that his descriptions of her are highly unreliable. From Watson’s perspective, it’s understandable why Franklin’s uncooperative and standoffish personality would be frustrating, especially since they could have been working together on DNA research. But from Franklin’s perspective, it’s easy to see why Watson would have been just as frustrating, as he barged in unannounced and started to challenge her interpretation of her own results in her own field of expertise. (Meanwhile, he was a decade younger than her and had very little experience in crystallography.)
Themes
In the hallway, Maurice Wilkins told Watson that Rosalind Franklin also nearly attacked him once. He revealed that he and his assistant were copying Franklin’s X-ray diffraction images, and that Franklin discovered a new form of DNA (the “B” form). Wilkins showed Watson an image of it, and Watson was astonished: the “B” form was very simple, and it was clearly a helix. Wilkins agreed, but he explained that the real problem was where the nitrogenous bases and sugar-phosphate backbone were located. Watson explained his fear that Linus Pauling would quickly find the solution, but Wilkins wasn’t convinced. Then, their conversation strayed to other topics. On the train back to Cambridge, Watson decided that he would start building a two-chain model of DNA.
Franklin’s diffraction image gave Watson and Crick a definite advantage over Pauling. But it also created a major controversy, which is still ongoing many decades after Franklin’s death and Crick and Watson’s discovery. While sharing data is the norm in science, taking someone else’s data without their permission is not. And yet Crick and Watson’s theoretical innovations simply wouldn’t have been possible without Franklin’s data—or the years of hard work that went into producing it. Still, there’s no clear answer to the questions that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins’s behavior raised: what should they have done with Franklin’s data? How much credit did Franklin deserve for helping discover the double helix? Did Franklin have the right to use her own data to build her own theory before anyone else? Or was taking her data justified, because she rejected the correct idea that DNA could be helical? Most importantly, how should scientists divide their time, attention, and credit between theory-building and experimentation?
Themes
