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
Crick and Watson knew that their discovery was incredibly important. Their next step was to build a formal 3-D model of the double helix structure. The next day, they explained their findings to John Kendrew and Max Perutz, then received the final molecular model parts from the shop and started building. They were done by dinner. Next, they had to measure the location of all the atoms in the structure. At dinner, Odile Crick asked if, given her husband’s new discovery, they might be able to stay in Cambridge instead of going to Brooklyn.
After their first blunder, Crick and Watson learned their lesson: even if they could get away with bragging about their discovery in a bar, they shouldn’t start informing other DNA scientists until they were entirely sure that it was right. In a way, then, their failures actually molded them into shrewder scientists. Meanwhile, Watson presents Odile Crick as completely oblivious to the gravity of her husband’s discovery. In fact, her worries about living in America show how labor was divided in Oxford: men like Francis Crick got to spend all their time doing intellectual work, while women like Odile Crick take care of those men’s material needs. Thus, Francis’s life likely wouldn’t have changed very much in Brooklyn, while Odile’s would have changed completely—even though she wasn’t even the one who wanted to move.
Themes
Watson and Crick spent the next few days measuring the coordinates of each atom in their model. They also showed their work to Sir Lawrence Bragg. After they finished their measurements, Watson wrote to Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria. But neither he nor Crick wanted to call Maurice Wilkins, who had just written them saying that he was about to start using molecular models to look for the structure of DNA.
After Crick and Watson verified their data enough to inform scientists outside their immediate circle about their discovery, they still felt guilty about facing Maurice Wilkins, because they recognized that he put more time and effort into DNA than anyone else. They clearly felt that to some extent, they may have stolen work that was rightly Wilkins’s. In fact, Wilkins’s experiments were the very reason Watson became interested in DNA crystallography and went to England in the first place. And as Watson noted at the beginning of the book, by English convention, Wilkins should have had the first shot at modeling DNA—he only didn’t because he was waiting for Rosalind Franklin to leave his laboratory first.
Themes
