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
When Max Delbrück received Watson’s letter about the double helix structure, he started telling everyone in his lab about it. The news quickly reached Linus Pauling, who responded with “genuine thrill.” In Paris, the Canadian phage biochemist Gerry Wyatt told Watson about phage DNA results that also strongly supported the double helix structure. Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Crick put together a new molecular model for the “A” form of DNA.
Linus Pauling’s reaction of “genuine thrill” shows that he greatly valued scientific progress in general. Like Maurice Wilkins, he was more satisfied to see DNA’s mysteries solved than he was disappointed to have not been the one to solve them. (Of course, Pauling’s attitude toward Crick and Watson was far more generous than Crick and Watson’s attitude toward him, after his own DNA model failed.) Moreover, while the public often associates scientists with one or two great discoveries, Crick and Watson’s work clearly didn’t end with their great discovery about the double helix. On the contrary, their discovery created much more work for them and opened endless and exciting new paths for research.
Themes
Watson and Crick drafted their paper within a week. Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins asked them to mention a colleague who also experimented with hydrogen bonds in DNA, and Watson and Crick reluctantly agreed. Crick wanted to explain all of their work’s far-reaching implications, but Watson convinced him to leave just a brief note about the DNA replication mechanism. Sir Lawrence Bragg was delighted at Crick and Watson’s discovery. Not only did they beat Linus Pauling, but they also used the X-ray technique that Bragg invented decades earlier. Watson’s sister Elizabeth agreed to type up the final paper, which Bragg sent to the prominent journal Nature on April 2, 1953.
Crick and Watson confronted two of the most important (and most difficult) parts about publishing their work: how to give credit where it’s due and how to describe the consequences of their research without straying too far from the facts. The first is an ethical problem about scholars’ obligations to the community that makes their work possible. Indeed, readers may feel that Crick and Watson didn’t give enough credit to many of the people who made their discovery—including, most notably, Rosalind Franklin. The second problem is really about how to communicate the sense of wonder and possibility that animates their interest in science and DNA, while remaining scientific and professional. In fact, Crick and Watson’s approach to this problem—noting the possible implications of their theory without waxing poetic about the meaning of life—has become by far the most famous line in their paper.
Themes
Two days later, Linus Pauling reached Cambridge. He affirmed that he thought Crick and Watson were right. That night, Linus and Peter Pauling, Francis and Odile Crick, and Watson and his sister Elizabeth all had dinner together. The next day, Watson and his sister flew to Paris to celebrate Watson’s birthday and say goodbye before Elizabeth would go home and then get married in Japan. While Elizabeth was having tea with a friend, Watson stared at French girls on the street.
Linus Pauling had more to gain than anyone else by finding flaws in Crick and Watson’s model—so his support for it essentially sealed the deal for them and eliminated any lingering doubts that they were right. Their dinner is also significant. Throughout the book, senior scientists nearly always dismissed, ridiculed, or otherwise looked down on Crick and Watson’s work when they met or shared dinner. But Pauling dined with Crick and Watson as equals, signaling that they deserved as much respect as anyone in the scientific community. Yet the book’s closing scene shows that, despite making one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century, Watson remained an ordinary young man with an ordinary social and family life. Clearly, despite his coming scientific fame, he was still on the lookout for love.
Themes
