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
Watson remembers meeting his friend Alfred Tissieres in the Swiss Alps in 1955. They ran into the scientist Willy Seeds on a path near their hotel. But instead of stopping to chat, Seeds kept walking by and asked Watson, “How’s Honest Jim?” This reminded Watson of his time in England a few years before, when he was searching for the secret of DNA with his colleagues: Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, and most importantly, Francis Crick.
Willy Seeds’s sarcastic greeting—“How’s Honest Jim?”—suggests that James Watson developed a reputation for deceit in the years after he and Crick made their great discovery. This probably relates to their use of others’ data and ruthless race to solve DNA’s structure before anyone else. Seeds worked for Maurice Wilkins, who was also close to discovering the structure of DNA when Crick and Watson published their results in 1953.
Themes
