Word: helix
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WHATEVER else may be said about James D. Watson in The Double Helix, he is honest about his motives. He knew then (in 1953, when he was 24 years old) that DNA was something big. He knew that to the scientist who discovered its structure would come renown and a Nobel Prize. And he knew that Linus Pauling, working in California, was after the prize and had a head start on Watson and his colleagues working in England. "Within a few days of my arrival," he writes, "we knew what to do: imitate Linus Pauling and beat...
...believe some of Watson's tales about the quarrelsome coterie of scientists in Great Britain who were after DNA. One woman, Rosalind Franklin, refuses to let Watson and Crick see her X-ray photographs of DNA crystals, the world's best, because she does not believe in the helix theory, and insists on working independently. At one point, Rosy--as her colleagues call her--almost assaults Watson in a one-one-one situation...
Sometimes memoirs, sometimes literature, The Double Helix is a perfect example of the new kind of journalism which has come to dominate the best-seller lists. Like Norman Mailer on the conventions, Watson is telling what happened as Watson saw it, as Watson likes to remember it. Thus, we are provided as much insight into the author as into the subject. And this is the way Watson intended it, for just as the new journalism proclaims that the story depends on the reporter, Watson writes in his introduction that science's steps forward "are often very human events in which...
What causes this piscatorial version of The Picture of Dorian Gray? Now, after studying the salmon for six weeks during a Pacific voyage aboard the oceanographic ship Alpha Helix, 40 scientists and doctors have returned to the U.S. with some provocative insights into the aging process...
...Fuel. Aboard the Alpha Helix, Biochemist Eberhard Trams of the National Institutes of Health discovered that the brain's control of the pituitary gland was a major factor in the sudden aging of the salmon. As the fish enters fresh water, he found, the pituitary quickly grows to more than twice its normal size, and the central nervous system fails to maintain control. The gland then triggers a metabolic speedup that burns away practically all of the fat in the salmon's body. Biochemist Andrew Benson, associate director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, explains...