Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...interesting enough to have historians and sociologists of science uncovering this dark aspect of one of our most noble professions. But when a distinguished scientist himself confesses his motives to the reading public, he is bound to shock...
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...
PAULING is the book's hero-at-a distance (when he dines with Pauling near the end of the book Watson proudly writes that Pauling prefers his youthful company to Crick's). But Watson's other scientist-characters are viewed from up close, and you can smell them. From the opening line ("I never saw Francis Crick in a modest mood"), Watson is critical of all his scientific colleagues at Cambridge and in London. But he is even more critical of the lesser scientists who were not his colleagues, and who form the bulk of the profession. "A goodly number...
...even more difficult to figure out Jim Watson himself. Reading this account, one gets the feeling that Watson is trying to dupe the reader into thinking it was all so easy--so much easier than we know it was. He sets himself up as a kid scientist, still wet under the nose, making it because of a will to conquer DNA, despite his unpreparedness in chemistry, X-ray crystallography, and mathematics. He portrays the discovery as little more than the fitting together of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with one eye on the clock because Pauling is almost there...
...would be folly to think Watson is any more modest than Crick. It is just that he is concerned with the literary value of his narrative. Though he claims in the introduction that he means this book to be the autobiographical recollections of a working scientist, one senses that Watson tries to write about scientific discovery as Melville did about whaling, or Hemingway about bullfighting. Watson wants his autobiographical recollections to be a novel: the novel about science...