Rating: 
Summary: The True Story of the Double Helix
Review: When I first read Watson's "Double Helix" there were a few things that bothered me. First, it is clear that this guy was really full of himself- that's OK, maybe he's entitled, but his view of science as an exercise in cunning, of "beating others in the race", finding out what they were doing but keeping your results close to your vest, was so at odds with the prevailing view of science and ethics that Harvard University Press refused to publish it. And of course, what seemed to be continual derogatory references to Rosalind Franklin and her family- "Rosy has to go". How in the world could Watson call for the firing of somebody working in another Laboratory many miles away?Of course, Rosalind Franklin had died by that time and couldn't defend herself. But as an experimental physicist, I could not understand Watson's fixation on large tinkertoy models. After all,the data supporting such a structure has to be obtained elsewhere, from physics experiments like x-ray diffraction. And Anne Sayre's book explains this to the popular reader. Perhaps the most impressive thing about all this is the support she received from Max Perutz and Aaron Klug, among others. Klug and Franklin were the first to determine the structure of a virus (just before her death). She never knew that a few years before, Wilkins, also at Kings College, had given her experimental results to Watson, allowing him to obtain the correct structure for DNA. Aaron Klug won the Nobel Prize in 1982. On June 25, 1997, he dedicated the new Rosalind Franklin Laboratory at Birkbeck College in London ...
| 
