DNA: The Secret of Life by James D Watson with Andrew Berry
Heinemann £20 pp415

WATSON AND DNA by Victor K McElheny
Wiley £18.99 pp365

James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the structure of DNA, is one of the greatest living biologists. His special scientific gift was to know precisely when to turn from the big picture to the smallest details, and vice versa, making unusual connections that illuminated many clues mostly overlooked and discarded by others. One piece of the jigsaw puzzle was an x-ray picture of DNA belonging to the rival researcher Rosalind Franklin.

She never got to share the Nobel prize, since she had died by the time of the award in 1962.

Watson’s new book is an important event, for he is a scintillating writer, and who better to chart the progress and the undeniable disappointments of genetic science 50 years on? But it is good to have an excellent third-person account in Victor McElheny’s Watson and DNA for its invaluable array of objective character perspectives.

McElheny tells us, for example, that Watson’s scientific style is “that of a commando operation: small, aggressive, narrowly focused, quick and opportunistic”. And so is Watson’s writing, which has just the right amount of anecdote to put flesh and blood into a story that starts with youthful optimism and ends in notable successes not untrammelled by doubt and human greed.

The molecular-biology revolution, for all its undoubted achievements, has been riven with rows over intellectual property rights and the scramble for commercial applications. At the same time, the promise of genetic engineering, heralding cures for 4,000 genetically based illnesses, has proved to be more disappointing than anyone imagined. Ultimately, as Watson himself emphasises, we have not cures but increasingly accurate diagnostic tests for abnormalities that enable a mother to decide whether or not to have an abortion.

Readers will compare this new book with Watson’s first, The Double Helix, which became a classic, an unusual mix of scientific suspense as well as an unabashed account of Watson’s own dippy personality. It told the story of lab culture in Cambridge in the early 1950s, before biology went big, and researchers were obliged to spend 75% of their time writing grant applications. DNA: The Secret of Life recalls that world of youthful excitement and promise as if it were another planet.

For, by the 1980s, as biotechnology expanded rapidly and the pharmaceutical industry burgeoned, science began to change out of all recognition. By the 1990s, Watson, now a grand old man of science, found himself in charge of the $3 billion human-genome project, the scheme to identify the 100,000 (now scaled down to 35,000) genes by the turn of the new century. It did not take long for problems and passions to arise, bringing the project to the brink of disaster. Watson tells the story well, but McElheny’s terse, impartial commentary is also essential at this point.

In 1992, Watson opposed the decision of Bernadine Healy, boss of the American Institutes of Health and the project’s biggest source of funding, to file for patent on genes known to relate to the brain, but not as yet specifically identified. The issue of patenting goes to the heart of the tensions between those who believe that such knowledge should be published freely, and those who argue that science can only flourish when discoveries are patented and profits from their success ploughed back.

Healy, an admirer of Baroness Thatcher, defended the patenting bid as a decisive choice for science as “pro-competitive”. Watson retorted that attempting to copyright unspecified genetic fragments was “lunacy” and resigned. For his part, Watson’s unhappiness lay not only in his reluctance to see genes patented, but in his conviction that such issues should involve the views of scientists and not just politicians and business people. Patent battles persist and grow more threatening by the day, casting shadows over the application of the new genetics.

Watson meditates even more sombrely at the end of his chronicle on another unfolding story: the fact that genetic therapy has been killing patients rather than curing them. By this year, three attempts to deliver genetic alterations in young patients have ended in catastrophe, one patient having died of cancer, two others of leukaemia. Genetic therapy has been consequently constrained by severe regulations and future prospects look grim.

In his final chapter, moreover, Watson engages in a remarkable spasm of indignation, revealing the story of a deeply wounding attack on his reputation. In 2001, he wrote an article for a German newspaper advocating diagnostic tests early in pregnancy for untreatable diseases such as Tay-Sachs, which involves great suffering and early death in childhood. Watson, who was clearly advocating abortion, was consequently condemned by leading figures in the German medical world for promoting eugenicist policies “following the logic of the Nazis, who differentiated between a life worth living and a life not worth living”.

For all his scientific brilliance, the incident reveals Watson’s strange political Achilles heel. Tay-Sachs is restricted to Ashkenazi Jews. The idea that, in Germany of all places, he could get away with promoting abortion within a Jewish population indicates that the targets of his criticism did not have a monopoly in obtuseness.

Watson’s personal story, which parallels the extraordinary advances in the knowledge of human heredity for half a century, reveals in a striking and highly readable fashion the ethical and political conflicts that are inseparable from this fast-moving science. A great man in every sense emerges from the chronicle, but it was only to be expected that he is thoroughly human and occasionally all too fallible.

Available at the Books Direct prices of £16 plus £1.95 p&p, and £15 (Watson and DNA) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksdirect

Ideas men
“I never met two men who knew so little and aspired to so much,” was how one DNA researcher dismissed Crick and Watson in the early 1950s. But it was partly their willingness to make daring leaps into the unknown that led them to succeed more quickly than their rivals. Equally important was the pettiness of these rivals, not least Linus Pauling and Erwin Chargaff, who spent an entire boat journey from Paris to America not speaking to each other, even though Chargaff had information that could have been invaluable to Pauling.

Read on... websites:
www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/watsoncrick.html
Time magazine on Watson and Crick, including a talk and slides

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