The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,67

had never heard of, an excitable, voluble young man named James Watson. Wilkins’s talk on the structure of DNA was dry and academic. One of his last slides, presented with little enthusiasm, was an early X-ray diffraction picture of DNA. The photograph flickered onto the screen at the end of a long talk, and Wilkins showed little, if any, excitement about the fuzzy image. The pattern was still a muddle—Wilkins was still hampered by the quality of his sample and the dryness of his chamber—but Watson was instantly gripped by it. The general conclusion was unmistakable: in principle, DNA could be crystallized into a form amenable to X-ray diffraction. “Before Maurice’s talk, I had worried about the possibility that the gene might be fantastically irregular,” Watson would later write. The image, however, quickly convinced Watson otherwise: “Suddenly, I was excited about chemistry.” He tried to talk to Wilkins about the image, but “Maurice was English, and [didn’t] talk to strangers.” Watson slunk away.

Watson knew “nothing about the X-ray diffraction technique,” but he had an unfailing intuition about the importance of certain biological problems. Trained as an ornithologist at the University of Chicago, he had assiduously “avoid[ed] taking any chemistry or physics courses which looked of even medium difficulty.” But a kind of homing instinct had led him to DNA. He too had read Schrödinger’s What Is Life? and been captivated. He had been working on the chemistry of nucleic acids in Copenhagen—“a complete flop,” as he would later describe it—but Wilkins’s photograph entranced him. “The fact that I was unable to interpret it did not bother me. It was certainly better to imagine myself becoming famous than maturing into a stifled academic who had never risked a thought.”

Impetuously, Watson returned to Copenhagen and asked to be transferred to Max Perutz’s lab at Cambridge (Perutz, the Austrian biophysicist, had fled Nazi Germany and moved to England during the exodus of the 1930s). Perutz was working on molecular structures, and it was the closest that Watson could get to Wilkins’s image, whose haunting, prophetic shadows he could not get out of his brain. Watson had decided that he was going to solve the structure of DNA—“the Rosetta stone for unraveling the true secret of life.” He would later say, “As a geneticist, it was the only problem worth solving.” He was all of twenty-three years old.

Watson had moved to Cambridge for the love of a photograph. The very first day that he landed in Cambridge, he fell in love again—with a man named Francis Crick, another student in Perutz’s lab. It was not an erotic love, but a love of shared madness, of conversations that were electric and boundless, of ambitions that ran beyond realities.III “A youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us,” Crick would later write.

Crick was thirty-five—a full twelve years older than Watson, and still without a PhD (in part because he had worked for the Admiralty during the war years). He was not conventionally “academic,” and he certainly was not “stifled.” A former physics student with an expansive personality and a booming voice that often sent his coworkers running for cover and a bottle of aspirin, he too had read Schrödinger’s What Is Life?—that “small book that had started a revolution”—and become transfixed by biology.

Englishmen hate many things, but no one is despised more than the man who sits by you on the morning train and solves your crossword puzzle. Crick’s intelligence was as free ranging and as audacious as his voice; he thought nothing of invading the problems of others and suggesting solutions. To make things worse, he was usually right. In the late 1940s, switching from physics to graduate work in biology, he had taught himself much of the mathematical theory of crystallography—that swirl of nested equations that made it possible to transmute silhouettes into three-dimensional structures. Like most of his colleagues in Perutz’s lab, Crick focused his initial studies on the structures of proteins. But unlike many others, he had been intrigued by DNA from the start. Like Watson, and like Wilkins and Franklin, he was also instinctively drawn to the structure of a molecule capable of carrying hereditary information.

The two of them—Watson and Crick—talked so volubly, like children let loose in a playroom, that they were assigned a room to themselves, a yellow brick chamber with wooden rafters where they were left to their own devices and dreams, their “mad pursuit[s].” They were complementary strands, interlocked