I decided to give this book a try after watching the short, well-acted BBC Horizon documentary "Life Story" which is based on this book with Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park) playing the role of James D. Watson. The names of James Watson and Francis Crick have been forever immortalized in high school biology textbooks for their principal role in the 1953 discovery of the molecular structure of the DNA with the names of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin being only mentioned in passing. They make it seem as if everything was smooth sailing during this discovery. "Honest Jim" puts any such misgivings on the part of the reader to complete rest by giving a brutally candid and perhaps even one-sided recounting of the events that led to the fateful 1953 discovery.

This 226 page book, first published in 1968, has gained much notoriety and rightly so for some of the statements made by the author would seem bold, innopportune and outright outrageous.

There are a lot of personalities involved and like another reviewer I'll list the most important ones and their situation in 1951

1. James Watson - A 23 year old recently-graduated molecular biologist and geneticist from Indiana University who goes to Copenhagen University as a postdoctoral fellow in 1950 at the behest of his supervisor Salvador Luria and collaborator Max Delbruck in order to learn nucleic-acid chemistry necessary for tackling DNA's structure. A year later, after hearing about X ray crystallography (XRC) from Maurice Wilkins of King's College, London, he switches to Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University to work in Max Perutz's lab with the hope of getting to learn XRC.

2. Maurice Wilkins - Of King's College, London. A Physicist turned Biologist who uses XRC to generate photographs of DNA.

3. Francis Crick - A 35 year old, loud mouthed PhD student of Max Perutz at Cavendish lab who becomes Watson's close colleague and collaborator. He makes his ambitious wish clearly known to all - to discover DNA's structure and beat the American chemist Linus Pauling at his own game. The only problem preventing him from pursuing this along with his dissertation work is that it's unethical to hijack someone else's project within England - in this case, Maurice Wilkins's in nearby King's College. Once he teams up with J.D. Watson, all concerns for ethics go down the drain.

4. Linus Pauling - The famous Caltech, Pasadena based Chemist who is fresh out of his triumph of deciphering correctly the alpha-helix structure of proteins and is on an all out mission to decode the structure of the DNA. He is more hands-on and prefers to deduce molecular structure by building trial-and-error toy models of biomolecules that satisfy experimentally measured data instead of resorting to purely XRC based approach.

5. William Lawrence Bragg - The son in the father-son duo of W.H.Bragg-W.L.Bragg who developed the technique of X-ray crystallography for probing crystal structures and after whom the Bragg's law is named. He is the director of Cavendish lab and is particularly interested in having the DNA structure figured out at Cambridge before any outsider beats them to it.

6. Rosalind Franklin - The most tragic character in this tale of intrigue. She's been hired to assist Maurice Wilkins on the DNA project and XRC is her specialization. Believes in systematically deducing DNA's structure purely from XRC instead of playing with toy models. Has a sour working relationship with Maurice Wilkins and prefers to carry out her task independently. Maurice frequently complains about her to Watson and Crick who on their part try to pump him for XRC photographs generated by Rosalind.

The whole book is a very quick read with some pages containing photographs of the people mentioned and some of the handwritten technical letters that JDW wrote back to Max Delbruck. The 2012 special annotated edition of this book has a lot more illustrations. Even though this book is aimed at a general audience there are a lot of terminologies (such as sugar-phosphate backbone, nucleotides, tautomers, etc) which are not clearly explained and may require the reader to frequently look up Wikipedia.

As for my views on how the events unfolded, I consider it a tragic irony that the structure of the DNA was ultimately decoded not by the experienced and righteous Linus Pauling but instead by two youthful, relatively unknown braggarts at Cavendish Lab that were trying to imitate Pauling's model-building tactics. Also JDW's occasional gibes at Rosalind Franklin (or "Rosy" as he called her mockingly) seem annoying and though he does try to patch up his professional relationship with her by giving her full credit for generating the excellent XRC photographs, it feels half-hearted and too late. The what-if question remains that she might have perhaps beaten them all to the solution only if she and Maurice had been aware that JDW and FC were closing in on the answer. But then again she might have also suffered the same fate as Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell did. Perhaps her own memoir on the events that transpired might have thrown light on what was happening at that time. All this is left for the reader to speculate upon.

My only complaint about this book is that it ends in a very anti-climactic fashion. After leading the reader through the neck and neck race that went on, JDW finishes the memoir in a mundane fashion. All along he makes it very clear that glory is all he cares about. To each his/her own, I suppose. After all not everyone can be like Grigori Perelman. What JDW manages to successfully capture in this book and convey to the readers are - the sense of urgency that prevailed at that time among DNA researchers, the styles and techniques adopted to infer molecular structure and the ultimate thrill of discovery. For this sake alone, this book deserves to be read. (And also because it features on Library of Congress' "Books that Shaped America" list)

Lastly, here are some excerpts that will demonstrate why this book is considered scandalous
1. The opening line of Chapter 1 begins memorably as such - "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." One can only imagine what FC's first reaction could have been when he read that line.

2. On the sticky "Why-only-me?" situation that Maurice Wilkins found himself in - "All this was most unsettling to Maurice. He had not escaped into biology only to find it personally as objectionable as physics, with its atomic consequences. The combination of both Linus and Francis breathing down his neck often made it very difficult to sleep. But at least Pauling was 6000 miles away and even Francis was separated by a 2 hour rail journey. The real problem, then, was Rosy. The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab."

3. On W.L.Bragg - "For too long he had lived under the shadow of his famous father, with most people falsely thinking that his father, not he, was responsible for the sharp insight behind Bragg's law." This is awkward considering that the foreword to this book was written by W.L.Bragg and on his part W.L.Bragg states gracefully "Those who figure in this book must read it in a very forgiving spirit."

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The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA