Watson's famous "Aha!" was but the last in a long chain. It was Crick who had fastened onto a chemist friend's theoretical hunch of a natural attraction between A and T, C and G. He had then championed the complementarity scenario — sometimes against Watson's resistance — as a possible explanation of "Chargaff's rules," the fact that DNA contains like amounts of adenine and thymine and of guanine and cytosine. But it was Watson who had first learned of these rules.

As Horace Freeland Judson observed in "The Eighth Day of Creation," this sort of synergy is, above all, what Rosalind Franklin lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with — no supportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched.

Writing up their findings for the journal Nature, the famously brash Watson and Crick donned a British reserve. They capped a dry account of DNA's structure with one of the most famous understatements in the history of science: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." They faced the question of byline: Watson and Crick, or Crick and Watson? They flipped a coin.

The double helix — both the book and the molecule — did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful — as human — helped de-deify scientists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism — a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

Watson drifted from pure science into administration. As director of the molecular-biology lab at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., he turned it into a scientific powerhouse. He also served as head of the Human Genome Project, absorbing some fallout from the high-energy ethical debates whose fuse he and Crick had lighted nearly four decades earlier.

As the practical and philosophical issues opened by the double helix continue to unfold, policy, philosophy and even religion will evolve in response. But one truth seems likely to endure, universal and immutable. It emerges with equal clarity whether you examine the DNA molecule or the way it was revealed. The secret of life is complementarity.

Robert Wright is author of The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life

< < Previous  1 | 2 | 3

		The Appeal By: John Grisham				A Thousand Splendid Suns By: Khaled Hosseini				7th Heaven (Women's Murder Club) By: James Patterson