The double helix: an autobiographical review on the discovery of DNA (original title: The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA) is a personal account of the events that took place around the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in the 1950s, written by the American molecular biologist James D. Watson and originally published in 1968.
In 1998, the Modern Library publisher placed The Double Helix at number 7 on its list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the twentieth century. In 2012, the Library of Congress of the United States named The Double Helix as one of the 88 books that shaped the United States.
Although it is an important book about a very important subject, it was and still is a controversial review. Although originally it was to be published by Harvard University Press, the university where Watson worked, Harvard declined the agreement after receiving protests from Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, the co-authors of the DNA structure discovery. Instead, it was published by Atheneum in the United States and by Weidenfeld & amp; Nicolson in the United Kingdom.
The intimate memories of a scientific discovery were unusual at the time of its publication. The book has been acclaimed for its highly personal point of view on scientific work, although its author apparently only cared about the glory of the scoop and the appropriation of data obtained by other scientists in order to be the first. It has also been criticized as an overly sexist book towards Rosalind Franklin, another participant in the discovery, who had already died when Watson wrote the book.
The events described in the book were dramatized in a BBC television program called Life Story (known as The Race for the Double Helix in the United States).
ReviewsIn 1980, an edition of The Double Helix published by Norton and edited by Gunther Stent analyzed the events during the initial publication of the book. This edition presents a selection of several positive and negative reviews of the book, written by personalities such as Philip Morrison, Richard Lewontin, Alex Comfort, Jacob Bronowski and more in-depth analysis by Peter Medawar, Robert K. Merton, and Andre Lwoff. Erwin Chargaff did not grant permission to reprint his antipathetic review published in Science in its March 29, 1968 edition, but letters written as a replica of Max Perutz, Maurice Wilkins, and Watson are included. It also includes retrospectives from the 1974 edition of Nature written by Francis Crick and Linus Pauling, as well as an analysis of Franklin's work by his student Aaron Klug. The Norton edition concludes with the article on the structure of DNA that was published in Nature in 1953. The work of Rosalind Franklin according to Watson
In the book Rosalind Franklin and DNA, author Anne Sayre harshly criticizes Watson's review. She claims that Watson's book did not give a neutral description of Rosalind Franklin and the nature of her interactions with Maurice Wilkins at King's College London. Sayre's book calls into question the ethics involved in Watson and Crick's use of some of Franklin's results and whether he was given proper attribution. Watson had very limited contact with Franklin while she worked on the structure of the DNA molecule. By providing more information about Franklin's life than the one included in Watson's book, Sayre was able to offer a different perspective on the role Franklin played in the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA. (see Rosalind Franklin - DNA research)
In the preface to the book, Watson explains that he is describing his impressions while the events described occurred and not at the time of writing the book. In the epilogue, Wat
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