84 pages • 2 hours read
James D. WatsonThe Double Helix
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Foreword, Preface, and PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Foreword by Lawrence Bragg Summary
Lawrence Bragg was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory where Cricks and Watson were based while working on their solution to the structure of DNA.
Bragg’s Forward introduces Watson’s book and describes its value in four different ways.
First, Bragg states its “scientific interest” as an account of “one of the major scientific events” of the 20th century (xvii). He points out the waves of new research Watson and Crick’s discovery has inspired, and its huge implications.
Bragg secondly notes its merit as an exciting story. The final chapters he describes as “drama of the highest order,” with “the tension mounting and mounting towards the final climax” (xvii).
Thirdly, he says the book sheds light on an important moral dilemma in science to do with intellectual ownership. When is it acceptable to make use of another scientist’s findings or step into their domain of research? This dilemma is central to “the DNA story” (xviii). Bragg notes his satisfaction that the Nobel Prize was awarded not only to Crick and Watson, but also Maurice Wilkins, whose work (along with Rosalind Franklin’s) laid the grounds for their discovery.
Finally, Bragg points out “the human interest of the story” (xviii): the vivid and direct impressions it offers of Europe and England, and the scientific community. He stresses its frank and subjective character, which means “those who figure in it must read it in a very forgiving spirit” (xviii).
It is, he says, a “record of impressions rather than historical facts” (xviii), valuable precisely because of its fresh and personal nature. Equally, its personal nature means that Watson’s account of events and people is inevitably one-sided. That said, Bragg also acknowledges that its “intuitive understanding of human frailty strikes home” (xviii).
Preface (1967) Summary
“This account represents the way I saw things then 1951-53: the ideas, the people and myself” (1).
Written at a distance of over 15 years from the events narrated, this is Watson’s introduction to his own account of events. In it, he explains his approach and its rationale.
The key point he wants to make is that this is “[his] version of how the structure of DNA was discovered” (1), true to his impressions and experiences at the time; it doesn’t attempt to be an objective or historical account.
The consequence of this, he states, is that some of what he says will appear one-sided and unfair, as it belongs to his subjective impressions. Similarly, he notes other participants in events would doubtlessly tell the story differently, as “no two people ever see the same event in the same light” (1).
He explains his reasons for wanting to present this kind of personal account. He wants to “convey the spirit of an adventure” that belongs to his experience of those days, along with his own “youthful arrogance” and his beliefs about the scientific truth they were unfolding (1).
Most importantly, he wants to show us something about “the way science is done” (2). He says his main aim is to show that science rarely proceeds in the “straightforward, logical way” (1) that outsiders might imagine—that human events, personalities and cultural traditions all have a major influencing role. He notes that the tension between individual ambition and a sense of fair play is a common dynamic in the scientific community.
Watson says the idea to write this account was with him from “almost the moment the double helix was found” (2). He notes that, in writing his account, he has drawn on weekly letters that he wrote at the time to his parents, and on the comments of friends involved in the events, with whom he shared early drafts.
Untitled Prologue Summary
This brief prologue relates an episode that took place in 1955, three years after Watson and Crick’s decisive discovery.
Watson tells us he was invited by a fellow scientist for a walking holiday in the Alps. While the two were doing a training walk they encountered another group, one of whom Watson recognises as the scientist Willy Seed, who had worked with Maurice Wilkins at King’s College. As the two groups pass Willy gave the impression he might stop and talk, but simply says, “How’s honest Jim?” and makes off (5).
The incident leads Watson to reflect, as he walks, about his previous meeting with Willy in London, “then DNA was still a mystery, up for grabs, and no one was sure who would get it” (5). Looking back, as “one of the winners” of the race for DNA, he reflects that “the tale was not simple and certainly not as the newspapers reported” (6).
He says that five people were centrally involved in the discovery: “Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick and me” (6). And as Crick was crucial in shaping Watson’s part in it, he starts the story with him.
Foreword, Preface and Prologue Analysis
Far from being just opening formalities, these three framing sections have a tremendous amount to tell us about the book we are about to read, and its central themes. What’s intriguing is the way they seek to position, explain, qualify and even pre-emptively defend Watson’s account. The choice of Lawrence Bragg to write the Forward is interesting, as Bragg is a figure of considerable scientific authority, and himself a participant in the action.
Both the Preface and the untitled Prologue are written from a perspective some years after the main events, and show us Watson reflecting upon and distancing himself from his earlier perspective. All three sections allude to a moral dilemma that will be at the heart of this story: the way Watson and Crick drew upon the work of Wilkins and Franklin to make the final break-through on DNA.
Both the Foreword and Preface (along with the title itself) stress that this is a “personal account,” and not an objective history. In other words, Watson doesn’t claim to be representing the truth of events, but rather the truth of his experience of events at the time. Thus, even before we begin the account, we have a warning that the perspective it presents is not entirely reliable, and that like all personal perspectives, it is partial and caught up in the very events it’s narrating.
The words Watson writes have implications for those involved. As narrator, he has the power both to represent and misrepresent individuals and actions. As such, the claim to be providing just “a personal account” is a way of downplaying this power of narration, and pre-emptively diffusing potential criticisms from those involved in the action, who might say things happened quite differently. To that charge, Watson pre-emptively says that it’s only how he saw things. Indeed, both Bragg and Watson point out that the reality was more complex than he perceived at the time, and that some of his views aren’t fair.
The potential for offence is exacerbated by what Bragg calls the “frankness” (xviii) of Watson’s account. Watson, as we shall see, makes no qualms about presenting people in a critical, negative, even satirical light. This again, it can be argued, is true to Watson’s personal thoughts and experiences at the time.
But while both the Foreword and Preface accept the limitations of Watson’s “personal account,” they also claim that its value lies precisely in its personal nature, and the way it captures the atmosphere of the time, the scientific community and the DNA story, from the point of view of someone so intimately involved in it. By being a “personal account,” it can offer things that a history simply couldn’t, and indirectly it sheds light on the narrator himself, and his beliefs and the person he was.
The personal nature of the narrative links well to what Watson described as one of his chief aims in writing this account: to show the personal or human aspect of the way science is conducted, and to correct what he sees as a misconception.
Science, he points out, does not proceed in “the straightforward logical” (1) ways that some outsiders might imagine. It isn’t a purely objective and dispassionate enterprise conducted in pursuit of truth; rather, it’s a messy affair, influenced by all kinds of human and circumstantial factors. The DNA story will bear witness to this.
By providing a “personal account,” Watson gives us direct insight into the role of personal ambition, friendship, animosity, and his own “youthful arrogance” (1). We see early signs of this in the untitled Prologue, where Watson receives a jibe from a fellow scientist, and reflects on the way DNA was seen as a “race” to be won (6). The mountain climbing that Watson is doing at the time provides an interesting analogy, as it is another example of human beings exploring, and racing to master an element of nature.
It becomes clear already that while Watson and Crick were the first to finish line, no scientific discovery is made in isolation, and a complex web of relationships, collaborations, approaches, errors and incremental developments informs their individual breakthrough. It is this complex and conflicted world of human relationships behind the science that Watson brings to life in his account.
When explaining in the Preface that he is writing a personal account, Watson points out that “no two people ever see the same events in exactly the same light” and as such there will never be a “definitive history of how the structure [of DNA] was established.” (1) Instead of a definitive history we would have a sum of evolving perspectives, which perhaps could never fit together to form a unified whole.
This makes for an interesting contrast to the scientific work that Watson and Crick are engaged in. For, despite its personal dimension, this is a narrative of people pursuing and finding an objective scientific truth—the structure of DNA. The pieces eventually fit together in a way that scientists, for all their personal differences, could objectively see and agree on. History and human stories are quite different in this respect; whatever version of truth is presented, there will always be ambiguity and multiplicity, and the pieces never quite fit together into a final, definitive solution.
