Maclyn McCarty, who was later described as ‘a scientists’ scientist’, died of heart failure in early 2005.
One colleague who did not come to pay homage at what Colin MacLeod nicknamed ‘Fessgate’ was Alfred Mirsky. He retired in 1964 but maintained his links with the Rockefeller University (as it had become in 1954), firstly as its librarian and later as the donor of an extensive collection of art and archaeology. Mirsky also kept in touch with research, and in a piece for Scientific American on ‘The discovery of DNA’, admitted that twenty-five years earlier he had believed that genes were made of proteins, not DNA. This was in 1968; better late than never.
Across town, another controversial voice continued to hurl erudition and insults at a world that had lost the plot. After failing to win his Nobel Prize, Erwin Chargaff (who had nominated Avery, but forgot to mention DNA in the citation) became even more ruminative and bitter. Despite winning the Pasteur Medal (Sweden) and the National Medal of Science (USA), he raged against ‘big science’, the scourge of molecular biology (‘the practice of biochemistry without a license’), and the scheming administrators who locked him out of his office at Columbia for bad behaviour (‘I do not wish to be remembered by this university’).
In later life, the man who described himself as ‘the Outsider on the Inside’ turned to philosophical writings in both English and his native German. Heraclitean Fire: Sketches From a Life Before Nature (1978) was a characteristically witty and barbed collection of essays (or rants) about everything that was wrong with science. After the death of his wife, Chargaff saw in the twenty-first century alone, surrounded by thousands of books in his parkside apartment in New York. He died in June 2002, an unrepentant ninety-six years old.
Across the Atlantic, there were also loose ends to be tied up. The first was Bill Astbury, who had not shown any bitterness or regret at the publication of the double helix structure; he had moved on to a newer passion, and anyway had the gift (not universal among scientists) of being genuinely delighted by the successes of others. So he continued to give witty and elegant lectures about fibres and bacterial flagella (‘How to swim with a molecule for a tail’).
In 1958, Elwyn Beighton took an X-ray photograph which moved Astbury to tears. It was nothing to do with DNA or even flagella; just a single human hair, like the one that Astbury himself had photographed for Sir William Bragg back in 1926. Astbury’s latest extracurricular obsession was the violin, which he practised until his fingers bled; he wept because the photo was beautiful and the hair had come from the head of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Astbury was a man who ‘made every day feel like Christmas’, but some felt that, as a scientist, he lacked star quality. He was a visionary who never fully opened his eyes; easily distracted, prone to publishing too quickly and too superficially, and with a remarkable knack for ‘missing the gold in his pan’. The brightest of the nuggets he handed to someone else were the alpha-helix of proteins and the double helix of DNA. Astbury felt those pains but bounced back, healed by the perpetual excitement of ‘the adventure of science’.
Bill Astbury never retired. His first health warning came in August 1955, when he developed deep venous thromboses after a flying visit to Australia. A diseased heart valve and an irregular pulse were noted during his hospital admission (which Astbury found to be ‘a grand spiritual experience’). He made light of it all until 3 June 1961. That evening, he was in cracking form, ebullient and demanding more whisky; the next morning, he was dead.
Ten days later, Nature published a letter which Astbury had sent in about the term ‘molecular biology’. As the person ‘first responsible for propagating the name’, Astbury explained what he originally had in mind. This was the exploration of both structure and function of biological molecules. Knowing their three-dimensional shape was not enough; we have to find out what they do and how they work.
The last word must go to Astbury’s old friend and competitor, J.D. Bernal. In the obituary he wrote for the Royal Society, Bernal said farewell to ‘one of the most characteristic figures of the heroic age of crystal structure analysis’, a man who ‘belonged to the great sealing-wax and string tradition’, and above all, ‘someone who made you glad to be alive’.
DNA was not the top card in Sir Lawrence Bragg’s hand when Nature published the double helix papers in April 1953; the crystallography group at the Cavendish was outnumbered by those in nuclear physics and the new science of radio astronomy. Moreover, Bragg’s acquaintance with DNA was short-lived, because he left Cambridge on 1 January 1954 to follow in his father’s footsteps.
He went to be Fullerian Professor and later Director of the Royal Institution. He was sixty-three, a couple of years older than Sir William had been when he became Director in 1923, and the challenges were broadly similar: an organisation that had again lost its way and allowed its research to atrophy, with the added spice of a lawsuit from his predecessor claiming unfair dismissal. History repeated itself, in that Bragg Junior revitalised the public lectures and the X-ray crystallography, bringing in Perutz and Kendrew as visiting researchers. Notable successes included the first ever three-dimensional picture of a protein (myoglobin, by Kendrew in 1958) and the structure of lysozyme, an intriguing enzyme with antibacterial properties that is found in tears.
Just as his father had done, Lawrence Bragg became a leading ambassador for British science and a grand old man of the scientific establishment. His power to ‘enthral, stimulate and provoke’ was elegantly displayed in his public talks, including the televised Christmas Lectures. He was also prominent on the world stage; it was as President of the International Science Hall at the forthcoming Brussels World Expo that he sent a message to Rosalind Franklin at the 1956 Gordon Conference to tell her that her model of TMV had been selected for display.
Bragg’s time at the Institution, enlivened by ‘memorable’ parties for his staff at the family retreat on the Suffolk coast, was ‘his happiest’, but age and medical misfortune began to catch up with him. The news in October 1962 that four of his juniors had won two separate Nobel Prizes was badly timed; he was critically ill in hospital from complications of routine surgery. The fiftieth anniversary of his own Nobel Prize, attended by over twenty British laureates, was celebrated at the Institution in September 1966. In the same year, he was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1966, twenty-one years after Sir Henry Dale’s failed attempt to hand the same prize to Oswald Avery in New York.
When he finally got there, Bragg took to retirement with enthusiasm and began writing his autobiography. It could have been a blockbuster – after all, the unit he set up in Cambridge had become the best in the world, as measured by the number of Nobel Prizes – but for once he did not finish the project. He died in hospital in Sussex on 1 July 1971.
J.D. Bernal, a man who made the word ‘polymath’ look pedestrian, was one of the most brilliant gems in this saga, and one of its most inexplicably flawed. He maintained that the pages of his biography should be colour-coded, and Dorothy Hodgkin suggested which colours might be appropriate: plain white for his science, red for his politics, blue for his interest in the arts, and purple for his personal life.
Bernal shared Oscar Wilde’s ability to inspire, delight and scandalise, often simultaneously. The brilliance of his science inspired more than crystallographers and structural biologists. C.P. Snow turned him into Constantine, the ‘dazzling young scientist’ in his novel The Search; and the London cabbie who collided with Bernal’s ailing Austin was happy to accept blame when ‘Sage’ sketched out Newton’s Laws of Motion in the dust on the side of his cab.
Politically, Bernal remained as ‘Red as the flames of hell’, even when put to the test by the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). He was active in the World Peace Council, with numerous missions (‘too many for his own good’, according to Hodgkin) to confer with the likes of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung. He suffered a setback in 1965, when Khrushchev declared that Trofim Lysenko had
blighted Soviet agriculture for thirty years, and publicly stripped him of all his power.
Bernal’s personal life (‘private’ would have been inaccurate) was more colourful than just ‘purple’. His relationship with the opposite sex was notably asymmetrical (there was only one of him, and many of them) and his wife had to put up with the fact that he could only be ‘faithful in his way’. At the same time, Francis Crick described him as ‘the only genius I ever met with consideration for the feelings of others’.
The last decade of Bernal’s life, through the 1960s, was ‘increasingly difficult’ because of a series of strokes which left him with cumulative disabilities. By the time he retired in 1968, after thirty years at Birkbeck, he was confined to a wheelchair and had to be carried up steps to scientific meetings. Nonetheless, he made a point of attending the inaugural meeting of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science at the Royal Society, at which Maurice Wilkins presided. Bernal eventually became ‘very wretched’ at losing his ‘power to change the state of the world’, but remained fascinated by science, whether it was Dorothy Hodgkin’s structure of insulin or microspheres of silica brought back from the surface of the moon.
He died peacefully at home just three months after Lawrence Bragg, on 15 September 1971. His obituary for the Royal Society was written by someone who had first seen him forty years earlier as ‘young and shock-headed’: Dorothy Hodgkin FRS (1947), Nobel laureate in Chemistry (1964), Order of Merit (1965), and one-time lover of J.D. ‘Sage’ Bernal (1937–8).
The double helix had rather little direct impact on John Randall. After the fuss died down, he went back to his normal routine of research, wheeling and dealing. His research interests migrated into the study of cilia, the scaled-up and much more complex versions of Astbury’s bacterial flagella, which drive spermatozoa and form the escalator that continually lifts secretions out of the lungs. The wheeling and dealing was to secure a solid future and better premises for his group; after much scheming, the Biophysics Department moved into a fine new building on Drury Lane.
Randall’s retirement in 1970 was exactly what he had wanted to do throughout his working life: pure, hands-on research that was not spoiled by having to be a manager. He defected completely to biology, joining the Zoology Department in Edinburgh and writing grants to build up a new group to continue his exploration of cilia. He also returned to his plantsman’s roots, with a house in the country to the south of the city where he cultivated two acres of steep hillside. At last happy in his work, Randall remained active and ‘on top of the job’ until his late seventies. He set up a research collaboration with a group in Grenoble, which he visited periodically with a briefcase ‘full of samples that needed immediate attention’. They remembered him there as ‘a small, dapper, smartly dressed elderly gentleman, smiling and about as fresh after his 9–10 hour journey as the flower in his lapel’ – which, apart from ‘elderly’, is close to Maurice Wilkins’s description on first meeting him in Birmingham in 1937. And as would be expected, Randall continued to work until shortly before his death on 16 June 1984, aged seventy-nine.
Two of a kind
After The Double Helix and its debilitating aftermath, Maurice Wilkins drifted away from nucleic acids and into the completely unrelated field of neuroscience. He also returned to a passion that he had abandoned as the idealistic student member of the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group. In 1969, together with Stephen and Hilary Rose, he founded the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science and became its first president. This was the start of a trail that would take him to conferences on the social impact of biology and to Ban the Bomb rallies in Trafalgar Square.
When John Randall died in 1984, Wilkins was asked to write his obituary for the Royal Society. Randall had planned ahead, sorting and cataloguing his papers for the archives at Churchill College, Cambridge. Sifting through these gave Wilkins new insights into his former chief: his humble origins, his battles for recognition and the patents for the magnetron, his love of gardening. He also found a copy of the letter which Randall had sent to Rosalind Franklin in Paris. This was when Wilkins discovered that, behind his back, Randall had given Franklin ownership of DNA and Ray Gosling. The letter was also proof that Randall had repeatedly lied to him about Franklin’s behaviour, notably in a detailed account which Randall had sent him in 1970, in the aftermath of The Double Helix. Wilkins was badly shaken by this duplicity, and the realisation that ‘divide and rule’ had been Randall’s way of keeping his group under control. When the obituary appeared, it included large tracts of Wilkins’s own life, evidence of how closely their careers had been tied together.
From time to time, Wilkins was reminded of his troubled times with Rosalind Franklin. One enquiry from a publisher led him to retort: ‘No, I was never in love with her!’ He also played ‘what if’ and concluded that if he had pursued base-pairing and she had shared her data, the double helix could well have been called ‘Wilkins-Franklin’ rather than ‘Watson-Crick’. However, ‘we lost the race from the start, because we weren’t working together’.
During the late 1990s, Wilkins began corresponding again with Francis Crick, almost as they had done nearly fifty years earlier. Crick had moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California in 1978. His autobiography, written ten years later, had the same title as the seminar which had pushed Bragg over the edge: What Mad Pursuit.
Crick and Wilkins were now grand old emeriti but still active and with striking similarities: born within six months of each other in 1916, and both late converts to neuroscience (Crick had been researching visual perception and consciousness). In time, they shared confidences. Towards the end of 1998, Crick wrote that he always ‘been at pains to emphasise the part you and Rosalind played’, but conceded that when young, he had been ‘rather brasher and may not always have said what I should’. Soon after, Wilkins told Crick that he was working on his own autobiography, using lab books, diaries, letters and postcards from the Cricks as prompts. ‘Writing to you is like a journey in time’, he wrote, and asked Crick to provide ‘constructive criticism’ so that a ‘positive account’ could be produced, avoiding ‘some of the kerfuffle there was over Jim’s book’.
In June 1999, Wilkins sent other news. The Cricks – and Watson – would receive a formal invitation to the grand opening at King’s of the massive new Franklin-Wilkins Building. There was to be a museum about DNA, including the X-ray camera with which Rosalind Franklin took Photograph 51, and which Wilkins had rescued from a skip. He added, ‘It would be good to see you and Odile there.’ Unfortunately, that did not happen, because Crick could no longer travel large distances, ‘mainly for health reasons’.
Wilkins’s autobiography came out in 2003; the publishers ignored his protests and subtitled it The Third Man of DNA. On 7 January 2004, Crick wrote to say that he had very much enjoyed reading the book, but was sorry to hear ‘how upset’ Wilkins had been at Crick’s request to start model-building again. ‘I did not sense how deeply it affected you. Please accept my belated apologies.’ He added an update: ‘I have stopped chemotherapy from my colon cancer and am now trying radiation treatment, but a complete cure seems highly unlikely.’ He went on: ‘Is there any chance of your coming to California in the near future?’, and signed off ‘Yours ever, Francis.’
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins reached the end of their lives in near synchrony. Crick died on 28 July 2004 and Wilkins just ten weeks later, on 5 October. Thereafter, they drifted apart. Crick was ‘the man who discovered the secret of life’, ‘the dominant hero of the heroic age of molecular biology’, ‘the Charles Darwin of the twentieth century’. Wilkins ‘had a role in the discovery of DNA’ and was ‘the third and least well-known of the three scientists who in 1962 were awarded Nobel Prizes’.
Some might find those judgements unjust. Remembering what each of the three had done to unravel the double helix, it could be argued that Wilkins was not the third man, but the first among equals.
&nbs
p; Last man standing
At the conference entitled ‘Watson, Crick and the future of DNA’, held in 1993 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the discovery, the editor of Nature referred to Jim Watson as ‘that mercurial fellow, oscillating between enthusiasm and doubt’, and ‘a loose cannon to be reckoned with’. Watson himself ended his talk with the advice to ‘quit before they fire you, if you feel your colleagues are against you’.
Those comments capture the essence of the man and his journey so far through life. After The Double Helix was published in 1968, Watson left his professorship at Harvard to become Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Molecular biology came with him, and during his thirty-five-year term, he created ‘a research environment that is unparalleled in the world of science’. In 1990, he was appointed head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Both these positions confirmed his retreat from the front line of research, where he had last seen active service in the mid-1960s.
In his 2005 public lecture, ‘How I/we discovered the Double Helix’, Watson remarked (to laughter), ‘I wrote a book.’ Fifty years after publication, The Double Helix is still in print, and currently lies seventh (below Rachel Carson but above Albert Einstein) in the Modern Library list of the 100 greatest non-fiction titles published since 1900. Watson has written other books, including two masterly textbooks on the molecular biology of the gene and the cell, and the ambiguously titled Avoid Boring People. The latter did not receive universal acclaim, especially from colleagues he labelled as ‘mediocre’, ‘vapid’ or ‘has-beens’.
Watson has always given the impression that he relishes being a loose cannon and is oblivious to the hazards of self-inflicted cannonball injuries. He was apparently on the side of the angels when he fell out with the Director of NIH over her attempts to patent pieces of the human genome; he argued that this information belonged ‘to the world’s people’ and made his own genome available online. On the other hand, he had to resign as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor in 2007, having implied that intelligence was racially determined. Other manifestations of his foot-in-mouth syndrome include some unfortunate reflections on homosexuality, women and the relationship between skin colour and libido. Claiming loss of income after being sacked as Chancellor, Watson auctioned his Nobel Medal for $1.4 million; that episode ended happily because he donated some of the money to research and a food bank, and the Russian magnate who bought the medal gave it back to him.
Unravelling the Double Helix Page 41