Jason Furman's Reviews > The Double Helix

I cannot believe that I had not read this before. I had been carrying around my father's copy for twenty-five years but only just read it. It is a fascinating, exciting and sometimes even funny account of the race to unravel the structure of DNA. It is unflinchingly honest in describing not only the thrill of scientific discovery but also the more ordinary impulses including scientific rivlaries and everything from the desire to win the Nobel Prize to the desire to win over girls. It is also a great account of collaboration, not only with Francis Crick but also with Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Linus Pauling -- in the case of the later three the collaboration was mixed with a fervent desire that they not beat Watson and Crick to the discovery of the strucure of DNA. Finally, it is also an excellent detective story as Watson and Crick follow fragmenatory and contradictory evidence along several false leads but eventually stumble on the extremely elegant answer.

The Double Helix is at the opposite extreme of Einstein's book Relativity which presents the pure science, derived from first principles, and explained to the lay reader. Instead in The Double Helix, the extensive descriptions of the science are all subsurvient to moving the story of the discovery forward. None of these scientific discsussions are derived from first principles or includes any explanation for the reader (and I, for one, started the book with no knowledge of x-ray crystallography or stereoscopic chemistry and only pieced together a dim understanding of them over the course of the book). And there is virtually no discussion of the implications of the discovery, what followed, or really much in the way of context. But it is hard to hold any of that against The Double Helix, especially when many, many other books have handled all of those topics, while this book uniquely and superlatively describes the process of discovery itself.