In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 457-458



[Access article in PDF]
Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution. By Victor K. McElheny. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003. Pp. xiv+363. $27.50.

James D. Watson has been a celebrity biologist and scientific entrepreneur for half a century. He has also been, at various times, brilliant, stupid, inspiring, emotionally deaf, kind, mean-spirited, a mentor, a destroyer of graduate students' dreams, clever, publicly vulgar, hostile, and an empire builder. Victor McElheny's Watson and DNA has much to say about his celebrity, and not so much beyond that.

In truth, this is not really a biography. McElheny is a science writer who worked with Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for several years. For this book, written under a grant from the Sloan Foundation, he interviewed more than fifty of Watson's scientific and professional colleagues and read extensively in the public record of Watson's activities; he also personally observed some of the events he describes. He did not, however, have access to Watson's papers, and Watson refused to be interviewed. [End Page 457]

Watson's youth, which might hold the key to his sometimes hard-to-understand behavior, is covered in a mere nine pages, much of which repeats what Watson has written elsewhere. McElheny tells of Watson humiliating colleagues on whom his professional life depended, using vulgar language in public addresses, and denigrating the work and skills of Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer who first managed to take crucial X-ray photographs of the DNA molecule. But he does not analyze any of this. McElheny acknowledges his indebtedness to Watson for many personal and professional kindnesses over the years, so there is less than arm's length between author and subject; this may explain his somewhat less-than-critical stance.

Watson and DNA is overly influenced by Watson's own egomania, attributing a scientific revolution to him alone when, in reality, many people and many institutions were involved. Though this is a well-written book, historians of science will find nothing new in it concerning the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. Historians of technology may wonder that the two innovations on which the sequencing of the human genome depended, the sequencing machine and the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) process, are mentioned only in passing. Social historians will find that questions about the relation of a driven, competitive, egomaniacal personality to the production of good science get short shrift.

Rather, what interests McElheny is Watson's entrepreneurship—or, to put it another way, the question of how an individual with such poor interpersonal skills could have succeeded as a scientific manager, first resurrecting a dying scientific institution (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) and turning it into a mecca for molecular biological research, and then combining the skills of a Groves and an Oppenheimer to direct biology's first "big science" initiative, the Human Genome Project. Unfortunately, the answer to this question ultimately eludes him. Watson and DNA contains good reporting of what happened at scientific meetings and during congressional testimony, what Watson said at press conferences and in speeches, who managed to work well with Watson and who did not. But in the end the mystery of what makes a scientific entrepreneur remains just that. What we have here is a first act, setting the stage for what will some day be a really interesting play about science, hubris, politics, celebrity, and money.


Neil Cowan is an independent scholar who specializes in oral history interviewing. With his wife, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, he is working on a prosopography of American women engineers.
Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.


...

pdf

Share