The Path to the Double Helix by Robert Olby (review)

The Path to the Double Helix. By Robert Olby. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974. Pp. 534. $23.50. "The Hindsight Saga"—the excellent name reportedly chosen by S. J. Perelman for his autobiography—could also serve as the title of this book; for here a peevish Rhadamanthus calls the dead and the living, one after the other, before his cloudy throne and judges them severely, more for what they have not done than for what they have. All this from the happy perspective of full and final glory achieved, paid for, and delivered. In the triumphant glow of the Holy Grail, as it were, the hapless Knights of the Round Table are given hell for not having found the noble cup. It so happens that this particular Holy Grail was discovered by two knights riding one horse; but of the two Parsifals only one appears to have commissioned or otherwise blessed the book: the foreword is signed by Francis Crick. This has always been the predicament of the historian: he knows how it all ended. But does he really? In trying to describe a distant ocean is he himself not being tossed by an enormous wave? If it is notoriously difficult for the historian to account plausibly for the motives of the actions of his subjects, it is completely impossible to explain what has not happened. The psychohistory of failures is only written if they pay for the treatment—and then not for publication. History with a happy end is always in danger of becoming a fairy tale; and this is especially true of one of its most precarious subspecialties, the history of science, where there never is an end. Just as all great artists are the greatest —only the art dealer or his alter ego, the art historian, will deny this—all good scientists are the best, auction prices or Nobel prizes notwithstanding. The others simply do not count. Classification by rank, distinction of major and minor, have always impressed me as silly, particularly in science where the final goal will invariable elude us, almost by definition. This is not the only reason it is so difficult to write science history. All hangs together in this cosmos constructed by so many minds; but the single writer, entirely unequipped to distinguish among truth, plausiblity, and fad, must take much too much for granted. No sifting of the printed evidence can revive the scientific atmosphere of a given period which, in addition, may not represent what went on in individual minds; no selection of pithy statements, pleasing though the arrangement may be, is really indicative of what was known, and to whom, at any given time. Rather than follow, laboriously, the growth of a concept or of a construct—a difficult and meager task—the writer is tempted to deck out his account with as many anecdotes as he can get hold of. Since most scientists are unmemorable people, anecdotes about them are by necessity equally unmemorable; and this makes most histories of recent scientific events read like high school yearbooks. Having said this, 1 may now proceed faintly to praise Olby's book. He has worked hard on it, reading innumerable and often very dull, papers, traveling to many unrewarding places, burrowing and borrowing his way through achives of private correspondence, interviewing both the proud and the sorry remnants of a soi-disant historical epoch (even me, though he omits my name from the list on p. x). In other words, he has tried to produce as good a book as he could. That it still is not a very good book is presumably not so much his fault as that of the decision to write so big a book under the narrow perspective indicated in its title. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1976 I 289 This is not the history of the sources and the development of our concepts of the chemistry and physics of heredity. If this were the case, we should not have 12 pages on Avery and at least 150 on Crick and Watson. We should hear more of so important a laboratory as that ofTodd and his collaborators in Cambridge; and the name...